[extropy-chat] Re: ECON/Liberty: Is choice bad for you?

[Hal Finney]

I read Schwartz's article a few weeks ago in Scientific American,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0006AD38-D9FB-1055-973683414B7F0000 .
(Actually that's just the intro, I guess you have to subscribe to read
the whole thing online.)

It does seem to me that these kinds of results pose a problem particularly
for Extropians.  However, I would put a somewhat different spin on how
we interpret the data.

These results suggest that giving people what they want is not always
the best way to make them happy.  People who have many choices are not
happier than people who have few.  People who get something that they
want really badly are often not happier after they get it.  People today
are not happier than people in previous decades.

The author draws a personality type distinction between what he calls
satisficers, or people who are happy with something that is good enough;
and maximizers, or people who want the best.  His basic thesis is that
maximizers tend to be unhappy because it takes so much effort to decide
which is the best, and they are always worried that they don't have
the best.

The problem for us is that Extropians tend to be maximizers to the nth
degree!  We want choice, lots of choice, as much choice as possible.
We want to perfect ourselves, to maximize our abilities, our talents.
We want to live out our dreams, to make every desire come true, to
eliminate all obstacles.  Of course we don't expect to achieve all of
these things right away, but these are our goals, the direction which
we are striving towards.

Based on Schwartz's analysis, this is not going to make us happy.
We think these things will satisfy us, but they won't.  In fact, his
data suggests that we will be less happy and more anxious in such a
situation than we are today.

Now, he draws a lot of collectivist conclusions, tut-tutting about the
consumer society and advertisers and such.  Plus he manages to turn this
into an endorsement of Democratic Party positions on privatization of
Social Security and Medicare and school vouchers.  This part was tired
and predictable to me.

More helpful was his personal advice, which boiled down to, try to be a
satisficer rather than a maximizer.  Fine, but these personality traits
are to some extent built in to us.  It's not clear that we can change
and become satisfied more easily, just by wishing it were so.

My interpretation is to see these results in the light of some of the
similar paradoxes of perception and belief we have discussed previously,
such as Robin Hanson's theories about truth-seeking and altruism.
Our minds are evolved to be successful in a social environment, where
one of the main determinates of how well we do is how successful we
are socially.  Robin argued that in many cases the simplest and most
direct way to achieve social success would be for the mind to be deluded
about its own desires.  We have evolved a highly accurate ability to
detect lying and insincerity, so it follows that the most effective way
to fool others is to fool ourselves.  His work and that of evolutionary
psychologistss and social scientists has identified many areas in which
we are systematically self-deluded.

Schwartz's result should be seen as another example of this same
phenomenon.  We desire more choices because historically that desire
has been beneficial.  For example, leaders tend to have more choices
than followers.  By giving us a desire for choice, we will strive to
rise in the social heirarchy, which incidentally will let us have more
children and give them a better chance to survive.  But of course the
true direction of causation is the opposite.  What really matters
is reproduction and survival.  Striving for choice is just a trick
which evolution uses to get the mind to take steps that will benefit
reproduction.

So what does this all mean for Extropians?  Should we give up on our goals
and accept a future where we face the same limitations we have today?

Not necessarily.  If we ignore the psychological impact for a moment,
objectively, more choice ought to be genuinely better.  Everyone has
different needs, and so with more choices, each person is more likely
to find something which best suits his requirements.  The problem is
that Schwartz has shown that moving from a low-choice to a high-choice
situation can be stressful, and that further, having a differential in
choice level throughout society will lead to people trying too hard to
get into a high-choice situation.

I think we can remedy these problems with technology.  People will need
to delegate their choice-making to automated systems, and then trust
these devices to do their jobs.  We have had many discussions here in
the past about collaborative filtering as a technology to help people cut
through an overwhelming selection of choices and quickly identify those
which would be the most beneficial.  We see this has come to life in some
ways in the blogging world, where a constant flow of cross referencing
and commentary automates the distribution and filtering of information.
Likewise, comparison shopping sites make it easy to bring all the relevant
choices together.  I bought a new car last month, and it was tremendously
easier and less stressful than our previous purchase, nine years ago.

Future technologies of ubiquitous and pervasive computing will allow this
kind of support to be with us all the time.  Faced with an overwhelming
selection at the grocery store, your shopping agent will instantly
highlight the product which has gotten the best reviews from those with
tastes like yours.

The main personal adjustment will be for those high-stress type A people
to relax and trust this information.  It's not going to be practical in
the future to evaluate every alternative manually.  In business, part of
the secret of being a good manager is learning to delegate tasks and not
micro-manage.  In the future, we will all be managers, managers of our
own lives, and we will similarly have to learn to delegate and trust.

As far as the more extreme Extropian goals of self-perfection, we can
still hold to them, and we all may have our own reasons for seeking
such goals.  But we should be aware of the evolutionary bias which may
be driving us in this direction.  To the extent that our desires are
based on these ancient drives, we have to accept that we are likely to
be disappointed.  Becoming an immortal of godlike power is not going to
make us happy, in and of itself, not when everyone else is an immortal of
godlike power, too.  No matter how far we go, other people are going to be
there before us, and we need to keep that in mind as we dream our dreams.

Hal