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Pain and gain motivation
Note: this post is basically just summarizing some of PJ Eby's freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation and presenting them in a form that's easier for the LW crowd to digest. I claim no credit for the ideas presented here, other than the credit for summarizing them.
EDIT: Note also Eby's comments and corrections to my summary at this comment.
Eby proposes that we have two different forms of motivation: positive ("gain") motivation, which drives us to do things, and negative ("pain") motivation, which drives us to avoid things. Negative motivation is a major source of akrasia and is mostly harmful for getting anything done. However, sufficiently large amounts of negative motivation can momentarily push us to do things, which frequently causes people to confuse the two.
To understand the function of negative motivation, first consider the example of having climbed to a tree to avoid a predator. There's not much you can do other than wait and hope the predator goes away, and if you move around, you risk falling out of the tree. So your brain gets flooded with signals that suppress activity and tell it to keep your body still. It is only if the predator ends up climbing up the tree that the danger becomes so acute that you're instead pushed to flee.
What does this have to do with modern-day akrasia? Back in the tribal environment, elicting the disfavor of the tribe could be a death sentence. Be cast out by the tribe, and you likely wouldn't live for long. One way to elict disfavor is to be unmasked as incompetent in some important matter, and a way to avoid such an unmasking is to simply avoid doing anything where to consequences of failure would be severe.
You might see why this would cause problems. Sometimes, when the pain level of not having done a task grows too high - like just before a deadline - it'll push you to do it. But this fools people into thinking that negative consequences alone will be a motivator, so they try to psyche themselves up by thinking about how bad it would be to fail. In truth, this is only making things worse, as an increased chance of failure will increase the negative motivation that's going on.
Open Thread: May 2010
You know what to do.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)
Followup to: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values
When I met the futurist Greg Stock some years ago, he argued that the joy of scientific discovery would soon be replaced by pills that could simulate the joy of scientific discovery. I approached him after his talk and said, "I agree that such pills are probably possible, but I wouldn't voluntarily take them."
And Stock said, "But they'll be so much better that the real thing won't be able to compete. It will just be way more fun for you to take the pills than to do all the actual scientific work."
And I said, "I agree that's possible, so I'll make sure never to take them."
Stock seemed genuinely surprised by my attitude, which genuinely surprised me.
TED Talks: Daniel Kahneman
People who have had a painful experience remember it as less painful if the pain tapers off, rather than cutting off sharply at the height of intensity, even if they experience more pain overall. I'd heard of this finding before (from Dan Ariely), but Kahneman uses the finding to throw the idea of "experiencing self" vs. "remembering self" into sharp relief. He then discusses the far-reaching implications of this dichotomy and our blindness to it.
The talk is entitled "The riddle of experience vs. memory".
Welcome to Heaven
I can conceive of the following 3 main types of meaning we can pursue in life.
1. Exploring existing complexity: the natural complexity of the universe, or complexities that others created for us to explore.
2. Creating new complexity for others and ourselves to explore.
3. Hedonic pleasure: more or less direct stimulation of our pleasure centers, with wire-heading as the ultimate form.
What I'm observing in the various FAI debates is a tendency of people to shy away from wire-heading as something the FAI should do. This reluctance is generally not substantiated or clarified with anything other than "clearly, this isn't what we want". This is not, however, clear to me at all.
The utility we get from exploration and creation is an enjoyable mental process that comes with these activities. Once an FAI can rewire our brains at will, we do not need to perform actual exploration or creation to experience this enjoyment. Instead, the enjoyment we get from exploration and creation becomes just another form of pleasure that can be stimulated directly.
If you are a utilitarian, and you believe in shut-up-and-multiply, then the correct thing for the FAI to do is to use up all available resources so as to maximize the number of beings, and then induce a state of permanent and ultimate enjoyment in every one of them. This enjoyment could be of any type - it could be explorative or creative or hedonic enjoyment as we know it. The most energy efficient way to create any kind of enjoyment, however, is to stimulate the brain-equivalent directly. Therefore, the greatest utility will be achieved by wire-heading. Everything else falls short of that.
What I don't quite understand is why everyone thinks that this would be such a horrible outcome. As far as I can tell, these seem to be cached emotions that are suitable for our world, but not for the world of FAI. In our world, we truly do need to constantly explore and create, or else we will suffer the consequences of not mastering our environment. In a world where FAI exists, there is no longer a point, nor even a possibility, of mastering our environment. The FAI masters our environment for us, and there is no longer a reason to avoid hedonic pleasure. It is no longer a trap.
Since the FAI can sustain us in safety until the universe goes poof, there is no reason for everyone not to experience ultimate enjoyment in the meanwhile. In fact, I can hardly tell this apart from the concept of a Christian Heaven, which appears to be a place where Christians very much want to get.
If you don't want to be "reduced" to an eternal state of bliss, that's tough luck. The alternative would be for the FAI to create an environment for you to play in, consuming precious resources that could sustain more creatures in a permanently blissful state. But don't worry; you won't need to feel bad for long. The FAI can simply modify your preferences so you want an eternally blissful state.
Welcome to Heaven.
Superstimuli, setpoints, and obesity
Related to: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.
The main proximate cause of increase in human weight over the last few decades is over-eating - other factors like decreased energy need due to less active lifestyle seem at best secondary if relevant at all. The big question is what misregulates homeostatic system controlling food intake towards higher calorie consumption?
The most common accepted answer is some sort of superstimulus theory - modern food is so tasty people find it irresistible. This seems backwards to me in its basic assumption - almost any "traditional" food seems to taste better than almost any "modern" food.
It is as easy to construct the opposite theory of tastiness set point - tastiness is some estimate of nutritional value of food - more nutritious food should taste better than less nutritious food. So according to the theory - if you eat very tasty food, your appetite thinks it's highly nutritious, and demands less of it; and if you eat bland tasteless food - your appetite underestimates its nutritious content and demands too much of it.
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