Thanks! I haven't seen 500 Days of Summer but have considered making some film review youtube channel that dissects romance films with this lens, so if I do I'll keep that one in mind :)

No apologies necessary, it's possible I wasn't clear enough!

My main point is that the orthogonality thesis applies to humans too: intelligence and values are distinct things. To judge someone's actions as irrational, you need to actually understand their values and preferences. If you think they shouldn't do something because the tradeoff is too high, and they acknowledge the tradeoff but want to do it anyway, that may just reveal preferences different from yours, not necessaril  irrationality.

This is a good point, but the actual difference in the scenario is that ice cream is not meth ;P  I think it is actually meaningful to notice that, while there may in fact be good reasons not to have ice cream, there are many, much stronger reasons not to do meth, and Bryce bringing those up are much more likely to dissuade Ash, and if they don't, Ash is much more irrational if Ash chooses to do it anyway... but that choice is still independent from wanting meth.

Your version of Bryce is doing a less defensible thing, while mine is being more reasonable, while still being wrong, and I think that's the important point I'm making.

Ah, yeah, see again my emphasis that I did not name this article "Emotions Are Good" :P

If you pick scenarios where people can find other emotions by which they end up doing the Morally Good and Personally Optimal thing... yeah, envy isn't needed there.

But my claim is there are situations where people are driven by envy to do things that make their liklihood to survive and thrive better than if they had not felt it. If you disagree with that, this is what the article is trying to accomplish as a step 1, and integration happens after that.

But none of that requires "endorsement" in the way you seem(?) to mean it. Envy is not Nice. To put it in another frame, it is MtG: Black, and the value it brings to the table needs to be understood seperately from "is it good/altruistic/endorsed."

Does that make sense?

It is certainly not my argument, nor implied by the example, that the only reason someone would do something is because of Jealousy or Envy. Things like pleasure and admiration motivate us as well, but most people don't wonder why we have them or wish they would go away.

I hope I didn't imply somehow that there are no other reasons people might do things besides envy or jealousy!

"You haven't actually offered me a better alternative" sounds like a failure on your parents' parts, or a failure of imagination on your 15-year-old-self's part. Which happens fairly often, and is a separate thing about the preferences themselves being irrational. Many people would be happy with a life of leisure and no responsibilities, and the desire for that isn't irrational at all. It's important to be educated about the long-term consequences of it specifically because that's what helps people feel motivated to do something more robust to their future self's preferences.  

I'd also note that "didn't want to do schoolwork" is different from "didn't want to go to school at all," which yes has legal consequences that rather drastically changes the outcome.

I cover your definition of jealousy under "Romantic jealousy," though I should specify that it can apply to other things like freindship as well.

As for laziness, I think it is actually often the case that people feel lazy for energy conservation reasons, and I do think that is a separate thing from "lacking motivation to do a thing at all." The energy conservation example was indeed badly phrased, though, I'll edit it :)

Curiosity is definitely an emotion! Did you try the 5 minute exercise on it? :)

Ahhh, you're talking about the memory. Yes, that was the moment of Joy's realization for why Sadness has value. But before her friends/teammates show up to cheer for her, it's her parents that show up to comfort her. I think it's fair to say that her friends showing up to cheer for her probably meant a lot more to Riley than her parents' comfort in that moment, since it was more tied to the specific thing that was making her feel bad, but Joy's out-loud recognition was that Riley's parents showed they cared about her when she was sad, which is the important parallel for the issue in the plot where Riley feels like her parents don't care about her.