Buying happiness
There's a semi-famous paper by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson: "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right". (Proper reference: Dunn, E.W., Gilbert, D.T., and Wilson, T.D., If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right, Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol 21, issue 2, April 2011, pp. 115–125.) It's been referenced a few times on LW but curiously never written up properly here. The purpose of this post is to remedy that.
There is an earlier LW post called "Be Happier" which among other things references this paper and quotes some things it says, but that post is monstrously long and covers a lot more ground (hence, less details on the material in this paper).
Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson (hereafter "DGW") offer eight principles to follow. Here they are.
1. Buy experiences instead of things.
Many studies have asked people to reflect on past "material" and/or "experiential" purchases and have consistently found that they report greater happiness from (and are made happier by recalling) the latter than the former.
Why? DGW propose 5 reasons. First, deliberately sought-out experiences encourage us to focus on the here and now (something shown to increase happiness substantially); second, when things don't change we adapt to them rapidly, and "material" purchases like cars and tables tend to be pretty stable (whereas ongoing experiences are more varied); third, it turns out that people spend more time anticipating experiences before they happen and recalling them afterwards than they do for material purchases. Fourth, experiences are less directly comparable to alternatives than material things, and therefore less subject to post-purchase regret. Fifth, experiences are often shared, and other people are a great source of happiness.
2. Help others instead of yourself.
Prosocial spending correlates better to happiness than personal spending. If you give random people money and either tell them to spend it on themselves or to spend it on someone else, the latter makes them happier. Reflecting on past spending-on-others makes people happier than reflecting on past spending-on-self. (I am a little skeptical about that one: the right point of comparison would be not the past spending but the past enjoyment of whatever you spent the money on.)
Why? DGW propose two reasons. First, prosocial spending is good for relationships and relationships are good for happiness. Second, when you spend on someone else you get to feel like a good person.
Most people have wrong intuitions about this: they expect spending on themselves to make them happier. Most people are wrong.
3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones.
As we saw above under #1, we quickly adapt to changes. Therefore, a larger number of varied small pleasures may be a better buy than a single big one. There is some evidence for this (though to my mind it seems to bear less directly on DGW's principle than in the other cases we've considered so far). If you correlate people's happiness with their positive experiences, the correlation with how frequent those experiences are is stronger than the correlation with how intense they are. The optimal (for happiness) number of sexual partners to have over a year is one, perhaps because that gets you more sex even if individual instances are less exciting. (I find this less than convincing; individual instances might be better because partners learn what works well for them.)
The other reason DGW suggest why more smaller things should be better is diminishing marginal utility: half a cookie is more than half as good as a whole cookie. (This is, I think, partly because of adaptation, but that isn't the whole story.)
DGW suggest that this is one reason why the relationship between wealth and happiness isn't stronger: "wealth promises access to peak experiences, which in turn undermine the ability to savor small pleasures".
4. Buy less insurance.
We adapt to bad things as well as good, which means that bad things are less bad than we are liable to expect. Our overestimation of the impact of adverse occurrences is one reason why we buy insurance, which notoriously is always negative-expectation in monetary terms.
DGW cite various studies showing that people expect to be made markedly unhappier by losses than they actually are if the losses occur, and that people expect to regret bad outcomes more than they actually do (we overestimate how much we will blame ourselves, because we underestimate how good we are at blaming anything and anyone else for our misfortunes).
5. Pay now and consume later.
The opposite of the bargain proposed by credit cards! Besides the purely financial problems that arise from overspending (which are large and widespread), DGW suggest that "consume now, pay later" is bad for our happiness because it eliminates anticipation. We may derive a lot of pleasure even from anticipating something that we don't enjoy very much when it happens. "People who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general."
You might think that moving an experience later would simply mean more anticipation (good) but less reminiscence (bad), but it turns out that anticipation generally brings more happiness. (And, for unpleasant events, more pain.)
DGW suggest two other benefits of delaying consumption. First, we may make better choices (meaning, in this case, ones yielding more happiness overall, even if less in the very short term) when we make them a little way ahead. Second, the delay may increase uncertainty, which may keep attention focused on the thing we're buying, which may reduce adaptation. (This seems a little convoluted to me; DGW cite some research backing it up but I'm not sure it backs up the "by reducing adaptation" part of it.)
6. Think about what you're not thinking about.
That is: when choosing what to spend on, take some time to consider less obvious aspects that you'd otherwise be tempted to neglect. "The bigger home may seem like a better deal, but if the fixer-upper requires trading Saturday afternoons with friends for Saturday afternoons with plumbers, it may not be such a good deal after all." And: "consumers who expect a single purchase to have a lasting impact on their happiness might make more realistic predictions if they simply thought about a typical day in their life." (Rather than considering only the small bits of that day that will be impacted by their purchase.)
7. Beware of comparison shopping.
Comparison shopping, say DGW, focuses attention on the features that most clearly distinguish candidate purchases from one another, whereas other more-common features may actually have much more impact on happiness. It may also focus attention on more-concrete differences; for instance, if you ask people whether they would more enjoy a small heart-shaped chocolate or a large cockroach-shaped one, they generally prefer the former, but if you ask them to choose one of the two they tend to focus on the size and choose the latter.
DGW also point out that the context during comparison-shopping tends to be different from that during actual consumption, which can skew our evaluations.
8. Follow the herd instead of your head.
DGW cite research supporting de la Rochefoucauld's advice: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it." Others' actual experiences of a thing are likely to be better predictors of our enjoyment than our theoretical estimates: we may know ourselves better, but they know the thing better.
They also suggest (and I don't think this really fits their heading) looking to others for advice on how we would enjoy something we are considering buying. The example they give is of research in which subjects were shown some foods and asked to estimate how much they would enjoy them, after which they ate them and evaluated their actual enjoyment. The wrinkle is that they were also observed, at the moment of being shown the foods, by other observers, who rated their immediate facial reactions -- which turned out to be better predictors of their enjoyment than the subjects' own assessments. So "other people may provide a useful source of information about the products that will bring us joy because they can see the nonverbal reactions that may escape our own notice".
Happiness interventions
I found a website called Happier Human. It's about how to become and stay happier. I've trawled through it. Here are the best posts in my opinion:
[Meditate]. Don't [worry/overthink/fantasise/compare]. [Disregard desire]. [Motivate]. [Exercise gratitude]. [Don’t have kids].
[Buy many small gifts]. [Trade some happiness for productivity]. [Set] [happiness goals]
If you've found any other happiness interventions on any website, please share them.
A heuristic for predicting minor depression in others and myself, and related things
Summary
Look at how you or other people walk. Then going a bit meta.
Disclaimer
This post is probably not high quality enough to deserve to be top level purely on its qualitative merits. However I think the sheer importance of the issue for human well-being makes it so. Please consider importance / potential utility of the whole discussion and not just the post, and not only quality when voting.
The problem
Minor depression is not really an accurately defined, easily recognizable thing. First of all there are people with hard, boring or otherwise unsatisfactory life who are unhappy about it, how can one tell this normal, justifiable unhappiness from minor depression? Especially that therapists often say having good reasons to be depressed still counts as one, so at that point you don't really know whether to focus on fixing your mind or fixing your life. Then a lot of things that don't even register as direct sadness or unhappiness are considered part of or related to depression, such as lethargy/low energy/low motivation, irritability/aggressiveness, eating disorders, and so on. How could you tell if you are just a bad tempered lazy glutton or depressed? And finally, don't cultural expectations play a role, such as how Americans tend to be optimistic and expect a happy, pursue-shiny-things life, while e.g. Finns not really?
Of course there are clinical diagnosis methods, but people will ask a therapist for a diagnosis only when they already suspect something is wrong. They must think "Jolly gee, I really should feel better than I do now, it is not really normal to feel so, better ask a shrink!" But often it is not so. Often it is like "My mind is normal. It is life that sucks." So by what heuristic could you tell whether there is something wrong with yourself or other people?
Basis
This is heuristic I built mainly on observational correlations plus some psychological parallels. Has nothing to do with accepted medical science or experts opinion. My goal isn't as much as to convince you this is a good heuristic, but to open an open-ended discussion, asking you if it seems to be a good one, and also trigger a discussion where you propose other methods.
How I think non-depressed men walk
"Having a spring in the step." This old saying is IMHO surprisingly apt. I like this drawing - NOT because I think depression is based on T levels, but I think this cartoonishly over-exaggerated body language is fairly expressive of the idea. For all I know this seems more of a dopamine thing, eagerness, looking forward not testosterone.
It seems to me non-depressed men push themselves forward with their rear leg, heels raised, calves engaged, almost like jumping forward. This is the "spring" in the step. The actual spring is the rear leg calf muscle. Often this is accompanied by a movement of arms while walking. A slight rocking or swaying of the NOT hips but chest / shoulders may also be part of it, but I think it is less relevant. The general message / feel is "I'm so eager to tackle challenges! That's fun!"
Psychologically, I think all this eagerly-looking-forward-to-challenges spring in the step means a mindset where you are not afraid of the future, but not because you think it will be smooth sailing, but because you are confident in yourself to be able to tackle challenges and even enjoy doing so. This seems like a healthy mindset.
How I think depressed men walk
Dragging feet. Dragging a slouched, sack-like, non-tension upper body. Leaning forward. Head down. Shoulders pulled up, hunched up to protect the neck, engaging the upper trapezius muscles. A chronic pain in the upper traps (from their constant engagement), when having your upper traps massaged feels SO good, may be a predictive sign of it. Comes accross as embarrassed, scolded-boy body language.
Another way of walking I noticed on myself and probably counts as depressed is the duck-walk. The movement is started by the upper body slightly "falling" forward, the center of gravity starting to go forward, then "catching" the fall by sticking forward a leg, and the foot hits the ground flat, not with the front part of the foot but the whole foot, like a duck.Basically your heels are almost never raised and calves are not engaged much. This would be impossible / difficult if you had a springy step i.e. pushing forward with the rear leg, you would have to raise a heel for that, but possible if you fall forward and catch, fall forward and catch. Often not raising feet high (related verbs: to scuff, to shuffle).
How I think non-depressed women walk
Generally speaking I use the same heuristic for women who seem like they are "one of the boys" type (i.e. those who wear comfortable sports shoes, focus on career goals not seducing men etc.)
But this clearly does not work with all women, for example, that springy step thing is pretty much impossible in stillettoes for example. Rather I think non-depressed women often tend to sway the hips. It is an unconscious enjoyment of their own femininity and sexiness, not a show put on for the sake of men.
I don't really have clear ideas of how depressed women walk, all I can offer is not like the above. When both the eager spring and the sexy hip sway are missing, it may be a sign.
For people of non-binary gender and other special cases: again all I can offer is that if you are non-depressed, you probably have either the eager spring or the hip sway.
Am I putting the bar too high? False positives?
Is it possible that it is a too "strict" heuristic? While I think these heuristics are generally true for peopel who are in an excellent emotional shape, feel confident, love them some challenges, feel sexy etc. this may be possible that this emotional shape is higher than the waterline for depression, it is possible that some people are not depressed and yet below this like, have less confidence, less eager, happy expectation, less self-conscious sexiness or something like that.
Essentially I think my method does not really have many false negatives, but could possibly yield false positives.
Have you seen many cases that would count as false positives?
Meta: why is minor depression so difficult to tell / diagnose accurately?
There are clinically made checklists, but they sound like a collection of unrelated things. Could really the same thing cause you to sleep too much or not enough, eat too much or not enough? Doesn't it sound like Selling Nonapples? Putting everybody who does not have just the perfect sleeping or eating habits into one common category called depression?
For example in the West most people see depression as "the blues" i.e. some form of sadness. But often people don't report feeling sad, but report being very lethargic and not having energy and motivation and that, too, is often seen as depression. Some people are just negative and bitter and not enjoy anything, and yet they don't see it as their own sadness but more like "life is hard". I guess in both cases it is more line internalizing sadness, considering being sad a normal thing, and not really expecting to feel good. (This may be the case of mine and surprisingly many people in my family / relatives. A life-is-tough, survivalist ethos, not fun ethos.)
Then you go outside the West and you find even more different things. I cannot find my source anymore, but I remember a story that in a culture like Mali women generally don't express their emotions, are not conscious of them, and there depression is diagnosed through physical symptoms like chest pain.
Is minor depression an apple or a nonapple? A thing, one thing, or a generic "anything but normal happiness" bin?
I think my walking heuristic does predict something, and that something is probably close enough to the idea of minor depression, but whether it is a too broad tool with many false positives, or whether it predicts only a narrowly specific case of depressions, I cannot really tell and basically I asking you here whether it matches your experiences or not.
What are your heuristics? What would be a low false positives easy heuristic?
P.S. Researchers found a reverse link saying walking in a happy or depressed style _causes_ mood changes. It seems the article assumes everybody knows what walking in a happy or depressed style means. In fact this is what I am trying to find out here!
P.P.S. I know I suck at writing, so let me try to reformulate the main point a different way: we know people cannot be happy all the time and often have such a unsatisfying life that they are rarely happy. How can we find the thin line between being normal common life dissatisfaction based unhappiness (hard or boring life) and minor depression? Can walking style be used as a good predictor of specifically this thin line?
[link] The surprising downsides of being clever
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden see here
Did you know The surprising downsides of being clever? Is Happiness And Intelligence: Rare Combination? There are longitudinal studies which seem to imply this: Being Labeled as Gifted, Self-appraisal, and Psychological Well-being: A Life Span Developmental Perspective
I found these via slashdot.
As LessWrong is harbor to unusually high-IQ people (see section B in here). I wonder how happiness compares to the mean. What are your thoughts.
rational dating - can we escape the rat race be setting smarter goals?
According to evolutionary psychologists as well as the cultural main stream, men are going for sensually attractive women, while women are going for men who can provide them safety (plus other things we don't need to get into here). Whereas we might think that modern, cultured people are somewhat above those basic instincts and actually look for mates which fit their individual character, values, preferences, and interests, the world of online dating seems to throw us back a couple of centuries of progress. Many dating sites have been designed to increase usage and interaction with the site (so that more ads can be shown) and do this by relying a lot on pictures of their users to incite other users' interest. On the other hand, our individual character, values, preferences, and interests (or, ICVPI, for short) are to a large extent represented in text form as either essays or predefined answers to predefined questions. Now, while the text contains a lot of the relevant information, it is severely disadvantaged by this site design. Not only do the pictures have a much higher salience, their presence also directly speaks to our impulses and emotions (or system one, for those who have read Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow") which hinders the already somewhat harder processing of text by system two.
The result of this click-optimizing is that user's choices whom to contact are much more driven by pictures (and therefore, looks) than by other criteria. This leads to the destructive effect that visually attractive women are swamped in messages among which it is hard and tedious to chose ones to reply to, while the less attractive ones do not have enough choice to find men that match their individual preferences. In other words, the mutual matching between people who might fit each other is more sabotaged than helped by those picture-driven dating sites.
Now, as a basic rationalist I will of course question my motivations and ask myself if the run for beauty is really for my own best or if it is a learned behavior stemming from our (in this case arguably superficial) culture. If we leave aside the antiquated Freudian principle of "drive" and read psychologists like Rogers and Fromm, we might realize that hunting for beautiful mates is just one way among others for a man to boost his self-esteem, not necessarily a motivator in and of itself. Indeed, modern studies have shown that lasting self-esteem and deep happiness can be created best by exercising our strengths in a meaningful way. (For details and the studies see Seligman's "Authentic Happiness".) Following this argument, if I get my self-esteem and social recognition from (for example) writing awesome blog articles and helping lots of people at work, then this positive emotion will "buffer" (in Seligman's terms) against any judgmental looks and statements that I will be facing when going out with my awesome, but ugly, new girl friend. (Can you hear them saying "what? are you dating her?" in a raising voice that bounces back from the ceiling?)
To sum up, wouldn't it be the most rational thing to simply switch off pictures on the dating site (Firefox currently has AddOns for this, Chrome can do it natively, just type "block" in the search box on the settings page), thus keeping my impulsive system one at calm, write more thoughtful messages, and get more and better responses, both because I am writing to less message-swamped women and because my own messages are better. Then dating will be less like a meaningless competition, the resulting relationships are more profound, and I will find out that my friends are not actually prejudiced against ugly people and will not look down at me for making that choice. Just let go of my own prejudices and false beliefs and I win. Right?
Instrumental rationality/self help resources
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
- One resource per comment
- Place your comment in the appropriate category
- Only post resources you've actually used. Write a short review of your resource and if possible, a short summary of the key points. Say whether or not you would recommend the resource.
- Mention approximately how long it's been since you first used the resource and whether or not you have made external improvements in the subject area. On the other hand, keep in mind that there are a myriad of confounding factors that can be present when applying self-help resources to your life, and therefore it is perfectly acceptable to say "I would recommend this resource, but I have not improved" or "I do not recommend this resource, but I have improved".
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.
Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
A few centuries ago it was believed that the reason why people near the tropics didn't achieve the level of affluence of their northern conspecifics was that the heat made the blood grow thicker, and that slowed down their movements, and thoughts (thoughts at that time used to take place not only in the head, but also in the heart).
It's a funny theory, very catchy, as mechanistic as the time demanded and all that. No wonder it was appreciated for a while.
Many centuries have passed now, and we have a lot of better hypotheses for why there is less development in tropical areas than elsewhere. Here are a few.
More diseases that consume family resources
Lower average IQ
Centuries of exploitation by Europe and US
Fewer Institutions (There is a terrible paper by Daron Acemoglu, whom I hear otherwise is a great economist, on that)
Shorter east-west axis within a land area (Guns, Germs and Steel)
More frequent natural disasters, in particular floods, leading to property damage.
Probably all of those play a small role. I just want to say that primitive as it is as an explanation, I still think that the heat, and sunshine that comes with it, is a very strong factor, still today. Development is not my target though, my target is individual productivity and individual freedom, here thought of as "amount of things per unit time someone could be doing", not political freedom.
So far I've spent three weeks in England, at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, this month. During those 21 days, I have experienced strictly 08 (eight) minutes of sunlight. Outside it is freezing. So no wonder that all interactions I had were had inside walls. Meanwhile talking to friends back home, at the Tropic of Capricorn, they had outside parties, picnics at the park, bike riding days, shopping outside in the streets, free dancing at the streets festivals, learning to do slacklining, swimming pool etc...
In this grey lowlight world of English weather, with the added factor that by and large interaction between anglophones is mostly linguistic, it is not admirable that many come to office even on Saturdays and Sundays, and also stay late during weekdays. Basically, where else would they go?
The same distinction I saw while in California when comparing it to Boston. Both I saw in the winter-ish. In Boston you can basically choose in which venue you will eat, and in which venue you will read. In California you could go to the park, or to the mountains, or hike in the woods, or walk through the beach, or even go to a theme park, or that weird place where people surf false waves...
Brains are devices you can train. If you train them to skateboard, or play with dogs, or play soccer in a park, that is what they will learn. If a brain is compelled to think all day long, and read, speak, listen and write, that is what it will get good at.
The cold constrains, and a lot, what people do on a daily basis, and thus they become more specialized, and better, in the things they do. I think that this plays an enormous role on why tropical people don't tend to intellectual/high productivity lives as much as people in colder regions.
A few more subtle considerations: There are human drives relating to outside activity that not even the cold can stop. But it can still significantly hinder. Groups of young people still summon the strength to face the cold in particular for two activities: Training for sport competitions, and staying in line for a dancing club. Curiously, those are ritualized forms of hunting and courtship, something that our most northern relative, the Japanese Macaque, finds worthy of leaving hot baths to do. You'll find Japanese Macaques walking around in the snow for the same reasons you'll find someone walking around in the snow in many of the coldest cities, and that is saying something. Kids in both species also play outside heated areas. Playing, finding food (or defeating rowing arc-rivals), and doing some sort of ritualized courtship are sufficiently worthy, for us and them,to face the spiking thorns of the cold.
The cold transforms sport into just sport. Get there quick, enter, play, leave. Whichever surrounding rituals could have arisen around sport, either they are left for the summer time, or they will perish culturally.
Same with the nightclub lines. No one will stay more than one second longer than necessary outside, they become only lines, strictly lines, and mini-skirted women pay in pain the price of wanting to be attractive/sensual. Men do also wearing fewer coats. No extra time before or after the party. And the only kind of making up that is allowed outside is the really drunk kind, since no one whose peripheral nervous system is sending the right signals to their brain would tolerate that cold, the same peripheral nervous system that should be delivering ecstatic feelings of seduction and desire.
Young people pay quite a price for the cold. But it's nowhere near the price that older people pay. In an Arabic country, there is a disproportion of males in the streets, and a western eye will frequently think that this is prejudice, or something bad, happening against women. Boston and Oxford are university towns, but even accounting for that, the absence of people at the 40-80 age group in the streets is shocking. In Buenos Aires, 23:00 on a Tuesday, you'll see hundreds of people, of many ages, strolling around the streets, chatting, having dinner, drinking beer, laughing etc... same for Rio, or São Paulo. Some people face the cold at older ages in Oxford and Boston, but not so many, they could get a cold after all, and they are mostly done with sport and nightclubs. There are more women walking around in Syria, than 50 year olds walking around in Oxford.
Lightlevels are also higher in inside areas than outside areas, as far as I recall, both in Boston and in Oxford, though not in California, Florida or the Latin cities cited. One more reason to stay inside.
My claim is then that life is more productive in the cold because the cold significantly constrains what people do, and it constrains it in the way that makes them produce for longer periods output of linguistic sort -including maths and programming and everything that is mostly parsing, coding, transforming symbols etc... - I'd further claim that this effect cannot be accounted for by the six factors mentioned above, and that it will at least be comparable in intensity with whichever one ends up being the strongest one among those.
A further claim is that because life in cold areas is significantly constrained, moving to colder areas is a costly signal of willingness to do lots of work. This could partially explain why most of the top 20 universities in the world are in very cold areas. You must really love studying if you are willing to constrain your life that much, and conversely, once your life is constrained, you'd better love studying.
Speaking of love, stats famously show that people in California are not happier than people in New England. Julia Galef famously disagrees. I don't know if the effect is neutral if you compare people born in one place who moved to the other. Like her, I'd bet highly it isn't. Sure after a long period there is a regression towards base level happiness, but I'll bet the regression is slow and incomplete, and the process takes very long.
I've spent about six months of my life in cold areas, partly travelling, partly working/researching. Despite all the costs that it entails, at this moment my inclination is to decide to live in one of those cold lowlight areas for a while. Get some work done, or some more work done, of a research kind, now that movement building already took some 2 years of me. I wrote this partly to better understand the trade-offs, to more clearly think about this decision. I hope it helps someone else who is thinking about similar, or opposite, decisions, I've met at least one person here, and one back in the US who were thinking of doing the reverse.
No wonder I'm writing from Oxford...
Malthusian copying: mass death of unhappy life-loving uploads
Robin Hanson has done a great job of describing the future world and economy, under the assumption that easily copied "uploads" (whole brain emulations), and the standard laws of economics continue to apply. To oversimplify the conclusion:
- There will be great and rapidly increasing wealth. On the other hand, the uploads will be in Darwinian-like competition with each other and with copies, which will drive their wages down to subsistence levels: whatever is required to run their hardware and keep them working, and nothing more.
The competition will not so much be driven by variation, but by selection: uploads with the required characteristics can be copied again and again, undercutting and literally crowding out any uploads wanting higher wages.
Megadeaths
Some have focused on the possibly troubling aspects voluntary or semi-voluntary death: some uploads would be willing to make copies of themselves for specific tasks, which would then be deleted or killed at the end of the process. This can pose problems, especially if the copy changes its mind about deletion. But much more troubling is the mass death among uploads that always wanted to live.
What the selection process will favour is agents that want to live (if they didn't, they'd die out) and willing to work for an expectation of subsistence level wages. But now add a little risk to the process: not all jobs pay exactly the expected amount, sometimes they pay slightly higher, sometimes they pay slightly lower. That means that half of all jobs will result in a life-loving upload dying (charging extra to pay for insurance will squeeze that upload out of the market). Iterating the process means that the vast majority of the uploads will end up being killed - if not initially, then at some point later. The picture changes somewhat if you consider "super-organisms" of uploads and their copies, but then the issue simply shifts to wage competition between the super-organisms.
The only way this can be considered acceptable is if the killing of a (potentially unique) agent that doesn't want to die, is exactly compensated by the copying of another already existent agent. I don't find myself in the camp arguing that that would be a morally neutral or positive action.
Pain and unhappiness
Wasted life
It's just occurred to me that, giving all the cheerful risk stuff I work with, one of the most optimistic things people could say to me would be:
"You've wasted your life. Nothing of what you've done is relevant or useful."
That would make me very happy. Of course, that only works if it's credible.
Track Your Happiness
Track your happiness using your iphone:
For thousands of years, people have been trying to understand the causes of happiness. What is it that makes people happy? Yet it wasn’t until very recently that science has turned its attention to this issue.
Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.
Seems like a no-brainer to use this to me, at least if you have an iphone. For those with a droid, according to their twitter feed:
the next item on the roadmap is to make track your happiness available to as many people/phones as possible.
Despite being a really cool app for managing your happiness, this is just a great idea for doing research. Now I want to take advantage of the large iphone/droid user base to learn about people in some way. Any ideas?
Hunger can make you stupid
When I originally wrote "When to scream 'Error!'", I was mainly thinking of bad patterns of thought or bad problem-solving strategies as being the source of the error. Since then, I've come to realize that my own most common source of stupidity is because I've neglected some comfort. I may be hungry without consciously paying attention to it, dehydrated because I've been living on coffee for too long, or simply have a headache and need to take an Ibuprofen -- as a result, I don't think well, get irritated at the fact that I'm not thinking well, and generally begin a death spiral if I don't realize why.
In hindsight, it feels obvious that I should take care of the physiological needs that I can because they're likely preventing me from thinking straight. However, I've failed to do this on numerous occasions and so thought it worth mentioning.
In summary: Whenever you're screaming "Error", I suggest you stop and figure out whether you're hungry, thirsty, tired, or hurting before trying to find a problem in your thinking itself, especially if you're not usually good at noticing such things.
Happiness Engineering
On the same day that Lukeprog posted How to be happy, Scott Adams made a similar post on the Dilbert Blog, Happiness Engineering.
I'm always skeptical when receiving life advice from successful people, because their advice is biased towards taking too much risk, because successful people are selected for having been lucky. But Scott's list doesn't raise any red flags with me, and is admirably concise.
People Neglect Who They Really Are When Predicting Their Own Future Happiness [link]
The scientists who conducted this interesting study...
found that our natural sunny or negative dispositions might be a more powerful predictor of future happiness than any specific event. They also discovered that most of us ignore our own personalities when we think about what lies ahead -- and thus miscalculate our future feelings.
Scott Sumner on Utility vs Happiness [Link]
A distinction that some people grok right away and some others may not realize exists:
Imagine a country called “Lanmindia,” where much of the population has seen its legs blown off in horrible accidents. Does that sound like a pretty miserable place? Happiness research suggests not. The claim is that there is a sort of natural “set-point” for happiness, and that after winning a lottery one is happy for a short time, and then you revert right back to your natural happiness level. I find that plausible. They also claim that if someone loses a limb, then they are unhappy for a short period and then revert back to normal. I find that implausible, but if the evidence says it is the case then I guess I need to accept that.
My claim is that although Lanmindia is just as happy as America, it has much lower utility. Let’s define ’utility’ as ”that which people maximize.” People very much don’t want to have their legs blown off, and hence emigrate from Lanmindia in droves. People behave as if they care about utility, not happiness.
-Scott Sumner, "Nonsense on stilts: Part 1. What if utility and happiness are unrelated?" TheMoneyIllusion
This is also somewhat a reply to Hanson's "Lift Up Your Eyes" on Overcoming Bias. Some people on LessWrong are careful to make the distinction between ordinal utility, cardinal utility, and fuzzies, and others aren't quite so much. The above sentence on accepting evidence and the post script that he is not serious about one part of the post might also make interesting conversation -- part two is advice to move next door to a child molester for cheaper housing if you don't have a kid and part three is about The Fed taking advantage of banks.
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