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pjeby comments on The Apologist and the Revolutionary - Less Wrong
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This reminded me of something.
In the book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard, the author goes into detail about how mood is strongly correlated with differential activation in the two hemispheres of the brain. The left forebrain is more strongly activated than the right forebrain when a person is happy, and the right forebrain is more strongly activated when a person is sad. (Ramachandran mentions that stroke victims with left brain damage frequently become depressed, while ones with right brain damage don't.)
If the left brain interprets data through the perspective of current theories and the right brain forces theory revision, and left brain activation is associated with happiness and right brain activation is associated with unhappiness, what does that say about happiness and rationality?
Actually, it just sounds like when we're unhappy, we're more likely to be willing to revise our theories. It doesn't say anything about the rationality of the theories we used before, or the ones we're about to have.
Well, I suppose you could say it means the previous theories didn't produce a good result, but that's not necessarily correlated with the rationality of the theories. If a theory doesn't work the first time you try it, it doesn't necessarily make it wrong.
In any event, the person using "true" rationality will have fewer occasions of unhappiness over the long haul, since they will not have as many "opportunities" to revise their theories, due to low correlation with relevant realities.
(Of course, I happen to think that If you'll really be happier over the course of your life believing something false, then great, go for it. I just also believe that the probability of that actually being the case is very low... especially when compared to the greater pain of discovering the falsehood later.)