I think parts of your Notes on Honesty are as close to the post I was trying to write as what I actually wrote was. I wonder if I had some cryptomnesia going on, even. In any case, thanks for writing that and for pointing it out here!
Orioth
Karma: 19
What do the Rats Sing?
(A list of songs compiled from impromptu group singing sessions at a few rationalist-adjacent events. Anything where the program was decided in advance is excluded from this list. My memory is imperfect, and I’m more likely to remember songs I’m familiar with.)
Group singing standards
Country Roads (x3)
Wagon Wheel
Hallelujah
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Leave Her, Johnny
Songs which were written for Secular Solstice
Time Wrote the Rocks
Bitter Wind Blown
When I Die
Little Echo
(and see the ‘Filk and filk-adjacent’ and ‘Uncategorized’ sections, which include some that weren’t written for Solstice but are oft sung at it)
Filk and filk-adjacent
Lucifer
Landsailor
Somebody Will
HaMephorash
What’s it Like to Be a Bat
Hymn of the Breaking Strain (x2)
We went through the whole album Blood on the Tracks that one time
Tangled Up in Blue
Simple Twist of Fate
You’re a Big Girl Now
Idiot Wind
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (x2)
Meet Me in the Morning
Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts
If You See Her, Say Hello
Shelter from the Storm
Buckets of Rain
Uncategorized
Hey Jude (x2)
Here Comes the Sun (x2)
We Will All Go Together When We Go
American Pie
(If You Ain’t Got That) Dough Re Mi
The Mary Ellen Carter
The Itsy Bitsy Spider, to the tune of The Mary Ellen Carter
The Water is Wide
Five Thousand Miles
Sons and Daughters
Riptide
Viva la Vida
Our Favorite Things (dspeyer’s ingroup version)
So, in general not having your values changed is an Omohundro goal, right? But would I suggest that if you you change your utility function[1] from
U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w)or whatever it is, toU(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) + 5000, all your choices that involve explicit expected utility comparisons will come out the same as before, but you’ll be happier.- ^
There are a lot of issues with utility functions as a framing for describing actual human motivations, but bear with me.
- ^
[...] Ricardo’s Law Of Comparative Advantage was one of the most inspirational things he’d ever read. This is an economic theorem which says that under ideal frictionless capitalism, even if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can do the thing you’re relatively least worst at, trade with other people, and be guaranteed to make nonzero money. Maybe not very much money, but nonzero. It will mean that your actions have made other people nonzero better off, and they are nonzero grateful to you.
I do not find this inspiring! Under ideal frictionless capitalism, if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can make nonzero money, but most likely less then the cost of living, so the most likely outcome is that you die in abject poverty, having in the meantime done some things that made other people nonzero better off, and which might—or might not—outweigh any costly screw ups you may have made or suffering you may have undergone in the process.
And that’s under ideal frictionless capitalism! In the real world this can and does sometimes happen even to people who are pretty good at some things!
The terms ‘living money’ and ‘dead money’ seem to include an unwarranted implication that living is better. As I understand it, that framework would count money spent on buying something just because one wants it as ‘dead money’ - there’s no hope of a financial return, it gets used up via paying people to do things and then it’s gone. But being able to spend it to get what one wants is arguably the entire point of money! It’s not clear to me if this generalizes to willpower in this analogy, though.