Elo,
You seem to be posting, like, a lot. This is good, this is what we have personal blogs for.
I do have an issue with syndicating your content straight to here, regardless of state, amount of research, amount of prior discussion with other people, confidence, or epistemic status. This introduces an asymetric opportunity cost on behalf of the lesswrong community; specifically, writing these is much easier, and lower effort, than the amount of effort these will collectively soak up for no gain.
For this reason, I have downvoted this post as is. I will also kindly ask of you to introduce a pre-syndication filter, which respects other people's limited amount of time, and attention; and cross-post only the ones where you have 1, a coherent thesis, and 2, validated interest coming from other people (as in, someone explicitely remarked "that's interesting").
Thanks.
Edit: I assume when you said this:
writing these is much easier, and lower effort, than the amount of effort these will collectively soak up for no gain
you mean to say that energy required to write contrasted to energy required to read which is far greater when multiplied by the audience size. (Writing might take 2 hours, reading might take 20 people 10 mins each or 200 hours of burden created, leading to concerns about the virtue of silence, being a burden on the community and destroying the commons of "quality posts", given that my posts ar...
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/preference-over-null-preference/
For some parts of life it is better to exist with a prepared preference, for other parts of life it is better to exist without a prepared preference. This is going to be about looking at the sets of preferences and what might be better in each scenario.
On the object level some examples:
The specific examples are irrelevant but hopefully you get the idea. Having a preference is about having full set and reducing it to a smaller set. Example: one colour is my favourite out of the full set of colours.
In contrast, a null preference might look like this:
While null preferences are technically just another form of preference, I want to separate them out for a moment so that we can talk about them.
Deciding whether you should hold a preference, even if you didn't previously have one - can be an effective strategy for making decisions where there were previously difficulties. The benefit of having a preference is that it stands as a pre-commitment to yourself to maintain existing choices on certain choice-nodes.
The disadvantage of using this strategy is that if your preference fails to be fulfilled then you are at risk of disappointment.
If you get to the supermarket and can't decide which type of jam (or jelly for american;) to buy, you can consult an existing preference for blueberry jam and skip the whole idea of considering other types of jam.
For preference failure, if you prefer blueberry but the store doesn't have any, you risk leaving without jam, or being left with a choice less desirable like strawberry.
Nothing about your preference on the world effects the world until you interact with it. For the jam example: deciding you like blueberry will not cause blueberry jam to be available to you. Modifying the map will not immediately impact the territory. If you go on an endless tirade everywhere you travel - of demanding blueberry jam, chances are that at some point people will be more motivated to be prepared for the mad blueberry jammer. However the instant that you decide to have a preference, you have not yet caused any impact on the world. So the instantaneous effect of having a preference is nothing.
There will be times where you are not in control of the choice nodes available to you. There are times when you will be. That doesn't seem relevant to which is better.
There will be times when there will be more choices and times when there will be less. That doesn't seem relevant.
There will be times when your preference will be easily fulfilled and times when it will be hard or impossible. That doesn't seem relevant.
There are big expensive important choices, and small irrelevant insignificant choices. Apart from desiring to spending more time on big expensive important choices, that doesn't seem relevant either.
There will be days with more willpower and days with less willpower, (and days exist on which willpower does not deplete).
Should I change what I do right now?
I don't know. What do you do now? Can we derive knowledge from the pre-existing system to make progress on what should change towards the future.
Try this:
Examples:
As I get to this point I don't have a defining thesis for this concept. I don't have an answer as to whether preference can be ruled better than a null. Or that you might want to reduce your identity down until you have all null preferences, leading you to flexibility and freedom (of course such a reduction leads to a burden of maintaining the system of nulls as well).
I do want to open up this concept to you to decide and influence the use of the idea. If you hold a preference too strongly you risk the possibility of making the wrong choice over and over. If you hold it too loosely you risk indifference towards the world (maybe part of the answer is to look at where you are now in terms of decision problems and consider which direction you want to travel towards). I don't know.
Meta: 2 hours writing, then I got stuck when I realised I didn't have a concluding thesis (didn't actually have the answers) but I wanted to release the incomplete concept anyway to see if anyone else could come up with ideas around it.