Is felt preference a useful indicator? (A ramble)

Evolutionary signals are useful inasmuch as they retain the same context as they had in the evolutionary environment. In other words we're adaptation executors instead of fitness maximizers.

Our evolutionarily derived pleasure and pain signals are still useful even if they are noisy. They remain useful because the noise is systemic and can be compensated for. Eg, we loved calories back then because they were scarce then but they aren't now; we can note this and compensate. However, we still live a ~20% oxygen environment and going without breathing is bad for us, so we should listen to our lung's signals when they tell us to breathe.

What about stuff like wheat, which is claimed to be both painkiller and gut irritant? It feels better than the alternative, but appears to be actually doing damage / increasing inflammation.

There's also stuff like mate selection- who I find attractive may not be the best person for the relationship goals I espouse. (For example, liking other men in part based on their projected fertility is problematic both because it won't lead to kids and because it's not making best use of that it won't lead to kids.)

Nobody says that human contact is bad, even though many people like it.

Doctors used to say (about a hundred years ago) that human contact with infants was bad, because of the increased risk of infectious disease. Mothers could not resist touching their babies, and so just felt guilty about doing it- but caretakers in orphanages were perfectly willing to minimize contact. Turns out that not touching infants causes a lot of psychological problems! Oops. (Also, mothers make antibodies for pathogens they pick up by kissing / playing with their babies which then get transmitted to the baby through breast milk, so frequent contact can decrease risk.)

Things that people dislike that are bad for them:

• Bruises
• Broken bones
• Internal bleeding
• External bleeding
• Infection
• Eating anything except food
• Going long amounts of time without eating
• Going moderate amounts of time without drinking
• Going short amounts of time without breathing
• Being chased by wild animals

Things that people like that are good for them:

• Eating when hungry
• Drinking when thirsty

If there was a negative correlation between what we liked and what was healthy, we'd be completely unable to survive. Liking things that are bad for us is the exception.

Well, I've got a problem of this type in front of me right now. Does anyone know something about optimal limping? I broke my littlest toe and, although I know I need to keep weight off it as much as I can, I'm not sure how to minimize damage when I walk. My athletic brother said limping at all can cause other muscle strain, and I should go get crutches, but, while I don't have them, is just avoiding pain the right strategy? Do I balance and go with small discomfort in the toe, but a more natural stride?

My felt preference is, I guess, no pain, but honestly I hate walking slowly so much that if I knew it was safe to be less cautious, I'd definitely be moving faster through the discomfort.

Counterexamples: scratching itches feels good but can damage the skin if overdone, and anyway IME it doesn't help at all with recovering from mosquito bites and similar irritations; and after vomiting you feel thirsty but drinking water immediately afterwards would only make you throw it up too (IME at least). Yeah, and eating a lot when you already are plump enough, but everyone else has already mentioned it.

In all other cases I can think of, it's good advice: for example, I heard that when you have a fever you should cover yourself up when you feel cold (because your body needs your temperature to be higher) and uncover yourself when you feel hot (because your body no longer needs that).

I seem to remember a conversation along the lines of

A: blablabla ... hurts ... blablabla.

B: Yeah, drinking hot water [or something like that] is painful.

A: Actually I meant hurt as in 'harmful', not as in 'painful'.

Me: Well, after all pain receptors evolved for us to avoid damage, so if drinking hot water is painful probably it's because it would damage us.

There certainly is a positive correlation between what people like and what is good for them, for obvious evolutionary reasons, as well as meta-evolutionary ones (we evolved the ability to learn to like previously rewarding experiences). But it's weak evidence and stronger evidence specific to the kind of behavior being discussed will overrule it very easily.

In the example of food, it's known that many foods exist today which people like but are bad for them. People have to deliberately keep to unpleasant, healthy diets. Even though there is disagreement over which diets are better, there is no disagreement that the diets formed by just eating whatever we like are harmful (ETA:) for many people. The evolutionary optimizations are clearly not working for them. And the different dietary theories explicitly address this: they will say that modern food availability is different from the ancestral environment in certain ways which cause this harmful behavior.

Absent such specific knowledge, it would seem that the prior should indeed be that we instinctively like what is good for us and dislike what is bad for us. But in most practical cases it's easy to imagine that the behavior or stimulus in question didn't exist in the same form in the EEA.

Suppose I am hungry in the jungle, and I encounter an unfamiliar kind of fruit tree. Its fruits are green and fuzzy like tennis balls. I feel a desire to bite one. When I taste it I enjoy the taste. Does that mean it's good to eat? Or does it mean it reminds me of some irrelevant, artificial modern food's taste and also of the fact I love to play tennis? I have no idea, and my caution of new unfamiliar food would win out because I don't trust my evolutionary instincts enough.

Perhaps this heuristic of doing what I like works best in specific sub-fields where it is known to work well. For instance, social relations for some people (like me) are pretty opaque: I'm at a party, should I laugh now, can I start talking to this person, am I dressed right? I can get along fairly well by just doing what feels good, which is presumably a whole lot of complex behavioral adaptation working correctly.

CR = Calorie restriction or Carbohydrate restriction or something else?

A person's feelings on something is medium to strong evidence of something being at least not the opposite. If you take all possible things that could happen to a person, the vast majority of them that are bad would give a negative or neutral response, and those that are good would mostly give a positive or neutral response. As an example, almost all sensations would elicit the accurate response.

There are exceptions, like food, but they are fairly rare in comparison to how many things the body gets right, or at least not wrong.

Relevant: Only to first order. An obvious counterexample is fast food, which people like a lot but generally regard as bad. Same for candy and sugar. A controversial one is porn, which we also like a lot but many people consider bad for you. (Not so many on LW, perhaps.)

Irrelevant: My first reading of "felt preference" was "preference for felt", the material; I was really confused when your post didn't at all mention how someone's taste in cloth would indicate something useful about them. Perhaps I need some caffeine.