[SEQ RERUN] Resist the Happy Death Spiral
Today’s post, Resist the Happy Death Spiral was originally published on 04 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
You can avoid a Happy Death Spiral by (1) splitting the Great Idea into parts (2) treating every additional detail as burdensome (3) thinking about the specifics of the causal chain instead of the good or bad feelings (4) not rehearsing evidence (5) not adding happiness from claims that “you can’t prove are wrong”; but not by (6) refusing to admire anything too much (7) conducting a biased search for negative points until you feel unhappy again (8) forcibly shoving an idea into a safe box.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Affective Death Spirals, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
An important point to me about “happy death spiral” is group effect : you join a group (be it a company for work, a political movement or even Less Wrong) and you start giving signals showing you belong to the group, agreeing with the thesis of the group, being exposed to more of the group rhetoric, …
To counter that effect, I found that most useful thing to do is not to stay alone and refuse joining any group, which is anyway very hard to do, but to be part of different groups, who have different outlooks and sometimes contradictory outlooks on things, so you can sort out ideas on your own, and avoid falling completely to one attractor.