Today's post, Continuous Improvement was originally published on 11 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Humans seem to be on a hedonic treadmill; over time, we adjust to any improvements in our environment - after a month, the new sports car no longer seems quite as wonderful. This aspect of our evolved psychology is not surprising: it is a rare organism in a rare environment whose optimal reproductive strategy is to rest with a smile on its face, feeling happy with what it already has. To entirely delete the hedonic treadmill seems perilously close to tampering with Boredom itself. Is there enough fun in the universe for a transhuman to jog off the treadmill - improve their life continuously, leaping to ever-higher hedonic levels before adjusting to the previous one? Can ever-higher levels of pleasure be created by the simple increase of ever-larger floating-point numbers in a digital pleasure center, or would that fail to have the full subjective quality of happiness? If we continue to bind our pleasures to novel challenges, can we find higher levels of pleasure fast enough, without cheating? The rate at which value can increase as more bits are added, and the rate at which value must increase for eudaimonia, together determine the lifespan of a mind. If minds must use exponentially more resources over time in order to lead a eudaimonic existence, their subjective lifespan is measured in mere millennia even if they can draw on galaxy-sized resources.

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