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PhilGoetz comments on Incremental Progress and the Valley - Less Wrong
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While we're on the subject: I, and I think MBlume, meant simply happiness, not what you're calling Happiness.
Yes and no. I meant Happiness to include your values. But I meant it to mean your brain states in response to the time-varying level of satisficing of your values.
Here's two possible definitions of rationality:
The Happiness definition of rationality has evolutionary requirements: It should always motivate a creature to increase its utility, and so it should resemble the first derivative of utility.
With this definition, maximizing utility over time means maximizing the area under your utility curve. Maximizing Happiness over a time period means maximizing the amount by which your final utility is greater than your initial utility.
So utility rationality focuses on the effects during the interval under consideration. Making a series of decisions, each of which maximizes your utility over some time period, is not guaranteed to maximize your utility over the union of those time periods. (In fact, in real life, it's pretty much guaranteed not to.)
Happiness rationality is a heuristic that gives you nearly the same effect as evaluating your total utility from now to infinity, even if you only ever evaluate your utility over a finite time-period.
My initial reaction is that Happiness rationality is more practical for maximizing your utility in the long-term.
Which do people prefer? Or do they have some other definition of rationality?
Everyone here except you is using 1.
Do you see how using 2 can better accomplish 1?
<EDIT> We think we can best maximize our utility by trying to maximize our utility. Evolution is a better reasoner than us, and designed us to { maximize our utility by trying to maximize our happiness }. </EDIT>
That nature is (always) a better reasoner than man isn't a credible premise, particularly these days, when the analogous unconditional superiority of the market over central planning is no longer touted uncritically.
Do you assume individual rationality's justification is utility maximization, even if we settle for second-tier happiness in proxy? Programmed to try to maximize happiness, we act rationally when we succeed, making maximizing utility irrational or at least less rational. Utility has nothing more to recommend it when happiness is what we want.
Another way of saying this is that happiness is utility if utility is to play its role in decision theory, and what we've been calling utilities are biased versions of the real things.
I would be more sympathetic towards your complaints about people speaking for you if you didn't frequently speak for others. All others.
Even if you were right, such behavior would be intolerable. And you frequently aren't. You aren't even rhetorically accurate, letting 'everyone' represent an overwhelming majority.
From now on I will downvote any comment or post of yours that puts words in my mouth, whether directly or through reference to us collectively, regardless of the remainder of the content.
When I said "which do people prefer", I meant "Which do you prefer after considering my explanation?" Most people are using 1 because they've never realized that the brain is using 2. I'd be more interested in hearing what you think people should use than what they do use, and why they should use it.