Title: Proclivities
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 26.5
Words: 615
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
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## Proclivities

There is a very good chance that you will unconsciously work something devoid of intrinsic value into your objective function. You will consciously know this thing has no intrinsic value, but you may *still* work it into your objective function. Non-intrinsic values that work their way into your objective function are what we call proclivities.

We work proclivities into our objective functions because we know we will be unable to take the sometimes hard-to-swallow “pill” of our objective functions without adding a sweetener to it. You may be a famous musician who has logically concluded that all humans’ emotional states are of equal value and given the vast amount of poverty in the world, if you followed your “raw objective function,” you would have to give away almost everything you owned. Realistically, though, you may also realize that you could never get yourself to accept or stick to this. To get yourself to accept your objective function, you may need to add in factors like a personal happiness threshold that must be met before you are willing to help others (you get to keep your house, cars, exotic shark collection, and fame, but everything beyond that goes to the poor).

We ask individuals to include their proclivities in their objective functions because if they do not do so, they make up false ideologies to protect themselves from truly challenging their beliefs and making the sacrifices necessary to achieve what is truly meaningful to them.

Those subconsciously trying to justify proclivities may convince themselves that they would be less effective at redistributing their wealth if they lived in a one-room house instead of their mansion. Never make the habit of lying to yourself like this. Recognize your weakness of character and accept it. Hopefully in the future, you will become a better person and shed more of your proclivities.

Common proclivities include:

- Fame
- Comfort
- Happiness
- Conformity
- Honor
- Sexual gratification
- Being remembered after death
- Minimizing the suffering of those around us

Proclivities sometimes resemble intrinsic values. One person’s intrinsic value might be another person’s proclivity.

For example, personal happiness may be of intrinsic value to Edward and minimizing the suffering of others may be of intrinsic value to Xiang. At the same time, Edward might have a proclivity for minimizing others’ suffering, and Xiang might have a proclivity for personal happiness. Nevertheless, if Edward or Xiang focused on their proclivities instead of their core intrinsic values, they would do a poor job at achieving their objective functions, as their proclivities merely distract them from what really matters.

We want to believe that our proclivities have wormed their way into our value systems for a good reason: “I am more productive when I am happy,” you might say to yourself. “I can’t work hard on things that have real value without a base level of happiness.” Sometimes these statements are true, but often they are lies, and at best, most belong as ideologies—hypotheses about how to achieve an objective function, such as “I hypothesize that happiness makes people more productive.”

The important thing to remember is this: When you must choose between a proclivity and your objective function, your objective function takes priority. For example, if feeling comfortable and dignified is a proclivity you have, but to achieve something related to your objective function you must become uncomfortable and lose your dignity for a while, you should not waver in your choice to endure those discomforts.

Regardless of their real value to us, proclivities are part of being human. The most we can expect from ourselves is to be cognizant of what is a real intrinsic value and what is a proclivity when optimizing our lives.