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polymathwannabe comments on Which ideas from LW would you most like to see spread? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Extremely difficult to get into normal people's heads: that striving to become more rational has nothing to do with becoming "less emotional."
Part of that's because LW redefined rationality to mean something different than it means out there.
At the last weekend I was at a birthday with a lot of LW people where we did lightning talks. One speaker made the point that he programs better when he shuts off his emotions because his computer doesn't care whether he's angry at it. Even when the software tries to get him to feel pleasure by being pretty that draws him out of his analytic programming mode.
There are people for whom striving to become more rational involves focusing on the analytic mode. Thinking about the tradeoffs is useful. Having words for them is as well.
To you think "think more clearly" has connotations of "become less emotional"?
Thinking is often seen as opposed to feeling, which is as if eating were opposed to drinking.
I like what Khalil Gibran says: "Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas."
Not to me, but laypeople tend to think in terms of a brain-vs.-heart divide.