Two More Decision Theory Problems for Humans

formulating our goals well enough for use in a formal decision theory is perhaps the last milestone, far outside of what can be reached with a lot of work!

Did you mean to say "without a lot of work"?

(Or did you really mean to say that we can't reach it, even with a lot of work?)

Consequentialism over world-histories feels pretty safe to me. Consequentialism over world states seems pretty unsafe to me. Do you feel that even consequentialism over world histories is unsafe? What would be a potential value that couldn't be captured by that model?

I believe it is common

Name one example? :)

Valentine's The Art of Grieving Well, perhaps?

I’d like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth. It doesn’t happen only when someone dies. For instance, people go through a very similar process when mourning the loss of a romantic relationship, or when struck with an injury or illness that takes away something they hold dear (e.g., quadriplegia). I think we even see smaller versions of it when people break a precious and sentimental object, or when they fail to get a job or into a school they had really hoped for, or even sometimes when getting rid of a piece of clothing they’ve had for a few years.

In general, I think familiarization looks like tracing over all the facets of the thing in question until we intuitively expect what we find. I’m particularly fond of the example of arriving in a city for the first time: At first all I know is the part of the street right in front of where I’m staying. Then, as I wander around, I start to notice a few places I want to remember: the train station, a nice coffee shop, etc. After a while of exploring different alleyways, I might make a few connections and notice that the coffee shop is actually just around the corner from that nice restaurant I went to on my second night there. Eventually the city (or at least those parts of it) start to feel smaller to me, like the distances between familiar locations are shorter than I had first thought, and the areas I can easily think of now include several blocks rather than just parts of streets.

I’m under the impression that grief is doing a similar kind of rehearsal, but specifically of pain. When we lose someone or something precious to us, it hurts, and we have to practice anticipating the lack of the preciousness where it had been before. We have to familiarize ourselves with the absence.

When I watch myself grieve, I typically don’t find myself just thinking “This person is gone.” Instead, my grief wants me to call up specific images of recurring events — holding the person while watching a show, texting them a funny picture & getting a smiley back, etc. — and then add to that image a feeling of pain that might say “…and that will never happen again.” My mind goes to the feeling of wanting to watch a show with that person and remembering they’re not there, or knowing that if I send a text they’ll never see it and won’t ever respond. My mind seems to want to rehearse the pain that will happen, until it becomes familiar and known and eventually a little smaller.

I think grieving is how we experience the process of changing our emotional sense of what’s true to something worse than where we started.

Unfortunately, that can feel on the inside a little like moving to the worse world, rather than recognizing that we’re already here.