We have to read "was about" as "was (supposed to be) about".

What the parable ends up being about is any consistent interpretation well supported by the actual text of the parable!

In the parable, the Whispering Earring is a kind of character. It has autonomy and agency; a mind of its own, separate from that of the wearer. It generates ideas and suggests them to the wearer, eventually rendering most of their brain unnecessary. (The implication being that the individual, as a sentient being, has wasted away and has been effectively replaced by the host, as if possessed in the classical sense).

Someone who could be just as powerful in making all the right decisions guaranteed to make them happy, but using their own brain instead of taking suggestions from a whispering daemonic oracle, would not waste away and be replaced; their brain would have to be doing remarkable work and developing in the process rather than atrophying.

I suspect that it would actually be very difficult to repair the parable, while retaining the key element of the Whispering Earring as an autonomous entity, into being about "the dangers of becoming too powerful oneself". (Has the author tried?)

I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of misleading language:

> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

The wearer doesn't really live any sort of life. Once it fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you're no longer experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've basically died and been replaced by the earring.

Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.

In your paradoxical sentence, "will regret" could be interpreted as either "know at that moment that they will regret" or "come to know after the fact that they regret it".

The former is a paradox, but the latter isn't.

As life advice, I think it works better when you consider it amortized over a collection of choices instead of a set of serial choices each of which it must be rigidly applied to: One should make a set of choices using a strategy that leads some of them to be likely to be regretful (but presumably without being able to predict ahead of time which ones will be).

Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not.

I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.

>"It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own."

I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal', there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the advice unquestioningly.

A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of those various options to consider "good" or "better".

And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument, because different people have different definitions of the "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks like to the choices made by the people, themselves.

Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge, well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging condition, rather than a sequential act.

(As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature undeniably provides some structure to ultimate desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering or decay of the mind...)

I think the moral of the story is that instead of reaching for something to "shift you" start doing the shifting. You are a living mind, rather than asking for some device to affect you, assert your own will. Don't avoid stress and conflict, embrace it, that's life. This instinctive demand for some therapeutic, external helper is what's wrong in the story, people craving to be put into passivity.

This need not even be a technology, The moral version of this could be some priest lecturing you on good and evil, some paternalistic boss making your decisions for you, the crux here is submission, being acted upon rather than actively embracing your own nature.

Imagine doing a crossword while a voice whispers the correct letter to enter for each cell. You'd definitely finish it a lot faster and without making mistakes. Crossword answers are public knowledge, and people still work them out instead of looking them up. They don't just want to solve them; they want to solve them theirselves. That's what is lost here.

The goals you form depend on your values, and your values are formed by learning from trial and error by what you like and what you regret. If the earring removes all chance of regret, then you also remove all chance of learning and all possibility of forming values or meaningful goals. You effectively erase yourself, hence why the brains were atrophied.

That implies that it could be maximized. Perhaps along a particular subdimension of a multidimensional concept, but still, some aspect of it could be maximized.

What would such a maximization look like in the extrema?

Could a benzene ring be the happiest thing in the universe? It's really easy to imagine some degenerate case like that coming to pass.

You can generally play this game along any such dimension; "consciousness", "agony", "love"... if you have a definition of it, in principle you can minmax it.