Interesting addition to the OP. There’s a monumental amount of evidence that our brains are biased in that way. It’s called addiction, akrasia, procrastination, etc. An example is when short-term indicators such as how something tastes mis-align with long-term ones like whether later you get a stomach ache, nausea, dizziness, etc. For example, you may eat a donut now because of how great it tastes, but then regret it later because you end up feeling sick and nauseous.
I consider this a modern world problem. I assume that all these indicators are supposed to be in harmony, but the modern environment breaks this delicate balance. We end up with a conflict of interests among our different selves over time. Perhaps the most famous and familiar example would be night guy vs. morning guy. It would be one thing if you went to sleep too late one night, found yourself miserable the next day, and then made sure to not make that mistake again… but it’s another one entirely to do this systematically—day in and day out.
This phenomenon of the internal conflict between night guy and morning guy is another indicator problem. Your signals for going to sleep mis-align with those of whether you got enough sleep by the time the next morning morning rolls around. This conflict is intractable. Your night self wants to stay up, but it’s not him that pays the damages; it’s your morning self. What’s the cause of this internal conflict? Artificial lights, unnatural lack of exercise, comfortable chairs, TV, computers, the internet, etc. Once again, the modern world breaks a delicate system.
So what about WoW? Well, is staying up super late unmitigated enjoyment? Is refreshing LW and your email 85 times per hour as fun as your revealed preferences would suggest? No. They blow. There are many downsides. The LW refresh cycles that last until 4 AM usually include their fair share of FML. Fun is fun, but it stops being worth it when “FML!!” gets too interspersed between those moments of fun. Or later when you find that you’ve lost your health, your girlfriend, your job, etc.
I find that every kind of super-stimuli (e.g., junk food, music, WoW) has a slew of disadvantages. They do damage to your health, your social life, your work, your emotional sanity, and so on, whether directly or through causing you to neglect other areas of your life. If these things don’t matter to you, then fine. But I really doubt that. Being healthy, happy, etc… that is fun. Going emotionally insane, being sleep deprived, losing your health, not getting any face-to-face social contact… that blows almost no matter how you slice it.
If you can play WoW in moderation and enjoy it and not feel any bad cognitive effects or hits to your health, that’s great. But it’s very addictive in that it will send an overwhelming shock-wave through the rest of your natural reward system, and your brain will start equating the health of your character with your own. This is scary shit. Your identity will become unstable, and looking at yourself in the mirror after a long WoW session will be a bizarre experience. This might well advance until the day you admit to yourself that you’ve gone completely insane.
WoW is not mind safe. Again, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. I can get raw enjoyment out of things that won’t threaten to destroy my health, drive me insane, wreck me emotionally, etc. And many of those things will build a whole slew of skills that I will be able to use to have even more fun in the future. WoW may well build some important skills, but the downsides and cognitive hazards are just too massive.
Interesting addition to the OP. There’s a monumental amount of evidence that our brains are biased in that way. It’s called addiction, akrasia, procrastination, etc.
The hypothesis I’m suggesting is that all of that evidence is only evidence when evaluated from the giddily-optimistic view of “what I could have done with all that time if I hadn’t wasted it”. Not from comparison with the accomplishments of a control group that didn’t waste their time.
I can get raw enjoyment out of things that won’t threaten to destroy my health, drive me insane, wreck me emotionally, etc.
If people destroy their health for a game, to some extent that is evidence that the game is worth destroying their health for. Or to use another example: If you are living in a crack neighborhood in Detroit and the best you have to look forward to is a life of poverty, about a third of which is spent in jail if you don’t get killed first, then maybe taking cocaine every day for a couple of years until it kills you really will give you a better life. We have a deep-seated prejudice against admitting that might be the case.
The hypothesis I’m suggesting is that all of that evidence is only evidence when evaluated from the giddily-optimistic view of “what I could have done with all that time if I hadn’t wasted it”. Not from comparison with the accomplishments of a control group that didn’t waste their time.
Oh I see. Yes, that’s an important consideration. Not “wasting time” playing WoW doesn’t automatically dictate that you’re not gonna do some other “useless” activity or that you’re gonna get anywhere with any of your “important” projects.
So it’s a matter of what you’ll give up for it and what it’s upsides and downsides are. For me personally, it would almost definitely lead to less exercise, less face-to-face social interaction, less showers, less oral hygiene, less progress on projects that are deeply important to me, etc. I’ve been there (not WoW, but other addictive video games), and I don’t want to go back.
But it might be different for you. Maybe those things wouldn’t happen. Perhaps you wouldn’t care if they did. Etc. Need more context! Should you play WoW? In this thread, I gave you plenty of considerations that may or may not have been aware of (what you’re responding to right now plus an earlier comment). Ultimately though, we perhaps require more information about your situation.
For me: less music, earlier bed-times, less YouTube cycles, no junk food, no MMOs, etc; these all contribute to greater long-term happiness. But should my self of this moment even care about my selves of the long-term? Well, the question isn’t really should. The fact is that I seem to be hard-wired that way. I never do anything of mere transient enjoyment or long-term disadvantage without at least a twinge of FML.
The incoherence of our utility function is a direct result of how different indicators mis-align with each other and launch our different selves into an intractable civil war. If my different selves are prepared to carry out the conflict, there’s no way to say who’s “right” and who’s “wrong”; all we may say is that there’s a conflict of interests and there will be a winner and a loser.
But I don’t think it’s in the interest of any of my different selves to have this disharmony. Night guy would much prefer to be able to go to sleep early and enjoy it rather than hate sleeping and instead stay up super late, end up feeling like shit, feeling guilty, etc.
Maybe I’m rambling by now, but I’m just trying to shed some light on the usually mysterious phenomenon that you pointed out: the incoherence of our utility function. And I’m trying to explain what it means for our action, which is perhaps what you’re grappling with at the moment.
If people destroy their health for a game, to some extent that is evidence that the game is worth destroying their health for.
Akrasia is systematic failure; rationality is systematic winning.
Short-term, revealed preferences rarely tell us the whole story. Just because somebody destroyed their health for a game doesn’t mean that they didn’t experience intense, intermittent FML mode the whole time and the vague, trapped feeling so often associated with akrasia, and certainly doesn’t mean that they didn’t regret it later.
Or to use another example: If you are living in a crack neighborhood in Detroit and the best you have to look forward to is a life of poverty, about a third of which is spent in jail if you don’t get killed first, then maybe taking cocaine every day for a couple of years until it kills you really will give you a better life.
Yes. Could be the case. Would need more information about his utility function, though.
We have a deep-seated prejudice against admitting that might be the case.
Most perhaps do, but not me.
I have no problem admitting that for somebody with a different utility function than mine, it might be a good idea to do any variety of what I don’t: drugs, junk food, WoW, etc. I’m prepared to dive as deep into the rabbit hole of value subjectivism as you want.
Interesting addition to the OP. There’s a monumental amount of evidence that our brains are biased in that way. It’s called addiction, akrasia, procrastination, etc. An example is when short-term indicators such as how something tastes mis-align with long-term ones like whether later you get a stomach ache, nausea, dizziness, etc. For example, you may eat a donut now because of how great it tastes, but then regret it later because you end up feeling sick and nauseous.
I consider this a modern world problem. I assume that all these indicators are supposed to be in harmony, but the modern environment breaks this delicate balance. We end up with a conflict of interests among our different selves over time. Perhaps the most famous and familiar example would be night guy vs. morning guy. It would be one thing if you went to sleep too late one night, found yourself miserable the next day, and then made sure to not make that mistake again… but it’s another one entirely to do this systematically—day in and day out.
This phenomenon of the internal conflict between night guy and morning guy is another indicator problem. Your signals for going to sleep mis-align with those of whether you got enough sleep by the time the next morning morning rolls around. This conflict is intractable. Your night self wants to stay up, but it’s not him that pays the damages; it’s your morning self. What’s the cause of this internal conflict? Artificial lights, unnatural lack of exercise, comfortable chairs, TV, computers, the internet, etc. Once again, the modern world breaks a delicate system.
So what about WoW? Well, is staying up super late unmitigated enjoyment? Is refreshing LW and your email 85 times per hour as fun as your revealed preferences would suggest? No. They blow. There are many downsides. The LW refresh cycles that last until 4 AM usually include their fair share of FML. Fun is fun, but it stops being worth it when “FML!!” gets too interspersed between those moments of fun. Or later when you find that you’ve lost your health, your girlfriend, your job, etc.
I find that every kind of super-stimuli (e.g., junk food, music, WoW) has a slew of disadvantages. They do damage to your health, your social life, your work, your emotional sanity, and so on, whether directly or through causing you to neglect other areas of your life. If these things don’t matter to you, then fine. But I really doubt that. Being healthy, happy, etc… that is fun. Going emotionally insane, being sleep deprived, losing your health, not getting any face-to-face social contact… that blows almost no matter how you slice it.
If you can play WoW in moderation and enjoy it and not feel any bad cognitive effects or hits to your health, that’s great. But it’s very addictive in that it will send an overwhelming shock-wave through the rest of your natural reward system, and your brain will start equating the health of your character with your own. This is scary shit. Your identity will become unstable, and looking at yourself in the mirror after a long WoW session will be a bizarre experience. This might well advance until the day you admit to yourself that you’ve gone completely insane.
WoW is not mind safe. Again, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. I can get raw enjoyment out of things that won’t threaten to destroy my health, drive me insane, wreck me emotionally, etc. And many of those things will build a whole slew of skills that I will be able to use to have even more fun in the future. WoW may well build some important skills, but the downsides and cognitive hazards are just too massive.
The hypothesis I’m suggesting is that all of that evidence is only evidence when evaluated from the giddily-optimistic view of “what I could have done with all that time if I hadn’t wasted it”. Not from comparison with the accomplishments of a control group that didn’t waste their time.
If people destroy their health for a game, to some extent that is evidence that the game is worth destroying their health for. Or to use another example: If you are living in a crack neighborhood in Detroit and the best you have to look forward to is a life of poverty, about a third of which is spent in jail if you don’t get killed first, then maybe taking cocaine every day for a couple of years until it kills you really will give you a better life. We have a deep-seated prejudice against admitting that might be the case.
Oh I see. Yes, that’s an important consideration. Not “wasting time” playing WoW doesn’t automatically dictate that you’re not gonna do some other “useless” activity or that you’re gonna get anywhere with any of your “important” projects.
So it’s a matter of what you’ll give up for it and what it’s upsides and downsides are. For me personally, it would almost definitely lead to less exercise, less face-to-face social interaction, less showers, less oral hygiene, less progress on projects that are deeply important to me, etc. I’ve been there (not WoW, but other addictive video games), and I don’t want to go back.
But it might be different for you. Maybe those things wouldn’t happen. Perhaps you wouldn’t care if they did. Etc. Need more context! Should you play WoW? In this thread, I gave you plenty of considerations that may or may not have been aware of (what you’re responding to right now plus an earlier comment). Ultimately though, we perhaps require more information about your situation.
For me: less music, earlier bed-times, less YouTube cycles, no junk food, no MMOs, etc; these all contribute to greater long-term happiness. But should my self of this moment even care about my selves of the long-term? Well, the question isn’t really should. The fact is that I seem to be hard-wired that way. I never do anything of mere transient enjoyment or long-term disadvantage without at least a twinge of FML.
The incoherence of our utility function is a direct result of how different indicators mis-align with each other and launch our different selves into an intractable civil war. If my different selves are prepared to carry out the conflict, there’s no way to say who’s “right” and who’s “wrong”; all we may say is that there’s a conflict of interests and there will be a winner and a loser.
But I don’t think it’s in the interest of any of my different selves to have this disharmony. Night guy would much prefer to be able to go to sleep early and enjoy it rather than hate sleeping and instead stay up super late, end up feeling like shit, feeling guilty, etc.
Maybe I’m rambling by now, but I’m just trying to shed some light on the usually mysterious phenomenon that you pointed out: the incoherence of our utility function. And I’m trying to explain what it means for our action, which is perhaps what you’re grappling with at the moment.
Akrasia is systematic failure; rationality is systematic winning.
Short-term, revealed preferences rarely tell us the whole story. Just because somebody destroyed their health for a game doesn’t mean that they didn’t experience intense, intermittent FML mode the whole time and the vague, trapped feeling so often associated with akrasia, and certainly doesn’t mean that they didn’t regret it later.
Yes. Could be the case. Would need more information about his utility function, though.
Most perhaps do, but not me.
I have no problem admitting that for somebody with a different utility function than mine, it might be a good idea to do any variety of what I don’t: drugs, junk food, WoW, etc. I’m prepared to dive as deep into the rabbit hole of value subjectivism as you want.