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wedrifid comments on Rationality Quotes October 2012 - Less Wrong
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James Stephens
What testable predictions does this make and have they been tested? The typical interactions of various emotions with each other is something we should be able to find out but I'm not sure if the message of the quote is supposed to be anything to do with making a claim about reality.
Purely anecdotal: I was a lot more frightened of spiders before I got a book about them out of the library and read it. They are pretty interesting little creatures. Mind you, I live where there are no actually dangerous ones.
Speculation: To the extent that a lot of fear is fear of the unknown, and curiosity attracts us to the unknown so we can know more of it, I can see how curiosity would help reduce fear.
Testable prediction: someone who reports a fear of something they don't know much about will report less fear of it after they can be encouraged to express and follow up some amount of curiosity about it. It's conditional on such curiosity actually existing. Possibly extreme phobias shut off any attempts to discuss or think about the object of fear.
Curiosity probably even helps with well-founded fears of things like bears, hydrofluoric acid or blue-glowing bits of metal. I'm content not to conquer well-founded fears I think.
Another anecdote: I was much less bothered by thunder (admittedly, I was distressed rather than panicked) when I found out that there were people who made a hobby of recording thunder. This caused me to listen to it rather than just be upset by the loud noise.
Hmmm... I've got an irrational loathing of piped music. Any suggestions?
Well, my thunder story isn't going to help-- the hook for me is that thunder is a little different every time.
One of my friends found that after she'd had a meditation practice, she suddenly saw piped music (I'm assuming you mean recorded music played in public places) as a benevolent thing-- an effort to make people's lives more pleasant. This might take a habit of meditation rather than just trying to see benevolence.
You could take a look at the basis of your loathing. Maybe there's an underlying premise that doesn't make sense.
Actually that sounds neat. I'll try to cultivate that attitude. I think the problem is that music (with words) disrupts my (continuous) inner train of thought. To the point where if there's music in a supermarket I'm much less capable of buying things. I'm pretty sure this problem is much worse for me that for most people (otherwise piped music would be illegal).
But if I'm going to get disrupted anyway, it would be nice not to be annoyed as well. And if I could find a way not to be annoyed that might reduce the disruption.
There's also earplugs, though I agree it's plausible that getting aggravated adds to the distraction.
This could be partially due to the idea of safety margins. If I meet something that I know very little about, I give it a wide safety margin, and get nervous if I am closer to it than my safety margin allows; once I know more about it, I can narrow down my safety margins considerably.
For example, if I know very little about snakes except that some are poisonous, and I happen to find a house snake in my house, my reaction would be one of caution (or, if I come across it very suddenly, even of fear) - with the aim of extricating myself from the situation unbitten. However, if I know enough about snakes to identify the snake as a member of a nonvenomous species, which apparently make reasonable pets, and that their first reaction to danger is to flee, then I would be a lot less afraid of the snake in question (though a cobra would still trigger a panic-run-away response).