As I understand it, positive emotions and logic/reasoning are strongly lateralized, both are centered largely in the left frontal lobe. If the same region is being stimulated, perhaps the effect stimulates positive emotions. For me, philosophical reverie seems to be accompanied by a mild buzz.
knb
Since you brought up Dawkins, I think teaching about Memetics would be very useful in raising the “sanity waterline”. Learning about Memetics really forces you to analyze your beliefs for selfish replicator ideas.
In addition, it challenges the view that consensus is an impregnable defense for believing bizarre things. You are put in the position of actually having to try to cite evidence for why you believe things. Of course even that doesn’t work very often, since most people have very strong ideological immune systems that protect their beliefs. But asking those questions, and trying to justify your beliefs is a necessary first step.
You are describing old clinical psychology. Its gotten so much better. Rorschach tests are now only a very marginal measure within psychoanalytic psychology. Psychoanalytic/pscyhodynamic psychologists are themselves outcasts from mainstream clinical psychology, which is increasingly centered around evidence-based practice. For example, behaviorists are using systematic desensitization in novel and effective ways (for treating things like panic disorder), and cognitive-behavioral therapy is quite effective in treating depression: significantly more so than antidepressants.
The important thing to remember is that patients often get the treatment they want. If you’re a self-absorbed neurotic, and you want to spend an hour a week for years talking about yourself, you can find someone who will take your money. If you want effective treatment, you can find that too. Most patients don’t want to get better, they want to feel like they are doing something, and especially they want to talk about themselves.
Hmmm. Unless you are suggesting a different definition for rationality, I think I disagree. If an atheist has the goal of gaining business contacts (or something) and he can further this goal by joining a church, and impersonating the irrational behaviors he sees, he isn’t being irrational. While behaviors that tend to have their origins in irrational thought are sometimes rewarded by human society, the irrationality itself never is. I think becoming more rational will help a person move up in a human status hierarchy, if that is the rationalist’s goal. I think we have this stereotyped idea of rationalists as Asperger’s-afflicted know-it-alls who are unable to deal with irrational humans. It simply doesn’t have to be that way.
I was very interested to read your views on why humans choke. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to a question posed by a professor. What I came up with at the time was that choking is caused by sympathetic fight or flight response (adaptive in less cognitively complex organisms but not in our human world where finesse is necessary). In other words, I was suggesting it is a misfire that is so deeply rooted in our mental architecture we haven’t managed to evolve out of it yet. Also, I wonder, are there examples of non-human animals “choking”?
Edit: I meant “choking” in the sense of failing during high pressure situations. I was referring to Robin Hanson’s second link ( to an OB post). Sorry for any confusion.
IQ is well correlated with job performance, so if you think the potential employer cares mainly about future performance (and knows what he or she is doing) include your IQ and that it qualifies you for Mensa. However, I suppose that most people who review applications would see a reference to IQ/Mensa membership as a downside. Mensans manage to be seen as both elitist and low status at the same time. They are usually smart people (mostly smart men actually) who have lower status jobs, so I doubt they would be very useful professional connections.
As to whether joining Mensa might have intrinsic value to you, I don’t know. I think they mainly trade puzzles with each other.
I resolve to not erase any memories. I want to never have to face the dilemma of wondering if something happened in my past that I had redacted. The only way to protect myself from this possible stressful situation is to believe I am not the kind of person who would ever tamper with my memories. (The “Golden Age” novels have a good depiction of the possible problems associated with discovering that you are the kind of person who has his/her memories redacted.)
Maybe I’m reaching here, but there also seems to be a parallel between the process of resolving to one-box in Newcomb’s problem and that of resolving to not redact in an Eternal Sunshine scenario. It is the act of resolving, of making oneself the kind of person who one-boxes, or non-redacts, that generates the benefits, not taking the one box or actually refusing to redact memories.
Right, but the kind of memories people would redact are specifically things they can’t forget. Presumably these are very important things, which might have practical implications on my life.
I wouldn’t know. In a world with this technology no one can ever know that they don’t have some or maybe a great many erased memories. The only defense against this uncertainty is a self-binding constraint placed voluntarily on myself.
Of course this is a limited defense, but short of a binding legal contract, its the best I can do.
In the case of Hubbard, preaching irrationality and being irrational is different. Hubbard went genuinely crazy in his later years, but when he knew what he was doing when he invented Scientology. He even said in an interview once “I’m tired of writing for a penny a page. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, he would invent a religion.”
″ It pays to be ONE step ahead of the mob, not 10! You cannot make money in the stock market by being 10 steps ahead. You’d be shorting stocks into oblivious in the 90′s and 2006-2007, while the mob was getting more and mroe exuberant.”
It is NOT rational to think that people are smarter than they are. If you really are better at predicting where stocks are going, factoring other peoples irrationality in is part of the game.
“As most readers will know by now, if you’re donating to a charity, it doesn’t make sense to spread your donations across several charities. You’ll want to pick the charity where your money does the most good, and then donate as much as possible to that one.”
This is not necessarily true. For some charities, the marginal utility is very high up to, say, the first $10 million. After that point, returns on each dollar donated might start to rapidly decline.
Admittedly this is mainly a problem for larger donors, though.
Well presumably most people don’t actually risk their lives for the cause. They risk their lives for the prestige, power, money, or whatever. Fighting in a war is a good (but risky) way to gain respect and influence. Also there are social costs to avoiding the fight.
“And if you generalize a bit further, then building the Art could also be taken to include issues like developing better introductory literature, developing better slogans for public relations, establishing common cause with other Enlightenment subtasks, analyzing and addressing the gender imbalance problem...”
The issue of racial imbalance on Less Wrong has gotten considerably less attention than gender imbalance. Is this because race is largely socially constructed, and thus not considered a meaningful division? Or is the issue of racial imbalance in this community simply too sensitive to touch?
Wow. I wonder why this comment was voted down, yet generated so many comments. Is it considered off-topic?
I certainly wasn’t generating a dichotomy. I was merely offering two suggestions. I never said that I was certain that it was one of those two.
Yes I was referring to the Facebook group. I suppose its possible that the racial division is actually in the Facebook group and not in Less Wrong.
First off, if westerners abandoned their western lifestyles, humanity would be sunk: next to the collapse of aggregate demand that would ensue, our present economic problems would look very mild.
Interesting. I’m not certain, but I think this isn’t quite right. In theory, the westerners would just be sending their money to desperately poor people, so aggregate demand wouldn’t necessarily decline, it would move around. Consumption really doesn’t create wealth. Of course rational utilitarian westerners would recognize the transfer costs and also wouldn’t completely neglect their own happiness.
All that said, I’d be really interested in reading a post by you on rationalist but non-utilitarian ethics. It seems to me that support for utilitarianism on this site is almost as strong as support for cryonics.
Unless you believe in objective morality, then a policy of utilitarianism, pure selfishness, or pure altruism all may be instrumentally rational, depending on your terminal values.
If you have no regard for yourself then pursue pure altruism. Leave yourself just enough that you can keep producing more wealth for others. Study Mother Teresa.
If you have no regard for others, then a policy of selfishness is for you. Carefully plan to maximize your total future well-being. Leave just enough for others that you aren’t outed as a sociopath. Study Anton LaVey.
If you have equal regard for the happiness of yourself and others, pursue utilitarianism. Study Rawls or John Stuart Mill.
Most people aren’t really any of the above. I, like most people, am somewhere between LaVey and Mill. Of course defending utilitarianism sounds better than justifying egoism, so we get more of that.
How do you choose your terminal values?
Short answer? We don’t. Not really. Human beings have an evolved moral instinct. These evolutionary moral inclinations lead to us assigning a high value to human life and well-being. The closest internally coherent seeming ethical structure seems to be utilitarianism. (It sounds bad for a rationalist to admit “I value all human life equally, except I value myself and my children somewhat more.”)
But we are not really utilitarians. Our mental architecture doesn’t allow most of us to really treat every stranger on earth as though they are as valuable as ourselves or our own children.
Presumably this is because allocation of capital drastically augments the labor that people do. (investing in a farm allows a farmer to replace his hand-plow with a tractor, drastically increasing output). I learned Intro. Econ from Greg Mankiw’s textbook “Principles of Economics” and I was very impressed by his reasoning.
If this wasn’t a sincere question then I apologize: my ability to read sarcasm is limited.