Believing that God exist is an activity and activities do have utility functions. It also has a lot to do with priors and it makes sense to choose your priors based on a heuristic that you evaluate with an utility function.

Well, okay. But can we at least agree that epistemic activities are special and remove them from the discussion?

I'm not arguing that it's theoretically impossible for people to have a high discount rate.

Right. So you just assuming that it's low enough for your argument to be applicable to them...

That's probably right, but doesn't have much to do with the argument I made. I spoke about health benefits because archery is sort of a sport and the secondary benefit that comes to mind for most sports is health benefits.

How does it not have much to do with your argument when you say that archery should be disprefered because, despite being a sport, it does not get you much in terms of secondary health benefits?

Finding archery fun is quite superficial. It not like valuing saving human lives or preventing the world from being destroyed. I do think that it's quite okay to change around how much happiness things bring that you do for higher purposes.

It is superficial, and I'm not suggesting that anybody would have performing archery as an actual terminal value. The terminal value may be closer to "do something cool by my present definition of cool" (as opposed to "do something cool by whatever definition I happen to have, so I'll self-modify to find useful things cool"). That's closer to an aesthetic preference - and then the happiness would not be the actual goal, but a side-effect of getting what you want. People can be structured in ways so that they value other things than or besides happiness and health (I am).

Also, we're not talking about it being okay to change your happiness function - we're talking about whether it's essentially obligatory, which you seem to be asserting.

I do find it strange to value being happy tomorrow but not valuing changing around associations in your mind to be happy tomorrow because engaging in certain activity fulfills a long term purpose. That position seems to me very constructed and I would doubt that many people seriously hold it.

Do you hold the same position about aesthetic preferences? Because frankly, trying to change your aesthetic preferences to fit your surroundings, instead of the other way around, strikes me as bizarre.

Again if that's your position and you give suggestions on a thread of how a rationalists can improve his life by spending money I do think you have the burden of being explicit about your abnormal utility function. I would also question whether that suggestion has any value for the person who started the thread as I would predict that they value the happiness they have in a year and don't just want to improve how happy they are tomorrow.

That's all very well. I guess if you haven't seen by now how that still makes your categorical assertions somewhat inappropriate, that point won't come in the future, either. Also, what's your basis for the assertion that the general structure of my utility function is so abnormal? Do you see people going around trying to change themselves to find things okay that they don't find okay, instead of trying to change those things? I suppose you would say that's the rational thing to do. Do you think everybody who doesn't do that is just being irrational?