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non-expert comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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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.
Let me make some more precise definitions: by "emotional responses to my thoughts" I mean "what I feel when I think a given thought," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when I think about calling people. By "emotional responses to my behavior" I mean "what I feel when I perform a given action," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when I call people. By "emotional responses to external stimuli" I mean "what I feel when a given thing happens in the world around me," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when people call me. The distinction I'm trying to make between my behavior and external stimuli is analogous to the distinction between operant and classical conditioning.
No, I'm just making the point that for the purposes of classifying different kinds of emotion-hacking I don't find it useful to have a category for other people's thoughts separate from other people's behaviors (in contrast to how I find it useful to have a category for my thoughts separate from my behaviors), and the reason is that I don't have direct access to other people's thoughts.
What problem?
Thanks for the clarification, now i understand.
Going back to the original comment i commented on:
Particularly with your third type of emotion hacking ("hacking your emotional responses to external stimuli"), it seems emotion hacking is vital for for epistemic rationality -- i guess that relates to my original point, that hacking emotions are at least as important for epistemic rationality as hacking emotions for instrumental rationality.
I raised the issue originally because I worry that rationality, to the extent it must value subjective considerations, tends to minimize the importance of those considerations to yield a more clear inquiry.