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Vladimir_Golovin comments on Experiential Pica - Less Wrong
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Excellent post. The one problem I have with the analogy is that pica is almost completely objective; it involves eating non-food items and is (usually) caused by a mineral deficiency. Akrasia isn't quite like that. It's entirely possible that doing Z will cause you to stop doing X, but there does not appear to be an objective sense in which Z is the real thing you need and X was a misguided proxy. Plenty of people play World of Warcraft and never go outside, and they can continue to be excellent, cheerful Warcraft-players. Pica, by contrast, can be harmful itself (ice is one of the most pleasant non-food substances one could pick) and also indicates the body not functioning correctly; mineral deficiencies have both measurable effects on people and (I think) experiential effects in the sense of poor health/energy/whatever mineral deficiencies do. Akrasia seems to lack such objective referents; one could sit down and play WoW for the rest of one's life and, in theory, be perfectly happy about it.
Yes, but will (s)he reproduce?
Iron deficiency impedes survival and reproduction. Same with WoW -- instead of spending resources on raising one's tribal status, getting a good mate and having their children survive to reproductive age, one is spending time and resources on raising status in a nonexistent tribe -- its members very rarely meet, let alone mate.
I feel like we ought to start letting go of evolutionary goals as if they are our own. I explicitly do not wish to reproduce. I'd enjoy being a father but I'd be plenty happy adopting and raising a child who already exists and is parentless. A higher incidence of shared alleles and some related cultural temporal idea of "my genetic child" mean nothing to me. There's some gut instinct for being a genetic father, but it's minor. Evolution doesn't really give a shit about my happiness (i.e. utility function) and the feeling is mutual.
Last I checked, I do not live in the savanna. These qualities are no longer associated with reproductive fitness in Western societies with even moderate social support networks.
More to the point, why should I care? You were out there having kids, I was in here getting epic loots and pwning n00bs. You like what you did. I like what I did. There's nothing to say that either of us was "right." As a fact about the world, more of your alleles will exist in future generations. Also as a fact about the world, my avatar will have more achievement points than yours. We'll both be thoroughly dead. You are more successful by evolutionary standards, and probably by social ones as well, but I don't care, because I'm more successful by my standards, which frankly are the only ones I care about, and reason alone cannot say that your standards are in any sense better than mine.