Kaj_Sotala comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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My theory of happiness.
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.
Kaj's hypothesis is a bit off: what he's actually talking about is the explore/exploit tradeoff. An animal in a bad (but not-yet catastrophic) situation is better off exploiting available resources than scouting new ones, since in the EEA, any "bad" situation is likely to be temporary (winter, immediate presence of a predator, etc.) and it's better to ride out the situation.
OTOH, when resources are widely available, exploring is more likely to be fruitful and worthwhile.
The connection to happiness and risk-taking is more tenuous.
I'd be interested in seeing the results of that experiment. But "rich" and "poor" are even more loosely correlated with the variables in question - there are unhappy "rich" people and unhappy "poor" people, after all.
(In other words, this is all about internal, intuitive perceptions of resource availability, not rational assessments of actual resource availability.)
If I were to wager a guess, the people who would accept the deal are those who feel they are in a catastrophic situation.
Speaking of catastrophic situations, have you seen The Wages of Fear or any of the remakes? I've only seen Sorcerer, but it was quite good. It's a rather more realistic situation that jumping off a cliff, but the structure is the same: a group of desperate people driving cases of nitroglycerin-sweating dynamite across rough terrain to get enough money that they can escape.
Or maybe not...
I'd buy "main road incorporating rope suspension bridges" over "millionaire hiring people to throw themselves off cliffs", but I see what you mean.
I believe you're right, now that I think about that.
I was kind of thinking expected value. In principle, if you always go by expected value, in the long run you will end up maximizing your value. But this may not be the best move to make if you're low on resources, because with bad luck you'll run out of them and die even though you made the moves with the highest expected value.
However, your objection does make sense and Eby's reformulation of my theory is probably the superior one, now that I think about it.
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 discrimination, I am in fact a south European (Greek), living in north Europe (the UK), and while this does not absolve me of all possibility of racism against my own, this theory has formed from my effort to explain the cultural differences I experience on a daily basis. Take it for what it's worth.
If any given instance of discrimination increases the degree of correspondence between your map and the territory, then there is no need for apology. Are these sorts of disclaimers really necessary here?
Relevant to your interests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg&feature=channel
Greatly appreciated.
present-oriented vs. future oriented is a good way to put it and I suspect there is some more research I could find if I dig further behind that speech.
And a very condensed note I wrote to myself (in brainstormish mode, without regard for feasibility or testability):