How to Be Happy • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Be Happy

#191

Post by mercer » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 12:00 PM UTC

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #46

I've read many articles and books on this subject and not a single one of them had any effect on my life. It's usually just a list of things that - according to the author (and every author of course has different opinion) - will make you happy. It's bullshit, there is no "golden solution" for everyone. Reading such articles will make you even more unhappy, because now you've the whole list of things and you feel lik…

I've found that the main reason why so many of these articles and books don't have an effect on my life is that I read them and then forget to apply what they suggest.

Sure, it's possible that many of them suggest approaches to 'happiness' that do not apply to me, but I really don't know because I never took the time to actually spend, say, 30 days committing to their advice. And my impression is that this seems to be the case for most people who bother with 'self-improvement'.

(That said, I'm not disagreeing with you. Finding what makes specifically you happy is important.)

Re: How to Be Happy

#192

Post by randallsquared » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 12:54 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #180

randallsquared wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you measure "good". :/ Most people measure goodness and badness by how they feel about it, and for anyone who feels a significant amount of badness (grief, anger, whatever) at the death of a single person, it is physiologically impossible for them to feel a million times worse about the death of a million people. It's intuitively obvious to most people, therefore, that suffering, annoyance, life-sav…

It's analogous to saying that "most people believe the world is flat. the burden is really on you to show that the world is really round." Which is true. But requires a willingness to counter one's own intuition when encountering contradictory evidence. Unfortunately the type of person that does that is uncommon.

I don't disagree with what you actually said, but your choice of analogy suggests that you believe that questions of morality are settled and have obvious, objective answers.

Re: How to Be Happy

#193

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 1:24 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #187

maaku wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is nonsense. It's an article posted to a curated community blog by some guy who happens to like reading tons of psychology papers and wanted to do some research into the state of scientific understanding of happiness... ...and is executive director of MIRI, the organization hosting and providing most of the content to Less Wrong.

Which would be an equivalent of pg posting his essay to HN, and then people accusing HNers of cultishness because of that essay. Hmm... actually, that happens every now and then and is exactly as fair as the accusations against lukeprog and LessWrong. Also, MIRI was created years after LessWrong.

MIRI is the continuation of SIAI which predates (and started) LessWrong.

Re: How to Be Happy

#194

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #192

maaku wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's analogous to saying that "most people believe the world is flat. the burden is really on you to show that the world is really round." Which is true. But requires a willingness to counter one's own intuition when encountering contradictory evidence. Unfortunately the type of person that does that is uncommon.

I don't disagree with what you actually said, but your choice of analogy suggests that you believe that questions of morality are settled and have obvious, objective answers.

In some cases, yes. If you accept utilitarianism as the the reductive explanation of morality, and assume some non-controversial terminal values, then all of morality is reduced to straight-forward calculations.

"The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right." -Leibniz

Unfortunately we retain some ignorance on the correct nature of utility functions (finite? time-preference adjusted? etc.), and terminal values for humans are demonstrably arbitrary.

Re: How to Be Happy

#195

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 1:46 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #60

maaku wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumed independence. You are talking about a strictly different setup. Assume that these individuals don't know each other.

I don't think he is making the assumption that they know each other. Each individual has a tolerance of what they can comfortably cope with. If 3^^^3 people were all experiencing a pain that is below that tolerance, nobody would be prevented from happiness. However in the other situation, the tortured individual clearly would be.

That's an example of infinite or unbounded utility functions: no matter how many specks of dust in the eye, it will never add up to a single person being tortured for 50 years. Even 3^^^^^^^^^^^3 specks of dust. Unfortunately the mathematics of infinite and/or unbounded utility functions doesn't work out well. It leads to some seriously messed up edge cases. (So does finite utilitariansm, to be fair -- [Pascal's mugging](http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/pascal.pdf) -- but these are fully dealt with by decision theory, whereas the infinite or unbounded cases are not). It's not very strong, but it is evidence that we should be accepting of the calculations of finite utilitarianism since the formalization works out better in cases which are within the realm of our experience.

Re: How to Be Happy

#196

Post by maaku » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 1:46 PM UTC

twobits wrote: post #162

maaku wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and their annoyance can't be simply added together Why not? EDIT: Serious question. If I save two lives that is twice as good as saving one, right? Why is this situation different?

To put it differently, since we are rationalists, try the scientific way. Do an experiment. First day, let a speck of dust enter your eye, at noon. Before sleeping, write down how you feel about that event. Next day, rip your balls off at noon. Before sleeping, write down how you feel about that.

Let me know how it goes.

Re: How to Be Happy

#197

Post by dllthomas » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

mansr wrote: post #189

dllthomas wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't assume that we can simply add their annoyance together. It assumes that, whatever function computes the badness of some badness applied to multiple people, it diverges and does so fast enough (where "fast enough" will probably include "exceptionally slowly", but in principle there are sufficiently slow divergent functions). I don't think this is well enough established, though it seems plausible .

I'm inclined to think that there is some threshold below which that function is constant. "Dust in eye" is definitely below this threshold.

I think that's illusory, at best. Does time play a role? If not, this would lead to "Someone has ever got a dust speck in their eye. It is now no longer a bad thing when someone else gets a dust speck in their eye." Which seems absurd. In fact, given that we live in a universe where someone has ever got a dust speck in their eye, it would mean that getting a dust speck in one's eye is no longer the "least bad bad thing" that could happen, which violates the assumption of the thought experiment and you should substitute something more severe.

If time does play a role, you can spread out the 3^^^3 dust specks. (Obviously, we don't realistically have enough time, but then we don't realistically have enough space either).

Re: How to Be Happy

#198

Post by lolpep8 » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #194

randallsquared wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with what you actually said, but your choice of analogy suggests that you believe that questions of morality are settled and have obvious, objective answers.

In some cases, yes. If you accept utilitarianism as the the reductive explanation of morality, and assume some non-controversial terminal values, then all of morality is reduced to straight-forward calculations. "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let…

And why, even while being an atheist, would I accept utilitarianism over Jesus Christ in this case?

Re: How to Be Happy

#199

Post by bitexploder » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

yellow_and_gray wrote: post #188

bitexploder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think another key factor with a lot of modern unhappiness is that, as the article notes, money does not correlate to happiness as long as you are above the poverty line. We have lost the art of teaching people how to have a philosophy of life. We teach people how to have a craft. We teach basic morals. In religious households you may even be taught a pretty comprehensive "life philosophy", but it is often underpinn…

Thank you for writing this. Can you say more about the system you found, this binding strategy for "strategies for happiness"? My judgements being wrong used to be a source of frustration for me too. Now I take them as a given. Being wrong is part of the process. The biggest problem I have now is forgetting what strategy I had decided to follow. Mostly because there are too many things to decice. The process of me de…

Here is the thing. Stoicism as it was taught 2000 years ago was extremely bound up in its "providential" and deity focus. Not as unpalatable as some of the more direct monotheistic religions, but depending on your teacher stoicism was still on a scale of pantheism to direct theism. (Marcus was very pantheistic and deemphasized religion, Epictetus was much more vocal about the theistic elements). As a modern reader a lot of ancient philosophy is like that. It has elements that you have to excise. So ancient philosophies are not really plug in play for a modern rationalist.

Basically, I think you have to start by writing things down and learning about the elements of these ancient, and modern, philosophies to see the sort of systems they put in place to deal with every day life events and exceptional events. How should I think about X? And some very obvious patterns will emerge. Some elements of stoicism may be difficult to employ and Stoicism in general is a hard to follow (fully) philosophy. The key point Epictetus had was that very few of us have the ability to follow Stoicism (or any coherent, but challenging) philosophy to its fullest. However, we should still endeavor down this path of "progress". This is why Epictetus has stayed so popular. He didn't advocate perfection of philosophy, merely that you work at it.

Which brings me to my final thought for you to answer your question directly: write it all down. For example, Stoicism has a lot of great elements that resemble modern psychology CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). So you pull the elements of ancient philosophies that work, you augment it with snippets like this Less Wrong articles various things. And you write your own coherent philosophy of life. And then you work at following it. It is pretty easy to lay down ideals, and pretty hard to stick to them. So you have to work at it, almost every day. You have to work on mindfulness and staying present and ensuring you keep your philosophy in mind in every day situations and exceptional situations. And, and this is where it gets tricky if you have trouble with non-empirical elements, you just have to believe your philosophy works. You have to believe it enough to follow it, even if you can't explain all of it. Science has spent the last 2000+ years catching up to things the ancient greeks found to work.

Much like a running coach can't really tell you WHY, exactly, everything he is having you do is working, it just does. Physiology has slowly been providing more and more detail, in the mean time running coaches have learned through trial and error how to train very efficiently. Some day we will probably have an exact explanation for the mechanisms of physiological improvement. Until then we can use our very good heuristics. I would argue it is the same from psychological perspective. It is close enough. Trust in your system and intuition and work to make it better and progress as a human being. There is no "perfect system" for everyone, but I think we could all agree on some pretty broad ideals that count as forward progress as humans :)

Re: How to Be Happy

#200

Post by coldtea » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #160

coldtea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth, and that the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." Possitive proof that IQ doesn't equal smartness, much less wisdom.

Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions. Saying that GP's criticism is just inaccurate would be extremely charitable.

>Positive proof that you can make everything sound ridiculous if you half-assedly read about it, cherry-pick some sentences, and misinterpret them as it suits your preconceived opinions.

Sure. But I can't conceive ANY possible argumentation and further discussion that accepts the above points that is not also silly.