Once you know about affective death spirals, you can use them in tricky ways. Consider for example, that you got into an affective death spiral about capital “R” Rationality which caused you to start entertaining false delusions (like that teaching Rationality to your evil stepmother would finally make her love you, or whatever). If you know that this is an affective death spiral, you can do an “affective death spiral transfer” that helps you avoid the negative outcome without needing to go to war with your own positive feelings: in this case, realise that it’s incredibly awesome that Rationality is so cool that it can even help you correct an affective death spiral about itself. Of course, you have to be careful to become actually good at this (but you get Rationality points for realising this, and triple Rationality points for actually achieving it. Awesome!!!). You also get huge Rationality boosts for realising failure modes in your pursuit of Rationality in general (because that’s totally Rational too! See how that works?).
Affective death spirals are like anti-akrasia engines, so getting rid of them entirely might be substantially less advantageous than applying some clever munchkinry to them.
Once you know about affective death spirals, you can use them in tricky ways. Consider for example, that you got into an affective death spiral about capital “R” Rationality which caused you to start entertaining false delusions (like that teaching Rationality to your evil stepmother would finally make her love you, or whatever). If you know that this is an affective death spiral, you can do an “affective death spiral transfer” that helps you avoid the negative outcome without needing to go to war with your own positive feelings: in this case, realise that it’s incredibly awesome that Rationality is so cool that it can even help you correct an affective death spiral about itself. Of course, you have to be careful to become actually good at this (but you get Rationality points for realising this, and triple Rationality points for actually achieving it. Awesome!!!). You also get huge Rationality boosts for realising failure modes in your pursuit of Rationality in general (because that’s totally Rational too! See how that works?).
Affective death spirals are like anti-akrasia engines, so getting rid of them entirely might be substantially less advantageous than applying some clever munchkinry to them.