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> It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest....The earring is never

> It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest....The earring is never wrong. > There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right. > ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family. > Niderion-nomai’s commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points. The piece implies that 1. at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret. 2. not knowing what will make one happy is part of what makes one free. I'm not sure I agree with these (it seems that 1. is a paradox) but it is an interesting thought experiment.

joshkel 1y ago
> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret. Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.
indoordin0saur 1y ago
I think it's less confusing when you consider the very first thing the earring says: "better for you if you take me off". The wearer should rationally always regret not following its advice, including that first thing. I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of misleading language: > ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family. The wearer doesn't really live any sort of life. Once it fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you're no longer experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've basically died and been replaced by the earring.
nine_k 1y ago
> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret. Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not. I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.
munificent 1y ago
Statements that involve the future are always linguistically vague. In your paradoxical sentence, "will regret" could be interpreted as either "know at that moment that they will regret" or "come to know after the fact that they regret it". The former is a paradox, but the latter isn't. As life advice, I think it works better when you consider it amortized over a collection of choices instead of a set of serial choices each of which it must be rigidly applied to: One should make a set of choices using a strategy that leads some of them to be likely to be regretful (but presumably without being able to predict ahead of time which ones will be).
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cjameskeller 1y ago
We are told: >"It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own." I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal', there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the advice unquestioningly. A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of those various options to consider "good" or "better". And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument, because different people have different definitions of the "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks like to the choices made by the people, themselves. Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge, well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging condition, rather than a sequential act. (As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature undeniably provides some structure to ultimate desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering or decay of the mind...)
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joshkel 1y ago

> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret. Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.

indoordin0saur 1y ago

I think it's less confusing when you consider the very first thing the earring says: "better for you if you take me off". The wearer should rationally always regret not following its advice, including that first thing. I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of misleading language: > ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family. The wearer doesn't really live any sort of life. Once it fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you're no longer experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've basically died and been replaced by the earring.

nine_k 1y ago

> at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret. Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not. I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.

munificent 1y ago

Statements that involve the future are always linguistically vague. In your paradoxical sentence, "will regret" could be interpreted as either "know at that moment that they will regret" or "come to know after the fact that they regret it". The former is a paradox, but the latter isn't. As life advice, I think it works better when you consider it amortized over a collection of choices instead of a set of serial choices each of which it must be rigidly applied to: One should make a set of choices using a strategy that leads some of them to be likely to be regretful (but presumably without being able to predict ahead of time which ones will be).

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cjameskeller 1y ago

We are told: >"It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own." I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal', there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the advice unquestioningly. A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of those various options to consider "good" or "better". And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument, because different people have different definitions of the "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks like to the choices made by the people, themselves. Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge, well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging condition, rather than a sequential act. (As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature undeniably provides some structure to ultimate desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering or decay of the mind...)

deleted 1y ago

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