It would be particularly nice to understand what sense of “happiness” people (should) have in mind when they say that happiness is instrumentally useful.
When did people say happiness was instrumentally useful? I mean, I think it probably is to a certain extent, but I want happiness explicitly because it’s a terminal value, and I don’t judge people who place other values higher.
How do you make the distinction between valuing being happy versus valuing the things that cause you to be happy? I’m worried about happiness-seekers making errors here; I think that at least in some cases a person trying to increase his happiness sounds a lot like an economic planner trying to increase a country’s GDP, rather than trying to increase the things that GDP is (perhaps-incorrectly!) seen as an indicator of desirability of. It seems to me that various kinds of happiness are qualia that are outputs of certain motivational architectures which were created by variably egosyntonic genetic/memetic/Hebbian selection pressures aimed at solving not-entirely-motivational problems which might in themselves be valuable to solve. In such cases reifying the goal of being happy qua being happy would risk an unfortunate error. (This is all modulo my confusion about what people usually mean when they talk about “happiness” in general.)
There are things I value in addition to being happy. Creating quality art. Contributing to global human flourishing. But I definitely value happiness for its own sake. I don’t try to maximize happiness, but there’s a certain amount that I need to satisfice on.
I don’t know exactly what makes me happy—it’s includes “working on fulfilling projects,” “having a good social network”, “getting exercise”, and “having close, intimate friends/romantic-partners”. but not necessarily all of those things, all the time.
One important thing I learned last year is that sometimes, something I think of as “important” turns out to be making me unhappy. It’s useful to me to look at “total happiness GDP”, see when it started going down, and then figure out which variable was the cause.
This year, I started going to a bunch of new meetups, which were individually fun and valuable for my long-term non-happiness goals. But for some reason I became increasingly stressed and unhappy. Eventually I realized that I had forgotten I was an introvert, and even though I enjoy extroverted activities, I need to ensure I get alone time.
I cut back on meetups, and I feel much better now. I appreciate this because I feeling good is good, and also because it means I can get other things done.
Not sure if that explained it very well. I could write multiple pages about how I think about happiness, but if I’m doing that it probably should be a fully-formed post.
Yes, when I claimed that people sometimes say that happiness is instrumentally useful, that was not based on them saying happiness is worth pursuing and me concluding they must therefore think it’s instrumentally useful; rather, it was based on them saying happiness is instrumentally useful.
It would be particularly nice to understand what sense of “happiness” people (should) have in mind when they say that happiness is instrumentally useful.
When did people say happiness was instrumentally useful? I mean, I think it probably is to a certain extent, but I want happiness explicitly because it’s a terminal value, and I don’t judge people who place other values higher.
How do you make the distinction between valuing being happy versus valuing the things that cause you to be happy? I’m worried about happiness-seekers making errors here; I think that at least in some cases a person trying to increase his happiness sounds a lot like an economic planner trying to increase a country’s GDP, rather than trying to increase the things that GDP is (perhaps-incorrectly!) seen as an indicator of desirability of. It seems to me that various kinds of happiness are qualia that are outputs of certain motivational architectures which were created by variably egosyntonic genetic/memetic/Hebbian selection pressures aimed at solving not-entirely-motivational problems which might in themselves be valuable to solve. In such cases reifying the goal of being happy qua being happy would risk an unfortunate error. (This is all modulo my confusion about what people usually mean when they talk about “happiness” in general.)
There are things I value in addition to being happy. Creating quality art. Contributing to global human flourishing. But I definitely value happiness for its own sake. I don’t try to maximize happiness, but there’s a certain amount that I need to satisfice on.
I don’t know exactly what makes me happy—it’s includes “working on fulfilling projects,” “having a good social network”, “getting exercise”, and “having close, intimate friends/romantic-partners”. but not necessarily all of those things, all the time.
One important thing I learned last year is that sometimes, something I think of as “important” turns out to be making me unhappy. It’s useful to me to look at “total happiness GDP”, see when it started going down, and then figure out which variable was the cause.
This year, I started going to a bunch of new meetups, which were individually fun and valuable for my long-term non-happiness goals. But for some reason I became increasingly stressed and unhappy. Eventually I realized that I had forgotten I was an introvert, and even though I enjoy extroverted activities, I need to ensure I get alone time.
I cut back on meetups, and I feel much better now. I appreciate this because I feeling good is good, and also because it means I can get other things done.
Not sure if that explained it very well. I could write multiple pages about how I think about happiness, but if I’m doing that it probably should be a fully-formed post.
Yes, when I claimed that people sometimes say that happiness is instrumentally useful, that was not based on them saying happiness is worth pursuing and me concluding they must therefore think it’s instrumentally useful; rather, it was based on them saying happiness is instrumentally useful.
They didn’t say it on this page though, hence my confusion.