Roko comments on Spock's Dirty Little Secret - Less Wrong

46 Post author: pjeby 25 March 2009 07:07PM

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Tags: emotion priming iat self_deception

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Comment author: pjeby 26 March 2009 12:00:42AM 0 points [-]

This statement is either false or meaningless, depending on how you interpret "emotion".

Let's review the statement in question:

Without emotion, you have no way to narrow down the field of "all possible hypotheses" to "potentially useful hypotheses" or "likely to be true" hypotheses...

By "narrow down", I actually meant "narrow down prior to conscious evaluation" -- not consciously evaluate for truth or falsehood. You can consciously evaluate whatever you like, and you can certainly check a statement for factual accuracy without the use of emotion. But that's not what the sentence is talking about... it's referring to the sorting or scoring function of emotion in selecting what memories to retrieve, or hypotheses to consider, before you actually evaluate them.

Comment deleted 26 March 2009 12:37:36AM *  [-]
Comment author: pjeby 26 March 2009 12:53:31AM 0 points [-]

think that emotions often do the opposite. They narrow down the field of "all possible hypotheses" to "likely to make me feel good about myself if I believe it" hypotheses and "likely to support my preexisting biases about the world" hypotheses, which is precisely the problem that this site is tackling... if emotions subconsciously selected "likely to be true" hypotheses, we would not be in the somewhat problematic situation we are in.

Those are subsets of what you believe to be likely true.

Comment deleted 26 March 2009 01:51:04PM [-]
Comment author: pjeby 26 March 2009 03:15:33PM 0 points [-]

epistemic rationality is about believing things that are actually true, rather than believing things that you believe to be true.

And that's why it's a good thing to know what you're up against, with respect to the hardware upon which you're trying to do that.

Comment deleted 26 March 2009 03:27:43PM [-]
Comment author: pjeby 26 March 2009 04:42:34PM 2 points [-]

That which proposes hypotheses is not exactly the same piece of brainware as that which makes you laugh and cry and love

No... the former merely sorts those hypotheses based on information from the latter. Or more precisely, the raw data from which those hypotheses are generated, has been stored in such a manner that retrieval is prioritized on emotion, and such that any such emotions are played back as an integral part of retrieval.

One's physio-emotional state at the time of retrieval also has an effect on retrieval priorities... if you're angry, for example, memories tagged "angry" are prioritized.

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