saturn comments on If epistemic and instrumental rationality strongly conflict - Less Wrong

5 [deleted] 10 May 2012 01:46PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Amanojack 10 May 2012 06:49:01PM 3 points [-]

Any time you have a bias you cannot fully compensate for, there is a potential benefit to putting instrumental rationality above epistemic.

One fear I was unable to overcome for many years was that of approaching groups of people. I tried all sorts of things, but the best piece advice turned out to be: "Think they'll like you." Simply believing that eliminates the fear and aids in my social goals, even though it sometimes proves to have been a false belief, especially with regard to my initial reception. Believing that only 3 out of 4 groups will like or welcome me initially and 1 will rebuff me, even though this may be the case, has not been as useful as believing that they'll all like me.

Comment author: saturn 10 May 2012 11:57:28PM 4 points [-]

It doesn't sound like you were very successful at rewriting this belief, because you admit in the very same paragraph that your supposedly rewritten belief is false. What I think you probably did instead is train yourself to change the subject of your thoughts in that situation from "what will I do if they don't like me" to "what will I do if they like me", and maybe also rewrite your values so that you see being rebuffed as inconsequential and not worth thinking about. Changing the subject of your thoughts doesn't imply a change in belief unless you believe that things vanish when you stop thinking about them.