Clarity comments on Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (92)
That's not even true, though. If you are kidnapped and then tortured, you are not remotely in control of your own happiness, just to take the most obvious extreme answer. Even for more mundane situations, people can be trapped in terrible situations, where cruel people have power over them. If you are working at a minimum wage job with bills coming seemingly every day and which you only overcome by working 18 hour days before collapsing exhausted and doing it all again in the morning, there is very little you can do about it. Now if one of the supervisors at one of your jobs is a petty tyrant who makes you miserable, what choice do you have that would increase your happiness?
I see what the quote is trying to say, as a call to action to change your own life, but it simply isn't true. It also fails the false wisdom reversal test, in that a quote saying "You have no true control over your own happiness; therefore, you must accept your lot in life with all the grace you can muster" sounds just as deep and helpful.
It's not true, epistemically, but is true instrumentally.
I explicitly wrote it was an instrumental rationality quote, not epistemically rational because of the kind of literalism you've so gratuitously supplied :)
I don't think it's true, period. It's true that "No one is in control of your happiness but you", but it does not follow that "therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change". And for it to be true instrumentally, it should give us a tip about how to control your happiness.
The tip is implicit.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleep_of_Reason_Produces_Monsters
That one makes the same or similar claim, but explicitly. Do you get it now?
Yeah, that one is better. :-)