I try to treat my emotions in the following way: Emotions just ''are'' and as such carry information only about emotions themselves. They have meaning only in relation to other emotions, both mine and those of others. I've found that the most effective way to consistently take the outside view. Once I made that leap, it became much easier to apply rationality in mastering them for my own benefit. I can collect empirical data about my emotions and make predictions about my emotions. I can devise strategies to change my emotions and then assess whether they work. If you feel sad and it's raining today, you might infer that rain leads to an increased probability of sadness. If you feel excited about a job opportunity, you might infer that you will generally be happy on a day to day basis. If I meet someone and feel comfortable talking to them, that's only an indication that I will feel comfortable talking to them in the future. And if you pay attention for long enough, you realize that many emotions are ultimately harmless. If you stop feeding them, they drift away, they pass.

It is partly a dissociative approach, being a spectator to your own emotions (as mentioned by EE43026F). But at the same time, it's like treating your emotions as you treat your toes. They are a part of you, but they're only mildly informative about whether you should change careers.

Looking back on what I just wrote, I should also say that dealing with emotions is a skill. I don't mean to suggest that one little insight outweighs practice. About two years and a half years ago I made a commitment to not be some completely oblivious to emotions and it's taken a while to develop the skills. The simplest skill is just identifying emotions. At various points of the day, ask yourself how you are feeling. When I started, I literally could not give a verbal response, I could not produce a word describing how I felt.

Vox Day's post appears to be an example of the moral equivalence fallacy - saying "but we're not as bad as X!" as a form of counterattack in debate.

"The "not as bad as" argument is a form of the moral equivalence fallacy. It's popular with people who know perfectly well they're doing something wrong. Being fully aware of this problem, they feel compelled to attempt to justify it, and they do so by pointing to other, usually worse, actions."

Edit: Peter Lambert-Cole points out that Vox Day is not Catholic - I misremembered that he was. (Indeed, Mr Beale's views on Catholics are more than a little idiosyncratic.) Sorry about that.

I wouldn't say that this is a fear of an "inaccurate conclusion," as you say. Instead, it's a fear of losing control and becoming disoriented: "losing your bearings" as you said . You're afraid that your most trustworthy asset - your ability to reason through a problem and come out safe on the other side; an asset that should never fail you - will fail you and lead you down a path you don't want to go. In fact, it could lead to Game Over if you let that lead you to kill or be killed, as you highlight in your examples of the Unabomber, Mitchell Heisman and zealot soldiers.

I especially like the orientation metaphor here. And I think that your piece addresses this. First, you need to know where you are. Recognize when you are in far mode and thinking abstractly and when you are in near mode and thinking concretely. Then you can think about where you should be, near or far. Learn to recognize which one is better for your current situation and be able to switch between them. This is also part of being oriented. Finally, have a kill switch if you feel yourself losing control.

I think we should probably be very wary of taking anything based on the Myers Briggs classifications seriously. They seem to be based almost entirely on Forer Effect type predictions and almost impossible to falsify.

If I remember correctly, the Big Five tests are slightly more robust (eg, a Big Five profile has fairly high predictive power, and is fairly stable over time).

Thanks-- that's a lot more use than I've made of the system.

Does it make sense to think of yourself as crazy to the same extent that people of other psychetypes are?

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I think what got me into it was Psychetypes, a description of the Myers-Briggs types with some rather abstract theory about how they experience time and space differently than each other. [1] Anyway (and this should be a clue about how hard it can be to learn this sort of thing) when I first started reading the book, I got to the bit about there being many sorts of normal, and I put the book down for two years-- it was that hard to get past the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.

Anyway, look at how a lot of people talk about taste-- a lot of them really believe that everyone should like and dislike the same things they do.

Or people who believe that if some diet/exercise method worked for them, therefore it would work for everyone if they'd just try hard enough.

Or that allergies they haven't got must be illusionnary.

[1] IIRC, SPs experience the present moment most vividly, NTs imagine time as evenly spaced along a ruler, NFs have vivid experience of past emotional moments, and someone (it's got to be another N, and I can't remember what SJs experience) are most aware of future possibilities. You double all this to get 8 types because some people think spacial boundaries are real and others don't.

This sounds like a "Yes, Minister" interpretation. In that series, the British politicians are nominally in charge of the various ministries, being the representatives of the party in charge, but in actuality the civil service bureaucracy runs the show. The minister, Jim Hacker, and the permanent secretary (top civil servant), Sir Humphrey Appleby, are constantly in conflict over some little policy or bureaucratic issue and the latter almost always wins while letting his "superior" feel like he actually got his way.

So consciousness lets us think we are in charge, in fact we are convinced we are in charge, when in reality we will constantly be thwarted by that part of our brain operating outside conscious awareness.

Yeah-- argument by silliness (I think I'd describe it as finding something about the argument which can be made to sound silly) is one of the things I don't like about normal people.

There is something that bother's me and I would like to know if it bothers anyone else. I call it "Argument by Silliness"

Consider this quote from the Allais Malaise post: "If satisfying your intuitions is more important to you than money, do whatever the heck you want. Drop the money over Niagara Falls. Blow it all on expensive champagne. Set fire to your hair. Whatever."

I find this to be a common end point when demonstrating what it means to be rational. Someone will advance a good argument that correctly computes/deduces how you should act, given a certain goal. In the post quoted above, that would be maximizing your money. And in order to get their point across, they cite all the obviously silly things you could otherwise do. To a certain extent, it can be more blackmail than argument, because your audience does not want to seem a fool and so he dutifully agrees that yes, it would be silly to throw your money off of Niagara Falls and he is certainly a reasonable man who would never do that so of course he agrees with you.

Now, none of the intelligent readers on LW need to be blackmailed this way because we all understand what rationality demands of us and we respond to solid arguments not rhetoric. And Eliezer is just using that bit of trickery to get a basic point across to the uninitiated.

But the argument does little to help those who already grasp the concept improve their understanding. Absurdity does not mean you have correctly implemented a "reductio ad absurdum" technique. You have to be careful because he appealed to something that is self-evidently absurd and you should be wary of anything considered self-evident. Actually, I think it is more a case of being commonly accepted as absurd, but you should be just as wary of anything commonly accepted as silly. And you should be careful about where you think it is the former but it's actually the later.

The biggest problem, however, is that silly is a class in which we put things that can be disregarded. Silly is not a truth statement. It is a value statement. It says things are unimportant, not that they are untrue. It says that according to a given standard, this thing is ranked very low, so low in fact that it is essentially worthless.

Now, disregarding things is important for thinking. It is often impossible to think through the whole problem, so we at first concern ourselves with just a part and put the troublesome cases aside for later. In the Allais Malaise post, Eliezer was concerned just with the minor problem of "How do we maximize money under these particular constraints?" and separating out intuitions was part of having a well-defined, solvable problem to discuss.

But the silliness he cites only proves that the two standards - maximizing money and satisfying your intuitions - conflict in a particular case. It tells you little about any other case or the standards themselves.

The point I most want to make is "Embrace what you find silly," but since this comment has gone on very long, so I am going to break this up into several postings.

But I wonder if we are too concerned with the One True Map as opposed to an atlas of pretty good maps.

What's an example of people doing this?