I think that thinking of people as wanting happiness is similar to trying to understand speedrunning through the eyes of a child who is still at the stage of identifying with the video game character. They can’t think rationally about strategies that decrease hit points too much, because that means your character is getting *hurt.* To the speedrunner, health points are just one more dimension of tradeoff in a convex optimization space.
ambiguous wording, the optimization they’re doing over the space is convex. Also I don’t think choice of optimization function is super important for the metaphor. Just to give the flavor.
I agree with all of this.
*And*
I think that thinking of people as wanting happiness is similar to trying to understand speedrunning through the eyes of a child who is still at the stage of identifying with the video game character. They can’t think rationally about strategies that decrease hit points too much, because that means your character is getting *hurt.* To the speedrunner, health points are just one more dimension of tradeoff in a convex optimization space.
Why is the optimisation space convex?
ambiguous wording, the optimization they’re doing over the space is convex. Also I don’t think choice of optimization function is super important for the metaphor. Just to give the flavor.