You mention how yumminess positively biases for novel things. I think it also negatively biases for habitual things in ways that make not being an idiot harder.
IE, a new relationship feels a lot yummier than the same relationship with the same person 10 years later—even though that relationship is much more valuable to me personally after those 10 years than at the beginning.
There’s a dynamic where we don’t feel yumminess for things we have and are confident that we will continue having, even when those things are very valuable to us.
Two thoughts.
This is a kind of strange gap in human cognition that seems prone to a lot of common and obvious failure modes.
I wonder if the societal concept of Goodness is an attempted patch, which would imply that rejecting the memetic egregore successfully is harder than just not being an idiot. (And often involves subcultures building their own memetic egregore to serve a similar purpose).
IE, feeling right is really yummy … and it was ~ the memetic egregore of Rationality that got me to a point where being right is yummier than seeming / feeling right.
This feels related to generalized-hangriness—our values point in useful directions while on the object level being wrong.
IE, feeling right points to a desire to be respected and to understand the world, but is itself a bad object level way to achieve those goals.
So I’m not sure that “jettison the memetic egregore and pay attention to your and others’ actual Values” is good advice, and I worry that actual is doing a lot of non obvious work that is kind of contradictory with defining Values as things that feel yummy.
There’s a dynamic where we don’t feel yumminess for things we have and are confident that we will continue having, even when those things are very valuable to us.
I’d highlight there the distinction between “terminal-ish” values vs “instrumental-ish” values. Part of “don’t be an idiot about it” is to not just myopically chase the terminal-ish yumminess feelings; rather, plan ahead to embrace more yumminess feelings long term by working on instrumental-ish value (which might not provide yummy feelings in its own right) shorter term.
You mention how yumminess positively biases for novel things. I think it also negatively biases for habitual things in ways that make not being an idiot harder.
IE, a new relationship feels a lot yummier than the same relationship with the same person 10 years later—even though that relationship is much more valuable to me personally after those 10 years than at the beginning.
There’s a dynamic where we don’t feel yumminess for things we have and are confident that we will continue having, even when those things are very valuable to us.
Two thoughts.
This is a kind of strange gap in human cognition that seems prone to a lot of common and obvious failure modes.
I wonder if the societal concept of Goodness is an attempted patch, which would imply that rejecting the memetic egregore successfully is harder than just not being an idiot. (And often involves subcultures building their own memetic egregore to serve a similar purpose).
IE, feeling right is really yummy … and it was ~ the memetic egregore of Rationality that got me to a point where being right is yummier than seeming / feeling right.
This feels related to generalized-hangriness—our values point in useful directions while on the object level being wrong.
IE, feeling right points to a desire to be respected and to understand the world, but is itself a bad object level way to achieve those goals.
So I’m not sure that “jettison the memetic egregore and pay attention to your and others’ actual Values” is good advice, and I worry that actual is doing a lot of non obvious work that is kind of contradictory with defining Values as things that feel yummy.
I’d highlight there the distinction between “terminal-ish” values vs “instrumental-ish” values. Part of “don’t be an idiot about it” is to not just myopically chase the terminal-ish yumminess feelings; rather, plan ahead to embrace more yumminess feelings long term by working on instrumental-ish value (which might not provide yummy feelings in its own right) shorter term.