[xboxnolifes]

> The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done.

How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).

Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?

[yamtaddle]

> How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).

> Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?

I think this is mostly a distraction.

I don't think most folks find it that hard to separate the best 1/3 of things they might reasonably do to fill a free hour, from the worst 1/3, for example, or to name on a Thursday things they probably ought to do more of in the next couple days, because they've not done much of it this week, and it's good to do. Absence of iron-clad proof of what "good" is doesn't seem to impede them a bit.

[ozim]

I think only proper metric is "future quality of life". Sitting on couch watching TV - you are sure it is not going to contribute to your well being in 10-20-40 years. To be able to do some pushups while you are 70y.o. - you have to do hundreds of pushups while you were 20y.o.

I don't know anyone who wants to have a heart attack or spend his last 5-10 years of life in a hospital bed. So I am not writing about quality of life like getting a Porsche, because grabbing coffee with a friend or home brewing won't land you that. Having a habit of doing something, walking somewhere gets you going and if someone hits 70y.o. and they are couch potato, they will be in for a world of pain. Where if they would grab a coffee with their friends from time to time do some hobby they will have some lasting relations and stuff to do.

Well I suppose it is not trivially refutable - but happy to see what would be the refutation.

[copperx]

To be clear, when someone says "quality of life" they're referring to health, well-being, and happiness, whatever that is.

Buying a Porsche implies a certain standard of living, not quality of life. Completely orthogonal concepts. We Americans mix up these concepts frequently, which explains a lot about the culture.

[OkayPhysicist]

Individuals are free to choose their own evaluation metric for their lives, but it turns out that most fall into a relatively narrow band. Let's assume people have (at least some measure of) free will, because otherwise the question of "What should I do" is largely moot.

Let's define life as a path through a space of nonfungible states. Our utility metric U(s,t) gives a utility value to experiencing a certain state (s) at a certain time (t). Our goal is to maximize our utility over our lives (for the sake of the religious, include "and afterlives" wherever I say lives), aka the integral of U over the range 0 to infinity.

States are time and past state dependent. Two experiences are different states even holding everything else equal depending on what states you have previously experienced, and when you experience them.

What states you can experience at a given time is limited by your previous state. You may have an infinite number of possible next states, but there are also infinite states that you cannot experience next that you could have arrived at if you had a different previous state. e.g., you can't enjoy a night in with your wife, if your previous state didn't have you already married. The ultimate example of this is the secular "dead" state, where your only available next state is dead@t+epsilon.

With all that out of the way, we can start cutting away some easily analyzed sets of metrics. The easiest is the "heaven or hell" set. These assign some non-zero value to all dead states, dependent on a morality function applied to all states prior to death. As t->Inf, your average utility will be dominated by your death value, so your best choices in life are those that maximize your prescribed morality function. Given that most such religions assign a negative morality to sloth, and at the very least you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes that sitting on your couch is the most moral possible action you could be taking at any point in time, couch potato is right out.

Morality-based reincarnation metrics follow a similar line of thought, so long as you assume that your reincarnation has positive or negative effects on your range of possible average utility. (E.g., the best possible bug life is worse than the best possible human life).

If you follow a belief system where everyone experiences the same afterlife regardless of their life, then you can just subtract the value of U(afterlife,t) from a finite life metric to arrive at identical choices.

We'll ignore immortality/non-static afterlives, because they're hard to reason about, and relatively niche held beliefs.

What's left is finite life metrics, where U(dead,t)=0. All the utility you can possibly accumulate is going to be obtained before your time of death. These can be categorized into four groups:

A) Different states have varying utilities, but tend positive.

B) All states have the same positive utility: U(s!=dead,t) = x > 0

C) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative

D) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative, but killing yourself is more negative than the expected value of living until your natural demise.

Type C is the radical anti-natalist block. They assert the best possible move is to kill yourself. You are unlikely to meet someone who earnestly believes this due to survivorship bias, but since every state you spend alive is reducing your utility, delaying a deliberate exit to sit on the couch is sub-optimal.

Type B is exact opposite: the only thing that matters is living as long as possible. The best choice is always the one that extends your lifespan, which precludes the life-reducing sedentary choice of couch-potato-dom.

Type A (most secular philosophical beliefs systems), and D (more mainstream anti-natalism) are largely interchangeable except when it comes to evaluating the expected value of prolonging your life. Thus, for the purposes of refuting the couch-potato lifestyle we can analyze them together, because there are better ways both to die young and to grow to a ripe old age than sitting on your couch.

In this space it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.

The latter is where couch-pototo-ness really shines: it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. There is minimal sacrifice that needs to be made to achieve sitting on the couch, watching TV, relative to the bare minimum of survival. You don't need to do anything unpleasant, or immoral, or antisocial, or really anything at all to get to sit there and watch TV. But we can exclude metrics that assign a higher utility to some other, as easy or even easier to achieve states, because the leisure wouldn't be an attraction to them.

Future states is where the couch potato states really flounder: compared to pretty much any use of your time, they have very little effect on your available future states. Their utility will probably be somewhat above average in most people's metric functions, because that's what mass entertainment was designed for: being appealing to most people. But the lack of expanding your availability of options means that for almost any metric, there will be something you could be doing that takes slightly more delayed gratification, but with a much higher pay off.

So there's my (hopefully) non-trivially refutable explanation for why choosing to be a couch potato kinda sucks. TL;DR: It's a very-low, very-local maxima for most utility metrics because it doesn't open any new doors.

[factsaresacred]

> it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.

Great way to frame it. Somewhat similarly, I view it as path dependency: your current choices are constrained by previous choices, meaning the further you deviate from the person you wish to be the harder it is to turn things around if the future you so wishes to.

[boca_honey]

Is this satire? Surely you must know that many (most?) human beings don't conform into your presuppositions about value and the meaning of positive and negative, given that life isn't a spreadsheet.

[OkayPhysicist]

The mathiness of it is, admittedly, a touch tongue in cheek. But the underlying philosophy stands: Despite there being as many different views on "What do I value" as there are people, it's hard to construct a value system where sitting on the couch isn't paying a significant opportunity cost, unless you axiomatically take sitting on the couch as the greatest good there is.