To some degree. And I agree on most emotions, they exist for a reason and someone who discounts them without reflection is making a mistake. But I think Envy, on reflection, still strikes me as something better for the goals of evolution and in the environment of our ancestors than one that "makes sense" for us and in the modern world.
I think, insofar as Envy drives people to steal, it decreases people's likelihood to survive and thrive (jail isn't the optimal place for either of those, and if you're stealing from Envy, not desperation or something, it probably wasn't worth the risk). Cheating, another behavior driven by Envy, can lead to suffering violence at the hands of the spurned party (tho if you have "has more sex than otherwise" as a non-trivial term in "thrive" then possibly this one is a wash).
To me, Envy seems to be the drive to defect against a cooperator in some cases, which is, let's call it "effective" (to differentiate "good/nice") to take advantage of when you can. But it's calibrated for a situation where there are tribal levels of coalition with the cooperators, and now there are societal levels of coalition with the cooperators, so this is a much worse value proposition.
It "makes sense" that it evolved the way it did. And of course, if it didn't, it wouldn't have evolved that way. But that doesn't mean it must continue to "make sense" and I'm not sure it does.
Sure, but if the positives of Envy can be better obtained by less destructive emotions, does it really serve a purpose?
I mean, if Inside Out 2 was about the exploration of Envy being gone, and the best it could do is "Riley is still motivated, but just, a bit less than she would be otherwise" it wouldn't really make for a dramatic change.
And if I were building a person, and had the option to give them Envy, instead of upping their Admiration or Pleasure (as you name), I don't know why I would.
(Edit: that may be overly unfair. I can come up with reasons why. But they feel anti-altruistic. For example, Envy could push you to steal from people who have things you don't. This is good for you, because then you'll have more stuff. But in the same way society and the people in it are better off if no one steals, they'd also be better off if no one felt Envy. So I am still struggling to come up with reasons why I should endorse Envy.)
So I picked Envy for the exercise (though meant Jealousy in your wording), and came up with basically the example you gave in your section on it, but dismissed it, since it felt like a justification, not a reason. That is, it felt like what I would say if I needed to argue that Jealousy was useful, not an actual reason why Jealousy is useful.
Like, I don't imagine Jealousy is our only source of motivation. We would (but maybe only could?) want to do better or have more, without seeing someone else have more. The people in Tribe A would want more fish because they'd feel Happy if they had more, or Sad if they didn't have enough, or Angry if they went to long being denied fish. Presumably, Tribe C came up with better fishing for those reasons, since they didn't have anyone to be Jealous of. Tribe A, now seeing that better fishing is possible, not doing it because they don't feel Jealousy, would be like Tribe C not doing it after they came up with it, because there was no one to be Jealous of.
I think the evolutionary story of "why Jealousy" is simpler as just "because evolution cares about relative genetic fitness, and if someone is doing better than you, that's bad relatively, even if it isn't bad absolutely". (And so, unless you do care about relative genetic fitness, you should probably be very skeptical of Jealousy)
And in general, I would find it very surprising to learn that an emotional landscape optimized for hunting and gathering in the savanna is also optimized for working a 9 to 5 desk job. At the same time, I would be very surprised to learn that those two situations were so disparate that none of the emotional landscape translates. (So they're like an unreliable friend. Possibly helpful, but possibly untrustworthy)
But I think this is where I put your Envy example. Yeah, your tribe outcompeting and then destroying mine would be bad. But if I feel Envious of my richer friend, it's not because I think he'll use his richer-ness to destroy me. And if America is less productive and ends up losing a war to China, it'd be hard to explain through insufficient Envy, on account of how little anyone feels Envious of Chinese people they've never met and know nothing of the life circumstances of. I doubt "Envy" is the driving force of military strategy in the modern age.
I interpreted the thrust of the essay as something else. But more broadly, I get why you'd find intuition pump essays manipulative, but not why you'd find them unconvincing.
The point is to take someone who says "I don't like any dish with onions", and give them a dish that has onions in it. They'd normally refuse to eat that, so you don't tell them, and then when they like it you can show them that their claim is wrong.
(I will note that I think "writing an essay with a surprising conclusion" is a significantly smaller violation than "feed someone food they explicitly asked not to be fed")
I think this essay is aimed at people who think things like "Better AI is always good, because it will do things better, and that's good." If those people were not saying "No, you should've kept making better bows until you put an arrow through your friend's chest" then maybe they don't actually think "better" is always good. (Basically the Orthogonality Thesis)
Thank you for the reply. I think I'll need to look into things more.
One clarification I wanted to make. I wouldn't have normally said that I need to put effort into listening. I think I generally feel like it doesn't take effort. But somewhat recently I had an interaction with someone go poorly. It was a date, and they said afterwards that they didn't feel like I wanted to get to know them, because I hadn't asked enough things about them[1].
So I figure there's something lacking in my interaction with people. Something that I'm not doing that I should, and doing things requires effort, so therefore I'm lacking in effort in some way.
I think you're saying in some state it won't be effortful, because it will be the path of least resistance. But I think my problem was not knowing what they wanted, and I don't see how a state of mind would give me that information "for free".
Possibly this was just idiosyncracy on their part. Other people have not expressed this feeling to me, so I have considered I'm putting too much weight on a single interaction.
Then the wave crested.
Is there any more you can say about this?
People already tell me I have good vibes, and feel like I listen to them[1]. I give off an air of nonchalance, because I think I kill[2] my emotions in public.
But I do it because it's one more thing to deal with that I generally don't have energy for. I'm already bothered by all the light and sound.
It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped." And I'd like to know why, if that was legible to you.
Would appreciate any advice. I can probably say more about my experiences, but I'm not sure what more, if any, would be helpful.
I don't know if it's the same as you. I think I'm maybe not as active a listener? I don't think I'm incapable of the way I see you listen in your videos, but I'm not sure I put the energy into it.
I use a visceral word because I don't approve of this practice in myself. Perhaps "ignore" or "block" would be more accurate?
Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep – again, it is a mathematical decision with a correct answer.
Don't be overly naive consequentialist about this. "Nothing" is an overstatement.
Peace of mind can absolutely be one of the things you are purchasing with an insurance contract. If your Kelly calculation says that motorcycle insurance is worth $899 a month, and costs $900 a month, but you'll spend time worrying about not being insured if you don't buy it, and won't if you do, I fully expect that is worth more than $1 a month.
But do be actual consequentialist about it. If the value of the insurance is more like $10, but the cost is $900, I doubt peace of mind about this one thing is worth $890 a month.
I have a habit of reading footnotes as soon as they are linked, and your footnote says that you won with queen odds before the call to guess what odds you'd win at, creating a minor spoiler.
Is it important that negentropy be the result of subtracting from the maximum entropy? It seemed a sensible choice, up until it introduces infinities, and made every state's negentropy infinite. (And also that, if you subtract from 0, then two identical states should have the same negentropy, even in different systems. Unsure if that's useful, or harmful).
Though perhaps that's important for the noting that reducing an infinite system to a finite macrostate is an infinite reduction? I'm not sure if I understand how (or perhaps when?) that's more useful than having it be defined as subtracted from 0, such that finite macrostates have finite negentropy, and infinite macrostates have -infinite negentropy (showing that you really haven't reduced it at all, which, as far as I understand with infinities, you haven't, by definition).
I think I agree with a vibe I see in the comments that an AI that causes this problem is perhaps threading a very small needle.
Yudkowsky wrote The Hidden Complexity of Wishes to explain that a genie that does what you say will almost certainly cause problems. If people have this kind of Superintelligence, it won't take long before someone asks it to get them as many paperclips as possible and we all die. The kind of AI that does what humans want without killing everyone is one that does what we mean.
But how does this work? If you ask such a superintelligence to pull your kid from the rubble of a collapsed building, does it tell you no, because disturbing the rubble could cause it to collapse further and injure your kid more? That you have to wait for better equipment? If not, it probably causes paperclipping problems. If so, it knows when to not do the things you ask, because they won't accomplish what you "really want". This is necessarily paternalist.
Would such an AI still listen when people ask it to isolate themselves or others like this? I'm having trouble thinking of one that thinks that being manipulated into a certain set of beliefs is what is best, but is still "aligned" in a way that doesn't kill everyone.
Admittedly, I shear pretty close to Yudkowsky on doomerism, so that may be the crux. That I don't see much space between "we all die" and "robustly solved alignment ushers in techno-utopia" (given superintelligence). So arbitrarily targettable hyper-manipulative AI that don't cause either "AI takeover" or "massive swings in human power" just don't seem like a real through-line.
(Like, if someone asks their AI to convince everyone else that they are the king of the world. Does it do that? Does it succeed? Do any protections against "massive swings in human power" prevent this? Do passive AI protections everyone has know to defend against this? Do they not apply to convincing people that "Jesus is your Lord"? Does human civilization end as soon as some drunk person says "Hey GPT go convince everyone you're king of the world" or something? If I make a bubble and you tell an AI "go tell everyone in that bubble the truth," what happens? Does an AI war break out? Does it not hurt anyone somehow?)