I was responding to this section, which immediately follows your quote:
While we think measures of emotional states are closer to an ideal measure of happiness, far fewer data of this type is available.
I think emotional states are a quite bad metric to optimize for and that life satisfaction is a much better measure because it actually measures something closer to people’s values being fulfilled. Valuing emotional states feels like a map territory confusion in a way that I Nate Soares tried to get at in his stamp collector post:
Do you see where these naïve philosophers went confused? They have postulated an agent which treats actions like ends, and tries to steer towards whatever action it most prefers — as if actions were ends unto themselves.
You can’t explain why the agent takes an action by saying that it ranks actions according to whether or not taking them is good. That begs the question of which actions are good!
This agent rates actions as “good” if they lead to outcomes where the agent has lots of stamps in its inventory. Actions are rated according to what they achieve; they do not themselves have intrinsic worth.
The robot program doesn’t contain reality, but it doesn’t need to. It still gets to affect reality. If its model of the world is correlated with the world, and it takes actions that it predicts leads to more actual stamps, then it will tend to accumulate stamps.
It’s not trying to steer the future towards places where it happens to have selected the most micro-stampy actions; it’s just steering the future towards worlds where it predicts it will actually have more stamps.
Now, let me tell you my second story:
Once upon a time, a group of naïve philosophers encountered a group of human beings. The humans seemed to keep selecting the actions that gave them pleasure. Sometimes they ate good food, sometimes they had sex, sometimes they made money to spend on pleasurable things later, but always (for the first few weeks) they took actions that led to pleasure.
But then one day, one of the humans gave lots of money to a charity.
“How can this be?” the philosophers asked, “Humans are pleasure-maximizers!” They thought for a few minutes, and then said, “Ah, it must be that their pleasure from giving the money to charity outweighed the pleasure they would have gotten from spending the money.”
Then a mother jumped in front of a car to save her child.
The naïve philosophers were stunned, until suddenly one of their number said “I get it! The immediate micro-pleasure of choosing that action must have outweighed —
People will tell you that humans always and only ever do what brings them pleasure. People will tell you that there is no such thing as altruism, that people only ever do what they want to.
People will tell you that, because we’re trapped inside our heads, we only ever get to care about things inside our heads, such as our own wants and desires.
But I have a message for you: You can, in fact, care about the outer world.
I think I mostly agree with you here, but I’m slightly confused by HLI’s definition of “happiness”—I meant my comment as a set of questions for Michael, inspired by the points you made.
I was responding to this section, which immediately follows your quote:
I think emotional states are a quite bad metric to optimize for and that life satisfaction is a much better measure because it actually measures something closer to people’s values being fulfilled. Valuing emotional states feels like a map territory confusion in a way that I Nate Soares tried to get at in his stamp collector post:
I think I mostly agree with you here, but I’m slightly confused by HLI’s definition of “happiness”—I meant my comment as a set of questions for Michael, inspired by the points you made.