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pjeby 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.)
Interesting. Well, my experience, based on personal and student observation, is that contemplating "facing the truth" about a situation is painful, but actually facing it is a relief. It's almost as if evolution "wants" us to avoid facing the truth until the last possible moment... but once we do, there's no point in having bad feelings about it any more. (After all, you need to get busy being happy about your new theories, so you can convince everyone it's going to be okay!)
So unhappiness may result from merely considering the possibility that things aren't fitting your theories... while remaining undecided about whether to drop the old theories and change.
In other words, while the apologist and the revolutionary are in conflict, you suffer. But as soon as the apologist gives up and lets the revolutionary take over, the actual suffering goes away.
This seems to me like a testable hypothesis: I propose that, given a person who is unhappy about some condition in their life, an immediate change of affect could be brought about by getting the person to explicitly admit to themselves whatever they are afraid is happening or going to happen, especially any culpability they believe they personally hold in relation to it. The process of admitting these truths should create an immediate sensation of relief in most people, most of the time.
I feel pretty confident about this, actually, because it's the first step of a technique I use, called "truth loops". The larger technique is more than just fixing the unhappiness (it goes on to "admitting the truth" about other things besides the current negative situation), so I wasn't really thinking about it in this limited way before.
Meanwhile, although I do accept that, in general, affect-effects can also be affect-causes, I don't think there's as universal or simple a correlation between them as some people imply. For example, smiling does bias you towards happiness... but if you're doing it because you're being pestered to, it won't stop you from also being pissed off! And if you're doing it because you know you're sad and just want to be happy, you may also feel stupid or fake. Our emotional states aren't really that simple; we easily can (and frequently do!) have "mixed feelings".
I believe this is both widely accepted and true.
See also Robyn Dawes and Robin Hanson on therapy, and Eliezer on Dawes.
Well, I'm narrowing the hypothesis a bit: I'm stating that instead of talking to a math professor for some period of time, I'm guessing that you could cut the process a lot shorter by just getting straight to the damaging admissions. ;-)
Of course, there is also good evidence that simply writing about such things is beneficial, such as the study showing that 2 minutes of writing/day (about a personal trauma) improves your health.
I'm just seeing if we can narrow down to a more precisely-defined variable with greater correlation to positive results. That is, that the specific thing that needs to be included in the writing or talking is the admission of a problem and one's worst-case fears about it.