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Academian comments on Too busy to think about life - Less Wrong
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do you want the useful signal answer or the real answer? real: I want to acquire resources to make myself more attractive to the opposite sex. I want to extend my possibilities for mating as far into the future as I can. signal: i want to make the world a better place or something.
Have you read Thou Art Godshatter?
I agree with Eliezer that my values are an ad-hoc assembly of things that happened to increase the genetic fitness of my ancestors, and that this ad-hoc-ness is why I do not solely value my own genetic fitness. If natural selection were smarter, I would. But naturally, I'm satisfied with the values I got instead :)
From the perspective of a hypothetical, evolution-personified designer who "created" me, my morals might just be signals. So I'm careful that I might be running on hostile hardware that might try overtaking my conscious values to, say, become a corrupt and promiscuous political leader with many offspring. But I don't identify with this hostility as "my values", and will make much conscious effort to prevent such corruption.
ETA: You might really have those values; I just want to draw attention to them not being an inevitable consequence of evolution or "realizing one's true purpose". Thankfully, used as such "true purpose" doesn't have to mean anything non-subjective, nor in particular equate to "temporally earlier in-some-sense-implicitly-conceived purpose".
I'm not quite sure that's what the parent meant. I understood it literally and it does make sense as well.
I never talked about what nazgulnarsil's values meant, but my own ;) This was intentional. S/he really might have those values consciously; I only provided a foil to that possibility. So I just ETA'd to clarify that; sometimes I sincerely forget that consistent pronouns aren't explicit enough to convey intention.
I was being fairly literal. no one says as much because it is a very low status thing to say.
natural selection wasn't smart enough to keep me from getting a vasectomy. happiness: 1, genetic utility: -infinity
Wait a minute... Do you think status is the main reason people don't say they only value reproduction? It's not, say, because they don't only value reproduction?
Or are you just saying that among the few people who really only have that terminal value, few say so because of the status it signals?
That may be true. But more importantly (since it's so easy to observe what people say), I bet that even among the people who would say they value only reproduction, most respond to real-life in a way that reflects otherwise.
for natural selection reproduction is a terminal value and mating is an instrumental value. for me mating is the terminal value. to me it seems like males have mating as a terminal value and females have reproduction with a high status male as a terminal value. their signals seem to reflect this pretty accurately.
Why have you split your claim between genders? Are these values are naturally different between genders or that the differences are learned? In a society with large gender differences such as ours (or at least mine) it's hard to separate the differences in values due to gender (if there even are any) from the learned behaviour of members of the different sexes.
Their are straightforward evolutionary reasons for different mating strategies between males and females. It would be very surprising if there were not natural differences given the different selection pressures at work.
Fair enough. But those particular differences?
"for me mating is the terminal value." You mean that you act close to as if it was?
I think that you get pleasure from many other things too, and even if you would loose the interest in mating, you would go on getting pleasure from many of those other things.
I rationally think that I value the happiness of myself and others as a terminal value. I also get pleasure of it. To some extent this increases my mating chances but some of it decreases. The same seems to be true to people similar to you, although to a smaller extent: you are in between these two positions.
What is a" value"? Is it what I think as my value and try to achieve, or is it the thing towards which my genes (and memes?) are optimized? I think that it is closed to the former, but in my case neither of them is exactly mating, although I am a male.
I'd say that basic English pragmatics lead us to interpret it as "the terminal value relevant to this situation" rather than "the only terminal value I have". The relevant question would thus be not, "don't you enjoy other things unrelated to mating?" but rather, "If you stopped deriving pleasure/interpersonal connection/etc from mating, would you still be interested in doing it?"
Define mating so that “you stopped deriving pleasure/interpersonal connection/etc from mating” is a possible future state of the world. :-)