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An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which

by bumby 2y ago

An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context). Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.

tombert 2y ago
There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards. At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.
- bumby 2y ago
  I think this is all true, with an added nuance: We typically make decisions with our emotional mind, and justify it with our rational mind after the fact. I believe Bloom is in the camp that we can override that initial emotional impulse, but there are people who disagree with him. In any event, if the end goal is emotional ("minimize regret") I'm not sure there's much to be gained by bringing the rational into it. The biggest takeaway I had from his book is that being overly emotionally empathetic can make us biased and lose out on the bigger picture, like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs. (There are other biased aspects, like the fact that we tend to empathize more with people who are similar to us, that can lead to obvious less-than-great outcomes.)
  - tombert 2y ago
    > like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs Yeah, that's fair. In my previous apartment, there was a guy named Julius. I really liked him, he was very pleasant to talk to, funny, charming, and just very nice. We were in that apartment for three years, and nothing too remarkable happened, but the last year, Julius fell into some kind of lifestyle that I'm unsure of the details of, but ended up with him constantly stoned, missing teeth, and evicted from the apartment. He was still in my neighborhood (homeless as far as I could tell), and he would still talk to me, always really polite, but with increasingly-yellow eyes, and it made me really sad, because I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, let alone someone who was always kind to me. My wife and I discussed maybe giving him some money to try to get back on his feet, but we decided against it because we were confident that if we did it would likely go to drugs. We really wanted to help, but we were afraid, like you said, it would be a short-term want overshadowing a long term gain. If I had genuinely thought that writing him a check for $1,000 would dramatically improve his life, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but I didn't, and I felt like there was a good chance it would fuel a bender that would lead to an overdose. I would occasionally buy him lunch at the nearby Wendy's, and I offered to try and help him fix up his resume to maybe make him more employable, but nothing ever came of that. We eventually moved from that apartment and I'm not sure what happened to Julius. I hope he's ok, but I suspect that he's probably dead now, from an overdose or alcohol poisoning. A part of me wishes I had given him some money to dig himself out, but I think I made the right choice. I don't lose sleep over my actions on that one; there wasn't really anything I could have done much different. Sometimes sad shit just happens, and it's no one's fault.

by bumby 2y ago

tombert 2y ago

There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards. At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.

bumby 2y ago
I think this is all true, with an added nuance: We typically make decisions with our emotional mind, and justify it with our rational mind after the fact. I believe Bloom is in the camp that we can override that initial emotional impulse, but there are people who disagree with him. In any event, if the end goal is emotional ("minimize regret") I'm not sure there's much to be gained by bringing the rational into it. The biggest takeaway I had from his book is that being overly emotionally empathetic can make us biased and lose out on the bigger picture, like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs. (There are other biased aspects, like the fact that we tend to empathize more with people who are similar to us, that can lead to obvious less-than-great outcomes.)
- tombert 2y ago
  > like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs Yeah, that's fair. In my previous apartment, there was a guy named Julius. I really liked him, he was very pleasant to talk to, funny, charming, and just very nice. We were in that apartment for three years, and nothing too remarkable happened, but the last year, Julius fell into some kind of lifestyle that I'm unsure of the details of, but ended up with him constantly stoned, missing teeth, and evicted from the apartment. He was still in my neighborhood (homeless as far as I could tell), and he would still talk to me, always really polite, but with increasingly-yellow eyes, and it made me really sad, because I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, let alone someone who was always kind to me. My wife and I discussed maybe giving him some money to try to get back on his feet, but we decided against it because we were confident that if we did it would likely go to drugs. We really wanted to help, but we were afraid, like you said, it would be a short-term want overshadowing a long term gain. If I had genuinely thought that writing him a check for $1,000 would dramatically improve his life, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but I didn't, and I felt like there was a good chance it would fuel a bender that would lead to an overdose. I would occasionally buy him lunch at the nearby Wendy's, and I offered to try and help him fix up his resume to maybe make him more employable, but nothing ever came of that. We eventually moved from that apartment and I'm not sure what happened to Julius. I hope he's ok, but I suspect that he's probably dead now, from an overdose or alcohol poisoning. A part of me wishes I had given him some money to dig himself out, but I think I made the right choice. I don't lose sleep over my actions on that one; there wasn't really anything I could have done much different. Sometimes sad shit just happens, and it's no one's fault.