the aspiration curve from youth to old age
November 25, 2013 7:00 AM Subscribe
Commenting on work by Hannes Schwandt, Peter Levine writes: "Many young adults feel that they are not yet getting what they want from life but expect to get it in five years. In middle age, people are disappointed not to have seen their expectations met and rate themselves dissatisfied. They also expect life to get worse–it won’t offer important new satisfactions or successes, but their health will decline as their years run out. Instead, life does offer new rewards in the later decades, and so people are pleasantly surprised. Mean self-reported satisfaction is the same at age 70 as it was at age 30 (and much higher than it was at 50). What could we do to avoid the dreaded U-curve of satisfaction?"
These articles summarise CEP Discussion Paper No 1229; “Unmet aspirations as an explanation for the age U-shape in wellbeing.“
Perhaps also relevant: "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being," "Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion," and "Larger, enriched cages are associated with ‘optimistic’ response biases in captive European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)." (Open Access Button)
These articles summarise CEP Discussion Paper No 1229; “Unmet aspirations as an explanation for the age U-shape in wellbeing.“
Perhaps also relevant: "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being," "Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion," and "Larger, enriched cages are associated with ‘optimistic’ response biases in captive European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)." (Open Access Button)
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posted by fullerine at 7:09 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by fullerine at 7:09 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
Hmm, why do we have to avoid the 'U'? - Isn't that part of a maturation process that takes us way past an age when, in the past, we were expected to die, and which therefore involves a re-calibration?
Otherwise 'avoiding the U' can become just another meta-thing to be worried and anxious about. Although that might be good news for various types of therapists.
posted by carter at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
Otherwise 'avoiding the U' can become just another meta-thing to be worried and anxious about. Although that might be good news for various types of therapists.
posted by carter at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:20 AM on November 25, 2013
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:20 AM on November 25, 2013
Hmm, why do we have to avoid the 'U'?
If the U is mostly caused by erroneous expectations, then we might want to avoid the U simply because it's unnecessary: a clearer picture of the world and of the life process would increase our life satisfaction overall. Perhaps if there was less age-based social segregation, there would be other benefits as well.
But at the very least, if realism increases happiness, then we should be more realistic!
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:22 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
If the U is mostly caused by erroneous expectations, then we might want to avoid the U simply because it's unnecessary: a clearer picture of the world and of the life process would increase our life satisfaction overall. Perhaps if there was less age-based social segregation, there would be other benefits as well.
But at the very least, if realism increases happiness, then we should be more realistic!
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:22 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
Um, more and more young people are despairing of doing anything more fulfilling than just scraping by. Could we maybe get worked up about that, before tackling the 'U'? Maslow's hierarchy, and such.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [8 favorites]
posted by Artful Codger at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [8 favorites]
Healthcare.
I would be so much happier to work part time and make half as much money, but health insurance. Oh well. With the extra money I'm gonna buy some land mostly for the purpose of keeping other people off of it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]
I would be so much happier to work part time and make half as much money, but health insurance. Oh well. With the extra money I'm gonna buy some land mostly for the purpose of keeping other people off of it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]
Millenials, bookmark this. Next time another tired article rolls out lamenting how your generation was raised to think you deserved careers as rockstar-astronaut-ballerinas, you can point to this. People who were 70 in the 2000's had unmet expectations too.
posted by selfmedicating at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
posted by selfmedicating at 7:23 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
If the U is mostly caused by erroneous expectations, then we might want to avoid the U simply because it's unnecessary ...
Yes, although how to do so is an interesting question. I was thinking here - and this is not necessarily what the article says - that the expectations in each 'age' are not the same - that they come from two different perspectives.
So it's tempting maybe to think that when we change expectations, we are changing from expectation 1 to expectation 2 in the same perspective; but I think what we are doing is developing a new perspective (post 40s/50s, say) that generates its own new expectations, that are entirely different in character.
posted by carter at 7:34 AM on November 25, 2013
Yes, although how to do so is an interesting question. I was thinking here - and this is not necessarily what the article says - that the expectations in each 'age' are not the same - that they come from two different perspectives.
So it's tempting maybe to think that when we change expectations, we are changing from expectation 1 to expectation 2 in the same perspective; but I think what we are doing is developing a new perspective (post 40s/50s, say) that generates its own new expectations, that are entirely different in character.
posted by carter at 7:34 AM on November 25, 2013
"The dog is the happiest creature, because he is not cursed with the twin agonies of memory and ambition"
posted by griphus at 7:36 AM on November 25, 2013 [10 favorites]
posted by griphus at 7:36 AM on November 25, 2013 [10 favorites]
I think that's basically right, carter: expectations of satisfaction are predictions combined with preferences. Both preferences and predictions change as we age, and it's not clear that more accurate predictions are sufficient. Thus, we need philosophy (Stoic, Vedantic, whatever) to change our preferences, too.
But it seems like it matters that our predictions about our future preferences are wrong, and it seems like that ought to force some re-evaluation: "In five years I'll probably worry less about this shit than I do today" is a useful tool to keep in your back pocket.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:39 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
But it seems like it matters that our predictions about our future preferences are wrong, and it seems like that ought to force some re-evaluation: "In five years I'll probably worry less about this shit than I do today" is a useful tool to keep in your back pocket.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:39 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
Um, more and more young people are despairing of doing anything more fulfilling than just scraping by. Could we maybe get worked up about that, before tackling the 'U'? Maslow's hierarchy, and such.
Not to be an ass, but it is possible to simultaneously walk and chew gum. There's absolutely nothing that prevents us from doing other things while we are addressing our economic and employment problems. I mean, if we were to go down that road of reasoning, we'd have to say that we'd better not address our economic and employment problems until we've solved the overpopulation and climate-change problems... But even if A is a bigger problem than B, it doesn't mean that we always have to put everything else on hold before we address B.
Anyway, I, for one, am damn glad to hear this right about now in my life, so thanks from me, at least, anotherpanacea.
Also, and as I've often thought: Oh, to live at a time when tenure and fame could be secured by coming up with something like "Maslow's hierarchy of needs." Jebus. That's barely an idea at all.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 8:19 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
Not to be an ass, but it is possible to simultaneously walk and chew gum. There's absolutely nothing that prevents us from doing other things while we are addressing our economic and employment problems. I mean, if we were to go down that road of reasoning, we'd have to say that we'd better not address our economic and employment problems until we've solved the overpopulation and climate-change problems... But even if A is a bigger problem than B, it doesn't mean that we always have to put everything else on hold before we address B.
Anyway, I, for one, am damn glad to hear this right about now in my life, so thanks from me, at least, anotherpanacea.
Also, and as I've often thought: Oh, to live at a time when tenure and fame could be secured by coming up with something like "Maslow's hierarchy of needs." Jebus. That's barely an idea at all.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 8:19 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
Isn't that part of a maturation process that takes us way past an age when, in the past, we were expected to dieNo, people did not drop dead in their early 20s for most of human history. In hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, life expectancy at birth does hover around 21–25, but only because of very high infant mortality. Studies on fossils and existing hunter-gatherer societies show that members who survive childhood eventually die in their early 70s, following a mortality pattern that isn't much different from what we have now.
I really wish we could all just put this inane Snapple Fact to bed.
posted by aw_yiss at 8:30 AM on November 25, 2013 [16 favorites]
It's not you, it's U.
posted by tecg at 8:30 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by tecg at 8:30 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
(Also, I'm sorry if that came off as abrasive, but in most cases where I've seen that alluded to in an online discussion, it led into an attempt to justify that it's perfectly natural for a 28-year-old man to be sexually attracted to 13-year-old girls. It has kind of worn on me.)
posted by aw_yiss at 8:38 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by aw_yiss at 8:38 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]
after my dream date with paul williams in knee pants, i'm perfectly content to snuggle with my baby's arm holding an apple.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 9:04 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 9:04 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
In hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, life expectancy at birth does hover around 21–25, but only because of very high infant mortality.
Wasn't there a huge decline in life expectancy with intensive agriculture and again in the early industrial revolution in Europe? So there would be another U curve, with the high points in early hunter/gathers and currently, and huge dip over the intervening centuries.
With, I would assume, a similar U-shaped happiness curve.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:10 AM on November 25, 2013
Wasn't there a huge decline in life expectancy with intensive agriculture and again in the early industrial revolution in Europe? So there would be another U curve, with the high points in early hunter/gathers and currently, and huge dip over the intervening centuries.
With, I would assume, a similar U-shaped happiness curve.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:10 AM on November 25, 2013
We lie to our kids and tell them they can achieve anything if they just try hard enough.
For the tiny percentage of people who are lucky and talented and lucky and gifted and mostly just lucky enough to actually achieve those things, this is helpful because if we didn't give them these inflated expectations they would be less likely to be motivated to attempt the barely-possible.
For the rest of us, the overinflated expectations lead to disappointment -- either by motivating us to failure or by making us feel like failures because we never got around to attempting the achievements we were falsely led to believe was our due -- but that majority wouldn't have achieved anything significant anyway so what does it matter, societally speaking.
System working as intended.
Hello, I am 42 and according to these charts have another decade of declining life satisfaction to look forward to before fully resigning myself to the situation and becoming more satisfied with it! Sounds about right!
posted by ook at 9:13 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
For the tiny percentage of people who are lucky and talented and lucky and gifted and mostly just lucky enough to actually achieve those things, this is helpful because if we didn't give them these inflated expectations they would be less likely to be motivated to attempt the barely-possible.
For the rest of us, the overinflated expectations lead to disappointment -- either by motivating us to failure or by making us feel like failures because we never got around to attempting the achievements we were falsely led to believe was our due -- but that majority wouldn't have achieved anything significant anyway so what does it matter, societally speaking.
System working as intended.
Hello, I am 42 and according to these charts have another decade of declining life satisfaction to look forward to before fully resigning myself to the situation and becoming more satisfied with it! Sounds about right!
posted by ook at 9:13 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
embrace your mediocrity
you are ordinary
you made NO difference
posted by thelonius at 9:25 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
you are ordinary
you made NO difference
posted by thelonius at 9:25 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
There are more than 7,126,618,000 of us to compete with what did you expect would happen, really
Now that I think of it, here's an interesting thing: the year I was born there were only 3,743,401,880 of us
So already it's twice as hard. And getting harder every 0.42 seconds
Good luck, suckers
posted by ook at 9:37 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]
Now that I think of it, here's an interesting thing: the year I was born there were only 3,743,401,880 of us
So already it's twice as hard. And getting harder every 0.42 seconds
Good luck, suckers
posted by ook at 9:37 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]
If the U is mostly caused by erroneous expectations, then we might want to avoid the U simply because it's unnecessary: a clearer picture of the world and of the life process would increase our life satisfaction overall.
I understand this sentiment, but I can't help but read this as inveighing against virtuous ambition.
The linked paper uses 'aspirations' and 'expectations' interchangeably, but these are very different things. Let's say that there is a link, however: let's say that it is a quirk of human psychology that we can't aspire to great heights without also raising our expectations unrealistically (I think this is probably true). Does this mean that we shouldn't aspire? The easiest way to cope with unrealized dreams is to not dream. It's not obvious to me which is better: a world with fewer ambitious people but a flatter average U-curve, or a world with highly ambitious and hopeful young people who eventually have to restructure their lives around dashed hopes.
If the object of your desire does not obtain, you can either suffer the consequences of an unsatisfied desire, or you can alter your desire. I think of the latter tactic being a vaguely Buddhist thing to do: it's a way to end striving. But there is something very wrong in ending striving in this way, I think. If you are willing to change your preferences when they are unrealized, that just shows that they were never your preferences to begin with. You cannot value things while also being willing to revise those values. That's why it's not obvious to me that we should want flatter U-curves: realism about our lot in life, and altering our desires to match, might well lead to a decrease in our abilities to correctly track value and to care about things.
posted by painquale at 10:08 AM on November 25, 2013
I understand this sentiment, but I can't help but read this as inveighing against virtuous ambition.
The linked paper uses 'aspirations' and 'expectations' interchangeably, but these are very different things. Let's say that there is a link, however: let's say that it is a quirk of human psychology that we can't aspire to great heights without also raising our expectations unrealistically (I think this is probably true). Does this mean that we shouldn't aspire? The easiest way to cope with unrealized dreams is to not dream. It's not obvious to me which is better: a world with fewer ambitious people but a flatter average U-curve, or a world with highly ambitious and hopeful young people who eventually have to restructure their lives around dashed hopes.
If the object of your desire does not obtain, you can either suffer the consequences of an unsatisfied desire, or you can alter your desire. I think of the latter tactic being a vaguely Buddhist thing to do: it's a way to end striving. But there is something very wrong in ending striving in this way, I think. If you are willing to change your preferences when they are unrealized, that just shows that they were never your preferences to begin with. You cannot value things while also being willing to revise those values. That's why it's not obvious to me that we should want flatter U-curves: realism about our lot in life, and altering our desires to match, might well lead to a decrease in our abilities to correctly track value and to care about things.
posted by painquale at 10:08 AM on November 25, 2013
It's not obvious to me which is better: a world with fewer ambitious people but a flatter average U-curve, or a world with highly ambitious and hopeful young people who eventually have to restructure their lives around dashed hopes.
It strikes me as possible, at least in theory, to work towards a world in which one encourages high aspirations but also encourages realistic assessment of the likelihood of reaching those aspirations. That is, there's nothing wrong with a child dreaming of playing in the NBA or being a rock star, but there's something horribly wrong with a 40-year-old who considers him/herself a failure because they're just a "dull normal" and not a superstar of some kind. I think the problem with the U is not that people have dreams and aspirations at the beginning, it's that they beat themselves up too much for failing to realize those dreams and aspirations when they hit the middle.
posted by yoink at 10:19 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
It strikes me as possible, at least in theory, to work towards a world in which one encourages high aspirations but also encourages realistic assessment of the likelihood of reaching those aspirations. That is, there's nothing wrong with a child dreaming of playing in the NBA or being a rock star, but there's something horribly wrong with a 40-year-old who considers him/herself a failure because they're just a "dull normal" and not a superstar of some kind. I think the problem with the U is not that people have dreams and aspirations at the beginning, it's that they beat themselves up too much for failing to realize those dreams and aspirations when they hit the middle.
posted by yoink at 10:19 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
You cannot value things while also being willing to revise those values.
I'm trying not to moderate this thread, but I think this is pretty wrong: our values always exist in a web or network of other values.
I think this is akin to the mistake that people make when they say that science is a religion, too: there actually are ways to hold reviseable beliefs, and the same is true for values.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:42 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
I'm trying not to moderate this thread, but I think this is pretty wrong: our values always exist in a web or network of other values.
I think this is akin to the mistake that people make when they say that science is a religion, too: there actually are ways to hold reviseable beliefs, and the same is true for values.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:42 AM on November 25, 2013 [4 favorites]
I'm trying not to moderate this thread, but I think this is pretty wrong: our values always exist in a web or network of other values.
(I wouldn't worry about moderating the thread!)
I didn't mean to imply that we should think our values are unrevisable. I meant that we should not be willing to revise them. This is true of our beliefs as well. Central beliefs (like those in logical laws, etc) are those that are nearly unrevisable: we do not expect to find evidence that they are false, and we should only be willing to revise them when forced by overwhelming counterevidence. If it turns out that not much counterevidence was required, then the belief was never really that central.
Same with central values. I care about my friends greatly. I accept that events could happen that could cause me to stop being friends with them. But I do not think that those events will take place, and I will fight to prevent those events from taking place. If I did not, then it turns out that I didn't strongly care about my friends. To centrally value their friendship, I can't be wiling to revise my values and stop caring about them. It has to be forced upon me (just as only overwhelming counterevidence could force a change in central belief). Similarly, if I really care about an object of ambition, then I will fight to keep it as the object of my ambition. If I am willing to drop it as an object of ambition, then just like a dropped friend, it shows I never really cared about it at all.
It strikes me as possible, at least in theory, to work towards a world in which one encourages high aspirations but also encourages realistic assessment of the likelihood of reaching those aspirations.
I'm a little less sanguine about the psychological plausibility of this. We work hardest when we slightly delude ourselves about our capabilities and the outcomes, I think.
posted by painquale at 11:14 AM on November 25, 2013
(I wouldn't worry about moderating the thread!)
I didn't mean to imply that we should think our values are unrevisable. I meant that we should not be willing to revise them. This is true of our beliefs as well. Central beliefs (like those in logical laws, etc) are those that are nearly unrevisable: we do not expect to find evidence that they are false, and we should only be willing to revise them when forced by overwhelming counterevidence. If it turns out that not much counterevidence was required, then the belief was never really that central.
Same with central values. I care about my friends greatly. I accept that events could happen that could cause me to stop being friends with them. But I do not think that those events will take place, and I will fight to prevent those events from taking place. If I did not, then it turns out that I didn't strongly care about my friends. To centrally value their friendship, I can't be wiling to revise my values and stop caring about them. It has to be forced upon me (just as only overwhelming counterevidence could force a change in central belief). Similarly, if I really care about an object of ambition, then I will fight to keep it as the object of my ambition. If I am willing to drop it as an object of ambition, then just like a dropped friend, it shows I never really cared about it at all.
It strikes me as possible, at least in theory, to work towards a world in which one encourages high aspirations but also encourages realistic assessment of the likelihood of reaching those aspirations.
I'm a little less sanguine about the psychological plausibility of this. We work hardest when we slightly delude ourselves about our capabilities and the outcomes, I think.
posted by painquale at 11:14 AM on November 25, 2013
Wow aw_yiss, that's a great paper. But I think the misunderstanding out there is a bit more severe than a Snapple Fact; I know quite a lot of very well educated folks, and I'd bet that the vast majority of them remain misinformed about hunger-gatherer lifespans. I think a lot of them have finally hooked onto the fact that lifespans might have gone down in the agricultural and industrial eras, but I doubt whether very many of them would guess that the modal lifespan for hunter-gatherers (who make it into adulthood) was 70 or so. Since the annual round of scientific communication for this demographic is rapidly approaching -- ie, nonfiction books gifted for Christmas -- do you know of any good books on this? This article itself could easily be expanded into a whole book; it's a shame they don't appear to have done so.
posted by chortly at 11:16 AM on November 25, 2013
posted by chortly at 11:16 AM on November 25, 2013
Similarly, if I really care about an object of ambition, then I will fight to keep it as the object of my ambition. If I am willing to drop it as an object of ambition, then just like a dropped friend, it shows I never really cared about it at all.
I think you're conflating two different things. No one is saying that you need to "revise your ambition." You can just be realistic about the probability of that ambition being realized. I might have the "ambition" to be a rock star. I might devote my life to that end. But if I fail to achieve it, I should, realistically, take solace in accepting that the chances of realizing such a dream were always miniscule. In other words, no matter how hard I tried and no matter how good I got, there was always going to be a pretty large element of chance at play and the odds were not going to be in my favor.
Similarly if my "ambition" is to bring about world peace or to climb to the top of the academic world or to win a Nobel prize or what have you. No one is saying "hey, drop that stupid dream, cease working towards that end." They're simply saying "if the dream doesn't come true, don't automatically assume that this was because you failed in some way."
The flip side of that belief is that everyone who is not a Captain of Industry or a movie star or what have you is somehow a lesser human being. That the world sorts us out into "successes" and "failures" on strictly fair and reasonable grounds, and that we all get what we deserve--good or ill--in life. That strikes me as a deeply pernicious belief.
posted by yoink at 11:29 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
I think you're conflating two different things. No one is saying that you need to "revise your ambition." You can just be realistic about the probability of that ambition being realized. I might have the "ambition" to be a rock star. I might devote my life to that end. But if I fail to achieve it, I should, realistically, take solace in accepting that the chances of realizing such a dream were always miniscule. In other words, no matter how hard I tried and no matter how good I got, there was always going to be a pretty large element of chance at play and the odds were not going to be in my favor.
Similarly if my "ambition" is to bring about world peace or to climb to the top of the academic world or to win a Nobel prize or what have you. No one is saying "hey, drop that stupid dream, cease working towards that end." They're simply saying "if the dream doesn't come true, don't automatically assume that this was because you failed in some way."
The flip side of that belief is that everyone who is not a Captain of Industry or a movie star or what have you is somehow a lesser human being. That the world sorts us out into "successes" and "failures" on strictly fair and reasonable grounds, and that we all get what we deserve--good or ill--in life. That strikes me as a deeply pernicious belief.
posted by yoink at 11:29 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
I think you're conflating two different things. No one is saying that you need to "revise your ambition." You can just be realistic about the probability of that ambition being realized.
I don't mean to conflate them; I'm aware that aspiration and expectation are different (I pointed out that it's the paper that conflates them), but I think they're probably very closely psychologically linked, so that the best way to be ambitious and strive is to be slightly deluded about prospects. In any case, I don't think it's clear that the U-shaped slump comes from unrealized expectations rather than unrealized ambitions. I don't think the linked paper controls for this. Even if you are right and people can aspire while remaining realistic about their chances, unachieved goals might be what lead to mid-life unhappiness.
posted by painquale at 1:19 PM on November 25, 2013
I don't mean to conflate them; I'm aware that aspiration and expectation are different (I pointed out that it's the paper that conflates them), but I think they're probably very closely psychologically linked, so that the best way to be ambitious and strive is to be slightly deluded about prospects. In any case, I don't think it's clear that the U-shaped slump comes from unrealized expectations rather than unrealized ambitions. I don't think the linked paper controls for this. Even if you are right and people can aspire while remaining realistic about their chances, unachieved goals might be what lead to mid-life unhappiness.
posted by painquale at 1:19 PM on November 25, 2013
I think the language of "central values" begs the question. It's certainly true that if I define myself by my love of golf, then I will have the wrong set of attitudes towards my projects if I am willing to experiment and become a musician. But why should I define myself in this way? In particular, why should I define myself by the particular set of values that also cause me the most pain for seeming unacheivable?
Marking one's values as reviseable is just a different disposition towards oneself: it says, "Look, I'm the guy with this job and this mortgage and this set of relations, but odds are that the things that currently seem central won't always. Maybe that centrality is an illusion!"
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:03 PM on November 25, 2013
Marking one's values as reviseable is just a different disposition towards oneself: it says, "Look, I'm the guy with this job and this mortgage and this set of relations, but odds are that the things that currently seem central won't always. Maybe that centrality is an illusion!"
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:03 PM on November 25, 2013
Marking one's values as reviseable is just a different disposition towards oneself: it says, "Look, I'm the guy with this job and this mortgage and this set of relations, but odds are that the things that currently seem central won't always. Maybe that centrality is an illusion!"
That's possible. It might turn out that although this guy thought that he valued something deeply, he didn't. Maybe none of his values are all that deep. But I am also claiming, on top of all this, that there is something important in having deep, central, difficult-to-revise values. The strength of a care is (partly) a function of how unreviseable it is, and it is virtuous to strongly care about the things that you care about.
Here's an intuition pump. Suppose a genie comes to you and tells you that they can make you fall out of love with the person that you are most in love with (and vice versa), but they will make you fall in love with another person even more strongly. You will be happier. At every moment, you will have your desires satisfied; the genie will just shuffle around your desires. Should you take the genie's offer?
If you do, I think that just shows that you were never really that much in love in the first place. Fragile desires are hardly desires at all.
We can look over the divorce rate data and recognize that there's a good chance we will fall out of love with our spouses. That does not mean we should be willing to fall out of love now. I should rebel against falling out of love with the things that I love, else I hardly love at all.
posted by painquale at 3:44 PM on November 25, 2013
That's possible. It might turn out that although this guy thought that he valued something deeply, he didn't. Maybe none of his values are all that deep. But I am also claiming, on top of all this, that there is something important in having deep, central, difficult-to-revise values. The strength of a care is (partly) a function of how unreviseable it is, and it is virtuous to strongly care about the things that you care about.
Here's an intuition pump. Suppose a genie comes to you and tells you that they can make you fall out of love with the person that you are most in love with (and vice versa), but they will make you fall in love with another person even more strongly. You will be happier. At every moment, you will have your desires satisfied; the genie will just shuffle around your desires. Should you take the genie's offer?
If you do, I think that just shows that you were never really that much in love in the first place. Fragile desires are hardly desires at all.
We can look over the divorce rate data and recognize that there's a good chance we will fall out of love with our spouses. That does not mean we should be willing to fall out of love now. I should rebel against falling out of love with the things that I love, else I hardly love at all.
posted by painquale at 3:44 PM on November 25, 2013
in my 20s i wanted to make my living as a musician and get my hands on a recording studio
right before 40 i gave up and got married and had a kid
the job i got to support all that became even more important when i got divorced - and eventually at 56 i find myself with an almost 18 year old daughter and a kluged together recording studio with lots of cheap guitars and cheap rack synths and effects
little chance of making a living at it and really, the lifestyle and benefits suck, but i did get part of what i wanted and work with it constantly, making the music i always wanted to make
i guess if you keep at it long enough, you're bound to get something for it
maybe that explains the U - sometimes it just takes a long damned time ...
posted by pyramid termite at 5:02 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
right before 40 i gave up and got married and had a kid
the job i got to support all that became even more important when i got divorced - and eventually at 56 i find myself with an almost 18 year old daughter and a kluged together recording studio with lots of cheap guitars and cheap rack synths and effects
little chance of making a living at it and really, the lifestyle and benefits suck, but i did get part of what i wanted and work with it constantly, making the music i always wanted to make
i guess if you keep at it long enough, you're bound to get something for it
maybe that explains the U - sometimes it just takes a long damned time ...
posted by pyramid termite at 5:02 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]
Whenever you respond to the charge of "begging the question" with an intuition pump, it's an excuse to double down on begging the question.
Basically, I'd say two things about your intuition pump:
1. What drives your intuition pump isn't the idea of central values, it's the nature of loving another person in particular, where love for a person is partly a matter of loving the history of your relationship, not just their qualities, etc. Most projects that structure our expectations of satisfaction, and especially the decline in those expectations, are not person-loving projects.
2. In order for the analogy to work, you have to reframe it. Imagine that you are a woman in an abusive relationship, in which you stay because you think that relationship is the love of your life. The genie comes and tells you two things: in a few years, the relationship will be over and you will meet the true love of your life, and the genie can speed the process, making it take months instead of years. Should you take the genie's offer?
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:52 PM on November 25, 2013
Basically, I'd say two things about your intuition pump:
1. What drives your intuition pump isn't the idea of central values, it's the nature of loving another person in particular, where love for a person is partly a matter of loving the history of your relationship, not just their qualities, etc. Most projects that structure our expectations of satisfaction, and especially the decline in those expectations, are not person-loving projects.
2. In order for the analogy to work, you have to reframe it. Imagine that you are a woman in an abusive relationship, in which you stay because you think that relationship is the love of your life. The genie comes and tells you two things: in a few years, the relationship will be over and you will meet the true love of your life, and the genie can speed the process, making it take months instead of years. Should you take the genie's offer?
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:52 PM on November 25, 2013
Have things improved for the good-ole U-curve since 2010? Last I heard, it was looking too fragile to be believed.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 7:29 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 7:29 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]
Well, I'm still interested in the argument on the importance of what we care about, but I have to admit that that study is pretty much a debunking. No U-curve! Just a data artifact! Sorry everyone.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:49 AM on November 26, 2013
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:49 AM on November 26, 2013
(My comments below are conditional on the now-dubious existence of the U-curve.)
1. What drives your intuition pump isn't the idea of central values, it's the nature of loving another person in particular
I don't need to make it about another person. Suppose that a youth dedicates herself to social justice. She is constantly frustrated in her pursuits. Achieving social justice is tough! A genie appears and tells her that he can reduce her life's frustration by making her famous, and by making her care about fame much more than she cares about social justice. She'll be happier this way. Should she accede? Or, suppose a philosopher (we can call him 'anotheranotherpanacea') cares deeply about philosophy, knowledge, and truth. A genie appears and tells him he can make him exceptionally wealthy, while also removing his philosophical drives and replacing them with an even stronger desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake. This hypothetical future anotheranotherpanacea will look back at his past self and think that he was crazy to have been so interested in philosophy, and that he was of course correct to accept the genie's offer. So: should current anotheranotherpanacea accede?
I assume you think not. I think that these sorts of cases reveal that you do not and should not consider your deep values fungible. I'm trying to get at this by picking out items of value that you do in fact value. Earlier, you mentioned a person who defines himself by a love of golf. I think this only seems like a fungible desire that we should be willing to change because we are looking from the outside: a person who cares that deeply about golf is being somewhat silly and should change his values if it causes him pain. But from the perspective of a person who cares that deeply about it, and treats it as no less silly than you treat social justice or the pursuit of philosophy, his desire is something that he cannot treat as rationally reviseable for prudential reasons.
I also think that there aren't really that many people who deeply value golf, which makes the example seem even more silly. Most golf enthusiasts probably recognize that golf is a means to the attainment of some deeper end. Supposing that the U-curve exists and isn't just an artifact, I'd think that people become depressed when their core, central goals go unfulfilled. They're not upset that they don't play as much golf as they would like, but that they haven't achieved fame by becoming a golf star, or mass respect, or the autonomy and freedom to play golf whenever they want. It's a reorientation away from these sorts central goals that would quite plausibly cause the alleged pain of the 40-year-old; becoming interesting in stamp-collecting rather than golf isn't the kind of thing that causes deep existential anguish. My claim is that it should be painful to change these core concerns... it should be difficult to decide that in order to be happy you have to start over and start caring about new things. If you can make yourself happy by just changing any of your values to suit your situation, then your happiness is superficial. In the drive to eliminate depression, we must not medicate away mourning.
2. In order for the analogy to work, you have to reframe it.
Well, I don't think it's often dialectically legitimate to challenge a thought experiment by offering a different one that you think the person person should have focused on. You're right that your example is a closer analogy in some respects (not all), but the point of a thought experiment isn't to give the closest analogy possible. I was trying to establish a general principle about desire and value, and to do this I was abstracting away various complicating features in the original problem. Reintroducing those complicating features to make a closer analogy just changes the subject and makes it harder to see that general principle.
Here's the role the intuition pump was meant to play. I find it difficult to know whether we should want to flatten the U-curve because there are two different sorts of goods pulling in two directions. On one hand, it's bad that people report low well-being in their 40s, and it would be good to change that. On the other hand, it's good for people to have strong commitments and unfragile core desires. I took it that you were challenging the notion that there's a tension here by denying the existence of the latter sort of good. My thought experiment was supposed to establish the existence of that good by giving a case where there was no tension and noting that we're (at least, I'm) inclined to say that we shouldn't let genies alter our desires willy-nilly. The most plausible principle underlying these judgments is one that claims that the non-fungibility of our values is something we consider a good.
In your example, the abused person should definitely leave: the reasons to leave the abuser swamp out whatever commitments have been made. But we shouldn't think that just because the overwhelmingly correct thing to do is to fall out of love, the abused person's love for his or her abuser does not offer a pro tanto reason to stay in love. An abusive relationship is a complicated mess of reasons and emotions, but there's a clear verdict about what the abused person should do, which renders a lot of the pro tanto reasons invisible. That is why I was abstracting away from a close analogy. The pro tanto reasons are more apparent when you consider cases where there isn't outright abuse, but there are relationship difficulties. Should we want to be the sort of people who can immediately and rationally decide to stop valuing other people when we realize it will make us happier to do so? Or should we want to be people who find it difficult to fall out of love, and are saddened by loss? These are tough questions, and I find it difficult to say. But I find it difficult to say precisely because there is a tension between happiness and the good that comes from commitment to our central values.
posted by painquale at 5:35 AM on November 26, 2013
1. What drives your intuition pump isn't the idea of central values, it's the nature of loving another person in particular
I don't need to make it about another person. Suppose that a youth dedicates herself to social justice. She is constantly frustrated in her pursuits. Achieving social justice is tough! A genie appears and tells her that he can reduce her life's frustration by making her famous, and by making her care about fame much more than she cares about social justice. She'll be happier this way. Should she accede? Or, suppose a philosopher (we can call him 'anotheranotherpanacea') cares deeply about philosophy, knowledge, and truth. A genie appears and tells him he can make him exceptionally wealthy, while also removing his philosophical drives and replacing them with an even stronger desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake. This hypothetical future anotheranotherpanacea will look back at his past self and think that he was crazy to have been so interested in philosophy, and that he was of course correct to accept the genie's offer. So: should current anotheranotherpanacea accede?
I assume you think not. I think that these sorts of cases reveal that you do not and should not consider your deep values fungible. I'm trying to get at this by picking out items of value that you do in fact value. Earlier, you mentioned a person who defines himself by a love of golf. I think this only seems like a fungible desire that we should be willing to change because we are looking from the outside: a person who cares that deeply about golf is being somewhat silly and should change his values if it causes him pain. But from the perspective of a person who cares that deeply about it, and treats it as no less silly than you treat social justice or the pursuit of philosophy, his desire is something that he cannot treat as rationally reviseable for prudential reasons.
I also think that there aren't really that many people who deeply value golf, which makes the example seem even more silly. Most golf enthusiasts probably recognize that golf is a means to the attainment of some deeper end. Supposing that the U-curve exists and isn't just an artifact, I'd think that people become depressed when their core, central goals go unfulfilled. They're not upset that they don't play as much golf as they would like, but that they haven't achieved fame by becoming a golf star, or mass respect, or the autonomy and freedom to play golf whenever they want. It's a reorientation away from these sorts central goals that would quite plausibly cause the alleged pain of the 40-year-old; becoming interesting in stamp-collecting rather than golf isn't the kind of thing that causes deep existential anguish. My claim is that it should be painful to change these core concerns... it should be difficult to decide that in order to be happy you have to start over and start caring about new things. If you can make yourself happy by just changing any of your values to suit your situation, then your happiness is superficial. In the drive to eliminate depression, we must not medicate away mourning.
2. In order for the analogy to work, you have to reframe it.
Well, I don't think it's often dialectically legitimate to challenge a thought experiment by offering a different one that you think the person person should have focused on. You're right that your example is a closer analogy in some respects (not all), but the point of a thought experiment isn't to give the closest analogy possible. I was trying to establish a general principle about desire and value, and to do this I was abstracting away various complicating features in the original problem. Reintroducing those complicating features to make a closer analogy just changes the subject and makes it harder to see that general principle.
Here's the role the intuition pump was meant to play. I find it difficult to know whether we should want to flatten the U-curve because there are two different sorts of goods pulling in two directions. On one hand, it's bad that people report low well-being in their 40s, and it would be good to change that. On the other hand, it's good for people to have strong commitments and unfragile core desires. I took it that you were challenging the notion that there's a tension here by denying the existence of the latter sort of good. My thought experiment was supposed to establish the existence of that good by giving a case where there was no tension and noting that we're (at least, I'm) inclined to say that we shouldn't let genies alter our desires willy-nilly. The most plausible principle underlying these judgments is one that claims that the non-fungibility of our values is something we consider a good.
In your example, the abused person should definitely leave: the reasons to leave the abuser swamp out whatever commitments have been made. But we shouldn't think that just because the overwhelmingly correct thing to do is to fall out of love, the abused person's love for his or her abuser does not offer a pro tanto reason to stay in love. An abusive relationship is a complicated mess of reasons and emotions, but there's a clear verdict about what the abused person should do, which renders a lot of the pro tanto reasons invisible. That is why I was abstracting away from a close analogy. The pro tanto reasons are more apparent when you consider cases where there isn't outright abuse, but there are relationship difficulties. Should we want to be the sort of people who can immediately and rationally decide to stop valuing other people when we realize it will make us happier to do so? Or should we want to be people who find it difficult to fall out of love, and are saddened by loss? These are tough questions, and I find it difficult to say. But I find it difficult to say precisely because there is a tension between happiness and the good that comes from commitment to our central values.
posted by painquale at 5:35 AM on November 26, 2013
Ok, let me revise my earlier claim: given the new data, I'm not really as interested in re-litigating these Frankfurt problems as discussing the overall methodology of the intuition pumps and thought experiments. I think you're right that I started the pump-fight with my golf example, and I want to decide whether that was legitimate or not.
But let me first address the central values/integrity thesis. My claim has been that thinking of some set of our values as "unreviseable" is wrong, and that we ought to hold our values tentatively and loosely. I think that even though I have a wife and daughter, a career and research program, and innumerable other commitments. But what I mean by tentative/loose holding of these commitments is just that I think that I ought to stand ready to change or re-orient them given new evidence of the right sorts. My claim is not the simplistic utilitarian claim that we ought always maximize, but a more complex methodological consequentialism that says we ought to see our values as a part of a map or network, such that no single or set of values in indelible or unreviseable.
In that sense, I'm arguing for defeasibility conditions for our values, even our central values: that there ought to be things that I can recognize as causing me to leave my wife or daughter, give up my career and research, or drop any of my innumerable other commitments. That doesn't mean that the particular defeasibility conditions you describe are the right ones: I shouldn't do that because I want to have a -slightly- happier life. But there are conditions under which I would do that, and that's what matters. What's more, given the U-shape, I was trying to claim that there might be costlessly defeated commitments; that giving up our concerns with status, career, and success might increase happiness without loss. Without that U-shape, there's less justification for this, but I actually suspect this is a true claim that comes with age, and so I would like to defend it without having irrelevant claims about loving (which I also value!) in the mix. You seem to be arguing that I *must* hold my values tightly in order to be a virtuous human being; I'm arguing that I *can* hold them virtuously while still recognizing ways in which they might be revised in light of new evidence and experience.
The procedural/methodological account defeasibility and revision can only be parodied by an intuition pump that depends on magic or pills or magic pills or experience machines. The revisions must come in narratively plausible forms, so your genie fails to address my claim because it lacks that narrative plausibility.
Now to the thought experiments: my claim is that they never offer evidence, only clarification. That is, they can help someone see a point, but if they already understand the point but disagree with it from the perspective of that understanding, the intuition pump offers a false sort of evidence, an assurance or complicated distraction rather than a reason to change one's views. What's more, they're often insultingly personal, as when we talk about other people's family's as a part of a relatively anodyne social science discussion. It just feels intrusive, to pump other people's intutions in this way.
So consider another thought experiment along these lines: if the Great Predictor told you your dissertation research would fail, that you'd fail your dissertation defense, that you'd never get a job, and that you'd wind up penniless and shut out of the academy, would you abandon the project?
Now, of course you can choose not to be insulted. Perhaps you'd agree that being wrong is a good enough reason to revise a central project of your current existence. But at the heart of this thought experiment is a personal dig. It allows me to pretend that you are a failure, that your work is wrong and that you are wrong to pursue it. And I think that that is a breach of reasonable standards of discursive conduct, especially when I can make the argument with things like golf and music that don't personally involve either of us. And accusing someone of being a bad husband or father, or pretending that they might trade their profession for wealth and their commitments to truth for foppish things, is just this kind of insult, especially when there are much nicer ways of putting it: we can talk about the contingent ways in which we've come to love the things we love, discuss alternate historical possibilities that might have led to different values, and never once engage in the kind of aggressive thought experiment that you raised here. We can even wistfully confide that we wish that loved football and beer more than philosophy and literature.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:02 AM on November 26, 2013
But let me first address the central values/integrity thesis. My claim has been that thinking of some set of our values as "unreviseable" is wrong, and that we ought to hold our values tentatively and loosely. I think that even though I have a wife and daughter, a career and research program, and innumerable other commitments. But what I mean by tentative/loose holding of these commitments is just that I think that I ought to stand ready to change or re-orient them given new evidence of the right sorts. My claim is not the simplistic utilitarian claim that we ought always maximize, but a more complex methodological consequentialism that says we ought to see our values as a part of a map or network, such that no single or set of values in indelible or unreviseable.
In that sense, I'm arguing for defeasibility conditions for our values, even our central values: that there ought to be things that I can recognize as causing me to leave my wife or daughter, give up my career and research, or drop any of my innumerable other commitments. That doesn't mean that the particular defeasibility conditions you describe are the right ones: I shouldn't do that because I want to have a -slightly- happier life. But there are conditions under which I would do that, and that's what matters. What's more, given the U-shape, I was trying to claim that there might be costlessly defeated commitments; that giving up our concerns with status, career, and success might increase happiness without loss. Without that U-shape, there's less justification for this, but I actually suspect this is a true claim that comes with age, and so I would like to defend it without having irrelevant claims about loving (which I also value!) in the mix. You seem to be arguing that I *must* hold my values tightly in order to be a virtuous human being; I'm arguing that I *can* hold them virtuously while still recognizing ways in which they might be revised in light of new evidence and experience.
The procedural/methodological account defeasibility and revision can only be parodied by an intuition pump that depends on magic or pills or magic pills or experience machines. The revisions must come in narratively plausible forms, so your genie fails to address my claim because it lacks that narrative plausibility.
Now to the thought experiments: my claim is that they never offer evidence, only clarification. That is, they can help someone see a point, but if they already understand the point but disagree with it from the perspective of that understanding, the intuition pump offers a false sort of evidence, an assurance or complicated distraction rather than a reason to change one's views. What's more, they're often insultingly personal, as when we talk about other people's family's as a part of a relatively anodyne social science discussion. It just feels intrusive, to pump other people's intutions in this way.
So consider another thought experiment along these lines: if the Great Predictor told you your dissertation research would fail, that you'd fail your dissertation defense, that you'd never get a job, and that you'd wind up penniless and shut out of the academy, would you abandon the project?
Now, of course you can choose not to be insulted. Perhaps you'd agree that being wrong is a good enough reason to revise a central project of your current existence. But at the heart of this thought experiment is a personal dig. It allows me to pretend that you are a failure, that your work is wrong and that you are wrong to pursue it. And I think that that is a breach of reasonable standards of discursive conduct, especially when I can make the argument with things like golf and music that don't personally involve either of us. And accusing someone of being a bad husband or father, or pretending that they might trade their profession for wealth and their commitments to truth for foppish things, is just this kind of insult, especially when there are much nicer ways of putting it: we can talk about the contingent ways in which we've come to love the things we love, discuss alternate historical possibilities that might have led to different values, and never once engage in the kind of aggressive thought experiment that you raised here. We can even wistfully confide that we wish that loved football and beer more than philosophy and literature.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:02 AM on November 26, 2013
Gah! I didn't mean to make any of those accusations! I definitely didn't mean to impugn your own values. I was treating us as having shared values: the "foppish" things I guess you thought I was deriding are things I took us to both understand as valuable. Nor did I mean to become too invasive. I completely misread the tenor of the conversation. I apologize for any insult and for becoming inadvertently aggressive. I thought it was an interesting conversation and topic and I let my thoughts get in the way of my cordiality, so please let me cancel any negative implicatures that you read into my words. Debates about deep-seated values need to be handled delicately, and I'm not too confident about my ability to appropriately navigate this topic now, so I think I'll leave it there. Sorry.
posted by painquale at 8:06 AM on November 26, 2013
posted by painquale at 8:06 AM on November 26, 2013
I'm sorry painquale, I didn't mean to come off as if I'm deeply offended. I was trying to say that I don't see intuition pumps doing quite the kind of work that we want them to do (and often doing a different kind of work that has the aggressive character I discuss). I can separate myself from the arguments, but I was trying to explain why I chose the kinds of thought experiments that I did.
Please cancel all negative implicatures on my part as well.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:05 AM on November 26, 2013
Please cancel all negative implicatures on my part as well.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:05 AM on November 26, 2013
Oh good. Again, apologies.
Part of the reason that I was bringing up the more personal thought experiments is that I do not think that you can abstract away your own first-person perspective and the values that you actually hold when talking about value change. I, at least, make different evaluative judgments about the situations in which it's permissible for me to change my (actual) values than I do about when it's permissible for other people to change their values, or for when it's permissible for counterfactual me to change values that I do not actually hold. Acceptable value change looks very different from the inside.
I agree that thought experiments usually offer clarification, not evidence, but that is what I was using the genie experiments to offer.
posted by painquale at 4:40 AM on November 27, 2013
Part of the reason that I was bringing up the more personal thought experiments is that I do not think that you can abstract away your own first-person perspective and the values that you actually hold when talking about value change. I, at least, make different evaluative judgments about the situations in which it's permissible for me to change my (actual) values than I do about when it's permissible for other people to change their values, or for when it's permissible for counterfactual me to change values that I do not actually hold. Acceptable value change looks very different from the inside.
I agree that thought experiments usually offer clarification, not evidence, but that is what I was using the genie experiments to offer.
posted by painquale at 4:40 AM on November 27, 2013
Good. So back to value change: first, I think it makes sense to speak more in terms of projects and preferences. I'm not sure if this shift is important or not, but I suspect that many things that get called "values" and have a generic character (like "family, faith, and flag") may be directly linked to some central projects and preferences and so we do not revise the values while the projects still hold, and it would indeed seem disloyal to those projects to the change the values that go with them.
And I do also think that the language of projects, especially shared projects and the history of shared projects, makes it clear the kinds of internal first-person value revision I have in mind. It'll always feel wrong and artificial to use supernatural means to "trade projects" just in the sense that projects don't work like that. But that doesn't mean that we don't or shouldn't revise projects in light of new information or experiences. In fact it seems to be a failure of character to hold projects so tightly that we do not revise them when circumstances change, and that's what I meant by invoking the abused spouse or erroneous dissertation. The key is discovering the defeasibility conditions for different projects: once those conditions pertain, we ought change our projects and frequently this will mean changing the values that attach to them.
On my view, agency just is this tautological relationship to projects and values: to never revise them, except when we do. Any talk of virtues like loyalty or integrity will always be so shot through with caveats and defeasibility conditions (if it is accurate and not merely exhortative) that it ends up being this kind of tautology.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:52 AM on November 27, 2013
And I do also think that the language of projects, especially shared projects and the history of shared projects, makes it clear the kinds of internal first-person value revision I have in mind. It'll always feel wrong and artificial to use supernatural means to "trade projects" just in the sense that projects don't work like that. But that doesn't mean that we don't or shouldn't revise projects in light of new information or experiences. In fact it seems to be a failure of character to hold projects so tightly that we do not revise them when circumstances change, and that's what I meant by invoking the abused spouse or erroneous dissertation. The key is discovering the defeasibility conditions for different projects: once those conditions pertain, we ought change our projects and frequently this will mean changing the values that attach to them.
On my view, agency just is this tautological relationship to projects and values: to never revise them, except when we do. Any talk of virtues like loyalty or integrity will always be so shot through with caveats and defeasibility conditions (if it is accurate and not merely exhortative) that it ends up being this kind of tautology.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:52 AM on November 27, 2013
that study is pretty much a debunking. No U-curve! Just a data artifact! Sorry everyone.
Man. The guy who toiled his whole life coming up with the theory of the U-curve must be having a really disappointing mid-life period. And he started out with such high hopes, too. Oh well, no doubt he'll get over it in time.
posted by yoink at 9:25 AM on November 27, 2013
Man. The guy who toiled his whole life coming up with the theory of the U-curve must be having a really disappointing mid-life period. And he started out with such high hopes, too. Oh well, no doubt he'll get over it in time.
posted by yoink at 9:25 AM on November 27, 2013
In the past week I've had a lot of conversations inspired by this thread with philosophers who work on desire. Thanks for making it, anotherpanacea. It is striking to me how tiny the literature on the appropriateness of preference change seems to be. Most of the literature concerns how one ought to update one's preferences in order to maintain certain formal relations, such as transitivity. But this is hardly all that can be said about when we should change our basic preferences.
It'll always feel wrong and artificial to use supernatural means to "trade projects" just in the sense that projects don't work like that. But that doesn't mean that we don't or shouldn't revise projects in light of new information or experiences.
I guess I am interested in questions about what sort of new information could possibly lead to appropriate revision of our preferences (in either an epistemic or a moral sense of appropriateness). At least on standard decision theoretic models, because of the direction of fit of preference, preference isn't the sort of thing that is sensitive to new information or experience at all, except maybe for evidence that one's own preferences are incoherent (e.g. because they are non-transitive, because there are various conflicting second-order preferences, etc.).
An alternate possibility is that we directly perceive value in the world, and we should update our preferences to track objective value in the same way that we update beliefs to track objective truth. If this is the case, then something like a conative version of the Reflection Principle will tell us that we ought update our desires to become like those that we expect to eventually rationally hold. I'm not extremely inclined to think that we update preferences based on moral perception, which is why I was pushing the line that all preference change is inappropriate in some sense (except in cases of incoherence, although I don't think I ever made that explicit in the discussion). That's almost certainly too strong, but it's hard to see what other sort of middle ground is available. It's something I'll keep thinking about, for sure.
Something that stands in the way of progress on this issue: peoples' judgments vary wildly on individual cases. For instance, young activists who find themselves unhappily marginalized because of their political preferences and projects: what attitude should they take toward the fact that their older selves will very likely have more mainstream preferences and projects? You get a huge variety of answers to questions like these, and the judgments are often obviously tinged with personal biography. Whether particular instances of preference change are described as "settling" or "giving up", or as "maturing" or "learning", have a lot to do with whether the responder has gone through those changes himself or herself. These are really deep and important questions for pretty much every individual, so it is surprising to me that I'm having trouble finding a literature on them. (Perhaps there's a lack of a literature because it hits everyone so close to home! Or perhaps there's a huge literature that I am totally missing.)
posted by painquale at 7:53 AM on December 3, 2013
It'll always feel wrong and artificial to use supernatural means to "trade projects" just in the sense that projects don't work like that. But that doesn't mean that we don't or shouldn't revise projects in light of new information or experiences.
I guess I am interested in questions about what sort of new information could possibly lead to appropriate revision of our preferences (in either an epistemic or a moral sense of appropriateness). At least on standard decision theoretic models, because of the direction of fit of preference, preference isn't the sort of thing that is sensitive to new information or experience at all, except maybe for evidence that one's own preferences are incoherent (e.g. because they are non-transitive, because there are various conflicting second-order preferences, etc.).
An alternate possibility is that we directly perceive value in the world, and we should update our preferences to track objective value in the same way that we update beliefs to track objective truth. If this is the case, then something like a conative version of the Reflection Principle will tell us that we ought update our desires to become like those that we expect to eventually rationally hold. I'm not extremely inclined to think that we update preferences based on moral perception, which is why I was pushing the line that all preference change is inappropriate in some sense (except in cases of incoherence, although I don't think I ever made that explicit in the discussion). That's almost certainly too strong, but it's hard to see what other sort of middle ground is available. It's something I'll keep thinking about, for sure.
Something that stands in the way of progress on this issue: peoples' judgments vary wildly on individual cases. For instance, young activists who find themselves unhappily marginalized because of their political preferences and projects: what attitude should they take toward the fact that their older selves will very likely have more mainstream preferences and projects? You get a huge variety of answers to questions like these, and the judgments are often obviously tinged with personal biography. Whether particular instances of preference change are described as "settling" or "giving up", or as "maturing" or "learning", have a lot to do with whether the responder has gone through those changes himself or herself. These are really deep and important questions for pretty much every individual, so it is surprising to me that I'm having trouble finding a literature on them. (Perhaps there's a lack of a literature because it hits everyone so close to home! Or perhaps there's a huge literature that I am totally missing.)
posted by painquale at 7:53 AM on December 3, 2013
In the past week I've had a lot of conversations inspired by this thread with philosophers who work on desire.
Awesome! Has anyone pointed you toward Laurie Paul's paper "What you can't expect when you're expecting"?
I've also been interested in recent work in x-phi on second-order preferences showing that we only affirm meta-preferences when we agree with them. So we think that the conservative man struggling with homosexual desire and having second-order preferences to be straight has false meta-preferences that do not express his authentic self, while we think the glutton who has second-order preferences to eat moderately has true meta-preferences that do express his authentic self. I can't dredge up a reference now, but I'll look.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:12 PM on December 3, 2013
Awesome! Has anyone pointed you toward Laurie Paul's paper "What you can't expect when you're expecting"?
I've also been interested in recent work in x-phi on second-order preferences showing that we only affirm meta-preferences when we agree with them. So we think that the conservative man struggling with homosexual desire and having second-order preferences to be straight has false meta-preferences that do not express his authentic self, while we think the glutton who has second-order preferences to eat moderately has true meta-preferences that do express his authentic self. I can't dredge up a reference now, but I'll look.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:12 PM on December 3, 2013
Yes! I read Paul's paper when it was first making waves. But I don't think it's directly relevant to issues about preference change, and I didn't find it especially convincing. A crucial premise is that we cannot assign values to epistemically transformative phenomenal experiences, because we are completely ignorant about what it would like to be in those states, like Mary the Color Scientist. And because we cannot assign values to the outcomes of our actions, decision theory fails to apply. But I don't buy that we can't assign values to novel experiential states. If everyone like me has tried a kind of mushroom and found it unpleasant, I have good reason to think that I'll find it unpleasant too. It's weird to me that Paul denies this (and her comments of Vegemite make it pretty clear that she would). She recognizes the possibility of extrapolating one's own experience from those of similar people, and tries to suggest that it's illegitimate, but I find her comments pretty perfunctory and unsatisfying.
Looking at the paper again, it appears that she does have a little bit on preference change: personally transformative experiences are those that change our preferences. But the argument still proceeds from the premise that we have no idea how our preferences will change when we undergo personally transformative experiences. I don't think this is true. I can determine how my preferences will likely change when I have kids by looking at how other similar peoples' preferences change when they have kids. In any case, I'm interested in the appropriateness of preference change when ignorance is not an issue: when one is fully aware of how one's preferences can or will change in the future. Paul does cite a few people who discuss preference change after childbirth, however. There might be some interesting leads there. So, thank you for reminding me of the paper.
posted by painquale at 7:02 PM on December 4, 2013
Looking at the paper again, it appears that she does have a little bit on preference change: personally transformative experiences are those that change our preferences. But the argument still proceeds from the premise that we have no idea how our preferences will change when we undergo personally transformative experiences. I don't think this is true. I can determine how my preferences will likely change when I have kids by looking at how other similar peoples' preferences change when they have kids. In any case, I'm interested in the appropriateness of preference change when ignorance is not an issue: when one is fully aware of how one's preferences can or will change in the future. Paul does cite a few people who discuss preference change after childbirth, however. There might be some interesting leads there. So, thank you for reminding me of the paper.
posted by painquale at 7:02 PM on December 4, 2013
Oh yes, I think that the Paul argument fails, as it must, but it's still just a nice provocative piece that clarified some of these issues for me.
I'm much more of a character skeptic than you, apparently, because I don't really trust the experiences of "similar people." There are people I esteem and disesteem, but I'm not sure I know enough about myself to know who is truly similar, and in what respects. (And I think this is a general problem: we don't really identify similitude in others, we identify people as "like us" who are aspirations and role models, or conform to a self image that is limited by the first-person perspective.)
I wonder if you could give me some of your archetypical examples of preference change with full information: not tricky stuff, but ordinary life cases. The ones that come to mind for me:
Clearly change is required: "You find that your favorite employee has been stealing, and so you fire him."
Clearly change is deeply immoral: "Your son isn't as good at baseball as your neighbor's son, and so you start spending more time with your neighbor's son."
The tricky real-world case: "You find that your lover has been unfaithful, but now they are contrite, and so you have to decide whether to forgive them or break up."
So my claim is that preferences are tied to projects, and I've tried to describe it that way: the preference changes aren't described, just the projects.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:32 PM on December 4, 2013
I'm much more of a character skeptic than you, apparently, because I don't really trust the experiences of "similar people." There are people I esteem and disesteem, but I'm not sure I know enough about myself to know who is truly similar, and in what respects. (And I think this is a general problem: we don't really identify similitude in others, we identify people as "like us" who are aspirations and role models, or conform to a self image that is limited by the first-person perspective.)
I wonder if you could give me some of your archetypical examples of preference change with full information: not tricky stuff, but ordinary life cases. The ones that come to mind for me:
Clearly change is required: "You find that your favorite employee has been stealing, and so you fire him."
Clearly change is deeply immoral: "Your son isn't as good at baseball as your neighbor's son, and so you start spending more time with your neighbor's son."
The tricky real-world case: "You find that your lover has been unfaithful, but now they are contrite, and so you have to decide whether to forgive them or break up."
So my claim is that preferences are tied to projects, and I've tried to describe it that way: the preference changes aren't described, just the projects.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:32 PM on December 4, 2013
PS- This is the paper I was thinking of, regarding second-order preferences:
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:45 PM on December 4, 2013
"The belief that individuals have a “true self” plays an important role in many areas of psychology as well as everyday life. The present studies demonstrate that people have a general tendency to conclude that the true self is fundamentally good—that is, that deep inside every individual, there is something motivating him or her to behave in ways that are virtuous. Study 1 finds that observers are more likely to see a person’s true self reflected in behaviors they deem to be morally good than in behaviors they deem to be bad. Study 2 replicates this effect and demonstrates observers’ own moral values influence what they judge to be another person’s true self. Finally, Study 3 finds that this normative view of the true self is independent of the particular type of mental state (beliefs vs. feelings) that is seen as responsible for an agent’s behavior."This isn't directly relevant, but I worry that issues like this underwrite some of our intuitions (and our disagreements about intuitions) when it comes to preference changes.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:45 PM on December 4, 2013
I wonder if you could give me some of your archetypical examples of preference change with full information: not tricky stuff, but ordinary life cases.
Well, any example I could give will be abstract and artificial, because there's always uncertainty in life. I was just trying to say that, even in artificial cases with certainty about how our preferences would change over time given certain actions, I think there would still be questions about how we should go about influencing our preferences; Paul's argument wouldn't apply to such cases. The appeal to full information is just an idealization to show why I think my concerns are different than Paul's, but I don't need to appeal to it. In real life, I don't think we ever have full information about the development of our preferences: we have a subjective probability distribution over ways that our preferences will potentially change. Paul doesn't think we have even that.
I don't know with certainty what I'll be like if/when I have kids, but reading about other people rationally influences my predictions about what I'll be like. If I'm reading her correctly, Paul doesn't think that our predictions should be influenced at all.
I'm much more of a character skeptic than you, apparently, because I don't really trust the experiences of "similar people."
I'm pretty skeptical about the projectability of character traits myself, but it doesn't need to be character that we look to when predicting how our preferences will develop. It could be SES, nationality, language, political sensibilities, just the plain old property of being human, etc. All I really want to claim is that reading about how other people change their preferences gives me some defeasible information about how I will change my own, and I don't think that's too contentious.
posted by painquale at 6:47 AM on December 5, 2013
Well, any example I could give will be abstract and artificial, because there's always uncertainty in life. I was just trying to say that, even in artificial cases with certainty about how our preferences would change over time given certain actions, I think there would still be questions about how we should go about influencing our preferences; Paul's argument wouldn't apply to such cases. The appeal to full information is just an idealization to show why I think my concerns are different than Paul's, but I don't need to appeal to it. In real life, I don't think we ever have full information about the development of our preferences: we have a subjective probability distribution over ways that our preferences will potentially change. Paul doesn't think we have even that.
I don't know with certainty what I'll be like if/when I have kids, but reading about other people rationally influences my predictions about what I'll be like. If I'm reading her correctly, Paul doesn't think that our predictions should be influenced at all.
I'm much more of a character skeptic than you, apparently, because I don't really trust the experiences of "similar people."
I'm pretty skeptical about the projectability of character traits myself, but it doesn't need to be character that we look to when predicting how our preferences will develop. It could be SES, nationality, language, political sensibilities, just the plain old property of being human, etc. All I really want to claim is that reading about how other people change their preferences gives me some defeasible information about how I will change my own, and I don't think that's too contentious.
posted by painquale at 6:47 AM on December 5, 2013
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Or Schopenhauer
posted by thelonius at 7:07 AM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]