= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on Open Thread May 30 - June 5, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (95)
Here's a little example of prisoner's dilemma that I just thought up, which shows how mass media might contribute to modern loneliness:
Let's assume that everyone has a fixed budget of attention and empathy. Empathizing with imaginary Harry Potter gives you 1 point of utility. Empathizing with your neighbor gives them 10 points of utility, but doesn't give you anything, because your neighbor isn't as interesting as Harry Potter. So everyone empathizes with Harry Potter instead of their neighbor, and everyone is lonely.
Does that sound right? What can society do to get out of that trap?
This is a bad assumption. I could spend more time empathizing than I do -- for example, when I chose to read a nonfiction book, I am likely to emphasize less than when I read a fictional tear-jerker. Moreover, the media spends a lot of time trying to increase your attention and empathy budget, getting you very engaged (attentive and empathetic) to their characters, whether these be fictional or political personages or whatever. Anytime that you stay up late watching Football (rather than go to sleep) you have increased your attention and empathy for that day.
However, it is true that TV and internet have strong money-making incentives for gaming your attention and empathy, and your neighbors probably don't. So on the A&E market, it is reasonable to expect that large powerful players will often outperform small local players. The fact that the market is flexible rather than fixed is probably a factor that makes it worse.
I suspect that Dunbar's number includes fictional characters and people you don't know in person but have many information about them (celebrities, politicians). In the past people also had a few examples in this category, for example Jesus, or the local king, but that is at least an order of magnitude less than all current movie characters, celebrities, and politicians people are familiar with. Also, watching someone on TV is a stronger stimulus than merely hearing or reading about them.
So it seems to me quite likely that modern media consume our "empathy points". (And the clickbait media make it even worse, because they burn all kinds of "giving-a-shit points" like a wildfire.)
A solution is spending time offline with other people (doing something else than watching media). Because people are not automatically strategic, someone has to organize an event and invite others. LW meetups, former classmates meeting at a cafe every Thursday, etc.
That's a good way to put it.
I've found a Reddit comment that describes another related problem:
Spending time offline is probably part of the solution.
So, anyone wants to disconnect and settle for those in the immediate vicinity? Anyone? ...anyone?
It's not either-or; you could also decide to spend only 50% of your free time online, and 50% in the meatspace. It's just more tempting to spend 100% of the free time online. Except those few moments when you would appreciate a company in meatspace, but everyone is too busy on Reddit.
YMMV, as usual, but no, not for me.
Since this is a prisoner's dilemma, the solution won't be based on unilateral cooperation.
I don't think it's a prisoner's dilemma. I don't want to disconnect and settle regardless of what people around me do.
That's funny. That's my meme. Give a shit points. Only so much give a shit to go around.
Never come across this idea before. Not yet sure if I agree or disagree. I will have to think about it. (Dunbar's' is approximate anyway which makes it harder to quantify.)
As a fictional example of a prisoner's dilemma, it sounds fine. Solutions are the same as all PDs: out-of-game enforcement (social norms or the like), superrationality, repeated interactions and tit-for-tat, or accept the equilibrium.
As a description of actual choices made by individuals, no. Your assumptions and your reward scoring are nowhere near reasonable.
Consider how old and universal story-telling is. Humans felt empathy for fictional characters since forever.
That's a very weird concept of a "story".
Like ancient Greece and Rome are "remarkably recent"?
Nope. You continue to be wrong.
You are mostly familiar with Graeco-Roman mythology and less familiar with the literature of that period. But that literature certainly existed and I don't know on which basis do you make assertions about "most of their stories".
Take Apuleius' Golden Ass -- a story about the misadventures of a man who (spoilers!) manages to turn himself into a donkey. You think most people took it as true?
In any case, which characters are fictional is irrelevant to the original issue of spending empathy. What matters is whether the character you're feeling empathy for is someone you could meet in real life and form a relationship with. If the story, for example, concerns some illustrious ancestors who might well have been real, you're still "wasting" empathy on them because in the zero-sum game postulated by the OP this takes away from the empathy available for you to feel for your neighbours.
I don't think most people understood Aesops fables to be about a real fox at the time they were written.
Citation, please?
Fair point. But did the media always draw such a big proportion of the attention we could've spent on each other?
It's not a media issue. Think about how much empathy and attention did Jesus and his army of saints consume X-)
But generally speaking, I don't buy the "empathizing with your neighbor gives them 10 points of utility, but doesn't give you anything" assertion. That's not how human interaction works.