I’m not sure what you mean by hedonic treadmills not being a problem.
The article has caused me to realize that awesome has to be part of morality, but that too much of morality might be implicitly aimed at only achieving safety and comfort—with a smaller contingent saying that nothing is important but awesomeness—and that a well-conceived morality needs to have a good balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
I used to be someone who prioritized making the world as weird and interesting a place as possible. Then an incredibly important thing happened to me this year, at Burning Man:
Halfway through the week, a gigantic mechanical squid wandered by, spouting fire from its tentacles.
And I didn’t care. Because Burning Man is just uniformly weird all over the place and I had already (in 2 days) hedonic treadmilled on things-in-the-reference-class-of-giant-mechanical-squid-that-shoot-fire-from-their-tentacles.
(I had spend the previous 12 years of my life wishing rather specifically for a gigantic mechanical squid to wander by randomly. I was really pissed off when I didn’t care when it finally happened)
“Giant parties in space whales” isn’t all that much different than “heaven involves lots of gold and niceness and nobody having to work ever again.” I’m near-certain that the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate, and then reminisce about after you return to normalcy.
Some of those punctuations should certainly involve giant space-whale parties (and since giant space whale parties would probably blow my mind TOO much, you’d want fluctuations in what normalcy means, so you can have a period where normalcy is something closer to space whales, appreciating the space whales exactly enough when they arrive, but then have normalcy shift back to something simpler later on so you can also still appreciate the occasional space-sea-urchin as well.
the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate
Hm.
So, there was a time when being cold at night and in the winter was pretty much the standard human experience in the part of the world I live in. Then we developed various technologies for insulating and heating, and now I take for granted that I can lounge around comfortably in my underwear in my living room during a snowstorm.
If I lived during that earlier period, and I shared your reasoning here, it seems to me I would conclude that the ideal world involved being uncomfortably cold throughout most of the winter. We would heat the house for parties, perhaps, and that would make parties awesome, and we could reminisce about that comfortable warmth after the party was over and we’d gone back to shivering in the cold under blankets. That way we could appreciate the warmth properly.
Have I understood your reasoning correctly, or have I missed something important?
I deliberately wander around outside in the cold before I come in and drink hot chocolate. (In this case, strong cold is preferable, for somewhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours before additional cold stops making the experience nicer).
I don’t deliberately keep my house freezing in the winter, but when I’m in control of the temperature (not often, with roommates), I don’t turn the heat on until it’s actually interfering with my ability to do work. I know people who keep it even colder and they learn to live with it. I’m not sure what’s actually optimal—it may very from person to person, but overall you probably aren’t actually benefiting yourself much if you keep your house in the 70s during winter
Part of the key is variation, though. I also deliberately went to a giant party in the desert. It turns out that it is really hard to have fun in the desert because learning to properly hydrate yourself is hard work. But this was an interesting experience of its own right and yes, it was extremely nice to shower when I got back.
It’s probably valuable to vary having at least one element of you life be extremely “low quality” by modern western standards, most of the time.
(nods) I sympathize with that reasoning. Two things about it make me suspicious, though.
The first is that it seems to elide the difference between choosing to experience cold when doing so is nice, and not having such a choice. it seems to me that this difference is incredibly important.
The second is its calibration against “modern” standards.
I suspect that if I lived a hundred years ago I would similarly be sympathetic to the idea that it’s valuable to have at least one element of my life be extremely low quality by “modern” standards, and if I’m alive a hundred years from now I will similarly be sympathetic to it.
Which leads me to suspect that what’s going on here has more to do with variety being a valuable part of constructing an optimal environment than it does with ordinariness.
If I actually wanted to answer this question, I would get into the habit of recording how much I’m enjoying my life along various dimensions I wanted to optimize my enjoyment of life along, then start varying how hungry I am before I eat and seeing how my enjoyment correlated with that over time.
I think the important missing piece here is that different drivers of happiness have different degrees of hedonic adjustment. Intuitively, I would expect simpler, evolutionarily older needs (approximately those lower on Maslow’s Pyramid to adjust less.
This would imply that things like adequate food and sleep (I would guess that many of us are lacking in the later), moderate temperatures, lack of sickness and injury, etc. should be maintained consistently, while things like mechanical squids should be more varied.
I’m not sure I understand what a “degree of hedonic adjustment” is, here. Also, I’m not sure how we got from talking about ideal worlds and awesomeness, to talking about happiness.
So, OK.… being a little more concrete: “food” is very low on Maslow’s Pyramid, and “acceptance of facts” is very high. If I’ve understood you right, then in order to maximize happiness I should arrange my life so as to maintain a relatively consistent supply of food, but a highly variable supply of acceptance of facts.
Odd. To me, getting completely used to the bizarre is one of the best part of living surrounded in awesomeness. Sure, breaking into a military base is kinda cool, but if you’re really awesome you do it twice without breaking a sweat and it takes a drugged chase through a minefield to faze you.
I came to a somewhat similar conclusion from watching movies with a lot of CGI. Even if the individual scenes are good, one after another gets dull. For that matter, Fantasia II didn’t work very well—for me, it was some sort of repetitive beauty overload.
Do you have a new priority, and if so, what is it?
I had other priorities at the time, they just shifted around a bit. Mostly focusing on effective altruism and humanist culture nowadays, with occasional random parties with Hide-and-seek-in-a-dark-apartment-building for novelty and fun.
I probably don’t do nearly enough exciting things right now, though.
I mean that once you get a magic pill that makes the thirtieth cake of a huge pile just as tasty as the first cake after three days of fasting, your reaction is to say “Boring!” and throw away the pill, not “Awesome.”.
I had a similar realization, but from a different angle. We don’t actually want to rid the world of clever supervillains, though it is preferable to letting supervillains do evil things. We want to maximize their cleverness-to-evil ratio. This is usually accomplished by making them fictional, but we can do better.
I had a similar realization, but from a different angle. We don’t actually want to rid the world of clever supervillains, though it is preferable to letting supervillains do evil things. We want to maximize their cleverness-to-evil ratio. This is usually accomplished by making them fictional, but we can do better.
I’m not sure what you mean by hedonic treadmills not being a problem.
The article has caused me to realize that awesome has to be part of morality, but that too much of morality might be implicitly aimed at only achieving safety and comfort—with a smaller contingent saying that nothing is important but awesomeness—and that a well-conceived morality needs to have a good balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
I used to be someone who prioritized making the world as weird and interesting a place as possible. Then an incredibly important thing happened to me this year, at Burning Man:
Halfway through the week, a gigantic mechanical squid wandered by, spouting fire from its tentacles.
And I didn’t care. Because Burning Man is just uniformly weird all over the place and I had already (in 2 days) hedonic treadmilled on things-in-the-reference-class-of-giant-mechanical-squid-that-shoot-fire-from-their-tentacles.
(I had spend the previous 12 years of my life wishing rather specifically for a gigantic mechanical squid to wander by randomly. I was really pissed off when I didn’t care when it finally happened)
“Giant parties in space whales” isn’t all that much different than “heaven involves lots of gold and niceness and nobody having to work ever again.” I’m near-certain that the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate, and then reminisce about after you return to normalcy.
Some of those punctuations should certainly involve giant space-whale parties (and since giant space whale parties would probably blow my mind TOO much, you’d want fluctuations in what normalcy means, so you can have a period where normalcy is something closer to space whales, appreciating the space whales exactly enough when they arrive, but then have normalcy shift back to something simpler later on so you can also still appreciate the occasional space-sea-urchin as well.
Hm.
So, there was a time when being cold at night and in the winter was pretty much the standard human experience in the part of the world I live in. Then we developed various technologies for insulating and heating, and now I take for granted that I can lounge around comfortably in my underwear in my living room during a snowstorm.
If I lived during that earlier period, and I shared your reasoning here, it seems to me I would conclude that the ideal world involved being uncomfortably cold throughout most of the winter. We would heat the house for parties, perhaps, and that would make parties awesome, and we could reminisce about that comfortable warmth after the party was over and we’d gone back to shivering in the cold under blankets. That way we could appreciate the warmth properly.
Have I understood your reasoning correctly, or have I missed something important?
Yes and no.
I deliberately wander around outside in the cold before I come in and drink hot chocolate. (In this case, strong cold is preferable, for somewhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours before additional cold stops making the experience nicer).
I don’t deliberately keep my house freezing in the winter, but when I’m in control of the temperature (not often, with roommates), I don’t turn the heat on until it’s actually interfering with my ability to do work. I know people who keep it even colder and they learn to live with it. I’m not sure what’s actually optimal—it may very from person to person, but overall you probably aren’t actually benefiting yourself much if you keep your house in the 70s during winter
Part of the key is variation, though. I also deliberately went to a giant party in the desert. It turns out that it is really hard to have fun in the desert because learning to properly hydrate yourself is hard work. But this was an interesting experience of its own right and yes, it was extremely nice to shower when I got back.
It’s probably valuable to vary having at least one element of you life be extremely “low quality” by modern western standards, most of the time.
(nods) I sympathize with that reasoning. Two things about it make me suspicious, though.
The first is that it seems to elide the difference between choosing to experience cold when doing so is nice, and not having such a choice. it seems to me that this difference is incredibly important.
The second is its calibration against “modern” standards.
I suspect that if I lived a hundred years ago I would similarly be sympathetic to the idea that it’s valuable to have at least one element of my life be extremely low quality by “modern” standards, and if I’m alive a hundred years from now I will similarly be sympathetic to it.
Which leads me to suspect that what’s going on here has more to do with variety being a valuable part of constructing an optimal environment than it does with ordinariness.
Hedonism is hard work. If you want to optimize your enjoyment of life, how hungry should you be before you eat?
Beats me.
If I actually wanted to answer this question, I would get into the habit of recording how much I’m enjoying my life along various dimensions I wanted to optimize my enjoyment of life along, then start varying how hungry I am before I eat and seeing how my enjoyment correlated with that over time.
I think the important missing piece here is that different drivers of happiness have different degrees of hedonic adjustment. Intuitively, I would expect simpler, evolutionarily older needs (approximately those lower on Maslow’s Pyramid to adjust less.
This would imply that things like adequate food and sleep (I would guess that many of us are lacking in the later), moderate temperatures, lack of sickness and injury, etc. should be maintained consistently, while things like mechanical squids should be more varied.
I’m not sure I understand what a “degree of hedonic adjustment” is, here. Also, I’m not sure how we got from talking about ideal worlds and awesomeness, to talking about happiness.
So, OK.… being a little more concrete: “food” is very low on Maslow’s Pyramid, and “acceptance of facts” is very high. If I’ve understood you right, then in order to maximize happiness I should arrange my life so as to maintain a relatively consistent supply of food, but a highly variable supply of acceptance of facts.
Yes? No?
Odd. To me, getting completely used to the bizarre is one of the best part of living surrounded in awesomeness. Sure, breaking into a military base is kinda cool, but if you’re really awesome you do it twice without breaking a sweat and it takes a drugged chase through a minefield to faze you.
I came to a somewhat similar conclusion from watching movies with a lot of CGI. Even if the individual scenes are good, one after another gets dull. For that matter, Fantasia II didn’t work very well—for me, it was some sort of repetitive beauty overload.
Do you have a new priority, and if so, what is it?
I had other priorities at the time, they just shifted around a bit. Mostly focusing on effective altruism and humanist culture nowadays, with occasional random parties with Hide-and-seek-in-a-dark-apartment-building for novelty and fun.
I probably don’t do nearly enough exciting things right now, though.
I mean that once you get a magic pill that makes the thirtieth cake of a huge pile just as tasty as the first cake after three days of fasting, your reaction is to say “Boring!” and throw away the pill, not “Awesome.”.
I had a similar realization, but from a different angle. We don’t actually want to rid the world of clever supervillains, though it is preferable to letting supervillains do evil things. We want to maximize their cleverness-to-evil ratio. This is usually accomplished by making them fictional, but we can do better.
Heh, yes. The world needs more pranksters! Like these guys, for example.
Copyright cretins don’t understand the Internet; is this the one?
Yeah, pretty much.