VoiceOfRa comments on High Challenge - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 December 2008 12:51AM

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Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 03 November 2015 05:19:55PM 0 points [-]

Sounds like WoW is optimized for System 1 pleasures, and you explicitly reject this. I think that brings up an important point: How can we build a society/world where there are strong optimization forces to enable people to choose System 2 preferences? Once such a world iterated on itself for a couple generations, what might it look like?

I don’t think this would be a world with no WoW-like activities, because a world without any candy or simple pleasures strikes me as deeply lacking. My System 2 seems to place at least a little value on System 1 being happy. So I’d guess the world would just have many fewer of such activities, and be structured in such a way as to make it easy to avoid choices we’d regret the next day.

If this turns out to a physically impossible problem to overcome for some reason, then I could imagine a world with no System 1 pleasures, but such a world would be deeply lacking, even if that loss was more than made up for by gains in our System 2 values.

As a side note, it'd be an interesting question how much of the theoretical per capita maximum value falls into which categories. An easier question is how much of our currently actualized value is immediate gratifications. I'd expect that to be heavily biased toward System 1, since we suffer from Akrasia, but it might still be informative.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 10 November 2015 12:23:21AM 4 points [-]

The biggest problem isn't System 1 dominating System 2. It's system 2's being filled with BS and falsehoods.

Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 10 November 2015 03:09:30PM 2 points [-]

Excellent point. Most people aren't trying and failing to achieve their dreams. We aren’t even trying. We don’t have well-articulated dreams, so trying isn’t even a reasonable course of action until we have a clear objective. I'd guess that most adults still don't know what they want to be when they grow up, and still haven't figured it out by the time they retire.

Comment author: Lumifer 10 November 2015 06:00:36PM 0 points [-]

Most people aren't trying and failing to achieve their dreams. We aren’t even trying. We don’t have well-articulated dreams

Evidence or typical mind fallacy..? X-)

Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 10 November 2015 06:59:21PM *  1 point [-]

Guilty. I've spent most of my life trying to articulate and rigorously define what our goals should be. It takes an extra little bit of cognitive effort to model others as lacking that sense of purpose, rather than merely having lots of different well-defined goals.

(EDIT, to avoid talking past each other: Not that people don't have any well defined sub-goals, mind you. Just not well defined terminal values, and well defined knowledge of their utility function. No well-defined answers to Life, The Universe, And Everything.)

Comment author: Lumifer 10 November 2015 07:17:44PM *  1 point [-]

"Well-defined terminal values" are a very different thing from "well-articulated dreams".

P.S. People with "well-defined answers to Life, The Universe, And Everything" are usually pretty scary.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 11 November 2015 12:08:11AM 2 points [-]

Or have dreams that would be horrific if actually implemented because they haven't thought through the implications.