Yeah that did occur to me but I figured that one could still treat it in a binary way by simply saying Yes to the option with the most points.
But since happiness points or Life Points are not able to be measured exactly, I guess it has the same problem as weighing.
I asked Gemini about this and it gave a good answer (IMO):
You’re [saying] that ‘Happiness’ acts as a single currency that makes all goals commensurable.
However, I think treating happiness as a quantity to be maximized leads back to the problems with ‘Weighing’ that Elliot warns about. If we can’t objectively define a ‘unit of happiness,’ then saying one path gives ‘more’ happiness than another is just a way of hiding our unstated reasons behind a made-up number.
In a Critical Fallibilism framework, we don’t need ‘Happiness Math.’ We use Decisive Criticism. For example, I don’t choose a sleep schedule over a pay raise because of a ‘higher happiness score.’ I choose it because I have an explanation: ‘If I am chronically exhausted, I will fail at my goals of doing good work and enjoying my hobbies.’ That is a binary refutation of the Pay Raise option for the context of my current life.
I wonder how I can avoid making this same mistake (of falling back into the weighing paradigm) again.
I think the thing that tripped me up was thinking that one could have the binary goal of selecting the idea with the most goodness (or happiness/Life) points lol. But that’s still in the paradigm of attempting to measure the goodness of an idea. Hmm. I’d need to think about it some more. Any tips/pointers/etc are welcome.