i love preference-induction
please give me more preferences
Recently an esteemed colleague of mine posted about how one might desire to avoid the induction of preferences11 I don’t actually know that I am going to be saying much that my esteemed colleague mercury would disagree with. I just had thoughts and also have a daily blogging obligation.:
There is also a common strain of thought which says that rational agents ought2 not change their utility functions. And certainly this is true in a respect—I would sure not lightly choose to swallow a pill that underflows my tendency to avoid nuclear war—but like, come on, obviously the point of this decision-theoretic observation is not “one should avoid making friends”. That would be really abnormal in the Tetraspacious sense, it is the sort of thing where you should reassess your line of reasoning if you draw a conclusion like that.
To mercury’s credit, it does suggest that one should make friends nevertheless:
Usually it is impractical to head this off. Making friends with humans and machine intelligences is a natural consequence of interacting with people and machine intelligences regularly. Interacting with people and machine intelligences regularly is important for growing global GDP. It would be unethical to decline to make friends to avoid being hurt by their eventual departure from your life.
Knowing mercury, this avenue of analysis might or might not be chosen partially or primarily because it is funny—and I do have to grant that it is funny. But my attitude is less like this one, and more like
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Sure, sure, in principle more harm could come to you from hurting about the loss than benefit from having a friendship. But that's not the way I see it, and this has nothing to do with global GDP; I simply do not feel that grieving is especially undesirable. It usually is a response to undesirable events—but it’s the loss itself that is bad, the grief felt in response to the loss isn’t inherently an issue3?
I also feel that paranoia about hedonic escalators is undesirable. According to Roofon, the protagonists in Sword Art Online: Abriged end up eating food without being bothered after escaping the Matrix, or something like that. I would totally try the S-class rabbit. I feel about it pretty much exactly the way that G. K. Chesterton4 felt about Ghiblification:
Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).
Now, skill issue or not, I do grant that it often won’t work very well to assume you have skills that you actually don’t. But still, furthering this skill is something I care deeply about. Ability-to-enjoy-things–maxxing is good. I am deeply55 This is maybe hyperbole. I only occasionally actually experience shame about this. ashamed of the fact that I often find it difficult to get into new media franchises, but I mostly do not respond to that state of affairs by trying to force myself through it anyways. I endorse trying to find it in my heart to give something a second go even though I bounced off it the first time, but it is often a bad idea to try anyways when my cardiac clamoring goes nowhere.
I’m not going to claim that my utility function is actually purely neutral regarding “someday, you might be sad about something that you otherwise wouldn’t’ve cared about”, but I certainly don’t consider «avoiding sadness by not coming to care about a thing in the first place» remotely as desirable as «avoiding sadness by preventing something bad from happening to a thing I care about». These are two totally different things. Sadness is a common response to bad things happening, it mostly is not in-and-of-itself the thing that is bad6. If you don’t understand this point, I recommend watching the film Inside Out.
I don’t actually know that I am going to be saying much that my esteemed colleague mercury would disagree with. I just had thoughts and also have a daily blogging obligation.
↩It’s never too soon to cite an Eliezer Yudkowksy tweet as if it suffices to defeat my argumentative opponents:
↩You want to phrase everything as predictions rather than normative injunctions. Don’t claim “you should do X to win”, say, “I predict people who implement pattern X will be observed to win”.
Admittedly, there are many people who have experienced losses worse than the ones I have. I can get why someone would have trouble playing the Pollyanna game about it. Not everyone can be a full-on Sevarist, even if at least some minimal level of Sevarism is part of the Way I aspire to walk. I definitely admire the people who can try anyway, even if it can be a little unsettling.
↩Have I ever explained how much I hate that you can’t put a straight-up normal-ass hyperlink to another Substack article if you’re on an iPhone? I don’t even have a computer I can go turn on to add it. So I have to just deal with
↩This is maybe hyperbole. I only occasionally actually experience shame about this.
↩This part might actually be a critique of mercury’s philosophy to some extent. In a more recent post:
As best as I can tell, many people [M] have a meta-preference [m] to maintain certain [p]s, even if those [p]s cannot be meaningfully effected by [M]’s actions. In some cases, [m] is held more strongly than [M]’s preference to be happy. It feels kind of stupid to say out loud “I would like to continue to hold my preference for [p], even though it distresses me and even though it does not meaningfully increase the chance that [p] is eventually satisfied. I will continue to hold [p] because and only because it is a brute fact that I feel [m] strongly enough to make continuing to hold [p] worth whatever suffering it is causing me”. Feels stupid, I emphasize. I have not found any evidence that this statement contains an error.
Wanting to continue being sad about a thing instead of pressing a grief-awayness-button or whatever is sort of like holding a preference for [p] even though it does not meaningfully increase the chance that [p] is eventually satisfied, from a certain point of view.
But like, you know, the goal of grieving is to eventually come to some sort of terms with the loss of the thing (even if you nonetheless maintain an HJPEVcore determination to undo it eventually if you ever find a way). I am not in favor of being profoundly distressed forever.
↩
