Higher Purpose

1Eliezer_Yudkowsky23 January 2009 09:58AM

(This post is part of the Fun Theory Sequence.)
Followup to:  Something to Protect, Superhero Bias

Long-time readers will recall that I've long been uncomfortable with the idea that you can adopt a Cause as a hedonic accessory:

"Unhappy people are told that they need a 'purpose in life', so they should pick out an altruistic cause that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding some color, like nice living-room drapes."

But conversely it's also a fact that having a Purpose In Life consistently shows up as something that increases happiness, as measured by reported subjective well-being.

One presumes that this works equally well hedonically no matter how misguided that Purpose In Life may be - no matter if it is actually doing harm - no matter if the means are as cheap as prayer.  Presumably, all that matters for your happiness is that you believe in it.  So you had better not question overmuch whether you're really being effective; that would disturb the warm glow of satisfaction you paid for.

And here we verge on Zen, because you can't deliberately pursue "a purpose that takes you outside yourself", in order to take yourself outside yourself.  That's still all about you.

Which is the whole Western concept of "spirituality" that I despise:  You need a higher purpose so that you can be emotionally healthy.  The external world is just a stream of victims for you to rescue.

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Comments (19)

    Soulless morality

    9PhilGoetz14 March 2009 09:48PM

    Follow-up to: So you say you're an altruist

    The responses to So you say you're an altruist indicate that people have split their values into two categories:

    1. values they use to decide what they want
    2. values that are admissible for moral reasoning

    (where 2 is probably a subset of 1 for atheists, and probably nearly disjoint from 1 for Presbyterians).

    You're reading Less Wrong.  You're a rationalist.  You've put a lot of effort into education, and learning the truth about the world.  You value knowledge and rationality and truth a lot.

    Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

    What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality?

    There is little chance that any of the people you save in Africa will get a good post-graduate education and then follow that up by rejecting religion, embracing rationality, and writing Less Wrong posts.

    Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong.  If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access.  If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally.  If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation.  Not doing so is immoral.  You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

    Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable.  Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable.  You can't have it both ways.  If all lives have equal value, we shouldn't criticize someone who decides to become a drug addict on welfare.  Value is value, regardless of which equation it's in at the moment.

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    Comments (36)

      Altruist Coordination -- Central Station

      4MBlume27 March 2009 10:24PM

      Related to: Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?

      I thought it would be helpful for us to have a central space to pool information about various organizations to which we might give our money and/or time.  Honestly, a wiki would be ideal, but it seems this should do nicely.

      Comment to this post with the name of an organization, and a direct link to where we can donate to them.  Provide a summary of the group's goals, and their plans for reaching them.  If you can link to outside confirmation of the group's efficiency and effectiveness, please do so.

      Respond to these comments adding information about the named group, whether to criticize or praise it.

      Hopefully with the voting system, we should be able to collect the most relevent information we have available reasonably quickly.

      If you choose to contribute to a group, respond to that group's comment with a dollar amount, so that we can all see how much we have raised for each organization.

      Feel free to replace "dollar amount" with "dollar amount/month" in the above, if you wish to make such a commitment.  Please do not do this unless you are (>95%) confident that said commitment will last at least a year.

      If possible, mention this page, or this site, while donating.

      Comments (13)

        Rationalists lose when others choose

        -12PhilGoetz16 June 2009 05:50PM

        At various times, we've argued over whether rationalists always win.  I posed Augustine's paradox of optimal repentance to argue that, in some situations, rationalists lose.  One criticism of that paradox is that its strongest forms posit a God who penalizes people for being rational.  My response was, So what?  Who ever said that nature, or people, don't penalize rationality?

        There are instances where nature penalizes the rational.  For instance, revenge is irrational, but being thought of as someone who would take revenge gives advantages.1

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        Comments (52)

          Circular Altruism vs. Personal Preference

          3Vladimir_Nesov26 October 2009 01:43AM

          Suppose there is a diagnostic procedure that allows to catch a relatively rare disease with absolute precision. If left untreated, the disease if fatal, but when diagnosed it's easily treatable (I suppose there are some real-world approximations). The diagnostics involves an uncomfortable procedure and inevitable loss of time. At what a priori probability would you not care to take the test, leaving this outcome to chance? Say, you decide it's 0.0001%.

          Enter timeless decision theory. Your decision to take or not take the test may be as well considered a decision for the whole population (let's also assume you are typical and everyone is similar in this decision). By deciding to personally not take the test, you've decided that most people won't take the test, and thus, for example, with 0.00005% of the population having the condition, about 3000 people will die. While personal tradeoff is fixed, this number obviously depends on the size of the population.

          It seems like a horrible thing to do, making a decision that results in 3000 deaths. Thus, taking the test seems like a small personal sacrifice for this gift to others. Yet this is circular: everyone would be thinking that, reversing decision solely to help others, not benefiting personally. Nobody benefits.

          Obviously, together with 3000 lives saved, there is a factor of 6 billion accepting the test, and that harm is also part of the outcome chosen by the decision. If everyone personally prefers to not take the test, then inflicting the opposite on the whole population is only so much worse.

          Or is it?

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          Comments (14)
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