Just this guy, you know?
Sure. I'll take 2 of your 3 examples:
If peoples like taking drugs so much, why are drug addict's less happy than an average human?
This really does not seem to be related to adaptation, but to multiple dimensions and timeframes of happiness. This is a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
Why don't you like simple pleasures any more, if you enjoyed them when you was child (think about any computer game from your childhood)?
I definitely still like simple pleasures, they're just not enough for happiness anymore. In fact, they never were, but memory is a funny thing. This is also not caused by adaptation but is more about different context and complexity of experience to integrate the simple pleasure into.
I sometimes argue that even the common drive to variety is distinct from hedonic adaptation, but I'll leave that for later.
Note that I don't deny that hedonic adaptation is real and important - people's short-term happiness change and (partial) reversion to previous levels when losing a limb or winning a lottery are pretty strong examples. I only claim that there are multiple other mechanisms that explain a lot of change over time in experience->happiness causality.
I think this attributes way too much to hedonic adaptation. It's a real thing, and one's felt-happiness-from-experiences does change over time. HOWEVER, there's also a difference between pleasure and happiness, and for each of them different nonlinear impact over different timeframes.
These more fundamental differences in conflicting types and timeframes of desirable experiences can outweigh hedonic adaption by quite a bit. Reflectively, hedonic adaptation explains less than 1/4 of my experenced variance in desirability of different framings of experiences.
The system is never going to be all that great - it's really lightweight, low-information, low-committment to cast a vote. That's a big weakness, and also a requirement to get any input at all from many readers.
It roughly maps to "want to see more of" and "want to see less of" on LessWrong, but it's noisy enough that it shouldn't be taken too literally.
I tend to think that all the virtues are described over-simply and that we'd do well to consider that their actual value is contextual, but their signaling value is anti-contextual (it's more valuable for others to think you will exhibit the virtue in places where it's probably detrimental to you to actually do so).
Thanks for the write-up, and I'd recommend you add "self-honesty" to the list, in terms of what one believes about oneself, regardless of how accurate or forthright one is to any given external audience.
I'm a huge fan, especially for the user-specific, ephemeral uses like you describe. "Summarize the major contrasting views to this post" would be awesome. I'm much less happy with publication and posting-support uses that would be the obvious things to do.
I think this Is a reasonable model for many kinds of approval/opprobrium. I think it’s a feature, rather than a bug, for a lot of topics.
Especially for those things that are mixed-sum collections of games, collusion is a valuable strategy, and out unclear which way the causality goes: is this the reason that collusion works, or is collusion just another element of strategy in the social game (s)?
ideology of "law and order," the belief that more numerous and stricter laws lead to a stronger rule of law
Umm, do you have a cite or example of someone saying that NUMBER of laws is the key to law and order? All the discussion I've seen has been about enforcement of major categories of misbehavior, and addition of fairly broad, unspecific norms that are not currently in law.
In many places, the fine-grained detailed regulation and legislation is a different pathology, more pseudo-technocratic, not 'law and order'.
A person in the future might perceive the privilege of receiving life saving chemotherapy almost surely as a totally nasty and brutish treatment,
Plenty of people in the present recognize this, and choose not to endure it. I would argue that this choice and the respect of differing opinions on related topics is fairly modern, and I strongly prefer the current equilibrium. I recognize that circumstances will change, and the tension between enforcing conformity vs accepting inefficiency will shift as a result. My preference isn't a universal value judgement.
I think that's the key area where I'm not sure if we agree, or if we just are somewhat aligned accidentally: I don't think there is any objective valuation of individual or group behaviors. Many of us have preferences, but that's an overlay of individual valuation on top of each of our framings of our experiences. This does include some pretty strong modeling of causality, especially in smaller subsets of space-time. But it doesn't actually map to any territory.
I’m not sure if you’re arguing against a simplistic “progress toward utopia” narrative (which seems obviously wrong), or against all narrative descriptions of the complex weave of individuals across the past (which I’m not sure what other options there are).
I have done some amount of thinking on it, and I consider myself very lucky to have been born in the circumstances that I find myself in. It’s not uniform, but generally “nasty, brutish, and short” does describe most lives before the 20th century. And honestly, most today - I’m lucky on more dimensions than just the historical period I’m in.
This is far different than progress being inevitable or monotonic. In a lot of ways the end of the last century was better than the current (for my personal lived experiences). But it is progress, and it’s pretty significant when looked at in half-century chunks for the last half-millennium. It’s much less clear about fine-grained improvements over longer timeframes.
I fully agree with the distinction between pleasure and happiness, though I suspect the relationship between them is more complicated than long vs short terms. You should probably retitle the post and remove hedonic adaptation as your primary cause for the distinction. Either explore other causes, or just describe the weakness of the correlation without naming the reason.