= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pjeby comments on Pain and gain motivation - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (131)
I thank you for placing this qualification on your statement. As it happens, you are entirely correct, but that's very often not the case when you try to apply far-brain logic to near-brain emotions. I have to teach people to distrust logical answers, because emotional logic isn't based on understanding things. Your emotional brain is more of an outside-view frequentist than an inside-view Bayesian, you might say. ;-)
At any rate, it's subject to a different set of biases than the "far" brain, so far-brain reasoning tends to use a very wrong "theory of mind" when guessing at one's own emotional motivations.
You can trust logic; you can't trust that your brain is logical. I did the former.
Not from flawed premises, you can't. And most of the premises people typically assume about their own motivations are seriously flawed. Thus, people can use perfectly valid logic to construct reasonable, elegant theories about their behavior that are nonetheless 100% irrelevant to how they're actually generating those behaviors.
Actually, your brain is logical, in the sense that a computer is - it does what it's programmed to do, even if what it's programmed to do is stupid. ;-)
I should probably clarify what I mean by "distrust logical answers". I should've said, "distrust logical answers to emotional or experiential questions", or "distrust 'far' answers to 'near' questions". The question of one's motivation for doing a thing is "near", so generating an answer from the "far" side of the brain is pure confabulation. Thus, a logical, abstract, sophisticated answer to that question is not actually an answer to that question.