There is a sense in which being induced to consider whether your life is efficient or not is virtuous, of course. Since much of what we use every day is common resource, rather than private resource, we don't want people to be completely careless.
But things don't shake out fairly in the real world. The people who are most often punished for failing to optimize are not, by any stretch, the most profligate resource consumers. And yet no one is particularly concerned about whether the lifestyles of the wealthy are completely optimal or whether they could be making more rational use of their resources.
Even this state of affairs could be tolerable except that only a clown would suggest the distribution of resources we see now is one that aligns with what people deserve. For the most part, its the vagueries of history which have decided who gets to live without too much care for optimization and who must be completely rational or get fucked.
Except we all do, regardless of how society is organized. For example, is that luscious chocolate torte's taste worth the detriment to one's health? Is driving a little faster worth the extra risk of getting a ticket? Should I buy or rent? Should I buy the expensive shoes or the knockoffs? Should I buy it now at the higher price or wait till I get home and order it online for cheaper?
Its not inherent to the human condition. Imagine, either as a practical possibility, or an as yet manifested, potentially utopian ideal, where your time wasn't being metered out by any immediate demands and you moved through life on the basis of purely aesthetic concerns. Think of the supposed hunter-gatherers who lived in times of abundance. Only a bit of time was given each day to the dumb gods of survival. The rest of the time could be used for leisure - an idea almost dead in contemporary life (as your comment demonstrates).
In fact, just a few days ago, Paul Graham was posting about one important aspect of genius: an impractical (say aesthetically motivated) obsession unconnected to (though perhaps restrained by) practical concerns. Almost every human has some purely aesthetic desires which they would like to act on in the portion of their life which they can carve out from practicalities of survival.
I see the social contract or whatever you'd like to call it (if the name contract offends) as an attempt to carve out some portion, hopefully not too meager, of our lives out for just such living, for every human.
Its only an immediate condition of modernity, which I'd attribute vaguely to the vague "liberal" zeitgeist, which makes that idea seem alien to all but the wealthiest.
Its certainly true that we could rationalize our every moment but in almost any reasonable account a person who wanted to do that or who tried would be considered mentally ill and certainly unhappy. Its inhuman. Its not what we should want.
When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky, is what I'm saying. That should be the privilege of every person.
It is. Should you give up hunting that mastondon and instead look for easier and less risky prey?
> When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky
You are, whether you consciously realize it or not. You are always making cost-benefit choices. Watch TV or read a book. Play with kid or have a beer with buddies. Etc.
What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis.
What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time.
If you really must think of the spreadsheet, think of it this way: most people prefer for most of their decisions to be made ahead of time and for the circumstances of life, if at all possible, the change infrequently enough that they don't need to go back to the spreadsheet every single minute of their lives.
If you find that people react negatively to modernity, it might be because the liberal fantasy is that we're all just fucking going crazy on our spreadsheets all of the time (unless we're rich, then we pay someone else to think about our spreadsheets all the time and we live on the margins, as irrational and happy as pigs in the mud).
Every time a person makes a decision, they are doing a cost benefit analysis, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not.
> What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time.
It is true that many people (including me) prefer to "wing" decisions because they don't want to expend effort on it. But that itself is yet another cost-benefit decision.
GP is talking about being forced to do cost-benefit analyses on a conscious and even instinctive levels all the time, by our economy and our society. GP is talking about the desire to not have to do that, and to instead be able to enjoy life without constantly worrying that anything but close-to-optimal decision will be disastrous in short or long-term. The dream of being able to relax, to be able to dive deep into something that interests you for couple of weeks, without risking sacrificing your kid's whole future in the process.
Upthread, I believe GP was also talking about what I call the competitive vs. cooperative nature of society. Our society is way too competitive for my taste, and it's what I believe is driving this cost/benefit craze.
You cannot help but do it every single time. Even when you choose what TV channel to watch. If you conscious mind doesn't do it, your subconscious will.
Making good cost/benefit decisions is how poor people move up financially, and making bad ones is how the rich become not-so-rich. (Like David Cassidy, who spent his wealth on drugs and parties and one day woke up jobless, friendless, and money-less. A similar story happened to Will Smith, though he managed to turn his life around, make better decisions, and regained his wealth.)
What I am trying, but apparently failing, to get across, is that optimizing a cost benefit analysis is not the primary mode of human existence. It may be, in some uselessly wide tautological sense, an inevitable aspect of it, but it doesn't characterize the human experience in toto. Most human beings do plenty of things which they don't consciously evaluate in such bloodless terms and, indeed, because there is no universal notion of cost or benefit, its unclear what your imaginary perfect analyzer would be up to in the first place.
Thus, if we are to preserve as valid the vast majority of human activities, we must deny the idea that literally every moment needs to be consciously optimized and embrace the counter-notion: that society be organized in such a way that we can sometimes, perhaps as often as possible, chill the fuck out.
I get what you're saying, but, with respect, I think you're wrong about that.
> It may be, in some uselessly wide tautological sense, an inevitable aspect of it,
As far as scientific consensus goes, I think it's pretty common to encounter the belief that life is "just" biological machinery and, ergo, evolution is a chemical tautology.
> but it doesn't characterize the human experience in toto.
But here it seems to me that you're verging into mysticism, which personally I don't mind but you have to call it out.
> Most human beings do plenty of things which they don't consciously evaluate in such bloodless terms
Yes, I agree, and in fact it seems to me to be a very recent, even modern, thing that people are doing that at all. I mean, accounting only began around 5k years ago, eh? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform )
> there is no universal notion of cost or benefit, its unclear what your imaginary perfect analyzer would be up to in the first place.
There is a universal notion, but it's self-referential: success at replication.
Again, this is a IRL chemical tautology: success at replication engenders new conditions that then bring about changes in the (virtual) fitness landscape engendering new adaptation. (E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event )
Thus the universal notion of benefit is a verb not a noun, further, it's a self-defining "emergent" notion.
Evolution and meta-evolution occur at the same time, are the same process.
From this POV, it's absolutely fascinating (IMO) that this process created self-aware individuals with intelligence that can, e.g. look at the night sky and see stars in all their celestial glory (as contrasted to mere tiny lights on a fixed fabric.)
> Thus, if we are to preserve as valid the vast majority of human activities...
(Just to mention in passing, I don't think we can evaluate the validity of human activity en mass for at least a few hundred million years or so. If we talking apes can't survive longer than the unintelligent dinosaurs I don't think any of our civilization(s) can be considered valid.)
...we must deny the idea that literally every moment needs to be consciously optimized...
(Again, I'm not saying that, and I don't think WalterBright meant that either, but it's not interesting IMO)
...and embrace the counter-notion: that society be organized in such a way that we can sometimes, perhaps as often as possible, chill the fuck out.
Now, here, you are talking my language friend! I mentioned elsewhere in the thread that I'm a fan of Bucky Fuller, in part because he basically said that our tech can support us with a high standard of living w/o "disadvantaging anyone" and we should be able to retire at 25 (etc.)
So, yeah, slack off. :-)
That's the other interesting question, IMO: is the evolution of intelligence the end of evolution or a change of form? (And this Q is complicated by the fact that intelligence is ambient (cf. M. Levin's work.))
I mean, what if we all slack off ("Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay.") and get enslaved by Klingons or degenerate into blobs?
This is true in everything from investment opportunities (SEC with Registered Securities, and the higher bar for selling to unaccredited investors), to mortgages ($0 down with no income verification and a teaser adjustable rate), to food or drug safety (you don’t have to know how to check that food or drugs are safe at the grocery store or pharmacy) and generally you want it to be true of work opportunities as well — not that this is necessarily going to be the best use of your time, but that you know at least it should be safe and at least minimally profitable.
Personally I think many drivers make very good money on Uber, and also on the food delivery apps, in particular for how those apps fit their lifestyle and their preferences for when/how they want to work.
When it gets to be a bridge too far is if you exceed the baseline minima, and start telling people their preferences for how they want to work are wrong, or assuming everyone who disagrees with you just doesn’t know any better.
But perhaps this isn't about the fact that we're optimizers under pressure. Maybe it's better viewed as a problem with the shape of the optimization space. It looks vastly different for rich vs. regular people - the slopes are gentler when you have the means, so you don't have to worry so much about falling into local minima you can't ever escape from.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janitor-invented-flamin-ho...
But if you believe in evolution then WalterBright pretty much has to be right, from first principles.
The interesting thing is that things like daydreaming must be adaptive.
- - - -
The really mind-blowing thing is that if you take Michael Levin's work seriously ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 ) you have to confront the idea that living tissue thinks.
Does intelligence actually grant an escape from the evolutionary "Wheel of Karma" or just reify the forms that the drive to endure takes on?
Are we engines of terrible purpose or the art of Solaris?
There is no evolutionary reason to believe that literally all your brain power is devoted to cost benefit analysis, and even if that were the case, under the presumption that we have some self-determination, it wouldn't tell us much about whether its morally good or not or aesthetically pleasing or whatever criteria we might use.
The brain uses something like 1/5th of the oxygen you take in, what is it doing with all that?
If we use the phrase "cost benefit analysis" in a general sense (rather than the specific activity [1]) for coming up with the "best" thing to do then I think it's practically tautological that your brain is a gland for just that.
> if that were the case, under the presumption that we have some self-determination, it wouldn't tell us much about whether its morally good or not or aesthetically pleasing or whatever criteria we might use.
From what might be called an "evolutionary fundamentalist" POV "self-determination" is also something your CBA-gland does to get your genes into the future and (perhaps paradoxically) you don't get a choice about using it to maximize your expected future benefit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis
Pro-healthy-and-effective-markets and absolutist pro-liberty or laissez-faire stances aren't always aligned.