Could you please elaborate on this idea a little? … I’m interested in exactly how you tie it in with Kaczynski, and I also think it’s relevant to my current dilemma.
Sure!
In brief: Kaczynski seems to have realized that economies are driven by wanting, not liking, and that this will lead to unhappiness. I think that that conclusion is too strong though—I’d just say that it’ll lead to inefficiency.
Longer explanation: ok, so the economy is pretty much driven by what people choose to buy, and where people choose to work. People aren’t always so good at making these choices. One reason is because they don’t actually know what will make them happy.
Example: job satisfaction is important. There are lots of subtle things that influence job satisfaction. For example, there’s something about things like farming that produces satisfaction and contentment. People don’t value these things enough → these jobs disappear → people miss out on the opportunity to be satisfied and content.
Another reason why people aren’t good at making choices is because they don’t always have the willpower to do what they know they should.
Example: if people were smart, McDonalds wouldn’t be the huge empire that it is. People choose to eat at McDonalds because they don’t weigh the consequences it has on their future selves enough. The reason why McDonalds is huge is because tons of people make these mistakes. If people were smart, MealSquares and McDonalds would be flip-flopped.
Kaczynski seems to focus more on the first example, but I think they’re both important. Economies are driven by the decisions we make. Given the predictable mistakes people make, society will suffer in predictable ways. Kaczynski seems to have realized this.
I avoided using the terms “wanting” and “liking” on purpose. I’ll just say quickly words are just symbols that refer to things and as long as the two people are using the same symbol-thing mappings, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you seem to understand the distinction between the two things as far as wanting/liking goes. I do see what you mean about the term “wanting”, and now that I think about it I agree with you.
(I’ve avoided elaboration and qualifiers in favor of conciseness and clarity. Let me know if you want me to say more.)
Edit: I’m about 95% sure that there’s actual neuroscience research behind the wanting vs. liking thing. Ie. they’ve found distinct a brain area that corresponds to wanting, and they’ve found a different distinct brain area that corresponds to liking.
Note: I studied neuroscience in college. I did research in a lab where we studied vision in monkeys, and part of this involved stimulating the monkeys brain. There was a point where we were able to get the monkey to basically make any eye movement we want (based on where and how much we stimulated). It didn’t provide me with any new information as far as free will goes, but literally seeing it in person with my own eyes influenced me on an emotional level.
That’s why I’ve never tried smoking; I was scared I might like it and start to want it.
Interesting, I’ve never smoked, drank or done any drugs at all for similar reasons. Well, that’s part of the story.
Would I truly want it? Or am I just addicted?
I’m going to guess that the reason why you wouldn’t want to do drugs even if you knew they’d make you happy is because a) it’d sort of numb you away from thinking critically and making decisions, and b) you wouldn’t get to do good for the world. Your current lifestyle doesn’t seem to be preventing you from doing either of those.
“What if there were children in pain from starvation right outside the restaurant, and you knew the money you would spend in the restaurant could buy them rice and beans for two weeks… you would feel guilty about eating at the restaurant instead of helping, right?
:) I’ve proposed the same thought experiment except with buying diamonds. Eg. “Imagine that you go to the diamond store to buy a diamond, and there were x thousand starving kids in the parking lot who you could save if you spent the money on them instead. Would you still buy the diamond?”
And in the case of diamonds, it’s not only a) the opportunity cost of doing good with the money—it’s that b) you’re supporting an inhumane organization and c) you’re being victim to a ridiculous marketing scheme that gets you to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a shiny rock. The post Diamonds are Bullshit on Priceonomics is great.
Furthermore, people do a, b and c in the name of love. To me, that seems about as anti-love as it gets. Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. It’s amazing how far you could push a human away from what’s sensible. If I had an online dating profile, I think it’d be, “If you still think you’d want a diamond after reading this, then I hate you. If not, let’s talk.”
I know I haven’t acknowledged the main counterargument, which is that the sacrifice is a demonstration of commitment, but there are ways of doing that without doing a, b and c.
Why? (“it just isn’t!”)
That sort of thinking baffles me as well. I’ve tried to explain to my parents what a cost-benefit analysis is… and they just don’t get it. This post has been of moderate help to me because I understood what virtue ethics are after reading it (and I never understood what it is before reading it)
People who say “it just isn’t” don’t think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. They just have ideas about what is and isn’t virtuous. As people like us have figured out, if you follow these virtues blindly, you’ll run into ridiculousness and/or inconsistency.
However, this isn’t to say that virtue-driven thinking doesn’t have it’s uses. Like all heuristics, they trade accuracy for speed, which sometimes is a worthy trade-off.
I disagree. I think we would be better off if society could somehow advance to a stage where such unselfishness was the norm.
I’m glad to hear you disagree :) But I sense that I may not have explained what I think and why I think it. If you could just flip a switch and make everyone have equal preference ratios, I think that’d probably be a good thing.
What I’m trying to say is that there is no switch, and that making our preference ratios more equal would be very difficult. Ex. try to make yourself care as much about a random accountant in China as much as you do about, say your Aunt. As far as cost-benefit analysis goes, the effort and unease of doing this would be a cost. I sense that the costs aren’t always worth the benefits, and that given this, it’s socially optimal for us to accept our uneven preference ratios to some extent. Thoughts?
Good quote! Right now, I interpret this as showing how personal happiness and “altruism/not becoming a Dark Lord” are both inexplicable, perhaps sometimes competing terminal values… how do you interpret it?
I interpret it as “Harry seems to think there are good reasons for choosing certain terminal values. Terminal values seem arbitrary to me.”
(I’ve avoided elaboration and qualifiers in favor of conciseness and clarity. Let me know if you want me to say more.)
Nope, your longer explanation was perfect, and now I understand, thanks. I’m just a little curious why you would say those things lead to inefficiency instead of unhappiness, but you don’t have to elaborate any more here unless you feel like it.
Well, that’s part of the story.
Again, now I’m slightly curious about the rest of it...
I’m going to guess that the reason why you wouldn’t want to do drugs even if you knew they’d make you happy is because a) it’d sort of numb you away from thinking critically and making decisions, and b) you wouldn’t get to do good for the world. Your current lifestyle doesn’t seem to be preventing you from doing either of those.
Good guess. You’re right. But (I initially thought) smoking would hardly prevent those things, and I still don’t want to smoke. Then again, addiction could interfere with a), and the opportunity cost of buying cigarettes could interfere with b).
I’ve proposed the same thought experiment except with buying diamonds.
No way! A while back, I facebook-shared a very similar link about the ridiculousness of the diamond marketing scheme and proposed various alternatives to spending money on a diamond ring. I wasn’t even aware that the organization was inhumane.. yikes, information like that should be common knowledge. Also, probably at least some people don’t really want to get a diamond ring… but by the time the relationship gets serious, they can’t get themselves to bring it up (girls don’t want to be presumptuous, guys don’t want to risk a conflict?) so yeah, definitely a good kind of thing to get out of the way in a dating profile, haha.
This post has been of moderate help to me because I understood what virtue ethics are after reading it.
Wow, that’s so interesting, I’d never heard of virtue ethics before. I have many thoughts/questions about this, but let’s save that conversation for another day so my brain doesn’t suffer an overuse injury. My inner virtue-ethicist wants to become a more thoughtful person, but I know myself well enough to know that if I dive into all this stuff head first, it will just end up to be “a weird thinking phase I went through once” and instrumentally, I want to be thoughtful because of my terminal value of caring about the world.
(My gut reaction: Virtues are really just instrumental values that make life convenient for people whose terminal values are unclear/intimidating. (Like how the author of the link chose loyalty as a virtue. I bet we could find a situation in which she would abandon that loyalty.) But I also think that there’s a place for cost-benefit analysis even within virtue ethics, and that virtue ethicists with thoughtfully-chosen virtues can be more efficient consequentialists, which probably doesn’t make much sense, but I’d like to be both, please!)
If you could just flip a switch and make everyone have equal preference ratios, I think that’d probably be a good thing...it’s socially optimal for us to accept our uneven preference ratios to some extent. Thoughts?
Oh, yeah, that makes sense to me. Kind of like capitalism, it seems to work better in practice if we just acknowledge human nature. But gradually, as a society, we can shift the preference ratios a bit, and I think we maybe are. :) We can point to a decrease in imperialism, the budding effective altruism movement, or even veganism’s growing popularity as examples of this shifting preference ratio.
Nope, your longer explanation was perfect, and now I understand, thanks. I’m just a little curious why you would say those things lead to inefficiency instead of unhappiness, but you don’t have to elaborate any more here unless you feel like it.
I didn’t mean anything deep by that. Inefficiency just means “less than optimal” (or at least that’s what I mean by it). For him to say that it will lead to actual unhappiness would mean that the costs are so great that they overcome any associated benefits and push whatever our default state is down until it reaches actual unhappiness. I suspect that the forces aren’t strong enough to push us too far off our happiness “set points”.
Again, now I’m slightly curious about the rest of it...
I like your point about being afraid/ashamed to do something and the two cases in general and with regard to drinking as a social lubricant.
I’ll post my drinking experience over there too, though I don’t have too much to say.
Not the most formal sources, but at least it’ll be entertaining :)
Haha, ok
It seems that you don’t want to think about this now. If you end up thinking about it in the future, let me know—I’d love to hear your thoughts!
How convenient. I thought about it a bit more after all. I actually still like my initial idea of virtues being instrumental values. I commented on the link you sent me, but a lot of my comment is similar to what I commented here yesterday…
I actually still like my initial idea of virtues being instrumental values.
As a consequentialist, that’s how I’m inclined to think of it too. But I think it’s important to remember that non-consequentialists actually think of virtues as having intrinsic value. Of being virtuous.
Sure!
In brief: Kaczynski seems to have realized that economies are driven by wanting, not liking, and that this will lead to unhappiness. I think that that conclusion is too strong though—I’d just say that it’ll lead to inefficiency.
Longer explanation: ok, so the economy is pretty much driven by what people choose to buy, and where people choose to work. People aren’t always so good at making these choices. One reason is because they don’t actually know what will make them happy.
Example: job satisfaction is important. There are lots of subtle things that influence job satisfaction. For example, there’s something about things like farming that produces satisfaction and contentment. People don’t value these things enough → these jobs disappear → people miss out on the opportunity to be satisfied and content.
Another reason why people aren’t good at making choices is because they don’t always have the willpower to do what they know they should.
Example: if people were smart, McDonalds wouldn’t be the huge empire that it is. People choose to eat at McDonalds because they don’t weigh the consequences it has on their future selves enough. The reason why McDonalds is huge is because tons of people make these mistakes. If people were smart, MealSquares and McDonalds would be flip-flopped.
Kaczynski seems to focus more on the first example, but I think they’re both important. Economies are driven by the decisions we make. Given the predictable mistakes people make, society will suffer in predictable ways. Kaczynski seems to have realized this.
I avoided using the terms “wanting” and “liking” on purpose. I’ll just say quickly words are just symbols that refer to things and as long as the two people are using the same symbol-thing mappings, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you seem to understand the distinction between the two things as far as wanting/liking goes. I do see what you mean about the term “wanting”, and now that I think about it I agree with you.
(I’ve avoided elaboration and qualifiers in favor of conciseness and clarity. Let me know if you want me to say more.)
Edit: I’m about 95% sure that there’s actual neuroscience research behind the wanting vs. liking thing. Ie. they’ve found distinct a brain area that corresponds to wanting, and they’ve found a different distinct brain area that corresponds to liking.
Note: I studied neuroscience in college. I did research in a lab where we studied vision in monkeys, and part of this involved stimulating the monkeys brain. There was a point where we were able to get the monkey to basically make any eye movement we want (based on where and how much we stimulated). It didn’t provide me with any new information as far as free will goes, but literally seeing it in person with my own eyes influenced me on an emotional level.
Interesting, I’ve never smoked, drank or done any drugs at all for similar reasons. Well, that’s part of the story.
I’m going to guess that the reason why you wouldn’t want to do drugs even if you knew they’d make you happy is because a) it’d sort of numb you away from thinking critically and making decisions, and b) you wouldn’t get to do good for the world. Your current lifestyle doesn’t seem to be preventing you from doing either of those.
:) I’ve proposed the same thought experiment except with buying diamonds. Eg. “Imagine that you go to the diamond store to buy a diamond, and there were x thousand starving kids in the parking lot who you could save if you spent the money on them instead. Would you still buy the diamond?”
And in the case of diamonds, it’s not only a) the opportunity cost of doing good with the money—it’s that b) you’re supporting an inhumane organization and c) you’re being victim to a ridiculous marketing scheme that gets you to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a shiny rock. The post Diamonds are Bullshit on Priceonomics is great.
Furthermore, people do a, b and c in the name of love. To me, that seems about as anti-love as it gets. Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. It’s amazing how far you could push a human away from what’s sensible. If I had an online dating profile, I think it’d be, “If you still think you’d want a diamond after reading this, then I hate you. If not, let’s talk.”
I know I haven’t acknowledged the main counterargument, which is that the sacrifice is a demonstration of commitment, but there are ways of doing that without doing a, b and c.
That sort of thinking baffles me as well. I’ve tried to explain to my parents what a cost-benefit analysis is… and they just don’t get it. This post has been of moderate help to me because I understood what virtue ethics are after reading it (and I never understood what it is before reading it)
People who say “it just isn’t” don’t think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. They just have ideas about what is and isn’t virtuous. As people like us have figured out, if you follow these virtues blindly, you’ll run into ridiculousness and/or inconsistency.
However, this isn’t to say that virtue-driven thinking doesn’t have it’s uses. Like all heuristics, they trade accuracy for speed, which sometimes is a worthy trade-off.
I’m glad to hear you disagree :) But I sense that I may not have explained what I think and why I think it. If you could just flip a switch and make everyone have equal preference ratios, I think that’d probably be a good thing.
What I’m trying to say is that there is no switch, and that making our preference ratios more equal would be very difficult. Ex. try to make yourself care as much about a random accountant in China as much as you do about, say your Aunt. As far as cost-benefit analysis goes, the effort and unease of doing this would be a cost. I sense that the costs aren’t always worth the benefits, and that given this, it’s socially optimal for us to accept our uneven preference ratios to some extent. Thoughts?
I interpret it as “Harry seems to think there are good reasons for choosing certain terminal values. Terminal values seem arbitrary to me.”
Nope, your longer explanation was perfect, and now I understand, thanks. I’m just a little curious why you would say those things lead to inefficiency instead of unhappiness, but you don’t have to elaborate any more here unless you feel like it.
Again, now I’m slightly curious about the rest of it...
Good guess. You’re right. But (I initially thought) smoking would hardly prevent those things, and I still don’t want to smoke. Then again, addiction could interfere with a), and the opportunity cost of buying cigarettes could interfere with b).
No way! A while back, I facebook-shared a very similar link about the ridiculousness of the diamond marketing scheme and proposed various alternatives to spending money on a diamond ring. I wasn’t even aware that the organization was inhumane.. yikes, information like that should be common knowledge. Also, probably at least some people don’t really want to get a diamond ring… but by the time the relationship gets serious, they can’t get themselves to bring it up (girls don’t want to be presumptuous, guys don’t want to risk a conflict?) so yeah, definitely a good kind of thing to get out of the way in a dating profile, haha.
Wow, that’s so interesting, I’d never heard of virtue ethics before. I have many thoughts/questions about this, but let’s save that conversation for another day so my brain doesn’t suffer an overuse injury. My inner virtue-ethicist wants to become a more thoughtful person, but I know myself well enough to know that if I dive into all this stuff head first, it will just end up to be “a weird thinking phase I went through once” and instrumentally, I want to be thoughtful because of my terminal value of caring about the world. (My gut reaction: Virtues are really just instrumental values that make life convenient for people whose terminal values are unclear/intimidating. (Like how the author of the link chose loyalty as a virtue. I bet we could find a situation in which she would abandon that loyalty.) But I also think that there’s a place for cost-benefit analysis even within virtue ethics, and that virtue ethicists with thoughtfully-chosen virtues can be more efficient consequentialists, which probably doesn’t make much sense, but I’d like to be both, please!)
Oh, yeah, that makes sense to me. Kind of like capitalism, it seems to work better in practice if we just acknowledge human nature. But gradually, as a society, we can shift the preference ratios a bit, and I think we maybe are. :) We can point to a decrease in imperialism, the budding effective altruism movement, or even veganism’s growing popularity as examples of this shifting preference ratio.
I didn’t mean anything deep by that. Inefficiency just means “less than optimal” (or at least that’s what I mean by it). For him to say that it will lead to actual unhappiness would mean that the costs are so great that they overcome any associated benefits and push whatever our default state is down until it reaches actual unhappiness. I suspect that the forces aren’t strong enough to push us too far off our happiness “set points”.
Just did a write up here. How convenient.
Yeah, it is. Check out the movie Blood Diamond and the song Conflict Diamonds. Not the most formal sources, but at least it’ll be entertaining :)
It seems that you don’t want to think about this now. If you end up thinking about it in the future, let me know—I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I like your point about being afraid/ashamed to do something and the two cases in general and with regard to drinking as a social lubricant.
I’ll post my drinking experience over there too, though I don’t have too much to say.
Haha, ok
How convenient. I thought about it a bit more after all. I actually still like my initial idea of virtues being instrumental values. I commented on the link you sent me, but a lot of my comment is similar to what I commented here yesterday…
As a consequentialist, that’s how I’m inclined to think of it too. But I think it’s important to remember that non-consequentialists actually think of virtues as having intrinsic value. Of being virtuous.