Could you please elaborate on this idea a little? ... I'm interested in exactly how you tie it in with Kaczynski, and I also think it's relevant to my current dilemma.

Sure!

In brief: Kaczynski seems to have realized that economies are driven by wanting, not liking, and that this will lead to unhappiness. I think that that conclusion is too strong though - I'd just say that it'll lead to inefficiency.

Longer explanation: ok, so the economy is pretty much driven by what people choose to buy, and where people choose to work. People aren't always so good at making these choices. One reason is because they don't actually know what will make them happy.

• Example: job satisfaction is important. There are lots of subtle things that influence job satisfaction. For example, there's something about things like farming that produces satisfaction and contentment. People don't value these things enough -> these jobs disappear -> people miss out on the opportunity to be satisfied and content.

Another reason why people aren't good at making choices is because they don't always have the willpower to do what they know they should.

• Example: if people were smart, McDonalds wouldn't be the huge empire that it is. People choose to eat at McDonalds because they don't weigh the consequences it has on their future selves enough. The reason why McDonalds is huge is because tons of people make these mistakes. If people were smart, MealSquares and McDonalds would be flip-flopped.

Kaczynski seems to focus more on the first example, but I think they're both important. Economies are driven by the decisions we make. Given the predictable mistakes people make, society will suffer in predictable ways. Kaczynski seems to have realized this.

I avoided using the terms "wanting" and "liking" on purpose. I'll just say quickly words are just symbols that refer to things and as long as the two people are using the same symbol-thing mappings, it doesn't matter. What's important is that you seem to understand the distinction between the two things as far as wanting/liking goes. I do see what you mean about the term "wanting", and now that I think about it I agree with you.

(I've avoided elaboration and qualifiers in favor of conciseness and clarity. Let me know if you want me to say more.)

Edit: I'm about 95% sure that there's actual neuroscience research behind the wanting vs. liking thing. Ie. they've found distinct a brain area that corresponds to wanting, and they've found a different distinct brain area that corresponds to liking.

Note: I studied neuroscience in college. I did research in a lab where we studied vision in monkeys, and part of this involved stimulating the monkeys brain. There was a point where we were able to get the monkey to basically make any eye movement we want (based on where and how much we stimulated). It didn't provide me with any new information as far as free will goes, but literally seeing it in person with my own eyes influenced me on an emotional level.

That's why I've never tried smoking; I was scared I might like it and start to want it.

Interesting, I've never smoked, drank or done any drugs at all for similar reasons. Well, that's part of the story.

Would I truly want it? Or am I just addicted?

I'm going to guess that the reason why you wouldn't want to do drugs even if you knew they'd make you happy is because a) it'd sort of numb you away from thinking critically and making decisions, and b) you wouldn't get to do good for the world. Your current lifestyle doesn't seem to be preventing you from doing either of those.

"What if there were children in pain from starvation right outside the restaurant, and you knew the money you would spend in the restaurant could buy them rice and beans for two weeks... you would feel guilty about eating at the restaurant instead of helping, right?

:) I've proposed the same thought experiment except with buying diamonds. Eg. "Imagine that you go to the diamond store to buy a diamond, and there were x thousand starving kids in the parking lot who you could save if you spent the money on them instead. Would you still buy the diamond?"

And in the case of diamonds, it's not only a) the opportunity cost of doing good with the money - it's that b) you're supporting an inhumane organization and c) you're being victim to a ridiculous marketing scheme that gets you to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a shiny rock. The post Diamonds are Bullshit on Priceonomics is great.

Furthermore, people do a, b and c in the name of love. To me, that seems about as anti-love as it gets. Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. It's amazing how far you could push a human away from what's sensible. If I had an online dating profile, I think it'd be, "If you still think you'd want a diamond after reading this, then I hate you. If not, let's talk."

I know I haven't acknowledged the main counterargument, which is that the sacrifice is a demonstration of commitment, but there are ways of doing that without doing a, b and c.

Why? ("it just isn't!")

That sort of thinking baffles me as well. I've tried to explain to my parents what a cost-benefit analysis is... and they just don't get it. This post has been of moderate help to me because I understood what virtue ethics are after reading it (and I never understood what it is before reading it)

People who say "it just isn't" don't think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. They just have ideas about what is and isn't virtuous. As people like us have figured out, if you follow these virtues blindly, you'll run into ridiculousness and/or inconsistency.

However, this isn't to say that virtue-driven thinking doesn't have it's uses. Like all heuristics, they trade accuracy for speed, which sometimes is a worthy trade-off.

I disagree. I think we would be better off if society could somehow advance to a stage where such unselfishness was the norm.

I'm glad to hear you disagree :) But I sense that I may not have explained what I think and why I think it. If you could just flip a switch and make everyone have equal preference ratios, I think that'd probably be a good thing.

What I'm trying to say is that there is no switch, and that making our preference ratios more equal would be very difficult. Ex. try to make yourself care as much about a random accountant in China as much as you do about, say your Aunt. As far as cost-benefit analysis goes, the effort and unease of doing this would be a cost. I sense that the costs aren't always worth the benefits, and that given this, it's socially optimal for us to accept our uneven preference ratios to some extent. Thoughts?

Good quote! Right now, I interpret this as showing how personal happiness and "altruism/not becoming a Dark Lord" are both inexplicable, perhaps sometimes competing terminal values... how do you interpret it?

I interpret it as "Harry seems to think there are good reasons for choosing certain terminal values. Terminal values seem arbitrary to me."

For reference:

But I don't want to admit my preference ratios are that far out of whack; I don't want to be that selfish.

Why?

I think that exploring and answering that question will be helpful.

Try thinking about it in two ways:

1) A rational analysis of what you genuinely think makes sense. Note that rational does not mean completely logically.

2) An emotional analysis of what you feel, why you feel it, and in the event that your feelings aren't accurate, how can you nudge them to be more accurate.

You:

I want to answer this question with "because emotion!" Is this allowed?

Also:

Analyze emotion?? Can you do that?! As an istp, just identifying emotion is difficult enough.

Absolutely! That's how I'd start off. But the question I was getting at is "why does your brain produce those emotions". What is the evolutionary psychology behind it? What events in your life have conditioned you to produce this emotion?

By default, I think it's natural to give a lot of weight to your emotions and be driven by them. But once you really understand where they come from, I think it's easier to give them a more appropriate weight, and consequently, to better achieve your goals. (1,2,3)

And you could manipulate your emotions too. Examples: You'll be less motivated to go to the gym if you lay down on the couch. You'll be more motivated to go to the gym if you tell your friends that you plan on going to the gym every day for a month.

So I think that based solely on my intuition here, I might disagree with you and find personal happiness and altruism to be two separate terminal goals, often harmonious but sometimes conflicting.

So you don't think terminal goals are arbitrary? Or are you just proclaiming what yours are?

Edit:

But honestly I rarely think about it, and I'm 99.99% sure the overall impact on my happiness is much smaller than if I were to use the money to fly to Guatemala and take a few weeks' vacation to visit old friends. Yet, even as I acknowledge this, I still want to donate. I don't know why.

Are you sure that this has nothing to do with maximizing happiness? Perhaps the reason why you still want to donate is to preserve an image you have of yourself, which presumably is ultimately about maximizing your happiness.

(Below is a thought that ended up being a dead end. I was going to delete it, but then I figured you might still be interested in reading it.)

Also, an interesting thought occurred to me related to wanting vs. liking. Take a person who starts off with only the terminal goal of maximizing his happiness. Imagine that the person then develops an addiction, say to smoking. And imagine that the person doesn't actually like smoking, but still wants to smoke. Ie. smoking does not maximize his happiness, but he still wants to do it. Should he then decide that smoking is a terminal goal of his?

I'm not trying to say that smoking is a bad terminal goal, because I think terminal goals are arbitrary. What I am trying to say is that... he seems to be actually trying to maximize his happiness, but just failing at it.

DEAD END. That's not true. Maybe he is actually trying to maximize his happiness, maybe he isn't. You can't say whether he is or he isn't. If he is, then it leads you to say "Well if your terminal goal is ultimately to maximize your happiness... then you should try to maximize your happiness (if you want to achieve your terminal goals)." But if he isn't (just) trying to maximize happiness, he could add in whatever other terminal goals he wants. Deep down I still notice a bit of confusion regarding my conclusion that goals are arbitrary, and so I find myself trying to argue against it. But every time I do I end up reaching a dead end :/

Anyway, I went back through the book and found the title of the post. It's Terminal Values and Instrumental Values. You can jump to "Consider the philosopher."

Thank you! That does seem to be a/the key point in his article. Although "I value the choice" seems like a weird argument to me. I never thought of it as a potential counter argument. From what I can gather from Eliezer's cryptic rebuttal, I agree with him.

I still don't understand what Eliezer would say to someone that said, "Preferences are selfish and Goals are arbitrary".

1- Which isn't to imply that I'm good at this. Just that I sense that it's true and I've had isolated instances of success with it.

2 - And again, this isn't to imply that you shouldn't give emotions any weight and be a robot. I used to be uncomfortable with just an "intuitive sense" and not really understanding the reasoning behind it. Reading How We Decide changed that for me. 1) It really hit me that there is "reasoning" behind the intuitions and emotions you feel. Ie. your brain does some unconscious processing. 2) It hit me that I need to treat these feelings as Bayesian evidence and consider how likely it is that I have that intuition when the intuition is wrong vs. how likely it is that I have the intuition when the intuition is right.

3 - This all feels very "trying-to-be-wise-sounding", which I hate. But I don't know how else to say it.