You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Romashka comments on How It Feels to Improve My Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: SquirrelInHell 18 March 2016 09:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (50)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Romashka 19 March 2016 05:23:43AM 0 points [-]

No, I got that; I want to know, rather, how do you know whether you feeling something you associate with increasing rationality exactly in the subset of cases where you can be said to act rationally.

It should be testable, probably, with some kind of mood-tracking device (smart watch? Sorry, don't know a thing about it.)

Comment author: SquirrelInHell 19 March 2016 05:47:58AM *  0 points [-]

If I understand your question correctly, I don't know that and I don't think I could know it. What I wrote is about how it generally feels and this is definitely not concrete enough to guide me in rationality.

We've had enough historical cases of people following what feels right and ending up believing stuff willy nilly.

The only answer is, I guess, you just don't depend on this stuff to guide you, ever. I treat it like a curious post facto observation, not a rationality technique of any kind.

BTW, I'm a sort of a maniac of recording high quality data about my moods/feelings/energy etc. in daily life and doing statistics on them. I found I can get a lot of value out of it, but probably not in the sense you mean. I'll write about it some time.