I’m enjoying these posts. Each time it’s another red pill. Well done!
JEB_4_PREZ_2016
Karma: 6
This is a remarkably good post with which I couldn’t have more fully resonated. Thank you!
There’s a reason the saying “If you have to ask for the price, it’s too expensive for you” exists.
That saying has more to do with poor people not having the purchasing power of rich people and less to do with rich people and their lack of stinginess.
A huge reason why lottery winners go broke is that they don’t earn more money
False. Most jackpot winners (and almost all of the ones that go broke), come from the lower and less educated classes. If they were to invest their entire prize in passive investments and live off the annual returns, they’d be earning far more money than any salary they could’ve ever hoped to achieve with their labor. These people don’t go broke because they don’t earn more money—they go broke because they squander multiple lifetimes worth of upper class earnings astonishingly quickly.
there are other rich people who do earn money and who spent it lavishly.
Not in the way that was described in the original example. Note that in philh’s comment, Alice “doesn’t actually care very much about having this $1000 loaf over a $1 loaf,” but decides to go ahead and drop $1,000 on it anyways. The overwhelming majority of ultra rich people don’t spend this way. And when they sort of do, they don’t stay ultra rich over the long run.
All [long-term] wealthy people care about price differences. They’d go broke if they didn’t (see lottery winners). Even billionaires don’t just throw their money around, because their money is still scarce and they want to spend it so as to maximize their expected utility.
Replacing bread with wine doesn’t change anything; if a billionaire slightly prefers one type of wine to another, he doesn’t arbitrarily pay a ton more for it. He pays the market price.
Alice would probably not want to pay $1,000 for a loaf that she prefers only slightly to the $1 loaf. She’d likely be willing to pay $1.05 or $1.10 for it. And Bob would be willing to pay $2 or $3 or maybe even $4 since he wants it so badly.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead
Should LessWrong have been more open to political discourse? Might that have boosted popularity during its heyday and helped to offset the exodus of Eliezer and company?
my utility function tells me to
I agree with the first sentence. “Akrasia” is just the brain being [quite reasonably] unsure whether its long-term goals are really worth the effort.
where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Clearly you’ve never worked at a big corporation.
And I still don’t understand why would I want to become an ideal utility maximizer.
If you could flip a switch right now that makes you an ideal utility maximizer, you wouldn’t do it?
Also worth noting: LWers should be extracting more utility from their money than non-LWers.
But on a baseline day I consume between 1 and 1.5 gallons of water alone, not counting any water in the food I eat, or any other beverages such as almond milk.
That’s an absurd amount of water (not from food) to be consuming every day.
I think my “no free will believing self” causes me to model my future self more pessimistically, albeit more accurately, than my “free will believing self” used to.
More specifically, I now pretty much by default see my future self as destined to fail at achieving my current goals due to hyperbolic discounting and, among other things, unexpectedly low willpower striking at random times and lasting for random periods. So, my focus is mainly on continual massive upfront investment during the good times (the rare days when I’ve got an abundance of willpower) in order to mitigate these willpower failure risks and keep my productivity much more stable and higher in the long-run.
This probably isn’t necessary for most people, but I suspect it is a good tactic for those who, like me, are extremely volatile in terms of day-to-day willpower stores and who fail miserably at achieving their goals if they try to just “power through” at all times and ‘believe in the belief’ of free will.
Wireheading seems like a perfectly reasonable answer to me.
Well, you value whatever you’re doing instead of going to the gym more than you value saving the world is what I was getting at. People value their own expected utility more than they value societal expected utility, even if most individuals in society would be better off if everyone somehow valued societal expected utility. Seems reasonably likely to me anyways.
Perhaps I misunderstood you; now it seems like you were saying “why do we hyperbolic discount?” or something to that effect.
“I would generalize the question, because the generalization applies broadly—whatever we profess to value, whatever we believe we value, why aren’t we expending more time and energy actually creating that value?”
I’ve always thought it was interesting to think what you would actually do with eternity… You could have kids...like 1,000 >kids. And fall in love every week. And win Nobel Prizes in everything. And travel to the edge of the Universe. Or create >your own Universe and be the God of it. Etc. Etc. There might be thousands of years of novelty in that. Maybe millions. >But the returns are diminishing. Just think of all the amazing stuff we completely ignore and are bored with already.
I understand that boredom is an issue for many people, but I never really get bored so it’s difficult for me to relate. 1,000 years of various things like the ones you mention seems like it would be a lot of fun to me.
If a dude’s ordering half a dozen hookers to his room, he doesn’t mind publicity for it.
Well that was one hell of a read. For some reason it reminded me of this old classic by Eliezer. Thanks for sharing.