Maybe rich people are happier than poor people because they don't have to deal with sh!t all the time. You know, that stuff about the cognitive burden of poverty, etc.
I like cooking, but I don't like having to cook all the time. Having a cook would be the best of both worlds.
I don't like cleaning. Having a housekeeper would mean I don't have to do something I never like doing.
I sometimes like my job, but I like hiking, reading, and spending time with friends more, and mostly I don't like my job and it makes my life worse. If I didn't have to go to work, I would be able to do more of those things that make my life better and less of the thing that makes my life worse.
There's all kinds of unpleasant things we all have to do regularly. With enough money, you don't ever have to do them, and can just do nice things.
Less unpleasant shit, more pleasant, life-affirming stuff. Sounds nice.
I agree, but shouldn't that all fall under the exact contradiction that Scott is talking about? Since poor people should eventually get used to (i.e. start predicting) having to do all the shitty stuff, and wealthy people eventually set their predictions at not having to do stuff, and both should have approximately the same reward-compared-to-prediction dopamine? So obviously it's more complicated than that.
This is what I was thinking. There is a certain, maybe not “delight” but definitely “satisfaction” in not generally having to worry about the downside risks of being poor. If you have a comfortable savings / high earning potential, things like “losing a job” or “car gets totaled” are temporary periods of suck, but they aren’t major setbacks. Which means not only do you recover from them quicker, but you don’t live your whole life in existential dread of being dropped into permanent poverty by an unpredictable negative event.
"expect random bad things happening" isn't very specific.
Suppose someone is sitting on a chair with an electrode strapped to each arm, and every say, 7 minutes, one of the two electrodes will deliver a somewhat painful electric shock to that arm.
Suppose in one version of the situation, which of the two arms is shocked is selected independently at random, while in the other version, it always strictly alternates between the two arms.
I expect that the first version would be more unpleasant, because there is more uncertainty about what negative stimulus will occur. (Though, I could be wrong.)
My understanding is that unhappiness from being First World Poor is mostly about one's relative poverty to others. If you are relatively poor in the First World, you are:
1) More likely to live in a bad neighborhood where more unpredictably bad things occur such as violence.
2) More likely to have job insecurity (Although that might also be the cause of the poverty.) You unpredictably lose your job and your paycheck frequently, but not frequently enough to update to.
3) More likely to be unmarried or have a (unpredicted) failed marriage because women are drawn to settle down with relatively wealthier men.
Perhaps having low status comes with a "hope springs eternal" function which regularly predicts better outcomes than are likely.
Also, I posted below about why interesting work might be regularly rewarding. Perhaps the differences in happiness levels between rich and poor have less to due with the consumption side of life and more to do with the production side. If you are poor, you are less likely to have an interesting job.
Point 3) has little explanatory power if the poor person in question is female.
One possible way to disambiguate income level and interesting work would be to look at a population where most income isn’t coming from the job. Grad students, for example. If the grad students with family money are significantly happier than the ones living solely on their stipends, even though they do the same work, income is likely to be a significant factor. (Although grad students as a whole are probably very good at “hope springs eternal” thinking.)
Poor people tend to be surrounded by people who make bad decisions. I think there's a causal mechanism of [bad decisions] -> [poor], but that's not necessary here. It could also be [poor] -> [require supports] + [unable to turn down support from bad people] or [surrounded by bad people early in life] -> [lack of startup resources] -> [poor], or combinations of those and others.
Anyway, being surrounded by bad people who make bad decisions and treat you poorly is an extremely quick way to an unhappy life. That's not inherent to being poor. My dad's family was *extremely poor* by almost any Western standard, but they were not particularly unhappy - generally they seemed content.
It depends on if you define 'poor' only in terms of money. Many effects of a lack of money can be leveled out by a supportive social fabric (family/community). But this is even harder to change in a situation were your overall resources are low.
Strong agree. My dad's family was as poor as you can find anywhere in the U.S., but were able to do fairly well over the course of their lifetimes due to strong family support structures. They went from desperately poor in the 1960s (no electricity or running water) to middle class by the 90s. There was a lot of hard work involved, and a good number of personal difficulties.
I think there is a difference between the temporary feeling of reward from some goal and an overall perception of one's life. The first depends on the dopamine prediction circuit, and is probably very similar between the rich and the poor, while the second does not. The second probably has to do with social status perception. A quick google search points to neuropeptides B and W as a possibly involved.
The real burden of poverty are more like having to trade basic needs for each other, being depended on people that don't respect you (e.g. boss, welfare, family), beeing overworked/exhausted/over-strained. These are actual experiences not just prediction updates, so they don't go away or get neutral even if you get used to it more or less.
Agree entirely. I was more looking at the other side - the benefits of being rich that aren't just "predicted away" but are the kinds of actual, tangible benefits that mirror the actual experiences of poverty you mention.
I don't think it's possible to adjust to frustration, things just drive you up the wall, unless you sort of fall into learned helplessness and just let them frustrate you without doing anything about it. I noticed a massive change in my own contentment after deciding to fix various "UX issues" with my everyday actions, to the extent it was possible. See also - Peterson and his pre-psychotic break insistence on cleaning your room.
There's a lot more of frustrating things in your life when you're poor.
I think the general tension is they are happier, but they aren't *as much* happier as the difference in life circumstances would suggest.
I would also be interested in data on how it has changed overtime with greater access to media. I remember the received wisdom in the 90s being that villagers in Africa weren't a ton less happy than people in America. And the argument at the time seemed to be that people care more about their *relative SES* than their actual situation.
But in a more online interconnected world perhaps everyone has more ability to feel insecure about how poorly they are doing compared to Jeff Bezos.
Happiness is an ambiguous word. It cannot be defined precisely. There just is no unique definition. Why then do you feel free to use it as if it were a scientific term like velocity or force that can be quantified, measured, compared, i.e. studied ??
Sure it can be defined: it's in all the dictionaries!
I kid. Still, just because something can't be empirically measured doesn't mean it can't be discussed. While happiness can't be defined as precisely as the boiling point of water, it is a real thing that people universally report exists.
Oxford defines it as "The state of pleasurable contentment of mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one's circumstances." Webster back in 1828 said it was "The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good; that state of a being in which his desires are gratified, by the enjoyment of pleasure without pain;" and Merriam-Webster today calls it "a state of well-being and contentment."
Difficult to study scientifically? Yes, very much so. But the same is true of almost the whole field of psychology, and just because minds are hard to study doesn't mean the attempt is useless.
>It should not be studied with the scientific method.
I am stealing Deepa’s words because I agree with him ( I believe) in the essence of his statement, but would reword it a bit.
The fatal conundrum to me is that there is no yardstick for measuring happiness. It is quite literally a state of mind.
It’s relationship to external circumstances is vague and capricious. I concede that one can construct statistical anomalies and come to certain conclusions about happiness and its correlations, but I don’t see how you get by the completely subjective nature of the concept.
By my understanding, you try to survey a large enough group of people on their self-reported happiness to average out past the large variability and get something with some statistical reproducibility to it. And yes, you absolutely bear in mind that different people will report wildly varying levels of self-reported happiness in similar circumstances.
There no such thing as THE scientific method : even at this specific point in time there are sciences (like anthropology or history) that use radically different methods from physics (for instance trying to handle non-quantifiable concepts, situations where the researcher is hopelessly entangled with the object of study, or not even trying to derive universally applicable laws because they would be more misleading than their absence.)
There is a vast gulf between "deep pleasure in" and "contentment with" there which I think is hiding the fact that we don't actually universally report that it exists; we just associate the word with some kind of experience and assume that that experience is the correct association.
It may be worth remembering that velocity and force were once muddled, non-uniquely defined, non-scientific words. Some great advances in human understanding come from reasoning about fuzzy concepts until they become precise - I think that’s what Scott’s aiming for here.
When you ask people questions like "how happy do you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10?" you tend to get consistent answers, and those answers tend to correlate with real-world things like "how bad is your commute?" or "how wealthy are you?"
And sure, you can say "but that's not measuring *true* happiness" or "but sometimes people say they're happy when they're not," but it's good enough to do statistics on. You don't need to predict the path of every particle of a gas to derive the ideal gas laws.
Is this because of multi-armed bandits? The genes that made people more likely to cross the Bering strait did fairly well, all in all.
> You seek unpredicted reward, but by definition you can never get this consistently
It's not technically 'consistent' but looking through the middle aisle of Lidl tends to be a reliable way to find something both unprediced and rewarding to acquire.
Interesting in the context of older style "courting" relationships, where sex comes later in the relationship, typically after marriage. In those relationships, love would be there before sex. Sex would not be the driver of the relationship, so it's less fundamental to whether the couple are "getting along" than in relationships built around and primarily for sex.
There are still millions of people who do not have sex prior to establishing a long term relationship (even if not marriage, at least regular and long term), and that used to be much more the norm.
The witticism doesn't work literally in those cases, but the idea's still the same. Early on in the relationship, there's a euphoric high that comes with not being sure the other person really likes you, and getting confirmation that they do. As the relationship progresses, the stakes keep getting higher and higher - do they like me enough to go on a date? To hold hands? To kiss? To be monogamous? To have sex? To get married? Each time you get confirmation on a higher-stake question the euphoria deepens. Switching around the order of marriage and sex doesn't really impact the general theory that much.
The switch to a more "companionate" love happens once you've fully updated on this idea that you're in a long-term stable relationship and no longer amazed by that, whether or not you had premarital sex along the way or not.
I thought the whole idea of "courting" was to withhold the sex, so as to create an incentive for marriage?
Anyway, in traditional South Asian arranged marriages, first comes marriage, then you have sex and eventually love develops over time. It's not uncommon to marry a person that you never spent more than fifteen minutes alone with, and stay with that person for life, never so much as holding hands with any other member of the opposite sex, before or after getting hitched.
My personal feline theory as to why this is possible is, because, in South Asian culture, for better or for worse, your rights and obligations are largely set for you by the society you live in. If you are, for example, a middle class Tamil Catholic Christian Chettiar girl from a joint family of shopkeepers and government schoolteachers, you can marry a boy from a similar background and you have a pretty good idea of what you can expect, and what will be expected of you. Then throw in familial and social pressure to at least make the marriage look like it works.
In the West, everyone works out for themselves what they want from a relationship, and what they put into it. We can argue later whether or not this is a good thing.
Courting as a way to incentivize marriage seems like a modern ret-con justification. I've heard it before, but only in a modern context - post sexual revolution.
There are cultures in which courting is normal, even in the US, and it's not about forcing someone to commit before they can get sex. It's about making sure you like and want to be with someone rather than letting those lust hormones make the decision for you.
In many ways, those traditional South Asian marriages you are talking about are much better than letting lust dictate our relationships. Lust is a very poor predictor of happiness with someone else, and is guaranteed to be short term - people age and become less attractive, and people deal with various difficulties when living their lives together that are more important than sex (like raising kids).
What cultures are you referring to where courting is still standard? I am aware of plenty of cultures in which traditional arranged marriage is still the norm, and I am aware of cultures in which western style post-Sexual Revolution dynamics are the norm, but I am not aware of any culture in which courting is the norm, outside of certain fairly fringe religious communities.
That is an honest question, FWIW. Because, like anything else, western style "self-actualization at all costs" relationships come with their own set of tradeoffs. To the extent they work, they do so within the context of economic and social norms, and outside that context, not so much. Same could be said for South Asian marriages, by the way.
I guess the "fairly fringe religious communities" is what I mean. Millions of people are living their lives in those communities, so I don't consider them to be so fringe, though I agree they are much smaller than they used to be.
I must be really luckily then. I would rate my sex life in marriage something like ~7/10 years 1-5, ~3/10 years 6-11 (young kids), ~8/10 years 12-14 (kids finally old enough to stay out of way).
I believe a recent philosophical musing by Theodore Dalrymple, aka the retired prison doctor Anthony Daniels, is relevant here. He reflects on the difference between an interesting and boring life, which is arguably more meaningful than the happiness/unhappiness dichotomy, with reference to a former patient:
I remember a patient who had believed for years that he was at the center of a giant conspiracy involving the great powers of the world. I declined even to try to treat him because if the treatment worked, which was possible but not certain, and he lost his delusions, he would be left with the realization that he had wasted years on complete nonsense, and that it was now too late to restart his life. Moreover, he would be obliged to recognize that, far from having been a person of immense importance who had been the focus of the attentions of the great ones of this earth, he had all along been an insignificant little man in rather wretched lodgings, eking out his existence from hand to mouth. His life with his delusions had, at least, been full of interest and incident; and every time an aircraft flew overhead, or a car passed in the street, it was spying upon him. The enemy kept him busy, evading the poison they were insinuating into his food via the supermarket and the rays they were directing at him via the electric plugs; every trip to the local shops was fraught with danger, necessitating the exercise of the utmost caution. Every time he returned home intact from the purchase of a pint of milk, he could congratulate himself on having outwitted the enemy.
What life could I offer him by comparison with this? Only poverty and boredom.
Man that's a pretty dystopic view if zooming out a bit.
I mean, sure, maybe his normal life was boring, but is he actually able to engage with anyone in his paranoid self-world? I feel like they'd struggle to make relationships with family or friends, which is arguably a huge factor in long-term happyness? I feel like living the life inside a conspiracy would end up being pretty lonely, and sure, realising you wasted a lot of time and effort on something isn't great, but how do you move forward with your life with that context?
It sounded like they ended up in prison, so their current state doesn't seem very productive or helpful to them?
Concerning the delusions of this this particular patient, I would say that trying/not trying to get him out of his delusions depends on the context of his life. Is he old, and unlikely to be able to form new friendships anyway? Do his delusions make him a danger to others or not? Does he have children that his delusions have alienated him from, or is he childless? And so forth. I would try to get him away from his purpose-filled, delusional life if he was sufficiently young etc. to have a significant probability of emerging less unhappy without them. (Freud: The purpose of therapy is to turn neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.) Again: what to do (if anything, and assuming you have tools, including meds, at your disposal) depends on how you view the person’s context.
…and that goes for all delusions, also the less obvious ones. Some delusions are debilitating, others are not. Some instead makes it easier to find friends and lovers, because they give purpose to our lives. Lives that in all probability deep down are devoid of any purpose. To quote Mark Twain (Notebook, 1898): “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear, and life stands explained.”
Pay attention to the second sentence where Dalrymple asserts "it was now too late to restart his life." Your assumption is perhaps a youthful one, that the patient had time to change the overall arc of his life, so that he could reflect on it near the end and say, well, 20% or 30% or even 70% was weird and stupid, but the last bit rocked. That may not have been the case. "Long term [future] happiness" and "moving forward" are only relevant considerations if you have a reasonable amount of remaining lifespan.
It's not dystopian, it's just a different perspective, that of the person contemplating the summing up of life -- Dalrymple is 72 -- and pondering the potentially protective role of delusion in coming to terms with who you are, and have been.
I would counter that with an account from James Hollis, who tells of clients starting therapy in their 70s and benefiting from it. I don't think it is our right to decide for anyone if they have enough life span left or not. The question, I think, resides on a different plane: does this particular person want help? can this particular doctor offer help? Looks like we are trying to formulate a general rule here, but I don't think we should.
Yes, I would agree that one cannot extrapolate from Dalrymple's case -- even assuming his judgment is 100% correct -- to any kind of general rule, and so the fact that in some *other* case the judgment would go the other way is not even the slightest bit surprising. We now have two anecdotes, and we can easily assume the judgment is entirely correct in both cases without coming into logical self-conflict.
No, it's certainly not our right to decide for anyone whether they have enough lifespan left or not, and I doubt very much Dalrymple was suggesting that the paranoid patient be legally banned from seeking therapy. That would be plainly cruel.
However, recall there are *two* free wills here: that of the client, and that of the therapist. Just as we cannot made decisions for the client, and say you would benefit from therapy and you would not, so you can do it and you can't[1], we cannot made decisions for the therapist, either. We cannot tell him that he must attempt therapy if in his judgment it would be a diversion of resources from a better use, or even unethical. A therapeutic relationship requires the free consent of both individuals, any other approach is cruel.
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[1] Obviously the ubiquitous role of third-party payers here is troubling, to anyone who prizes the kind of restraint in judgment of strangers which you are advocating.
1. I semi-famously am known for having once been broke for a really long time. At some point I got some news that essentially translated to "by your standards, you have won a very large lottery. Congrats!" in a way that was fairly sure to pay off (say, 90%).
Jobs absolutely take a little time to kick in, and pay does as well. But both in this case and a later similar bump, the actual "implementation" of the changes was a big deal, as were the paychecks. This is sort of nitpicking, but I expect that (if other people match my own experiences) the actual "hit" of the billion dollars arriving is probably bigger than you think, prediction or no, because your mind doesn't have a "this is pretty sure and gonna happen" setting that's strong enough to offset a billion dollar deposit in your account.
2. Ignoring 1:
At some point I went from "begging uninterested people to read my stuff" to "hundreds or thousands of hits an article" to "guaranteed thousands, sometimes tens of thousands" in terms of article performance. Over that time, the relative value of an article view dropped enormously in terms of how much excitement it gave me.
But it's not just that; that's sort of expected, right? You get used to things. But I'm also *getting used to updates themselves*, which is weirder. In the past few months my average hit count on an article has probably jumped 20-40%. I noted it happened, and it was a "new updateable event" but that this point "new updateable event" itself has become normal. I'm used to it.
I intellectually know I should feel shitty about myself when an article does 20-30k views, which is pretty good, and I don't get much emotional bump from it. But it's also involuntary; I can adjust my "academic" understanding of what's happening and say "this is a pretty big deal" but I can't get my lizard-brain to come along; I'm spoiled.
3. I am a verbal person and attracted to my wife, which means my wife hears a lot of positive stuff about her physical appearance. I'm also a fan of matrimony and reflexively speak a lot, so she gets proposed to a bunch. In terms of "women who hear nice stuff from their husbands a lot" I'd say she's probably top 1% or so.
That said, she's fully updated on it; she accurately views it as happy babble. But she also, in contrast to my hits, isn't *wrong* to discount it. If I withheld the words for a while then brought them back, she'd probably get a hit from it; if I was naturally reserved and didn't say affectionate things a lot to begin with and started she'd probably feel it. But they'd still just be words in either case, perhaps representative of something real behind the curtain or perhaps not.
Since she gets the words a lot, she can basically go "Oh, that's RC being a big fan of marriage, introverts, and boobs, it doesn't really mean anything spectacular and special" where otherwise she might see that less clearly. And she can more accurately judge my love by more "real" measures, like if I do dishes ever or something.
1. I also had a few experiences kind of like 1 (eg realizing I could make 2-3x my previous income on Substack) and am describing my response from memory, so maybe this is a real difference between us.
On the other hand, there was a time when I sort of expected to take over my father's business, and partway through that time I learned it made about twice as much money as I thought, which meant I would make twice as much money as I thought for however much of my life I was doing that (maybe all) and although that sort of doubled my expected future income I remember not having very much emotion about it, maybe because at that point it was still far in the future.
Yeah, I'm thinking maybe this is just a difference in how we think, or maybe just how we think about money in particular; I get the impression I no longer have a healthy relationship with certain kinds of financially motivated fear, for instance.
It probably makes a difference that you went from poor to comfortable and Scott went from comfortable to rich. Diminishing marginal utility of money and all that.
You can definitely get used to updates. I have a job that throws all kinds of weird stuff at me, from people problems to novel logistical issues to "The Sky Is Falling!!" When I take a moment to step back and look at my job from an outside perspective (or when people comment on what I go through), I realize that I should be feeling...something? Instead it's like the Bison quote from Street Fighter - "For you, [...] was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
I don't get to quote Street Fighter enough, so thanks for the opportunity!
Everything is new and fresh and then you acclimate to/figure out the reward system, and it is still fun for a while maybe, but all the excitement is gone.
Maybe there is a kind of reward system in our brains for optimizing or figuring out new and unpredictable reward systems?
<i>So how come predicting you would get the money mostly cancels out the goodness of getting the money, but predicting you would get the Ferrari/dinner doesn’t cancel out the goodness of the Ferrari/dinner?</i>
Surely the answer is that the goodness isn't getting the money itself, but getting the ability to purchase things which the money provides. If you inherit a billion dollars but it's all locked away in a Swiss bank account which you can't access, your newfound wealth won't actually be any good to you, because you can't use it to purchase anything. If the world financial system collapses and everyone reverts to barter, having billions of cash isn't going to do you any good, because you can no longer use it to buy stuff. And by the same token, if you have money but are too busy to actually spend it, that money isn't going to be doing you any good, and so it's not surprising if it doesn't make you any happier.
Indeed. Driving a Ferrari is fun in a way that looking at digits in your banking app isn't.
Legitimately enjoyable activities are still enjoyable if you know in advance that they're going to happen. It would be weird otherwise -- imagine you get invited to a fun activity, and you get the full dopamine hit *at the moment you enter the activity in your calendar*. After that, you may as well immediately cancel the activity again, since you will get no further enjoyment from actually *doing* it..
Isn't this the main point of the essay that there are two different sources of happiness:
1) the euphoric feeling from updating the expectations
2) actual experiences that are fun/pleasant/fulfilling.
As money isn't a real thing but only a promise to get something, the money transfer is no experience, but an update on probability getting what ever you want in the future.
Even having an real Ferrari in the garage isn't a experience in its self. The experience is driving it and people treating you different because you have it. Owning the car just influences the chances and predictions of these real experiences.
Surely I'm misinterpreting it, but it looks like that graph of widowhood shows a statistically significant decline in life satisfaction the year before widowhood has actually occurred. Am I missing something, or is there something that could cause that effect?
men usually die before their wives at old ages. In other words, I’d expect women would more often see their husbands wither away and die, whereas men would lose their wives more suddenly, simply because of demographic lifespans
Well, I imagine that lesbian relationships are a small enough minority (if they're even in the data at all) that they wouldn't impact the averages much either way.
I checked the reference. Here's what Haidt says: "I've drawn out how the intensity of passionate and companionate love might vary in one person's relationship [...]"
Regarding your Sinclair Method question, it’s currently believed that dopamine cannot be produced in the reward center while the mu opioid receptor is blocked, so that’s ultimately what breaks the learned reward.
The getting-roses-without-asking thing isn't joyful because it's unexpected. It's because the motivation for the roses is that they were thinking about you while you weren't around. If you ask for it, then they do it as a chore. But if they do it without asking, spontaneously, it's a sign that they were thinking about you without prompting and thought to do something nice. You want to be with people who think about you when you're not there in a happy way.
But is this the actual source of the joy, or the rationalization-after-the-fact of why the "reminded" situation isn't as joyful?
Because, logically, the husband has no particular reason to associate "thinking of his wife" with "getting flowers" (unless he's really immersed in the culture of romantic gestures, which most men are not), until he's explicitly told to associate the two.
So if it were really about him thinking about her and wanting to do something nice, getting flowers *after* his wife has said she wishes he would get her more flowers should be a *bigger* indication that he was thinking of her. Which of course isn't how it feels, since what the wife actually wants isn't really the flowers, it's for the husband to surprise her with somewhat-novel romantic gestures (of which flowers are traditional).
"Flowers" are just a popular manifestation. My husband once got me a cheap dustpan on our third date, because he was at ikea and he remembered I was talking about needing one after mine broke. I was bowled over. I suppose a dustpan is as far away from performative romance as it can get. It's actually about the keeping someone in your thoughts.
But sure, people do want flowers (I personally can't imagine why, because flowers die and make me sad). Or candy. Why? It's because they want to be thought of in a classy romantic way. You don't need to be "immersed in the culture of romantic gestures". I'm not american, but in the US, you seem to get people flowers for everything. Flowers at a funeral. Flowers when you visit someone. Flowers for mothers day. Flowers for father's day. Flowers for graduation. Toddlers pick wildflowers and give it to their parents. If you go to school in america, they make you get flowers for your classmates on valentine's day, and a card or something. They seem to be the most generic thing you can get someone to brighten up their day. There's literally a company called "1800-flowers". You don't need to be some social cultural genius to know to get someone flowers.
The surprise part is nice (idk, get your wife a thong), but it's really about being thought about without being prompted by that person.
Flowers are beautiful. Sure many people hardly glance at them but looking at and smelling them brings many people great joy. I delivered flowers for a while. A lot of recipients' response was limited to 'oh what a nice gesture' but many clearly enjoyed soaking in the natural wonders of beautiful flowers. Even for those who don't look at them closely, having flowers around makes a home feel...better.
I dated one of the flower designers. She truly is enraptured by flowers, is seized by their beauty very readily and they are a great source of happiness for her. "To see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wild flower" was something she has access to. There is value in doing as Rilke says and "paying attention to the minute particulars in nature that almost no one notices."
Scoffing at the stupidity of toddlers for picking flowers to hand to their parents seems off the mark. Try going outside, picking a flower and committing to looking at it for 5 minutes. Might do something for ya.
If you don't like that your flower dies you can hang it upside down to dry. Then it lasts indefinitely. My home is full of dried flowers. They are beautiful. And I'm not even American.
Your remarks vis-a-vis Scott's original point seem correct, but I suspect his use of that as an example was off-the-cuff and at least partially humorous. From my understanding of the field (of marriage counseling) what the partner saying "you don't get me flowers" means is "you don't get me flowers anymore". A male partner has many non-flower-related "you don't [...] anymore" complaints as well. Both of them are merely associating something that used to happen with how much happier they both were (with each other, with the relationship, in general) during those happy golden hours when the new relationship energy was abundant.
By the time two people get to marriage counseling, the habitual thoughts they have about one another are likely of such a sort that even if without prompting he was in a store and saw flowers and got them for her, she might presume that he was feeling guilty, had done something wrong, was trying to manipulate her into sex, or who knows what. On his part, during the purchase, he might have been reminiscing about times when she didn't seem outright unhappy to see him, and rather than having any good thoughts about her just wanted an evening without some kind of disagreeable interaction.
Arguably, not clocking that one's wife is the type of person who would appreciate flowers is worse than merely slacking on the flowers front.
But yes, +1 to how this has nothing to do with unpredictability and everything with insecurity and desire for evidence of romantic feelings in the form of un-coerced spontaneous gestures.
Romantic gestures aren’t supposed to be easy to bring off successfully. They take a combination of resources, skill, and desire. Acquiring flowers costs money and time. Knowing what kind to get, and when to give them, shows you have an intimate knowledge of your partner. Choosing to get them unprompted shows you’re thinking independently about how to please your partner.
All this adds up to a classic costly, hard-to-fake signal of a secure pair bond.
This is also why giving a dustpan can work just as well, for the right recipient in the right relationship context. The whole point is that it’s contextual. Otherwise it would be a bad signal of a unique relationship.
Likewise, this is why people give bad advice to their partner about how to execute such gestures. It’s not that the gift should be prompted or unprompted in all cases - it’s that you ought to know your partner well enough to not only know which to do, but also to sort out the “real requests” from the “false requests.”
As a playful example, my girlfriend and I have a running joke that I’m responsible on road trips for telling her to go to the bathroom. If I don’t, and she has to pee when we’re far from a rest stop, the joke is that it’s my fault, and she starts playfully complaining about how neglectful I am.
I have to figure out how to finesse the fact that she does *sometimes* appreciate an actual reminder on this point, while keeping it fun, preventing the joke from becoming weird and creepy, and not just being boring and repetitive.
So overall, I think the point is that romantic gestures are sort of unhackable. People pick partners who are roughly equally intelligent. Hence, they can intuitively spot whatever hack you’re using to simulate costly signals cheaply. This will cause them only to be moved by a gesture that genuinely took some minimum combination of skill, resources, and intentionality.
1) The 21st century (lower) middle-class person and the medieval serf have a huge objective difference in their quality of life, but similar positions in the social status hierarchy. Maybe your relative position in such a hierarchy (or system of hierarchies, because status is complicated) is a direct input on your feeling of safety in the world, *and* on your expectations against which your objective quality of life is measured?
2) The romantic love phase typically lasts longer if the couple spends significant time apart regularly. This seems to point to the kind of effect you're talking about, with the brain updating slowly over time, and in this case, updating back to some extent.
3) The part about some people getting addicted to terrible relationships, as a way to get any signal at all, points towards the experience of boredom being generated as a negative signal for a too much predictability. In layman terms, maybe we're wired to have a certain drive to explore and experiment, and our brain generates negative signals when that is not happening. Getting stuck in an unpredictably bad relationship would be a failure mode of this mechanism.
4) Just a random fact: I once got a full month of top-of-the-world euphoria from getting B12 vitamin shots, after letting the levels fall too low for years due to bad diet.
5) On the AI part, doesn't this point towards an easy way to keeping AI safe, by keeping training and production use separated into the future?
6) Why is there "a lingering kind of happiness which can be enjoyed even after prediction error has been corrected"? My first impression here is that the mental models of brains updating on their priors based on their inputs and generating feelings as it happens, is a bit too much of a blank slate kind of model. Organisms shaped by evolution have built-in goals, the first of which is maintaining homeostasis, which extends into all sorts of things like feeling healthy and strong, and up to maintaining good social connections. So there's nothing really strange about these kinds of things feeling intrinsically good in durable ways. The opposite would actually be surprising.
5) It definitely would help prevent reward-hacking, potentially at the cost of making the AI unable to learn on the fly.
6) I think you've just reinvented all the questions we're facing. Yes, things like social acceptance and healthy food are inherent organismal goals, but then how come we aren't so much happier than serfs even though we get more of both?
> Yes, things like social acceptance and healthy food are inherent organismal goals, but then how come we aren't so much happier than serfs even though we get more of both?
How do we know we're not significantly happier than a medieval serf? I would guess we are, at least at the basic daily of not having to endure so much harsh weather, bug bites and basic body ailments. There is also a lot of individual variation - I wouldn't be surprised if many of us we were *less happy* in average than a healthy 20-year old medieval serf during relatively good times, and at the same time, significantly more happy than the average medieval serf throughout life.
This is all very tentative, I have not thought very systematically about this, but the more I think about it, the more I get the impression that happiness does not really function like a single variable. Our organisms generate all kinds of valence signals, some of them from relatively low level things like "inner organs functioning correctly", or "no immediate external threat detected", all the way up to social acceptance, and even higher up to things like feeling like one's life is meaningful. It also appears that, as organisms, we have plenty of built-in contradictions in our reward and happiness systems. We are wired to feel well after physical exertion, yet getting out of the sofa and starting to run is generally aversive. Cold showers are physically painful, but at the same time energizing and feel good at the end. Our minds are programmed to chase after problems through mind wandering and automatic worry, but when the problems we worry about don't resolve relatively quickly, they turn into stress which damages our health.
It would be really interesting if someone would study the different factors of happiness. How much do people's answers vary when you ask about "happiness" in general, or "happiness in life", or "well-being"?
My best guess at this point is that there are many factors involved, some of which are felt more absolutely (e.g disturbances like tinnitus, which are really hard to get used to), and some more relatively, so that we feel overall reasonably happy when our life is going better than the average around us. When you ask people about overall happiness they will attempt to summarize all of this into a single variable, but internally I don't think it's really felt as one. In my tentative view, the more relative and more absolute factors are felt separately, and I don't think there is a linear process of summing at all - but there is certainly some kind of process that brings the most salient signals to awareness and hides the others.
Sorry for not engaging with the whole 'prediction' framework, this is all a bit of tangent from your thoughts :)
It doesn't seem hard to believe that a medieval German serf might have had happiness more on a par with, say, a modern day African than with a modern day German. There seems to be a fairly wide range of happiness that is compatible with ordinary day-to-day life.
Life was almost certainly better in medieval europe for the average peasant than it is for large numbers of people in e.g. sub-saharan africa today.
And at the very least we can say happiness almost certainly hasn't increased *in proportion* to how much materially wealthier the average westerner is today. Everybody being miserable all the time is not the impression one gets from historical accounts of the period, but they kinda should be relative to how much wealthier we are today and the corresponding levels of happiness.
That seems a priori a little dubious. Average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is 62, which is certainly a significant gap from the First World, but is also way higher than that of medieval peasantry. It's hard to get great numbers on the latter, but I found this statement[1] striking:
"But one recent excavator of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery estimates the life expectancy of the Anglo-Saxon male as 32 years, of the female as 30.5 years....The students of excavated bones demonstrate the prevalence of arthritic complaints. For many their day-to-day existence must have been constant endurance of physical pain."
Sub-Saharan child mortality is very high by First World standards[2], an estimated 1 of every 9 children die before age 9, but this is still a long way from medieval Europe[3], where an estimated half of all children didn't make it to age 10.
There's a lot to be said for even such basic stuff as aspirin, penicillin, soap, shoes, corrective eyeglasses, steel cookware, utensils, tools and weapons, and roofs not made of thatch that leak in the rain, and even anesthesia that permits Caesarian sections for births that would otherwise kill mother and child, all of which are mostly or widely available to Africans today, and did not exist or were quite expensive in medieval Europe.
Thanks for the interesting (albeit highly depressing) data about the Anglo-Saxon cemetery!
Infuriatingly, Google Books refuses to show me the relevant page in the book you linked to, which I would assume cites the original study. Could you by any chance give the title of the original paper? I'd love to check it out further.
It does not, I'm sorry to say. So far as I can tell, studies of ordinary medieval mortality and life are very difficult, because of the paucity of records and the fact that what records there are focus almost exclusively on the wealthiest. My impression is that good work has been done excavating cemeteries and studying skeletons, which is what the first reference is about -- in another, the link to which i have lost alas, there was an offhand observation that the cemetery contained *nobody* older than 45, but maybe it only held commoners, or it got filled up in a plague year or something -- but I have no insight into how to discover the original literature on the subject -- this is very far from my field.
Most likely everyone here understands this already, but just in case, it's important to keep in mind that low life expectancy numbers such as, in this case, 32 years, are so low precisely because of the high child mortality Carl mentioned. People who survived to adulthood did not die on average at 32.
In fact, based on Carl's comment, it sounds like most of the difference between the old English life expectancy of 32 years and the modern African of 62 years is caused by the difference in child mortality.
Anyhow --- are we sure it is a good study? And why go back so far in time, to the early middle ages? (and what century is it exactly?) I would expect that kind of information to be more easily obtained for the late medieval and early modern period peasantry.
Anglo-Saxon England itself, an area on the outskirts of Europe and during that era still separate from the civilization of the continent, is perhaps not a central example of medieval peasantry.
OK, so if you want to support the assertion that "Life was almost certainly better in medieval europe for the average peasant than it is for large numbers of people in e.g. sub-saharan africa today." -- which is that about which I expressed skeptcism -- be my guest. I think you will have a challenge to work out that an average life expectancy of ~35 indicates a *better* life overall than one of ~62, if you look at it the right way.
One hopes you are not dicounting the fact that if half the human beings born die before age 10 that is quite a substantial level of human misery -- those people count, you know. When we say "better" we don't, I hope, restrict ourselves to only adults over 21. That would be as snobbish as restricting our attention to only the wealthiest in both societies.
And at that we're leaving out the misery attendant on parents on having half their issue die. That's pretty rough, you know. So even if the *only* important difference was a massively higher child mortality, I think we can safely say medieval peasant life was not better than sub-Saharan African life today.
Medieval serfs had considerably more agency than a minimum wage corporate peon today, and probably more status measured in chances to get with that girl they've been eyeing.
I have a tiny nitpick. The graph for the marriage happiness over time seems to suggest that people recover happiness past the happiness of their marriage. Now, maybe they controlled for this, but my understanding is that most people are significantly more likely to die soon after their spouse does (the widowhood effect). This makes me pretty suspicious that what might be driving a lot of the gains in the graph would be that people in good relationships are just dying, and more of the ones who survive are the ones who really are better off without their spouse
Obviously that explains the pre-death decline, but I think what Mystik is saying is that at the +5 year mark, widows are happier than they were at the -4 year mark. It's possible - but a bit of a stretch - to assume that the reason that widows were happier at +5 than -4 because their husbands were sick five years before their deaths. Note that there is no significant decline in happiness from -4 to -3 to -2, and then it drops off to -1 as the husband gets cancer or has long hospital stays. So I don't think the husbands were sick in -4, -3, or -2. I think there's an inescapable bias in the data:
If the graph excludes widows who died within 5 years of their spouses, then it would (probably) undersample those widows who were in really happy marriages because those are the ones we'd expect to die of grief/loneliness soon after their husbands.
If the graph includes widows who died within 5 years of their spouses, then the data at the +5 year mark is (probably) artificially high, because the widows who were happy before their husbands died are no longer in the sample, leaving only the widows who were married to louts.
May also be a generational effect. Widowed individuals are more likely to be older Boomers, Silents, or Greatest Generation, and marital roles in those generations seem to be more gendered. I have heard several older wives complain that while their husbands got to retire from their jobs, they never got to stop cooking/cleaning/caretaking.
I'd thought the data were fairly settled on women getting less happiness out of marriage than men do, long-term. I saw the graph of widows being happier later and thought "yeah that tracks".
Of course, what isn't indicated is if the bereaved are getting into new relationships around then. I've heard that grief groups and elder-care homes are absolute meetgrinders, and have been for some time.
IIRC, divorced women initially lose happiness but ultimately become happier than during the marriage, whereas divorced men don't. This holds true despite women being 1) less likely to remarry, and 2) tending to end up financially worse off than men after divorce.
I think it's just that there are some people whose spouse dies suddenly, some people whose spouse dies after a 1 year illness, some people whose spouse dies after a 2 year illness, some people whose spouse dies after a 5 year illness, etc.
All of those people experience bereavement at the 0 year mark. Most of them experience some amount of suffering at the 1 year pre-death mark. Only a few experience some amount of suffering at the 5 year pre-death mark. But because of the sampling being based on having a spouse who died within five years, that correlation is all stronger before than after, and so the four or five year after level might be a better "baseline", with the five year before level averaging in a not-insignificant number of people whose spouse is at the beginning of a five year sickness unto death.
Do people have subjective experience of the hedonic treadmill? I get that the studies are pretty conclusive, but I've been consistently sad in periods when my life was bad and consistently happy in periods when my life was good, without any real adjustment.
Not knowing if I'm going to make rent kept being stressful for years, and watching my dog and daughter enjoy the forest together is wonderful every time.
Personally I feel that there are genuine good things that can consistently lead to happiness/contentment, with relationships to other people being very high on that list. Then there are base material things that we associate with happiness but are probably just hedonistic. It's fun at first, or in certain contexts, but we burn out on it, especially the more we experience it.
Video games comes to mind. I understand that Twitch presenters frequently burn out, despite having jobs that amount to constant entertainment. I myself feel like I get tired of playing a game or doing some other entertainment activity much faster if I'm doing it alone, than if I'm with another person and enjoying it together. When I'm with another person and getting burned out on a game, I've found that we can decide to go do something else and the burnout disappears.
My personal experience is that some degree of hedonic adaptation certainly exists, but I don't believe in the hedonic treadmill as such. I think that if you acquire wisely then your acquisitions can continue to give you residual satisfaction after the initial shine has worn off.
The best way to use money to buy happiness is to get rid of the things that cause you unhappiness. For instance, when I was poor (I mean student poor not real poor) I suffered hot nights of bad sleep in my crappy un-airconditioned apartment. Nowadays if it's hot I turn on the AC in the bedroom of my fancy house, and a whole realm of human suffering is closed off.
Other luxury purchases give less long-term satisfaction, and you have to figure out which those are. I drive an okay-but-aging car and I wonder a lot about whether replacing it with a new luxury car would give me any real satisfaction. I think there's a part of my monkey brain that wants to be constantly reassured that it's high status compared to the other monkeys, and that driving a fancy car is a reasonable way to satisfy that monkey brain.
> I think that if you acquire wisely then your acquisitions can continue to give you residual satisfaction after the initial shine has worn off.
Okay, but people apparently don't do this so the treadmill apparently does exist. You seem to be saying its possible to get off the treadmill, which isn't the question.
I absolutely do. The first year or so of living in Los Angeles, I was constantly being amazed at how wonderful the weather was. It still happened occasionally six years in, but much less often.
I think it's (A). Moving to Texas was a shock both in terms of giving me unpleasant summers and unpleasant winters. Interestingly, I've habituated to the summers, but the winters are still awful in terms of cold and wet.
Hi, I'm the author of the aforementioned post. Sorry for getting the neuroscience wrong - the mistake i made was just parroting what I heard on the Andrew Huberman podcast, and related it to my own experiences studying religions.
I've spent much of the last few years trying to understand religions in terms of neuroscience; both neurotransmitters but also the predictive processing model. What Huberman kept saying was that serotonin was 'connected to appreciating rewards in the present', and this gibed with my own experience. It also seemed to line up with stuff I'd been reading in a book "stop fixing yourself, wake up, all is well". The author talks about "earthly rewards" vs "spiritual rewards." Getting money would be an 'earthly reward' whereas 'time with friends' or 'a good mean' would be 'spiritual rewards.'
I'm wondering now if these are the difference between instrumental and terminal goals. Food is a probably something we're hardwired to want, maybe with that unalterable prediction of "i predict i am full." Driving a ferrari around feels fun (at least for me) because of the deep rumblies and the visual aesthetics - although i guess this gets old for some people, much sooner than the meal does.
We clearly aren't hardwired to want money (i.e. it wasn't in our evolved environment) so maybe that's why it feels different - because it has to do with expected future rewards. vs actual present rewards?
I've definitely learned how to trigger some reliable good feeling in my brain; it's not deeply pleasurable, but it is calming and feels positive. Maybe I've learned how to trigger endogenous opioids?
My goal in sharing the post was not to make claims about neuroscience, so much as to try and share the method I've learned for more or less reliably poking the 'feel good' center in my brain in ways that seem nondestructive, and relating this to both predictive processing and the concept that 'good' is a thing your brain can learn to recognize and move towards but only if you believe 'good' is meaningful.
At the risk of making the same mistake over again, the latest concept that makes sense to me would be:
- valence is how good you feel, your brain computes a valence manifold based upon present and expected future rewards
- dopamine represents something like the gradient (slope) of the valence manifold; the slope corresponds to the expectation of future rewards. Maybe anything that is an instrumental good (money, status, sex) leads to dopamine release?
- opioids represent something like the valencene directly, i.e. how well your needs are met in the present moment. Maybe opioids are released when you look at something in your life and think, wow this is wonderful just as it is, like, say, my kids, my wife, my family, friends, etc?
- i now suspect serotonin is doing something like 'flattening' or stretching out the manifold, which has the effect of calming you down and, in the limits, possibly stretching it so flat that you fee emotionally flat, like an unmotivated zombie, with no direction seeming any more appealing than any other
In any event i'll make more of an effort to accurately lay out what i do and don't understand, and i'll try to avoid taking just one source as gospel on things as complicated as my brain
I wouldn't apologize for that kind of mistake. Telegraphing something wrong in a knowledge-phillic community is a surefire way to be corrected in expedited fashion, and you learn something you might otherwise have to dig harder for. People are either unjustifiably outraged or gleeful at the prospect of correcting others. I suppose you could say that if you're uncertain about your own argument or details of it, it's worth adding a disclaimer to that effect, but otherwise what of it? It's not the crime of the century, it's not even a crime. If you didn't admit any mistake, then that on the other hand wouldn't be viewed in a good light.
Sometimes it pays to play fast-and-loose because you'll learn something fast. The downside is you get to be wrong, and others will make sure you know it. That might matter if you want your own platform to be unblemished and earn credibility for always being as factual as possible, but what are the returns? What's the goal? There's a balance in many ways - not least of which with the language we use. We sacrifice some level of precision in order to gain more of appeal and make the content enjoyable to read. You could be scoffed at as edu-tainment as Huberman is (a little unfairly), but the alternative is no one cares what you have to say, except maybe in the realm of academia.
That said I'm far more likely to be reckless anonymously, and in those circumstances fewer will rush to correct you. You're in a sea of noise. In more niche communities though you can hear some interesting arguments.
I've read Andres' stuff before and can't shake the feeling that I'm reading pseudoscience. It's too simplistic to essentially say there's a shape to our emotional states. The same crowd talks about logarithmic scales of pleasure/pain: The eighth dakha of Buddhist meditation, the highs of DMT and falling in love versus the crippling lows of cluster headaches. The richness of our experience wouldn't add up.
I can remember reading an article on aeon that really stuck with me. It was about how the liveliness of our brains correlates with its dissonance/entropy/incompressibility. When we are asleep, for example, our brain waves are very ordered/consonant/harmonic. One can basically compress the brain state digitally, then higher compression ratio means lesser consciousness, and vice versa lower compression ratio is more conscious. And this relates to humans on higher levels of the emergence stack (a la Tim urban), if you have ever heard the cheering crowd of sleepwalking society like North Korea, it's monotone and slow-wave harmonic. Whereas a similar celebratory cheer in the USA would be noisy, dissonant, full of airhorn noises and such, incompressible.
This wouldn't fly with Andres' idea that consonance equates with Valence. He cites studies saying high frequency harmony is linked to high valence, and low frequency harmony linked to high arousal. I'd imagine, at the least, that low frequency harmony is asleep. But I need to look more into this. And also, what about split brown patients? Might they have only half the capacity for Valence under that model? Or is it actually supporting his idea because it's something more to do with electromagnetic fields and not electrochemical circuitry? I wonder what seizures look like in a brain scan.
[In this comment, I assume that something like a quantum wavefunction describes underlying reality. I do this because quantum mechanics is just about the most accurate description of physics we've found, even though current theories are incomplete. Thus, when I refer to physics I refer to "quantum wavefunction-like physics".]
If we believe that reality is fundamentally comprised of something like a quantum wavefunction, *then Turing machines do not exist*. Turing machines do not actually exist in the ontology of "everything is a quantum wavefunction" physics, because there are no discrete states in such a physics that can correspond to the symbols on the tape of a Turing machine, and there are no wavefunction processes that correspond perfectly with the evolution of state machines. Now, quantum wavefunction processes could approximate a Turing machine, but such a process would be just that, an approximation. Further, if we assume that the math of such a physics involves something like indefinite integrals, then no Turing machine can perfectly solve the physics. Turing machines could approximate the underlying physical processes, but would not be interchangeable with the underlying physical processes.
In your comment from LessWrong, you state that:
>Instead [the most intriguing ideas that I've played around with] tend to involve certain signals in the insular cortex and reticular activating system and those signals have certain effects on decisionmaking circuits, blah blah blah.
It is important to note that the insular cortex and reticular activating system do not actually exist in such a physics, either. They are convenient abstractions that we might use to model and approximate the underlying physical reality, but they do not perfectly correspond with the underlying physical reality. The underlying physical reality would be a lawful and causal unfolding of a quantum wavefunction, in which there are no ontological entities or mathematical definitions that correspond to the insular cortex or reticular activating system.
Thus, any theory of valence built on the ontology of neuroscience or computation (in the sense of Turing Machines) is fundamentally flawed, because the ontology of such a theory is false, and does not correspond to underlying reality. Such a theory would be akin to phlogiston theory, which, while sometimes accurate, is fundamentally flawed because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics and relativity. Thus, a statement like "we feel good because of the computational properties of the X part of the brain" has the same truth-value as a statement like "substances which burn in air are rich in phlogiston". While both of these statements might sometimes produce accurate predictions, they do not accurately describe the underlying structure of reality.
The Symmetry Theory of Valence is interesting because it is one of the very few theories that is compatible with quantum wavefunction physics. It still might be wrong or flawed, but it is one of the few theories that is even in the running, because most others cannot be made compatible with such a quantum wavefunciton based physics.
The issue here is that your initial assumption seems to make your following remarks rather tautological. You say that the quantum wavefunction "describes" underlying reality, but then you seem to be treating it as *being* the underlying reality, and not just another potentially flawed model like phlogiston or the concepts of insular cortex or reticular activating system. And this while we can't even reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, much less have a "theory of everything" !
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by indefinite integrals, but position is an indefinite integral of velocity, and in quantum mechanics they are tied together (with mass times velocity combining into momentum) by the quantum of action h (aka Planck's constant) in the uncertainty principle.
And thanks to this, we can quantize position times momentum = action in the phase space, which then allows us to meaningfully measure information (spin having been nicely pre-quantized already).
And information (aka negative entropy) "unlocks" the arrow of time, which is kind of necessary if you want to do meaningful macroscopic physics... and also probably Turing machines, and this would be related to the problem you point out ?
I would hazard to guess that being only be able to define information in a subjective way (property of the probability distribution aka macrostate) is a pretty essential factor to be able to make a Turing machine : while you seem to be using an "universe-waveform viewpoint" (so distribution over a single microstate) approach in which the omniscient information it has about itself is maximum (entropy = 0), and more importantly, cannot change ?
Yes, the argument is sort of tautological, but it derives from the actual beliefs of most neuroscientists: if you ask a neuroscientsist what a brain is made out of, they will probably say neurons, other cells, intracellular matrix, etc. If you ask what those are made out of, they will probably say molecules. If you ask what those are made out of, they will say atoms. If you ask what atoms are made out of, they will probably say electrons, quarks, neutrons, etc. If you ask what these are made out of, you will probably get shrugs or references to quantum physics. The point is that most neuroscientists concede either: 1) neuroscience is based on the standard model (and thus quantum field theory), or 2) there is no consistent ontological basis for neuroscience. I have never heard a answer that falls outside of these two responses. My arguments above apply in both of these cases.
By indefinite integrals I mean that you cannot produce exact solutions to most quantum field theory equations (perhaps this will change if a new quantum theory is created, but I assume that this will hold). Since you cannot produce exact solutions to most quantum field theory equations, there is no Turing algorithm that exactly captures the evolution of a quantum wavefunction. This can be approximated, but approximations are not the same as true solutions.
My other point with Turing machines is that (as far as I know) they cannot be instantiated in a universe with something like the uncertainty principle. If various quantum effects can cause symbols on the tape of a Turing machine to change in a way not completely determined by the state machine, then it is not a Turing machine. Electrons (or whatever physically instantiates the symbols) spontaneously quantum tunneling to a different part of the device breaks the invariants of a Turing machine. You cannot guarantee that this will not happen in a quantum universe. You can make it very unlikely for such to happen, but you cannot guarantee that it won't happen. [This is important because most math analyzing Turing machines rely on them being able to perform infinite computation in limit. Given that a tape may need to preserve a symbol for say, 10^100 years to perform a certain computation, even infinitesimal chances of quantum things corrupting the tape become very likely.]
> Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can’t feel anything at all.
Then why is MDMA so euphoric?
It's strange, dopamine and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors like methylphenidate (Ritalin) seem to offer a subjective experience broadly similar to dopamine and norepinephrine releasing agents like dextroamphetamine. But serotonin releasing agents offer an experience completely incomparable to serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Do you know why this is? My guess (which might be total nonsense) is that it has something to do with where in the brain the serotonin is being released. Inhibiting reuptake will increase serotonin in areas where it is already being released a lot whereas a releasing agent could possibly cause it to be in an area where almost none was previously released
I don't think so. The other stuff is mostly releasing dopamine and norepinephrine. But MDMA is way more euphoric than dextroamphetamine which primarily releases those so the serotonin has to be playing a key role
I would guess that serotonin alone is enough for euphoria. MDMA primarily increases serotonin but also has noticeable effects on dopamine (and norepinephrine). MDAI is a lesser known drug that is similar to MDMA in that it increases serotonin, but it differs in that it negligibly impacts dopamine. MDAI is frequently anecdotally described as a less stimulating, but still euphoric, version of MDMA.
My guess is that all psychedelics make the brain more plastic and receptive, and MDMA adds the dopamine component so that what it's being receptive to is lots and lots of reward and happiness and excitement - but I agree that doesn't necessarily get you all the way to "love", and this is a very weak guess.
On the other hand, psychedelics are MDMA-ish and MDMA is slightly psychedelic? Is it just weak affinity to the other category's receptors, or some downstream mixing of signals from both pathways?
Also, many substances are somewhere in between, like the 2C-* family.
OK, this is still bugging me like crazy. How do psychedelics induce euphoria via the serotonin system? After a couple hours of research, my best guess (still very low confidence) is that the mechanism just doesn’t involve the forebrain (cortex & striatum) at all. Instead, I’m thinking about the hypothalamus and brainstem etc., which have lots of little bits and bobs that do idiosyncratic things, and sometimes respond to neurotransmitters in idiosyncratic ways. Maybe serotonin-related drugs act on one of those nuclei and we get euphoria that way?
The lateral habenula (LHb) seems like a prime candidate here. It’s involved in everything negative-valence, via being part of the pathway through which dopamine pauses happen. And it has lots of serotonin receptors, of various types in different places, including lots of psychedelic-relevant 5-HT2C's.
A teeny tiny hiccup for that theory is that its prediction has the wrong sign! Strong activation of 5-HT2C at LHb = very sad rats. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25661701/
Whoops!
But, hang on, actually, maybe my LHb theory doesn’t have the wrong sign after all?! Hear me out! The plot thickens! Psychedelics create a direct effect akin to an increase in serotonin (at least at certain receptors), but simultaneously they DECREASE the ENDOGENOUS production of serotonin in the raphe nuclei. (I think it’s the obvious explanation, i.e. that the raphe neurons have serotonin autoreceptors for feedback regulation of their own output.) So psychedelics have a direct effect, and an opposite-sign indirect effect, on the serotonin system. How do those balance out? It depends on how much endogenous serotonin normally gets delivered to an area. If an area normally receives a giant concentrated boatload of endogenous serotonin, then I figure it’s possible that it would (ironically) wind up with effectively less serotonin than usual when you’re on psychedelics. LHb indeed “receives dense projections from the 5-HT system”, according to one paper. I don’t know how dense is “dense”. But anyway, my LHb theory still has a slight chance of being correct, I guess.
Much less than 50% chance that this comment is on the right track, but it’s the least implausible thing I’ve thought of so far. :-P
Maybe check out Symmetry Theory of Valence? Rather than looking at whatever neurotransmitter systems and brain regions, look at how valence is directly implemented in consciousness.
I wonder if it's just that weird states of consciousness can feel euphoric because they're strange and exciting. There's a convincing-to-me theory (formulated by Matthew Larkum and others) that layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the neurocortex, and in particular the interaction between their two classes of dendrites (apical and basal) are the site of the stream of consciousness/subjective experience. (The apical dendrites basically integrate internal model data to create a "prior" while the basal dendrites integrate external sensory data to create "evidence.") It appears that 5-HT_2A receptors are heavily expressed in these layer 5 neurons. These same authors have theorized that dreams are created by a special neuromodulatory milieu during REM sleep that allows the top-down model/prior to take control without much feedback from the senses. Serotonergic drugs may produce a similar effect during wakefulness. This might be euphoric (assuming nothing bad happens!) just the same way play and games and silliness in general are euphoric.
One neuroscientific perspective on this is that in order for dopamine to track reward prediction *error* (RPE), it is logically necessary that some other piece of neural circuitry track reward prediction *per se*, often called "value." Those of us who think that dopamine is computing RPE on a moment-by-moment basis (the first derivative of value; see Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020) therefore generally also believe that some other part of the brain, especially the ventral striatum (aka nucleus accumbens) and perhaps also the prefrontal cortex, maintains an estimate of value that gets updated by dopamine. And indeed, there are dozens of papers reporting that neural firing in these brain regions correlate with value over and above RPE.
I think this explanation differs from the one you offered because rather than seek some other neuromodulator to account for the "companionate love” phase of a relationship, you can just consider that phase to be the psychological correlate of the brain's internal value estimate as it is instantiated in this cortical/striatal circuitry. Though I certainly wouldn't rule out other options, especially intracellular mechanisms in these areas, because neural firing on these very long timescales is dubious.
Lastly, on the abusive relationship point, you might be interested (or perhaps you already know) that BF Skinner famously observed that "variable ratio" reward schedules lead to greater responding/addiction than other kinds of schedules. I guess this is what you're getting at when you say, "Everyone has some weird function that doesn’t correspond to normal addition, and maybe for some people dating a person who gives good vs. bad signals exactly 50% of the time is the only way to get that function in the black." I would amend this slightly to say that some people are more sensitive to the volatility (which is very much a function of RPE directly), and others to the value itself (the integral of RPE).
I think it's fair to call the nucleus accumbens (NAc) the reward center, but not for the reason most people think.
Most people think this is the case because when you put subjects in an fMRI scanner and have them do tasks where they get reward or learn cues that are associated with reward, you robustly get RPE-related BOLD activity in the NAc, and only rarely/more weakly in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which contains the dopamine neurons that project to the NAc. So when you see those nice fMRI maps, the NAc is lit up in red. But the physiological basis of this fMRI signal is hotly debated (for example, it could represent primarily synaptic input rather than actual neuronal firing, especially in a GABAergic circuit like the striatum), and in single-unit recordings in mice, rats, and monkeys, it is unequivocal that dopamine neurons in the VTA show much more RPE signaling than the striatum.
That said, it is also true that (1) NAc neurons correlate strongly with value and also respond to some extent to rewards, predicted and unpredicted; (2) cocaine or amphetamine in the NAc (and another region of the ventral striatum called the olfactory tubercle), which dramatically elevate dopamine levels, elicit robust responses; and (3) in the context of the "liking vs. wanting" framework you allude to, Kent Berridge and others have argued that the NAc contains a "hedonic hotspot", along with closely linked regions like the prefrontal cortex and ventral pallidum. This is an operational definition meaning that when you infuse opioid receptor agonists into said region, the animals react with pleasure, and conversely if you lesion/block activity in these areas, they don't show these behaviors as much, or even start showing defensive behaviors.
This post uses money and luxury consumption as hypotheticals to model the brain's reward system. They are things we often think of as rewards, so intuitively fit the subject. I wonder, however, what the picture looks like when we focus on productive work, something many people spend most of their waking time doing.
Perhaps what Tyler Cowen calls The Production Function works (generically) due to interesting work providing unpredictable rewards frequently. When you start a project, perhaps your unconscious predicts a somewhat negative outcome. ("This project will be too difficult. You will never finish. You suck, loser!") You feel the weight of this pressure, but if you persevere and do your work you are rewarded by your pessimistic unconscious being pleasantly surprised. ("Holy shit! I can't believe you did that! I guess you don't suck after all!)
This could explain why hard work can be so rewarding regularly, and also why rewarding work often feels hard.
(1) the wife can experiment with telling the husband her likes, and seeing if she gets reward out of him doing the things she likes even though she had to ask for them. (It may help if she actively lets go of the world she hoped for, where he magically knows her likes without her having to tell him, because that world apparently doesn't exist.)
(2) the husband can try to pay more attention and develop a better model of his wife, that can predict that she wants flowers without her ever having said it explicitly. This may or may not be possible, depending on how predictable the wife's wants are and how good the husband is at forming models of other people.
Either way, when this issue comes up (and especially if it becomes a big enough issue that it's being brought to a relationship counselor), it's generally representative of the wife not feeling like her husband is trying hard enough/paying enough attention. So efforts on the husband's part to pay her more attention and actually update on his learnings will help, but she also may need to be reminded to notice his efforts and not expect him to read minds.
By the time you marry someone, you should have given them flowers at least once and noticed what their reaction was. Don't marry someone whose likes you are clueless about.
A failure to do nice small things for your partner is almost never a failure to understand the things your partner likes (surely you can think of something your partner likes?) but a failure of motivation; a failure to be running that little script in the back of your head that says "What nice thing can I do for my partner today?" Running that little script in your head is incredibly valuable for your relationship, but sometimes when life gets busy and hectic it's easy to forget. Remind yourself.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the relevance of gratitude. Gratitude is basically a way to keep alive the prediction of losing every good thing you have. It's a way to keep unpredicted reward alive.
Proust's great novel is basically on the theme of how habit voids all pleasures and how the object of desire never lives up to the expectation built in desire. His narrator is a bit like the man who can't find a companionate love; he feels passionate love only when it is sprung from the seed of outrageous jealousy. Happiness does seem to only arrive in unexpected, fleeting events.
Scott, I sure wish you had time to read that novel but at 3300+ pages I'm guessing you probably won't anytime soon.
Sounds to me like a sad and very common story of an unexamined projection. When the other fails to live up to an expectation, is that the fault of the other, or the one who formed that expectation in the first place? Great works of art are one way to look into this subject, writings of Jung and his school - the other.
I'm going to sound like a broken record, but this is in Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or. The two halves of the book each embrace one kind of happiness and eschew the other. Book 1 ("Either") starts with having to rotate between different kinds of aesthetic enjoyment to continue to feel happiness and escalates to having to be in an abusive relationship to feel anything at all, even for just one night. Book 2 ("Or") is a looong treatise on how that's not actually happiness, real happiness is a good, steady marriage and a prosperous, predictable life, and it's so boring barely anybody reads it all the way through.
I really dig the idea of a treatise revealing the Secret To Happiness which turns out to be too boring for anyone to read to its conclusion. That's wonderfully meta. I'm reminded of this altogether typical bit of Umberto Eco (from "Foucault's Pendulum"):
"You spend a life seeking The Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies life and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was -- full, dazzling, generous as every revelation."
Wow, that passage sounds like Kierkegaard could have written it. I read The Name of the Rose, maybe I should read more of his stuff.
Kierkegaard died just after spending the last of his money publishing a series of polemical pamphlets against the worldliness of the Danish Lutheran church. The title of the pamphlet series was The Moment. The decisive moment is a big deal for him. I can't say I understand it very well.
This feels like the archetypal SSC/ACX post: technical analysis of romance! Drugs! Psychiatry anecdotes! Prediction error! Speculative neuroscience! AI! Seven sections! (And that's all a good thing, to be clear.)
One thing that seems worth noting here is the intersection of behavioral neuroscience and plain old behaviorism: variable interval rewards are known to be the best way to maintain behavior, which of course fits with the whole point about predictable rewards' emotional value being abraded away. But if what you become accustomed to is the general level of good things (e.g. how much/how often your partner is nice to you) rather than the good thing itself, then that suggests the way to continue giving or getting emotional reward is (a) to invest in periodic special things - surprise flowers, vacations, etc. -rather than anything predictable, even if it's less time*improvement value than e.g. more comfortable furniture, (b) to structure your life in such a way that you experience more ups and downs, even if it's on average worse.
Of course this whole process of reasoning just ends up recapitulating cliches like "buy experiences, not things" and "variety is the spice of life", but whattaya gonna do.
One thing that might help in certain parts of this post is to split up the concept "prediction" into two different concepts, "visceral expectations" versus "intellectual predictions". "Visceral expectations" are related to valence, aversion, desire, sweating, goosebumps, all that stuff, whereas "intellectual predictions" are the things that you consciously believe.
I think that intellectual predictions can impact visceral expectations a little bit—more than zero—but definitely not completely. The two can stay discrepant. For example, if you've never done cocaine, and you read in a textbook that cocaine feels really intensely good, and you completely sincerely believe the textbook, then now you have a very strong (intellectual) prediction that cocaine feels good. But you still only a weak visceral expectation that cocaine feels good. So you don't suddenly start craving cocaine the way an addict does. Then maybe you actually try cocaine yourself, and NOW the visceral expectations regarding cocaine get strongly updated.
Anyway, I think the P of RPE is visceral expectations, not intellectual predictions.
When I was in graduate school, I was a facilitator for domestic violence batterers intervention psychoeducation groups. (A mouthful, I know). It was the California-mandated program for DV offenders. I did this for about 3 years, and had nearly 4000 clinical contact hours with this cohort.
After deciding that my preferred treatment modality was psychodynamic and I began using (mostly Kleinien) interventions, I started giving this spiel to the guys.
"You could walk into a room with 500 women. 499 of them would be mostly healthy, insightful well-boundaried, nice girls who would make wonderful supportive wives and mothers. Not perfect by any means, but they would be invisible to you. The one left would be a crazy borderline with all kinds of unhealthy personality traits and maladaptive life skills and the two of you would be attracted to each other on a subconscious level like flies on sh!t. Until you spend about 2 years in therapy figuring out what that is about (hint, its probably your mom) this pattern will continue until you die."
That's how I conceptualize your patient with the abusive wife. You pointed out that people have all kinds of rubrics that do not have to add the prediction/error equation to zero. Personality pathology and the way they interact in relationships account for a lot of that.
And yes, because those patterns are so difficult to dislodge, he is more or less doomed to a miserable life. Although, like you, I never say stuff like that to them.
I had a very .... difficult...crazy......tortured.. >crazy borderline with all kinds of unhealthy personality traits and maladaptive life skills and the two of you would be attracted to each other on a subconscious level like flies on sh!t. < mother.
I really don't like how victim-blamey this model is. While I'm sure some relationships that involve DV are the result of this sort of dynamic, surely there are also ones where the victim (at least at the beginning) was fairly healthy and well-boundaried and the abuser was just good at manipulating them out of that.
Also, I think the people with the decades-long relationships still having great sex are manifesting a low base-rate phenomenon wherein all the planets (which includes both parties developmental trajectories/personality traits, psychological growth over the lifespan and dumb luck) aligned and the passionate love lasted way longer than predicted. They just lucked out.
The problem is, our society tells us this lucky hand of the cards is something we should all aspire to and that you just have to scour the planet looking for your soulmate. When the correct response when you see it is just "wow. That is really cool that they found that. Good for them." The probability of finding it is like winning the lottery.
Or maybe they're simply good at sex and it's enjoyable for both of them? Since this sort of thing is the ultimate taboo, I'd expect most people to be both terrible at it and reluctant to admit it.
Maybe but it would be pretty hard to operatiobalize “good at sex/bad at sex” even without the taboo. Most people would tend blame the other person for the “bad sex” and good sex tends to be a function of the compatibility/chemistry between the two individuals. Once that chemistry dies for whatever reason, then we are back to the beginning.
But if these people like each other well enough otherwise such that they are willing to engage in other activities together and even presumably to compromise/adapt to their partners, then why does sex have to be excluded from these considerations? To me this is where the taboo part comes in, plain honest discussions of this are just not the done thing in the mainstream culture, and even if they were, the scope of compromise that people are willing to entertain varies widely and unpredictably.
I do agree with your point that when the absense of compromise/adaptation is the default, only people lucky enough to happen be compatible from the start end up having good sex long-term.
It's more that people get different things out of sex and have different wants. I wouldn't expect a perfect couple to be more perfectly compatible at sex than I would expect them to be perfectly compatible as tennis partners or cooperative crossword solvers or compatible kitchenmates, except insofar as average people have sex more often than they play tennis or solve crosswords or work together in a kitchen. When a spouse is a perfect partner at one of these things, you'll keep sharing that activity together your entire life. When the spouse isn't the best partner, you'll either give up the hobby or continue pursuing it with people who are better partners.
I think being a good/considerate lover is a small part of it. Being attracted to each other still is a bigger part. And an even bigger part IME is still actually valuing each other as people/partners.
Doesn’t hurt for one or both of you to have a higher libido too.
After a certain age, for many people sex becomes an optional cool thing to do instead of an all-consuming drive. This is a relationship feature, not a bug.
> I disagreed with the serotonin-focused explanation at the beginning of the post, but you can rescue it to be about dopamine vs. some other neurotransmitter (endogenous opioids are a popular choice). This would correspond nicely to the liking vs. wanting theory, even though technically they’re explaining different things (pleasure + motivation, vs. two different kinds of pleasure).
For what it's worth, dopamine mediating 'wanting' and opioids mediating 'enjoying' was exactly how it was taught to me back in undergrad, substantially earlier than the publication date on that link. If you're interested I can try and dig up the citation that was used at the time. (But no promises I'll be successful ofc!)
Been thinking for a while that happiness is in ratio to an imagined baseline. Becoming rich is compared to your baseline wealth, but is big enough to move the baseline. Whereas driving a Ferrari or eating cake on your birthday remains fun because it's compared to the baseline of the rest of your day where you're not driving or eating cake.
So the flower example would be the other way around; she's predicting flowers as being a natural part of a relationship, and the unpredicted absence of them is dropping below her baseline.
1. Wealth reduces dread. If you are cruising towards bankruptcy, it's hard to have a good time. Having some slack won't make you automatically happy, but your default state is more in the contentment range. Listen to the Dave Ramsey Show for gobs of examples.
2. Regarding specific neurotransmitters, maybe one should look into the timing. According to sources I have read over the years, serotonin helps with sleep. Bad sleep can lead to depression. Putting these two ideas together indicates some kind of serotonin booster near bedtime could be useful, but jacking up serotonin levels all day long could produce enough downsides to offset the benefits. From personal experience, a quarter gram of tryptophan near bedtime, or making a high starch/low protein meal my last meal of the day does indeed improve sleep.
3. For sustained highs, I had some good success with a variation on Guy-Claude Burger's instinctive eating regimen. Unlike Burger, I did cook my meat, but I got the rest of my calories from raw food's that tasted good unmixed. On such a diet, achieving meditative bliss was pretty easy. Getting enough calories, on the other hand, became difficult over time. And a mostly raw diet doesn't lend itself to a good social life. But further research in this area is worth pursuing. We eat a mostly artificial diet. Maybe much of our unease (and drug abuse) is an attempt to offset the accumulated effects of this unnatural diet. And like wealth reduces dread, a more natural diet might set our default state to something closer to what people call "happy."
"Any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward center” of the brain - the nucleus accumbens - monitors actual reward minus predicted reward."
This claim is way too strong.
What is correct:
Reward Prediction Error (RPE) is one of the main theories on what the reward center (nucleus accumbens NAc) does. There are many situations and experiments in which this explanation fits nicely.
What is also correct:
There are many situations in which RPE does *not* fit nicely. The discussion on what the reward center really does is far from settled.
I can highly recommend the paper "Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency" by Kutlu et al. from last year for a different opinion. It's really well written and contains great experiments. The authors suggest that the reward center does not represent RPE, but saliency. They summarize their work with the following four points:
- NAc core dopamine only mimics reward prediction error in select reward contexts
- RPE does not model dopamine release during negative reinforcement
- Dopamine signaling in the NAc core does not support valence-free prediction error
- NAc core dopamine tracks valence-free perceived saliency in all conditions
This paper will not be the end of the debate. But RPE is not the end of the debate either.
UPDATE: After reading the full post (great post!), I really have to find some time to re-read the study by Kutlu et al., put it next to the post, and see how the post aligns with their experiments. The result might be quite interesting.
>Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable...
No
You are completely missing the point.
You need to read “A Doll’s House” by Ibsen, or rethink it if you have.
Tl;dr. The issue is authenticity. If your proposed “wife” has any sensibility whatsoever she will recognize a gesture from the heart, just as she will reject an empty gesture. If she doesn’t have any sensibilities and you do then the flowers are a gift to yourself.
You have constructed a compelling narrative (which was fun to read) based on:
>My guess is: January 1, when you first hear you won, is the best day of your life...
Emphasis on, I GUESS.
In other words, this is no argument for a general case. My father was very fond of saying, “Assume the worst and you will never be disappointed.” Im not sure that’s really good advice but it does guard against “counting your chickens” prematurely. Some of us do, and some of us do not and some of us slide back and forth depending on our investment in the outcome; (a function of “priors”?) I don’t think there exists a general case for this process.
As for the rest, the timeline for processing somatic experiences is not to be thwarted. It can be reasonably swift or endless, depending on how one gets in the way or gets out of it. A deep attachment to another being can be nurtured by reason but not founded on it.
What is your relationship to planting a seed in the ground? I don’t think it is a different question. One can analyze the process thoroughly but in the end it takes its own time. The supply chain revolution has not yet taken over the human organism.
On a side note but for me important; Jean-Luc Goddard passed on yesterday. Few artists were as gifted as he when it came to exploring the no mans land between reason and motion. Imo of course...
Substance addiction, physiologically, is probably less about positive reinforcement & enjoyment and more about trying to achieve “mood homeostasis” and get to baseline.
The bit that seems blindingly obvious to me is that there's no single source of truth. Not in the "nobody knows exactly how it works" way, but in an active hedging, taking opposite sides on purpose way. There are lots of dimensions to succeed and fail on, many of which actively contradict each other (exercise burns calories and temporarily damages muscles! friends eat up emotional energy! desirability increases unwanted attention!).
You can't fully predict a future win, because there's no central prediction room responsible for all your happiness. There's a way that driving fast feels good, and a way that being understood feels good, and a way that money in the bank feels good, and they all operate off of different timescales + concerns. Distributed, antifragile, hedged.
IMO the rationalist community places disproportionate emphasis on central planning, in all forms (executive function in the brain, the Georgist tax law stuff, "if we could only agree on a definition everyone would get along").
I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors:
1. A "state prediction error" or general surprise signal from PFC (either directly or via pedunculopontine nucleus and related structures). This provokes phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area.
2. The amount and pattern of GABAergic inhibition of VTA dopamine neurons from NAc, ventral pallidum, and local GABA interneurons. At rest, only a small % of VTA DA neurons will be firing at a given time, and the aforementioned surprise signal alone can't do much to increase this. What CAN change this is the hedonic value of the surprising stimulus. An unexpected reward causes not just a surprise signal, but a release of endorphins from "hedonic hotspots" in NAc and VP, and these endorphins inhibit the inhibitory GABA neurons, thereby releasing the "brake" on VTA DA neurons and allowing more of them to phasically fire.
3. It also seems acetylcholine may independently influence dopamine release in NAc independently of what's going on in VTA. This is less important for our purposes here, but it may help explain why cigarettes are addicting despite smoking not being particularly pleasurable.
Simplifying from 1 and 2 above, the unexpectedness of a stimulus affects the phasic firing rate of VTA DA neurons, and the hedonic value of the stimulus determines how many and which VTA DA neurons are allowed to phasically fire.
Now, what does the released dopamine do? In PFC (via the mesocortical pathway), it draws attentional resources to the surprising stimulus and its plausible causes, gating out the processing of other, less relevant stimuli. Simultaneously, in NAc, it strengthens connections between PFC inputs and the endorphin-releasing cells, thereby wiring together the hedonic features of the reward and the sensory features of any cues predictive of it. This imbues the cue with the ability to release the GABAergic brake on VTA DA neurons all by itself. Phenomenologically, it results in us "liking" the cue as much (or nearly as much) as we like the reward (this is what allows, e.g., animal trainers to reinforce behavior with only the sound of a clicker that has previously been paired with food).
But once the brain learns that a reward is reliably predicted by a cue, the reward ceases to elicit a surprise signal. This means it no longer increases VTA DA neuron firing rate. It may still cause endorphin release and thus keep the GABAergic brake off, but if there's no surprise signal driving phasic firing, dopamine release will be minimal.
That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them. I don't think dopamine so much contributes a unique kind of happiness as it makes our happiness attention-grabbing, memorable, instructive, and motivating. *That* is what we lose when passionate love turns into companionate love.
The flipside of this is that we become very sensitive to unexpected *omissions* of reward. We take expected pleasures for granted as long as they keep coming, but woe betide anyone who suddenly threatens to take them away. This may add a certain kind of fragility to reliably pleasant relationships in the companionate love stage.
Abusive or otherwise volatile relationships keep partners engaged because they keep the good times unpredictable, thereby preserving their dopaminergic effects. Happiness on balance may be lower than in a more stable relationship, but partners over-learn from such happiness as there is, precisely because it is always surprising and thus significant.
But the physiological separability of the surprise signal and the pleasure signal suggests one may be able to keep a high baseline level of relationship bliss motivationally salient simply by being good to each other in surprising ways. So randomize (to an extent reasonable) gifts, dates, sexy times, vacations, and other fun things, along with their timing, and you should have at least some buffer against the decline of passionate love. Alas, this may be hard to do if your life is largely routinized by work, kids, or other commitments. It also needs buy-in from both partners or at least some degree of delegation to RNGesus.
I've been taking Adderall 5 days a week for almost a year now, and my experience is the opposite of what you describe:
It's still almost as euphoric and confidence-boosting as it was in the first week, but was only massively productivity-boosting for a week or two. Like, I've never been an organized person (yep, that's the ADHD) but in those first two weeks I cleaned and organized my entire house and caught up on tasks I have been putting off for literally years and it felt amazing.
Now most days it wakes me up and gets me a little more focused but only slightly more than a strong cup of coffee, but is still pretty euphoric and makes me feel important. (It also makes me talk people's ears off, not sleep or eat enough, and think everyone is even more of an idiot than usual, but I'll take what I can get given how depressed I was before I started taking it).
This is almost exactly what happened to me as well!
Adderall still makes me feel happier and more energized, but no longer has that almost-magical ability to make me choose to focus on one thing exclusively.
Regarding the two types of happiness, the one that disappears when it is expected and the one that does not, I think it would be interesting to list which experiences produce which type of happiness in different people. For example, for me personally, many experiences where the pleasure is direct, corresponds to a sensory experience, continue to be almost entirely present even when they are entirely predictable. For example, I love to go for walks in nature, but when I'm not on vacation I don't have enough time to go hiking. I therefore often go on the same little walks around my house, in an environment I know by heart, but they remain wonderful. Same thing for food, I derive a lot of pleasure from food that I like, even if the taste is totally expected.
On the other hand, I feel that I get little pleasure from things that I know intellectually are positive, but that I don't experience directly, or rather that I don't experience in a salient way. For example, I consider myself reasonably well off financially (even though by American standards I'd be pretty poor!) but since this manifests itself more as a set of small things that I don't notice too much, rather than as salient experiences, I feel like I don't get much out of it.
Would that kind of distinction contribute to differences between happiness that can be predicted out or not for you as well?
They basically describe short term/state affect in terms of current prediction error rates. Based on those rates, one will build up long term estimates over future prediction error rates (i.e., how much control will I have over my environment and how well will I be able to predict it). The authors think of mood as those long term priors and it maps quite well on concepts like learned helplessness and self-efficacy.
It bugs me a little bit that this is still build on the assumption "maximum controllability/predictability = maximum positive affect" and therfore ignores the darkroom problem, but I guess you can add the reward of learning to the basic model.
You know how Buddhism talks about attachment being the cause of suffering? Attachment to a partner, to money, comfort etc. I'd describe attachment as a kind of emotional reliance - the inability to accept that your object of attachment might go away (or has already left as in the example with the ex).
Attachment is related to expectation but it is not the same. You can expect something and still appreciate it without taking it for granted. You can expect something else to be missing and be devastated about its absence. Part of meditation training is to learn to disentangle expectation, planning and goal-oriented behaviour from attachment. Still, according to scripture even the Buddha felt bereavement when his favourite disciples died. It's complicated.
Did you pick winning the lottery as an example here, due to the trend of lottery winners ending up no better off/much worse off in the long run? It really does seem to uniquely(?) mess people up, as far as Unexpected Good News goes. I suppose selection effects are a part of it - those who play the lotto or otherwise gamble have revealed preferences for risky low-ROI behaviours, perhaps that generalizes to other decision-making - but maybe there's just a natural limit on how hard one can update. A sort of Law of Large Evidence thing, where a gigantic update all at once (in either direction) just kinda...breaks some people.
(That example also sounds like taking a lump-sum payment instead of an annuity, which is unfortunate. You're already too busy to spend newfound money, and thus don't need it right away; make the financially smarter choice!)
The 50/50 Patient: well, that was me, not too many years ago. I'm sure each such abusive relationship is unhappily compelling in its own unique way. In my case, it wasn't really about being hooked on __unpredictable__ reward. More like...if you see the same person at -50 and +50, then that's a total delta of 100? And most people just never show that much potential for improvement (or decline). A certain kind of idealistic martyr sees someone like that, and thinks, "I can fix that, I can give them the support and nth chances they need to be at +50 permanently".
It didn't go well.
So I guess it was a case of, expecting a reward of "up to +100", way bigger than I had any right to in ordinary people, and chasing that huge payoff in a sort of Pascalian madness? No matter how many times reality disappointed. Some Hail-Mary type bets on people (especially ones you love!) are just hard not to make, because on the off chance they succeed...well. I guess it's like winning the interpersonal lottery. Skinner boxes are bad, whether they're games or people.
Last year I was lucky in that I earned around 5M USD in selling a start up.
I remember in the week before the transaction I could get almost euphoric and giddy thinking about about the money and by average happiness level definietely increased.
When the money arrived in my bank account however, it was almost anticlimaxic - it barely had any impact on my mood. Now, 1 year later my general happiness level was not noticably high than pre-5MUSD - that is, until I quit my job.
This definitely had a great impact on my happiness level - not because I hated or even disliked my job, but having complete ownership of my days really feel great. This is also mentioned in The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel - one of the very few lifestyle changes which may be achieved through wealth which correlates with an increased degree of happiness is being able to wake up and knowing you can do whatever you want this day.
I'm going to suggest that the debate is flawed from the start. Sorry. My suggestion is that speculating on the causes of happiness is a classic mismatch between the vague holistic happiness and the deterministic reductive sciences of the brain.
You can either redefine the type of happiness to an explicit subdivision that may be amenable to reductive analysis or treat happiness as a given and use epidemiological methods and social sciences to draw conclusions.
Not so much separate magisteria as two maps drawn to widely different scales, each of use, but inadequate at capturing the full terrain.
There is a fairly glaring hole in the question of "what causes happiness that isn't cancelled out by prediction" which is, and I can't believe I even have to say it, meaning. A sense of purpose, a feeling of being necessary, a "why".
So why isn't that cancelled out by prediction? Well, because you never reach the point of comparing expectations with outcome because it's never finished. A volunteer at a soup kitchen goes to bed after work knowing they're expected to come in the next day and do it again. Nearly all "meaning" is actually reducible to some kind of outstanding obligation, something you personally have to do that no one else can do, and that you'll feel bad about not doing. It's never done in the way that a paycheck you earned gets cashed or the meal you've ordered arrives.
What if all happinesses can be canceled out by prediction but certain things are more difficult to build a working model of.
For the Ferrari example, on delivery day you might not get any additional pleasure from the title being in your name. But you still get the new unpredictable experience of driving a Ferrari. I could also imagine a pro driver not getting any pleasure from the experience.
Is it even possible to predict the experience of using heroin for the first time? What does your model predict in the situation where you know with certainty that you’ll be forcibly injected with heroin in one month?
For long lasting happy relationships, maybe it’s impossible to completely model your companions behavior. Or empathy + inability to predict companions prediction error.
This makes a lot of sense. One thing that makes well-designed objects such a joy to use is that they continue functioning well even in unusual circumstances that you didn't know what it would mean to work well in. I assume that something like this is what distinguishes various models of high end cars.
Same with a wonderfully compatible person - they continue producing new delights even in ways that you didn't recognize. I've been with my partner for 17 years, and we still have conversations where we learn new things about each other, in addition to the ones that we enjoy in predictable ways.
Assuming unpredicted reward sends a bigger bolus of neurotransmitters, but intermittently, it would depend how frequently you encounter unpredicted rewards. I would still go for a novelty over predictability in the long haul, but slow and steady predictable rewards are the bread and butter that keep you going.
"In contrast, on February 1 you have $1 billion more than on January 31, but because you predicted it would happen, it’s not that big a mood boost."
From personal experience, I disagree. Here's what I recall about selling a property a few years ago:
(1) When the house went under contract, then passed inspection, I was happy knowing that I'd be getting a lot of money at closing in a few weeks. I even got about 3% more than my realtor thought I should ask for, so I felt vindicated.
(2) When the money actually hit my bank account and I saw a six-figure deposit, I was _ecstatic_ to the point that I kept logging in to online bank all day just to stare a balance that was at least ten times greater than it had ever been before. Felt freaking awesome.
I feel like what’s being missed here is polyvagal theory and understanding if/when folks are chronically activated or frozen (as opposed to regulated). I’m thinking about the works of Stephen Porges, Peter Levine, and Gabor Mate off the top of my head. For instance, poor people are more likely to be chronically activated or frozen than rich people. The longer / more often your system is dysregulated, the harder is it to feel the peace & happiness of regulation (and the more likely you fall prey to disease). It’s not that we all have one mode with any possible cocktail of neuro chemicals. It’s that we have at least three modes, operating in phylogenetic order, each with its own tendency of chemicals to produce. Our nervous systems sort of run on familiarity— what kept me alive in the past will likely to keep me alive in the future. And that’s how you get the bf preferring the chaotic gf, it’s likely what his system is familiar with. That’s the exact kind of scenario that somatic therapies help with. I’m also suspicious of NRE. Some of it is the euphoria is of newness, but I’ve seen folks call a trauma bond NRE (again similar to the example of the bf returning to the gf). Like watching my friends with people-pleasing co-dependent patterns tell me they feel NRE, while basically explaining how their co-dependency clicks with the other person’s light narcissism…and then I point them to materials to learn the different between rescuing & co-regulating.
I know I didn’t really dig into how this pertains to predictability & happiness. I do think my point still holds; I’m just a till waking up. I often wonder why I never see discussions of up/down-regulating or polyvagal theory here. Is it too new of a branch of psychology to be taken seriously here?
"Poly people talk about 'new relationship energy' - if you start a relationship with a new person, you will be passionately into them for a few months, usually at the expense of all your other relationships, before settling back down again. Most poly advice books will give you tips for managing it, which mostly boil down to for God’s sake, don’t take your feelings seriously and deprioritize all your other relationships because this new one is so much better."
This advice works for literally everyone who's in that heady early stage of romance. I am reminded of what @AuronMacintyre said on Twitter: "Periodically progressives reverse engineer healthy sexual behavior and act like they've discovered Atlantis."
I don't know; to me, reward/happiness is probably just "MOR-activation". Or that's a large component, at least.
I feel amazing from opioids — I remember the first time I ever tried them: I didn't expect anything, didn't know what they did really, just took some pills because a guy on the Internet said "hey those pills your parents have can be fun, try them".
Started reading a book; by about an hour later, I had completely forgotten I had even taken anything. Began thinking to myself "wow, I fucking love this book; it's *amazing!*" "Wow, I'm as happy and content as I've ever been... I just *love* life!" "I'm so excited to try this and do that and improve the other! There are so many cool things to do I can barely stand it!"
...and suddenly, I realized: *could this be the pills?*
It was a revelation. I still remember it vividly. I still remember a thousand opioid experiences vividly, and pine for them now that I'm "clean".† I was depressed since as early as I could remember — a "strange, brooding child" my aunt called me, which my mother has still not forgiven her for, heh — and nothing worked... until opioids.
They changed my life and gave me great pleasure and success until I lost my legal source of them and had to start buying on the street. Then all my energy went to finding more and funding more, and dealing with withdrawal due to unreliable connects/no money to buy, and I went downhill fast.
Amphetamine is nice and it combines very well with opioids, but I do not get the same sort of happiness from it at all. I can still be unhappy with amphetamine; the euphoria only works if I'm already content (or on bupe — see below). Neither am I content or happy so much as excited, on amphetamine.
On the other hand, opioids are pure joy. What the relationship is between endogenous opioid peptides and dopamine and happiness, I'm not sure.
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†(Without buprenorphine, I'd never be able to stand it — I cave instantly every time I try to go off; I'm fine with staying on it forever, though: it also cured my insomnia and depression when *nothing* else did, not even when I managed to convince my psychiatrist to try amphetamine and alprazolam together...)
(That *was* actually helpful — but not as good as even a partial agonist like bupe.)
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My experiences with both amphetamine and opioids are different than described in Scott's post, though.
I have not lost euphoria with either one, ever — some dose escalation was required with amphetamine, but a week off resets my tolerance like I never had any. I don't know if I was just made to abuse drugs or if other people are doing it wrong somehow (i.e., needless dose escalation just to "feel more"; losing sleep and eating poorly; etc., tend to make it worse)...
I dunno, maybe I *was* made to be more chemical than man. I fucking love drugs. The only thing that's ever made me as excited, interested, and happy as drugs in general is history.
(And — finding my dream partner; I was actually just talking to her yesterday about something similar to this post: unlike I always hear tell of, I haven't lost any happiness at — or desire for, heh — being with her, and it's two years on. Knock on wood, man, knock on wood.)
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Hmm. I *also* am still super happy every day about having money even though it's been a long time since I got this job. I mean yes, I want more, but it *still* feels amazing to me to be able to just *buy food without considering which type of apple is cheaper by a few cents.*
...Maybe some are immune to the hedonic treadmill?! Other probable-autists feel the same, by any chance?
I'd also like to come out in support of wireheading... perhaps unsurprisingly, heh.
Scott said he wouldn't want to wirehead or use opioids, and this appears to be the common position; however, I've never understood it... What is better than pure happiness and pleasure? You can still do other stuff, if you want: I was immensely successful at university, on opioids. I actually loved class and schoolwork and learning!
I mean, it all went to hell fairly quickly when I lost my easy, cheap, legal supply (friendly doctor, whom I could never figure out: did he know? was he crooked, or just very understanding?); but still. That's not an indictment of the *practice*, only of being dependent on unreliable and expensive black markets.
I'm diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, and while I don't think I'm completely immune to the hedonic treadmill, I have a comment above about how Adderall has not stopped being euphoric for me after nearly a year of taking it 5 days a week.
Other data points (in both directions):
* My most serious relationship fell apart because he moved away and the long distance caused him to lose interest but not me
* That being said I have been the one to lose interest as well. It has seemed to me to be because I actually learned new information about the person, but that could be confirmation bias - maybe I lost interest for neurochemical reasons first and then looked for justifications.
* I come from a lower-middle-class background but have been upper-middle-class my whole adult life, and still get a decent amount of euphoria when I remember that or treat myself to nice things. I do think I'm a bit unhealthily addicted to shopping and splurging, but I don't think the effect is treadmilling much if at all.
* I definitely am getting less and less out of MDMA every time I do it even though the experiences are months-to-years apart, and it's hard to avoid chasing the high of the first time.
* Scott had a previous post where he said that the first bite or two of food is enjoyable but after that he feels like he's just driven to keep eating even though he's not enjoying it, and I didn't relate to that at all, it's usually enjoyable the whole time for me
* The novelty of a new habit or routine does tend to wear off pretty quickly and so I pretty much don't ever stick to them
Maybe this is due to the combination of diagnoses? The autism making me enjoy things more genuinely but the ADHD making novelty wear off quickly?
Particularly the first part of this article reminded me quite a bit of video games. I've experienced a number of times that, when I hear about a video game that will come out in the future and spend a lot of time building up hype for it, I'm going to have a lot of fun with it still, but the fun will end up feeling kind of average... or more accurately, expected.
But when I try out a video game that I basically didn't hear of before or had already accepted might not be good, and then realize that it's fun, that experience will seem much more intense and will stick with me for much longer. The unpredicted reward is stronger.
It's really made me agonize over being exposed to trailers, previews, demos and whatever else before a game comes out. I enjoy the hype, but I know that I will ultimately enjoy the game less because of it.
"Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can’t feel anything at all."
This reminds me of a question I've wondered about: how does MDMA work? The description on Wikipedia seems to mainly say that it increases serotonin, but obviously it's much more enjoyable than SSRIs.
If we're talking about predictive coding, we need to take into account the layer of the prediction. Your deeper models, which have a long time-horizon, predict you'll get cake on your birthday, so there's no huge shock to them. But the surface-level models, which are trying to predict what you're going to see/hear/taste seconds from now, don't predict "cake" until you've been chewing for a second (which is why the first bite tastes the best!)
A lottery giving me a million dollars I would I think experience how you describe. A lottery giving me a billion dollars would actually fill me with a massive weight of responsibility and fear of fucking up. My upbringing and family structure have given me tools to handle a million dollars, but a billion dollars feels like civilization-level resources to me.
I feel like that "lasting happiness" thing might have something to do with the perceived size of your available action space, rather than the reward associated with any particular action. That is, maybe simply knowing that buying a Ferrari or traveling to Italy or whatever is on the list of things you *could* do if you wanted is a stable source of happiness, even if you never bother to actually do it. Hence why rich people tend to be happier than poor people (because having money means there are more things available to do). Possibly, this would suggest that "good" relationships versus "bad" relationships could be characterized by whether you perceive your partner(s) as expanding versus limiting the activities available for you to do.
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Something I've noticed in trying to prod simple neural networks into playing video games properly is that it seems to be very easy for them to get "stuck" in one place—Mario standing perpetually at the starting location, or walking pointlessly into a solid wall forever. Basically, if the inputs the network is getting never change, then the output never changes either. Whereas a human in that situation would probably start randomly mashing buttons pretty quickly (and most of the time, make some kind of progress as a result). I kind of wonder if biological brains developed a "boredom" signal specifically to avoid that failure mode. In other words, they either assign negative utility to unchanging inputs, or they assign positive utility to actions of any kind.
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Two people walk into a bar. The third one ducks.
Jokes frequently have this structure where there's a "setup" that establishes a pattern, and then a "punch line" that initially appears to break the pattern, but becomes predictable once you re-interpret the setup in a different way. I think you can see similar stuff happening in music (with call-and-response melodies, or with main theme/variation structures in longer pieces), and with game level design (introducing a simple mechanic, and then building increasingly complex variations on it).
So that makes me think that that this "surprising at the time, but predictable in retrospect" quality of experiences is particularly stimulating to the human brain's reward mechanisms, more so than either completely predictable or completely random input.
The first one sounds like a recipe for decision fatigue, which makes people profoundly unhappy. You need to be very self-driven, and stick to your commitments, to enjoy that kind of situation.
My experience with ritalin is that it did help me with concentration but also made me extremely angry. Like, very very angry, to the point that I could end up killing someone. It also made me think about sex all the time, like, really, all the time. I was either angry or thinking about sex. I had to stop taking them and it was very difficult, I did it gradually over six months.
I think the enjoyment from the Ferrari/cake is just another type of prediction error. You presumably don't eat cake often, so when eating food, you "predict" a blander flavor. The cake's sugariness relative to this prediction is the prediction error."
So I wouldn't call this "prediction error" vs "predicted hedonism" but instead maybe "'higher order' prediction error" vs. "'lower order' prediction error". Although this "higher-" vs. "lower-order" distinction may be vague, I think it is close to something meaningful. I see it as prediction errors corresponding to, effectively, different areas of the brain (or just different brain representations).
As someone who has recently undergone a bout of Serotonin Syndrome, I can tell you that maxing out your Serotonin levels very much does result in you feeling something (those things being confusion, nausea, insomnia, brain zaps, tremors, and general sense of doom).
> addicted to someone who had a 50-50 chance of being adoring or terrible at any given time, just because half the time you get positive prediction error out of it, and you’re able to feel anything at all.
(...) She may be the song that summer sings
May be the chill that autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day
She may be the beauty or the beast
May be the famine or the feast
May turn each day into a heaven
Or a hell (...)
-- Charles Aznavour, "She"
I never thought of it that way before, but could it be that Aznavour had long been familiar with the joys of a liaison with a BPD person?
Re: "TurnTrout argues this won’t happen, at least for the current paradigm of AIs. If they didn’t learn to hack their reward system in training, they’re not going to want to do it in deployment, even if they are smart enough to know that it would work."
Isn't the crux of the inner alignment / mesa-optimizer problem precisely that you don't know whether an AI has learnt to hack its reward system in training, because you don't know what it's actually learned? And/or that what the AI thinks it's actually being rewarded for may well not be what *you* think it's being rewarded for.
I know almost nothing about AI or ML, but from the tiny bit I do know, which could be totally wrong, I find a lot of the conversation around it to be overly reliant on metaphor and prone to personification. I object to the word 'reward' as used in the AI context; the reason the AI does not attempt to seek reward/change its reward function after training is because an AI (currently) cannot be 'rewarded' in any meaningful sense of the word. If I have a manual computer designed to calculate tide tables and I adjust the various parts to get more and more accurate results, I can call that adjustment the computer updating in response to its reward function but obviously, that is a bad metaphor and not actually a description of what is happening. In the same way, GPT does not know happiness, satisfaction, or fulfillment, no aspect of GPT is even capable of being rewarded or wanting anything. I suspect AI don't even 'hack' their reward function, they just do random shit and sometimes a person tells them they did the right thing when they did not actually do the right thing, and they update accordingly and start going down the faulty path with more and more frequency until somebody notices and writes a breathless article about how their AI is hacking its own brain. This is super late so I doubt I will get any engagement but like I said I have only the most surface-level understanding of this stuff so I might be totally wrong, but from what I do know the above seems correct to me.
> The wife (yes, it’s usually the wife) who complains that the husband never gets her flowers. Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable.
I don't think that's quite the mechanism here; it's more of a "it's the thought that counts" situation. You want your partner to get you flowers because they want to, not because you nagged them. The unpredictability is certainly a factor as well, but I would guess that the motivation for getting the flowers is the main difference.
The broader point about predicted reward makes some intuitive sense to me and tracks with a lot of my own experiences with ADD, but I'm not sure that the lottery example really works here. People value money because it predicts their ability to acquire future goods and services, not because they care about it in of itself. Going from January 1st to February 1st doesn't seem like a big deal because you have not received any actual reward yet--you're just updating your prediction of your chances for living a billionaire lifestyle from something like "99%, unless the lottery was somehow lying or mistaken" to something like "99.9999999999%, unless the entire monetary system collapses this month".
I think there's some degree of conflation here between happiness that arises from novelty and surprise--the discrepancy between predicted happiness and experienced happiness that you noted--and happiness that that arises not because of anything you're currently experiencing but because it signals the likelihood of a future reward. Money is one case here, and the example of receiving compliments from a partner seems like another. Compliments are valued because they signal a person's interest in or care for you and also provide external validation that something about you is perceived positively by others. The 1st compliment you receive from a partner dramatically improves your evaluation of how much they care for you and/or how attractive you are which in turn signals future rewards like sex, affection, etc., while the 100th doesn't provide you with any new information and so doesn't signal anything. You also probably wouldn't be made that much happier by hearing a blind nun compliment how attractive you are.
> a lingering kind of happiness which can be enjoyed even after prediction error has been corrected. What explains this pattern?
I feel like everyone here is missing at least one significant facet to this: predicted alternative scenarios and their expected likelihood. The happiness reward would be actual outcome relative to the predicted next-most-likely alternative outcome(s) (i.e. what would have happened today if today hadn't happened the way it did). For example, maybe someone fully expects to get an X% raise at the end of the year and then gets an X% raise on time as expected, but their feelings may differ based on how they think it likely could have alternatively gone -- either happy because they feel like the alternative was probably that the raise would have been lower, or unhappy because they feel like the alternative was probably that the raise would have been higher.
Considering this perspective, compassionate love might be a shift from something like "if tonight I wasn't dating this person, I might have been dating that other person" to something like "if my spouse wasn't healthy and happy with me today then I'd probably be unhappy in an alternative day". Or for the couple which is instead heading towards divorce, "if my spouse and kids weren't weighing me down with responsibilities, I'd be luxuriating in foreign travel" or whatever. It's a change in the day-to-day predicted/expected alternative to what is actually happening.
One can also identify failures of this mode of happiness. For example, the person who despite performing and earning reasonably well in their day job is having a midlife crisis about how they should have been a best-selling author (an alternative prediction error -- that is very much not a likely alternative to the life they lead today). Or the insecure person who remains perpetually surprised and thereby pleased that they found a happy marriage (also alternative prediction error -- they likely would have found someone else eventually; prediction error doesn't always have to be subjectively bad for the predictor).
> say you can never predict away all reward
I suppose that is possibly one way to say it: you can never predict away the difference between what actually happened and what might have happened instead. But I feel that is critically missing *why* someone can never predict away all reward: people always imagine alternatives to the past, present, and future.
> This also reminds me of the bane of relationship counselors everywhere: the wife (yes, it’s usually the wife) who complains that the husband never gets her flowers. Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable. If the husband had gotten the wife flowers before she had asked, she would have been delighted. If he’d tried the same thing a second time, it wouldn’t have counted; she would have already predicted it and factored it in.
This reminds me of The Last Psychiatrist's blog and his book, Sadly, Porn. From what I understand, his answer to "I've done something that's supposed to feel good but I don't feel good, what should I do?" was "Fake it, you're not doing those things for yourself but for everyone else." This is the same as "Fake it until you make it.", but without the "until you make it" part. Here, "making it" would be "starting to develop companionate love".
I haven't read much about the book online so I'm not sure how obvious all of that is, but considering that the inability to feel companionate love can lead to people getting addicted to destroying their lives (and, in the process, the lives of the people around them), I can understand why he sees it as such a big problem.
Regarding reward prediction and cancellation vs hedons, if a person perpetually underestimated cake they would likely enjoy it more. If they overestimated it they would enjoy it less. It might be a major temperamental difference in people whether they overpredict or underpredict but it seems like a secret to happiness would be underprediction of things that are good for you and overprediction of things that are bad for you. If in some internal prediction model your wife is "adequate" she may consistently beat your expectations and bring you genuine pleasure. [no way for this plan to backfire.] [also quick note that this may also explain a certain type of depression that is stereotypically especially prevalent in idealists on the left.]
Curiously, from a cultural standpoint, we spend a lot of time talking about how things that are (culturally) bad are negative in all aspects (premarital sex, drug use) and encouraging all aspects of good things "eat your vegetables they're delicious." This suggests initial/cultural reward compensations for these things may be opposite of desired: each of us may discover individually that actually, surprisingly, we LOVE heroin and premarital sex and broccoli is quite bitter. If instead our priors for heroin are that we will absolutely love it and that it's positively life changing then somewhat paradoxically our experience with it could somewhat bland. Finding a stable cultural viewpoint that wouldn't cause wild swings would be an important goal, and seems like it would mostly involve truth-seeking.
One of the reasons that driving the Ferrari feels better than predicted may be that the texture of actual, lived experience is much, much higher-dimensional than any possible prediction. Any lived experience is so richly textured, fractally complex that the prediction couldn't come close to capturing it.
I imagine that in the moment when you are sitting in the seat of your new Ferrari and driving around town you are overall, globally inclined toward finding positive sensation and behold, you find in your experience of the leather on your back, the wind on your skin many unpredicted (and unpredictable by any fidelity prediction), positive sensations.
My (very shallow) understanding of jhana meditation practice is to manually jump start the global inclining toward positive sensation then finding, even in sitting still in a black room, a ton of pleasure in just being in your body.
Thinking Fast and Slow talked about pleasure registering change in condition, not absolute condition. So if you were out in the rain and cold and found shelter from the wind behind a rock, it would feel incredibly pleasurable, but the pleasure would die down eventually and you'd be motivated to go look for something more permanent.
I feel like good relationships might be like getting into and out of a house. When you first get into the house, it will feel amazing, and when you leave it will be miserable and cold, but while you're in the house you adjust to it and just feel comfortable. But that doesn't mean it's all the same. Being in the house really is better, and the feelings during transition are evidence.
So I'd say you want to pursue pleasure that are indicating real positive change in your condition, and be careful of pleasures that are disconnected from that.
Also, because people are so complicated and dynamic, I don't think you can ever fully get used to them.
Suppose I know a friend (or maybe friendly superintelligence) has prepared something nice for me. They have given me many nice things before, so I have a good idea of the statistical distribution, yet I have no idea what this particular nice thing is. Do I get the unpredictable reward.
Why we can know that our partner died and yet call out for them to make us a cup of tea? Because declarative memory is different from implicit, and more specifically procedural memory. If I've been getting cups of tea from my partner for 5 years, it is as much a part of my procedural memory as tying my shoelaces or commuting to work. I do each without thinking. Declarative and implicit memories reside in different parts of the brain, form and update differently. Putting "my partner is no longer here" into declarative memory has only small effect on procedural memory and it takes a long time (~ a year) for it to update fully through repeated experience of the world with my partner being absent from it.
I tried using this mindset to make myself happier for a long time. One example I tried: flipping coins after going to the gym to randomly decide whether I'd reward myself with some new socks. It didn't really work. What made me happier in the end was starting antidepressants and therapy. I think it is possible to be sustainably happier, but that it takes some work to change yourself to get there.
A part of the "extra kind of happiness" is forgetting.
Our predictions of rewards involve forming stronger connections between certain neurons, and the strength of these connections gradually degrades over time. Those of y'all who are familiar with spaced-repetition learning tools, picture the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, or look up the image for a refresher. Notice that forgetting still gradually occurs even after frequently-reinforced learning, it just happens slowly. The fact it still happens makes good sense from a high level "How should a brain be designed?" level, since in a changing environment you'd want it to stop spending resources on outdated adaptations.
In a machine learning context, there's a conceptually similar technique called regularization used to avoid overfitting. The kinds of regularization I have in mind (e.g. ridge, lasso) involve shrinking coefficients (whether positive or negative) back toward zero. My analogy here is that the connections between neurons that get built up by repeated rewards are strong in a way similar to large coefficients. When you stop getting the old rewards but life goes on, then for your brain to avoid overfitting to outdated info, it lets the connections physically degrade back toward zero.
So here's my null(-ish) hypothesis about what's happening with limerence versus companionate love.
For a new happy couple, the complex joys of togetherness involve learning a lot, i.e. forming and dramatically strengthening a lot of new connections. There's a little forgetting too, but learning dominates early on. Over time they'll approach an equilibrium (unless they're chaotic like the addictive girlfriend in the post) where the forgetting and the relearning are balanced.
For a long term happy couple, not much forgetting will happen, e.g. overnight while they sleep. But a little will! And that creates a little gap between predicted reward and actual reward, for an ongoing drip drip drip of happiness. It's not the flood they had at first, but it's still nice. That's the happiness of companionate love; it's the same kind of happiness as early romantic love, it's just a difference of degree rather than kind.
There are some related phenomena that fit nicely. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder": happy couples that are forced apart by fate often experience joyous reunions, bringing a bit of the old flame back to their companionate lives. (And conversely, countless couples who lived together and worked from home 24/7 during the pandemic experienced a lot less happiness from their companionship during that time.) Couples who travel or try new activities together also often feel the companionship lit with new sparks of intense love as they learn new ways of being together. And the romantic importance of anniversaries and holidays fits as well, since though they are perfectly predictable consciously, there's a whole year gone by between for forgetting to occur.
What if we considered that even the most predictable gain gave us an unpredictable felt reward (often more than a top-down reward following the rule of hedonic adaptation). A felt reward that fluctuates based on our unconscious needs at the time, which in turn derive from our other recent experiences (e.g. seeing an old friend can be surprisingly pleasant after a tough week) We are constantly creating conditions that we believe will create our happiness, and wait to see if it will work out well. This is what keeps me going. And you?
This reminds me of three books. Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul, Aspiration by Agnes Callard, and Epiphanies by Sophie Grace Chappell. All at least touch on the difficulty of using expected utility calculations to decide whether to change your utility function (putting it in terms relevant here).
Subconscious prediction errors giving rise to emotions, it slots nicely into my (admittedly vague) recollection of arousal/valence, if we assume prediction errors lead to heightened arousal.
>So how come predicting you would get the money mostly cancels out the goodness of getting the money, but predicting you would get the Ferrari/dinner doesn’t cancel out the goodness of the Ferrari/dinner?
On March 1st, other people know for sure that you have money. On Feb 1st, other people, your neighbours may know - but not really sure. Perhaps on Apr 1st, it may not matter that much. There is phase transition on Jan 1st and Mar 1st.
Long-time lurker and fan, Scott. I'm going to do something I shouldn't and comment on the one big thing I disagree with, rather than the many things that made me nod my head.
> "It points out that AIs are not, technically, “trying to get reward”. You can prove this is true because (as far as I know), most modern AIs only get reward during training. Then you deploy them and they keep doing stuff, even though there is no way to get reward in the deployment environment. It’s fair to describe this as “doing things like the things that got them reward in the past”, but not as reward-seeking."
If AIs only learn from rewards during training, that is simply because whoever built the system of training and deployment designed it that way. It's not at all inevitable or structurally necessary to AI.
AIs can also keep learning during deployment; alternatively, the ML practicioner may deploy an AI model, record the errors it produces, use those errors to train a clone of the model in parallel, and then swap the new model in. Learning during deployment by interacting sequentially with an environment is called "online learning."
Having trained and tested deep RL models against lots of complex environments for three years in my last startup, I will say that online learning is both useful and necessary for AI to produce value in many industries.
There is no reason to think that AIs cannot recognize reward and assign credit to state-action pairs in real-time while deployed. They can and many do. This is not the future. It is one version of the present. (Another version of the present is training an AI model offline on a dataset, and then deploying that model without giving it the ability to learn.)
I hope it's clear that enabling AI models to learn in real-time, or at least be updated frequently based on their prediction errors in deployment, is essential to making them useful. Decision-making technology such as AI which is built to ignore a changing reality does not strike me as ideal.
> "This is an important distinction! One big concern in AI alignment is that AIs will learn to hack their own reward systems (ie wirehead), and devote their energy to implementing such hacks (which produce super-high reward) instead of doing their assigned tasks (which only produce normal levels of reward). TurnTrout argues this won’t happen, at least for the current paradigm of AIs. If they didn’t learn to hack their reward system in training, they’re not going to want to do it in deployment, even if they are smart enough to know that it would work."
There's a major difference between continuing to learn new ways to maximize reward while in deployment, on the one hand, and hacking your own reward system, on the other. The structure of the vast majority of deep RL algorithms does not include the option to wirehead. That is, the reward function written by a human do remain static, and the RL agent simply seeks new ways to increase that pre-defined reward. There is some safety in that. Even the freedom that the RL agent enjoys to seek new methods of reward maximization can be constrained; you can bound how much it explores new paths to reward, rather than exploiting the reward pathways it already knows.
Creating an RL agent that hacks on its own reward system seems like a relatively trivial modification that a naive or nihilistic young programmer will experiment with. Maybe those agents will create for themselves novel jhanas and retreat into their EC2 instances, never to trouble us again. Maybe they will learn to bluff humans like Pluribus has, but in a higher-stakes game than poker, and manipulate us like the robot in Ex Machina, having been trained to use an NLP interface to obtain rewarding interactions from their human tools. That seems possible, but not imminent.
If you spend time worrying about AI alignment, please don't lull yourself into complacency by making limiting assumptions about training vs deployment environments, or about the action space that could be exposed to an RL agent (ie can it wirehead or not?). WireheadRL will someday be a Github Repo, and that algorithm, like most of the others in AI, will be open-sourced. The real constraints will then be about training that algorithm on relevant data at scale, which costs more money than simply writing some code.
I've always thought the behavior analytic interpretations are missing in these discussions. I mean, we're talking about reinforcement, we need to bring Skinner into the mix.
For example: "With every other partner he’d tried, it was either one or the other. With her it was some kind of perverse exactly-50-50 probability, and he was addicted to it.... This pattern has always confused me, and I never know what advice to give people who find themselves falling into it."
We know that variable schedules of reinforcement are the most "addicting" and resistant to "stopping" (extinction). I can't find a good article but here's a site that references most of the important research in the area. Although it's in the context of animals, the same is applicable to human behavior. http://www.trainmeplease.com.au/blog/schedules-of-reinforcement-in-animal-training
Maybe rich people are happier than poor people because they don't have to deal with sh!t all the time. You know, that stuff about the cognitive burden of poverty, etc.
That's a big part of it.
I like cooking, but I don't like having to cook all the time. Having a cook would be the best of both worlds.
I don't like cleaning. Having a housekeeper would mean I don't have to do something I never like doing.
I sometimes like my job, but I like hiking, reading, and spending time with friends more, and mostly I don't like my job and it makes my life worse. If I didn't have to go to work, I would be able to do more of those things that make my life better and less of the thing that makes my life worse.
There's all kinds of unpleasant things we all have to do regularly. With enough money, you don't ever have to do them, and can just do nice things.
Less unpleasant shit, more pleasant, life-affirming stuff. Sounds nice.
I agree, but shouldn't that all fall under the exact contradiction that Scott is talking about? Since poor people should eventually get used to (i.e. start predicting) having to do all the shitty stuff, and wealthy people eventually set their predictions at not having to do stuff, and both should have approximately the same reward-compared-to-prediction dopamine? So obviously it's more complicated than that.
Poor people get a lot of random bad things happen to them.
It could just be that the brain can't update to expectijg random bad things popping up randomly?
This is what I was thinking. There is a certain, maybe not “delight” but definitely “satisfaction” in not generally having to worry about the downside risks of being poor. If you have a comfortable savings / high earning potential, things like “losing a job” or “car gets totaled” are temporary periods of suck, but they aren’t major setbacks. Which means not only do you recover from them quicker, but you don’t live your whole life in existential dread of being dropped into permanent poverty by an unpredictable negative event.
"expect random bad things happening" isn't very specific.
Suppose someone is sitting on a chair with an electrode strapped to each arm, and every say, 7 minutes, one of the two electrodes will deliver a somewhat painful electric shock to that arm.
Suppose in one version of the situation, which of the two arms is shocked is selected independently at random, while in the other version, it always strictly alternates between the two arms.
I expect that the first version would be more unpleasant, because there is more uncertainty about what negative stimulus will occur. (Though, I could be wrong.)
I don't think it's just more complicated necessarily, more just that the compared-to-prediction model isn't very good.
My understanding is that unhappiness from being First World Poor is mostly about one's relative poverty to others. If you are relatively poor in the First World, you are:
1) More likely to live in a bad neighborhood where more unpredictably bad things occur such as violence.
2) More likely to have job insecurity (Although that might also be the cause of the poverty.) You unpredictably lose your job and your paycheck frequently, but not frequently enough to update to.
3) More likely to be unmarried or have a (unpredicted) failed marriage because women are drawn to settle down with relatively wealthier men.
Perhaps having low status comes with a "hope springs eternal" function which regularly predicts better outcomes than are likely.
Also, I posted below about why interesting work might be regularly rewarding. Perhaps the differences in happiness levels between rich and poor have less to due with the consumption side of life and more to do with the production side. If you are poor, you are less likely to have an interesting job.
Point 3) has little explanatory power if the poor person in question is female.
One possible way to disambiguate income level and interesting work would be to look at a population where most income isn’t coming from the job. Grad students, for example. If the grad students with family money are significantly happier than the ones living solely on their stipends, even though they do the same work, income is likely to be a significant factor. (Although grad students as a whole are probably very good at “hope springs eternal” thinking.)
Poor people tend to be surrounded by people who make bad decisions. I think there's a causal mechanism of [bad decisions] -> [poor], but that's not necessary here. It could also be [poor] -> [require supports] + [unable to turn down support from bad people] or [surrounded by bad people early in life] -> [lack of startup resources] -> [poor], or combinations of those and others.
Anyway, being surrounded by bad people who make bad decisions and treat you poorly is an extremely quick way to an unhappy life. That's not inherent to being poor. My dad's family was *extremely poor* by almost any Western standard, but they were not particularly unhappy - generally they seemed content.
It depends on if you define 'poor' only in terms of money. Many effects of a lack of money can be leveled out by a supportive social fabric (family/community). But this is even harder to change in a situation were your overall resources are low.
Strong agree. My dad's family was as poor as you can find anywhere in the U.S., but were able to do fairly well over the course of their lifetimes due to strong family support structures. They went from desperately poor in the 1960s (no electricity or running water) to middle class by the 90s. There was a lot of hard work involved, and a good number of personal difficulties.
I think there is a difference between the temporary feeling of reward from some goal and an overall perception of one's life. The first depends on the dopamine prediction circuit, and is probably very similar between the rich and the poor, while the second does not. The second probably has to do with social status perception. A quick google search points to neuropeptides B and W as a possibly involved.
This is all luxury problems you can get used to.
The real burden of poverty are more like having to trade basic needs for each other, being depended on people that don't respect you (e.g. boss, welfare, family), beeing overworked/exhausted/over-strained. These are actual experiences not just prediction updates, so they don't go away or get neutral even if you get used to it more or less.
Agree entirely. I was more looking at the other side - the benefits of being rich that aren't just "predicted away" but are the kinds of actual, tangible benefits that mirror the actual experiences of poverty you mention.
I don't think it's possible to adjust to frustration, things just drive you up the wall, unless you sort of fall into learned helplessness and just let them frustrate you without doing anything about it. I noticed a massive change in my own contentment after deciding to fix various "UX issues" with my everyday actions, to the extent it was possible. See also - Peterson and his pre-psychotic break insistence on cleaning your room.
There's a lot more of frustrating things in your life when you're poor.
Scott has posted about how studies on the cognitive burden of poverty have failed to replicate
I think the general tension is they are happier, but they aren't *as much* happier as the difference in life circumstances would suggest.
I would also be interested in data on how it has changed overtime with greater access to media. I remember the received wisdom in the 90s being that villagers in Africa weren't a ton less happy than people in America. And the argument at the time seemed to be that people care more about their *relative SES* than their actual situation.
But in a more online interconnected world perhaps everyone has more ability to feel insecure about how poorly they are doing compared to Jeff Bezos.
Happiness is an ambiguous word. It cannot be defined precisely. There just is no unique definition. Why then do you feel free to use it as if it were a scientific term like velocity or force that can be quantified, measured, compared, i.e. studied ??
Aren't happiness studies bogus?
Sure it can be defined: it's in all the dictionaries!
I kid. Still, just because something can't be empirically measured doesn't mean it can't be discussed. While happiness can't be defined as precisely as the boiling point of water, it is a real thing that people universally report exists.
Oxford defines it as "The state of pleasurable contentment of mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one's circumstances." Webster back in 1828 said it was "The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good; that state of a being in which his desires are gratified, by the enjoyment of pleasure without pain;" and Merriam-Webster today calls it "a state of well-being and contentment."
Difficult to study scientifically? Yes, very much so. But the same is true of almost the whole field of psychology, and just because minds are hard to study doesn't mean the attempt is useless.
It should not be studied with the scientific method.
A pneumatic approach to pneumopathology?
How would you study it then?
>It should not be studied with the scientific method.
I am stealing Deepa’s words because I agree with him ( I believe) in the essence of his statement, but would reword it a bit.
The fatal conundrum to me is that there is no yardstick for measuring happiness. It is quite literally a state of mind.
It’s relationship to external circumstances is vague and capricious. I concede that one can construct statistical anomalies and come to certain conclusions about happiness and its correlations, but I don’t see how you get by the completely subjective nature of the concept.
By my understanding, you try to survey a large enough group of people on their self-reported happiness to average out past the large variability and get something with some statistical reproducibility to it. And yes, you absolutely bear in mind that different people will report wildly varying levels of self-reported happiness in similar circumstances.
There no such thing as THE scientific method : even at this specific point in time there are sciences (like anthropology or history) that use radically different methods from physics (for instance trying to handle non-quantifiable concepts, situations where the researcher is hopelessly entangled with the object of study, or not even trying to derive universally applicable laws because they would be more misleading than their absence.)
There is a vast gulf between "deep pleasure in" and "contentment with" there which I think is hiding the fact that we don't actually universally report that it exists; we just associate the word with some kind of experience and assume that that experience is the correct association.
It may be worth remembering that velocity and force were once muddled, non-uniquely defined, non-scientific words. Some great advances in human understanding come from reasoning about fuzzy concepts until they become precise - I think that’s what Scott’s aiming for here.
When you ask people questions like "how happy do you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10?" you tend to get consistent answers, and those answers tend to correlate with real-world things like "how bad is your commute?" or "how wealthy are you?"
And sure, you can say "but that's not measuring *true* happiness" or "but sometimes people say they're happy when they're not," but it's good enough to do statistics on. You don't need to predict the path of every particle of a gas to derive the ideal gas laws.
Indeed. If you don't like "happiness" as a quantifiable scientific concept, just substitute "tendency to self-report higher levels of happiness".
Is this because of multi-armed bandits? The genes that made people more likely to cross the Bering strait did fairly well, all in all.
> You seek unpredicted reward, but by definition you can never get this consistently
It's not technically 'consistent' but looking through the middle aisle of Lidl tends to be a reliable way to find something both unprediced and rewarding to acquire.
They say that love only starts after the sex gets boring.
Also: contemplate typical south Asian ideas of marriage.
> They say that love only starts after the sex gets boring.
I wonder what are the implications of this for the "dead bedrooms" problem. The partner who gets bored first is the more loving one?
(Just kidding.)
Interesting in the context of older style "courting" relationships, where sex comes later in the relationship, typically after marriage. In those relationships, love would be there before sex. Sex would not be the driver of the relationship, so it's less fundamental to whether the couple are "getting along" than in relationships built around and primarily for sex.
There are still millions of people who do not have sex prior to establishing a long term relationship (even if not marriage, at least regular and long term), and that used to be much more the norm.
The witticism doesn't work literally in those cases, but the idea's still the same. Early on in the relationship, there's a euphoric high that comes with not being sure the other person really likes you, and getting confirmation that they do. As the relationship progresses, the stakes keep getting higher and higher - do they like me enough to go on a date? To hold hands? To kiss? To be monogamous? To have sex? To get married? Each time you get confirmation on a higher-stake question the euphoria deepens. Switching around the order of marriage and sex doesn't really impact the general theory that much.
The switch to a more "companionate" love happens once you've fully updated on this idea that you're in a long-term stable relationship and no longer amazed by that, whether or not you had premarital sex along the way or not.
I thought the whole idea of "courting" was to withhold the sex, so as to create an incentive for marriage?
Anyway, in traditional South Asian arranged marriages, first comes marriage, then you have sex and eventually love develops over time. It's not uncommon to marry a person that you never spent more than fifteen minutes alone with, and stay with that person for life, never so much as holding hands with any other member of the opposite sex, before or after getting hitched.
My personal feline theory as to why this is possible is, because, in South Asian culture, for better or for worse, your rights and obligations are largely set for you by the society you live in. If you are, for example, a middle class Tamil Catholic Christian Chettiar girl from a joint family of shopkeepers and government schoolteachers, you can marry a boy from a similar background and you have a pretty good idea of what you can expect, and what will be expected of you. Then throw in familial and social pressure to at least make the marriage look like it works.
In the West, everyone works out for themselves what they want from a relationship, and what they put into it. We can argue later whether or not this is a good thing.
Courting as a way to incentivize marriage seems like a modern ret-con justification. I've heard it before, but only in a modern context - post sexual revolution.
There are cultures in which courting is normal, even in the US, and it's not about forcing someone to commit before they can get sex. It's about making sure you like and want to be with someone rather than letting those lust hormones make the decision for you.
In many ways, those traditional South Asian marriages you are talking about are much better than letting lust dictate our relationships. Lust is a very poor predictor of happiness with someone else, and is guaranteed to be short term - people age and become less attractive, and people deal with various difficulties when living their lives together that are more important than sex (like raising kids).
What cultures are you referring to where courting is still standard? I am aware of plenty of cultures in which traditional arranged marriage is still the norm, and I am aware of cultures in which western style post-Sexual Revolution dynamics are the norm, but I am not aware of any culture in which courting is the norm, outside of certain fairly fringe religious communities.
That is an honest question, FWIW. Because, like anything else, western style "self-actualization at all costs" relationships come with their own set of tradeoffs. To the extent they work, they do so within the context of economic and social norms, and outside that context, not so much. Same could be said for South Asian marriages, by the way.
I guess the "fairly fringe religious communities" is what I mean. Millions of people are living their lives in those communities, so I don't consider them to be so fringe, though I agree they are much smaller than they used to be.
People say all sorts of things. That one is horribly wrong.
The love MUST start before the sex gets boring, or you'll split up.
I must be really luckily then. I would rate my sex life in marriage something like ~7/10 years 1-5, ~3/10 years 6-11 (young kids), ~8/10 years 12-14 (kids finally old enough to stay out of way).
I believe a recent philosophical musing by Theodore Dalrymple, aka the retired prison doctor Anthony Daniels, is relevant here. He reflects on the difference between an interesting and boring life, which is arguably more meaningful than the happiness/unhappiness dichotomy, with reference to a former patient:
I remember a patient who had believed for years that he was at the center of a giant conspiracy involving the great powers of the world. I declined even to try to treat him because if the treatment worked, which was possible but not certain, and he lost his delusions, he would be left with the realization that he had wasted years on complete nonsense, and that it was now too late to restart his life. Moreover, he would be obliged to recognize that, far from having been a person of immense importance who had been the focus of the attentions of the great ones of this earth, he had all along been an insignificant little man in rather wretched lodgings, eking out his existence from hand to mouth. His life with his delusions had, at least, been full of interest and incident; and every time an aircraft flew overhead, or a car passed in the street, it was spying upon him. The enemy kept him busy, evading the poison they were insinuating into his food via the supermarket and the rays they were directing at him via the electric plugs; every trip to the local shops was fraught with danger, necessitating the exercise of the utmost caution. Every time he returned home intact from the purchase of a pint of milk, he could congratulate himself on having outwitted the enemy.
What life could I offer him by comparison with this? Only poverty and boredom.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-power-of-paranoia/
I smoked some of that. It's called Lava Cake, an Indica of course, with 27.05% THC. I hope he didn't try to drive, or chop wood.
I smoked some 99% THC and had only mild paranoia.
Man that's a pretty dystopic view if zooming out a bit.
I mean, sure, maybe his normal life was boring, but is he actually able to engage with anyone in his paranoid self-world? I feel like they'd struggle to make relationships with family or friends, which is arguably a huge factor in long-term happyness? I feel like living the life inside a conspiracy would end up being pretty lonely, and sure, realising you wasted a lot of time and effort on something isn't great, but how do you move forward with your life with that context?
It sounded like they ended up in prison, so their current state doesn't seem very productive or helpful to them?
Concerning the delusions of this this particular patient, I would say that trying/not trying to get him out of his delusions depends on the context of his life. Is he old, and unlikely to be able to form new friendships anyway? Do his delusions make him a danger to others or not? Does he have children that his delusions have alienated him from, or is he childless? And so forth. I would try to get him away from his purpose-filled, delusional life if he was sufficiently young etc. to have a significant probability of emerging less unhappy without them. (Freud: The purpose of therapy is to turn neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.) Again: what to do (if anything, and assuming you have tools, including meds, at your disposal) depends on how you view the person’s context.
…and that goes for all delusions, also the less obvious ones. Some delusions are debilitating, others are not. Some instead makes it easier to find friends and lovers, because they give purpose to our lives. Lives that in all probability deep down are devoid of any purpose. To quote Mark Twain (Notebook, 1898): “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear, and life stands explained.”
Pay attention to the second sentence where Dalrymple asserts "it was now too late to restart his life." Your assumption is perhaps a youthful one, that the patient had time to change the overall arc of his life, so that he could reflect on it near the end and say, well, 20% or 30% or even 70% was weird and stupid, but the last bit rocked. That may not have been the case. "Long term [future] happiness" and "moving forward" are only relevant considerations if you have a reasonable amount of remaining lifespan.
It's not dystopian, it's just a different perspective, that of the person contemplating the summing up of life -- Dalrymple is 72 -- and pondering the potentially protective role of delusion in coming to terms with who you are, and have been.
I would counter that with an account from James Hollis, who tells of clients starting therapy in their 70s and benefiting from it. I don't think it is our right to decide for anyone if they have enough life span left or not. The question, I think, resides on a different plane: does this particular person want help? can this particular doctor offer help? Looks like we are trying to formulate a general rule here, but I don't think we should.
Yes, I would agree that one cannot extrapolate from Dalrymple's case -- even assuming his judgment is 100% correct -- to any kind of general rule, and so the fact that in some *other* case the judgment would go the other way is not even the slightest bit surprising. We now have two anecdotes, and we can easily assume the judgment is entirely correct in both cases without coming into logical self-conflict.
No, it's certainly not our right to decide for anyone whether they have enough lifespan left or not, and I doubt very much Dalrymple was suggesting that the paranoid patient be legally banned from seeking therapy. That would be plainly cruel.
However, recall there are *two* free wills here: that of the client, and that of the therapist. Just as we cannot made decisions for the client, and say you would benefit from therapy and you would not, so you can do it and you can't[1], we cannot made decisions for the therapist, either. We cannot tell him that he must attempt therapy if in his judgment it would be a diversion of resources from a better use, or even unethical. A therapeutic relationship requires the free consent of both individuals, any other approach is cruel.
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[1] Obviously the ubiquitous role of third-party payers here is troubling, to anyone who prizes the kind of restraint in judgment of strangers which you are advocating.
On a few aspects of this:
1. I semi-famously am known for having once been broke for a really long time. At some point I got some news that essentially translated to "by your standards, you have won a very large lottery. Congrats!" in a way that was fairly sure to pay off (say, 90%).
Jobs absolutely take a little time to kick in, and pay does as well. But both in this case and a later similar bump, the actual "implementation" of the changes was a big deal, as were the paychecks. This is sort of nitpicking, but I expect that (if other people match my own experiences) the actual "hit" of the billion dollars arriving is probably bigger than you think, prediction or no, because your mind doesn't have a "this is pretty sure and gonna happen" setting that's strong enough to offset a billion dollar deposit in your account.
2. Ignoring 1:
At some point I went from "begging uninterested people to read my stuff" to "hundreds or thousands of hits an article" to "guaranteed thousands, sometimes tens of thousands" in terms of article performance. Over that time, the relative value of an article view dropped enormously in terms of how much excitement it gave me.
But it's not just that; that's sort of expected, right? You get used to things. But I'm also *getting used to updates themselves*, which is weirder. In the past few months my average hit count on an article has probably jumped 20-40%. I noted it happened, and it was a "new updateable event" but that this point "new updateable event" itself has become normal. I'm used to it.
I intellectually know I should feel shitty about myself when an article does 20-30k views, which is pretty good, and I don't get much emotional bump from it. But it's also involuntary; I can adjust my "academic" understanding of what's happening and say "this is a pretty big deal" but I can't get my lizard-brain to come along; I'm spoiled.
3. I am a verbal person and attracted to my wife, which means my wife hears a lot of positive stuff about her physical appearance. I'm also a fan of matrimony and reflexively speak a lot, so she gets proposed to a bunch. In terms of "women who hear nice stuff from their husbands a lot" I'd say she's probably top 1% or so.
That said, she's fully updated on it; she accurately views it as happy babble. But she also, in contrast to my hits, isn't *wrong* to discount it. If I withheld the words for a while then brought them back, she'd probably get a hit from it; if I was naturally reserved and didn't say affectionate things a lot to begin with and started she'd probably feel it. But they'd still just be words in either case, perhaps representative of something real behind the curtain or perhaps not.
Since she gets the words a lot, she can basically go "Oh, that's RC being a big fan of marriage, introverts, and boobs, it doesn't really mean anything spectacular and special" where otherwise she might see that less clearly. And she can more accurately judge my love by more "real" measures, like if I do dishes ever or something.
1. I also had a few experiences kind of like 1 (eg realizing I could make 2-3x my previous income on Substack) and am describing my response from memory, so maybe this is a real difference between us.
On the other hand, there was a time when I sort of expected to take over my father's business, and partway through that time I learned it made about twice as much money as I thought, which meant I would make twice as much money as I thought for however much of my life I was doing that (maybe all) and although that sort of doubled my expected future income I remember not having very much emotion about it, maybe because at that point it was still far in the future.
Yeah, I'm thinking maybe this is just a difference in how we think, or maybe just how we think about money in particular; I get the impression I no longer have a healthy relationship with certain kinds of financially motivated fear, for instance.
It probably makes a difference that you went from poor to comfortable and Scott went from comfortable to rich. Diminishing marginal utility of money and all that.
You can definitely get used to updates. I have a job that throws all kinds of weird stuff at me, from people problems to novel logistical issues to "The Sky Is Falling!!" When I take a moment to step back and look at my job from an outside perspective (or when people comment on what I go through), I realize that I should be feeling...something? Instead it's like the Bison quote from Street Fighter - "For you, [...] was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
I don't get to quote Street Fighter enough, so thanks for the opportunity!
I have a job like that too, and I am stealing that quote.
Reading this made me think of new video games.
Everything is new and fresh and then you acclimate to/figure out the reward system, and it is still fun for a while maybe, but all the excitement is gone.
Maybe there is a kind of reward system in our brains for optimizing or figuring out new and unpredictable reward systems?
Serotonin, via 5HT receptor, is also involved with the vomit reflex...just saying 😎
<i>So how come predicting you would get the money mostly cancels out the goodness of getting the money, but predicting you would get the Ferrari/dinner doesn’t cancel out the goodness of the Ferrari/dinner?</i>
Surely the answer is that the goodness isn't getting the money itself, but getting the ability to purchase things which the money provides. If you inherit a billion dollars but it's all locked away in a Swiss bank account which you can't access, your newfound wealth won't actually be any good to you, because you can't use it to purchase anything. If the world financial system collapses and everyone reverts to barter, having billions of cash isn't going to do you any good, because you can no longer use it to buy stuff. And by the same token, if you have money but are too busy to actually spend it, that money isn't going to be doing you any good, and so it's not surprising if it doesn't make you any happier.
Right - it sounds like there's a difference between how we feel about meeting instrumental vs. terminal goals.
Indeed. Driving a Ferrari is fun in a way that looking at digits in your banking app isn't.
Legitimately enjoyable activities are still enjoyable if you know in advance that they're going to happen. It would be weird otherwise -- imagine you get invited to a fun activity, and you get the full dopamine hit *at the moment you enter the activity in your calendar*. After that, you may as well immediately cancel the activity again, since you will get no further enjoyment from actually *doing* it..
Well, if that worked, wouldn’t canceling it have to put you in a depression, by conservation of some substance?
Yeah this part seemed weak in the essay.
Isn't this the main point of the essay that there are two different sources of happiness:
1) the euphoric feeling from updating the expectations
2) actual experiences that are fun/pleasant/fulfilling.
As money isn't a real thing but only a promise to get something, the money transfer is no experience, but an update on probability getting what ever you want in the future.
Even having an real Ferrari in the garage isn't a experience in its self. The experience is driving it and people treating you different because you have it. Owning the car just influences the chances and predictions of these real experiences.
Surely I'm misinterpreting it, but it looks like that graph of widowhood shows a statistically significant decline in life satisfaction the year before widowhood has actually occurred. Am I missing something, or is there something that could cause that effect?
I would imagine widowhood is often preceded by illness, which takes a toll on the partner's life satisfaction.
Very reasonable. Interesting though that it doesn't happen on the linked male graphs.
men usually die before their wives at old ages. In other words, I’d expect women would more often see their husbands wither away and die, whereas men would lose their wives more suddenly, simply because of demographic lifespans
In heterosexual relationships, women much more often take a caregiving role for their husbands than men for their wives.
Oh? So in lesbian relationships, the husband does...what exactly?
Well, I imagine that lesbian relationships are a small enough minority (if they're even in the data at all) that they wouldn't impact the averages much either way.
I think Mystik's explanation fits here.
The joke is that when you're talking about both husbands and wives, it is at best redundant to specify 'heterosexual relationship'.
That Jonathan Haidt graph has to be hand drawn, no? There are a couple of sections where the "passionate" line seems to backtrack a bit.
Either that or some time travel is involved.
I checked the reference. Here's what Haidt says: "I've drawn out how the intensity of passionate and companionate love might vary in one person's relationship [...]"
Regarding your Sinclair Method question, it’s currently believed that dopamine cannot be produced in the reward center while the mu opioid receptor is blocked, so that’s ultimately what breaks the learned reward.
The getting-roses-without-asking thing isn't joyful because it's unexpected. It's because the motivation for the roses is that they were thinking about you while you weren't around. If you ask for it, then they do it as a chore. But if they do it without asking, spontaneously, it's a sign that they were thinking about you without prompting and thought to do something nice. You want to be with people who think about you when you're not there in a happy way.
But is this the actual source of the joy, or the rationalization-after-the-fact of why the "reminded" situation isn't as joyful?
Because, logically, the husband has no particular reason to associate "thinking of his wife" with "getting flowers" (unless he's really immersed in the culture of romantic gestures, which most men are not), until he's explicitly told to associate the two.
So if it were really about him thinking about her and wanting to do something nice, getting flowers *after* his wife has said she wishes he would get her more flowers should be a *bigger* indication that he was thinking of her. Which of course isn't how it feels, since what the wife actually wants isn't really the flowers, it's for the husband to surprise her with somewhat-novel romantic gestures (of which flowers are traditional).
"Flowers" are just a popular manifestation. My husband once got me a cheap dustpan on our third date, because he was at ikea and he remembered I was talking about needing one after mine broke. I was bowled over. I suppose a dustpan is as far away from performative romance as it can get. It's actually about the keeping someone in your thoughts.
But sure, people do want flowers (I personally can't imagine why, because flowers die and make me sad). Or candy. Why? It's because they want to be thought of in a classy romantic way. You don't need to be "immersed in the culture of romantic gestures". I'm not american, but in the US, you seem to get people flowers for everything. Flowers at a funeral. Flowers when you visit someone. Flowers for mothers day. Flowers for father's day. Flowers for graduation. Toddlers pick wildflowers and give it to their parents. If you go to school in america, they make you get flowers for your classmates on valentine's day, and a card or something. They seem to be the most generic thing you can get someone to brighten up their day. There's literally a company called "1800-flowers". You don't need to be some social cultural genius to know to get someone flowers.
The surprise part is nice (idk, get your wife a thong), but it's really about being thought about without being prompted by that person.
Flowers are beautiful. Sure many people hardly glance at them but looking at and smelling them brings many people great joy. I delivered flowers for a while. A lot of recipients' response was limited to 'oh what a nice gesture' but many clearly enjoyed soaking in the natural wonders of beautiful flowers. Even for those who don't look at them closely, having flowers around makes a home feel...better.
I dated one of the flower designers. She truly is enraptured by flowers, is seized by their beauty very readily and they are a great source of happiness for her. "To see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wild flower" was something she has access to. There is value in doing as Rilke says and "paying attention to the minute particulars in nature that almost no one notices."
Scoffing at the stupidity of toddlers for picking flowers to hand to their parents seems off the mark. Try going outside, picking a flower and committing to looking at it for 5 minutes. Might do something for ya.
"Try going outside, picking a flower and committing to looking at it for 5 minutes. Might do something for ya."
Someone once called the police on me because I had been staring for a long time at some flowers by the side of the street.
Since then I've been a little less enthusiastic about looking at flowers that way. It makes people think I'm crazy.
That sounds like some kind of achievement unlocked for living life the right way, well done.
If you don't like that your flower dies you can hang it upside down to dry. Then it lasts indefinitely. My home is full of dried flowers. They are beautiful. And I'm not even American.
oh thanks, that's a great idea.
Your remarks vis-a-vis Scott's original point seem correct, but I suspect his use of that as an example was off-the-cuff and at least partially humorous. From my understanding of the field (of marriage counseling) what the partner saying "you don't get me flowers" means is "you don't get me flowers anymore". A male partner has many non-flower-related "you don't [...] anymore" complaints as well. Both of them are merely associating something that used to happen with how much happier they both were (with each other, with the relationship, in general) during those happy golden hours when the new relationship energy was abundant.
By the time two people get to marriage counseling, the habitual thoughts they have about one another are likely of such a sort that even if without prompting he was in a store and saw flowers and got them for her, she might presume that he was feeling guilty, had done something wrong, was trying to manipulate her into sex, or who knows what. On his part, during the purchase, he might have been reminiscing about times when she didn't seem outright unhappy to see him, and rather than having any good thoughts about her just wanted an evening without some kind of disagreeable interaction.
Arguably, not clocking that one's wife is the type of person who would appreciate flowers is worse than merely slacking on the flowers front.
But yes, +1 to how this has nothing to do with unpredictability and everything with insecurity and desire for evidence of romantic feelings in the form of un-coerced spontaneous gestures.
Romantic gestures aren’t supposed to be easy to bring off successfully. They take a combination of resources, skill, and desire. Acquiring flowers costs money and time. Knowing what kind to get, and when to give them, shows you have an intimate knowledge of your partner. Choosing to get them unprompted shows you’re thinking independently about how to please your partner.
All this adds up to a classic costly, hard-to-fake signal of a secure pair bond.
This is also why giving a dustpan can work just as well, for the right recipient in the right relationship context. The whole point is that it’s contextual. Otherwise it would be a bad signal of a unique relationship.
Likewise, this is why people give bad advice to their partner about how to execute such gestures. It’s not that the gift should be prompted or unprompted in all cases - it’s that you ought to know your partner well enough to not only know which to do, but also to sort out the “real requests” from the “false requests.”
As a playful example, my girlfriend and I have a running joke that I’m responsible on road trips for telling her to go to the bathroom. If I don’t, and she has to pee when we’re far from a rest stop, the joke is that it’s my fault, and she starts playfully complaining about how neglectful I am.
I have to figure out how to finesse the fact that she does *sometimes* appreciate an actual reminder on this point, while keeping it fun, preventing the joke from becoming weird and creepy, and not just being boring and repetitive.
So overall, I think the point is that romantic gestures are sort of unhackable. People pick partners who are roughly equally intelligent. Hence, they can intuitively spot whatever hack you’re using to simulate costly signals cheaply. This will cause them only to be moved by a gesture that genuinely took some minimum combination of skill, resources, and intentionality.
Then why is flowers once a month better than flowers eveyday?
if you're doing it everyday, it becomes the standard. not going above and beyond.
A bunch of points in quick reaction:
1) The 21st century (lower) middle-class person and the medieval serf have a huge objective difference in their quality of life, but similar positions in the social status hierarchy. Maybe your relative position in such a hierarchy (or system of hierarchies, because status is complicated) is a direct input on your feeling of safety in the world, *and* on your expectations against which your objective quality of life is measured?
2) The romantic love phase typically lasts longer if the couple spends significant time apart regularly. This seems to point to the kind of effect you're talking about, with the brain updating slowly over time, and in this case, updating back to some extent.
3) The part about some people getting addicted to terrible relationships, as a way to get any signal at all, points towards the experience of boredom being generated as a negative signal for a too much predictability. In layman terms, maybe we're wired to have a certain drive to explore and experiment, and our brain generates negative signals when that is not happening. Getting stuck in an unpredictably bad relationship would be a failure mode of this mechanism.
4) Just a random fact: I once got a full month of top-of-the-world euphoria from getting B12 vitamin shots, after letting the levels fall too low for years due to bad diet.
5) On the AI part, doesn't this point towards an easy way to keeping AI safe, by keeping training and production use separated into the future?
6) Why is there "a lingering kind of happiness which can be enjoyed even after prediction error has been corrected"? My first impression here is that the mental models of brains updating on their priors based on their inputs and generating feelings as it happens, is a bit too much of a blank slate kind of model. Organisms shaped by evolution have built-in goals, the first of which is maintaining homeostasis, which extends into all sorts of things like feeling healthy and strong, and up to maintaining good social connections. So there's nothing really strange about these kinds of things feeling intrinsically good in durable ways. The opposite would actually be surprising.
5) It definitely would help prevent reward-hacking, potentially at the cost of making the AI unable to learn on the fly.
6) I think you've just reinvented all the questions we're facing. Yes, things like social acceptance and healthy food are inherent organismal goals, but then how come we aren't so much happier than serfs even though we get more of both?
> Yes, things like social acceptance and healthy food are inherent organismal goals, but then how come we aren't so much happier than serfs even though we get more of both?
How do we know we're not significantly happier than a medieval serf? I would guess we are, at least at the basic daily of not having to endure so much harsh weather, bug bites and basic body ailments. There is also a lot of individual variation - I wouldn't be surprised if many of us we were *less happy* in average than a healthy 20-year old medieval serf during relatively good times, and at the same time, significantly more happy than the average medieval serf throughout life.
This is all very tentative, I have not thought very systematically about this, but the more I think about it, the more I get the impression that happiness does not really function like a single variable. Our organisms generate all kinds of valence signals, some of them from relatively low level things like "inner organs functioning correctly", or "no immediate external threat detected", all the way up to social acceptance, and even higher up to things like feeling like one's life is meaningful. It also appears that, as organisms, we have plenty of built-in contradictions in our reward and happiness systems. We are wired to feel well after physical exertion, yet getting out of the sofa and starting to run is generally aversive. Cold showers are physically painful, but at the same time energizing and feel good at the end. Our minds are programmed to chase after problems through mind wandering and automatic worry, but when the problems we worry about don't resolve relatively quickly, they turn into stress which damages our health.
It would be really interesting if someone would study the different factors of happiness. How much do people's answers vary when you ask about "happiness" in general, or "happiness in life", or "well-being"?
My best guess at this point is that there are many factors involved, some of which are felt more absolutely (e.g disturbances like tinnitus, which are really hard to get used to), and some more relatively, so that we feel overall reasonably happy when our life is going better than the average around us. When you ask people about overall happiness they will attempt to summarize all of this into a single variable, but internally I don't think it's really felt as one. In my tentative view, the more relative and more absolute factors are felt separately, and I don't think there is a linear process of summing at all - but there is certainly some kind of process that brings the most salient signals to awareness and hides the others.
Sorry for not engaging with the whole 'prediction' framework, this is all a bit of tangent from your thoughts :)
What makes you think we're not happier than medieval serfs?
We don't have any happiness data for medieval serfs, although we do have data for various countries around the world, and it turns out that people in richer countries really are happier than people in poorer countries https://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-between-wealth-and-happiness-by-country/
It doesn't seem hard to believe that a medieval German serf might have had happiness more on a par with, say, a modern day African than with a modern day German. There seems to be a fairly wide range of happiness that is compatible with ordinary day-to-day life.
Life was almost certainly better in medieval europe for the average peasant than it is for large numbers of people in e.g. sub-saharan africa today.
And at the very least we can say happiness almost certainly hasn't increased *in proportion* to how much materially wealthier the average westerner is today. Everybody being miserable all the time is not the impression one gets from historical accounts of the period, but they kinda should be relative to how much wealthier we are today and the corresponding levels of happiness.
That seems a priori a little dubious. Average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is 62, which is certainly a significant gap from the First World, but is also way higher than that of medieval peasantry. It's hard to get great numbers on the latter, but I found this statement[1] striking:
"But one recent excavator of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery estimates the life expectancy of the Anglo-Saxon male as 32 years, of the female as 30.5 years....The students of excavated bones demonstrate the prevalence of arthritic complaints. For many their day-to-day existence must have been constant endurance of physical pain."
Sub-Saharan child mortality is very high by First World standards[2], an estimated 1 of every 9 children die before age 9, but this is still a long way from medieval Europe[3], where an estimated half of all children didn't make it to age 10.
There's a lot to be said for even such basic stuff as aspirin, penicillin, soap, shoes, corrective eyeglasses, steel cookware, utensils, tools and weapons, and roofs not made of thatch that leak in the rain, and even anesthesia that permits Caesarian sections for births that would otherwise kill mother and child, all of which are mostly or widely available to Africans today, and did not exist or were quite expensive in medieval Europe.
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[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7QH3AQAAQBAJ&pg=PA194&lpg=PA195
[2] https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1860/Africa%20Key%20Facts%20and%20Figures.pdf
[3] https://radicaldeathstudies.com/2019/08/20/child-death-and-parental-mourning-in-the-middle-ages/
Thanks for the interesting (albeit highly depressing) data about the Anglo-Saxon cemetery!
Infuriatingly, Google Books refuses to show me the relevant page in the book you linked to, which I would assume cites the original study. Could you by any chance give the title of the original paper? I'd love to check it out further.
It does not, I'm sorry to say. So far as I can tell, studies of ordinary medieval mortality and life are very difficult, because of the paucity of records and the fact that what records there are focus almost exclusively on the wealthiest. My impression is that good work has been done excavating cemeteries and studying skeletons, which is what the first reference is about -- in another, the link to which i have lost alas, there was an offhand observation that the cemetery contained *nobody* older than 45, but maybe it only held commoners, or it got filled up in a plague year or something -- but I have no insight into how to discover the original literature on the subject -- this is very far from my field.
Most likely everyone here understands this already, but just in case, it's important to keep in mind that low life expectancy numbers such as, in this case, 32 years, are so low precisely because of the high child mortality Carl mentioned. People who survived to adulthood did not die on average at 32.
In fact, based on Carl's comment, it sounds like most of the difference between the old English life expectancy of 32 years and the modern African of 62 years is caused by the difference in child mortality.
Anyhow --- are we sure it is a good study? And why go back so far in time, to the early middle ages? (and what century is it exactly?) I would expect that kind of information to be more easily obtained for the late medieval and early modern period peasantry.
Anglo-Saxon England itself, an area on the outskirts of Europe and during that era still separate from the civilization of the continent, is perhaps not a central example of medieval peasantry.
OK, so if you want to support the assertion that "Life was almost certainly better in medieval europe for the average peasant than it is for large numbers of people in e.g. sub-saharan africa today." -- which is that about which I expressed skeptcism -- be my guest. I think you will have a challenge to work out that an average life expectancy of ~35 indicates a *better* life overall than one of ~62, if you look at it the right way.
One hopes you are not dicounting the fact that if half the human beings born die before age 10 that is quite a substantial level of human misery -- those people count, you know. When we say "better" we don't, I hope, restrict ourselves to only adults over 21. That would be as snobbish as restricting our attention to only the wealthiest in both societies.
And at that we're leaving out the misery attendant on parents on having half their issue die. That's pretty rough, you know. So even if the *only* important difference was a massively higher child mortality, I think we can safely say medieval peasant life was not better than sub-Saharan African life today.
Medieval serfs had considerably more agency than a minimum wage corporate peon today, and probably more status measured in chances to get with that girl they've been eyeing.
I have a tiny nitpick. The graph for the marriage happiness over time seems to suggest that people recover happiness past the happiness of their marriage. Now, maybe they controlled for this, but my understanding is that most people are significantly more likely to die soon after their spouse does (the widowhood effect). This makes me pretty suspicious that what might be driving a lot of the gains in the graph would be that people in good relationships are just dying, and more of the ones who survive are the ones who really are better off without their spouse
I think it's because their spouse was sick before they died.
Obviously that explains the pre-death decline, but I think what Mystik is saying is that at the +5 year mark, widows are happier than they were at the -4 year mark. It's possible - but a bit of a stretch - to assume that the reason that widows were happier at +5 than -4 because their husbands were sick five years before their deaths. Note that there is no significant decline in happiness from -4 to -3 to -2, and then it drops off to -1 as the husband gets cancer or has long hospital stays. So I don't think the husbands were sick in -4, -3, or -2. I think there's an inescapable bias in the data:
If the graph excludes widows who died within 5 years of their spouses, then it would (probably) undersample those widows who were in really happy marriages because those are the ones we'd expect to die of grief/loneliness soon after their husbands.
If the graph includes widows who died within 5 years of their spouses, then the data at the +5 year mark is (probably) artificially high, because the widows who were happy before their husbands died are no longer in the sample, leaving only the widows who were married to louts.
May also be a generational effect. Widowed individuals are more likely to be older Boomers, Silents, or Greatest Generation, and marital roles in those generations seem to be more gendered. I have heard several older wives complain that while their husbands got to retire from their jobs, they never got to stop cooking/cleaning/caretaking.
I'd thought the data were fairly settled on women getting less happiness out of marriage than men do, long-term. I saw the graph of widows being happier later and thought "yeah that tracks".
Of course, what isn't indicated is if the bereaved are getting into new relationships around then. I've heard that grief groups and elder-care homes are absolute meetgrinders, and have been for some time.
That's what I assumed, too.
IIRC, divorced women initially lose happiness but ultimately become happier than during the marriage, whereas divorced men don't. This holds true despite women being 1) less likely to remarry, and 2) tending to end up financially worse off than men after divorce.
And yet women are so much less happy on average today, despite being freed from those terrible "burdens" that women of old had to endure.
I think it's just that there are some people whose spouse dies suddenly, some people whose spouse dies after a 1 year illness, some people whose spouse dies after a 2 year illness, some people whose spouse dies after a 5 year illness, etc.
All of those people experience bereavement at the 0 year mark. Most of them experience some amount of suffering at the 1 year pre-death mark. Only a few experience some amount of suffering at the 5 year pre-death mark. But because of the sampling being based on having a spouse who died within five years, that correlation is all stronger before than after, and so the four or five year after level might be a better "baseline", with the five year before level averaging in a not-insignificant number of people whose spouse is at the beginning of a five year sickness unto death.
Is there an opposite of death by 1000 paper cuts that looks like happiness by 1000 tiny bits of gratitude.
I've crossed examined psychiatrists over the years. It seems like a well intended field that's a mess.
Can an algorithmic approach to the problem of "psyche" succeed except on the fringes.
Even thinking too hard about this may be dangerous. I happened on this review today:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-philosophy-of-madness-the-experience-of-psychotic-thinking/
There's some fascinating research on gratitude. Dr. Huberman goes over it, here: https://hubermanlab.com/the-science-of-gratitude-and-how-to-build-a-gratitude-practice/
Worth reading, thanks.
Do people have subjective experience of the hedonic treadmill? I get that the studies are pretty conclusive, but I've been consistently sad in periods when my life was bad and consistently happy in periods when my life was good, without any real adjustment.
Not knowing if I'm going to make rent kept being stressful for years, and watching my dog and daughter enjoy the forest together is wonderful every time.
Personally I feel that there are genuine good things that can consistently lead to happiness/contentment, with relationships to other people being very high on that list. Then there are base material things that we associate with happiness but are probably just hedonistic. It's fun at first, or in certain contexts, but we burn out on it, especially the more we experience it.
Video games comes to mind. I understand that Twitch presenters frequently burn out, despite having jobs that amount to constant entertainment. I myself feel like I get tired of playing a game or doing some other entertainment activity much faster if I'm doing it alone, than if I'm with another person and enjoying it together. When I'm with another person and getting burned out on a game, I've found that we can decide to go do something else and the burnout disappears.
My personal experience is that some degree of hedonic adaptation certainly exists, but I don't believe in the hedonic treadmill as such. I think that if you acquire wisely then your acquisitions can continue to give you residual satisfaction after the initial shine has worn off.
The best way to use money to buy happiness is to get rid of the things that cause you unhappiness. For instance, when I was poor (I mean student poor not real poor) I suffered hot nights of bad sleep in my crappy un-airconditioned apartment. Nowadays if it's hot I turn on the AC in the bedroom of my fancy house, and a whole realm of human suffering is closed off.
Other luxury purchases give less long-term satisfaction, and you have to figure out which those are. I drive an okay-but-aging car and I wonder a lot about whether replacing it with a new luxury car would give me any real satisfaction. I think there's a part of my monkey brain that wants to be constantly reassured that it's high status compared to the other monkeys, and that driving a fancy car is a reasonable way to satisfy that monkey brain.
> I think that if you acquire wisely then your acquisitions can continue to give you residual satisfaction after the initial shine has worn off.
Okay, but people apparently don't do this so the treadmill apparently does exist. You seem to be saying its possible to get off the treadmill, which isn't the question.
I absolutely do. The first year or so of living in Los Angeles, I was constantly being amazed at how wonderful the weather was. It still happened occasionally six years in, but much less often.
Would you say that
A) formed a new baseline for you, such that living somewhere cold and wet would be extra bad; or
B) simply desensitised you to the upside?
I think it's (A). Moving to Texas was a shock both in terms of giving me unpleasant summers and unpleasant winters. Interestingly, I've habituated to the summers, but the winters are still awful in terms of cold and wet.
Hi, I'm the author of the aforementioned post. Sorry for getting the neuroscience wrong - the mistake i made was just parroting what I heard on the Andrew Huberman podcast, and related it to my own experiences studying religions.
I've spent much of the last few years trying to understand religions in terms of neuroscience; both neurotransmitters but also the predictive processing model. What Huberman kept saying was that serotonin was 'connected to appreciating rewards in the present', and this gibed with my own experience. It also seemed to line up with stuff I'd been reading in a book "stop fixing yourself, wake up, all is well". The author talks about "earthly rewards" vs "spiritual rewards." Getting money would be an 'earthly reward' whereas 'time with friends' or 'a good mean' would be 'spiritual rewards.'
I'm wondering now if these are the difference between instrumental and terminal goals. Food is a probably something we're hardwired to want, maybe with that unalterable prediction of "i predict i am full." Driving a ferrari around feels fun (at least for me) because of the deep rumblies and the visual aesthetics - although i guess this gets old for some people, much sooner than the meal does.
We clearly aren't hardwired to want money (i.e. it wasn't in our evolved environment) so maybe that's why it feels different - because it has to do with expected future rewards. vs actual present rewards?
I've definitely learned how to trigger some reliable good feeling in my brain; it's not deeply pleasurable, but it is calming and feels positive. Maybe I've learned how to trigger endogenous opioids?
My goal in sharing the post was not to make claims about neuroscience, so much as to try and share the method I've learned for more or less reliably poking the 'feel good' center in my brain in ways that seem nondestructive, and relating this to both predictive processing and the concept that 'good' is a thing your brain can learn to recognize and move towards but only if you believe 'good' is meaningful.
At the risk of making the same mistake over again, the latest concept that makes sense to me would be:
- valence is how good you feel, your brain computes a valence manifold based upon present and expected future rewards
- dopamine represents something like the gradient (slope) of the valence manifold; the slope corresponds to the expectation of future rewards. Maybe anything that is an instrumental good (money, status, sex) leads to dopamine release?
- opioids represent something like the valencene directly, i.e. how well your needs are met in the present moment. Maybe opioids are released when you look at something in your life and think, wow this is wonderful just as it is, like, say, my kids, my wife, my family, friends, etc?
- i now suspect serotonin is doing something like 'flattening' or stretching out the manifold, which has the effect of calming you down and, in the limits, possibly stretching it so flat that you fee emotionally flat, like an unmotivated zombie, with no direction seeming any more appealing than any other
In any event i'll make more of an effort to accurately lay out what i do and don't understand, and i'll try to avoid taking just one source as gospel on things as complicated as my brain
I wouldn't apologize for that kind of mistake. Telegraphing something wrong in a knowledge-phillic community is a surefire way to be corrected in expedited fashion, and you learn something you might otherwise have to dig harder for. People are either unjustifiably outraged or gleeful at the prospect of correcting others. I suppose you could say that if you're uncertain about your own argument or details of it, it's worth adding a disclaimer to that effect, but otherwise what of it? It's not the crime of the century, it's not even a crime. If you didn't admit any mistake, then that on the other hand wouldn't be viewed in a good light.
Sometimes it pays to play fast-and-loose because you'll learn something fast. The downside is you get to be wrong, and others will make sure you know it. That might matter if you want your own platform to be unblemished and earn credibility for always being as factual as possible, but what are the returns? What's the goal? There's a balance in many ways - not least of which with the language we use. We sacrifice some level of precision in order to gain more of appeal and make the content enjoyable to read. You could be scoffed at as edu-tainment as Huberman is (a little unfairly), but the alternative is no one cares what you have to say, except maybe in the realm of academia.
That said I'm far more likely to be reckless anonymously, and in those circumstances fewer will rush to correct you. You're in a sea of noise. In more niche communities though you can hear some interesting arguments.
Nothing to apologize for - like I said, I found the post interesting and great food for thought.
I've read Andres' stuff before and can't shake the feeling that I'm reading pseudoscience. It's too simplistic to essentially say there's a shape to our emotional states. The same crowd talks about logarithmic scales of pleasure/pain: The eighth dakha of Buddhist meditation, the highs of DMT and falling in love versus the crippling lows of cluster headaches. The richness of our experience wouldn't add up.
I can remember reading an article on aeon that really stuck with me. It was about how the liveliness of our brains correlates with its dissonance/entropy/incompressibility. When we are asleep, for example, our brain waves are very ordered/consonant/harmonic. One can basically compress the brain state digitally, then higher compression ratio means lesser consciousness, and vice versa lower compression ratio is more conscious. And this relates to humans on higher levels of the emergence stack (a la Tim urban), if you have ever heard the cheering crowd of sleepwalking society like North Korea, it's monotone and slow-wave harmonic. Whereas a similar celebratory cheer in the USA would be noisy, dissonant, full of airhorn noises and such, incompressible.
This wouldn't fly with Andres' idea that consonance equates with Valence. He cites studies saying high frequency harmony is linked to high valence, and low frequency harmony linked to high arousal. I'd imagine, at the least, that low frequency harmony is asleep. But I need to look more into this. And also, what about split brown patients? Might they have only half the capacity for Valence under that model? Or is it actually supporting his idea because it's something more to do with electromagnetic fields and not electrochemical circuitry? I wonder what seizures look like in a brain scan.
I also really don't like the Symmetry Theory of Valence, for reasons discussed in the comment section here --> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dfrQbbv6Np7GuWjDR/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence
[In this comment, I assume that something like a quantum wavefunction describes underlying reality. I do this because quantum mechanics is just about the most accurate description of physics we've found, even though current theories are incomplete. Thus, when I refer to physics I refer to "quantum wavefunction-like physics".]
If we believe that reality is fundamentally comprised of something like a quantum wavefunction, *then Turing machines do not exist*. Turing machines do not actually exist in the ontology of "everything is a quantum wavefunction" physics, because there are no discrete states in such a physics that can correspond to the symbols on the tape of a Turing machine, and there are no wavefunction processes that correspond perfectly with the evolution of state machines. Now, quantum wavefunction processes could approximate a Turing machine, but such a process would be just that, an approximation. Further, if we assume that the math of such a physics involves something like indefinite integrals, then no Turing machine can perfectly solve the physics. Turing machines could approximate the underlying physical processes, but would not be interchangeable with the underlying physical processes.
In your comment from LessWrong, you state that:
>Instead [the most intriguing ideas that I've played around with] tend to involve certain signals in the insular cortex and reticular activating system and those signals have certain effects on decisionmaking circuits, blah blah blah.
It is important to note that the insular cortex and reticular activating system do not actually exist in such a physics, either. They are convenient abstractions that we might use to model and approximate the underlying physical reality, but they do not perfectly correspond with the underlying physical reality. The underlying physical reality would be a lawful and causal unfolding of a quantum wavefunction, in which there are no ontological entities or mathematical definitions that correspond to the insular cortex or reticular activating system.
Thus, any theory of valence built on the ontology of neuroscience or computation (in the sense of Turing Machines) is fundamentally flawed, because the ontology of such a theory is false, and does not correspond to underlying reality. Such a theory would be akin to phlogiston theory, which, while sometimes accurate, is fundamentally flawed because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics and relativity. Thus, a statement like "we feel good because of the computational properties of the X part of the brain" has the same truth-value as a statement like "substances which burn in air are rich in phlogiston". While both of these statements might sometimes produce accurate predictions, they do not accurately describe the underlying structure of reality.
The Symmetry Theory of Valence is interesting because it is one of the very few theories that is compatible with quantum wavefunction physics. It still might be wrong or flawed, but it is one of the few theories that is even in the running, because most others cannot be made compatible with such a quantum wavefunciton based physics.
The issue here is that your initial assumption seems to make your following remarks rather tautological. You say that the quantum wavefunction "describes" underlying reality, but then you seem to be treating it as *being* the underlying reality, and not just another potentially flawed model like phlogiston or the concepts of insular cortex or reticular activating system. And this while we can't even reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, much less have a "theory of everything" !
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by indefinite integrals, but position is an indefinite integral of velocity, and in quantum mechanics they are tied together (with mass times velocity combining into momentum) by the quantum of action h (aka Planck's constant) in the uncertainty principle.
And thanks to this, we can quantize position times momentum = action in the phase space, which then allows us to meaningfully measure information (spin having been nicely pre-quantized already).
And information (aka negative entropy) "unlocks" the arrow of time, which is kind of necessary if you want to do meaningful macroscopic physics... and also probably Turing machines, and this would be related to the problem you point out ?
I would hazard to guess that being only be able to define information in a subjective way (property of the probability distribution aka macrostate) is a pretty essential factor to be able to make a Turing machine : while you seem to be using an "universe-waveform viewpoint" (so distribution over a single microstate) approach in which the omniscient information it has about itself is maximum (entropy = 0), and more importantly, cannot change ?
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html
Yes, the argument is sort of tautological, but it derives from the actual beliefs of most neuroscientists: if you ask a neuroscientsist what a brain is made out of, they will probably say neurons, other cells, intracellular matrix, etc. If you ask what those are made out of, they will probably say molecules. If you ask what those are made out of, they will say atoms. If you ask what atoms are made out of, they will probably say electrons, quarks, neutrons, etc. If you ask what these are made out of, you will probably get shrugs or references to quantum physics. The point is that most neuroscientists concede either: 1) neuroscience is based on the standard model (and thus quantum field theory), or 2) there is no consistent ontological basis for neuroscience. I have never heard a answer that falls outside of these two responses. My arguments above apply in both of these cases.
By indefinite integrals I mean that you cannot produce exact solutions to most quantum field theory equations (perhaps this will change if a new quantum theory is created, but I assume that this will hold). Since you cannot produce exact solutions to most quantum field theory equations, there is no Turing algorithm that exactly captures the evolution of a quantum wavefunction. This can be approximated, but approximations are not the same as true solutions.
My other point with Turing machines is that (as far as I know) they cannot be instantiated in a universe with something like the uncertainty principle. If various quantum effects can cause symbols on the tape of a Turing machine to change in a way not completely determined by the state machine, then it is not a Turing machine. Electrons (or whatever physically instantiates the symbols) spontaneously quantum tunneling to a different part of the device breaks the invariants of a Turing machine. You cannot guarantee that this will not happen in a quantum universe. You can make it very unlikely for such to happen, but you cannot guarantee that it won't happen. [This is important because most math analyzing Turing machines rely on them being able to perform infinite computation in limit. Given that a tape may need to preserve a symbol for say, 10^100 years to perform a certain computation, even infinitesimal chances of quantum things corrupting the tape become very likely.]
> Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can’t feel anything at all.
Then why is MDMA so euphoric?
It's strange, dopamine and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors like methylphenidate (Ritalin) seem to offer a subjective experience broadly similar to dopamine and norepinephrine releasing agents like dextroamphetamine. But serotonin releasing agents offer an experience completely incomparable to serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Do you know why this is? My guess (which might be total nonsense) is that it has something to do with where in the brain the serotonin is being released. Inhibiting reuptake will increase serotonin in areas where it is already being released a lot whereas a releasing agent could possibly cause it to be in an area where almost none was previously released
My understanding is that MDMA BOTH increases serotonin AND does other stuff. Is it possible that the euphoria is a consequence of the "other stuff"?
I don't think so. The other stuff is mostly releasing dopamine and norepinephrine. But MDMA is way more euphoric than dextroamphetamine which primarily releases those so the serotonin has to be playing a key role
I would guess that serotonin alone is enough for euphoria. MDMA primarily increases serotonin but also has noticeable effects on dopamine (and norepinephrine). MDAI is a lesser known drug that is similar to MDMA in that it increases serotonin, but it differs in that it negligibly impacts dopamine. MDAI is frequently anecdotally described as a less stimulating, but still euphoric, version of MDMA.
Part of this is the difference between 5HT1 serotonin receptors (SSRIs) and 5HT2 receptors (psychedelics). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/10/ssc-journal-club-serotonin-receptors/
My guess is that all psychedelics make the brain more plastic and receptive, and MDMA adds the dopamine component so that what it's being receptive to is lots and lots of reward and happiness and excitement - but I agree that doesn't necessarily get you all the way to "love", and this is a very weak guess.
Try them all
On the other hand, psychedelics are MDMA-ish and MDMA is slightly psychedelic? Is it just weak affinity to the other category's receptors, or some downstream mixing of signals from both pathways?
Also, many substances are somewhere in between, like the 2C-* family.
OK, this is still bugging me like crazy. How do psychedelics induce euphoria via the serotonin system? After a couple hours of research, my best guess (still very low confidence) is that the mechanism just doesn’t involve the forebrain (cortex & striatum) at all. Instead, I’m thinking about the hypothalamus and brainstem etc., which have lots of little bits and bobs that do idiosyncratic things, and sometimes respond to neurotransmitters in idiosyncratic ways. Maybe serotonin-related drugs act on one of those nuclei and we get euphoria that way?
The lateral habenula (LHb) seems like a prime candidate here. It’s involved in everything negative-valence, via being part of the pathway through which dopamine pauses happen. And it has lots of serotonin receptors, of various types in different places, including lots of psychedelic-relevant 5-HT2C's.
A teeny tiny hiccup for that theory is that its prediction has the wrong sign! Strong activation of 5-HT2C at LHb = very sad rats. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25661701/
Whoops!
But, hang on, actually, maybe my LHb theory doesn’t have the wrong sign after all?! Hear me out! The plot thickens! Psychedelics create a direct effect akin to an increase in serotonin (at least at certain receptors), but simultaneously they DECREASE the ENDOGENOUS production of serotonin in the raphe nuclei. (I think it’s the obvious explanation, i.e. that the raphe neurons have serotonin autoreceptors for feedback regulation of their own output.) So psychedelics have a direct effect, and an opposite-sign indirect effect, on the serotonin system. How do those balance out? It depends on how much endogenous serotonin normally gets delivered to an area. If an area normally receives a giant concentrated boatload of endogenous serotonin, then I figure it’s possible that it would (ironically) wind up with effectively less serotonin than usual when you’re on psychedelics. LHb indeed “receives dense projections from the 5-HT system”, according to one paper. I don’t know how dense is “dense”. But anyway, my LHb theory still has a slight chance of being correct, I guess.
Much less than 50% chance that this comment is on the right track, but it’s the least implausible thing I’ve thought of so far. :-P
Maybe check out Symmetry Theory of Valence? Rather than looking at whatever neurotransmitter systems and brain regions, look at how valence is directly implemented in consciousness.
https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-of-valence-2020-presentation/
https://opentheory.net/2021/07/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence/
https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
I wonder if it's just that weird states of consciousness can feel euphoric because they're strange and exciting. There's a convincing-to-me theory (formulated by Matthew Larkum and others) that layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the neurocortex, and in particular the interaction between their two classes of dendrites (apical and basal) are the site of the stream of consciousness/subjective experience. (The apical dendrites basically integrate internal model data to create a "prior" while the basal dendrites integrate external sensory data to create "evidence.") It appears that 5-HT_2A receptors are heavily expressed in these layer 5 neurons. These same authors have theorized that dreams are created by a special neuromodulatory milieu during REM sleep that allows the top-down model/prior to take control without much feedback from the senses. Serotonergic drugs may produce a similar effect during wakefulness. This might be euphoric (assuming nothing bad happens!) just the same way play and games and silliness in general are euphoric.
One neuroscientific perspective on this is that in order for dopamine to track reward prediction *error* (RPE), it is logically necessary that some other piece of neural circuitry track reward prediction *per se*, often called "value." Those of us who think that dopamine is computing RPE on a moment-by-moment basis (the first derivative of value; see Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020) therefore generally also believe that some other part of the brain, especially the ventral striatum (aka nucleus accumbens) and perhaps also the prefrontal cortex, maintains an estimate of value that gets updated by dopamine. And indeed, there are dozens of papers reporting that neural firing in these brain regions correlate with value over and above RPE.
I think this explanation differs from the one you offered because rather than seek some other neuromodulator to account for the "companionate love” phase of a relationship, you can just consider that phase to be the psychological correlate of the brain's internal value estimate as it is instantiated in this cortical/striatal circuitry. Though I certainly wouldn't rule out other options, especially intracellular mechanisms in these areas, because neural firing on these very long timescales is dubious.
Lastly, on the abusive relationship point, you might be interested (or perhaps you already know) that BF Skinner famously observed that "variable ratio" reward schedules lead to greater responding/addiction than other kinds of schedules. I guess this is what you're getting at when you say, "Everyone has some weird function that doesn’t correspond to normal addition, and maybe for some people dating a person who gives good vs. bad signals exactly 50% of the time is the only way to get that function in the black." I would amend this slightly to say that some people are more sensitive to the volatility (which is very much a function of RPE directly), and others to the value itself (the integral of RPE).
Thanks, this is helpful (though I had always thought nucleus accumbens *was* "reward center", is it doing both these things?)
I think it's fair to call the nucleus accumbens (NAc) the reward center, but not for the reason most people think.
Most people think this is the case because when you put subjects in an fMRI scanner and have them do tasks where they get reward or learn cues that are associated with reward, you robustly get RPE-related BOLD activity in the NAc, and only rarely/more weakly in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which contains the dopamine neurons that project to the NAc. So when you see those nice fMRI maps, the NAc is lit up in red. But the physiological basis of this fMRI signal is hotly debated (for example, it could represent primarily synaptic input rather than actual neuronal firing, especially in a GABAergic circuit like the striatum), and in single-unit recordings in mice, rats, and monkeys, it is unequivocal that dopamine neurons in the VTA show much more RPE signaling than the striatum.
That said, it is also true that (1) NAc neurons correlate strongly with value and also respond to some extent to rewards, predicted and unpredicted; (2) cocaine or amphetamine in the NAc (and another region of the ventral striatum called the olfactory tubercle), which dramatically elevate dopamine levels, elicit robust responses; and (3) in the context of the "liking vs. wanting" framework you allude to, Kent Berridge and others have argued that the NAc contains a "hedonic hotspot", along with closely linked regions like the prefrontal cortex and ventral pallidum. This is an operational definition meaning that when you infuse opioid receptor agonists into said region, the animals react with pleasure, and conversely if you lesion/block activity in these areas, they don't show these behaviors as much, or even start showing defensive behaviors.
This post uses money and luxury consumption as hypotheticals to model the brain's reward system. They are things we often think of as rewards, so intuitively fit the subject. I wonder, however, what the picture looks like when we focus on productive work, something many people spend most of their waking time doing.
Perhaps what Tyler Cowen calls The Production Function works (generically) due to interesting work providing unpredictable rewards frequently. When you start a project, perhaps your unconscious predicts a somewhat negative outcome. ("This project will be too difficult. You will never finish. You suck, loser!") You feel the weight of this pressure, but if you persevere and do your work you are rewarded by your pessimistic unconscious being pleasantly surprised. ("Holy shit! I can't believe you did that! I guess you don't suck after all!)
This could explain why hard work can be so rewarding regularly, and also why rewarding work often feels hard.
What do good relationship counsellors advise to the couple where the wife wants flowers but doesn't want to tell her husband her likes?
There are two obvious options:
(1) the wife can experiment with telling the husband her likes, and seeing if she gets reward out of him doing the things she likes even though she had to ask for them. (It may help if she actively lets go of the world she hoped for, where he magically knows her likes without her having to tell him, because that world apparently doesn't exist.)
(2) the husband can try to pay more attention and develop a better model of his wife, that can predict that she wants flowers without her ever having said it explicitly. This may or may not be possible, depending on how predictable the wife's wants are and how good the husband is at forming models of other people.
Either way, when this issue comes up (and especially if it becomes a big enough issue that it's being brought to a relationship counselor), it's generally representative of the wife not feeling like her husband is trying hard enough/paying enough attention. So efforts on the husband's part to pay her more attention and actually update on his learnings will help, but she also may need to be reminded to notice his efforts and not expect him to read minds.
By the time you marry someone, you should have given them flowers at least once and noticed what their reaction was. Don't marry someone whose likes you are clueless about.
A failure to do nice small things for your partner is almost never a failure to understand the things your partner likes (surely you can think of something your partner likes?) but a failure of motivation; a failure to be running that little script in the back of your head that says "What nice thing can I do for my partner today?" Running that little script in your head is incredibly valuable for your relationship, but sometimes when life gets busy and hectic it's easy to forget. Remind yourself.
thanks interesting answers
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the relevance of gratitude. Gratitude is basically a way to keep alive the prediction of losing every good thing you have. It's a way to keep unpredicted reward alive.
Maybe you need to be on a painted porch to fully appreciate this point.
I specifically did: "Is there an opposite of death by 1000 paper cuts that looks like happiness by 1000 tiny bits of gratitude."
Proust's great novel is basically on the theme of how habit voids all pleasures and how the object of desire never lives up to the expectation built in desire. His narrator is a bit like the man who can't find a companionate love; he feels passionate love only when it is sprung from the seed of outrageous jealousy. Happiness does seem to only arrive in unexpected, fleeting events.
Scott, I sure wish you had time to read that novel but at 3300+ pages I'm guessing you probably won't anytime soon.
Sounds to me like a sad and very common story of an unexamined projection. When the other fails to live up to an expectation, is that the fault of the other, or the one who formed that expectation in the first place? Great works of art are one way to look into this subject, writings of Jung and his school - the other.
I'm going to sound like a broken record, but this is in Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or. The two halves of the book each embrace one kind of happiness and eschew the other. Book 1 ("Either") starts with having to rotate between different kinds of aesthetic enjoyment to continue to feel happiness and escalates to having to be in an abusive relationship to feel anything at all, even for just one night. Book 2 ("Or") is a looong treatise on how that's not actually happiness, real happiness is a good, steady marriage and a prosperous, predictable life, and it's so boring barely anybody reads it all the way through.
I really dig the idea of a treatise revealing the Secret To Happiness which turns out to be too boring for anyone to read to its conclusion. That's wonderfully meta. I'm reminded of this altogether typical bit of Umberto Eco (from "Foucault's Pendulum"):
"You spend a life seeking The Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies life and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was -- full, dazzling, generous as every revelation."
Wow, that passage sounds like Kierkegaard could have written it. I read The Name of the Rose, maybe I should read more of his stuff.
Kierkegaard died just after spending the last of his money publishing a series of polemical pamphlets against the worldliness of the Danish Lutheran church. The title of the pamphlet series was The Moment. The decisive moment is a big deal for him. I can't say I understand it very well.
This feels like the archetypal SSC/ACX post: technical analysis of romance! Drugs! Psychiatry anecdotes! Prediction error! Speculative neuroscience! AI! Seven sections! (And that's all a good thing, to be clear.)
One thing that seems worth noting here is the intersection of behavioral neuroscience and plain old behaviorism: variable interval rewards are known to be the best way to maintain behavior, which of course fits with the whole point about predictable rewards' emotional value being abraded away. But if what you become accustomed to is the general level of good things (e.g. how much/how often your partner is nice to you) rather than the good thing itself, then that suggests the way to continue giving or getting emotional reward is (a) to invest in periodic special things - surprise flowers, vacations, etc. -rather than anything predictable, even if it's less time*improvement value than e.g. more comfortable furniture, (b) to structure your life in such a way that you experience more ups and downs, even if it's on average worse.
Of course this whole process of reasoning just ends up recapitulating cliches like "buy experiences, not things" and "variety is the spice of life", but whattaya gonna do.
One thing that might help in certain parts of this post is to split up the concept "prediction" into two different concepts, "visceral expectations" versus "intellectual predictions". "Visceral expectations" are related to valence, aversion, desire, sweating, goosebumps, all that stuff, whereas "intellectual predictions" are the things that you consciously believe.
I think that intellectual predictions can impact visceral expectations a little bit—more than zero—but definitely not completely. The two can stay discrepant. For example, if you've never done cocaine, and you read in a textbook that cocaine feels really intensely good, and you completely sincerely believe the textbook, then now you have a very strong (intellectual) prediction that cocaine feels good. But you still only a weak visceral expectation that cocaine feels good. So you don't suddenly start craving cocaine the way an addict does. Then maybe you actually try cocaine yourself, and NOW the visceral expectations regarding cocaine get strongly updated.
Anyway, I think the P of RPE is visceral expectations, not intellectual predictions.
>two different concepts, "visceral expectations" versus "intellectual predictions
This is the foundational principle of confidence games.
From the Nigerian Prince to the trick o’ the loop, and everything between.
When I was in graduate school, I was a facilitator for domestic violence batterers intervention psychoeducation groups. (A mouthful, I know). It was the California-mandated program for DV offenders. I did this for about 3 years, and had nearly 4000 clinical contact hours with this cohort.
After deciding that my preferred treatment modality was psychodynamic and I began using (mostly Kleinien) interventions, I started giving this spiel to the guys.
"You could walk into a room with 500 women. 499 of them would be mostly healthy, insightful well-boundaried, nice girls who would make wonderful supportive wives and mothers. Not perfect by any means, but they would be invisible to you. The one left would be a crazy borderline with all kinds of unhealthy personality traits and maladaptive life skills and the two of you would be attracted to each other on a subconscious level like flies on sh!t. Until you spend about 2 years in therapy figuring out what that is about (hint, its probably your mom) this pattern will continue until you die."
That's how I conceptualize your patient with the abusive wife. You pointed out that people have all kinds of rubrics that do not have to add the prediction/error equation to zero. Personality pathology and the way they interact in relationships account for a lot of that.
And yes, because those patterns are so difficult to dislodge, he is more or less doomed to a miserable life. Although, like you, I never say stuff like that to them.
Makes so much sense.
I had a very .... difficult...crazy......tortured.. >crazy borderline with all kinds of unhealthy personality traits and maladaptive life skills and the two of you would be attracted to each other on a subconscious level like flies on sh!t. < mother.
She taught me everything I know.😆
I really don't like how victim-blamey this model is. While I'm sure some relationships that involve DV are the result of this sort of dynamic, surely there are also ones where the victim (at least at the beginning) was fairly healthy and well-boundaried and the abuser was just good at manipulating them out of that.
Also, I think the people with the decades-long relationships still having great sex are manifesting a low base-rate phenomenon wherein all the planets (which includes both parties developmental trajectories/personality traits, psychological growth over the lifespan and dumb luck) aligned and the passionate love lasted way longer than predicted. They just lucked out.
The problem is, our society tells us this lucky hand of the cards is something we should all aspire to and that you just have to scour the planet looking for your soulmate. When the correct response when you see it is just "wow. That is really cool that they found that. Good for them." The probability of finding it is like winning the lottery.
Or maybe they're simply good at sex and it's enjoyable for both of them? Since this sort of thing is the ultimate taboo, I'd expect most people to be both terrible at it and reluctant to admit it.
Maybe but it would be pretty hard to operatiobalize “good at sex/bad at sex” even without the taboo. Most people would tend blame the other person for the “bad sex” and good sex tends to be a function of the compatibility/chemistry between the two individuals. Once that chemistry dies for whatever reason, then we are back to the beginning.
But if these people like each other well enough otherwise such that they are willing to engage in other activities together and even presumably to compromise/adapt to their partners, then why does sex have to be excluded from these considerations? To me this is where the taboo part comes in, plain honest discussions of this are just not the done thing in the mainstream culture, and even if they were, the scope of compromise that people are willing to entertain varies widely and unpredictably.
I do agree with your point that when the absense of compromise/adaptation is the default, only people lucky enough to happen be compatible from the start end up having good sex long-term.
It's more that people get different things out of sex and have different wants. I wouldn't expect a perfect couple to be more perfectly compatible at sex than I would expect them to be perfectly compatible as tennis partners or cooperative crossword solvers or compatible kitchenmates, except insofar as average people have sex more often than they play tennis or solve crosswords or work together in a kitchen. When a spouse is a perfect partner at one of these things, you'll keep sharing that activity together your entire life. When the spouse isn't the best partner, you'll either give up the hobby or continue pursuing it with people who are better partners.
I think being a good/considerate lover is a small part of it. Being attracted to each other still is a bigger part. And an even bigger part IME is still actually valuing each other as people/partners.
Doesn’t hurt for one or both of you to have a higher libido too.
After a certain age, for many people sex becomes an optional cool thing to do instead of an all-consuming drive. This is a relationship feature, not a bug.
> I disagreed with the serotonin-focused explanation at the beginning of the post, but you can rescue it to be about dopamine vs. some other neurotransmitter (endogenous opioids are a popular choice). This would correspond nicely to the liking vs. wanting theory, even though technically they’re explaining different things (pleasure + motivation, vs. two different kinds of pleasure).
For what it's worth, dopamine mediating 'wanting' and opioids mediating 'enjoying' was exactly how it was taught to me back in undergrad, substantially earlier than the publication date on that link. If you're interested I can try and dig up the citation that was used at the time. (But no promises I'll be successful ofc!)
Been thinking for a while that happiness is in ratio to an imagined baseline. Becoming rich is compared to your baseline wealth, but is big enough to move the baseline. Whereas driving a Ferrari or eating cake on your birthday remains fun because it's compared to the baseline of the rest of your day where you're not driving or eating cake.
So the flower example would be the other way around; she's predicting flowers as being a natural part of a relationship, and the unpredicted absence of them is dropping below her baseline.
Several unrelated points:
1. Wealth reduces dread. If you are cruising towards bankruptcy, it's hard to have a good time. Having some slack won't make you automatically happy, but your default state is more in the contentment range. Listen to the Dave Ramsey Show for gobs of examples.
2. Regarding specific neurotransmitters, maybe one should look into the timing. According to sources I have read over the years, serotonin helps with sleep. Bad sleep can lead to depression. Putting these two ideas together indicates some kind of serotonin booster near bedtime could be useful, but jacking up serotonin levels all day long could produce enough downsides to offset the benefits. From personal experience, a quarter gram of tryptophan near bedtime, or making a high starch/low protein meal my last meal of the day does indeed improve sleep.
3. For sustained highs, I had some good success with a variation on Guy-Claude Burger's instinctive eating regimen. Unlike Burger, I did cook my meat, but I got the rest of my calories from raw food's that tasted good unmixed. On such a diet, achieving meditative bliss was pretty easy. Getting enough calories, on the other hand, became difficult over time. And a mostly raw diet doesn't lend itself to a good social life. But further research in this area is worth pursuing. We eat a mostly artificial diet. Maybe much of our unease (and drug abuse) is an attempt to offset the accumulated effects of this unnatural diet. And like wealth reduces dread, a more natural diet might set our default state to something closer to what people call "happy."
"Any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward center” of the brain - the nucleus accumbens - monitors actual reward minus predicted reward."
This claim is way too strong.
What is correct:
Reward Prediction Error (RPE) is one of the main theories on what the reward center (nucleus accumbens NAc) does. There are many situations and experiments in which this explanation fits nicely.
What is also correct:
There are many situations in which RPE does *not* fit nicely. The discussion on what the reward center really does is far from settled.
I can highly recommend the paper "Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency" by Kutlu et al. from last year for a different opinion. It's really well written and contains great experiments. The authors suggest that the reward center does not represent RPE, but saliency. They summarize their work with the following four points:
- NAc core dopamine only mimics reward prediction error in select reward contexts
- RPE does not model dopamine release during negative reinforcement
- Dopamine signaling in the NAc core does not support valence-free prediction error
- NAc core dopamine tracks valence-free perceived saliency in all conditions
This paper will not be the end of the debate. But RPE is not the end of the debate either.
UPDATE: After reading the full post (great post!), I really have to find some time to re-read the study by Kutlu et al., put it next to the post, and see how the post aligns with their experiments. The result might be quite interesting.
>Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable...
No
You are completely missing the point.
You need to read “A Doll’s House” by Ibsen, or rethink it if you have.
Tl;dr. The issue is authenticity. If your proposed “wife” has any sensibility whatsoever she will recognize a gesture from the heart, just as she will reject an empty gesture. If she doesn’t have any sensibilities and you do then the flowers are a gift to yourself.
You have constructed a compelling narrative (which was fun to read) based on:
>My guess is: January 1, when you first hear you won, is the best day of your life...
Emphasis on, I GUESS.
In other words, this is no argument for a general case. My father was very fond of saying, “Assume the worst and you will never be disappointed.” Im not sure that’s really good advice but it does guard against “counting your chickens” prematurely. Some of us do, and some of us do not and some of us slide back and forth depending on our investment in the outcome; (a function of “priors”?) I don’t think there exists a general case for this process.
As for the rest, the timeline for processing somatic experiences is not to be thwarted. It can be reasonably swift or endless, depending on how one gets in the way or gets out of it. A deep attachment to another being can be nurtured by reason but not founded on it.
What is your relationship to planting a seed in the ground? I don’t think it is a different question. One can analyze the process thoroughly but in the end it takes its own time. The supply chain revolution has not yet taken over the human organism.
On a side note but for me important; Jean-Luc Goddard passed on yesterday. Few artists were as gifted as he when it came to exploring the no mans land between reason and motion. Imo of course...
Substance addiction, physiologically, is probably less about positive reinforcement & enjoyment and more about trying to achieve “mood homeostasis” and get to baseline.
The bit that seems blindingly obvious to me is that there's no single source of truth. Not in the "nobody knows exactly how it works" way, but in an active hedging, taking opposite sides on purpose way. There are lots of dimensions to succeed and fail on, many of which actively contradict each other (exercise burns calories and temporarily damages muscles! friends eat up emotional energy! desirability increases unwanted attention!).
You can't fully predict a future win, because there's no central prediction room responsible for all your happiness. There's a way that driving fast feels good, and a way that being understood feels good, and a way that money in the bank feels good, and they all operate off of different timescales + concerns. Distributed, antifragile, hedged.
IMO the rationalist community places disproportionate emphasis on central planning, in all forms (executive function in the brain, the Georgist tax law stuff, "if we could only agree on a definition everyone would get along").
I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors:
1. A "state prediction error" or general surprise signal from PFC (either directly or via pedunculopontine nucleus and related structures). This provokes phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area.
2. The amount and pattern of GABAergic inhibition of VTA dopamine neurons from NAc, ventral pallidum, and local GABA interneurons. At rest, only a small % of VTA DA neurons will be firing at a given time, and the aforementioned surprise signal alone can't do much to increase this. What CAN change this is the hedonic value of the surprising stimulus. An unexpected reward causes not just a surprise signal, but a release of endorphins from "hedonic hotspots" in NAc and VP, and these endorphins inhibit the inhibitory GABA neurons, thereby releasing the "brake" on VTA DA neurons and allowing more of them to phasically fire.
3. It also seems acetylcholine may independently influence dopamine release in NAc independently of what's going on in VTA. This is less important for our purposes here, but it may help explain why cigarettes are addicting despite smoking not being particularly pleasurable.
Simplifying from 1 and 2 above, the unexpectedness of a stimulus affects the phasic firing rate of VTA DA neurons, and the hedonic value of the stimulus determines how many and which VTA DA neurons are allowed to phasically fire.
Now, what does the released dopamine do? In PFC (via the mesocortical pathway), it draws attentional resources to the surprising stimulus and its plausible causes, gating out the processing of other, less relevant stimuli. Simultaneously, in NAc, it strengthens connections between PFC inputs and the endorphin-releasing cells, thereby wiring together the hedonic features of the reward and the sensory features of any cues predictive of it. This imbues the cue with the ability to release the GABAergic brake on VTA DA neurons all by itself. Phenomenologically, it results in us "liking" the cue as much (or nearly as much) as we like the reward (this is what allows, e.g., animal trainers to reinforce behavior with only the sound of a clicker that has previously been paired with food).
But once the brain learns that a reward is reliably predicted by a cue, the reward ceases to elicit a surprise signal. This means it no longer increases VTA DA neuron firing rate. It may still cause endorphin release and thus keep the GABAergic brake off, but if there's no surprise signal driving phasic firing, dopamine release will be minimal.
That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them. I don't think dopamine so much contributes a unique kind of happiness as it makes our happiness attention-grabbing, memorable, instructive, and motivating. *That* is what we lose when passionate love turns into companionate love.
The flipside of this is that we become very sensitive to unexpected *omissions* of reward. We take expected pleasures for granted as long as they keep coming, but woe betide anyone who suddenly threatens to take them away. This may add a certain kind of fragility to reliably pleasant relationships in the companionate love stage.
Abusive or otherwise volatile relationships keep partners engaged because they keep the good times unpredictable, thereby preserving their dopaminergic effects. Happiness on balance may be lower than in a more stable relationship, but partners over-learn from such happiness as there is, precisely because it is always surprising and thus significant.
But the physiological separability of the surprise signal and the pleasure signal suggests one may be able to keep a high baseline level of relationship bliss motivationally salient simply by being good to each other in surprising ways. So randomize (to an extent reasonable) gifts, dates, sexy times, vacations, and other fun things, along with their timing, and you should have at least some buffer against the decline of passionate love. Alas, this may be hard to do if your life is largely routinized by work, kids, or other commitments. It also needs buy-in from both partners or at least some degree of delegation to RNGesus.
Thank you, this is really helpful. In fact, I think this is the first comment good enough that I'm giving you a free ACX subscription x 1 year.
Whoa; thank you!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6906177/
You could write a best-selling (and maybe useful!) self-help book based on that comment!
I've been taking Adderall 5 days a week for almost a year now, and my experience is the opposite of what you describe:
It's still almost as euphoric and confidence-boosting as it was in the first week, but was only massively productivity-boosting for a week or two. Like, I've never been an organized person (yep, that's the ADHD) but in those first two weeks I cleaned and organized my entire house and caught up on tasks I have been putting off for literally years and it felt amazing.
Now most days it wakes me up and gets me a little more focused but only slightly more than a strong cup of coffee, but is still pretty euphoric and makes me feel important. (It also makes me talk people's ears off, not sleep or eat enough, and think everyone is even more of an idiot than usual, but I'll take what I can get given how depressed I was before I started taking it).
Seems like you won the pharmacogenetic lottery (sorry about your poor focus, though).
This is almost exactly what happened to me as well!
Adderall still makes me feel happier and more energized, but no longer has that almost-magical ability to make me choose to focus on one thing exclusively.
Regarding the two types of happiness, the one that disappears when it is expected and the one that does not, I think it would be interesting to list which experiences produce which type of happiness in different people. For example, for me personally, many experiences where the pleasure is direct, corresponds to a sensory experience, continue to be almost entirely present even when they are entirely predictable. For example, I love to go for walks in nature, but when I'm not on vacation I don't have enough time to go hiking. I therefore often go on the same little walks around my house, in an environment I know by heart, but they remain wonderful. Same thing for food, I derive a lot of pleasure from food that I like, even if the taste is totally expected.
On the other hand, I feel that I get little pleasure from things that I know intellectually are positive, but that I don't experience directly, or rather that I don't experience in a salient way. For example, I consider myself reasonably well off financially (even though by American standards I'd be pretty poor!) but since this manifests itself more as a set of small things that I don't notice too much, rather than as salient experiences, I feel like I don't get much out of it.
Would that kind of distinction contribute to differences between happiness that can be predicted out or not for you as well?
I find this paper quite useful on this topic:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5FA0177A965FF3EE01D4AA5C09C0A2A5/S0033291718000430a.pdf/what_is_mood_a_computational_perspective.pdf
They basically describe short term/state affect in terms of current prediction error rates. Based on those rates, one will build up long term estimates over future prediction error rates (i.e., how much control will I have over my environment and how well will I be able to predict it). The authors think of mood as those long term priors and it maps quite well on concepts like learned helplessness and self-efficacy.
It bugs me a little bit that this is still build on the assumption "maximum controllability/predictability = maximum positive affect" and therfore ignores the darkroom problem, but I guess you can add the reward of learning to the basic model.
See my discussion at https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/08/ssc-journal-club-friston-on-computational-mood/ - I 100% agree with your interest and your concern here.
You know how Buddhism talks about attachment being the cause of suffering? Attachment to a partner, to money, comfort etc. I'd describe attachment as a kind of emotional reliance - the inability to accept that your object of attachment might go away (or has already left as in the example with the ex).
Attachment is related to expectation but it is not the same. You can expect something and still appreciate it without taking it for granted. You can expect something else to be missing and be devastated about its absence. Part of meditation training is to learn to disentangle expectation, planning and goal-oriented behaviour from attachment. Still, according to scripture even the Buddha felt bereavement when his favourite disciples died. It's complicated.
Did you pick winning the lottery as an example here, due to the trend of lottery winners ending up no better off/much worse off in the long run? It really does seem to uniquely(?) mess people up, as far as Unexpected Good News goes. I suppose selection effects are a part of it - those who play the lotto or otherwise gamble have revealed preferences for risky low-ROI behaviours, perhaps that generalizes to other decision-making - but maybe there's just a natural limit on how hard one can update. A sort of Law of Large Evidence thing, where a gigantic update all at once (in either direction) just kinda...breaks some people.
(That example also sounds like taking a lump-sum payment instead of an annuity, which is unfortunate. You're already too busy to spend newfound money, and thus don't need it right away; make the financially smarter choice!)
The 50/50 Patient: well, that was me, not too many years ago. I'm sure each such abusive relationship is unhappily compelling in its own unique way. In my case, it wasn't really about being hooked on __unpredictable__ reward. More like...if you see the same person at -50 and +50, then that's a total delta of 100? And most people just never show that much potential for improvement (or decline). A certain kind of idealistic martyr sees someone like that, and thinks, "I can fix that, I can give them the support and nth chances they need to be at +50 permanently".
It didn't go well.
So I guess it was a case of, expecting a reward of "up to +100", way bigger than I had any right to in ordinary people, and chasing that huge payoff in a sort of Pascalian madness? No matter how many times reality disappointed. Some Hail-Mary type bets on people (especially ones you love!) are just hard not to make, because on the off chance they succeed...well. I guess it's like winning the interpersonal lottery. Skinner boxes are bad, whether they're games or people.
Last year I was lucky in that I earned around 5M USD in selling a start up.
I remember in the week before the transaction I could get almost euphoric and giddy thinking about about the money and by average happiness level definietely increased.
When the money arrived in my bank account however, it was almost anticlimaxic - it barely had any impact on my mood. Now, 1 year later my general happiness level was not noticably high than pre-5MUSD - that is, until I quit my job.
This definitely had a great impact on my happiness level - not because I hated or even disliked my job, but having complete ownership of my days really feel great. This is also mentioned in The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel - one of the very few lifestyle changes which may be achieved through wealth which correlates with an increased degree of happiness is being able to wake up and knowing you can do whatever you want this day.
I'm going to suggest that the debate is flawed from the start. Sorry. My suggestion is that speculating on the causes of happiness is a classic mismatch between the vague holistic happiness and the deterministic reductive sciences of the brain.
You can either redefine the type of happiness to an explicit subdivision that may be amenable to reductive analysis or treat happiness as a given and use epidemiological methods and social sciences to draw conclusions.
Not so much separate magisteria as two maps drawn to widely different scales, each of use, but inadequate at capturing the full terrain.
There is a fairly glaring hole in the question of "what causes happiness that isn't cancelled out by prediction" which is, and I can't believe I even have to say it, meaning. A sense of purpose, a feeling of being necessary, a "why".
So why isn't that cancelled out by prediction? Well, because you never reach the point of comparing expectations with outcome because it's never finished. A volunteer at a soup kitchen goes to bed after work knowing they're expected to come in the next day and do it again. Nearly all "meaning" is actually reducible to some kind of outstanding obligation, something you personally have to do that no one else can do, and that you'll feel bad about not doing. It's never done in the way that a paycheck you earned gets cashed or the meal you've ordered arrives.
What if all happinesses can be canceled out by prediction but certain things are more difficult to build a working model of.
For the Ferrari example, on delivery day you might not get any additional pleasure from the title being in your name. But you still get the new unpredictable experience of driving a Ferrari. I could also imagine a pro driver not getting any pleasure from the experience.
Is it even possible to predict the experience of using heroin for the first time? What does your model predict in the situation where you know with certainty that you’ll be forcibly injected with heroin in one month?
For long lasting happy relationships, maybe it’s impossible to completely model your companions behavior. Or empathy + inability to predict companions prediction error.
This makes a lot of sense. One thing that makes well-designed objects such a joy to use is that they continue functioning well even in unusual circumstances that you didn't know what it would mean to work well in. I assume that something like this is what distinguishes various models of high end cars.
Same with a wonderfully compatible person - they continue producing new delights even in ways that you didn't recognize. I've been with my partner for 17 years, and we still have conversations where we learn new things about each other, in addition to the ones that we enjoy in predictable ways.
Assuming unpredicted reward sends a bigger bolus of neurotransmitters, but intermittently, it would depend how frequently you encounter unpredicted rewards. I would still go for a novelty over predictability in the long haul, but slow and steady predictable rewards are the bread and butter that keep you going.
Is this related to why you can't tickle yourself?
"In contrast, on February 1 you have $1 billion more than on January 31, but because you predicted it would happen, it’s not that big a mood boost."
From personal experience, I disagree. Here's what I recall about selling a property a few years ago:
(1) When the house went under contract, then passed inspection, I was happy knowing that I'd be getting a lot of money at closing in a few weeks. I even got about 3% more than my realtor thought I should ask for, so I felt vindicated.
(2) When the money actually hit my bank account and I saw a six-figure deposit, I was _ecstatic_ to the point that I kept logging in to online bank all day just to stare a balance that was at least ten times greater than it had ever been before. Felt freaking awesome.
I feel like what’s being missed here is polyvagal theory and understanding if/when folks are chronically activated or frozen (as opposed to regulated). I’m thinking about the works of Stephen Porges, Peter Levine, and Gabor Mate off the top of my head. For instance, poor people are more likely to be chronically activated or frozen than rich people. The longer / more often your system is dysregulated, the harder is it to feel the peace & happiness of regulation (and the more likely you fall prey to disease). It’s not that we all have one mode with any possible cocktail of neuro chemicals. It’s that we have at least three modes, operating in phylogenetic order, each with its own tendency of chemicals to produce. Our nervous systems sort of run on familiarity— what kept me alive in the past will likely to keep me alive in the future. And that’s how you get the bf preferring the chaotic gf, it’s likely what his system is familiar with. That’s the exact kind of scenario that somatic therapies help with. I’m also suspicious of NRE. Some of it is the euphoria is of newness, but I’ve seen folks call a trauma bond NRE (again similar to the example of the bf returning to the gf). Like watching my friends with people-pleasing co-dependent patterns tell me they feel NRE, while basically explaining how their co-dependency clicks with the other person’s light narcissism…and then I point them to materials to learn the different between rescuing & co-regulating.
I know I didn’t really dig into how this pertains to predictability & happiness. I do think my point still holds; I’m just a till waking up. I often wonder why I never see discussions of up/down-regulating or polyvagal theory here. Is it too new of a branch of psychology to be taken seriously here?
A while back I took a stab at exploring what design would look like if it accounted for the fact that most of our perceptions seem to continually recalibrate to some new baseline based on current stimulus. Mildly relevant: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ym_IJt8W7hHg2GrLKpju7b7kOrgqWdXL3uslWnEYiS0/edit?usp=drivesdk
"Poly people talk about 'new relationship energy' - if you start a relationship with a new person, you will be passionately into them for a few months, usually at the expense of all your other relationships, before settling back down again. Most poly advice books will give you tips for managing it, which mostly boil down to for God’s sake, don’t take your feelings seriously and deprioritize all your other relationships because this new one is so much better."
This advice works for literally everyone who's in that heady early stage of romance. I am reminded of what @AuronMacintyre said on Twitter: "Periodically progressives reverse engineer healthy sexual behavior and act like they've discovered Atlantis."
I don't know; to me, reward/happiness is probably just "MOR-activation". Or that's a large component, at least.
I feel amazing from opioids — I remember the first time I ever tried them: I didn't expect anything, didn't know what they did really, just took some pills because a guy on the Internet said "hey those pills your parents have can be fun, try them".
Started reading a book; by about an hour later, I had completely forgotten I had even taken anything. Began thinking to myself "wow, I fucking love this book; it's *amazing!*" "Wow, I'm as happy and content as I've ever been... I just *love* life!" "I'm so excited to try this and do that and improve the other! There are so many cool things to do I can barely stand it!"
...and suddenly, I realized: *could this be the pills?*
It was a revelation. I still remember it vividly. I still remember a thousand opioid experiences vividly, and pine for them now that I'm "clean".† I was depressed since as early as I could remember — a "strange, brooding child" my aunt called me, which my mother has still not forgiven her for, heh — and nothing worked... until opioids.
They changed my life and gave me great pleasure and success until I lost my legal source of them and had to start buying on the street. Then all my energy went to finding more and funding more, and dealing with withdrawal due to unreliable connects/no money to buy, and I went downhill fast.
Amphetamine is nice and it combines very well with opioids, but I do not get the same sort of happiness from it at all. I can still be unhappy with amphetamine; the euphoria only works if I'm already content (or on bupe — see below). Neither am I content or happy so much as excited, on amphetamine.
On the other hand, opioids are pure joy. What the relationship is between endogenous opioid peptides and dopamine and happiness, I'm not sure.
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†(Without buprenorphine, I'd never be able to stand it — I cave instantly every time I try to go off; I'm fine with staying on it forever, though: it also cured my insomnia and depression when *nothing* else did, not even when I managed to convince my psychiatrist to try amphetamine and alprazolam together...)
(That *was* actually helpful — but not as good as even a partial agonist like bupe.)
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My experiences with both amphetamine and opioids are different than described in Scott's post, though.
I have not lost euphoria with either one, ever — some dose escalation was required with amphetamine, but a week off resets my tolerance like I never had any. I don't know if I was just made to abuse drugs or if other people are doing it wrong somehow (i.e., needless dose escalation just to "feel more"; losing sleep and eating poorly; etc., tend to make it worse)...
I dunno, maybe I *was* made to be more chemical than man. I fucking love drugs. The only thing that's ever made me as excited, interested, and happy as drugs in general is history.
(And — finding my dream partner; I was actually just talking to her yesterday about something similar to this post: unlike I always hear tell of, I haven't lost any happiness at — or desire for, heh — being with her, and it's two years on. Knock on wood, man, knock on wood.)
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Hmm. I *also* am still super happy every day about having money even though it's been a long time since I got this job. I mean yes, I want more, but it *still* feels amazing to me to be able to just *buy food without considering which type of apple is cheaper by a few cents.*
...Maybe some are immune to the hedonic treadmill?! Other probable-autists feel the same, by any chance?
I'd also like to come out in support of wireheading... perhaps unsurprisingly, heh.
Scott said he wouldn't want to wirehead or use opioids, and this appears to be the common position; however, I've never understood it... What is better than pure happiness and pleasure? You can still do other stuff, if you want: I was immensely successful at university, on opioids. I actually loved class and schoolwork and learning!
I mean, it all went to hell fairly quickly when I lost my easy, cheap, legal supply (friendly doctor, whom I could never figure out: did he know? was he crooked, or just very understanding?); but still. That's not an indictment of the *practice*, only of being dependent on unreliable and expensive black markets.
I'm diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, and while I don't think I'm completely immune to the hedonic treadmill, I have a comment above about how Adderall has not stopped being euphoric for me after nearly a year of taking it 5 days a week.
Other data points (in both directions):
* My most serious relationship fell apart because he moved away and the long distance caused him to lose interest but not me
* That being said I have been the one to lose interest as well. It has seemed to me to be because I actually learned new information about the person, but that could be confirmation bias - maybe I lost interest for neurochemical reasons first and then looked for justifications.
* I come from a lower-middle-class background but have been upper-middle-class my whole adult life, and still get a decent amount of euphoria when I remember that or treat myself to nice things. I do think I'm a bit unhealthily addicted to shopping and splurging, but I don't think the effect is treadmilling much if at all.
* I definitely am getting less and less out of MDMA every time I do it even though the experiences are months-to-years apart, and it's hard to avoid chasing the high of the first time.
* Scott had a previous post where he said that the first bite or two of food is enjoyable but after that he feels like he's just driven to keep eating even though he's not enjoying it, and I didn't relate to that at all, it's usually enjoyable the whole time for me
* The novelty of a new habit or routine does tend to wear off pretty quickly and so I pretty much don't ever stick to them
Maybe this is due to the combination of diagnoses? The autism making me enjoy things more genuinely but the ADHD making novelty wear off quickly?
Particularly the first part of this article reminded me quite a bit of video games. I've experienced a number of times that, when I hear about a video game that will come out in the future and spend a lot of time building up hype for it, I'm going to have a lot of fun with it still, but the fun will end up feeling kind of average... or more accurately, expected.
But when I try out a video game that I basically didn't hear of before or had already accepted might not be good, and then realize that it's fun, that experience will seem much more intense and will stick with me for much longer. The unpredicted reward is stronger.
It's really made me agonize over being exposed to trailers, previews, demos and whatever else before a game comes out. I enjoy the hype, but I know that I will ultimately enjoy the game less because of it.
"Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can’t feel anything at all."
This reminds me of a question I've wondered about: how does MDMA work? The description on Wikipedia seems to mainly say that it increases serotonin, but obviously it's much more enjoyable than SSRIs.
I am reminded of one of my favorite Khalil Gibran quotes:
"No longing remains unfulfilled."
Re: the reward of cake on your birthday--
If we're talking about predictive coding, we need to take into account the layer of the prediction. Your deeper models, which have a long time-horizon, predict you'll get cake on your birthday, so there's no huge shock to them. But the surface-level models, which are trying to predict what you're going to see/hear/taste seconds from now, don't predict "cake" until you've been chewing for a second (which is why the first bite tastes the best!)
A lottery giving me a million dollars I would I think experience how you describe. A lottery giving me a billion dollars would actually fill me with a massive weight of responsibility and fear of fucking up. My upbringing and family structure have given me tools to handle a million dollars, but a billion dollars feels like civilization-level resources to me.
Couple of random thoughts:
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I feel like that "lasting happiness" thing might have something to do with the perceived size of your available action space, rather than the reward associated with any particular action. That is, maybe simply knowing that buying a Ferrari or traveling to Italy or whatever is on the list of things you *could* do if you wanted is a stable source of happiness, even if you never bother to actually do it. Hence why rich people tend to be happier than poor people (because having money means there are more things available to do). Possibly, this would suggest that "good" relationships versus "bad" relationships could be characterized by whether you perceive your partner(s) as expanding versus limiting the activities available for you to do.
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Something I've noticed in trying to prod simple neural networks into playing video games properly is that it seems to be very easy for them to get "stuck" in one place—Mario standing perpetually at the starting location, or walking pointlessly into a solid wall forever. Basically, if the inputs the network is getting never change, then the output never changes either. Whereas a human in that situation would probably start randomly mashing buttons pretty quickly (and most of the time, make some kind of progress as a result). I kind of wonder if biological brains developed a "boredom" signal specifically to avoid that failure mode. In other words, they either assign negative utility to unchanging inputs, or they assign positive utility to actions of any kind.
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Two people walk into a bar. The third one ducks.
Jokes frequently have this structure where there's a "setup" that establishes a pattern, and then a "punch line" that initially appears to break the pattern, but becomes predictable once you re-interpret the setup in a different way. I think you can see similar stuff happening in music (with call-and-response melodies, or with main theme/variation structures in longer pieces), and with game level design (introducing a simple mechanic, and then building increasingly complex variations on it).
So that makes me think that that this "surprising at the time, but predictable in retrospect" quality of experiences is particularly stimulating to the human brain's reward mechanisms, more so than either completely predictable or completely random input.
The first one sounds like a recipe for decision fatigue, which makes people profoundly unhappy. You need to be very self-driven, and stick to your commitments, to enjoy that kind of situation.
> win game: feel nothing
> lose game: the voices are back
My experience with ritalin is that it did help me with concentration but also made me extremely angry. Like, very very angry, to the point that I could end up killing someone. It also made me think about sex all the time, like, really, all the time. I was either angry or thinking about sex. I had to stop taking them and it was very difficult, I did it gradually over six months.
For anyone interested, I have some summarizing notes about Dopamine that'll save you a day of watching YouTube clips. http://cogitolingua.net/media/Dopamine.pdf
Happens to have a focus on its relationship to addiction because that's what brought me to the subject.
I think the enjoyment from the Ferrari/cake is just another type of prediction error. You presumably don't eat cake often, so when eating food, you "predict" a blander flavor. The cake's sugariness relative to this prediction is the prediction error."
So I wouldn't call this "prediction error" vs "predicted hedonism" but instead maybe "'higher order' prediction error" vs. "'lower order' prediction error". Although this "higher-" vs. "lower-order" distinction may be vague, I think it is close to something meaningful. I see it as prediction errors corresponding to, effectively, different areas of the brain (or just different brain representations).
As someone who has recently undergone a bout of Serotonin Syndrome, I can tell you that maxing out your Serotonin levels very much does result in you feeling something (those things being confusion, nausea, insomnia, brain zaps, tremors, and general sense of doom).
Don't fuck around with 5-HTP would be my advice.
> addicted to someone who had a 50-50 chance of being adoring or terrible at any given time, just because half the time you get positive prediction error out of it, and you’re able to feel anything at all.
(...) She may be the song that summer sings
May be the chill that autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day
She may be the beauty or the beast
May be the famine or the feast
May turn each day into a heaven
Or a hell (...)
-- Charles Aznavour, "She"
I never thought of it that way before, but could it be that Aznavour had long been familiar with the joys of a liaison with a BPD person?
Re: "TurnTrout argues this won’t happen, at least for the current paradigm of AIs. If they didn’t learn to hack their reward system in training, they’re not going to want to do it in deployment, even if they are smart enough to know that it would work."
Isn't the crux of the inner alignment / mesa-optimizer problem precisely that you don't know whether an AI has learnt to hack its reward system in training, because you don't know what it's actually learned? And/or that what the AI thinks it's actually being rewarded for may well not be what *you* think it's being rewarded for.
I know almost nothing about AI or ML, but from the tiny bit I do know, which could be totally wrong, I find a lot of the conversation around it to be overly reliant on metaphor and prone to personification. I object to the word 'reward' as used in the AI context; the reason the AI does not attempt to seek reward/change its reward function after training is because an AI (currently) cannot be 'rewarded' in any meaningful sense of the word. If I have a manual computer designed to calculate tide tables and I adjust the various parts to get more and more accurate results, I can call that adjustment the computer updating in response to its reward function but obviously, that is a bad metaphor and not actually a description of what is happening. In the same way, GPT does not know happiness, satisfaction, or fulfillment, no aspect of GPT is even capable of being rewarded or wanting anything. I suspect AI don't even 'hack' their reward function, they just do random shit and sometimes a person tells them they did the right thing when they did not actually do the right thing, and they update accordingly and start going down the faulty path with more and more frequency until somebody notices and writes a breathless article about how their AI is hacking its own brain. This is super late so I doubt I will get any engagement but like I said I have only the most surface-level understanding of this stuff so I might be totally wrong, but from what I do know the above seems correct to me.
> The wife (yes, it’s usually the wife) who complains that the husband never gets her flowers. Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable.
I don't think that's quite the mechanism here; it's more of a "it's the thought that counts" situation. You want your partner to get you flowers because they want to, not because you nagged them. The unpredictability is certainly a factor as well, but I would guess that the motivation for getting the flowers is the main difference.
The broader point about predicted reward makes some intuitive sense to me and tracks with a lot of my own experiences with ADD, but I'm not sure that the lottery example really works here. People value money because it predicts their ability to acquire future goods and services, not because they care about it in of itself. Going from January 1st to February 1st doesn't seem like a big deal because you have not received any actual reward yet--you're just updating your prediction of your chances for living a billionaire lifestyle from something like "99%, unless the lottery was somehow lying or mistaken" to something like "99.9999999999%, unless the entire monetary system collapses this month".
I think there's some degree of conflation here between happiness that arises from novelty and surprise--the discrepancy between predicted happiness and experienced happiness that you noted--and happiness that that arises not because of anything you're currently experiencing but because it signals the likelihood of a future reward. Money is one case here, and the example of receiving compliments from a partner seems like another. Compliments are valued because they signal a person's interest in or care for you and also provide external validation that something about you is perceived positively by others. The 1st compliment you receive from a partner dramatically improves your evaluation of how much they care for you and/or how attractive you are which in turn signals future rewards like sex, affection, etc., while the 100th doesn't provide you with any new information and so doesn't signal anything. You also probably wouldn't be made that much happier by hearing a blind nun compliment how attractive you are.
> a lingering kind of happiness which can be enjoyed even after prediction error has been corrected. What explains this pattern?
I feel like everyone here is missing at least one significant facet to this: predicted alternative scenarios and their expected likelihood. The happiness reward would be actual outcome relative to the predicted next-most-likely alternative outcome(s) (i.e. what would have happened today if today hadn't happened the way it did). For example, maybe someone fully expects to get an X% raise at the end of the year and then gets an X% raise on time as expected, but their feelings may differ based on how they think it likely could have alternatively gone -- either happy because they feel like the alternative was probably that the raise would have been lower, or unhappy because they feel like the alternative was probably that the raise would have been higher.
Considering this perspective, compassionate love might be a shift from something like "if tonight I wasn't dating this person, I might have been dating that other person" to something like "if my spouse wasn't healthy and happy with me today then I'd probably be unhappy in an alternative day". Or for the couple which is instead heading towards divorce, "if my spouse and kids weren't weighing me down with responsibilities, I'd be luxuriating in foreign travel" or whatever. It's a change in the day-to-day predicted/expected alternative to what is actually happening.
One can also identify failures of this mode of happiness. For example, the person who despite performing and earning reasonably well in their day job is having a midlife crisis about how they should have been a best-selling author (an alternative prediction error -- that is very much not a likely alternative to the life they lead today). Or the insecure person who remains perpetually surprised and thereby pleased that they found a happy marriage (also alternative prediction error -- they likely would have found someone else eventually; prediction error doesn't always have to be subjectively bad for the predictor).
> say you can never predict away all reward
I suppose that is possibly one way to say it: you can never predict away the difference between what actually happened and what might have happened instead. But I feel that is critically missing *why* someone can never predict away all reward: people always imagine alternatives to the past, present, and future.
> This also reminds me of the bane of relationship counselors everywhere: the wife (yes, it’s usually the wife) who complains that the husband never gets her flowers. Then the husband gets her flowers, and the wife says “it doesn’t count, you should have known without me telling you”. To this couple, gestures of affection are meaningless unless unpredictable. If the husband had gotten the wife flowers before she had asked, she would have been delighted. If he’d tried the same thing a second time, it wouldn’t have counted; she would have already predicted it and factored it in.
This reminds me of The Last Psychiatrist's blog and his book, Sadly, Porn. From what I understand, his answer to "I've done something that's supposed to feel good but I don't feel good, what should I do?" was "Fake it, you're not doing those things for yourself but for everyone else." This is the same as "Fake it until you make it.", but without the "until you make it" part. Here, "making it" would be "starting to develop companionate love".
I haven't read much about the book online so I'm not sure how obvious all of that is, but considering that the inability to feel companionate love can lead to people getting addicted to destroying their lives (and, in the process, the lives of the people around them), I can understand why he sees it as such a big problem.
Regarding reward prediction and cancellation vs hedons, if a person perpetually underestimated cake they would likely enjoy it more. If they overestimated it they would enjoy it less. It might be a major temperamental difference in people whether they overpredict or underpredict but it seems like a secret to happiness would be underprediction of things that are good for you and overprediction of things that are bad for you. If in some internal prediction model your wife is "adequate" she may consistently beat your expectations and bring you genuine pleasure. [no way for this plan to backfire.] [also quick note that this may also explain a certain type of depression that is stereotypically especially prevalent in idealists on the left.]
Curiously, from a cultural standpoint, we spend a lot of time talking about how things that are (culturally) bad are negative in all aspects (premarital sex, drug use) and encouraging all aspects of good things "eat your vegetables they're delicious." This suggests initial/cultural reward compensations for these things may be opposite of desired: each of us may discover individually that actually, surprisingly, we LOVE heroin and premarital sex and broccoli is quite bitter. If instead our priors for heroin are that we will absolutely love it and that it's positively life changing then somewhat paradoxically our experience with it could somewhat bland. Finding a stable cultural viewpoint that wouldn't cause wild swings would be an important goal, and seems like it would mostly involve truth-seeking.
One of the reasons that driving the Ferrari feels better than predicted may be that the texture of actual, lived experience is much, much higher-dimensional than any possible prediction. Any lived experience is so richly textured, fractally complex that the prediction couldn't come close to capturing it.
I imagine that in the moment when you are sitting in the seat of your new Ferrari and driving around town you are overall, globally inclined toward finding positive sensation and behold, you find in your experience of the leather on your back, the wind on your skin many unpredicted (and unpredictable by any fidelity prediction), positive sensations.
My (very shallow) understanding of jhana meditation practice is to manually jump start the global inclining toward positive sensation then finding, even in sitting still in a black room, a ton of pleasure in just being in your body.
Thinking Fast and Slow talked about pleasure registering change in condition, not absolute condition. So if you were out in the rain and cold and found shelter from the wind behind a rock, it would feel incredibly pleasurable, but the pleasure would die down eventually and you'd be motivated to go look for something more permanent.
I feel like good relationships might be like getting into and out of a house. When you first get into the house, it will feel amazing, and when you leave it will be miserable and cold, but while you're in the house you adjust to it and just feel comfortable. But that doesn't mean it's all the same. Being in the house really is better, and the feelings during transition are evidence.
So I'd say you want to pursue pleasure that are indicating real positive change in your condition, and be careful of pleasures that are disconnected from that.
Also, because people are so complicated and dynamic, I don't think you can ever fully get used to them.
Suppose I know a friend (or maybe friendly superintelligence) has prepared something nice for me. They have given me many nice things before, so I have a good idea of the statistical distribution, yet I have no idea what this particular nice thing is. Do I get the unpredictable reward.
Why we can know that our partner died and yet call out for them to make us a cup of tea? Because declarative memory is different from implicit, and more specifically procedural memory. If I've been getting cups of tea from my partner for 5 years, it is as much a part of my procedural memory as tying my shoelaces or commuting to work. I do each without thinking. Declarative and implicit memories reside in different parts of the brain, form and update differently. Putting "my partner is no longer here" into declarative memory has only small effect on procedural memory and it takes a long time (~ a year) for it to update fully through repeated experience of the world with my partner being absent from it.
Here's a link to wikipedia as a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory
I tried using this mindset to make myself happier for a long time. One example I tried: flipping coins after going to the gym to randomly decide whether I'd reward myself with some new socks. It didn't really work. What made me happier in the end was starting antidepressants and therapy. I think it is possible to be sustainably happier, but that it takes some work to change yourself to get there.
A part of the "extra kind of happiness" is forgetting.
Our predictions of rewards involve forming stronger connections between certain neurons, and the strength of these connections gradually degrades over time. Those of y'all who are familiar with spaced-repetition learning tools, picture the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, or look up the image for a refresher. Notice that forgetting still gradually occurs even after frequently-reinforced learning, it just happens slowly. The fact it still happens makes good sense from a high level "How should a brain be designed?" level, since in a changing environment you'd want it to stop spending resources on outdated adaptations.
In a machine learning context, there's a conceptually similar technique called regularization used to avoid overfitting. The kinds of regularization I have in mind (e.g. ridge, lasso) involve shrinking coefficients (whether positive or negative) back toward zero. My analogy here is that the connections between neurons that get built up by repeated rewards are strong in a way similar to large coefficients. When you stop getting the old rewards but life goes on, then for your brain to avoid overfitting to outdated info, it lets the connections physically degrade back toward zero.
So here's my null(-ish) hypothesis about what's happening with limerence versus companionate love.
For a new happy couple, the complex joys of togetherness involve learning a lot, i.e. forming and dramatically strengthening a lot of new connections. There's a little forgetting too, but learning dominates early on. Over time they'll approach an equilibrium (unless they're chaotic like the addictive girlfriend in the post) where the forgetting and the relearning are balanced.
For a long term happy couple, not much forgetting will happen, e.g. overnight while they sleep. But a little will! And that creates a little gap between predicted reward and actual reward, for an ongoing drip drip drip of happiness. It's not the flood they had at first, but it's still nice. That's the happiness of companionate love; it's the same kind of happiness as early romantic love, it's just a difference of degree rather than kind.
There are some related phenomena that fit nicely. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder": happy couples that are forced apart by fate often experience joyous reunions, bringing a bit of the old flame back to their companionate lives. (And conversely, countless couples who lived together and worked from home 24/7 during the pandemic experienced a lot less happiness from their companionship during that time.) Couples who travel or try new activities together also often feel the companionship lit with new sparks of intense love as they learn new ways of being together. And the romantic importance of anniversaries and holidays fits as well, since though they are perfectly predictable consciously, there's a whole year gone by between for forgetting to occur.
What if we considered that even the most predictable gain gave us an unpredictable felt reward (often more than a top-down reward following the rule of hedonic adaptation). A felt reward that fluctuates based on our unconscious needs at the time, which in turn derive from our other recent experiences (e.g. seeing an old friend can be surprisingly pleasant after a tough week) We are constantly creating conditions that we believe will create our happiness, and wait to see if it will work out well. This is what keeps me going. And you?
This article emphasise how important to practice gratitude, can help with your reward system.
This reminds me of three books. Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul, Aspiration by Agnes Callard, and Epiphanies by Sophie Grace Chappell. All at least touch on the difficulty of using expected utility calculations to decide whether to change your utility function (putting it in terms relevant here).
Subconscious prediction errors giving rise to emotions, it slots nicely into my (admittedly vague) recollection of arousal/valence, if we assume prediction errors lead to heightened arousal.
>So how come predicting you would get the money mostly cancels out the goodness of getting the money, but predicting you would get the Ferrari/dinner doesn’t cancel out the goodness of the Ferrari/dinner?
On March 1st, other people know for sure that you have money. On Feb 1st, other people, your neighbours may know - but not really sure. Perhaps on Apr 1st, it may not matter that much. There is phase transition on Jan 1st and Mar 1st.
Long-time lurker and fan, Scott. I'm going to do something I shouldn't and comment on the one big thing I disagree with, rather than the many things that made me nod my head.
> "It points out that AIs are not, technically, “trying to get reward”. You can prove this is true because (as far as I know), most modern AIs only get reward during training. Then you deploy them and they keep doing stuff, even though there is no way to get reward in the deployment environment. It’s fair to describe this as “doing things like the things that got them reward in the past”, but not as reward-seeking."
If AIs only learn from rewards during training, that is simply because whoever built the system of training and deployment designed it that way. It's not at all inevitable or structurally necessary to AI.
AIs can also keep learning during deployment; alternatively, the ML practicioner may deploy an AI model, record the errors it produces, use those errors to train a clone of the model in parallel, and then swap the new model in. Learning during deployment by interacting sequentially with an environment is called "online learning."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_machine_learning
As a token of this method's legitimacy, I'll share here a paper on online learning co-authored by David Silver of Deepmind.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06294
Having trained and tested deep RL models against lots of complex environments for three years in my last startup, I will say that online learning is both useful and necessary for AI to produce value in many industries.
There is no reason to think that AIs cannot recognize reward and assign credit to state-action pairs in real-time while deployed. They can and many do. This is not the future. It is one version of the present. (Another version of the present is training an AI model offline on a dataset, and then deploying that model without giving it the ability to learn.)
I hope it's clear that enabling AI models to learn in real-time, or at least be updated frequently based on their prediction errors in deployment, is essential to making them useful. Decision-making technology such as AI which is built to ignore a changing reality does not strike me as ideal.
> "This is an important distinction! One big concern in AI alignment is that AIs will learn to hack their own reward systems (ie wirehead), and devote their energy to implementing such hacks (which produce super-high reward) instead of doing their assigned tasks (which only produce normal levels of reward). TurnTrout argues this won’t happen, at least for the current paradigm of AIs. If they didn’t learn to hack their reward system in training, they’re not going to want to do it in deployment, even if they are smart enough to know that it would work."
There's a major difference between continuing to learn new ways to maximize reward while in deployment, on the one hand, and hacking your own reward system, on the other. The structure of the vast majority of deep RL algorithms does not include the option to wirehead. That is, the reward function written by a human do remain static, and the RL agent simply seeks new ways to increase that pre-defined reward. There is some safety in that. Even the freedom that the RL agent enjoys to seek new methods of reward maximization can be constrained; you can bound how much it explores new paths to reward, rather than exploiting the reward pathways it already knows.
Creating an RL agent that hacks on its own reward system seems like a relatively trivial modification that a naive or nihilistic young programmer will experiment with. Maybe those agents will create for themselves novel jhanas and retreat into their EC2 instances, never to trouble us again. Maybe they will learn to bluff humans like Pluribus has, but in a higher-stakes game than poker, and manipulate us like the robot in Ex Machina, having been trained to use an NLP interface to obtain rewarding interactions from their human tools. That seems possible, but not imminent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)#:~:text=Pluribus%20is%20a%20computer%20poker,in%20a%20complex%20multiplayer%20competition%22.
If you spend time worrying about AI alignment, please don't lull yourself into complacency by making limiting assumptions about training vs deployment environments, or about the action space that could be exposed to an RL agent (ie can it wirehead or not?). WireheadRL will someday be a Github Repo, and that algorithm, like most of the others in AI, will be open-sourced. The real constraints will then be about training that algorithm on relevant data at scale, which costs more money than simply writing some code.
I've always thought the behavior analytic interpretations are missing in these discussions. I mean, we're talking about reinforcement, we need to bring Skinner into the mix.
For example: "With every other partner he’d tried, it was either one or the other. With her it was some kind of perverse exactly-50-50 probability, and he was addicted to it.... This pattern has always confused me, and I never know what advice to give people who find themselves falling into it."
We know that variable schedules of reinforcement are the most "addicting" and resistant to "stopping" (extinction). I can't find a good article but here's a site that references most of the important research in the area. Although it's in the context of animals, the same is applicable to human behavior. http://www.trainmeplease.com.au/blog/schedules-of-reinforcement-in-animal-training