On ChrisHallquist's post extolling the virtues of money, the top comment is Eliezer pointing out the lack of concrete examples. Can anyone think of any? This is not just hypothetical: if I think your suggestion is good, I will try it (and report back on how it went)
I care about health, improving personal skills (particularly: programming, writing, people skills), gaining respect (particularly at work), and entertainment (these days: primarily books and computer games). If you think I should care about something else, feel free to suggest it.
I am early-twenties programmer living in San Francisco. In the interest of getting advice useful to more than one person, I'll omit further personal details.
Budget: $50/day
If your idea requires significant ongoing time commitment, that is a major negative.
This is a discussion. If I argue against something being wrong by a certain metric X but the person thinks metric Y is more important and has an argument for why the activity fulfills metric Y then I'm happy to hear that argument.
I'm happy to get such an analysis because it might tell me something about archery that I don't know. It might also tell me something about fun I don't know.
If someone believes in God because he likes believing in God more than he likes being an atheist would anyone on LW object to calling that person irrational?
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I'm not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
If you can't provide a utility analysis for why you do the activities that you do then I do think that qualifies as irrational by LW standards. We all know that people are frequently irrational in their day to day decisions. If you don't have a utility analysis that backs up your decision, why should I assume that it's a rational decision?
I'm happy to hear an utility analysis for archery (or sailing and go-kart racing) that makes sense, where I would say, if you have the metric that you have, than it makes sense to make that decision.
As far as advocating Salsa for fun, I haven't seen anyone argue seriously that playing card games like MtG is a good way to escape depression. I did hear people argue that sport is a good way to escape depression and physical contact with other people is as well.
Given my theoretical idea of how happiness generally happens Salsa checks more relevant marks then MtG, archery or sailing. I'm not simply generalizing from one example of myself and my personal experience that Salsa is fun.
The hobbies we chose has a significant effect on our lives and therefore I do think that it's much more important to make rational decisions about which hobby you have than it's about whether you call yourself an atheist or theist.
Well, I intended for my above comment to have a conciliatory flavour, but apparently that didn't quite come across...
That's not comparable because the truth-value of "God exists" is a function of reality, whereas the truth-value of "archery is a good hobby" is a function of reality and a utility function.
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