Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Rationality Quotes February 2013 — LessWrong

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The point isn't that you're taking pleasure in their misfortune, it's that you're taking pleasure in your own fortune. "I'm so lucky for having X." If you don't do that, then any improvements in your standard of living or situation in general will end up having no impact on your happiness, since you just get used to them and take them for granted and don't even realize that you would have a million reasons to be happy. And then (in the most extreme case) you'll end up feeling miserable because of something completely trivial, because you're ignoring everything that could make you happy and the only things that can have any impact on your state of mind are negative ones.

jooyous13y20

And then (in the most extreme case) you'll end up feeling miserable because of something completely trivial, because you're ignoring everything that could make you happy and the only things that can have any impact on your state of mind are negative ones.

Someone commented above about the instrumental value of crying and feeling bad, and you're actually pointing out the case where crying and feeling bad fail at being instrumental. Basically, I'm for whatever attitude that gets you to stop crying and start fixing some problem, and if resetting your baseli... (read more)

2Dahlen13y

... I think I see where you're coming from -- by realizing we're not at the far end of the unhappiness scale (since we have a counterexample to that), we should calibrate our feelings about our situation accordingly, yes? It's still not the way I view things; I'd like to say I prefer judging these things according to an absolute standard, but it's likely that that would be less true for me than I want it to be. To the extent that it doesn't hold true for me, I think it's better to take into consideration better states as well as worse ones. Saying, "at least I don't have it as bad as X" just doesn't feel enough; everybody who doesn't have it as bad as X could say it, and people in this category can vary widely in their levels of satisfaction, the more so the worse X has it. It's more complete to say "Yes, but I don't have it as good as Y either" or, better yet, "I have it better/worse than my need requires".

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