I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions’ dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.
I’m against Spock too, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It seems unlikely that your level of humour is exactly what you want. People try to strengthen or weaken their own emotions all the time, by becoming more confident, less anxious, less depressed, more motivated. The grandparent is evidence that you can do such self-modification easily through punishment or reinforcement.
It’s not fully general; it’s an instance of a general argument that things are unlikely to be optimal in the absence of strong optimization pressures. Which is true.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should fine-tune humour; we’d need to look at the costs and benefits of doing that versus whatever else we could be doing.
and I thought LW was against spock-rationality
I’m against Spock too, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It seems unlikely that your level of humour is exactly what you want. People try to strengthen or weaken their own emotions all the time, by becoming more confident, less anxious, less depressed, more motivated. The grandparent is evidence that you can do such self-modification easily through punishment or reinforcement.
Isn’t humour it’s own reward? What extra reinforcement system could you use to increase it?
This seems close to a fully general argument. That said, I’m not sure it’s wrong—but tread carefully.
It’s not fully general; it’s an instance of a general argument that things are unlikely to be optimal in the absence of strong optimization pressures. Which is true.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should fine-tune humour; we’d need to look at the costs and benefits of doing that versus whatever else we could be doing.
In theory. In practice, it would be Spock Rational to be against Spock Rationality, so we give it lip service.
I’m not quite sure I follow.
Yes, I upvoted it as an interesting idea, but wouldn’t endorse actually putting it into practice.