Efficiency Morality

Efficiency and Morality #

A thought experiment based on some simplified assumptions. Could very well have large holes in it, but currently has a large influence on how I make decisions.

Assumption 1: Our goal is to maximize positive emotions. #

Our goal is to maximize the amount of time people feel positive emotions:

  • happiness
  • fulfillment
  • satisfaction
  • empowerment
  • energy

And minimize the time spent feeling negative emotions:

  • pain
  • depression
  • apathy

Since this is our goal, I’ll define a “moral” act as an act that helps further this goal.

Assumption 2: Emotions are personal reactions to experiences. #

Emotions arise when an experience is having positive or negative effects on you or people/things you care about (as far as you perceive it).

Emotions are not intrinsically tied to specific experiences. For instance, depending on the person and their context, the experience of swimming can induce a wide variety of emotions:

  • fear
  • exhaustion
  • empowerment
  • adventure
  • relaxation

These same emotions can be induced by a wide variety of other experiences. No experience has a “monopoly” on specific emotions, except for very low level drives (like eating satisfying hunger, drinking satisfying thirst, etc).

Assumption 3: Experience-having requires resource destruction (cost), which often has negative emotional cost. #

Most experiences require some destruction of resources to have. All experiences require the experiencer’s time at the very least, but many also require:

  1. The work of other people.
  2. A share of a finite resource.

In our society, we use money as a proxy for these resources, and spend that money on experiences, quantifying this exchange. Money that goes unspent can be used to have more personal experiences in the future, given to others so they can do the same, or used to build a system that makes future experience-having cheaper.

Assumption 4: There is a lower cost threshold required for good experiences. #

Everyone needs to eat, drink, and fulfill other basic needs to not suffer large amounts of negative emotions (and die). These experiences have a cost, although it can be very low. One outlier is medical care, but the minimum necessary cost of this is controversial.

Assumption 5: Emotional effects of an experience are uncoupled to cost past their lower threshold. #

Past the lower threshold for basic need type experiences, my observation is that the emotional effects of experiences are not well correlated to their cost. Rather, they are primarily influenced by the context of that experience in life. Some anecdotes:

Media #

The excitement or other emotional reaction to media (books/movies/games) comes often from:

  • Nostalgia
  • What media one has consumed in the past
  • What one’s been thinking about recently
  • What friends are talking about (not necessarily what’s new)
  • Media quality. Luckily the globalization of entertainment means this does not have a large impact on individual user cost.

Physicality #

Most physical pleasures are almost entirely dependent on context:

  • Hunger can make almost any food taste good; fullness can make even the fanciest desert sickening.
  • Sleep can be the most important thing in the world, or impossible to do.
  • Sexual experiences can be amazing, or traumatic.

Novelty #

Trips to foreign lands or completely new experiences get their excitement from novelty.

Side Note: Lifestyle Inflation #

Many experiences get boring over time (they become less emotionally powerful). A common tendency is to try to make them more interesting by dumping more resources into them in an effort to “upgrade” them. This is convenient because it allows one to feel the comfort of familiarly with the experience while getting the thrill of novelty at the same time.

Unfortunately, this can get very expensive and, even worse, can leave one at a new baseline of cost to uphold the new normal of these experiences. At this point, trying to downgrade will usually cause negative emotional reaction, which is counter to our goal.

Conclusion: Living efficiently is morally optimal. #

I define efficiency as the ratio of maximum positive emotionality achieved to the cost required to achieve that emotionality. I argue that the best way to meet our original goal is to maximize the efficiency of our lives. This will allow the greatest number of people to meet their lower threshold experience costs, and leave resources left over to make it even easier to meet this cost going forward.

Wasteful activities, which are high cost but produce the same emotional return as lower cost activities, are therefore to be avoided as much as possible. Their cost indirectly takes resources away from places where those resources would be much more emotionally powerful. This can be extreme; people spend many times a basic income requirement on experiences commonly :(.