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gwern comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/22/100322crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all
(Glad I kept this citation; knew at some point I would run into someone claiming parenthood is a joy. Wish I had the one that said parenthood was a net gain in happiness only years/decades later after the memories have been distorted enough.)
The basic idea about parents and hedonic psychology, as I understand it, is that your moment-to-moment happiness is not typically very high when you have kids, but your "tell me a story" medium/long term reflective happiness may be quite high.
Neither of those is privileged. Have you ever spent a day doing nothing but indulging yourself (watching movies, eating your favourite foods, relaxing)? If you're anything like me you find that even thought most moments during the day were pleasant, the overall experience of the day was nasty and depressing.
Basically, happiness is not an integral of moment-to-moment pleasure, so while it's naive to say parenting is an unqualified joy, it's not so bleak as to be only a good thing after the memories are distorted by time.
As a parent I can report that most days my day-wise maximum moment-to-moment happiness is due to some interaction with my child.
But then, my child is indisputably the most lovable child on the planet. </parental preening>
(welcome thread link not necessary)
Then let me just say, welcome!
I'm inclined to believe you, but note that what you said doesn't quite contradict the hypothesis, which is that if you were not a parent, your day-wise maximum (from any source) would probably be higher.
Also, beware of attributing more power to introspection than it deserves, especially when the waters are already muddied by the normativity of parents' love for their children. You say your happiest moments are with your child, but a graph of dopamine vs. time might (uninspiringly) show bigger spikes whenever you ate sugar. Or it might not. My point is that I'm not sure how much we should trust our own reflections on our happiness.
Fair point. So let me just state that as far as I can tell, the average of my DWMM2M happiness is higher than it was before my child was born, and I expect that in a counterfactual world where my spouse and I didn't want a child and consequently didn't have one, my DWMM2M happiness would not be as great as in this one. It's just that knowing what I know (including what I've learned from this site) and having been programmed by evolution to love a stupendous badass (and that stupendous badass having been equally programmed to love me back), I find that watching that s.b. unfold into a human before my eyes causes me happiness of a regularity and intensity that I personally have never experienced before.
I would mischievously point out things like the oxytocin released after childbirth ought to make us especially wary of bias when it comes to kids. After all, there is no area of our life that evolution could be more concerned about than the kids. (Even your life is worth less than a kid or two, arguably, from its POV.)
That oxytocin &c. causes us to bond with and become partial to our children does not make any causally subsequent happiness less real.
So, then, you would wirehead? It seems to me to be the same position.
I wouldn't: I have preferences about the way things actually are, not just how they appear to me or what I'm experiencing at any given moment.
So that use of oxytocin (and any other fun little biases and sticks and carrots built into us) is a 'noble lie', justified by its results?
In keeping with the Niven theme, so, then you would not object to being tasped by a third party solicitous of your happiness?
Er, what? Please draw a clearer connection between the notion of having preferences over the way things actually are and the notion that our evolutionarily constructed bias/carrot/stick system is a 'noble lie'.
I'm not categorically against being tasped by a third party, but I'd want that third party to pay attention to my preferences, not merely my happiness. I'd also require the third party to be more intelligent than the most intelligent human who ever existed, and not by a small margin either.
Hm... not obviously so. Any reductionist explanation of happiness from any source is going to end up mentioning hormones & chemicals in the brain, but it doesn't follow that wanting happiness (& hence wanting the attendant chemicals) = wanting to wirehead.
I struggle to articulate my objection to wireheading, but it has something to do with the shallowness of pleasure that is totally non-contingent on my actions and thoughts. It is definitely not about some false dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" happiness; after all, Nature doesn't have a clue what the difference between them is (nor do I).
Certainly not, but we do need to understand utility functions and their modification; if we don't, then bad things might happen. For example (I steal this example from EY), a 'FAI' might decide to be Friendly by rewiring our brains to simply be really really happy no matter what, and paperclip the rest of the universe. To most people, this would be a bad outcome, and is an intuitive argument that there are good and bad kinds of happiness, and the distinctions probably have something to do with properties of the external world.
I'm not going to claim having children is "rational", but to judge it by the happiness of "caring for children" is about the same as to judge quality of food by enjoyment of doing the dishes. This is very one-dimensional.
Moreover I actually think it's foolish to use any kind of logical process (such as reading this study) to make decisions in this area except for extreme circumstances such as not having enough money or having genetic diseases.
The reason for my attitude is that I think besides the positive upsides to having kids (there are many, if you're lucky) there is a huge aspect of regret minimization involved; it seems to me Nature choose stick rather than a carrot here.
ETA: I should perhaps say short-term carrot and a long term stick
I wasn't proposing that parenthood is a joy - I may have misunderstood what SilasBarta meant by "utility function places positive weight".
"Utility function of agent A places positive weight on X" is equivalent to "A regards X as a terminal value".