Rationality Quotes: June 2011

Oscar_Cunningham

Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I seem to have run into a strange inferential distance.

The word "obsessive-compulsive" seems to have suggested the wrong picture. I do not mean rules as impulses to perform stereotyped ritual behaviors.

What I'm trying to describe is a way to handle explicit choices. "Are you coming home this weekend?", "Do I want some chocolate?", "Am I enjoying this movie?". Much (most?) of the time, a simple "yes, good" or "no, bad" gut feeling somehow gets generated with no conscious input. That's a decision.

But some of the time, there's no such gut feeling. Introspection returns "I have no freaking clue what I want.". This is quite distressing, especially when there's pressure to decide immediately.

A known set of rules can thus be useful. "Which movie should I watch?" "ERROR: decision-making system unavailable." "Okay, then let's go with the most educational."

Problems with this approach are absence of relevant rules, bad rules, and inability to access the rule-based decision-making system as well as the emotional reaction-based one.

Someone coming up to me as I agonize and telling me "You don't need rules" is not helping. What do I use instead?

I wonder if it would help for you to try to satisfice. You're not trying to choose the best option, you just have some minimum acceptable standard, and you're trying to pick one of the options (any of the options) that meets that standard. You could pick more-or-less randomly, or you could look for any inclination in favor of one of the options and then go with that one.

For instance, if there are 4 movies that you're trying to choose between, and all 4 seem like movies that you're likely to enjoy, then it doesn't really matter which one you pick. You ju... (read more)

2roland15y

Do you know the book "How we decide" by Jonah Lehrer? In the first chapter, section 3 there is a case of a patient who lost his orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) due to a cancer and suddenly he couldn't make decisions anymore because all emotions where cut off and all choices suddenly became equal in value. So sometimes there are underlying neurological problems that can cause this. Quote: [...]

0roland15y

Or maybe if you don't feel like going to any movie why not do something else? Is there something that you would like to do? I don't watch movies either, but I love reading good books. I suppose when you read LW and write comments here you don't apply a decision procedure in order to do it, but instead you simply enjoy it somehow. Is that correct? [...] Sorry, I think the internet is not the right medium, personal conversation with a knowledgeable individual would probably help more.