Created: July 13, 2020
Modified: March 20, 2022
Modified: March 20, 2022
the balanced-utility trap
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Status: in conflict with negative utility ?
- See also: the hedonic treadmill.
- Evolutionary, 'pain' exists to motivate you to get out of situations that will damage your future prospects, and conversely pleasure exists to motivate you to do things that improve your future prospects. If you experienced pain, or pleasure, all the time, it wouldn't be an effective motivator. Their entire reason to exist depends on the transience of pain and pleasure.
- Cognitively: we know that normalization (eg batch normalization) is often helpful in ML systems. We shouldn't be surprised if our brain also uses a normalized reward signal.
- In the extreme, this view implies that it's futile to optimize utility: no matter what we do, however many improvements to the world we make, our brains will just renormalize. You might be rich, in a first-world country, with every physical comfort, high social status, and a fit and attractive body, and yet still be sad about what you don't have or have not achieved. I've experienced this during and after my PhD. Meanwhile, people in the poorest situations find joy in things that might seem insignificant to me. One even assumes that people even a few thousand years ago were often happy. Does this mean it's really not possible to make things better?
- No.
- Antidepressants disprove this thesis. We genuinely can use drugs to change baseline utility. Sure this might, in the long run, change behavior and lead to different decisions than what would have maximized your non-drug utility---which might have a higher maximum than your non-drug utility, even if it also has a lower minimum---but it does imply that utility is not unavoidably normalized.
- We also don't need to assume that things are no better now than they were a few thousand years ago. Even negative utility is fine with saying that things are a lot better now than they were in the past---it just requires that they are still overall negative. Which implies that the previous 'state of nature' had to be really negative.
- Buddhist wisdom says that suffering is unavoidable. We will never have relief from suffering. This doesn't mean that suffering has to dominate our lives or our attention.
- If we can control attention, then we can attend to positive things. If we spend more time attending to positive than to negative things, then we will spend more time experiencing positive than negative emotions. See also developing taste.