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Not sure. I can't dissolve my own confusion about the question yet. But a big part of it is indeed about consistency: it worries me that both Caplan-now and Caplan-counterfactual claim to have no regrets about the past, even though their pasts are different.
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Well I don't think it makes sense to regret one's entire past and be satisfied with merely that. You want to draw specific lessons from your past. An ideal agent might not need regret of course, being able to learn from past mistakes without a feeling of regret toward a specific event which gave rise to the general lesson. But I think humans might find it useful to have an event serve as a reminder of a lesson learned.
We can interpret Caplan's "no regret" (perhaps too charitably) as "my past does not contain any lessons wrt. me behaving in a certain way in order to have my children be a certain way". But this leaves room for other lesson-specific regret wrt. other genuine lessons.
As for the massive counterfactual of "Caplan having behaved even minisculely different in his past", I think it's quite useless and hence meaningless, at least with respect to Caplan and his children. It doesn't help him better raise his children, for example. It's like how not every English sentence corresponds to a meaningful statement.
I feel the mistake is in transplanting Caplan-now into the universe of Caplan-counterfactual, just like the guy in my quote transplants himself into a bizarre alternate universe where he eats spinach despite hating it. It would make more sense to empathize with Caplan-counterfactual directly.
Hmm it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the counterfactual I think. Is there a particular reason why you think it would make more sense to empathize with the Caplan-counterfactual, independent of it being more 'consistent' I guess?
In response to
The proper use of regret?
I think he was making a joke, or at least an intentionally overblown statement.
This seems likely. Still I think there's a lesson to be learned here :)
In response to
The proper use of regret?
It seems to me that Caplan is making approximately the same mistake as the guy who says "I'm glad I don't like spinach, because if I did then I would eat it, and I can't stand the stuff". But that's just a vague feeling and I don't have any general principle to rule out such mistakes. Anyone?
I don't see how it's even approximately the same mistake.
Caplan is correct in thinking that his children would be different persons than who they are now, if there were any alterations to his past. He is correct in thinking Caplan-now would not love these children. He also realizes that Caplan-counterfactual would love these children.
It's as with the pebble sorters. You could acknowledge that you would find prime number heaps morally correct if you were to become a pebble sorter yet deny that prime number heaps are morally correct.
I just don't think it's a very productive regret Caplan is having there. Because he should regret some parts of his past life because such regret would be instrumental in making his future better.
I follow people who have a taste for insight. Mostly via twitter, but there are other ways as well.
The proper use of regret?
Bryan Caplan in Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret explains: whatever tiny alterations he makes to his life before he had his children, would result in him not having the precise children he has today whom he so dearly loves, and therefore he does not regret a thing.
This is seems to me like an entirely wrong use of regret. I think regret is useful when it suggests how you could have done otherwise, when having different such behavioral policy consistently leads to better results in structurally similar situations.
It's not exactly like the mistake of thinking that chaos theory should suggest you pay attention to every little thing in life. There the mistake was to think you could reliably and precisely enough predict how the little things being different leads to outcomes being different. Bryan is thinking about a very specific outcome in his life which he already knows has come to pass. He is counterfactually considering how it would not have been if everything in his past were not exactly as they were.
But given determinism, everything is already decided. This does not rule out free will, but it does suggest a proper use for counterfactuals. According to Vladimir Nesov: The meaning of a thing is how you should be influenced by it (the most succinct expression of LW philosophy imho). According to Gary Drescher: Why should you consider alternatives when making a decision, given that your ultimate actions are already determined? Because counterfactually-speaking if you did not consider such alternatives, you wouldn't have decided the way you did. So the use of counterfactuals, and in particular regret, is for us deciding how to behave. I don't see how Caplan's regret makes use of this.
And of course, there are other aesthetic uses to counterfactuals. Fiction, to take an obvious example. But am I missing something here in thinking that Bryan's regret is quite useless?
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(on the general topic of regret)
I can't recall any instance of extreme, wincing regret at some moment in my life, that doesn't have a flavor of regret for what it signals about me. That is, if regret has a use, it's to spur me to avoid damaging my reputation and relationships. For this to cover all cases, though, it would have to be the case that the mechanism is too dumb to realize that nobody knows except me - just that it would be damaging if it were known.
I do feel like I want to suppress regret (not by doing fewer things to regret), so that only the worries I find useful are implanted in my mind.
In the category of non-signaling regret, which upon consideration isn't empty (just less painful, in my experience), I suppose losses of resource, opportunity, or health are felt roughly twice as severe as a gain (according to various research I won't search for).
I've yet to lose my wallet. But I feel potential regret every time I realize I'm insufficiently aware of its whereabouts. I don't think actual regret is needed; imagined regret is just fine (and potentially unwanted). I've known other (well-off) people who have stronger or less discriminate tendencies toward regret and worry than I do, and they seem less happy.
Bravo! That's insightful. Thank you.
(I placed the Nesov quote there to hopefully prime people into not immediately accept whatever senses of regret which seem to 'make sense'. For example, merely looking for 'consistency'.)