If I were to guess at the source of your intuition, I would say you were taught a value system that denigrates people for not putting enough effort into things, or being focused on one’s own pleasure rather than doing more “important” things.
The musician and video game player have to at least work for their pleasure, and their reward is a place on a status ladder of some kind. The stim user isn’t climbing any ladders or putting in any effort, and thus should be denigrated/disapproved of.
This isn’t an acultural moral intuition, though: it’s based on your specific schooling, family, or other cultural upbringing. A person brought up in an environment where personal ambition is denigrated would likely see the musician as a try-hard, the video game player as acceptable as long as they’re not too serious about it, and the stim user as someone to get together and have a stim party with!
Further:
we must do our best to optimize what little time we have as effectively as possible
Healthy humans are usually more satisficing than optimizing. (Slack is healthy, Moloch not so much.)
In general, my observation has been that the more somebody talks up some form of utility maximization, not as a simple consequence of math or a useful tool, but as a moral imperative and a personal ideal, the more likely the interest arises from a compulsion to virtue-signal in opposition to something one has been taught should be denigrated. The virtue signaling impulse then happens whenever one is exposed to examples of the denigrated thing (e.g. thinking about somebody using a stim machine).
Cultural indoctrination like this can be altered or deleted fairly simply using memory reconsolidation techniques, after which one ceases to have the urge to denigrate or virtue-signal in response to a pattern-match, replaced with something like, “well, it depends”—i.e., specific-case reasoning rather than a compulsive heuristic.
If I were to guess at the source of your intuition, I would say you were taught a value system that denigrates people for not putting enough effort into things, or being focused on one’s own pleasure rather than doing more “important” things.
The musician and video game player have to at least work for their pleasure, and their reward is a place on a status ladder of some kind. The stim user isn’t climbing any ladders or putting in any effort, and thus should be denigrated/disapproved of.
This isn’t an acultural moral intuition, though: it’s based on your specific schooling, family, or other cultural upbringing. A person brought up in an environment where personal ambition is denigrated would likely see the musician as a try-hard, the video game player as acceptable as long as they’re not too serious about it, and the stim user as someone to get together and have a stim party with!
Further:
Healthy humans are usually more satisficing than optimizing. (Slack is healthy, Moloch not so much.)
In general, my observation has been that the more somebody talks up some form of utility maximization, not as a simple consequence of math or a useful tool, but as a moral imperative and a personal ideal, the more likely the interest arises from a compulsion to virtue-signal in opposition to something one has been taught should be denigrated. The virtue signaling impulse then happens whenever one is exposed to examples of the denigrated thing (e.g. thinking about somebody using a stim machine).
Cultural indoctrination like this can be altered or deleted fairly simply using memory reconsolidation techniques, after which one ceases to have the urge to denigrate or virtue-signal in response to a pattern-match, replaced with something like, “well, it depends”—i.e., specific-case reasoning rather than a compulsive heuristic.