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.
DaystarEld
Karma: 1,309
I hope I didn’t imply somehow that there are no other reasons people might do things besides envy or jealousy!
“You haven’t actually offered me a better alternative” sounds like a failure on your parents’ parts, or a failure of imagination on your 15-year-old-self’s part. Which happens fairly often, and is a separate thing about the preferences themselves being irrational. Many people would be happy with a life of leisure and no responsibilities, and the desire for that isn’t irrational at all. It’s important to be educated about the long-term consequences of it specifically because that’s what helps people feel motivated to do something more robust to their future self’s preferences.
I’d also note that “didn’t want to do schoolwork” is different from “didn’t want to go to school at all,” which yes has legal consequences that rather drastically changes the outcome.
I cover your definition of jealousy under “Romantic jealousy,” though I should specify that it can apply to other things like freindship as well.
As for laziness, I think it is actually often the case that people feel lazy for energy conservation reasons, and I do think that is a separate thing from “lacking motivation to do a thing at all.” The energy conservation example was indeed badly phrased, though, I’ll edit it :)
Curiosity is definitely an emotion! Did you try the 5 minute exercise on it? :)
Ahhh, you’re talking about the memory. Yes, that was the moment of Joy’s realization for why Sadness has value. But before her friends/teammates show up to cheer for her, it’s her parents that show up to comfort her. I think it’s fair to say that her friends showing up to cheer for her probably meant a lot more to Riley than her parents’ comfort in that moment, since it was more tied to the specific thing that was making her feel bad, but Joy’s out-loud recognition was that Riley’s parents showed they cared about her when she was sad, which is the important parallel for the issue in the plot where Riley feels like her parents don’t care about her.
Yep, thanks for pointing this out; it often comes up in the class itself if people ask something like “What happens if people don’t care if you start crying?” but it’s hard to comprehensively address all these sorts of points without making each section two or three times longer.
Was this comment meant to be in reply to me, or the OP? (I agree with these points and think I covered them in my response.)
Ahh, I see. There’s a few things here:
1) When allies respond to your sadness with comfort and presence, they’re essentially saying “your wellbeing matters to me” and “you still belong here despite this loss.” This creates a buffer against secondary psychological harms you alluded to, like isolation, abandonment fears, or spiraling into deeper despair that might come from bad frames where losing the contest means you’ll always lose future ones, or wasted all your time practicing, etc. The original loss remains, but you’re not facing it alone and it’s not extending beyond what actually happened.2) Even when the specific thing can’t be fixed, allies might offer practical support that reduces the overall burden. Some might try covering responsibilities so you can rest, like bringing food or helping with chores so you have fewer stressors and your capacity isn’t overwhelmed. This help can range from the direct to the indirect depending on how fungible the loss is; no one would pretend that buying someone a nice dinner would make up for the loss of a wedding ring, or even something much cheaper with heavy emotional significance, but it can still help take some of the sting out, especially if it’s something like missing a flight where the financial loss is a more significant fraction of the overall.
3) Seeing others who care about you remain stable and functional despite your loss can itself be reassuring evidence that this setback isn’t catastrophic to your broader social world. This may sound like 1, but I think it’s actually separate because it doesn’t require you to having additional negative beliefs that spiral out from the initial loss, but rather bolsters you more directly in continuing to try hard things or feel less of the sting from loss.
Also as an aside, the hockey ring situation is from Inside Out 2: in the first one Sadness signals to Riley’s parents that she is very unhappy and needs a lot more support and attention, which isn’t going to make up for e.g. losing her friends, but can help her feel more cared for in all three ways, to some degree.
The examples you gave are ones where your friends cannot reasonably help you “solve” the problem, in which case just having social support and signals of care is often the best they can do, and many do find that valuable.
But there are plenty of situations where friends can help with the thing that makes you feel sad or overwhelmed, and I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding your question. Do you not think those sorts of situations ever existt? Or are you asking why “sadness” is necessary to get them to help you?
First, I’d acknowledge the 13-year-old’s preference. Not wanting to do schoolwork is completely valid and not irrational. School often is boring, stressful, or feels pointless. Many adults would feel the same way if forced back into that environment. So I wouldn’t shame them for this preference or try to convince them they should enjoy homework.
Instead I might try to elicit their full model of what school is for, and what homework is for, and what happens if they just stop doing it. I’d listen carefully to understand their actual concerns and values. Maybe they feel like they’re missing out on pursuing their real interests. Maybe they’re overwhelmed by pressure to perform. Maybe they see successful people who didn’t follow traditional paths and wonder why they should. Or maybe they’d rather just play video games.
Once you understand their perspective, you might share some stories. Not manipulative ones, but truthful accounts of how different educational paths have played out for different people. Stories about those who dropped out and succeeded, but also stories about how that path actually looked day-to-day, including the challenges, or what they did instead of the “normal” path to success.
The key is approaching this with genuine curiosity about what they want their life to look like, and then collaboratively exploring whether completely stopping schoolwork gets them there. Maybe it does! Maybe you discover alternative educational approaches that align better with their values. Maybe you find ways to minimize the parts of school they hate while keeping doors open.
If you find yourself getting frustrated or pushy, that’s a sign you’ve slipped into trying to “win” rather than understand. You have something in mind that you’re worried about for them, that you think they aren’t taking seriously. That’s fair; they probably don’t have as full a model of the world or future as you do.
But it’s worth noting that a lot of people who think they know what the future has in store are often wrong. The truth is you don’t know for sure what’s better for your 13 year old; your guesses are more informed than theirs, but there’s always uncertainty. So you can do your best to educate and inform them, but first make them an active participant in that process, and stay open to the idea that they have good reasons for it.
If it really is just a case of wanting to play video games (or whatever) instead of doing homework, then the thing you’re trying to do, effectively, is teach them about short-term vs long-term tradeoffs. That’s hard, but not impossible, particularly for 13 year olds. It often requires helping them understand what the world is actually like for people unprepared for it (ideally not in a “scared straight” way), and requires helping them find something they can be excited about in the future, instead of just the present.
Emotions Make Sense
Right, those words definitely seem more accurate to me!
It is the case that Bryce is, ostensibly, just trying to help Ash fulfill their terminal goals while being healthier. The problem is that Bryce presumes that of the available action space, ice cream is fungible for something else that is healthier, and does not listen when Ash reasserts that ice cream itself is the thing they want.
Just because it is a safe bet that Ash will share the value/desire for good health does not mean Ash must prioritize good health in every action they take.
I just donated $1,000. This is not a minor amount for me, and I almost just donated $10 as suggested in Shoshannah’s comment, but I knew I could donate that much without thought or effort, and I wanted to really put at least some effort into this, after seeing how much obvious effort Oliver and others at Lesswrong have been putting in.
My decision process was as follows:First, I dealt with my risk aversion/loss aversion/flinch response to giving large sums of money away. This took a couple minutes, much faster than it used to be thanks to things like my Season of Wealth a couple years ago, but felt like a mildly sharp object jiggling around in my chest until I smoothed it out with reminders of how much money I make these days compared to the relatively poor upbringing I had and the not-particularly-high salary I made for the first ~decade of my adult life.
Second, I thought of how much I value Lesswrong and Lighthaven existing in the world as a vague thing. Impersonally, not in the ways they have affected me, just like… worlds-with-these-people-doing-this-thing-in-it vs worlds-without. This got me up to a feeling of more than double what I wanted to give, somewhere around 25ish.
Third, I thought about how much value I personally have gained from Lesswrong and Lighthaven. I cannot really put a number on this. It’s hard to disentangle the value from all the various sources in the rationality space, and the people who posts on LW and attended Lighthaven events. This ballooned the amount to something extremely hard to measure. Far more than $100, but probably less than 10,000?
Fourth, I dealt with the flinch-response again. 10,000 is a lot for me. I lost more than that due to FTX’s collapse even before the clawback stress started, and that took a bit of time to stop feeling internal jabs over. A few subsections needed dealing with; what if I have an emergency and need lots of money? What if my hypothetical future wife or kids do? Would I regret donating then? This bumped me way back down to the hundreds range.
Fifth, I thought about how I would feel if I woke up today and instead of reading this post, I read a post saying that they had to shut down Lighthaven, and maybe even LessWrong, due to lack of funding. How much I would regret not having donated money, even if it didn’t end up helping. I’m still quite sad that we lost Wytham, and would pay money to retroactively try to save it if I could. This brought me up to something like $3-500.
Sixth, I confronted the niggling thought of “hopefully someone out there will donate enough that my contribution will not really matter, so maybe I don’t even need to really donate much at all?” This thought felt bad, and I had a brief chat with my parts, thanking my internal pragmatism for its role in ensuring we’re not being wasteful before exploring together if this is the sort of person we want to be when other people might need us. After that conversation was over the number had stabilized around 500.
Seventh, I thought about the social signal if I say I donated a lot and how this might encourage others to donate more too, effectively increasing the amount Lesswrong gets, and decided this didn’t really affect much. Maybe a minor effect toward increasing, but nothing noticeable.
Eighth, I thought about the impact to the world re: Alignment. I felt the black hole there, the potential infinite abyss that I could throw my savings and life into and probably not get any useful effect out of, and spent some time with that before examining it again and feeling like another few hundred may not “make sense” in one direction or the other, but felt better than not doing it.
And ninth, I finally thought about the individuals working at Lighthaven that I know. How much do I trust them? How much do I want them to feel supported and motivated and cared for by the community they’re contributing so much to?
By the end of that I was around 8-900 and I thought, fuck it, I’ve made stupider financial decisions than an extra hundred bucks for a fancy T-shirt, and nice round numbers are nice and round.
Thank you all for all you do. I hope this helps.
Sure. So, there are some workplaces have implicit cultural norms that aren’t written down but are crucial for career advancement. Always being available and responding to emails quickly might be an unspoken expectation, or participating in after-work social events might not be mandatory but would be noted and count against people looking for promotion. Certain dress codes or communication styles might be rewarded or penalized beyond their actual professional relevance.
In a community, this usually comes as a form of purity testing of some kind, but can also be related to preferences around how you socialize or what you spend your time doing. If you’re in a community that thinks sex-work is low status, for example, and you want to ask if that’s true… just asking might in fact be costly, because it might clue people in to your potential interest in doing it.
Does that make sense?
I agree that those are the thoughts at the surface-level of Bryce in those situations, and they are not the same as “it’s wrong/stupid to enjoy eating ice cream.”
But I think in many cases, they often do imply “and you are stupid/irrational if knowing these things does not spoil your enjoyment or shift your hedonic attractor.” And even if Bryce genuinely doesn’t feel that way, I hope they would still be very careful with their wording to avoid that implication.
The implication that the preference itself is bad only works with assumptions that the preference will cause harm, to yourself or others, even if you don’t act on it. But I don’t think this is always true; it’s often a matter of degree or context, and how the person’s inner life works.
We could certainly say it is inconvenient or dysfunctional to have a preference that causes suffering for the self or others, and maybe that’s what you mean by “bad.” But this still doesn’t justify the assertion that “expressing” the preference is “wrong.” That’s the thing that feels particularly presumptuous, to me, about how preferences should be distinguished from actions.
Ah, yeah I definitely struggle a bit sometimes with people who make objective-assertion-type-statements when promoting or defending things they enjoy. I also gain quite a lot of enjoyment from looking at various kinds of media with a critical eye; I just do my best to keep that criticism in contexts where the listener or reader wants to share it :)
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?