Truth and Happiness

Epistemic status: open question

How does truth interact in finding happiness?

Are the ancient philosophers ways of finding peace based on deception? What do rationalists have to say about this? Are morals and rules that don't entirely apply through all situations wrong?

I will be openly thinking about this here.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on acceptance:

But this is not how de­ci­sion the­ory works—the “ra­tio­nal” strat­egy adapts to the other play­ers’ strate­gies, it does not de­pend on the other play­ers be­ing ra­tio­nal. If a ra­tio­nal agent be­lieves the other play­ers are ir­ra­tional then it takes that ex­pec­ta­tion into ac­count in max­i­miz­ing ex­pected util­ity. Van Vogt got this one right: his ra­tio­nal­ist pro­tag­o­nists are formidable from ac­cept­ing re­al­ity swiftly and adapt­ing to it swiftly, with­out re­luc­tance or at­tach­ment.

Self-hand­i­cap­ping (hat-tip Yvain) is when peo­ple who have been made aware of their own in­com­pe­tence or prob­a­ble fu­ture failure, de­liber­ately im­pose hand­i­caps on them­selves—on the stan­dard model, in or­der to give them­selves an ex­cuse for failure. To make sure they had an ex­cuse, sub­jects re­duced prepa­ra­tion times for ath­letic events, stud­ied less, ex­erted less effort, gave op­po­nents an ad­van­tage, low­ered their own ex­pec­ta­tions, even took a drug they had been told was perfor­mance-in­hibit­ing...

So you can see how much peo­ple value hav­ing an ex­cuse—how much they’ll pay to make sure they have some­thing out­side them­selves to blame, in case of failure. And this is a need which many be­lief sys­tems fill—they provide an ex­cuse.

In the same sense, I would sug­gest that a baby with your genes, born into a uni­verse en­tirely fair, would by now be such a differ­ent per­son that as to be nowhere close to “you”, your point in Pla­tonic per­son-space. You are defined by the par­tic­u­lar un­fair challenges that you face; and the test of your ex­is­tence is how well you do with them.

From within that pro­ject—what good does a sense of vi­o­lated en­ti­tle­ment do? At all? Ever? What good does it do to tell our­selves that we did ev­ery­thing right and de­served bet­ter, and that some­one or some­thing else is to blame? Is that the key thing we need to change, to do bet­ter next time?

Im­me­di­ate adap­ta­tion to the re­al­ities of the situ­a­tion! Fol­lowed by win­ning!

Me

(How true and valid are these?)

Letting yourself feel your emotions makes you feel important.

Lessons should stop the emotions from generating in the first place, but if you are already feeling you shouldn't try to use the lessons to supress the emotions because you will fail and be incentivised by yourself (and by fear of being low-status and weak) to lie to yourself to say you're doing a good job of not feeling the emotion, and they will fester.