The hedonic treadmill exists because minds are built to climb utility gradients—absolute utility levels are not even uniquely defined, so as long as your preferences are time-consistent you can just renormalize before maximizing the expected utility of your next decision.
I find this vaguely comforting. It’s basically a decision-theoretic and psychological justification for stoicism.
(must have read this somewhere in the sequences?)
I think self-reflection in bounded reasoners justifies some level of “regret,” “guilt,” “shame,” etc., but the basic reasoning above should hold to first order, and these should all be treated as corrections and for that reason should not get out of hand.
The hedonic treadmill exists because minds are built to climb utility gradients—absolute utility levels are not even uniquely defined, so as long as your preferences are time-consistent you can just renormalize before maximizing the expected utility of your next decision.
I find this vaguely comforting. It’s basically a decision-theoretic and psychological justification for stoicism.
(must have read this somewhere in the sequences?)
I think self-reflection in bounded reasoners justifies some level of “regret,” “guilt,” “shame,” etc., but the basic reasoning above should hold to first order, and these should all be treated as corrections and for that reason should not get out of hand.