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Morendil comments on Pain and gain motivation - Less Wrong
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As a tentative rephrasing, something that's "emotionally implausible" is something that "I would never do" or that "could never happen to me." Like you, I can visualize myself falling with a high degree of accuracy; but I can't imagine throwing myself off the bridge in the first place. Suicide? I would never do that.
It occurs to me that "can't imagine" implies a binary division when ability to imagine is more of a continuum: the quality of imagination drops steadily between trying to imagine brushing my teeth (everyday), calling 911 (very rare, but I've done it before), punching through a wall (never done it, but maybe if I was mad enough), and jumping off a bridge (I would never do that).
For all four, I can imagine the physical events as bare facts; but for the first two I can easily place myself in the simulation, complete with cognitive and emotional states. That's much harder in the third case; in the fourth, I'm about as confident in my imagination as I am in trying to imagine a world where 1+1=3.
I really do mean I imagine committing suicide. It really does feel to me as if it's not outlandish that I might just, as it were, blow a fuse and jump off the bridge on an impulse. I can project how I'd feel the instant after the "decision" - scared out of my mind, gut-wrenchingly regretful, but also inappropriately exhilarated.
Conversely, I'm not sure I can imagine brushing my teeth in great detail - it's too boring. But I do occasionally imagine things that I would describe as emotionally implausible with some degree of precision.
It's possible that I'm just weird, but anyway I mean my observations as cautions against generalizing from a sample of one.
Come on Morendil, you're supposed to link to these things.
ETA: OMG, that post got Yvain over a thousand karma.
This makes me kind of wish we had WikiStyleLinks, where if you simply put a phrase in CamelCase, it automatically generates a link to the page whose name is that phrase. You could simply speak of GeneralizingFromOneExample, and boom, a link to Yvain's post.
The thing is, though, reading text with WikiStyleLinks can get PrettyAnnoying after a while.
TV Tropes has an interesting variation of this: it supports WikiStyleLinks as well as MediaWiki-style bracketed links, but the Wiki Style Links automatically get spaces inserted (like that) in the name as displayed, so the appearance is merely capitals.
Yes, that's largely the reason I avoid CamelCase in source code.