[extropy-chat] Would You Enjoy Knitting?

[Mark Walker]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Hanson" <

>
> It is not clear to me which will be more important: what people now
> want, or what they now want to want.
>
> People now do seem to have preferences they want to have, that differ
> from the preferences they do have.   Many religious people, for
> example, want to be more committed to their religion.   Many married
> people want to be less tempted to betray their marriage.   Many
> somewhat ambitious people would like to be more devoted to their
> ambitions.  Many somewhat altruistic people would like to be more
> truly altruistic.  Many soldiers would like to be more courageous in
> battle.  And so on.
>
> In general humans want to be more "ideal" than they are, and this is
> due to a generic self-deception whereby people believe they are more
> ideal than they are, in order to convince others to admire and
> affiliate with them.   "Be careful what you wish for" is apt here -
> many bad things will happen when people get their wish to be more
> ideal.   And because deep down people know they really don't want to
> be as ideal as they say they do, many people will find excuses to
> back away from their professed ideals.

If I understand you Robin you are saying that self-deception is the root 
cause of us wanting to be more ideal. The idea is that I might deceive 
myself about how good looking I am, and since this is a matter of 
self-deception at some level (however one describes the cognitive states of 
self-deception) I realize that I am not what I claim to be. But I am not 
sure how this helps. Is the idea that if say I am objectively a 5 out of 10 
on the good looking scale but deceive myself that I am a 7 then wanting to 
be ideal is a way of letting my beliefs track the truth. If this is the case 
then shouldn't my goal to be a 7 objectively so that now my beliefs and the 
truth dovetail? How do you explain my wanting to be a 10 if I don't deceive 
myself as being a 10? Is the idea that there would be an iteration of the 
problem until I reached perfection? If so, it looks like I would have to 
have some pretty sophisticated beliefs to explain all of this.


Second, you say that many people would find a way to back away from their 
ideal if they were given some (easier) way of achieving it. Someone might 
predict the same thing if they thought that people are sometimes mistaken 
about what they want: as the old saw you mention reminds us. I wonder how we 
could experimentally differentiate these two explanations.

Suppose people could take a pill that would allow them to speed up them to 
control their desire for food, e.g., imagine being able to dial in how many 
calories in a day before you feel full and losing the desire for more food. 
I predict that an overwhelming percentage, say over 75%, who take the pill 
would be pleased that they could approach their ideal weight in such an easy 
fashion. Some might miss the satisfaction of dieting the old-fashion way, 
but most who take the pill I think would not regret what they wished for. 
Does your prediction (if that is what it is) of "many" conflict with this?

Mark

Dr. Mark Walker
Department of Philosophy
University Hall 310
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1
Canada