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anonym comments on Incremental Progress and the Valley - Less Wrong
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Hmm, good point. But is that a specific belief, or a family of beliefs parameterized over values of "good"? Still, it's a subjective belief constraint, if nothing else.
I think it's an attitude, which is a set of dispositions to think and believe (and thus act) in certain ways. The disposition can be represented internally as a belief, but it's actually something more fundamental. The belief corresponding to an attitude is a representation rather than the thing itself.
To illustrate what I mean, consider people suffering from depression. Their primary problem in cognitive terms is not that they have particular dysfunctional beliefs (my life sucks, I'm a failure, etc.), but that they have a dysfunctional attitude that predisposes them to act in self-defeating ways and adopt particular self-defeating beliefs. They have an attitude that manifests as a strong predisposition to filter the positive, blow the negative out of proportion, and interpret every event in life in a way that would actually be cause for unhappiness if the interpretation were accurate.
Julian Simon's Good Mood is a counterexample. He was seriously considering suicide once his children were grown-- he had no pleasure in life and a high background level of emotional pain.
Still, he was running his life quite well, and got over his depression when he finally had everything squared away enough that he could spend a little time thinking about it. He concluded that depression is caused by making negative comparisons about one's situation, and found a bunch of strategies (lower standards, improve situation, find something more important than making comparisons, etc.) for not making them.
The link is to the whole text of the book.
Oh, indeed. Well put.