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army1987 comments on How can I spend money to improve my life? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know; I'd guess it's both. Why are you asking?
Sounds like the fallacy of grey / a fully general counterargument against ever enjoying one pastime more than another other than for its practical benefits. I mean, if you hit a state of flow cleaning toilets will feel fun, too, but for certain people it's easier to hit a state of flow with certain activities than with others.
That basically means that you don't take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
I think the average level of fun that a person who's into the hobby for a bit is more important than the level of fun you have when you start a hobby.
I also have control over what I feel. To me it seems much easier to simply choose to enjoy an activity by having control over my own state of mind than to sample a large number of hobbies, hoping that I accidentally find one that's fun.
I admit that the way I gained the belief that I'm in control was highly manipulative NLP but it's now real for me. I guess it's like the issue of believing in ego depletion. (Make a mental note to find someone sooner or later to remove my belief in ego depletion)
I'm not sure I understand this reply -- these two paragraphs appear to contradict each other.
Also, it seems orthogonal to what I said. How long it takes before the average person is able to enjoy X and how much people vary in how much they'll eventually enjoy X sound like different questions to me.
How do you decide whether archery is fun for you?You could use the first lesson of archery to make the decision. You could make that decision after a month. I don't think either of those tell you how much you will enjoy it after a year.
To the extend that you can't predict how you will feel after a year you can look at what the average person who takes it for a year feels. That means you don't get to base your decision on how different people enjoy different hobbies.
So what? If in a year's time I no longer find archery fun, I'll still be allowed to stop doing it. And in any event it's none of your freakin' business.
(I don't actually do archery in real life BTW, though I do have a few hobbies that don't build muscle, fluent body movement or produce a high heart rate that helps the heart, such as for example commenting on Less Wrong.)
If we have a discussion about the value of engaging in activities and spending money for it, why is it not my business to discuss that value?
Tapping out. (EDIT: I didn't downvote.)
Well, okay, so you're a highly unusual individual and on the basis of this, you're arguing about the advisability of various things for other people... Your advice kind of boils down to "become like me", doesn't it? Which, of course, is a whole other issue.
What's wrong with that? First, I have no good evidence that I would, after a couple of months, be able to hit flow with it. Second, I can't and am unwilling to take arbitrary hits to my well-being even for restricted periods of time by engaging for a hobby that makes me miserable for the first couple of months. (Sounds a bit exaggerated, to be sure, but it was exactly what I thought when I read your salsa example somewhere else in the comments here.)
No. My advice is to look at the various possible usages of your time and rationally access which benefits they provide. To the extend that challenge is "please become more like me" I find it surprising that someone raising that objection against myself at lesswrong. Maybe I take some ideas about rationality too seriously?
I don't do martial arts classes (for complicated reasons that don't generalize well to the general population). I don't to improv comedy classes yet you will find that I recommend both of those activities because I consider them high value.
If you aren't a person who's good at telling jokes your first improv comedy classes might not be very funny for you. They might be highly challenging. If you take that to conclude that improv comedy classes are the wrong thing for you, then I think you are missing an experience that will bring you forward.
Well, your whole argument seemed to me to be: certain hobbies have various benefits, so you should change yourself to be able to engage in them to reap those benefits. That struck me as a bit far-reaching, hence the "whole other issue" remark.
When I took up Salsa it was exactly for the reasons I use here to advocate it. At the time I was an unfit person who wasn't having much social contact spending most of the time in front of the computer.
I think doing something that changed me was the point. I'm not the person who took up Salsa because a girl needed a dance partner and dragged me along. I did make the decision to take it up after rational analysis and I think in retrospect it was the right decision for myself at that time.
I think the whole idea of rationality is that you should change yourself to engage in behavior that makes you more likely to win. If you don't think that's what rationality is about, than what is?
I'm not saying (or thinking) that your decision to take up Salsa wasn't perfectly rational. What I do think is my decision not to do such a thing is also perfectly rational, which is probably why I had a negative emotional reaction to your very... vehement advocacy. In the case of archery, the structure of the discussion I gathered is: you said it was much inferior in health benefits to other activities - somebody brought up that it was simply fun - and you replied essentially that, well, then you should learn to find better things fun! That struck me as somewhat bizarre, because you were so forcefully condemning hobbies that were not optimal according to your metric without taking into account that other people may have other metrics and/or be constrained by various circumstances.
At this point, it's become pretty clear to me that the reason I voiced this objection was that I perceived you as arguing so vehemently that I felt essentially I was being told that I'm irrational because I like the wrong things.
That's a frequent LW mode :-D
This is a discussion. If I argue against something being wrong by a certain metric X but the person thinks metric Y is more important and has an argument for why the activity fulfills metric Y then I'm happy to hear that argument.
I'm happy to get such an analysis because it might tell me something about archery that I don't know. It might also tell me something about fun I don't know.
If someone believes in God because he likes believing in God more than he likes being an atheist would anyone on LW object to calling that person irrational?
The issue involves so much mind-killing that I'm not allowed to judge things as right or wrong?
If you can't provide a utility analysis for why you do the activities that you do then I do think that qualifies as irrational by LW standards. We all know that people are frequently irrational in their day to day decisions. If you don't have a utility analysis that backs up your decision, why should I assume that it's a rational decision?
I'm happy to hear an utility analysis for archery (or sailing and go-kart racing) that makes sense, where I would say, if you have the metric that you have, than it makes sense to make that decision.
As far as advocating Salsa for fun, I haven't seen anyone argue seriously that playing card games like MtG is a good way to escape depression. I did hear people argue that sport is a good way to escape depression and physical contact with other people is as well.
Given my theoretical idea of how happiness generally happens Salsa checks more relevant marks then MtG, archery or sailing. I'm not simply generalizing from one example of myself and my personal experience that Salsa is fun.
The hobbies we chose has a significant effect on our lives and therefore I do think that it's much more important to make rational decisions about which hobby you have than it's about whether you call yourself an atheist or theist.
Well, I intended for my above comment to have a conciliatory flavour, but apparently that didn't quite come across...
That's not comparable because the truth-value of "God exists" is a function of reality, whereas the truth-value of "archery is a good hobby" is a function of reality and a utility function.
You're not allowed to judge other people's terminal preferences as rational or irrational because that's a category mistake. You're kind of not allowed to vocally judge them as right or wrong because it's impolite and pointless.
This, incidentally, is also impolite. I said no such thing.
Salsa: Not taking this up may be a perfectly rational case of risk aversion. One might basically be avoiding psychological bankruptcy, depending on how detrimental the fact of the first few months of infelicitous and awkward interaction would be on one's mind.
Archery: Well, maybe some people just find it very fun, are not good at retraining themselves at finding new things fun (you even admitted that you are probably special in that regard), and telling them to first learn to find arbitrary things fun is kind of besides the point when the discussion is about what are reasonable hobbies.
You're also not taking into account the possibility of temporal discounting. Why should it be impossible for a person to have simply too high a discounting rate, which need not be irrational, in order for this whole suffering and personality-changing to be happier in the far future to be worth it? (In particular, someone might value health benefits much less than you do. This alone means that while you can make a conditional argument that if you value health benefits a lot, there are much better options than archery, you're not entitled to assert that taking up archery is irrational because you're missing out on all those health benefits from other activities.)
And then one's value structure doesn't have to be such that changing one's emotional reactions to various things makes sense. This is clearest in aesthetic preferences: if I have a preference for beautiful things, that means that I want the things around me to be such that I would, by my present standards, consider them beautiful. It does not mean that I want my perception of beauty to be altered in such a way that I find the things which are, in fact, around me beautiful. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to be in the analogous situation with respect to happiness.
And what's that thing about MtG? I never mentioned that...
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.
I'm not arguing that it's theoretically impossible for people to have a high discount rate. Someone at the last lesswrong meetup argued that smoking is rational for him because he doesn't care if he loses 10 years of lifespan.
On the other hand if that's your position answering: "You should take up smoking" when someone asks for a good way to spend his life to improve his life on a lesswrong thread doesn't make any sense without talking at all about the fact that you have a high possibility of temporal discounting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You brought up me wanting other people to take up Salsa. I did that in the MtG discussion when I said it's probably more exicting. Here I suggest martial arts as substitute for archery.