Open Thread: June 2010

Morendil

To whom it may concern:

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)

To whom it may concern:

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)

My theory of happiness.

In my experience, happy people tend to be more optimistic and more willing to take risks than sad people. This makes sense, because we tend to be more happy when things are generally going well for us: that is when we can afford to take risks. I speculate that the emotion of happiness has evolved for this very purpose, as a mechanism that regulates our risk aversion and makes us more willing to risk things when we have the resources to spare.

Incidentally, this would also explain why people falling in love tend to be intensly happy at first. In order to get and keep a mate, you need to be ready to take risks. Also, if happiness is correlated with resources, then being happy signals having lots of resources, increasing your prospective mate's chances of accepting you. [...]

I was previously talking with Will about the degree to which people's happiness might affect their tendency to lean towards negative or positive utilitarianism. We came to the conclusion that people who are naturally happy might favor positive utilitarianism, while naturally unhappy people might favor negative utilitarianism. If this theory of happiness is true, then that makes perfect sense: risk aversion and a desire to avoid pain corresponds to negative utilitarianism, and willingness to tolerate pain corresponds to positive utilitarianism.

Note that most Western humans have a far greater access to resources than our ancestors did, so we are likely all far more risk-averse than would be optimal given the environment.

How does this make sense exactly? A happy person, with more resources, would be better off not taking risks that could result in him losing what he has. On the other hand, a sad person with few resources, would need to take more risks then the happy person to get the same results. If you told a rich person, jump off that cliff and I'll give you a million dollars, they probably wouldn't do it. On the other hand, if you told a poor person the same thing, they might do it as long as there was a chance they could survive.

My idea of why people were happy wasn't a static value of how many resources they had, but a comparative value. A rich person thrown into poverty would be very unhappy, but the poor person might be happy.

8Alexandros16y

Hi Kaj, I really liked the article. I had a relevant theory to explain the perceived difference of attitudes of north Europeans versus south Europeans. I guess you could call it a theory of unhappiness. Here goes: I take as granted that mildly depressed people tend to make more accurate depictions of reality, that north Europeans have higher incidence of depression and also much better functioning economies and democracies. Given a low resource environment, one needs to plan further, and make more rational projections of the future. If being on the depressive side makes one more introspective and thoughtful, then it would be conducive to having better long-term plans. In a sense, happiness could be greed-inducing, in a greedy algorithm sense. This more or less agrees with kaj's theory. OTOH, not-happiness would encourage long-term planning and even more co-operative behaviour. In the current environment, resources may not be scarce, but our world has become much more complex, actions having much deeper consequences than in the ancestral environment (Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes this point in Black Swan) therefore also needing better thought out courses of action. So northern Europeans have lucked out where their adaptation to climate has been useful for the current reality. If one sees corruption as a local-greedy behaviour as opposed to lawfulness as a global-cooperative behaviour, this would also explain why going closer to the equator you generally see an increase in corruption and also failures in democratic government. Taken further, it would imply that near-equator peoples are simply not well-adapted to democratic rule, which demands a certain limiting of short-term individual freedom for the longer-term common good, and a more distributed/localised form of governance would do much better. I think this (rambling) theory can more or less be pieced together with kaj's, adding long-term planning as a second dimension. Disclaimer: Before anyone accuses me of dis

0Will_Newsome16y

And a very condensed note I wrote to myself (in brainstormish mode, without regard for feasibility or testability): [...]

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