ERICOPOLY

Paul, What is guilt? It is a form of social pain. You feel physical pain when you harm yourself -- like if you cut your finger off. You experience social pain when you harm your social group -- like if you cheat at the rules of your group. This pain is experienced as an emotion, and it is what we call "guilt". Social creatures are motivated by avoidance of guilt. Violate the rules, experience the emotional pain (guilt). Social creatures communicate a set of rules to each other. These rules serve the best interests of the group. Staying with a group had advantages to the individual. But there must be an evolutionary trait that motivates all members of the group to stick together and to work within the agreed-upon rules. That trait is guilt. It is the punishment you privately experience when you work against the rules/goals of the social group. It's obvious to me (me alone perhaps). You might be able to completely block out guilt -- but not me. No more so than cutting off my finger and trying to think about chocolate cake to avoid the pain.

Are you talking about a character from a Marvel comic? Were it to be possible to have such mastery of rationalization, guilt would never be experienced. However, back to the real world. We anticipate guilt and adjust behavior to avoid it. Just like physical pain.

There could also be an anchoring bias at work here. You believe there is a God/Supernatural that explains your feelings of love for your family. That might be hard to reject (due to anchoring bias) when a chemical-electrical based alternative is presented. I admit, the former is far more romantic and that belief in itself might bring you more enjoyment... so you would feel a bit depressed to give up that drug. A bit like being anchored to a wonderful outcome, adjusting to those beliefs, and later on not finding it a happy thing to accept a more sober reality even if the observable evidence tends to favor it.

The thing is, I believe I try to live rationally, knowing that sometime seemingly irrational choices are rational given my known limitations (given what I know about myself). For example, if I believe that it's in my nature to feel regret, I will rationally make choices that will spare me from regret. Or if I believe that it's in my nature to feel guilty, I will position myself with actions that will minimize my guilt. A snowboarder, for example, wants to pull off some amazing stunts... but ultimately he hedges a bit and keeps the stunts within the bounds of what he believes he can control, and part of that is based on what he understands about his own flexibility and mass, and his relationship to the Earth and it's gravity. He takes other things into consideration, such as the quality of the snow, etc... My expectation of guilt is my gravity. I know it's in my nature just as much as the gravity of the Earth guides the snowboarder. So I just look for a way to "shred", keeping within my own psychological gravity. Over time, you learn not to stick your finger in an electrical socket -- guilt works the same way. The rational thing is to anticipate the pain and figure out another activity instead.

I would be working at Microsoft still. So there's one life you've changed. I can't do this without the help of your board. I needed ideas to cheat off of. I had a similar experience and similar thoughts in 7th grade.

My wife has something to add... "Happy wife, happy life". There's morality that will make you happy :) Her "rules" are pretty easy -- so belonging to her social "marriage" group isn't hard. Find a cool wife and you'll have a happy life. That's my advice.

You don't have to rationalize what already fits within the rules of a social group (your social group, the mafia, wants you to carry out the hit). You aim to please the group in order to belong (driven by social instinct). You only have to rationalize things that go against what the group wants. The church creates a rule against murder -- you now feel guilty if you commit murder because you are putting yourself in a position of going against what the social unit wants. The church could arbitrarily create more rules and you would feel guilty about violating them too -- but not until they make rules against it. For example they could say that something pleasing like masturbation is immoral... and then you would feel guilty about that too! Oh wait, excuse me, they already did that. My bad. Think about it... any rule they make... anything they deem to be "immoral" will make you feel guilty. Your sense of belonging to this group called the church is so firmly entrenched that you take these rules as what you call "objective morality". However, that's due to your firm sense of belonging and how highly you value your membership to this group -- and thus your respect for it's laws/rules.

Your church is beneficial as a social group to which millions belong. Your church has a core set of moral-based rules... things like fidelity, charity, etc... Because you feel a strong attachment to this group, you feel guilty about these things when you violate them. It's your instincts punishing you for letting down your social group (in this case, your church). Finally, the church also tells you that it's God himself that made up the churches morals/rules -- but that's just what they say, and it doesn't necessarily make it so. It does however reinforce your sense of belonging to the group, because of the hook-in that comes with wanting to be with the group that God favors. That only makes you feel all the more guilty of violating their rules (because you feel motivated to belong to God's protected group), so when they pass the hat... you then give generously (one of the social group's rules is charity). Then, they've got you. But I think it's all manipulation of your social instincts. It's very clever. It's also largely harmless so I don't care.

I keep using the term "social group". You can have an easier time killing a person outside of one's social group versus within. There are also varying levels of attachment that a person feels to a social group, and can belong to more than one social group at the same time, with varying levels of loyalty to each. A "hitman" is serving the needs of one social group (the mafia). He might feel guilt at betraying a member of his own group, but may not experience guilt at carrying out hits on another social group. Social groups have their own rules and when you know the rules, you know what it takes to remain a part of the social group. If you need the group, you will feel bad about letting them down. Your skills as a hitman fulfill your social instincts as a member of the mafia group -- you will feel some manner of "good" by living up to the group's expectations of you... even if those expectations are to carry out a "mafia hit". It's all very nuanced, but we have social instincts that drive us to belong to various social groups. They have different rules. You can't say that a hitman is only going to belong to a group with "churchy" rules. So you can't use the hitman as a counterexample.

Right, but you have not conquered the instinct to eat. You have merely made a substitution of certain foods for others. This is very different from conquering the instinct to eat. Similarly, I assert that it's not possible to abandon your social instincts without your brain punishing you (with a negative emotion, like guilt).

You're not listening to me properly if you think that's my worldview. I believe that... It's not possible for a social adjusted individual to experience an absence of guilt when hoarding his money/food rather than sharing some of it. Or perhaps helping in some other way other than money. Completely ignoring others and only serving yourself is going in violation of your social instincts, and thus you'll get guilt. This is because he experiences both selfish instincts/needs as well as social/instincts needs. Only if he lacked social instincts could he not experience any guilt whatsoever. This is why I keep using the term "nuanced". Social instincts are not something to be "conquered". You might ignore them, or act against them, but then you get some associated emotion like "guilt". That's the mechanism by which instincts guide us to keep the social unit in mind. It will just keep whipping you each time you act selfishly -- you cannot get around it.

I agree, but... "you can't get there from here". Like I said, I might not want to be unplugged once on the machine. But I hesitate and choose my family over the machine due to the social instincts kicking in. Guilt (driven by the social instincts) makes me turn the machine down -- the guilt is triggered by the implication of social group abandonment/betrayal. It would be hard to choose the machine over them in the first place... You could do it if you suffered from less social attachment. Perhaps people who are abandoned early in life have trouble forming attached relationships, and for them it would be easier as they are not as close to a social group. You could act more selfishly if you were alone... or felt a lack of belonging despite living amongst others.

It would be that much were it not for the taxes paid along the way. Perhaps a shade under.

Pleasure is the experience of the good brain chemicals. Again, this is very nuanced. We have both selfish instincts and social instincts. About social instincts... social animals evolved to work together in social units. Instincts prevent us from feeling good about causing harm to others in our social unit. In your example, you mention cheating on the wife. Why this doesn't unequivocally equate to pleasure because of what I just mentioned about the social instincts. I might fall on a hand grenade to save my buddies in my platoon -- I am driven to do so by a social instinct, even though it's not the selfishly most optimal outcome. Just like I might forego a blow-job from the secretary... it's not the best for my personal short-term pleasure, but our minds are complicated by our instincts to help the social unit. When you violate what those social instincts are telling you, you experience guilt. So you can take the blowjob and feel good for the moment, and feel guilty afterwards. Or forego the short-term pleasure to avoid the guilt. Instincts often drive us to avoid the short-term pleasure in order to keep the social unit happy (the wife) -- our instincts reward us by not punishing us with guilt.

Perhaps the brain chemicals are what tell you what is good, and what is bad. Perhaps instincts govern the production and release of these chemicals. You somehow assume that you are making a conscious choice over this... that you first have the opportunity to think if your actions were really good or bad before the chemical release happens -- why do you have that belief? Instincts drive the release of them to your brain, you feel euphoric, and say "damn, I did a good thing today. that good deed made me feel great". You didn't first observe the dopamine meter on the machine rise -- you just experienced it positively and it set the tone for you to experience that as "good feeling" and equated that with your deed as a "good deed". Are there good deeds that make us feel bad? You save somebody's life -- you just feel good. It's not like you feel lousy afterwards after you find out that "good" was triggered by production of dopamine.

Have you never masturbated? Is there some greater cause other than pleasure? Does it only feel good to you because you believe you are doing a "good" thing? Once you've seen a movie before, you might experience boredom the second time around. You already know the ending. No suspense. I probably wouldn't give it up without a fight -- you should see us try to take the iPad from our kids :-) It's difficult to say that I would give up my life for such a thing, but just remember people commute hours each day and live unhappy lives believing that a little bit more money will make them happy. I think they are chasing this very machine, only they can't attain it. But I think we are evolved to feel good by helping others -- the survival of the social unit is important for the passing on of our own genes. We individually have better success through cooperation. So for better or worse, we can be happy without such a machine. Turning down the machine then might not be too crazy since we are programmed to think about others too, and not just ourselves in isolation. So, perhaps I would opt to stay with my family and social unit instead, and that would make me happy enough (knowing I hadn't abandoned them for a greater, yet selfish, pleasure). It's nuanced. THat's what the social instincts do to us -- they make it nuanced... sometimes you'll put the group before yourself, and even that will feel good because we have instincts to survive individually but also to ensure group survival.

Only if you believe it's pointless to do things merely because they make us feel good. I believe that we are all going to die and just be returned to dust. Nothing beyond that. So all we have in this life is to try to feel good about ourselves and experience joy. Fortunately, we can get that from helping others due to these social instincts that are within us. We can love and help others and if that makes us feel good, it doesn't make it pointless! Exactly the opposite. Knowing it's all due to brain chemicals is interesting... but it does not take away the pleasure of feeling good. It's like... knowing that physics can explain something about hitting a baseball over the fence does not make it less fun to do so.

Article says Clippers were purchased in 1981 for $12 million. 33 years later... $2b. wow, that's 17% annually compounding returns! I wonder what earnings were pulled out by the owners over the years... that 17% is just the capital gain. http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/12/us/sterling-nba-clippers-ballmer/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

I agree. 90% of money managers did not foresee the housing bubble, but many survived by not exposing themselves to the worst of the housing dependent stocks. In other words, you wear a seatbelt not because you forecast an accident, but because you really don't know what will happen.

If you had asked any investor in 2007 how their bank stocks would fare if real estate prices fell by 30%, I doubt that even one of them would have said, "I think they’d be fine." Our big mistake was that we didn't see the real estate crash coming. http://www.oakmark.com/Commentary/Commentary-Archives/2Q14--Bill-Nygren.htm?rf=dr Personally, I don't think that was his mistake. Warren Buffett's financial picks survived just fine. Nygren chose Washington Mutual to concentrate in, and Buffett was concentrated in Wells Fargo. So was not forecasting the real estate decline really Nygren's mistake?

You only enjoy your short time in this life if you are experiencing joy. You can't argue with that, so don't even try.

Grain deflation shouldn't be a worry for the Fed -- I would think they would rather have deflation than inflation, when it comes to food staples. People don't defer their meals to next year, expecting the prices of bread to be better in the future. Higher food prices may leave them with less purchasing power at Toys'R'Us though. And the Fed does care about that. Okay, pork belly prices have been dropping all morning, which means that everybody is waiting for it to hit rock bottom, so they can buy low. Which means that the people who own the pork belly contracts are saying, "Hey, we're losing all our damn money, and Christmas is around the corner, and I ain't gonna have no money to buy my son the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip! And my wife ain't gonna f... my wife ain't gonna make love to me if I got no money!" So they're panicking right now, they're screaming "SELL! SELL!" to get out before the price keeps dropping. They're panicking out there right now, I can feel it. I love that movie.

Grain deflation shouldn't be a worry for the Fed -- I would think they would rather have deflation than inflation, when it comes to food staples. People don't defer their meals to next year, expecting the prices of bread to be better in the future. Higher food prices may leave them with less purchasing power at Toys'R'Us though. And the Fed does care about that.

You probably also have a lot of prisoners being put in the hospital on a regular basis by their violent cellmates. Alleviating the prison overcrowding would lessen that, and reduce the number of associated healthcare workers. More jobs lost. The good news is... so many positions we could create a cleaner society! Paying people to build and maintain proper public toilet facilities seems better than employing them in prisons instead.

I like the idea of telling them that they will just have to live on what they earn. Later, perhaps when they are 40 surprise them by paying off their mortgage. Something that doesn't ruin them too much but makes life more comfortable. That was the spirit of the tax idea. The reason being that if you try to hide your money and pretend like you don't have any, but you live in Montecito, their imaginations will perhaps overestimate what you really have. No, I won't tell them what I have, but I think it's going to be hard to pretend there will be nothing left for them. They currently go to public school, but Montecito Union Elementary is different from most public schools... example, one of my kids was in class with Don Johnson's son and I actually backed into him at the 2nd grade fair. Pretty funny. So it's not normal. However there are a lot of families who are much more modest in means -- they rent tiny houses near the freeway just to be in the school district. They'll move to a more affordable area once the kids finish the public school. So we meet some pretty down-to-earth families and that's who our kids play with at our BBQs and whatnot. Not the super-high-rollers. Absolutely not, I think he would only get worse. That's why you don't want to create an incentive that is purely based on how much they earn. I'm going to encourage them to pursue what they want to do in life, but unfortunately society has already provided the incentives. Careers are paid very differently -- I can't change that. Society says a banker has more value than an educator. It is what it is. I'm not sure I have the power to change that while at the same time telling them they'll get nothing. Difficult dilemma -- although perhaps I should be raising them in Australia where pay is more equal.