So I picked Envy for the exercise (though meant Jealousy in your wording), and came up with basically the example you gave in your section on it, but dismissed it, since it felt like a justification, not a reason. That is, it felt like what I would say if I needed to argue that Jealousy was useful, not an actual reason why Jealousy is useful.
Like, I don’t imagine Jealousy is our only source of motivation. We would (but maybe only could?) want to do better or have more, without seeing someone else have more. The people in Tribe A would want more fish because they’d feel Happy if they had more, or Sad if they didn’t have enough, or Angry if they went to long being denied fish. Presumably, Tribe C came up with better fishing for those reasons, since they didn’t have anyone to be Jealous of. Tribe A, now seeing that better fishing is possible, not doing it because they don’t feel Jealousy, would be like Tribe C not doing it after they came up with it, because there was no one to be Jealous of.
I think the evolutionary story of “why Jealousy” is simpler as just “because evolution cares about relative genetic fitness, and if someone is doing better than you, that’s bad relatively, even if it isn’t bad absolutely”. (And so, unless you do care about relative genetic fitness, you should probably be very skeptical of Jealousy)
And in general, I would find it very surprising to learn that an emotional landscape optimized for hunting and gathering in the savanna is also optimized for working a 9 to 5 desk job. At the same time, I would be very surprised to learn that those two situations were so disparate that none of the emotional landscape translates. (So they’re like an unreliable friend. Possibly helpful, but possibly untrustworthy)
But I think this is where I put your Envy example. Yeah, your tribe outcompeting and then destroying mine would be bad. But if I feel Envious of my richer friend, it’s not because I think he’ll use his richer-ness to destroy me. And if America is less productive and ends up losing a war to China, it’d be hard to explain through insufficient Envy, on account of how little anyone feels Envious of Chinese people they’ve never met and know nothing of the life circumstances of. I doubt “Envy” is the driving force of military strategy in the modern age.
It is certainly not my argument, nor implied by the example, that the only reason someone would do something is because of Jealousy or Envy. Things like pleasure and admiration motivate us as well, but most people don’t wonder why we have them or wish they would go away.
Sure, but if the positives of Envy can be better obtained by less destructive emotions, does it really serve a purpose?
I mean, if Inside Out 2 was about the exploration of Envy being gone, and the best it could do is “Riley is still motivated, but just, a bit less than she would be otherwise” it wouldn’t really make for a dramatic change.
And if I were building a person, and had the option to give them Envy, instead of upping their Admiration or Pleasure (as you name), I don’t know why I would.
(Edit: that may be overly unfair. I can come up with reasons why. But they feel anti-altruistic. For example, Envy could push you to steal from people who have things you don’t. This is good for you, because then you’ll have more stuff. But in the same way society and the people in it are better off if no one steals, they’d also be better off if no one felt Envy. So I am still struggling to come up with reasons why I should endorse Envy.)
Ah, yeah, see again my emphasis that I did not name this article “Emotions Are Good” :P
If you pick scenarios where people can find other emotions by which they end up doing the Morally Good and Personally Optimal thing… yeah, envy isn’t needed there.
But my claim is there are situations where people are driven by envy to do things that make their liklihood to survive and thrive better than if they had not felt it. If you disagree with that, this is what the article is trying to accomplish as a step 1, and integration happens after that.
But none of that requires “endorsement” in the way you seem(?) to mean it. Envy is not Nice. To put it in another frame, it is MtG: Black, and the value it brings to the table needs to be understood seperately from “is it good/altruistic/endorsed.”
To some degree. And I agree on most emotions, they exist for a reason and someone who discounts them without reflection is making a mistake. But I think Envy, on reflection, still strikes me as something better for the goals of evolution and in the environment of our ancestors than one that “makes sense” for us and in the modern world.
I think, insofar as Envy drives people to steal, it decreases people’s likelihood to survive and thrive (jail isn’t the optimal place for either of those, and if you’re stealing from Envy, not desperation or something, it probably wasn’t worth the risk). Cheating, another behavior driven by Envy, can lead to suffering violence at the hands of the spurned party (tho if you have “has more sex than otherwise” as a non-trivial term in “thrive” then possibly this one is a wash).
To me, Envy seems to be the drive to defect against a cooperator in some cases, which is, let’s call it “effective” (to differentiate “good/nice”) to take advantage of when you can. But it’s calibrated for a situation where there are tribal levels of coalition with the cooperators, and now there are societal levels of coalition with the cooperators, so this is a much worse value proposition.
It “makes sense” that it evolved the way it did. And of course, if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have evolved that way. But that doesn’t mean it must continue to “make sense” and I’m not sure it does.
Indeed, the example of envy seems very strained: I put pictures on the walls not because I envy my neighbours who have pictures on the walls, or select a tastier kind of tea not because I feel jealous about people who drink it.
So I picked Envy for the exercise (though meant Jealousy in your wording), and came up with basically the example you gave in your section on it, but dismissed it, since it felt like a justification, not a reason. That is, it felt like what I would say if I needed to argue that Jealousy was useful, not an actual reason why Jealousy is useful.
Like, I don’t imagine Jealousy is our only source of motivation. We would (but maybe only could?) want to do better or have more, without seeing someone else have more. The people in Tribe A would want more fish because they’d feel Happy if they had more, or Sad if they didn’t have enough, or Angry if they went to long being denied fish. Presumably, Tribe C came up with better fishing for those reasons, since they didn’t have anyone to be Jealous of. Tribe A, now seeing that better fishing is possible, not doing it because they don’t feel Jealousy, would be like Tribe C not doing it after they came up with it, because there was no one to be Jealous of.
I think the evolutionary story of “why Jealousy” is simpler as just “because evolution cares about relative genetic fitness, and if someone is doing better than you, that’s bad relatively, even if it isn’t bad absolutely”. (And so, unless you do care about relative genetic fitness, you should probably be very skeptical of Jealousy)
And in general, I would find it very surprising to learn that an emotional landscape optimized for hunting and gathering in the savanna is also optimized for working a 9 to 5 desk job. At the same time, I would be very surprised to learn that those two situations were so disparate that none of the emotional landscape translates. (So they’re like an unreliable friend. Possibly helpful, but possibly untrustworthy)
But I think this is where I put your Envy example. Yeah, your tribe outcompeting and then destroying mine would be bad. But if I feel Envious of my richer friend, it’s not because I think he’ll use his richer-ness to destroy me. And if America is less productive and ends up losing a war to China, it’d be hard to explain through insufficient Envy, on account of how little anyone feels Envious of Chinese people they’ve never met and know nothing of the life circumstances of. I doubt “Envy” is the driving force of military strategy in the modern age.
It is certainly not my argument, nor implied by the example, that the only reason someone would do something is because of Jealousy or Envy. Things like pleasure and admiration motivate us as well, but most people don’t wonder why we have them or wish they would go away.
Sure, but if the positives of Envy can be better obtained by less destructive emotions, does it really serve a purpose?
I mean, if Inside Out 2 was about the exploration of Envy being gone, and the best it could do is “Riley is still motivated, but just, a bit less than she would be otherwise” it wouldn’t really make for a dramatic change.
And if I were building a person, and had the option to give them Envy, instead of upping their Admiration or Pleasure (as you name), I don’t know why I would.
(Edit: that may be overly unfair. I can come up with reasons why. But they feel anti-altruistic. For example, Envy could push you to steal from people who have things you don’t. This is good for you, because then you’ll have more stuff. But in the same way society and the people in it are better off if no one steals, they’d also be better off if no one felt Envy. So I am still struggling to come up with reasons why I should endorse Envy.)
Ah, yeah, see again my emphasis that I did not name this article “Emotions Are Good” :P
If you pick scenarios where people can find other emotions by which they end up doing the Morally Good and Personally Optimal thing… yeah, envy isn’t needed there.
But my claim is there are situations where people are driven by envy to do things that make their liklihood to survive and thrive better than if they had not felt it. If you disagree with that, this is what the article is trying to accomplish as a step 1, and integration happens after that.
But none of that requires “endorsement” in the way you seem(?) to mean it. Envy is not Nice. To put it in another frame, it is MtG: Black, and the value it brings to the table needs to be understood seperately from “is it good/altruistic/endorsed.”
Does that make sense?
To some degree. And I agree on most emotions, they exist for a reason and someone who discounts them without reflection is making a mistake. But I think Envy, on reflection, still strikes me as something better for the goals of evolution and in the environment of our ancestors than one that “makes sense” for us and in the modern world.
I think, insofar as Envy drives people to steal, it decreases people’s likelihood to survive and thrive (jail isn’t the optimal place for either of those, and if you’re stealing from Envy, not desperation or something, it probably wasn’t worth the risk). Cheating, another behavior driven by Envy, can lead to suffering violence at the hands of the spurned party (tho if you have “has more sex than otherwise” as a non-trivial term in “thrive” then possibly this one is a wash).
To me, Envy seems to be the drive to defect against a cooperator in some cases, which is, let’s call it “effective” (to differentiate “good/nice”) to take advantage of when you can. But it’s calibrated for a situation where there are tribal levels of coalition with the cooperators, and now there are societal levels of coalition with the cooperators, so this is a much worse value proposition.
It “makes sense” that it evolved the way it did. And of course, if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have evolved that way. But that doesn’t mean it must continue to “make sense” and I’m not sure it does.
Indeed, the example of envy seems very strained: I put pictures on the walls not because I envy my neighbours who have pictures on the walls, or select a tastier kind of tea not because I feel jealous about people who drink it.
I hope I didn’t imply somehow that there are no other reasons people might do things besides envy or jealousy!