Talk:One man's look at hedonism

Rename

We don't typically name main space pages after users, and almost never for landing pages. A neutral landing page for Hedonism should be created with a subpage for the essay / original research. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 01:15, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

A comment

The Bellman Equation may be a good model for how we plan what we do, and if that's the case we all optimize a time-discounted "reward". I don't have a reference for this offhand, but vaguely recall reading about the Bellman Equation in AI:AMA by Russel et al. or maybe another book on AI. The Wikipedia article isn't that great (computer science articles on Wikipedia usually aren't, unfortunately) and doesn't mention anything about individual human behavior. I could swear I've read something in this vein somewhere though. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 08:38, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I forgot to state my point in the above, which is that I think the word "hedonism" is often applied to two distinct patterns. Notice that in the bellman equation, rewards are time-discounted by a certain factor. One cannot optimize rewards infinitely far in the future, so this makes sense. A person who seeks short-term gratification may be called a "hedonist" but suppose instead that they simply have a sharp discount factor. On the other hand, someone who's amoral, anti-social and/or generally self-serving may not simply seek short-term gratification, yet their behavior could also arguably be called hedonistic. What do you think of this distinction? I'm not well-read on the subject of hedonism, so I don't understand all of the terms in the resource, but it seems like this distinction might be worth making. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:04, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

To put it another way, hedonism has to do with the "objective" that is optimized, rather than the discount factor. It seems the resource implies this with the line "The sort of hedonism so criticized is both short-term and long-term hedonism; term does not matter; what matters is that it is an egoistic hedonism or aiming at one's own pleasure as the only ultimate aim, or self-pleasure-seeking." but I wanted to call your attention to bellman's equations since it makes the point easy to see terms of discount factor vs objective. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:11, 14 October 2023 (UTC)