Hello, I’m a 21 year old undergraduate student studying Economics and a bit of math on the side. I found LessWrong through HPMOR, and recently started working on the sequences. I’ve always been torn between an interest in pure rational thinking, and an almost purely emotional / empathetic desire for altruism, and this conflict is becoming more and more significant as I weigh options moving forward out of Undergrad (Peace Corp? Developmental Economics?)… I’m fond of ellipses, Science Fiction novels and board games—I’ll keep my interests to a minimum here, but I’ve noticed there are meetups regularly; I’m currently studying abroad in Europe, but I live close to Washington DC and would enjoy meeting members of the community face to face at some point in the future!
Edit: If anyone reads this, could you either direct me to a conversation that addresses the question “How has LW / rational thinking influenced your day to day life, if at all,” or respond to me directly here (or via PM) if you’re comfortable with that! Thanks!
Do you have any sources that suggest that emotional reactions (such as ease of incitement to anger) are significantly different from individual to individual? I feel it more likely to be the case that you are still using the correspondence bias when you say that you’ll kick the vending machine when “the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row”—these circumstances have provoked a emotion in you that you identify as anger. When you see a third party kicking a vending machine, attributing his action (kicking the machine) to a fundamental trait (“the man has an angry personality”) is an example of the correspondence bias. People are less likely to think “that guy is having a bad day and the machine swallowed his last dollar” than “he is an angry person” because we attribute actions to personality traits in other people. You might be overvaluing genetics here.
I think that the correspondence bias is also displayed when we look at different countries or cultures. For example, traveling in Spain, one might think that Spaniards are warm loving people, because they make an effort to talk to tourists and communicate with them. Compare this to those who live in New York City, which has a reputation for curt, impolite citizens (probably because traffic is bad in the city, and everyone is trying to get to work ducking and weaving in between mobs of tourists who just get in the way—visitors to the city fall victim to the correspondence bias when thinking “New Yorkers are rude!”).