Comments on: Know thyself (through others)

By: admin

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:42:51 +0000

But then, all that was measured was the enjoyment of the speed-date itself, not of actually dating the guys. It’s more of a surrogate measure of people’s ability to be good conversationalists than mates. Right?

By: rnadler

rnadler — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:38:13 +0000

It’s funny, because you would think a speed dating experience would be particularly unfriendly to surrogation. Maybe this is my Y chromosome talking, but tastes in potential mate vary widely from person to person. Maybe women are actually more likely to agree on what they want in a man, but I can say with confidence despite the small sample size that my three blockmates and I have completely divergent tastes in women and as such surrogation would be a disaster.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:38:12 +0000

I just read Gilbert’s original 20-March paper in Science:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;323/5921/1617

He sums up the implications for our lives like this:
“Surrogation is by definition superior to simulation when individual differences are relatively small and simulations errors are relatively large, and it is inferior to simulation when the opposite is true. Although there is no way to know which of these is more typical in everyday life, the situations we studied—dating and peer-evaluation—are by no means exotic.”

So there’s the (obvious) rub. You should eschew information other than another person’s enjoyment of an experience to help you decide whether to have the experience yourself (“surrogation”) if it’s the sort that doesn’t vary wildly between people (love-it-or-hate-it experiences) AND it’s the sort that you’re unlikely to accurately imagine (“simulation”) yourself doing. So the question is, what sort of experiences are those? Apparently, speed-dating and getting judged by peers. What else? How far does it go?

OK, one experience that is NOT amenable to surrogation is high school. I pretty much hated it. Many people have fond memories. Doing a PhD? The reverse. Perhaps there’s just too much variation in enjoyment for surrogation to be useful.
–John Bohannon

By: rnadler

rnadler — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:39:50 +0000

Here’s another way of motivating the problem: a philosophy professor of mine, in the first lecture for Ethical Theory, remarked that it would seem “terribly untoward” for someone facing an ethically challenging life decision to simply seek out and consult a “moral expert” and simply accept her recommendation without further deliberation. It makes sense: we would be likely to say that this person is being lazy, or doing something dangerous, or maybe even diminishing his personhood somehow.

The same thing seems to be true of decisions about personal happiness. It strikes us as a bad thing when someone basically says “tell me what will make me happy.” Is this just an obsolete psychological bias?