tldr: some free ways to benefit others
Epistemic status: Some things I noticed, made up or let ChatGPT generate
Idea
What if you had a button that you could press to make other people happy? Pushing the button doesn’t cost you anything besides the negligible effort. How often would you press it? If your answer is somewhere in the range between “Very often” and “Obviously I would build a robot arm that could press the button as fast as physically possible”, then there probably are a couple of things you should be doing more often:
Examples
- Give genuine compliments. I made a trigger-action plan that if I like something about someone and it’s not inappropriate to say, then I say it.
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Thanks for your comment, I think it raises an important point if I understood it correctly. But I'm not sure if I have understood it correctly. Are you saying that by doing random things that make other people happy, I would be messing with their reward function? So that I would, for example, reward and thus incentivise random other things the person doesn't really value?
In writing this, I had indeed assumed that while happiness is probably not the only valuable thing and we wouldn't want to hook everybody up to a happiness machine, the marginal bit of happiness in our world would be positive and quite harmless. But maybe superstimuli are a counterexample to that? I have to think about it more.