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Desrtopa comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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I've argued on a number of occasions on this site that people who're suicidal are usually not in a position to accurately judge the expected value of staying alive, but honestly, if a person's life really isn't worth living, why should they have to?
This is a question that is very close to me, and which I've been chewing over for the better part of a decade. I have had a close personal friend for many years with a history of mental illness; having watched their decline over time, I found myself asking this question. From a purely rational standpoint, there are many different functions that you can use calculate the value of suicide versus life. As long as you don't treat life as a sacred/infinite value ("stay alive at all costs"), you can get answers for this.
My problem is that a few years ago, I started noticing measures that were pro-suicide. As quality of life and situation declined, more and more measures flipped that direction. What do you do as an outside observer when most common value judgements all seem to point toward suicide as the best option?
It's not like I prefer this answer. What I want is for the person in question get their life together and use their (impressive) potential to live a happy, full life; what I want is another awesome person making the world we live in even more awesome. Instead, there is a person who as near as I can estimate actually contributes negative value when measured by most commonly accepted goals.
How much is the tradeoff worth? If I sacrifice the remainder of my rather productive life in an attempt to 'save' this person, have I done the right thing? I cannot in good conscience say yes.
These are obnoxious problems.
"If a person's life really isn't worth living [objectively]" then the person should stop caring about flawed concepts like objective value. "If a person's life really isn't worth living [subjectively]" then they should work on changing their subjective values or changing the way that their life is so it is subjectively worth living. If neither of the above is possible, then they should kill themselves.
It's important that we recognize where the worth "comes from" as a potential solution to the problem.
This insight brought to you by my understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Read his stuff!)
It's hard to say what it would even mean for moral value to be truly objective, but say that, if a person is alive, it will cause many people to suffer terribly. Should they stop caring about this in order to keep wanting to live?
If a person is living in inescapably miserable circumstances, changing their value system so they're not miserable anymore is easier said than done. And if it were easy, do you think it would be better to simply always change our values so that they're already met, rather than changing the world to satisfy our values?
Better to self-modify to suffer less due to not achieving your goals (yet), while keeping the same goals.
Easier said than done, unfortunately.
This doesn't make sense.
How do you retain something as a goal while removing the value that you place on it?
Don't remove the value. Remove just the experience of feeling bad due to not yet achieving the value.
If I have a value/goal of being rich, this doesn't have to mean I will feel miserable until I'm rich.
What you're implicitly doing here is divorcing goals from values (feelings are a value). Either that or you're thinking that there's something especially wrong related to negative incentives that doesn't apply to positive ones.
If you don't feel miserable when you're poor or, similarly, if you won't feel happier when you're rich, then why would you value being rich at all? If your emotions don't change in response to having or not having a certain something then that something doesn't count as a goal. You would be wanting something without caring about it, which is silly. You're saying we should remove the reasons we care about X while still pursuing X, which makes no sense.
There's something terribly wrong about the way negative incentives are implemented in humans. I think the experience of pain (and the fear or anticipation of it) is a terrible thing and I wish I could self-modify so I would feel pain as damage/danger signals, but without the affect of pain. (There are people wired like this, but I can't find the name for the condition right now.)
Similarly, I would like to get rid of the negative affect of (almost?) everything else in life. Fear, grief, etc. They're the way evolution implemented negative reinforcement learning in us, but they're not the only possible way, and they're no longer needed for survival; if we only had the tools to replace them with something else.
Being rich is (as an example) an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. I want it because I will use the money to buy things and experiences that will make me feel good, much more than having the money (and not using it) would.
"pain asymbolia"
Treating it as an instrumental goal doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it back a step. Even if you wouldn't feel miserable by being poor because you magically eliminated negative incentives you would still feel less of the positive incentives when you are poor than when you were rich, even though richness is just the means to feeling better. All of this:
still applies.
(Except insofar as it might be altered by relevant differences between positive and negative incentives.)
To clarify, what I'm contending is that this would only make sense as a motivational system if you placed positive value on achieving certain goals which you hadn't yet achieved, I think you agree with this part but am not sure. But I don't think we can justify treating positive incentives differently than negative ones.
I don't view the distinction between an absence of a positive incentive and the presence of a negative incentive the same way you do. I'm not even sure that I have any positive incentives which aren't derived from negative incentives.
Negative and positive feelings are differently wired in the brain. Fewer positive feelings is not the same as more negative ones. Getting rid of negative feelings is very worthwhile even without increasing positive ones.
I think DanArmak means modify the negative affect we feel from not acheiving the goals while keeping the desire and motivation to acheive them.
EDIT: oops, ninja'd by DanArmak. Never mind.
If you cannot change the world to satisfy your values then your values should change, is what I advocate. To answer your tradeoff example: Choose whichever one you value more, then make the other unachievable negative value go away.
And I don't know how to solve the problem I mention in my other comment below.
There's an interesting issue here.
The agent might have a constitution such that they don't place subjective value on changing their subjective values to something that would be more fulfillable. The current-agent would prefer that they not change their values. The hypothetical-agent would prefer that they have already changed their values. I was just reading the posts on Timeless Decision Theory and it seems like this is a problem that TDT would have a tough time grappling with.
I'm also feeling that it's plausible that someone is systematically neg karmaing me again.
They don't "have" to keep going but striving for better is a more optimistic encouragement is it not? I would rather teach someone that they have worth rather than tell them that suicide (Which will undoubtedly have negative effects on their family if they have a family that loves them) is what I want for them too.