Alex Hollow
To paraphrase the hiker’s saying “regret is mandatory, suffering is optional”. What you describe as not feeling regret to me sounds like feeling regret but not suffering because of it. Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make. Suffering as a result of it is bad for you (it’s suffering, after all), and it sounds like you don’t suffer when you regret. This is a good place to be! It’s good to both recognize that there were better possibilities, and maybe you can aspire to pick better next time, but maybe you did ultimately do as good as you could have done in that situation, so beating yourself up wouldn’t be useful.
We may disagree on the semantics of the word regret, so imagine I’m saying regret_{alex} for my version, and regret_{gordon} for your version.
The original post has much more value than the one-sentence summary, but having a one-sentence explanation of the commonality between the mathematical example and the programming example can be useful.
I would say it is perhaps not nice to provide that sort of summary but it is kind.
The general lesson is that understanding the thing directly is better than understanding someone else’s explanation of the thing.
This is a massive misread of the article. The benefit of lifting is the feeling of joy in the merely material, and of transforming the feeling of being embodied from a feeling of trappedness to a feeling of capabilities being granted to you.
Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed by the necessity of occupying space while shuffling around this mortal coil. And now I do not. Moreover, I no longer feel that I need some special justification for existing, because simply residing in the material is now a privilege.
The first time I moved apartments after I started seriously lifting, I enjoyed it. I had always suffered while moving before lifting, ending up sore and tired and cranky, but after lifting, I didn’t feel any negatives.
Unfortunately, all of life is a virtue ethics/game theory context.
Excellent post. To do things, do things, and surround yourself with people who do things. To do things better, you have to practice rationality, but without some specific target goal, you can’t evaluate whether you are being successful at your practice of rationality.
I’ve noticed a similar thing with Anki flashcards, where my brain learns to memorize responses to the shape of the input text blob when I have cards that are relatively uniquely-shaped. I have to swap around the layout every few months to ensure that the easiest model to subconsciously learn is the one that actually associates the content on the front of the card with the content on the back of the card.
Less so under potentially adversarial conditions, when there are politics/culture-war aspects. For example, many people have large personal and social incentives to convince you of various ideas related to UFOs. In that case, it may not be the correct move to engage with the presented arguments, if they are words chosen to manipulate and not to inform. Do not process untrusted input,.
I’m curious if you think that this formulation of the above idea is still antithetical to epistemic rationality.
Kids can be surprisingly useful resources at a surprisingly early age.
On farms, as you’ve said, kids can figure out what to do and help out easily. If your work requires a lot of low-skill repetitive manual labor, kids can do that, and it can help teach them how to do your slightly higher-skill labor next year.
This does not apply if you work as an engineer, or in an office, or many other cases where specific skills contingent on mostly-finished-developing brains are required to do your work and there is no manual labor that you can offload to children. If you expect your kid to go through the standard college route, there are 22 years of waiting before they can really do anything useful to help with your labor.
It feels like an important metric is “karma per view” or “karma per read” or “karma per user-minute-looking-at-text” something similar. Currently, we can’t gauge that, and so when someone who gives a strong prior that their post will be worth reading posts, that post will get more views which means more upvotes even if they have a similar “karma per read”.
EDIT: EY’s post loaded the second I posted this, but I promise it was an independent invention
What asymmetries did you introduce into your simulations that lead to a difference? Models with no gender differences but with mandatory sexual reproduction usually tend to be 50⁄50 in my experience.
Excellent post. Well-researched, with important caveats put right where I was about to ask for a clarification, and solidly straddles the line between life advice and teaching new facts about the world. As someone with alcoholic’s genes who gets almost no hangovers, I probably won’t be trying this, but I appreciate knowing that activated charcoal might help if I do start to worry about hangovers.
I noticed the same thing, and realized that I was feeling the LW-tribe feeling of “people say they like real science but like fake science, only me and my in-group like real science”. It was also annoying for me as I watched it, but I think that responding specifically to that phrase is as much a tribal signaling thing as using it is.
For a good paper on this topic, I have to recommend Werfel et al. 2017:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173677
They make a spatial model of a world where resources replenish at a fixed rate and show that mortal populations outcompete immortal populations by improving their children’s fitness, as there are fewer mass starvation events.
Hi—I like this post and I’m glad you were able to put 60% of the value of a book into a table! One question I had—you say that IVF costs $12k and surrogacy costs $100k, but also that surrogacy is only $20k more than IVF? That doesn’t add up to me.
Also, sperm/egg donation are usually you getting paid to give those things, which help you have children technically. But those children are probably not being raised by you, so a lot of the benefits you cite, like playing with grandchildren, might be smaller for children created with donated gametes than children you bear and raise yourself.
I think winning at sports is more of a thing that lead to our ancestors increasing their chances of procreation. Would you feel as happy about your relatives becoming sperm or egg donors?
To me, executing adaptations that probably made my ancestors increase their chances of procreation does make me happier (flirting successfully with people, feeling high-status, eating good food, etc), but not the things that actually maximize my current inclusive fitness. Otherwise, I would be really happy about the thought of becoming a sperm donor! You might be interested in this post about executing adaptations.
Can you clarify? Are you saying that you are only happy while actively procreating or increasing your children/relatives’ chance of precreation?
Book review is now up here for those interested.
Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume 2: Evolution of Sex by W. D. Hamilton claims to cover this topic, and I just got a copy. I plan on reading and writing a book review, because I suspect that Hamilton has some good theories that LW would be interested in, given this post and recent interest in the evolution of sex.
If you make a car with a max speed of 65mph by decreasing the amount of force available, it will be:
impossible to pass cars safely, because you won’t be able to overtake quickly
very difficult to maneuver while going near 65 mph, because you won’t be able to accelerate quickly
very annoying to change lanes, because while you are vectored to the side, you will be going less than 65 miles per hour down the road because you will max out at (65 * sin(theta)) mph, making it difficult to speed up while changing lanes, which is often considered good form
very difficult to go up steep hills at speed, because you will use most of your power fighting gravity.
It’s very difficult to decrease max speed by decreasing performance without creating a car that is much worse.