Perhaps I’m just being dense here but why is liking and happy being linked together the way they are? I don’t think “I like pizza.” (presumably to eat) is a completely different statement from “I am happy when I eat pizza.”
I do agree that we often do things that ultimately are not in our own interests but I don’t really see that as a huge problem. We’re rather complex in our existence. I don’t think we have some internal utility function with a single metric to maximize. What we end up dealing with is more a constrained maximization case. Moreover, the various margins we maximize on are often not only mutually exclusive but mutually incompatible.
Perhaps I’m just being dense here but why is liking and happy being linked together the way they are? I don’t think “I like pizza.” (presumably to eat) is a completely different statement from “I am happy when I eat pizza.”
I do agree that we often do things that ultimately are not in our own interests but I don’t really see that as a huge problem. We’re rather complex in our existence. I don’t think we have some internal utility function with a single metric to maximize. What we end up dealing with is more a constrained maximization case. Moreover, the various margins we maximize on are often not only mutually exclusive but mutually incompatible.