There’s an age old tension between ~”contentment” and ~”striving” with no universally accepted compelling resolution, even if many people feel they have figured it out. Related:
In my own thinking, I’ve been trying to ground things out in a raw consequentialism that one’s cognition (including emotions) is just supposed to take you towards more value (boring, but reality is allowed to be)[1].
I fear that a lot of what people do is ~”wireheading”. The problem with wireheading is it’s myopic. You feel good now (small amount of value) at the expense of greater value later. Historically, this has made me instinctively wary of various attempts to experience more contentment such as gratitude journaling. Do such things curb the pursuit of value in exchange for feeling better less unpleasant discontent in the moment?
Clarity might come from further reduction of what “value” is. The primary notion of value I operate with is preference satisfaction: the world is how you want it to be. But also a lot of value seems to flow through experience (and the preferred state of the world is one where certain experiences happen).
A model whereby gratitude journaling (or general “attend to what is good” motions) maximize value as opposed to the opposite, is that they’re about turning ‘potential value’ into ‘experienced actual value’. The sunset on its own is merely potential value, it becomes experienced actual value when you stop and take it in. The same for many good things in one’s life you might have just gotten used it, but could be enjoyed and savored (harvested) again by attending to them.
Relatedly, I’ve thought a distinction between actions that “sow value” vs “reap value”, roughly mapping onto actions that are instrumental vs terminal to value, roughly mapping to “things you do to get enjoyment later” vs “things you actually enjoy[2] now”.
My guess is that to maximize value over one’s lifetime (the “return” in RL terms), one shouldn’t defer reaping/harvesting value until the final timestep. Instead you want to be doing a lot of sowing but also reaping/harvesting as you go to, and gratitude-journaling-esque, focus-on-what-you-got-already stuff faciliates that, and is part of of value maximization, not simply wireheading.
It’s a bit weird in our world, because the future value you can be sowing for (i.e. the entire cosmic endowment not going to waste) is so overwhelming, it kinda feels like maybe it should outweigh any value you might reap now. My handwavy answer is something something human psychology it doesn’t work to do that.
I’m somewhat rederiving standard “obvious” advice, but I don’t think it actually is, and figuring out better models and frameworks might ultimately solve the contentment/striving tension (/ focus on what you go vs focus on what you don’t tension).
And as usual, that doesn’t mean one tries to determine the EV of every individual mental act. It means when setting up policies, habits, principles, etc., etc., that ultimate the thing that determines whether those are good is the underlying value consequentialism.
I think gratitude also has value in letting you recognize what is worth maintaining and what has historically shown itself to have lots of opportunities and therefore in the future may have opportunities too.
Once I’m rambling, I’ll note another thought I’ve been mulling over:
My notion of value is not the same as the value that my mind was optimized to pursue. Meaning that I ought to be wary that typical human thought patterns might not be serving me maximally.
That’s of course on top of the fact that evolution’s design is flawed even by its own goals; humans rationanlize left, right, and center, are awfully myopic, and we’ll likely all die because of it.
I don’t think wireheading is “myopic” when it overlaps with self-maintenance. Classic example would be painkillers; they do ~nothing but make you “feel good now” (or at least less bad), but sometimes feeling less bad is necessary to function properly and achieve long-term value. I think that gratitude journaling is also part of this overlap area. That said I don’t know many peoples’ experiences with it so maybe it’s more prone to “abuse” than I expect.
Yeah, I think a question is whether I want to say “that kind of wireheading isn’t mypoic” vs “that isn’t wireheading”. Probably fine eitherway if you’re consistent / taboo adequately.
There’s an age old tension between ~”contentment” and ~”striving” with no universally accepted compelling resolution, even if many people feel they have figured it out. Related:
In my own thinking, I’ve been trying to ground things out in a raw consequentialism that one’s cognition (including emotions) is just supposed to take you towards more value (boring, but reality is allowed to be)[1].
I fear that a lot of what people do is ~”wireheading”. The problem with wireheading is it’s myopic. You feel good now (small amount of value) at the expense of greater value later. Historically, this has made me instinctively wary of various attempts to experience more contentment such as gratitude journaling. Do such things curb the pursuit of value in exchange for feeling better less unpleasant discontent in the moment?
Clarity might come from further reduction of what “value” is. The primary notion of value I operate with is preference satisfaction: the world is how you want it to be. But also a lot of value seems to flow through experience (and the preferred state of the world is one where certain experiences happen).
A model whereby gratitude journaling (or general “attend to what is good” motions) maximize value as opposed to the opposite, is that they’re about turning ‘potential value’ into ‘experienced actual value’. The sunset on its own is merely potential value, it becomes experienced actual value when you stop and take it in. The same for many good things in one’s life you might have just gotten used it, but could be enjoyed and savored (harvested) again by attending to them.
Relatedly, I’ve thought a distinction between actions that “sow value” vs “reap value”, roughly mapping onto actions that are instrumental vs terminal to value, roughly mapping to “things you do to get enjoyment later” vs “things you actually enjoy[2] now”.
My guess is that to maximize value over one’s lifetime (the “return” in RL terms), one shouldn’t defer reaping/harvesting value until the final timestep. Instead you want to be doing a lot of sowing but also reaping/harvesting as you go to, and gratitude-journaling-esque, focus-on-what-you-got-already stuff faciliates that, and is part of of value maximization, not simply wireheading.
It’s a bit weird in our world, because the future value you can be sowing for (i.e. the entire cosmic endowment not going to waste) is so overwhelming, it kinda feels like maybe it should outweigh any value you might reap now. My handwavy answer is something something human psychology it doesn’t work to do that.
I’m somewhat rederiving standard “obvious” advice, but I don’t think it actually is, and figuring out better models and frameworks might ultimately solve the contentment/striving tension (/ focus on what you go vs focus on what you don’t tension).
And as usual, that doesn’t mean one tries to determine the EV of every individual mental act. It means when setting up policies, habits, principles, etc., etc., that ultimate the thing that determines whether those are good is the underlying value consequentialism.
To momentarily speak in terms of experiential value vs preference satisfaction value.
I think gratitude also has value in letting you recognize what is worth maintaining and what has historically shown itself to have lots of opportunities and therefore in the future may have opportunities too.
Once I’m rambling, I’ll note another thought I’ve been mulling over:
My notion of value is not the same as the value that my mind was optimized to pursue. Meaning that I ought to be wary that typical human thought patterns might not be serving me maximally.
That’s of course on top of the fact that evolution’s design is flawed even by its own goals; humans rationanlize left, right, and center, are awfully myopic, and we’ll likely all die because of it.
I don’t think wireheading is “myopic” when it overlaps with self-maintenance. Classic example would be painkillers; they do ~nothing but make you “feel good now” (or at least less bad), but sometimes feeling less bad is necessary to function properly and achieve long-term value. I think that gratitude journaling is also part of this overlap area. That said I don’t know many peoples’ experiences with it so maybe it’s more prone to “abuse” than I expect.
Yeah, I think a question is whether I want to say “that kind of wireheading isn’t mypoic” vs “that isn’t wireheading”. Probably fine eitherway if you’re consistent / taboo adequately.