LeishaKivlin comments on The Lens That Sees Its Flaws - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 September 2007 12:10AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 August 2012 08:36:31PM *  1 point [-]

To ask which beliefs make you happy, is to turn inward, not outward—it tells you something about yourself, but it is not evidence entangled with the environment. I have nothing anything against happiness, but it should follow from your picture of the world, rather than tampering with the mental paintbrushes.

Quite. I encounter a lot of people with this mindset; they hold to a belief because it makes them happier to, and they prefer to be happy and overly optimistic than realistic and disappointed. Having the self-awareness to realize that's exactly what they're doing is somewhat rarer, perhaps because the awareness makes the illusory belief harder to hold to (it starts to take on characteristics of belief-in-belief?)

The maximization of happiness is, of course, a legitimate value to pursue, but not at the expense of the accuracy of the map. That causes more problems than it solves. And for the notion that our optimist is better off with his or her particular rose-tinted glasses on, there's always the Litany of Gendlin