Okay, I guess I should have known some terminology correction was coming. If you want to define "happiness" as the preferred mind-state, no worries. I'll just say the preferred mind-state of happiness is the harmony of our innate desire for pleasure and our innate desire for altruism, two desires that often overlap but occasionally compete. Do you agree that altruism deserves exactly the same sort of special recognition as an ultimate motivator that pleasure does? If so, your guess that we might not have disagreed about anything real was right.
IF going on vacation produces mind-state A. IF giving to charity produces mind-state B. IF mind-state A is preferable to mind-state B. THEN going on vacation leads you to a mind-state that is preferable to the one that giving to charity leads you to.
Okay...most people want some vacation, but not full-time vacation, even though full-time vacation would bring us a LOT of pleasure. Doing good for the world is not as efficient at maximizing personal pleasure as going on vacation is. An individual must strike a balance between his desire for pleasure and his desire to be altruistic to achieve Harmonious Happiness (Look, I made up a term with capital letters! LW is rubbing off on me!)
I'm pleased to tell you that we all have "that altruism mutation". Because of the way evolution works, we evolve to maximize the spread of our genes.
Yay!!! I didn't think of a mother sacrificing herself for her kids like that, but I did think the most selfish, pleasure-driven individuals would quite probably be the most likely to end up in prison so their genes die out and less probably, but still possibly, they could also be the least likely to find spouses and have kids.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope my being sorry isn't offensive in any way. If it is, could you please tell me? I'd like to avoid offending people in the future.
I almost never get offended, much less about this. I appreciate the sympathy! But others could find it offensive in that they'd find it arrogant. My thoughts on arrogance are a little unconventional. Most people think it's arrogant to consider one person more gifted than others or one idea better than others. Some people really are more gifted and have far more positive qualities than others. Some ideas really are better. If you happen to be one of the more gifted people or understand one of the better ideas (evolution, in this case), and you recognize yourself as more gifted or recognize an idea as better, that's not arrogance. Not yet. That's just an honest perspective on value. Once you start to look down on people for being less gifted than you are or having worse ideas, that's when you cross the line and become arrogant. If you are more gifted, or have more accurate ideas, you can happily thank the universe you weren't born in someone else's shoes, while doing your best to imagine what life would have been like if you were. You can try to help others use their own gifts to the best of their potential. You can try to share your ideas in a way that others will understand. Just don't look down on people for not having certain abilities or believing the correct ideas because you really can't understand what it's like to be them :) But yeah, if you don't want to offend people, it's dangerous to express pity. Some people will look at your "feeling sorry" for those who don't share your intelligence/life opportunities/correct ideas and call you arrogant for it, but I think they're wrong to do so. There's a difference between feeling sorry for people and looking down on them. For example, I am a little offended when one Christian friend and her dad who was my high school Calculus teacher look down on me. Most of my other friends just feel sorry for me, and I would be more offended if they didn't, because feeling sorry at least shows they care.
Your hypotheses and thought experiments are really impressive. I'm beginning to suspect that you do indeed have training and are denying this in order to make a status play.
I'm flattered!! But I must confess the one thought experiment that was actually super good, the one at the end about free will, wasn't my idea. It was a paraphrase of this guy's idea and I had used it in the past to explain my deconversion to my friends. The other ideas were truly original, though :) (Not to say no one else has ever had them! Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of being very pleasantly surprised to find that other people beat me to all my ideas, like how I felt when I first read Famine, Affluence and Morality ten years after trying to convince my family it was wrong to eat in restaurants)
I'd just like to offer a correction here for your knowledge. Mutations spread almost entirely because they a) increase the chances that you produce offspring or b) increase the chances that the offspring survive (and presumably produce offspring themselves).
Hey, this sounds like what I was just reading this week in the rationality book about Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers! I think I get this, and maybe I didn't write very clearly (or enough) here, but maybe I still don't fully understand. But if someone is nice to have around, wouldn't he have fewer enemies and be less likely to die than the selfish guys? So he lives to have kids, and the same goes for them? Idk.
Note: I just read your note and now have accordingly decreased the probability that I had said something way off-base :)
I'll just say the preferred mind-state of happiness is the harmony of our innate desire for pleasure and our innate desire for altruism, two desires that often overlap but occasionally compete. Do you agree that altruism deserves exactly the same sort of special recognition as an ultimate motivator that pleasure does? If so, your guess that we might not have disagreed about anything real was right.
I agree that in most cases (sociopaths are an exception) pleasure and doing good for others are both things that determine how happy something makes you. And ...
This was originally a comment to VipulNaik's recent indagations about the academic lifestyle versus the job lifestyle. Instead of calling it lifestyle he called them career options, but I'm taking a different emphasis here on purpose.
Due to information hazards risks, I recommend that Effective Altruists who are still wavering back and forth do not read this. Spoiler EA alert.
I'd just like to provide a cultural difference information that I have consistently noted between Americans and Brazilians which seems relevant here.
To have a job and work in the US is taken as a *de facto* biological need. It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating. It just doesn't cross people's minds.
If anyone has insight above and beyond "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism" let me know about it, I've been waiting for the "why?" for years.
So yeah, let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working. that not getting a job isn't going to kill you or make you less healthy, that ultravagabonding is possible and feasible and many do it for over six months a year, that I have a friend who lives as the boyfriend of his sponsor's wife in a triad and somehow never worked a day in his life (the husband of the triad pays it all, both men are straight). That I've hosted an Argentinian who left graduate economics for two years to randomly travel the world, ended up in Rome and passed by here in his way back, through couchsurfing. That Puneet Sahani has been well over two years travelling the world with no money and an Indian passport now. I've also hosted a lovely estonian gentleman who works on computers 4 months a year in London to earn pounds, and spends eight months a year getting to know countries while learning their culture etc... Brazil was his third country.
Oh, and never forget the Uruguay couple I just met at a dance festival who have been travelling as hippies around and around South America for 5 years now, and showed no sign of owning more than 500 dollars worth of stuff.
Also in case you'd like to live in a paradise valley taking Santo Daime (a religious ritual with DMT) about twice a week, you can do it with a salary of aproximatelly 500 dollars per month in Vale do Gamarra, where I just spent carnival, that is what the guy who drove us back did. Given Brazilian or Turkish returns on investment, that would cost you 50 000 bucks in case you refused to work within the land itself for the 500.
Oh, I forgot to mention that though it certainly makes you unable to do expensive stuff, thus removing the paradox of choice and part of your existential angst from you (uhuu less choices!), there is nearly no detraction in status from not having a job. In fact, during these years in which I was either being an EA and directing an NGO, or studying on my own, or doing a Masters (which, let's agree is not very time consuming) my status has increased steadily, and many opportunities would have been lost if I had a job that wouldn't let me move freely. Things like being invited as Visiting Scholar to Singularity Institute, like giving a TED talk, like directing IERFH, and like spending a month working at FHI with Bostrom, Sandberg, and the classic Lesswrong poster Stuart Armstrong.
So when thinking about what to do with you future my dear fellow Americans, please, at least consider not getting a job. At least admit what everyone knows from the bottom of their hearts, that jobs are abundant for high IQ people (specially you my programmer lurker readers.... I know you are there...and you native English speakers, I can see you there, unnecessarily worrying about your earning potential).
A job is truly an instrumental goal, and your terminal goals certainly do have chains of causation leading to them that do not contain a job for 330 days a year. Unless you are a workaholic who experiences flow in virtue of pursuing instrumental goals. Then please, work all day long, donate as much as you can, and may your life be awesome!