Correct. However, if "experiencing thrills" is one of my terminal goals, then that thrill is helping me.
Yes, that's trivially true.
Then how is a thrill-seeker not "getting it"? Or are you claiming thrill-seekers don't exist?
To the extent that they don't enforce the 'right' behavior, I'd prefer to change that instead of having to choose between cheap thrills and abstract goals.
That's you. Your original comment wasn't phrased in the first person, however:
If you still get thrill out of slot machines, it just means that you don't get it at a deeper level.
That statement is false. Plenty of people don't care whether or not their sources of happiness "correctly" contribute to their reproductive success.
People have circuits built in that causes them to feel 'thrilled' in certain circumstances. These circuits still fire in some situations that don't help serve the "purpose" that natural selection "designed them for".
I was calling the circuits "a deeper level of 'you'", and you seem to want to call it "not me, just part of my body". This sure sounds like an issue with semantics to me.
You don't have any problems with paying money to run in circles, but I do. You want to use different words to describe this than I used. Is there really anything of substance here?
(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.