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Xachariah comments on Life-changing decisions pertaining to education. Help. - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (33)
What other state should you be in for answering difficult questions? Regarding confusion, a tough decision that can go either way should feel like confusion until you have a convincing answer. Picking a college is a literal once (maybe twice) in a lifetime question that is fully out of context for him.
As for depression, there's a school of thought that (certain types of) depression* is nature's way to make you focus on thinking and adopt a risk averse strategy in the meanwhile (re food/social stance). Here's a well linked to article from Time. In SAT analogy form, Anger : Precommitment :: Sadness : Thinking. This is not to say that depression is good per se, but that it is not automatically dangerous to make hard decisions while in a depressed state of mind.
*This theory defines depression as the expected short-term depression one feels after a loss (eg losing a loved one), and the theory considers clinical depression as a malignant variant of adaptive depression.
Confused and happy. Confused with neutral affect. Maybe not-confused and proud of yourself for acquiring the information needed to make the decision a no brainer.
(I do agree that it can depend on the situation and that various moods bias us in ways that can be more useful in certain situations.)
Is there any research about how whether one makes better decisions when one is happy then when one is depressed?