It turns out an awful lot of things affect everything, and a lot of them affect a lot of things a lot. That something has a broad influence is certainly a good starting criteria for it being important. It’s just a really low bar. It shouldn’t be the whole reason anyone does science or repairs roads, because it doesn’t distinguish those activities from a huge number of other ones. There is more than one thing that affects everything, because the set of things we might care about are not causally organized like a tree, they are organized like a very loopy web of loops.

Even the dots on the right affect everything. Image via Wikipedia

Often this ‘affects everything’ criterion is not even used on any relevant margin. It is used in the sense that if you didn’t have sleep or any understanding of humans at all you would be in a much worse situation than if you had these things in abundance. A better question is whether sleeping another half hour or dedicating your own career to sociology is going to make a huge difference to everything. An even better question is whether it’s going to make an even bigger difference to everything than anything else you could do with that half hour or career. This is pretty well known, and applied in many circumstances, but for some reason it doesn’t stop people arguing from the interconnectedness of everything to the maximal importance of whatever they are doing.

Perhaps it is psychologically useful to have an all purpose excuse for anyone doing anything that contributes at all to our hugely interconnected society to feel like they are doing the most important thing ever. But if you really want to do something unusually useful, you’ll need a stronger criterion than ‘it affects everything’.

This is all, of course, irrational. If I expect that opening my eyes will show me evidence that will make me believe X, then I already believe X. Or I should, if I am rational and expect to remain so. In these cases I don’t expect to remain rational. I quite reasonably expect that if I receive particular pieces of evidence I will update too much, so I should not believe what I expect to believe in the future, conditional on collecting evidence. I should avoid the evidence.

The ‘avoid evidence’ solution doesn’t seem like a very good one though. If I recognize that updating so much is irrational in time to avoid the evidence, why don’t I just recognize it when I get the evidence, and not update so much?

Perhaps I am just full of irrational fears that I can’t control by my mere will and reasoning. I don’t think that’s quite it though. Intuitively it seems the problem is that while I believe that I will vastly overweight any evidence I get to the effect that my sandwich is dangerous, when I actually see the rashy hand go into the lettuce or whatever it’s hard to judge whether this isn’t perhaps one of the rare occasions when I should be concerned. The specific piece of evidence looks different every time, so it’s hard to convince myself that a novel particular event that looks bad at the moment really fits into the reference class of other evidence that looks bad and isn’t dangerous.

Do other people behave this way? How should they behave instead? How do you fix this?

If only it were possible to feel like you had lower standards without actually settling for the very easiest career that would pay for your tent, noodles, and blow up companion.

I wonder if this is a significant reason people drink alcohol.

It seems that when people drink they lower their standards for many things. For what to laugh at, for what’s worth saying, and for who it’s worth saying to, for instance. They enthusiastically eat things they would find barely passable sober, and are thrilled by activities they usually find beneath them.

Yet this standard lowering is constrained in time, so as long as you don’t become permanently intoxicated you can spend most of your days having high standards. And since there was a specific identifiable reason for your low standards (even if purely social), it need not contaminate your image as a discerning person. At least not as much.

Is this an actual common point of drinking, or just a side effect? I don’t know – I don’t drink enough, and apparently this isn’t considered a good topic of party conversation. Maybe my observation is wrong, and people raise their standards in some ways when they drink, for instance coming to want more socializing than they do the rest of the time. I’m not sure about that. It’s also not clear why choosing to drink when you are sober wouldn’t count as having low standards at that point. But people are regularly forgiven for things they do while drunk, so it seems we generally don’t hold people so responsible for such indirect decisions.

1. People are consuming too much
2. The advertising industry makes people want things they wouldn’t otherwise want, worsening the problem

The reasoning behind 1) is usually that consumption requires natural resources, and those resources will run out. It follows from this that less natural-resource intensive consumption is better* i.e. the environmentalist prefers you to spend your money attending a dance or a psychologist than buying new clothes or jet skis, assuming the psychologist and dance organisers don’t spend all their income on clothes and jet skis and such.

How does the advertising industry get people to buy things they wouldn’t otherwise buy? One practice they are commonly accused of is selling dreams, ideals, identities and attitudes along with products. They convince you (at some level) that if you had that champagne your whole life would be that much more classy. So you buy into the dream though you would have walked right past the yellow bubbly liquid.

But doesn’t this just mean they are selling you a less natural-resource-intensive product? The advertisers have packaged the natural-resource intensive drink with a very non-natural-resource intensive thing – classiness – and sold you the two together.

Yes, maybe you have bought a drink you wouldn’t otherwise have bought. But overall this deal seems likely to be a good thing from the environmentalist perspective: it’s hard to just sell pure classiness, but the classy champagne is much less resource intensive per dollar than a similar bottle of unclassy drink, and you were going to spend your dollars on something (effectively – you may have just not earned them, which is equivalent to spending them on leisure).

If the advertiser can manufacture enough classiness for thousands of people with a video camera and some actors, this is probably a more environmentally friendly choice for those after classiness than most of their alternatives, such as ordering stuff in from France. My guess is that in general, buying intangible ideas along with more resource intensive products is better for the environment than the average alternative purchase a given person would make.  There at least seems little reason to think it is worse.

Of course that isn’t the only way advertisers make people want things they wouldn’t otherwise want. Sometimes they manufacture fake intangible things, so that when you get the champagne it doesn’t really make you feel classy. That’s a problem with dishonest people in every industry though. Is there any reason to blame ‘advertisers’ rather than ‘cheats’?

Another thing advertisers do is tell you about things you wouldn’t have thought of wanting otherwise, or remind you of things you had forgotten about. When innovators and entrepreneurs do this we celebrate it. Is there any difference when advertisers do it? Perhaps the problem is that advertisers tend to remind you of resource intensive, material desires more often than they remind you to consume more time with your brother, or to meditate more. This is somewhat at odds with the complaint that they try to sell you dreams and attitudes etc, but perhaps they do a bit of both.

Or perhaps they try to sell you material goods to satisfy longings you would otherwise fulfil non-materially? For instance recommending new clothes where you might otherwise have sought self-confidence through posture or public speaking practice or doing something worthy of respect. Some such effect seems plausible, though I doubt a huge one.

Overall it seems advertisers probably have effects in both directions. It’s not clear to me which is stronger. But insofar as they manage to package up and sell feelings and identities and other intangibles,  those who care for the environment should praise them.

*This is not to suggest that I believe natural resource conservation is particularly important, compared to using human time well for instance.

It seems possible (i.e. consistent) to have a concept of preference fulfilment that requires the person to be alive at the time the preference is fulfilled, and similarly possible to have one that doesn’t require this. Which is the ‘true’ concept seems a poorly defined question. Which concept you choose matters though. The concept is intended to fit into your ethical stance, or your preferences, so presumably one concept better fits what should really happen, or what you really want. Here are some considerations for working out which concept you want to use:

The analogy with space

If you can’t have your preferences fulfilled in parts of time where you don’t exist (after you die, or before you are born), can you have preferences fulfilled in parts of space where you don’t exist? Can I prefer for my fridge to contain milk even before I open the door? Can I prefer my brother to be alive even though we don’t cohabit the same spatial region? If so, what’s the relevant difference between time and space? You can bite the bullet and refuse to acknowledge preferences over anything other than a person’s own mental states. And you could do that without straying too far from your intuitions about what you do prefer by noting that a lot of things that are spatially distant from you will eventually send some kind of signal to you, and claim it is those signals you care about. You are still then committed to indifference about for instance what kinds of assault go on behind the closed doors of people you love, as long as you are never informed about them.

The vagueness of personal identity

Another implication of not being able to value things that don’t overlap with you in time is that what you can or can’t value depends on what counts as ‘you’. And what counts as ‘you’ is pretty vaguely defined usually. Some people think ‘you’ are the bunch of physical processes we call ‘you’, or whichever of those we find most important – your continued memory and personality for instance. This is a concept with pretty blurry boundaries, and different people find different features important enough to call ‘themselves’. Do you want such an arbitrary definitional choice to determine what values can count for anything? If you think of me as a series of person-moments, suddenly I can’t legitimately care about the milk in the fridge even if a later-Katja will learn about it later. If you identify me with all past and future people who feel a lot like me, then I’m allowed preferences about what happens after the death of this body. Is there some particular line in the many-dimensional space of things more or less like me that seems hugely important to you in deciding which preferences are valid?

Other people think there is more to ‘you’ than a set of physical processes, in which case there may be one clear line around what counts as ‘you’. On the other hand, you probably don’t have any good way to locate this non-physical line. The more ignorant you are about the location of the line, the more you are committed to caring about preferences that may be outside it, assuming some straightforward kind of consequentialism.

The limits of biology

Perhaps you want a concept of preference fulfilment that requires the person to be alive at the time because you doubt anyone can actually have preferences that don’t involve their existing. For instance perhaps you think the way that preferences are encoded in a mind involve a representation of oneself enjoying the thing, or something else like that. So that even if I say ‘I value bandicoots existing’, my feelings are really that I value thinking that bandicoots exist. I’ll discuss that view in more depth if anyone who actually holds this view tells me exactly what it is. At a glance it seems this kind of view also implies that it’s impossible to care about anything other than your mental states.

Strategic considerations

For the purpose of trading, the more of another person’s preferences you are willing to deal with, the better for you. But this is a different question to which of their values you want to care about outside of trading.

In other news about the future, I intend to be at the Singularity Summit, and also the next Pittsburgh Less Wrong meetup in two weeks, in case you are in one of those areas and would like to meet.

• School
• Future

We’re more efficient than we’ve ever been, but extreme efficiency has drawbacks:

More efficient forestation means running through forests faster. More efficient fishing methods means running through natural fishing stocks faster. … The truth is that we have limits. True connections between family, friends and colleagues can not be compressed down to tightly scheduled “quality time.” The relentless logic of efficiency can unintentionally strip the most valued qualities of human life just as easily as it strips forests.

Under a common meaning, ‘efficiency’ is just getting more of what you want for a given cost. Since people want different things, what is efficient for you may be very inefficient for someone else. If you don’t want deforestation, then my efficient tree harvesting method is not an efficient way to pursue your goals. Often people seem to forget this and think of the fact that other people are efficiently pursuing goals they don’t like as a problem with the concept of efficiency. This can then prompt them to go back and reject the original goal of efficiency in their own endeavours. Which is a very bad idea, if they are hoping to get what they want, without wasting other things they want in the process. Which is very likely what they are hoping for.

For instance if ‘the most valued qualities of human life’ are stripped by spending most of your time say efficiently pursuing career productivity, the problem is not that efficiency is bad, the problem is that you are efficiently pursuing the wrong goals. i.e. goals that are not your own, or at least not all of what you value. Being inefficient about, say, work is a terrible strategy for improving your home life, since only a miniscule proportion of the ways to be inefficient at work involve any home life improvement, and most of those not efficient improvements. Fortunately people using this strategy probably know intuitively that they will have to aim at the set of ways of being inefficient at work that do help their family lives. But once you have got as far as pursuing the values you actually care about, being efficient about them has really got to help, no matter how much your enemies also like efficiency. Similarly, don’t abandon ‘succeeding’, just because bad people also like it.

I agree with him for the most part. But he is claiming that most people are very wrong about something they are very familiar with. So the big question must be why everyone is so wrong, and why they feel so sure of it. I have had many a discussion where my conversational partner insists that if they were frozen and revived, or a perfect replica were made of them, or whatever, it would not be them. 

To be clear, what exactly is this fallacious notion of personal identity that people have?

• - each human has one and only one, which lasts with them their entire life
• - If you cease to have it you are dead, because you are it
• - it doesn’t wax or wane, it can only be present or absent.
• - it is undetectable (except arguably from the inside)
• - two people can’t have the same one, even if they both split from the same previous person somehow.
• - They are unique even if they have the same characteristics – if I were you and you were me, our identities would be the other way around from how they are, and that would be different from the present situation.

So basically, they are like unique labels for each human which label all parts of that human and distinguish it from all other humans. Except they are not labels, they are really there, characterising each creature as a particular person.

I suspect then the use of such a notion is a basic part of conducting social relationships. Suppose you want to have nuanced relationships, with things like reciprocation and threats and loyalty, with a large number of other monkeys. Then you should be interested in things like which monkey today is the one who remembers that you helped them yesterday, or which is the one who you have previously observed get angry easily.

This seems pretty obvious, but that’s because you are so well programmed to do it.There are actually a lot of more obvious surface characteristics you could pay attention to when categorising monkeys for the purpose of guessing how they will behave: where they are, whether they are smiling, eating, asleep. But these are pretty useless next to apparently insignificant details such as that they have large eyes and a hairier than average nose, which are important because they are signs of psychological continuity. So you have to learn to categorize monkeys, unlike other things, by tiny clues to some hidden continuity inside them. There is no need for us to think of ourselves as tracking anything complicated, like a complex arrangement of consistent behaviours that are useful to us, so we just think of what we care about in others as an invisible thing which is throughout a single person at all times and never in any other people.

The clues might differ over time. The clues that told you which monkey was Bruce ten years ago might be quite different from the ones that tell you that now. Yet you will do best to steadfastly believe in a continuing Bruceness inside all those creatures. Which is because even if he changes from an idealistic young monkey to a cynical old monkey, he still remembers that he is your friend, and all the nuances of your relationship, which is what you want keep track of. So you think of his identity as stretching through an entire life, and of not getting stronger or weaker according to his physical details.

One very simple heuristic for keeping track of these invisible things is that there is only ever one instantiation of each identity at a given time. If the monkey in the tree is Mavis, then the monkey on the ground isn’t. Even if they are identical twins, and you can’t tell them apart at all, the one you are friends with will behave differently to you than the one whose nuts you stole, so you’d better be sure to conceptualise them as different monkeys, even if they seem physically identical.

Parfit argues that what really matters – even if we don’t appreciate it because we are wrong about personal identity – is something like psychological or physical continuity. He favours psychological if I recall. However if the main point of this deeply held belief in personal identity is to keep track of relationships and behavioural patterns, that suggests that what really matters to us in that vicinity is more limited than psychological continuity. A lot of psychological continuity is irrelevant for tracking relationships. For instance if you change your tastes in food, or have a terrible memory for places, or change over many years from being reserved to being outgoing, people will not feel that you are losing who you are. However if you change your loyalties, or become unable to recognise your friends, or have fast unpredictable shifts in your behaviour I think people will.

Which is not to say I think you should care about these kinds of continuity when you decide whether an imperfect upload would still be you. I’m just hypothesising that these are the things that will make people feel like ‘what matters’ in personal identity has been maintained, should they stop thinking what matters is invisible temporal string. Of course what you should call yourself, for the purpose of caring disproportionately about it and protecting its life is a matter of choice, and I’m not sure any of these criteria is the best basis for it. Maybe you should just identify with everyone and avoid dying until the human race ends.