Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I suppose there is a third kind of emotion-hacking, namely hacking your emotional responses to external stimuli.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 &qu... (read more)