One problem is that going down that route in the extreme leads to sociopathy or psychopathy. I think we see a foreshadowing of Yudkowsky’s meta-ethics here, which oversimplified to this discussion would be: what is good is what you care about. If you were to suppress feeling bad about bad things, then eventually you’ll stop caring about making sure that bad things don’t happen. Alternatively, if you embrace your emotional response then you can start caring more. I think it is very important to not lose sight of the instrumental goal—making the outcomes you care about come true. The strength of your emotional bond to the goal is what determines how stable that goal is.
That said, I myself have a much more nuanced view of the interplay between emotion and thinking. Emotions drive our thinking by expanding, contracting, or reshaping the space of possibilities our mind’s planning engines consider. To a first approximation, emotions constitute modes of thinking, and sometimes it is useful to engage modes other than the privileged default of serenity. To learn more about this perspective on the false schism of emotion vs rational thinking, I recommend reading Minsky’s The Emotion Machine, or his prior work The Society of Mind.
One problem is that going down that route in the extreme leads to sociopathy or psychopathy. I think we see a foreshadowing of Yudkowsky’s meta-ethics here, which oversimplified to this discussion would be: what is good is what you care about. If you were to suppress feeling bad about bad things, then eventually you’ll stop caring about making sure that bad things don’t happen. Alternatively, if you embrace your emotional response then you can start caring more. I think it is very important to not lose sight of the instrumental goal—making the outcomes you care about come true. The strength of your emotional bond to the goal is what determines how stable that goal is.
That said, I myself have a much more nuanced view of the interplay between emotion and thinking. Emotions drive our thinking by expanding, contracting, or reshaping the space of possibilities our mind’s planning engines consider. To a first approximation, emotions constitute modes of thinking, and sometimes it is useful to engage modes other than the privileged default of serenity. To learn more about this perspective on the false schism of emotion vs rational thinking, I recommend reading Minsky’s The Emotion Machine, or his prior work The Society of Mind.