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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don't remember who. This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.
It's perhaps worth noting that EY seems to have taken instead the "accurate beliefs and accurate emotions" tack in e.g. The Twelve Virtues of Rationality. Or at least that seems to be what's implied.
I mean, I suspect "accurate beliefs and useful emotions" really is the way to go; but this is something that -- if it really is a sort of consensus here -- we need to be much more explicit about, IMO. At the moment there seems to be little about that in the sequences / core articles, or at least little about it that's explicity (I'm going from memory in making that statement).
Agreed. The idea that I should be paying attention to and then hacking my emotions is not something I learned from the Sequences but from the CFAR workshop. In general, though, the Sequences are more concerned with epistemic than instrumental rationality, and emotion-hacking is mostly an instrumental technique (although it is also epistemically valuable to notice and then stop your brain from flinching away from certain thoughts).
emotion-hacking seems far more important in epistemic rationality, as your understanding of the world is the setting in which you use instrumental rationality, and your "lens" (which presumably encompasses your emotions) is the key hurdle (assuming you are otherwise rational) preventing you from achieving the objectivity necessary to form true beliefs about the world.
I suppose I should distinguish between two kinds of emotion-hacking: hacking your emotional responses to thoughts, and hacking your emotional responses to behaviors. The former is an epistemic technique and the latter is an instrumental technique. Both are quite useful.
whose thoughts and whose behaviors? not disagreeing, just asking.
My thoughts and my behaviors. I suppose there is a third kind of emotion-hacking, namely hacking your emotional responses to external stimuli. But it's not as if I can respond to other people's thoughts, even in principle: all I have access to are sounds or images which purport to be correlated to those thoughts in some mysterious way.
All emotions are responses to external stimuli, unless your emotions relate only to what is going on in your head, without reference to the outside (i.e. outside your body) world.
I agree you can't respond to others' thoughts, unless they express them such that they are "behaviors." Interestingly, the "problem" you have with the sounds or images (or words?) which purport to be correlated to others' thoughts is the same exact issue everyone is having with you (or me).
if we're confident in our own ability to express our thoughts (i.e. the correlation problem is not an issue for you), then how much can we dismiss others' expressions because of that very same issue?
I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
isn't this the ONLY kind of emotion-hacking out there? what emotions are expressed irrespective of external stimuli? seems like a small or insignificant subset.
the second two paragraphs above are responding to this. sorry to throw it back at you, but perhaps i'm misunderstanding the point you were trying to make here? I thought you were questioning the value of considering/responding to others' thoughts, because you are arguing that even if you could, you would need to rely on their words and expressions, which may not be correlated with their "true" state of mind.