It’s critical to distinguish between ease/convenience and pleasure.
Absent conscious intervention, we don’t optimize for pleasure—we optimize for a combination of pleasure and non-effort. For example, TV is for many people easy to choose, and work and exercise are hard to choose, despite TV having low-average enjoyment ratings, exercise having average ratings, and work having high-average ratings (see e.g. p. 243 of this book).
Patri’s concept of “shiny/fun”, insofar as it is correct, seems to be about low effort activities more than about high reward activities. To attain high personal growth, we need to learn to exert effort toward the highest-value learning and productivity tasks. As Patri emphasizes, this involves learning to direct our attention, learning to resist shiny, low-effort distractions, and to get through relatively boring local drudge work when needed. It does not, AFAICT, involve choosing less rewarding tasks on average; peak growth and productivity are often more rewarding (though also harder to choose) than clicking repeatedly on the “next comments” button.
(The ideas in this comment are stolen from Michael Vassar.)
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere I’ve rarely experienced high pleasure from work but the exercise phenomenon is one I’ve been aware of for a long time. Going back to when I was a kid I remember the realization that I really hated getting up early and going out in the cold to play rugby but I enjoyed it once I was there. The same is true for most of the physical activities I do now.
I’ve never been able to ‘integrate’ this knowledge for exercise / physical activity though. Some people seem to reach a stage of genuinely anticipating exercise with pleasure but for me it is always still a conscious effort of reminding myself that I will enjoy it once I get going in order to overcome the reluctance and lack of motivation. I still fail at this more often than I’d like.
Literally hundreds of times I have realized that it will soon be time to go to tae kwon do class, and that I was dreading it, even though each time I mentally noted for future reference during class that I was enjoying myself considerably.
I sometimes wonder if a few hundred more repetitions will make the dread go away, but Laplace’s rule is not optimistic.
Absent conscious intervention, we don’t optimize for pleasure—we optimize for a combination of pleasure and non-effort.
This is a bit tangential to your point, but why should we consciously optimize for pleasure, instead of of a combination of pleasure and non-effort? If you think pleasure is likely to be part of our True Preferences (however defined, e.g., our consciously held preferences after sufficient reflection), why not non-effort also?
Still, if I found out now that my pleasure would be raised above my usual baseline from now on, I’d feel happy. And if I found out my effort would be reduced (without side-effects), I would not. It could be that the temporal discount rates work differently for pleasure vs. non-effort.
Much has to do with short-term pleasure vs. short-term flow and long-term satisfaction. Both wise old people and happiness studies tell us that if we do the instinctually easy things, even though they are sometimes pleasurable and the pull to do them feels strong, we will later feel regret at the way we have lived our life, and indeed at the time may not even feel happy.
Whereas if we do things that take some effort to start, that are based on research indicating they will make us happy, and that are in service of our goals, both wise old people (who have tried various strategies) and some happiness research suggest that we will end up happier.
Yes, effort matters, but our internal/instinctual effort/reward calibrator is totally whacked, especially when long time periods are involved. And it screws up things that were in the evolutionary environment (food, sex) because the modern environment is different (caloric abundance, pictures of 1 in a million hot women everywhere while the normal hunter-gatherer would only see 1 in 100 hotness), and it screws up things that weren’t because it isn’t tuned for them (no idea what TV gets interpreted as, but whatever it is, it is highly addictive but doesn’t lead to short or long-term happiness).
So if we want pleasure, we need to override the hell out of this miserable instinct—ie learn to direct our attention consciously.
The fact that you will regret a choice does not imply that the choice is irrational, since the way our regret works is itselfirrational.
If we accept Eliezer’s position, we’d probably take all of these things—pleasure, non-effort, non-regret, happiness, etc. - and make them components of our utility functions. But I have no idea how we are supposed to weigh these things against each other. How do you know that your consciously chosen trade-off is the right one? How do you even know that it’s an improvement over what your subconscious/instinct/intuition tends to choose?
How do you know that your consciously chosen trade-off is the right one? How do you even know that it’s an improvement over what your subconscious/instinct/intuition tends to choose?
It’s critical to distinguish between ease/convenience and pleasure.
Absent conscious intervention, we don’t optimize for pleasure—we optimize for a combination of pleasure and non-effort. For example, TV is for many people easy to choose, and work and exercise are hard to choose, despite TV having low-average enjoyment ratings, exercise having average ratings, and work having high-average ratings (see e.g. p. 243 of this book).
Patri’s concept of “shiny/fun”, insofar as it is correct, seems to be about low effort activities more than about high reward activities. To attain high personal growth, we need to learn to exert effort toward the highest-value learning and productivity tasks. As Patri emphasizes, this involves learning to direct our attention, learning to resist shiny, low-effort distractions, and to get through relatively boring local drudge work when needed. It does not, AFAICT, involve choosing less rewarding tasks on average; peak growth and productivity are often more rewarding (though also harder to choose) than clicking repeatedly on the “next comments” button.
(The ideas in this comment are stolen from Michael Vassar.)
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere I’ve rarely experienced high pleasure from work but the exercise phenomenon is one I’ve been aware of for a long time. Going back to when I was a kid I remember the realization that I really hated getting up early and going out in the cold to play rugby but I enjoyed it once I was there. The same is true for most of the physical activities I do now.
I’ve never been able to ‘integrate’ this knowledge for exercise / physical activity though. Some people seem to reach a stage of genuinely anticipating exercise with pleasure but for me it is always still a conscious effort of reminding myself that I will enjoy it once I get going in order to overcome the reluctance and lack of motivation. I still fail at this more often than I’d like.
I can second this one.
Literally hundreds of times I have realized that it will soon be time to go to tae kwon do class, and that I was dreading it, even though each time I mentally noted for future reference during class that I was enjoying myself considerably.
I sometimes wonder if a few hundred more repetitions will make the dread go away, but Laplace’s rule is not optimistic.
This is a bit tangential to your point, but why should we consciously optimize for pleasure, instead of of a combination of pleasure and non-effort? If you think pleasure is likely to be part of our True Preferences (however defined, e.g., our consciously held preferences after sufficient reflection), why not non-effort also?
Good question.
Still, if I found out now that my pleasure would be raised above my usual baseline from now on, I’d feel happy. And if I found out my effort would be reduced (without side-effects), I would not. It could be that the temporal discount rates work differently for pleasure vs. non-effort.
Much has to do with short-term pleasure vs. short-term flow and long-term satisfaction. Both wise old people and happiness studies tell us that if we do the instinctually easy things, even though they are sometimes pleasurable and the pull to do them feels strong, we will later feel regret at the way we have lived our life, and indeed at the time may not even feel happy.
Whereas if we do things that take some effort to start, that are based on research indicating they will make us happy, and that are in service of our goals, both wise old people (who have tried various strategies) and some happiness research suggest that we will end up happier.
Yes, effort matters, but our internal/instinctual effort/reward calibrator is totally whacked, especially when long time periods are involved. And it screws up things that were in the evolutionary environment (food, sex) because the modern environment is different (caloric abundance, pictures of 1 in a million hot women everywhere while the normal hunter-gatherer would only see 1 in 100 hotness), and it screws up things that weren’t because it isn’t tuned for them (no idea what TV gets interpreted as, but whatever it is, it is highly addictive but doesn’t lead to short or long-term happiness).
So if we want pleasure, we need to override the hell out of this miserable instinct—ie learn to direct our attention consciously.
The fact that you will regret a choice does not imply that the choice is irrational, since the way our regret works is itself irrational.
If we accept Eliezer’s position, we’d probably take all of these things—pleasure, non-effort, non-regret, happiness, etc. - and make them components of our utility functions. But I have no idea how we are supposed to weigh these things against each other. How do you know that your consciously chosen trade-off is the right one? How do you even know that it’s an improvement over what your subconscious/instinct/intuition tends to choose?
In short … how do you be less wrong?