Choose To Be Happy

The problem is that 2.b. is blatantly false.

Nope. Felling bad about bad things only helps you to protest or punish people (yourself included) for the way things are. This is a very indirect form of "fighting bad things", and one which is largely ineffectual outside our evolutionary social environment. In the modern environment, protest and punishment are next to useless for accomplishing anything.

Do you really believe that someone who felt happy despite knowing about the state of suffering in the world would be more strongly motivated to reduce suffering than someone who felt a great sadness and a burning desire to stop it every time they thought about it?

You're begging the question here: what is the difference between "strongly motivated" and "burning desire"?

That is, you just said, "I think that there is more M in S+M than there is in X", where you haven't expanded X.

(Also, I'm not sure what kind of brain can actually experience "great sadness" and "burning desire" at the same time. Mixed emotions are usually not extreme emotions.)

It might be more useful to restate your question as "Will an otherwise-happy person have a greater probability of increased utility per their values, than one who is sad about the world's currently low utility?" My answer to that is an unqualified YES. Happy people make better choices about which actions to take, have greater motivation to act upon them, and better follow-through -- it is simply no contest.

if your moral system dictates, as most of ours do, that reducing suffering is currently by far the best thing you could do, and you actually want, unlike most of us, to follow your morals to their conclusions

Let us draw an important distinction between "morals" and "values". To me, a "moral" is a statement about what levels of a value we should protest or punish (e.g. by shaming/shunning), and it is of limited use outside the evolutionary environment (where others shared our morals and could be more influenced by our social maneuvering).

As Asimov put it, "never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right." The people who put a lot of moral weight (using my reduction of "moral") on the elimination of suffering seem much more motivated to protest, "raise awareness", "speak out", and perform other social signaling behaviors in place of direct action.

OTOH, I know lots of happy entrepreneurs who give or volunteer on behalf of various causes who, AFAICT, are not at all outraged or depressed by the suffering they witness. Without exception, the people I've met who actually DO things about the problems of the world (as opposed to merely talking about them) are happy people who are not disturbed by suffering in principle, even if they may be moved in relation to some particular individual's suffering.

So, in the context of this post, what is being said is that dropping one's moral rules allows one to pursue one's real values without impediment by our biased instincts to protest-and-punish -- which are in any case mostly ineffectual in the modern environment.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Your point is valid, but I think it's much weaker and less widely applicable than you claim.

1. In many cases, people know definitely that they will not solve a certain problem; I think this applies to many people and problems, and is one of this post's main targets. Perhaps they definitely cannot affect it, like I can't stop the prison torture. Or perhaps they have consciously decided not to try to solve it, and invest their effort elsewhere. However, emotionally, being aware of the problem often causes suffering. This suffering is needless and it does not help to solve the problem, or any other problem that these people are trying to solve.

2. In addition to e.g. sadness, there are other emotions. One example is fear, which led to this post. The person there was afraid of failing at important future tasks, or of bad things happening beyond their control. Empirically, more than a small amount of fear does not server to further motivate us to prevent such problems. On the contrary, it sometimes paralyzes and prevents action. We should therefore strive to minimize the amount of fear experienced to be at least no greater than needed to motivate us to act.

3. Negative emotions can induce bias such as looking away from problems. In the absence of bad emotions, we can deal with problems more rationally.

4. Once we have decided to solve a problem, the original emotion that made us decide this has become less necessary. We can consciously, rationally, sustain our fight against the problem even in the absence of the emotion. This is analogous to pain which continues after a wound has been treated, and is counterproductive. This is an argument for reducing the amount of negative emotion we allow ourselves to feel.

5. Happiness isn't sadness with a negative sign. Reducing the amount of sadness isn't the same as increasing the amount of happiness. Both sadness (because there is a problem) and happiness (imagining the potential solution) can motivate us to solve a problem. If we increase positive motivation at the expense of negative motivation, this is a good thing.

Do you really believe that someone who felt happy despite knowing about the state of suffering in the world would be more strongly motivated to reduce suffering than someone who felt a great sadness and a burning emotional desire to stop it every time they thought about it?

Not necessarily - though it is possible (sadness can be paralyzing, depressing, and disruptive). But at the very least I do believe the happy person should not be significantly less motivated than the sad person - if they remember being sad, and preserve the (a-emotional) decision to solve the problem.

Do you think being happily mortal is the best emotional state for crusading to stop death?

I don't propose being happy about being mortal. I do propose being less sad about being mortal. Being "sadly mortal" in the sense of constantly being sad is demotivating and I believe counterproductive. Enjoying life is a mentally healthy state and is conductive to work, including work on immortality tech.

Do you really believe that someone who felt happy despite knowing about the state of suffering in the world would be more strongly motivated to reduce suffering than someone who felt a great sadness and a burning desire to stop it every time they thought about it?

Sadness and burning desire are not in the same bucket. Sadness doesn't make me want to do anything at all. It quickly leads to depression, which is about the most unmotivated it's possible to feel. Certainly when I'm happy, I'm more motivated to do something about saddening things than when I'm actually sad.

Now, anger is an extremely motivating emotion that might work better for these purposes...

This seems to miss the point rather dramatically. Assume that there is suffering in the world that we can measure at -$200 trillion. We'll just assume that's the cost of alleviating that suffering. Pretty much no matter who you are, you can't alleviate more than a few million dollars of that suffering. Even if you're a complete outlier, like Bill Gates, you might be able to reduce world suffering by .1%.

If you feel bad in proportion to the amount of suffering in the world, given the inability of human feeling to make extremely nuanced distinctions (e.g. how much worse would it actually feel to lose $283.27 versus $283.07?), if you attempt to feel suffering in proportion to the amount that exists in the world, there actually isn't much of a point in combating suffering. It'd feel rather like dedicating your whole life to dropping a tablespoon of water into a swimming pool.

Strong emotions are also often conducive to irrational behaviour (and things such as depression).

Also, everyone has a utility function that is heavily self-centered. Exceptions may exist, but it is an extreme minority of people who sincerely act as if they do not count for substantially more than other individuals in their utility function. I'd argue this is a good thing, but that aside, it is reality. Given that, not feeling miserable throughout life is a rather important end. This is even more true if you cannot demonstrate a clear connection between feeling miserable about the world in general and striving to make the world a better place. I have to admit I do not know many people I would describe as successful activists for any cause who are also genuinely unhappy in life. General unhappiness seems to be a major inhibitor of success in any of one's pursuits.

This is definitely true for me. I started doing more to improve the world after hearing a speech that made me feel horribly sad and guilty about not doing so.

Most people learn to look away from death or justify it as necessary, good or just. This clearly involves various biases, logical fallacies, and compartmentalization. So when people who think this way become rational, they usually discard these thoughts. It's a well known irrationality, as well as being important to discard (since this is necessary for anyone to fight death).

For these reasons, I gave it as a typical example. Of course it's not a necessary example, it's not an inherent part of being "a rationalist" (or just "being rational").

In any case, the point of my post is that it is rational to e.g. look away from death, justify it, and use other mental techniques to feel less bad about it - as long as that doesn't appreciably lessen your effectiveness (if any) at fighting death.

To paraphrase a comment I posted a few days ago on a different topic: "Death is an artifact of evolution, why keep it that way?"

Oh huh, and it also pairs well with my later Choosing the Zero Point [? · GW] post!

I think the comic is better matched by The Scourge of Perverse-Mindedness.