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Mass_Driver comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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I dunno, this strikes me as a somewhat sex-negative attitude. Responding seriously to your question about the better things we could be doing, it strikes me that we people spend most of our time doing worthless things. We seldom really know whether we are happy, what it means to be happy, or how what we are doing might connect to somebody's future happiness.
If the buttons actually made people happy from time to time, it could be quite useful as a 'reality check.' People suspecting that X led to happiness could test and falsify their claim by seeing whether X produced the same mental/emotional state that the button did.
Obviously we shouldn't spend all our time pressing buttons, having sex, or looking at porn. But I sometimes wonder whether we wouldn't be better off if most people, especially in the developed world where labor seems to be over-supplied and the opportunity cost of not working is low, spent a couple hours a day doing things like that.
Isn't that a bit like snorting some coke (or perhaps just masturbating) after a happy experience (say, proving a particularly interesting theorem) to test whether it was really 'happy'?
There are many different kinds of 'happiness', and what makes an experience a happy or an unhappy one is not at all simple to pin down. A kind of happiness that one can obtain at will, as often as desired, and which is unrelated to any "objective improvement" in oneself or the things one cares about, isn't really happiness at all.
Pretend it's new year's eve and you're planning some goals for next year - some things that, if you achieve them, you will look back with pride and a sense of accomplishment. Is 'looking at lots of porn' on your list (even assuming that it's free and no-one was harmed in producing it)?
I don't mean to imply anything about sex, because sex has a whole lot of things associated with it that make it extremely complicated. But the 'pleasure button' scenario gives us a clean slate to work from, and to me it seems an obvious reductio ad absurdum of the idea that pleasure = utility.
You seem to be confusing happiness with accomplishment:
Sure it is. It may not be accomplishment, or meaningfulness, but it is happiness, by definition. I think the confusion comes because you seem to value many other things more than happiness, such as pride and accomplishment. Happiness is just a feeling; it's not defined as something that you need to value most, or gain the most utility from.
How do you distinguish a degenerate case of 'happiness' from 'satiation of a need'. Is the smoker or heroin addict made 'happy' by their fix? Does a glass of water make you 'happy' if you're dying from thirst, or does it just satiate the thirst?
And can't the same sensation be either 'happy' or 'unhappy' depending on the circumstances. A person with persistent sexual arousal syndrome isn't made 'happy' by the orgasms they can't help but 'endure'.
The idea that there's a "raw happiness feeling" detachable from the information content that goes with it is intuitively appealing but fatally flawed.
Yes, this is true. We will need to assume that the button can analyze the context to determine how to provide happiness for the particular brain it's attached to.
My point is that happiness is not necessarily associated with accomplishment or objective improvement in oneself (though it can be). In such a situation, some people might not value this kind of detached happiness, but that doesn't mean it's not happiness.
Depends on how you define happiness. If you define it as "how much dopamine is in my system" ,"joy" or "these are the neat brainwaves my brain is giving off" then yes, you could achieve happiness by pressing a button (in theory).
A lot of people seem to assume happiness = utility measured in utilons, which is a whole different thing altogether.
Sort of like seeing some one writhe in ecstasy after jamming a needle in their arm and saying, "I'm so happy I'm not a heroin addict."
Oh, really? How can I get a cheap, legal, repeatable dopamine rush to my brain?
Edited my post to reflect your point. Although, I'm a young male and can achieve orgasm multiple times in under ten minutes with the aid of some lube and free porn. You probably didn't want to know that.
That's amazing. A drug that could eliminate refractory period like that would sell better than Viagra.
Actually, orgasms are usually much less intense and don't result in ejaculation if I achieve them in under a certain amount of amount of time. I find the best are in the 20-30 minute period.
It seems the pharma industry discovered the effect of PDE5 inhibitors on erectile dysfunction pretty much by accident. The stuff was initially developed to treat heart disease, initial tests showed it didn't work, but male test subjects reported a useful side effect. Reminds me of the story of post-it notes: the guy who developed them actually wanted to create the ultimate glue, but sadly the result of his best efforts didn't stick very well, so he just went ahead and commercialized what he had.
If big pharma is listening, I'd like to post a request for exercise pills.
Yes, I've noticed that assumption, and I think even Jeremy Bentham talked about pleasure in utility terms. I don't think it's accurate for everyone, for instance, someone who values accomplishment more than happiness will assign higher utility to choices that lead to unhappy accomplishment than to unproductive leisure.
...and then they're happier working. By definition. Welcome to semantics.
That's a strange definition of "happier". They're happier with a choice just because they prefer that choice? Even if they appear frustrated and tired and grumpy all the time? Even if they tell you they're not happy and they prefer this unhappiness to not accomplishing anything?
(In real life, I suspect happy people actually accomplish more, but consider a hypothetical where you have to choose between unhappy accomplishment and unproductive leisure.)
Eliezer did this whole thing in the Fun Theory sequence. Yes, not doing anything would be very boring, and being filled with cool drugs sounds like a horror story to my current utility curve. Let's hope the future isn't some form of ironic hell.
AlephNeil, I was taking Scott Adams' assertion that the button produces "happiness" at face value. I was being rather literal, I'm afraid. I think you're right to worry that no actual mechanism we can imagine in the near future would act like Scott's button.
I stand by my point, though, that if we really did have a literal happiness button, it would probably be a good thing.
As perhaps a somewhat more neutral example, I like to splash around in a swimming pool. It's fun. I hope to do that a lot over the next year or so. If I successfully play in the pool a lot during time that otherwise might have been spent reading marginally interesting articles, staring into space, harassing roommates, or working overtime on projects I don't care about, I will consider it a minor accomplishment.
More to the point, if regular bouts of aquatic playtime keep me well-adjusted and accurately tuned-in to what it means to be happy, then I will rationally expect to accomplish all kinds of other things that make me and others happy. I will consider this to be a moderate accomplishment.
There is a difference between pleasure and utility, but I don't think it's ridiculous at all to have a pleasure term in one's utility function. A more pleasant life, all else being equal, is a better one. There may be diminishing returns involved, but, well, that's why we shouldn't literally spend all day pressing the button.
That depends on how people react. It's at least plausible that people need some amount of pleasure in order to be able to focus on their other goals.