Nice, but 3 and 4 feel more tenuous to me than the rest. About depression, why would reevaluation of strategy sometimes lead to suicide? About liking, can’t I like someone even if they didn’t do anything good for me?
Also, what I put for “happiness” isn’t an algorithm. Sorry about that one.
Suicides are pretty rare, and there are rare cases where suicide works as an evolutionary strategy—essentially where you are taking resources away from more successful kin.
Re. liking—iterated prisoner’s dilemma starts off with “cooperate” so you should like everyone to start off with. Would you continue to like someone if they kept defecting?
About liking, I don’t like everyone by default. And sometimes people like people who defect against them. There’s some correlation, but it doesn’t seem to be a complete explanation.
About suicide, do you think suicide is much less likely if you have no kin? That seems empirically checkable and I’d be amazed if it turned out to be true.
I would have expect suicide to be less likely if you have no kin, as that’s my hypothesis. A very quick Googling doesn’t show anything up though, so I’ll update in favor of “other hypothesis I haven’t thought of yet”.
[Edit: in order to help vindicate or demolish this hypothesis, some other things it would predict: suicidal intentions would be correlated with loss of appetite, spending frugally and family-wide poverty]
The original journal article is behind a paywall, but here is Jesse Bering’s SciAm Blog post elucidating on Dr. Denys deCatanzaro’s theory on adaptive suicide.
His theory seems to be in alignment with your beliefs on the subject.
Happiness is how an increase in expected reproductive success feels from the inside
Also, what I put for “happiness” isn’t an algorithm. Sorry about that one.
I might have written instead that happiness is what you feel when your algorithm for tracking your plan for achieving reproductive success reports that the trajectory is close to being as you had planned. Happiness strikes me as an emotion which celebrates the maintenance of a pleasant status-quo, rather than one that goes around looking for a boost.
Nice, but 3 and 4 feel more tenuous to me than the rest. About depression, why would reevaluation of strategy sometimes lead to suicide? About liking, can’t I like someone even if they didn’t do anything good for me?
Also, what I put for “happiness” isn’t an algorithm. Sorry about that one.
Suicides are pretty rare, and there are rare cases where suicide works as an evolutionary strategy—essentially where you are taking resources away from more successful kin.
Re. liking—iterated prisoner’s dilemma starts off with “cooperate” so you should like everyone to start off with. Would you continue to like someone if they kept defecting?
About liking, I don’t like everyone by default. And sometimes people like people who defect against them. There’s some correlation, but it doesn’t seem to be a complete explanation.
About suicide, do you think suicide is much less likely if you have no kin? That seems empirically checkable and I’d be amazed if it turned out to be true.
I would have expect suicide to be less likely if you have no kin, as that’s my hypothesis. A very quick Googling doesn’t show anything up though, so I’ll update in favor of “other hypothesis I haven’t thought of yet”.
[Edit: in order to help vindicate or demolish this hypothesis, some other things it would predict: suicidal intentions would be correlated with loss of appetite, spending frugally and family-wide poverty]
The original journal article is behind a paywall, but here is Jesse Bering’s SciAm Blog post elucidating on Dr. Denys deCatanzaro’s theory on adaptive suicide.
His theory seems to be in alignment with your beliefs on the subject.
I might have written instead that happiness is what you feel when your algorithm for tracking your plan for achieving reproductive success reports that the trajectory is close to being as you had planned. Happiness strikes me as an emotion which celebrates the maintenance of a pleasant status-quo, rather than one that goes around looking for a boost.