Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious “spend money to pay people to do things you don’t like doing but want done” route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there’s a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here’s what I’d start with:
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I’d start at a lake.
Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).
Racing. You’d probably want to start with go-karts and the like.
Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.
As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.
For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You’d have to do the math to see how much you’d wind up paying for your time.
Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.
I’d also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It’s anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It’s hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she’s ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.
choose your hobbies wisely. take ecstatic dance in oakland, for instance. its not very expensive, it will make sure your body stays a little fit, there will be great cahances to socialize and flirt. and you wont die.
compare that with motorcicle racing. it is competitive, male oriented, hard to find time and a place to do it, way more expensive, there are no women, it pollutes the earth, and you have to keep a motorbike in good conditions. not to mention you’ll live 15 minutes less per hour ran, according to tegmarks old website.
The advice above of getting hobbies is a good one, but choose activities that are physical, social, and will make you healthy and sexy, unless you really, really, really love playing magic the gathering, like i do, then just nerd your money around and leave the other things to another time.
I completely agree with dance lessons as a worthwhile hobby to consider. The point I was trying to get at is that if you have disposable disposable income and free time and your hobbies are “books and computer games”, you’ve probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
you’ve probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
When doing the exploration it makes sense to analyse the hobby beforehand. Motorcicle racing might be as fun as the ecstatic dance suggestion but it’s still a worse alternative because fun isn’t the only factor.
It depends on the relative costs of analysis versus just trying it, really. If it takes ten hours to figure out which hobby you want to try first, you could have already tried the top three gut-feeling hobbies out for three hours each.
If it takes ten hours to figure out which hobby you want to try first, you could have already tried the top three gut-feeling hobbies out for three hours each.
How much do you learn about the value of motorcycle racing by trying it out for three hours? I don’t think that provides much valuable information for a decision whether or not to engage in motorcycle racing.
It doesn’t provide you any information about accident risks. It doesn’t even provide you any information about whether it’s fun once you developed a decent ability at it.
I get that some hobbies are better than others, and you can use analysis to figure out costs and benefits. I have a tendency to over-analyze things instead of actually going out and doing them, so I tailored my advice for someone that likely has the same issues (since they’ve got a list of hobbies that indicates not going out and trying things).
Some people need to spend more time figuring out what hobbies they want and their relative costs or benefits. The people that need this branch of advice have already tried several of the hobbies listed and aren’t asking for advice along these lines.
I don’t remember the exact figures, but the risk of getting a persistent dry eye problem from laser eye surgery was significant enough to make me forget about it. My eyes are already pretty dry, and it’s a very annoying inconvenience to have.
That is good evidence, but I’d disbelieve its reliability a bit because it is so funny. Like obese dieticians, or non-rich investment brokers, or divorced marriage counselors.
Excellent point. I’d have difficulty believing this guy too, if he hadn’t predicted millimeter wave full-body scanners wouldn’t work before anybody in the media knew they wouldn’t, based on the fact he’d been building them.
He says the main problem with LASIK is that when you correct myopia with it, your presbyopia (inevitable hyperopia from being over 40) is going to be worse by the same degree that the operation made the myopia better, and you’re going to be stuck with it for much longer. Glasses or contacts for myopia you can just take off when you reach that age, but LASIK for myopia will need to be countercorrected. He didn’t object to LASIK for hyperopia.
One possible reason is that (reputedly, among opthalmologists) one of the side-effects of Lasik is thought to be fractionally worse colour discrimination. Which might be fine for Joe Public, but very bad for people who spend their careers identifying and manipulating sub-milimeter structures.
How much of that is age-related? LASIK doesn’t remove the need for reading glasses—it pegs your eyes to 20⁄20 if done properly, but as you age you lose the ability to alter focal distances, so you’re only 20⁄20 at a particular distance(usually far-field).
Because my myopia is too high, laser surgery was deemed unsafe. I had permanent implants instead (they call them phakic intraocular lenses). It has much fewer secondary effects. It cost me 5x what the laser surgery would have, but I had recently got a windfall and it was the best of all things I did with that money.
What else did you do with the money? (If the answer is ‘I blew it all on a Vegas weekend I can’t remember’, I will be much less impressed by the implants.)
Also, I lived three months without working and helped a roommate with her share of rent during her rough spot (she eventually paid me back). I bought furniture and cold-weather clothes that I needed.
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Why? Archery isn’t a sport that builds muscle, fluent body movement or produces a high heart rate that helps the heart.
To me it seems a suboptimal hobby for a rationalist.
I’d also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day.
That’s pricing the risk that it messes up your eye at zero. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.
Why? Archery isn’t a sport that builds muscle, fluent body movement or produces a high heart rate that helps the heart. To me it seems a suboptimal hobby for a rationalist.
Because it’s neat! I took glassblowing in college, and (a) it was fun, (b) I get to see glass objects and puzzle out how they were made, and (c) I get to tell people I took glassblowing which makes people do a double take.
(I mean, c’mon, I get opportunities to tell people that one of my final exams in college was making a Hero Engine).
Archery seems similarly likely to make you feel awesome.
Archery seems similarly likely to make you feel awesome.
Opportunity cost. An improv comedy course does this as well.
(c) I get to tell people I took glassblowing which makes people do a double take.
Years ago I heard an audio book by Jim Rohm in which he made the point that
even people without near-death experiences have intersting stories to tell.
I said to myself: “I do have had sort of a near-death experience but I still
feel like I have no intersting stories to tell.” After that day I stopped
making that excuse.
I do have plenty of stories that signal much more uniqueness because they are
not easily reconstructed. Everyone can imagine just signing up for a college
course or an archery class.
If you want to signal specialness experiences that
aren’t easily simulated are better.
That’s pricing the risk that it messes up your eye at zero. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the risks were sufficiently tiny that I was not concerned about them. Anything that laser eye surgery can do to the outer layers of the eye I fully expect to be fixable in the ~30 year future before age-related eye issues become a problem for me. A great deal of the remaining “messes up your eye” scenarios are fixable by the surgeon. The truly horrific stuff means a malpractice lawsuit (or settlement under threat thereof).
I did some more reading on the risks from the website and handouts from the place I got my eyes done. 7% have their eyes over or under corrected and get re-correction in the first year. Serious complications are much more rare.
It goes without saying that you should do your homework and go to the best place you can find.
The risk of dry eye is because LASIK cuts a flap in the cornea, severing many of the nerves that sense irritation and dryness. Other procedures like epi-LASEK or PRK don’t involve cutting into the cornea, so their risk of dry eye is much lower. Unfortunately, those procedures are more painful and take months to heal. They involve scraping the epithelial cells off of your cornea, zapping your eye, and then letting them grow back. On the bright side, there is no flap that can be dislodged by a blow to the eye.
I got wavefront-guided epi-LASEK a few years ago. My vision went from 20⁄200 to 20⁄15. It can be pricey ($5k), but it’s definitely the best money I’ve ever spent.
My eyes have gotten noticeably drier since I got laser eye surgery, and I consider it minor—it’s significantly less annoying than glasses. I may not have as severe a version as some, though.
Archery isn’t a sport that builds muscle, fluent body movement or produces a high heart rate that helps the heart.
Reading novels, playing bridge, or playing the harmonica do none of those things either; would you recommend against these activities too for the same reasons? Hell, even commenting on LW does none of those things! ;-)
To me it seems a suboptimal hobby for a rationalist.
Well, what choice is optimal depends on what one’s goals are, “rationalist” isn’t a narrow enough category for this purpose, and in any event it’s not like each person is only allowed to have one hobby at a time.
Well, what choice is optimal depends on what one’s goals are, “rationalist” isn’t a narrow enough category for this purpose
Than I’m happy to hear about which goals you achieve better by taking up archery than by taking up martial arts. For what goals does archery happen to be an optimal solution or even a good one.
We’re kind of kicking at different goalposts here. You’re trying to show that archery isn’t the best possible use of time (presumably for fitness) and I’m skeptical of your specific claims about it.
A couple things to consider.
Archery, by a formal reading of the term, is a martial art.
Not all forms of archery and martial arts are made equal. There’s considerably overlap in physical requirements. Compare a sport crossbow to an English longbow; compare tai chi to muay thai.
I practice martial arts, but not archery. When I had a chance to spend an afternoon firing a longbow with a measly 45lbs draw, I ached in all new places in my neck, arms, core, and thighs. I also needed to coordinate my body in novel ways.
Archery is not nearly as demanding for time as martial arts; it can be done in addition to other sports fairly easily.
Hopefully that gives you some idea of why I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss archery as suboptimal.
We’re kind of kicking at different goalposts here. You’re trying to show that archery isn’t the best possible use of time
Given that the whole thread is about ways a rationalist can spend money to improve his life, if archery isn’t a good use of your time buying a bow probably isn’t good use of your money either.
To the extend that I have used strong words to dismiss archery as suboptimal it’s because I dislike the idea of people recommending activities like archery, sailing or go-kart racing without any thought about secondary benefits.
I do think it makes sense to think seriously how about one spends his time. I think I get around 8 separate benefits from dancing.
Fun
Physical Confidence with women. It both provides heavy reaction therapy and an enviroment where
it’s socially expected that the men leads the woman.
Physical exercise that improves body coordination. I think that leads to more expressiveness in my body language in tasks such as public speaking.
It’s a general sport and fits the recommendation that one should do sport to be healthy.
It trains sensitivity of perception what happens physically inside other people.
Practical understand about human physiology that I can’t get from a physiology testbook. A limit space to experiment and check theories.
I’m in an enviroment with woman that are potential romantic partners.
I learn to listen to music on a deeper level (but compared to the other points that’s not really useful in other stuff I do)
That doesn’t mean that I think everyone should take up Salsa. I don’t even argue that it’s the perfect dance but I do think I have much better reasons for it than were provided here for taking up archery.
Archery, by a formal reading of the term, is a martial art.
I don’t care for the semantics.
I practice martial arts, but not archery. When I had a chance to spend an afternoon firing a longbow with a measly 45lbs draw, I ached in all new places in my neck, arms, core, and thighs
Even if it does grow some muscles, it doesn’t grow them symmetrically. Good muscle training should train both sides evenly. Having uneven muscles distribution isn’t good.
Do you think that’s genetic? I think its mostly learned behavior.
I don’t know; I’d guess it’s both. Why are you asking?
If you hit a state of flow both will feel fun.
Sounds like the fallacy of grey / a fully general counterargument against ever enjoying one pastime more than another other than for its practical benefits. I mean, if you hit a state of flow cleaning toilets will feel fun, too, but for certain people it’s easier to hit a state of flow with certain activities than with others.
but for certain people it’s easier to hit a state of flow with certain activities than with others.
That basically means that you don’t take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
I think the average level of fun that a person who’s into the hobby for a bit is more important than the level of fun you have when you start a hobby.
I also have control over what I feel. To me it seems much easier to simply choose to enjoy an activity by having control over my own state of mind than to sample a large number of hobbies, hoping that I accidentally find one that’s fun.
I admit that the way I gained the belief that I’m in control was highly manipulative NLP but it’s now real for me. I guess it’s like the issue of believing in ego depletion. (Make a mental note to find someone sooner or later to remove my belief in ego depletion)
That basically means that you don’t take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
I think the average level of fun that a person who’s into the hobby for a bit is more important than the level of fun you have when you start a hobby.
I’m not sure I understand this reply—these two paragraphs appear to contradict each other.
Also, it seems orthogonal to what I said. How long it takes before the average person is able to enjoy X and how much people vary in how much they’ll eventually enjoy X sound like different questions to me.
How do you decide whether archery is fun for you?You could use the first lesson of archery to make the decision. You could make that decision after a month.
I don’t think either of those tell you how much you will enjoy it after a year.
To the extend that you can’t predict how you will feel after a year you can look at what the average person who takes it for a year feels. That means you don’t get to base your decision on how different people enjoy different hobbies.
How do you decide whether archery is fun for you?You could use the first lesson of archery to make the decision. You could make that decision after a month. I don’t think either of those tell you how much you will enjoy it after a year.
So what? If in a year’s time I no longer find archery fun, I’ll still be allowed to stop doing it. And in any event it’s none of your freakin’ business.
(I don’t actually do archery in real life BTW, though I do have a few hobbies that don’t build muscle, fluent body movement or produce a high heart rate that helps the heart, such as for example commenting on Less Wrong.)
Well, okay, so you’re a highly unusual individual and on the basis of this, you’re arguing about the advisability of various things for other people… Your advice kind of boils down to “become like me”, doesn’t it? Which, of course, is a whole other issue.
That basically means that you don’t take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
What’s wrong with that? First, I have no good evidence that I would, after a couple of months, be able to hit flow with it. Second, I can’t and am unwilling to take arbitrary hits to my well-being even for restricted periods of time by engaging for a hobby that makes me miserable for the first couple of months. (Sounds a bit exaggerated, to be sure, but it was exactly what I thought when I read your salsa example somewhere else in the comments here.)
Well, okay, so you’re a highly unusual individual and on the basis of this, you’re arguing about the advisability of various things for other people… Your advice kind of boils down to “become like me”, doesn’t it? Which, of course, is a whole other issue.
No. My advice is to look at the various possible usages of your time and rationally access which benefits they provide. To the extend that challenge is “please become more like me” I find it surprising that someone raising that objection against myself at lesswrong. Maybe I take some ideas about rationality too seriously?
I don’t do martial arts classes (for complicated reasons that don’t generalize well to the general population). I don’t to improv comedy classes yet you will find that I recommend both of those activities because I consider them high value.
If you aren’t a person who’s good at telling jokes your first improv comedy classes might not be very funny for you. They might be highly challenging. If you take that to conclude that improv comedy classes are the wrong thing for you, then I think you are missing an experience that will bring you forward.
Well, your whole argument seemed to me to be: certain hobbies have various benefits, so you should change yourself to be able to engage in them to reap those benefits. That struck me as a bit far-reaching, hence the “whole other issue” remark.
When I took up Salsa it was exactly for the reasons I use here to advocate it. At the time I was an unfit person who wasn’t having much social contact spending most of the time in front of the computer.
I think doing something that changed me was the point. I’m not the person who took up Salsa because a girl needed a dance partner and dragged me along. I did make the decision to take it up after rational analysis and I think in retrospect it was the right decision for myself at that time.
I think the whole idea of rationality is that you should change yourself to engage in behavior that makes you more likely to win. If you don’t think that’s what rationality is about, than what is?
I’m not saying (or thinking) that your decision to take up Salsa wasn’t perfectly rational. What I do think is my decision not to do such a thing is also perfectly rational, which is probably why I had a negative emotional reaction to your very… vehement advocacy. In the case of archery, the structure of the discussion I gathered is: you said it was much inferior in health benefits to other activities—somebody brought up that it was simply fun—and you replied essentially that, well, then you should learn to find better things fun! That struck me as somewhat bizarre, because you were so forcefully condemning hobbies that were not optimal according to your metric without taking into account that other people may have other metrics and/or be constrained by various circumstances.
At this point, it’s become pretty clear to me that the reason I voiced this objection was that I perceived you as arguing so vehemently that I felt essentially I was being told that I’m irrational because I like the wrong things.
because you were so forcefully condemning hobbies that were not optimal according to your metric without taking into account that other people may have other metrics and/or be constrained by various circumstances.
This is a discussion. If I argue against something being wrong by a certain metric X but the person thinks metric Y is more important and has an argument for why the activity fulfills metric Y then I’m happy to hear that argument.
I’m happy to get such an analysis because it might tell me something about archery that I don’t know. It might also tell me something about fun I don’t know.
At this point, it’s become pretty clear to me that the reason I voiced this objection was that I perceived you as arguing so vehemently that I felt essentially I was being told that I’m irrational because I like the wrong things.
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?
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I’m not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
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?
I’m happy to hear an utility analysis for archery (or sailing and go-kart racing) that makes sense, where I would say, if you have the metric that you have, than it makes sense to make that decision.
As far as advocating Salsa for fun, I haven’t seen anyone argue seriously that playing card games like MtG is a good way to escape depression. I did hear people argue that sport is a good way to escape depression and physical contact with other people is as well.
Given my theoretical idea of how happiness generally happens Salsa checks more relevant marks then MtG, archery or sailing.
I’m not simply generalizing from one example of myself and my personal experience that Salsa is fun.
The hobbies we chose has a significant effect on our lives and therefore I do think that it’s much more important to make rational decisions about which hobby you have than it’s about whether you call yourself an atheist or theist.
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.
Still, you cannot just learn at will to find arbitrary things fun.
Actually, I can if I put effort into it. Especially if the activity has a purpose for myself.
But even if you can’t, you won’t know how an activity will feel after a year by taking a lesson in it.
My first month of dancing Salsa was horrible. In the Salsa community the first months for males get called “beginner’s hell”. If you only engage in hobbies that are fun the first time in which you engage them I don’t think you optimize happiness and more importantly you probably won’t engage in activities that challenge your weak area’s in a way that makes you improve on a more general level.
Are you sure? Archery requires a lot of strength and full-body coordination. Archers that I know have to do strength training for it. I’m not going to make any claims about how optimal it is, but that seems untrue on its face.
Archers that I know have to do strength training for it.
Exactly. Archery doesn’t provide strength training if you have to do strength training to do archery. If it would be good at strength training than archers wouldn’t need separate strength training.
Yes, there might be some effects but if your goal is strength training I would guess that there are better ways.
As far as full-body coordination goes, archery forces you into being still in a quite unnatural position. I don’t think that’s what you want to train. A good martial arts or a good dance class provides you with better training.
Exactly. Archery doesn’t provide strength training if you have to do strength training to do archery. If it would be good at strength training than archers wouldn’t need separate strength training.
That’s incorrect. Every sport requires additional strength training in order to perform at a high level. Even in strength sports, supplemental strength training is required beyond practicing the sport itself. This doesn’t mean that the sport itself doesn’t provide a strength adaptation response. Yoga counts as strength training for the sufficiently weak.
In Olympic weightlifting, the contested lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Even minimalistic weightlifting programming involves squatting, and most programs include pressing, rows, deadlifting, and other strength work as well.
Powerlifting is a much simpler sport, testing only the squat, bench press, and deadlift for one repetition. Just practicing the sport would involve doing single reps with squats, bench presses, and deadlifts. Virtually no successful powerlifters train this way. Basically all of them do multiple repetitions on the main lifts, and the majority do other exercises as well.
That still doesn’t seem right to me, but I should point out that a good motivation to do a thing is as valuable as the thing itself, if otherwise you wouldn’t.
For me I don’t see any reason to prefer archery over a martial art.
And there might not be any reason to do it for you, but other people might be uncomfortable with hitting other people, concerned about their hands (much easier to break a finger or twist your wrist if you’re doing martial arts than archery, I imagine), be looking for a relaxing rather than exciting hobby, etc.
Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious “spend money to pay people to do things you don’t like doing but want done” route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there’s a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here’s what I’d start with:
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I’d start at a lake.
Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).
Racing. You’d probably want to start with go-karts and the like.
Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.
As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.
For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You’d have to do the math to see how much you’d wind up paying for your time.
Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.
I’d also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It’s anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It’s hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she’s ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.
choose your hobbies wisely. take ecstatic dance in oakland, for instance. its not very expensive, it will make sure your body stays a little fit, there will be great cahances to socialize and flirt. and you wont die.
compare that with motorcicle racing. it is competitive, male oriented, hard to find time and a place to do it, way more expensive, there are no women, it pollutes the earth, and you have to keep a motorbike in good conditions. not to mention you’ll live 15 minutes less per hour ran, according to tegmarks old website.
The advice above of getting hobbies is a good one, but choose activities that are physical, social, and will make you healthy and sexy, unless you really, really, really love playing magic the gathering, like i do, then just nerd your money around and leave the other things to another time.
I completely agree with dance lessons as a worthwhile hobby to consider. The point I was trying to get at is that if you have disposable disposable income and free time and your hobbies are “books and computer games”, you’ve probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
When doing the exploration it makes sense to analyse the hobby beforehand. Motorcicle racing might be as fun as the ecstatic dance suggestion but it’s still a worse alternative because fun isn’t the only factor.
It depends on the relative costs of analysis versus just trying it, really. If it takes ten hours to figure out which hobby you want to try first, you could have already tried the top three gut-feeling hobbies out for three hours each.
How much do you learn about the value of motorcycle racing by trying it out for three hours? I don’t think that provides much valuable information for a decision whether or not to engage in motorcycle racing.
It doesn’t provide you any information about accident risks. It doesn’t even provide you any information about whether it’s fun once you developed a decent ability at it.
I get that some hobbies are better than others, and you can use analysis to figure out costs and benefits. I have a tendency to over-analyze things instead of actually going out and doing them, so I tailored my advice for someone that likely has the same issues (since they’ve got a list of hobbies that indicates not going out and trying things).
Some people need to spend more time figuring out what hobbies they want and their relative costs or benefits. The people that need this branch of advice have already tried several of the hobbies listed and aren’t asking for advice along these lines.
I don’t remember the exact figures, but the risk of getting a persistent dry eye problem from laser eye surgery was significant enough to make me forget about it. My eyes are already pretty dry, and it’s a very annoying inconvenience to have.
A friend of mine got Lasik and deeply regretted it. So you should do lots of research and be sure to get it from someone competent.
Well, hindsight is 20⁄20.
Why does she regret it, specifically?
Since we’re already at the anecdote level: A friend of mine saw a LASIK surgeons conference at his university and he says they’re all wearing glasses.
To get away from the anecdote level and bring in an empirical source, LASIK satisfaction rates are at 95.4%. [non-paywall pdf]
Thank you for a very interesting read, and especially for thinking to provide a non-paywall link.
That’s the most impressive list of declared conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.
That is good evidence, but I’d disbelieve its reliability a bit because it is so funny. Like obese dieticians, or non-rich investment brokers, or divorced marriage counselors.
Excellent point. I’d have difficulty believing this guy too, if he hadn’t predicted millimeter wave full-body scanners wouldn’t work before anybody in the media knew they wouldn’t, based on the fact he’d been building them.
He says the main problem with LASIK is that when you correct myopia with it, your presbyopia (inevitable hyperopia from being over 40) is going to be worse by the same degree that the operation made the myopia better, and you’re going to be stuck with it for much longer. Glasses or contacts for myopia you can just take off when you reach that age, but LASIK for myopia will need to be countercorrected. He didn’t object to LASIK for hyperopia.
One possible reason is that (reputedly, among opthalmologists) one of the side-effects of Lasik is thought to be fractionally worse colour discrimination. Which might be fine for Joe Public, but very bad for people who spend their careers identifying and manipulating sub-milimeter structures.
How much of that is age-related? LASIK doesn’t remove the need for reading glasses—it pegs your eyes to 20⁄20 if done properly, but as you age you lose the ability to alter focal distances, so you’re only 20⁄20 at a particular distance(usually far-field).
Because my myopia is too high, laser surgery was deemed unsafe. I had permanent implants instead (they call them phakic intraocular lenses). It has much fewer secondary effects. It cost me 5x what the laser surgery would have, but I had recently got a windfall and it was the best of all things I did with that money.
What else did you do with the money? (If the answer is ‘I blew it all on a Vegas weekend I can’t remember’, I will be much less impressed by the implants.)
Two words: book fair.
Also, I lived three months without working and helped a roommate with her share of rent during her rough spot (she eventually paid me back). I bought furniture and cold-weather clothes that I needed.
Why? Archery isn’t a sport that builds muscle, fluent body movement or produces a high heart rate that helps the heart. To me it seems a suboptimal hobby for a rationalist.
That’s pricing the risk that it messes up your eye at zero. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.
Because it’s neat! I took glassblowing in college, and (a) it was fun, (b) I get to see glass objects and puzzle out how they were made, and (c) I get to tell people I took glassblowing which makes people do a double take.
(I mean, c’mon, I get opportunities to tell people that one of my final exams in college was making a Hero Engine).
Archery seems similarly likely to make you feel awesome.
Opportunity cost. An improv comedy course does this as well.
Years ago I heard an audio book by Jim Rohm in which he made the point that even people without near-death experiences have intersting stories to tell.
I said to myself: “I do have had sort of a near-death experience but I still feel like I have no intersting stories to tell.” After that day I stopped making that excuse.
I do have plenty of stories that signal much more uniqueness because they are not easily reconstructed. Everyone can imagine just signing up for a college course or an archery class.
If you want to signal specialness experiences that aren’t easily simulated are better.
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the risks were sufficiently tiny that I was not concerned about them. Anything that laser eye surgery can do to the outer layers of the eye I fully expect to be fixable in the ~30 year future before age-related eye issues become a problem for me. A great deal of the remaining “messes up your eye” scenarios are fixable by the surgeon. The truly horrific stuff means a malpractice lawsuit (or settlement under threat thereof).
I did some more reading on the risks from the website and handouts from the place I got my eyes done. 7% have their eyes over or under corrected and get re-correction in the first year. Serious complications are much more rare.
It goes without saying that you should do your homework and go to the best place you can find.
Persistent dry eyes is probably the most significant risk. Sounds minor, but isn’t.
The risk of dry eye is because LASIK cuts a flap in the cornea, severing many of the nerves that sense irritation and dryness. Other procedures like epi-LASEK or PRK don’t involve cutting into the cornea, so their risk of dry eye is much lower. Unfortunately, those procedures are more painful and take months to heal. They involve scraping the epithelial cells off of your cornea, zapping your eye, and then letting them grow back. On the bright side, there is no flap that can be dislodged by a blow to the eye.
I got wavefront-guided epi-LASEK a few years ago. My vision went from 20⁄200 to 20⁄15. It can be pricey ($5k), but it’s definitely the best money I’ve ever spent.
My eyes have gotten noticeably drier since I got laser eye surgery, and I consider it minor—it’s significantly less annoying than glasses. I may not have as severe a version as some, though.
Reading novels, playing bridge, or playing the harmonica do none of those things either; would you recommend against these activities too for the same reasons? Hell, even commenting on LW does none of those things! ;-)
Well, what choice is optimal depends on what one’s goals are, “rationalist” isn’t a narrow enough category for this purpose, and in any event it’s not like each person is only allowed to have one hobby at a time.
Than I’m happy to hear about which goals you achieve better by taking up archery than by taking up martial arts. For what goals does archery happen to be an optimal solution or even a good one.
We’re kind of kicking at different goalposts here. You’re trying to show that archery isn’t the best possible use of time (presumably for fitness) and I’m skeptical of your specific claims about it.
A couple things to consider.
Archery, by a formal reading of the term, is a martial art.
Not all forms of archery and martial arts are made equal. There’s considerably overlap in physical requirements. Compare a sport crossbow to an English longbow; compare tai chi to muay thai.
I practice martial arts, but not archery. When I had a chance to spend an afternoon firing a longbow with a measly 45lbs draw, I ached in all new places in my neck, arms, core, and thighs. I also needed to coordinate my body in novel ways.
Archery is not nearly as demanding for time as martial arts; it can be done in addition to other sports fairly easily.
Hopefully that gives you some idea of why I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss archery as suboptimal.
Given that the whole thread is about ways a rationalist can spend money to improve his life, if archery isn’t a good use of your time buying a bow probably isn’t good use of your money either.
To the extend that I have used strong words to dismiss archery as suboptimal it’s because I dislike the idea of people recommending activities like archery, sailing or go-kart racing without any thought about secondary benefits.
I do think it makes sense to think seriously how about one spends his time. I think I get around 8 separate benefits from dancing.
Fun
Physical Confidence with women. It both provides heavy reaction therapy and an enviroment where it’s socially expected that the men leads the woman.
Physical exercise that improves body coordination. I think that leads to more expressiveness in my body language in tasks such as public speaking.
It’s a general sport and fits the recommendation that one should do sport to be healthy.
It trains sensitivity of perception what happens physically inside other people.
Practical understand about human physiology that I can’t get from a physiology testbook. A limit space to experiment and check theories.
I’m in an enviroment with woman that are potential romantic partners.
I learn to listen to music on a deeper level (but compared to the other points that’s not really useful in other stuff I do)
That doesn’t mean that I think everyone should take up Salsa. I don’t even argue that it’s the perfect dance but I do think I have much better reasons for it than were provided here for taking up archery.
I don’t care for the semantics.
Even if it does grow some muscles, it doesn’t grow them symmetrically. Good muscle training should train both sides evenly. Having uneven muscles distribution isn’t good.
For certain people the former might be more fun (and for other people it might be the other way around).
Do you think that’s genetic? I think its mostly learned behavior. If you hit a state of flow both will feel fun.
I don’t know; I’d guess it’s both. Why are you asking?
Sounds like the fallacy of grey / a fully general counterargument against ever enjoying one pastime more than another other than for its practical benefits. I mean, if you hit a state of flow cleaning toilets will feel fun, too, but for certain people it’s easier to hit a state of flow with certain activities than with others.
That basically means that you don’t take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
I think the average level of fun that a person who’s into the hobby for a bit is more important than the level of fun you have when you start a hobby.
I also have control over what I feel. To me it seems much easier to simply choose to enjoy an activity by having control over my own state of mind than to sample a large number of hobbies, hoping that I accidentally find one that’s fun.
I admit that the way I gained the belief that I’m in control was highly manipulative NLP but it’s now real for me. I guess it’s like the issue of believing in ego depletion. (Make a mental note to find someone sooner or later to remove my belief in ego depletion)
I’m not sure I understand this reply—these two paragraphs appear to contradict each other.
Also, it seems orthogonal to what I said. How long it takes before the average person is able to enjoy X and how much people vary in how much they’ll eventually enjoy X sound like different questions to me.
How do you decide whether archery is fun for you?You could use the first lesson of archery to make the decision. You could make that decision after a month. I don’t think either of those tell you how much you will enjoy it after a year.
To the extend that you can’t predict how you will feel after a year you can look at what the average person who takes it for a year feels. That means you don’t get to base your decision on how different people enjoy different hobbies.
So what? If in a year’s time I no longer find archery fun, I’ll still be allowed to stop doing it. And in any event it’s none of your freakin’ business.
(I don’t actually do archery in real life BTW, though I do have a few hobbies that don’t build muscle, fluent body movement or produce a high heart rate that helps the heart, such as for example commenting on Less Wrong.)
If we have a discussion about the value of engaging in activities and spending money for it, why is it not my business to discuss that value?
Tapping out. (EDIT: I didn’t downvote.)
Well, okay, so you’re a highly unusual individual and on the basis of this, you’re arguing about the advisability of various things for other people… Your advice kind of boils down to “become like me”, doesn’t it? Which, of course, is a whole other issue.
What’s wrong with that? First, I have no good evidence that I would, after a couple of months, be able to hit flow with it. Second, I can’t and am unwilling to take arbitrary hits to my well-being even for restricted periods of time by engaging for a hobby that makes me miserable for the first couple of months. (Sounds a bit exaggerated, to be sure, but it was exactly what I thought when I read your salsa example somewhere else in the comments here.)
No. My advice is to look at the various possible usages of your time and rationally access which benefits they provide. To the extend that challenge is “please become more like me” I find it surprising that someone raising that objection against myself at lesswrong. Maybe I take some ideas about rationality too seriously?
I don’t do martial arts classes (for complicated reasons that don’t generalize well to the general population). I don’t to improv comedy classes yet you will find that I recommend both of those activities because I consider them high value.
If you aren’t a person who’s good at telling jokes your first improv comedy classes might not be very funny for you. They might be highly challenging. If you take that to conclude that improv comedy classes are the wrong thing for you, then I think you are missing an experience that will bring you forward.
Well, your whole argument seemed to me to be: certain hobbies have various benefits, so you should change yourself to be able to engage in them to reap those benefits. That struck me as a bit far-reaching, hence the “whole other issue” remark.
When I took up Salsa it was exactly for the reasons I use here to advocate it. At the time I was an unfit person who wasn’t having much social contact spending most of the time in front of the computer.
I think doing something that changed me was the point. I’m not the person who took up Salsa because a girl needed a dance partner and dragged me along. I did make the decision to take it up after rational analysis and I think in retrospect it was the right decision for myself at that time.
I think the whole idea of rationality is that you should change yourself to engage in behavior that makes you more likely to win. If you don’t think that’s what rationality is about, than what is?
I’m not saying (or thinking) that your decision to take up Salsa wasn’t perfectly rational. What I do think is my decision not to do such a thing is also perfectly rational, which is probably why I had a negative emotional reaction to your very… vehement advocacy. In the case of archery, the structure of the discussion I gathered is: you said it was much inferior in health benefits to other activities—somebody brought up that it was simply fun—and you replied essentially that, well, then you should learn to find better things fun! That struck me as somewhat bizarre, because you were so forcefully condemning hobbies that were not optimal according to your metric without taking into account that other people may have other metrics and/or be constrained by various circumstances.
At this point, it’s become pretty clear to me that the reason I voiced this objection was that I perceived you as arguing so vehemently that I felt essentially I was being told that I’m irrational because I like the wrong things.
That’s a frequent LW mode :-D
This is a discussion. If I argue against something being wrong by a certain metric X but the person thinks metric Y is more important and has an argument for why the activity fulfills metric Y then I’m happy to hear that argument.
I’m happy to get such an analysis because it might tell me something about archery that I don’t know. It might also tell me something about fun I don’t know.
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?
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I’m not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
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?
I’m happy to hear an utility analysis for archery (or sailing and go-kart racing) that makes sense, where I would say, if you have the metric that you have, than it makes sense to make that decision.
As far as advocating Salsa for fun, I haven’t seen anyone argue seriously that playing card games like MtG is a good way to escape depression. I did hear people argue that sport is a good way to escape depression and physical contact with other people is as well.
Given my theoretical idea of how happiness generally happens Salsa checks more relevant marks then MtG, archery or sailing. I’m not simply generalizing from one example of myself and my personal experience that Salsa is fun.
The hobbies we chose has a significant effect on our lives and therefore I do think that it’s much more important to make rational decisions about which hobby you have than it’s about whether you call yourself an atheist or theist.
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.
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You’re really in a judging mood today, aren’t you..?
Still, you cannot just learn at will to find arbitrary things fun. So what’s your point?
Actually, I can if I put effort into it. Especially if the activity has a purpose for myself.
But even if you can’t, you won’t know how an activity will feel after a year by taking a lesson in it. My first month of dancing Salsa was horrible. In the Salsa community the first months for males get called “beginner’s hell”. If you only engage in hobbies that are fun the first time in which you engage them I don’t think you optimize happiness and more importantly you probably won’t engage in activities that challenge your weak area’s in a way that makes you improve on a more general level.
Are you sure? Archery requires a lot of strength and full-body coordination. Archers that I know have to do strength training for it. I’m not going to make any claims about how optimal it is, but that seems untrue on its face.
Exactly. Archery doesn’t provide strength training if you have to do strength training to do archery. If it would be good at strength training than archers wouldn’t need separate strength training.
Yes, there might be some effects but if your goal is strength training I would guess that there are better ways.
As far as full-body coordination goes, archery forces you into being still in a quite unnatural position. I don’t think that’s what you want to train. A good martial arts or a good dance class provides you with better training.
That’s incorrect. Every sport requires additional strength training in order to perform at a high level. Even in strength sports, supplemental strength training is required beyond practicing the sport itself. This doesn’t mean that the sport itself doesn’t provide a strength adaptation response. Yoga counts as strength training for the sufficiently weak.
In Olympic weightlifting, the contested lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Even minimalistic weightlifting programming involves squatting, and most programs include pressing, rows, deadlifting, and other strength work as well.
Powerlifting is a much simpler sport, testing only the squat, bench press, and deadlift for one repetition. Just practicing the sport would involve doing single reps with squats, bench presses, and deadlifts. Virtually no successful powerlifters train this way. Basically all of them do multiple repetitions on the main lifts, and the majority do other exercises as well.
That still doesn’t seem right to me, but I should point out that a good motivation to do a thing is as valuable as the thing itself, if otherwise you wouldn’t.
Taking a hobby costs a lot of time.
For me I don’t see any reason to prefer archery over a martial art. The martial art does provide a bunch of secondary benefits.
And there might not be any reason to do it for you, but other people might be uncomfortable with hitting other people, concerned about their hands (much easier to break a finger or twist your wrist if you’re doing martial arts than archery, I imagine), be looking for a relaxing rather than exciting hobby, etc.