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Swimmer963 comments on Avoid misinterpreting your emotions - Less Wrong
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it's lines like this that make me a little uneasy about your essay. If you say that sometimes emotions are worth listening too and sometimes not, doesn't this imply that they are quite worthless as an advisor? If they are wrong roughly the same amount as they are right, that does not mean that they are "half good" it means they totally fail, as a coinflip would give you the same result. Shouldn't it then be the conclusion that one should just ignore emotion all together and rethink issues from scratch if they are somehow relevant? In other words: if you are forced to reconsider all the data given by emotional input anyway, what good is it in the first place?
Even if it was 50%, noticing and then re-evaluating your emotional 'advisor' won't have the same result as ignoring it. For example, if 50% of your bad moods are because of random brain-chemistry imbalances, and 50% indicate a problem, you can either ignore all bad moods, or notice all bad moods and then go look for problems that might be causing them. In which case you'll find a potentially fixable problem 50% of the time, and no apparent cause the other 50%. So at the cost of more energy spent on thought and emotion-evaluation, you can catch some problems in your life that you might not have noticed otherwise. This would still be true even if only 25% of bad moods were in response to a fixable problem: there would be a higher cost of emotion-evaluation relative to payoff in problem-discovery, but the result would still be different than if you just ignored the bad moods.