Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
The article I linked to wasn't just saying that emotions exist. It was saying that they're part of rationality.
If emotions didn't make people behave rationally, then people wouldn't evolve to have emotions.
Rand doesn't deny that emotions are part of rationality, she denies that they are tools of rationality. It is rational to try to make yourself experience positive emotions, but to say "I have a good feeling about this" is not a rational statement, it's an emotional statement. It isn't something that should interfere with cognition.
As for emotions affecting humans behavior, I think all mammals have emotions, so it's not easy for humans to discard them over a few generations of technological evolution. Emotions were useful in the ancestral environment, they are no longer as useful as they once were.