Well, I intended for my above comment to have a conciliatory flavour, but apparently that didn’t quite come across...
If someone believes in God because he likes believing in God more than he likes being an atheist would anyone on LW object to calling that person irrational?
That’s not comparable because the truth-value of “God exists” is a function of reality, whereas the truth-value of “archery is a good hobby” is a function of reality and a utility function.
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I’m not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
You’re not allowed to judge other people’s terminal preferences as rational or irrational because that’s a category mistake. You’re kind of not allowed to vocally judge them as right or wrong because it’s impolite and pointless.
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I’m not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
This, incidentally, is also impolite. I said no such thing.
If you can’t provide a utility analysis for why you do the activities that you do then I do think that qualifies as irrational by LW standards. We all know that people are frequently irrational in their day to day decisions. If you don’t have a utility analysis that backs up your decision, why should I assume that it’s a rational decision?
Salsa: Not taking this up may be a perfectly rational case of risk aversion. One might basically be avoiding psychological bankruptcy, depending on how detrimental the fact of the first few months of infelicitous and awkward interaction would be on one’s mind.
Archery: Well, maybe some people just find it very fun, are not good at retraining themselves at finding new things fun (you even admitted that you are probably special in that regard), and telling them to first learn to find arbitrary things fun is kind of besides the point when the discussion is about what are reasonable hobbies.
You’re also not taking into account the possibility of temporal discounting. Why should it be impossible for a person to have simply too high a discounting rate, which need not be irrational, in order for this whole suffering and personality-changing to be happier in the far future to be worth it? (In particular, someone might value health benefits much less than you do. This alone means that while you can make a conditional argument that if you value health benefits a lot, there are much better options than archery, you’re not entitled to assert that taking up archery is irrational because you’re missing out on all those health benefits from other activities.)
And then one’s value structure doesn’t have to be such that changing one’s emotional reactions to various things makes sense. This is clearest in aesthetic preferences: if I have a preference for beautiful things, that means that I want the things around me to be such that I would, by my present standards, consider them beautiful. It does not mean that I want my perception of beauty to be altered in such a way that I find the things which are, in fact, around me beautiful. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to be in the analogous situation with respect to happiness.
And what’s that thing about MtG? I never mentioned that...
That’s not comparable because the truth-value of “God exists” is a function of reality, whereas the truth-value of “archery is a good hobby” is a function of reality and a utility function.
Believing that God exist is an activity and activities do have utility functions. It also has a lot to do with priors and it makes sense to choose your priors based on a heuristic that you evaluate with an utility function.
Why should it be impossible for a person to have simply too high a discounting rate, which need not be irrational, in order for this whole suffering and personality-changing to be happier in the far future to be worth it?
I’m not arguing that it’s theoretically impossible for people to have a high discount rate. Someone at the last lesswrong meetup argued that smoking is rational for him because he doesn’t care if he loses 10 years of lifespan.
On the other hand if that’s your position answering: “You should take up smoking” when someone asks for a good way to spend his life to improve his life on a lesswrong thread doesn’t make any sense without talking at all about the fact that you have a high possibility of temporal discounting.
In particular, someone might value health benefits much less than you do.
That’s probably right, but doesn’t have much to do with the argument I made. I spoke about health benefits because archery is sort of a sport and the secondary benefit that comes to mind for most sports is health benefits.
It does not mean that I want my perception of beauty to be altered in such a way that I find the things which are, in fact, around me beautiful. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to be in the analogous situation with respect to happiness.
Finding archery fun is quite superficial. It not like valuing saving human lives or preventing the world from being destroyed. I do think that it’s quite okay to change around how much happiness things bring that you do for higher purposes.
I do find it strange to value being happy tomorrow but not valuing changing around associations in your mind to be happy tomorrow because engaging in certain activity fulfills a long term purpose.
That position seems to me very constructed and I would doubt that many people seriously hold it.
Again if that’s your position and you give suggestions on a thread of how a rationalists can improve his life by spending money I do think you have the burden of being explicit about your abnormal utility function. I would also question whether that suggestion has any value for the person who started the thread as I would predict that they value the happiness they have in a year and don’t just want to improve how happy they are tomorrow.
And what’s that thing about MtG? I never mentioned that...
You brought up me wanting other people to take up Salsa. I did that in the MtG discussion when I said it’s probably more exicting. Here I suggest martial arts as substitute for archery.
Believing that God exist is an activity and activities do have utility functions. It also has a lot to do with priors and it makes sense to choose your priors based on a heuristic that you evaluate with an utility function.
Well, okay. But can we at least agree that epistemic activities are special and remove them from the discussion?
I’m not arguing that it’s theoretically impossible for people to have a high discount rate.
Right. So you just assuming that it’s low enough for your argument to be applicable to them...
That’s probably right, but doesn’t have much to do with the argument I made. I spoke about health benefits because archery is sort of a sport and the secondary benefit that comes to mind for most sports is health benefits.
How does it not have much to do with your argument when you say that archery should be disprefered because, despite being a sport, it does not get you much in terms of secondary health benefits?
Finding archery fun is quite superficial. It not like valuing saving human lives or preventing the world from being destroyed. I do think that it’s quite okay to change around how much happiness things bring that you do for higher purposes.
It is superficial, and I’m not suggesting that anybody would have performing archery as an actual terminal value. The terminal value may be closer to “do something cool by my present definition of cool” (as opposed to “do something cool by whatever definition I happen to have, so I’ll self-modify to find useful things cool”). That’s closer to an aesthetic preference—and then the happiness would not be the actual goal, but a side-effect of getting what you want. People can be structured in ways so that they value other things than or besides happiness and health (I am).
Also, we’re not talking about it being okay to change your happiness function—we’re talking about whether it’s essentially obligatory, which you seem to be asserting.
I do find it strange to value being happy tomorrow but not valuing changing around associations in your mind to be happy tomorrow because engaging in certain activity fulfills a long term purpose. That position seems to me very constructed and I would doubt that many people seriously hold it.
Do you hold the same position about aesthetic preferences? Because frankly, trying to change your aesthetic preferences to fit your surroundings, instead of the other way around, strikes me as bizarre.
Again if that’s your position and you give suggestions on a thread of how a rationalists can improve his life by spending money I do think you have the burden of being explicit about your abnormal utility function. I would also question whether that suggestion has any value for the person who started the thread as I would predict that they value the happiness they have in a year and don’t just want to improve how happy they are tomorrow.
That’s all very well. I guess if you haven’t seen by now how that still makes your categorical assertions somewhat inappropriate, that point won’t come in the future, either. Also, what’s your basis for the assertion that the general structure of my utility function is so abnormal? Do you see people going around trying to change themselves to find things okay that they don’t find okay, instead of trying to change those things? I suppose you would say that’s the rational thing to do. Do you think everybody who doesn’t do that is just being irrational?
Do you hold the same position about aesthetic preferences? Because frankly, trying to change your aesthetic preferences to fit your surroundings, instead of the other way around, strikes me as bizarre.
As far as aesthetic preferences go, learning to appreciate the subtleties of high culture isn’t something that’s generally considered bizarre. Yes, you can enjoy pop culture but I do think that changing your aesthetics by learning to perceive fine details is worthwhile.
I’m not a high culture snob you listens all the time to classical music that the average person can’t appreciate because they didn’t develop the required qualia. You can probably guess the reason ;)
I do have a project running to develop finer ability to distinguish colors and that’s likely to change my aesthetics. I do think that developing finer qualia to perceive more depth of reality is worthwhile.
As a programmer I do want to develop aesthetics that make me shun bad code that’s likely to produce bugs. I think that if you want to hold on to the aesthetics of a beginner programmer that will hold you back in developing your programming ability.
The same goes for most expert domains. Developing good aesthetics for a field can be very worthwhile. Physicists distinguish beautiful theories from one’s that aren’t and developing the aesthetics to make that judgement will take time.
I strive to increase information inflow by being able to perceive finer distinctions of reality and I strive to develop aesthetics that make me more effective in the fields I want to have expertise.
It is superficial, and I’m not suggesting that anybody would have performing archery as an actual terminal value. The terminal value may be closer to “do something cool by my present definition of cool”
For me that would still be a pretty superficial goal. But if we would look at that definition we could have a least a decent discussion whether archery optimizes that goal or whether there another hobby that would be more cool given that definition.
I think that something like life purpose is the core thing towards which to optimize.
Also, what’s your basis for the assertion that the general structure of my utility function is so abnormal?
I think most people would agree that investing burrow money with 20% interest rate to enjoy an experience in the present when you have to pay it back in a year is a bad way to discount future utility.
Do you see people going around trying to change themselves to find things okay that they don’t find okay, instead of trying to change those things?
That sentence is quite complicated to answer. Trying to change yourself is the opposite from changing yourself.
In reality quite a lot of people do adept to their circumstances.
If you look at politics a lot of democrats suddenly find policies that they rejected under Bush to be okay, now that Obama implements them.
The thing I advocate is being clear about your purpose in life and then making the adaptions consciously instead of just letting them happen randomly.
Trying to change things is an activity in which a lot of people engage. It’s generally a bad habit. Either you change things or you don’t.
Also, we’re not talking about it being okay to change your happiness function—we’re talking about whether it’s essentially obligatory, which you seem to be asserting.
I do think that it’s quite supoptimal to have a happiness function that makes you unhappy if you engage in the activities that are best for you. I’m not saying that you have to modify it in a way to feel bad if you don’t engage in the activities that are best for you.
Feeling unhappy when you do what’s right just feels unnecessary. I would recommend to everyone to be happy over being depressed all things equal.
I’m ending this discussion. I’m finding it unproductive and, frankly, I’m getting annoyed by it because I feel like I have to expend too much energy on rectifying mischaracterisations and preventing you from derailing things with what I perceive to be silly word games (like that thing about “trying”).
I’m getting annoyed by it because I feel like I have to expend too much energy on rectifying mischaracterisations and preventing you from derailing things with what I perceive to be silly word games (like that thing about “trying”).
Trying is a very real word. It has a specific meaning.
If you try to have fun you won’t have fun. If you give a suggestion in hypnosis for someone to try something that means the person exerts effort on the task and doesn’t focus on a result.
Ideas like that are central to how to change how you feel about an activity. To the extend that you don’t want to understand what it takes to change how you feel about an activity you aren’t going to be in a position to judge it. This is inherently a discussion in which getting clear about what terms means matters.
Whether you believe it or not, some people fully intend to do X and fail for some reason, whether external or internal. The proper English phrase to describe what they did is “try to do X (and fail)”. “You should not try to do X” entails “You should not X”. “You should not try to do X” with strong focus intonation on “try” is an entirely different thing—but then you’re not talking about trying, you’re talking about the expression “try”. You’re making such metalinguistic statements, which are entirely besides the point that I was making. That’s what I call silly word games.
If you think that changing around utility functions has nothing to do with metalinguistics I think you miss core of what it’s about. The things you can say about changing around utility functions without addressing metalinguistics are superficial.
In the framework in which you operate it’s not easy to change around utility functions. To the extend we want to discuss changing around utility functions you should open your mind to learn to make distinctions that you aren’t used to make.
Whether you believe it or not, some people fully intend to do X and fail for some reason, whether external or internal.
Yes. And sometimes that reason is that they are engaging into “trying”. Often the opposite of trying is “waiting”.
You set an intention and allow the necessary process to happen. That not all of it, but it’s necessary.
I did spent a weekend trying to not try to get into a trance that’s deep enjoy to produce amnesia for numbers. It doesn’t. It’s not something that you can do from that state of mind. It will just fail.
On the other hand if you set an intention and let go and don’t try phenomena such as that are easy to produce. It very annoying but it’s the way the human mind works.
If you are used to trying and shoulding it might take you a year of practicing meditation to leave that mental framework.
It’s however not something that necessary for learning to enjoy Salsa. Instead it’s much better to go Salsa dancing and focus on why dancing Salsa is good for you. If that’s where you mental focus is you utility function will change.
If you constantly tell yourself: “I should enjoy Salsa.”, “Did I succeed in enjoying Salsa a bit more than last week?”, you botch up the whole process by trying to change your utility function.
I never said that you should be happy. You are allowed to be as miserable as you want and cement that status by trying to change it. I think that’s an unwise choice but you are free to engage in it. I don’t want to take anyone’s misery away against their will.
Well, I intended for my above comment to have a conciliatory flavour, but apparently that didn’t quite come across...
That’s not comparable because the truth-value of “God exists” is a function of reality, whereas the truth-value of “archery is a good hobby” is a function of reality and a utility function.
You’re not allowed to judge other people’s terminal preferences as rational or irrational because that’s a category mistake. You’re kind of not allowed to vocally judge them as right or wrong because it’s impolite and pointless.
This, incidentally, is also impolite. I said no such thing.
Salsa: Not taking this up may be a perfectly rational case of risk aversion. One might basically be avoiding psychological bankruptcy, depending on how detrimental the fact of the first few months of infelicitous and awkward interaction would be on one’s mind.
Archery: Well, maybe some people just find it very fun, are not good at retraining themselves at finding new things fun (you even admitted that you are probably special in that regard), and telling them to first learn to find arbitrary things fun is kind of besides the point when the discussion is about what are reasonable hobbies.
You’re also not taking into account the possibility of temporal discounting. Why should it be impossible for a person to have simply too high a discounting rate, which need not be irrational, in order for this whole suffering and personality-changing to be happier in the far future to be worth it? (In particular, someone might value health benefits much less than you do. This alone means that while you can make a conditional argument that if you value health benefits a lot, there are much better options than archery, you’re not entitled to assert that taking up archery is irrational because you’re missing out on all those health benefits from other activities.)
And then one’s value structure doesn’t have to be such that changing one’s emotional reactions to various things makes sense. This is clearest in aesthetic preferences: if I have a preference for beautiful things, that means that I want the things around me to be such that I would, by my present standards, consider them beautiful. It does not mean that I want my perception of beauty to be altered in such a way that I find the things which are, in fact, around me beautiful. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible to be in the analogous situation with respect to happiness.
And what’s that thing about MtG? I never mentioned that...
Believing that God exist is an activity and activities do have utility functions. It also has a lot to do with priors and it makes sense to choose your priors based on a heuristic that you evaluate with an utility function.
I’m not arguing that it’s theoretically impossible for people to have a high discount rate. Someone at the last lesswrong meetup argued that smoking is rational for him because he doesn’t care if he loses 10 years of lifespan.
On the other hand if that’s your position answering: “You should take up smoking” when someone asks for a good way to spend his life to improve his life on a lesswrong thread doesn’t make any sense without talking at all about the fact that you have a high possibility of temporal discounting.
That’s probably right, but doesn’t have much to do with the argument I made. I spoke about health benefits because archery is sort of a sport and the secondary benefit that comes to mind for most sports is health benefits.
Finding archery fun is quite superficial. It not like valuing saving human lives or preventing the world from being destroyed. I do think that it’s quite okay to change around how much happiness things bring that you do for higher purposes.
I do find it strange to value being happy tomorrow but not valuing changing around associations in your mind to be happy tomorrow because engaging in certain activity fulfills a long term purpose. That position seems to me very constructed and I would doubt that many people seriously hold it.
Again if that’s your position and you give suggestions on a thread of how a rationalists can improve his life by spending money I do think you have the burden of being explicit about your abnormal utility function. I would also question whether that suggestion has any value for the person who started the thread as I would predict that they value the happiness they have in a year and don’t just want to improve how happy they are tomorrow.
You brought up me wanting other people to take up Salsa. I did that in the MtG discussion when I said it’s probably more exicting. Here I suggest martial arts as substitute for archery.
Well, okay. But can we at least agree that epistemic activities are special and remove them from the discussion?
Right. So you just assuming that it’s low enough for your argument to be applicable to them...
How does it not have much to do with your argument when you say that archery should be disprefered because, despite being a sport, it does not get you much in terms of secondary health benefits?
It is superficial, and I’m not suggesting that anybody would have performing archery as an actual terminal value. The terminal value may be closer to “do something cool by my present definition of cool” (as opposed to “do something cool by whatever definition I happen to have, so I’ll self-modify to find useful things cool”). That’s closer to an aesthetic preference—and then the happiness would not be the actual goal, but a side-effect of getting what you want. People can be structured in ways so that they value other things than or besides happiness and health (I am).
Also, we’re not talking about it being okay to change your happiness function—we’re talking about whether it’s essentially obligatory, which you seem to be asserting.
Do you hold the same position about aesthetic preferences? Because frankly, trying to change your aesthetic preferences to fit your surroundings, instead of the other way around, strikes me as bizarre.
That’s all very well. I guess if you haven’t seen by now how that still makes your categorical assertions somewhat inappropriate, that point won’t come in the future, either. Also, what’s your basis for the assertion that the general structure of my utility function is so abnormal? Do you see people going around trying to change themselves to find things okay that they don’t find okay, instead of trying to change those things? I suppose you would say that’s the rational thing to do. Do you think everybody who doesn’t do that is just being irrational?
As far as aesthetic preferences go, learning to appreciate the subtleties of high culture isn’t something that’s generally considered bizarre. Yes, you can enjoy pop culture but I do think that changing your aesthetics by learning to perceive fine details is worthwhile.
I’m not a high culture snob you listens all the time to classical music that the average person can’t appreciate because they didn’t develop the required qualia. You can probably guess the reason ;) I do have a project running to develop finer ability to distinguish colors and that’s likely to change my aesthetics. I do think that developing finer qualia to perceive more depth of reality is worthwhile.
As a programmer I do want to develop aesthetics that make me shun bad code that’s likely to produce bugs. I think that if you want to hold on to the aesthetics of a beginner programmer that will hold you back in developing your programming ability.
The same goes for most expert domains. Developing good aesthetics for a field can be very worthwhile. Physicists distinguish beautiful theories from one’s that aren’t and developing the aesthetics to make that judgement will take time.
I strive to increase information inflow by being able to perceive finer distinctions of reality and I strive to develop aesthetics that make me more effective in the fields I want to have expertise.
For me that would still be a pretty superficial goal. But if we would look at that definition we could have a least a decent discussion whether archery optimizes that goal or whether there another hobby that would be more cool given that definition.
I think that something like life purpose is the core thing towards which to optimize.
I think most people would agree that investing burrow money with 20% interest rate to enjoy an experience in the present when you have to pay it back in a year is a bad way to discount future utility.
That sentence is quite complicated to answer. Trying to change yourself is the opposite from changing yourself. In reality quite a lot of people do adept to their circumstances. If you look at politics a lot of democrats suddenly find policies that they rejected under Bush to be okay, now that Obama implements them.
The thing I advocate is being clear about your purpose in life and then making the adaptions consciously instead of just letting them happen randomly.
Trying to change things is an activity in which a lot of people engage. It’s generally a bad habit. Either you change things or you don’t.
I do think that it’s quite supoptimal to have a happiness function that makes you unhappy if you engage in the activities that are best for you. I’m not saying that you have to modify it in a way to feel bad if you don’t engage in the activities that are best for you.
Feeling unhappy when you do what’s right just feels unnecessary. I would recommend to everyone to be happy over being depressed all things equal.
I’m ending this discussion. I’m finding it unproductive and, frankly, I’m getting annoyed by it because I feel like I have to expend too much energy on rectifying mischaracterisations and preventing you from derailing things with what I perceive to be silly word games (like that thing about “trying”).
Trying is a very real word. It has a specific meaning. If you try to have fun you won’t have fun. If you give a suggestion in hypnosis for someone to try something that means the person exerts effort on the task and doesn’t focus on a result.
Ideas like that are central to how to change how you feel about an activity. To the extend that you don’t want to understand what it takes to change how you feel about an activity you aren’t going to be in a position to judge it. This is inherently a discussion in which getting clear about what terms means matters.
Whether you believe it or not, some people fully intend to do X and fail for some reason, whether external or internal. The proper English phrase to describe what they did is “try to do X (and fail)”. “You should not try to do X” entails “You should not X”. “You should not try to do X” with strong focus intonation on “try” is an entirely different thing—but then you’re not talking about trying, you’re talking about the expression “try”. You’re making such metalinguistic statements, which are entirely besides the point that I was making. That’s what I call silly word games.
If you think that changing around utility functions has nothing to do with metalinguistics I think you miss core of what it’s about. The things you can say about changing around utility functions without addressing metalinguistics are superficial.
In the framework in which you operate it’s not easy to change around utility functions. To the extend we want to discuss changing around utility functions you should open your mind to learn to make distinctions that you aren’t used to make.
Yes. And sometimes that reason is that they are engaging into “trying”. Often the opposite of trying is “waiting”. You set an intention and allow the necessary process to happen. That not all of it, but it’s necessary.
I did spent a weekend trying to not try to get into a trance that’s deep enjoy to produce amnesia for numbers. It doesn’t. It’s not something that you can do from that state of mind. It will just fail.
On the other hand if you set an intention and let go and don’t try phenomena such as that are easy to produce. It very annoying but it’s the way the human mind works.
If you are used to trying and shoulding it might take you a year of practicing meditation to leave that mental framework.
It’s however not something that necessary for learning to enjoy Salsa. Instead it’s much better to go Salsa dancing and focus on why dancing Salsa is good for you. If that’s where you mental focus is you utility function will change. If you constantly tell yourself: “I should enjoy Salsa.”, “Did I succeed in enjoying Salsa a bit more than last week?”, you botch up the whole process by trying to change your utility function.
I never said that you should be happy. You are allowed to be as miserable as you want and cement that status by trying to change it. I think that’s an unwise choice but you are free to engage in it. I don’t want to take anyone’s misery away against their will.
and
and
You’re really in a judging mood today, aren’t you..?