sark comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: arundelo 05 February 2013 10:20PM

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Comment author: sark 02 February 2013 06:47:23PM 9 points [-]

Why not both useful beliefs and useful emotions?

Why privilege beliefs?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 02 February 2013 08:37:47PM *  11 points [-]

This is addressed by several Sequence posts, e.g. Why truth? And..., Dark Side Epistemology, and Focus Your Uncertainty.

Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don't. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn't seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)

Comment author: sark 03 February 2013 11:56:19AM 0 points [-]

"Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don't." Superb point that. And thanks for the links.