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Nick_Tarleton comments on The Apologist and the Revolutionary - Less Wrong
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I agree brainstorming-type idea change is fun. Exploration, and considering new avenues and potential projects, is plausibly happiness-inducing in general; such exploration and initiative (or successfully engaging others with the projects, and the hopes around the projects?) may be one of the core functions of happiness.
I also agree that deep personal change can be deeply satisfying and can have good aesthetics, bring fresh air and happiness, etc. And I agree that the negatively charged state of wincing at a mistake need not pervade through most belief-revision.
That said, I'd still assign significant (perhaps 40%) probability to there being a kind of thinking that is useful for parts of rationality and that directly causes sadness (not by an impossibly strong route -- you can frown and still be happy -- but that causes a force in that direction). Perhaps a kind of thinking that's involved in cutting through one's own social bluster to take an honest look at one's own abilities, or at the symmetry between one's own odds of being right, or of succeeding, and those of others in like circumstances. Or perhaps a kind of thinking that's involved in critically analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of particular theories or beliefs, rather than in exploring.
The evidence that's moving my belief is roughly: (a) correlation between unhappiness and willingness to actually update, among my non-OB acquaintance; (b) a prior (from other studies) that most effects of particular emotions can also be causes of those same emotions; (c) a vague notion that happiness might be for social interaction and enrolling others in one's ostensibly sure-to-succeed projects, while unhappiness might be for re-assessing. (What else might they be for? Rewards/punishments to motivate behavior doesn't work as an evolutionary theory for happiness and sadness; moods have pervasive, and so potentially costly, effects on behavior for long periods of time, in a way that brief, intense pain/pleasure doesn't. Those pervasive effects have to be part of what evolution is after.)
Both of these could proceed from low status/self-esteem. In that case, I would expect the correlation to be stronger with updating in response to other's opinions than to new info or self-generated ideas. I can't tell about that, although I think I notice the same correlation, in myself as well as others. On the other hand, genuinely depressed people are (at least stereotypically, but in my limited experience actually) unwilling to update regarding the (nominal) reasons for their sadness.
Agreed that direct reinforcement is unlikely, but there are other possible complex reasons; e.g. evolutionary approaches to depression.
What's also interesting about that idea, is that it might also be that chronically unhappy rationalists are contemplating the idea that rationality leads to unhappiness, while failing to accept it as a fact.
I mean, most of the people who go around saying that intelligence isn't correlated with happiness, are NOT saying this to mean, "therefore I will stop being so damn intelligent." (Certainly I wasn't, when I thought that.)
What they're really doing -- or at least what I was doing -- is using their unhappiness to prove their intelligence. That is, "look, I have a useful quality that should be acknowledged, and by the way, I'm making a big sacrifice for all of you by giving up my own happiness in search of the Truth -- you can thank me later". The supposed lamentation is really just a disguised bid for status and approval.
However, if they were to emotionally accept that their theories are not working (as I eventually did, after enough pain) then they'd start being unhappy a bit less often.
Another interesting hypothesis to test, even if it's not as much fun as squirting cold water in somebody's ear. ;-)