handoflixue comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 March 2012 01:35AM

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Comment author: handoflixue 02 April 2012 11:28:31PM 0 points [-]

I suppose the best analogy I could offer here is getting robbed. It takes maybe 5 minutes to get robbed. There's (usually) nothing you can do to fix the situation or recoup the cost. But people still feel bad about it for a while.

Your link seems to suggest, more or less, using hypnosis to just wipe out this guilt - except the examples you give don't really seem to address that emotional side at all. You're focusing on the intellectual acceptance of "yes, I should drop the PhD", which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the emotional baggage that comes with that, the sense that you've wasted 2 years as a sunk cost that isn't even doing you any good at this point.

If you're really hypnotizing way that guilt, that emotional response, then I guess I am misunderstanding you. Is that the case? Because I would say that, based on my personal experience, that is seriously dangerous territory. Not to say you shouldn't trust yourself with it - I do it myself. But it is a technique I have seen cause a lot of people serious problems, and definitely not one I'd teach casually.

Comment author: jimmy 03 April 2012 01:44:45AM 0 points [-]

If you're really hypnotizing way that guilt, that emotional response, then I guess I am misunderstanding you. Is that the case?

Haha! YES!

...people still feel bad about it for a while.

Yep. They're doing it wrong.

You're focusing on the intellectual acceptance of "yes, I should drop the PhD"

No no no no no! I'm talking about the emotional acceptance. It is a very different thing than intellectual acceptance, but that does not mean they can't track each other. If your mind is organized well, they do track.

Have you read Kaj's post on overcoming suffering and suffering as attention allocation conflicts? This is basically what I'm talking about

I would say that, based on my personal experience, that is seriously dangerous territory

There is a very important distinction between suppressing emotion (perhaps successfully) and eliminating the cause of the emotion directly by coming up with a better way of handling the conflict. The latter is healthy and quite low risk compared to the null option. This is what I do - with or without "hypnosis".

Suppressing emotion is a recipe for disaster.