I find the idea to replace fear with something like excitment apalling. Replacing one emotion with another emotion is logically unsound and not very healthy, consider this statement as an argument:
»At work, I am always afraid of being fired.«
No matter what harm this emotion may cause, it may also cause a lot of good, like getting up, being friendly to coworkers or being productive. Basically, every emotion is a motivation towards something, the outcome may be predictable, it will vary for the individual and it will affect peers or groups.
Most assumptions are logically unsound, one sided or author’s observations:
Fear for example is a very strong emotion. The cause may be simple self-preservation, so starting to run away from something is proof that fear started a good thing: Survival.
Excitement, while driving and steering fast cars, causes accidents.
Fear leads to fear, internal conflict may be an outcome.
The post is full of such fallancies (post hoc ergo propter hoc). The core problem is the spectrum that Richard adresses here. He tries to cover emotional states from individual like stage fright to fear based motivation, which is basically emotional repression
on a large scale. These are diffrent things. Replacing, which is removing or exchanging an emotion, is going cause a lot of harm, and there word for that: Conditioning.
TL;DR: Basically the post contradicts a lot of research in behavioral sciences:
No matter what harm this emotion may cause, it may also cause a lot of good, like getting up, being friendly to coworkers or being productive. Basically, every emotion is a motivation towards something, the outcome may be predictable, it will vary for the individual and it will affect peers or groups.
Fear isn’t a motivation towards something, it’s a motivation away from something. It’s not that it’s impossible to use fear productively, and Richard even touches on that.
It’s that constraining your response to fear to be only productive is fighting against entropy in the same way that pushing rope is fighting against entropy. Speaking of “fear of getting fired”, a friend of mine was in that boat recently, and while her fear did keep her from doing some things which would have gotten her fired, it also motivated her to refuse to look at the reality of the situation she was in—because that is an equally effective way of getting away from the experience of fear!
As a result, she wasn’t able to update her perspectives in the ways that would have been needed in order to keep the job, and so she lost that job. All of the things you list as potential good things that can come from fear are things that can come more fluidly from excitement. People who are friendly because they are afraid of what will happen if they aren’t friendly tend to come off more stilted and insecure than people who are just genuinely looking forward to seeing what they can create with you.
The response (motivation) from fear may vary. A direction is relative to the observer. We use different points of observation and agree on many things with Richard. I find his approach sometimes narrow, sometimes long and winded. The reduction to move away from fear towards something you are excited about is one dimensional. The outcome is predicitable and always optimal (implying success): It is quite anecdotical.
The example of your friend (hoping she is well) illustrates and supports that. Her response (I speculate here) to fear resulted in behavioral change. That caused anxiety, leading to denial (not being able to cope). Richard often refers to Fear (I prefer Anxiety) or Excitement in a very broad sense and quoting from Frank Herbert’s Dune makes it worse. Just sayin, maybe it is a LW thing since this is Frontpage material.
Still, I strongly disagree on »Fear-based« and I would recommend »Anxiety-based« instead. It reflects much better on the current state of humanity.
Curiosity or Stimulation is much closer to what Richard refers to as Excitement, as an disambiguation its fine, in this context it misled me. Your guidance did help.
Emotions can have classification, the impact and results vary. Moving away from Fear (and anxiety) towards (curiosity and) Excitement is very close to an optimal outcome. Studies in various disciplines confirm these facts since ages and we both agree that in an such environments interaction happens naturally (fluidly). Too often neglecting group dynamics, disregarding economic constraints or optimization for productivity in working environments. Other environments are prone to the tragedy of the commons.
Humoristic closing note: If we take into account, that Richard does AI alignment, a intersection of human-intelligence as model and machine-intelligence as model I could conclude that his model for machines is probably much more complex than that for humans. Based on my limited observations of him giving out advice on LW.
I find the idea to replace fear with something like excitment apalling. Replacing one emotion with another emotion is logically unsound and not very healthy, consider this statement as an argument:
»At work, I am always afraid of being fired.«
No matter what harm this emotion may cause, it may also cause a lot of good, like getting up, being friendly to coworkers or being productive. Basically, every emotion is a motivation towards something, the outcome may be predictable, it will vary for the individual and it will affect peers or groups.
Most assumptions are logically unsound, one sided or author’s observations:
Fear for example is a very strong emotion. The cause may be simple self-preservation, so starting to run away from something is proof that fear started a good thing: Survival.
Excitement, while driving and steering fast cars, causes accidents.
Fear leads to fear, internal conflict may be an outcome.
The post is full of such fallancies (post hoc ergo propter hoc). The core problem is the spectrum that Richard adresses here. He tries to cover emotional states from individual like stage fright to fear based motivation, which is basically emotional repression on a large scale. These are diffrent things. Replacing, which is removing or exchanging an emotion, is going cause a lot of harm, and there word for that: Conditioning.
TL;DR: Basically the post contradicts a lot of research in behavioral sciences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
Fear isn’t a motivation towards something, it’s a motivation away from something. It’s not that it’s impossible to use fear productively, and Richard even touches on that.
It’s that constraining your response to fear to be only productive is fighting against entropy in the same way that pushing rope is fighting against entropy. Speaking of “fear of getting fired”, a friend of mine was in that boat recently, and while her fear did keep her from doing some things which would have gotten her fired, it also motivated her to refuse to look at the reality of the situation she was in—because that is an equally effective way of getting away from the experience of fear!
As a result, she wasn’t able to update her perspectives in the ways that would have been needed in order to keep the job, and so she lost that job. All of the things you list as potential good things that can come from fear are things that can come more fluidly from excitement. People who are friendly because they are afraid of what will happen if they aren’t friendly tend to come off more stilted and insecure than people who are just genuinely looking forward to seeing what they can create with you.
The response (motivation) from fear may vary. A direction is relative to the observer. We use different points of observation and agree on many things with Richard. I find his approach sometimes narrow, sometimes long and winded. The reduction to move away from fear towards something you are excited about is one dimensional. The outcome is predicitable and always optimal (implying success): It is quite anecdotical.
The example of your friend (hoping she is well) illustrates and supports that. Her response (I speculate here) to fear resulted in behavioral change. That caused anxiety, leading to denial (not being able to cope). Richard often refers to Fear (I prefer Anxiety) or Excitement in a very broad sense and quoting from Frank Herbert’s Dune makes it worse. Just sayin, maybe it is a LW thing since this is Frontpage material.
Still, I strongly disagree on »Fear-based« and I would recommend »Anxiety-based« instead. It reflects much better on the current state of humanity.
Curiosity or Stimulation is much closer to what Richard refers to as Excitement, as an disambiguation its fine, in this context it misled me. Your guidance did help.
Emotions can have classification, the impact and results vary. Moving away from Fear (and anxiety) towards (curiosity and) Excitement is very close to an optimal outcome. Studies in various disciplines confirm these facts since ages and we both agree that in an such environments interaction happens naturally (fluidly). Too often neglecting group dynamics, disregarding economic constraints or optimization for productivity in working environments. Other environments are prone to the tragedy of the commons.
Humoristic closing note: If we take into account, that Richard does AI alignment, a intersection of human-intelligence as model and machine-intelligence as model I could conclude that his model for machines is probably much more complex than that for humans. Based on my limited observations of him giving out advice on LW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulation