Informal poll to ensure I’m not generalizing from one example:
How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can’t remember why)?
It seems like this is a cognitive shortcut, giving us access only to the “answer” that’s already been computed (how to act vis-a-vis steve) instead of wasting energy and working memory re-accessing all the data and re-performing the calculation.
I don’t do this on LessWrong, but that may be because I don’t care enough about LW, and the stakes are too low.
On Wikipedia, though, there are at least 10 editors who, when I see their name come up on my watchlist, I briefly freeze up with a combination of fear, disgust, and anger.
Fewer deletions. On Wikipedia, I have to fight tooth and nail for some things just to remain (and I often fail; I’m still a little bitter about the off-handed deletion of the Man-Faye article a few days ago); on LW, deletion of stuff is so rare that it’s a major event when Eliezer deletes an article.
How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can’t remember why)?
I do this constantly. In fact, I do it a lot right here on LW—in reading comment threads, I see a comment by a certain user and have either a positive or negative reaction to the username, based on previous comments of theirs I’ve read, despite having no recollection of what those comments actually were
I’m not quite sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Yes—and I agree that it’s probably a cognitive shortcut, because it’s also something that happens with purely conceptual ideas. I’ll forget the definition of a word, but remember whether it’s basically a positive or negative notion. Yay/Boo is surprisingly efficient shorthand for describing anything.
I would say that most people I know easily fit this heuristic, but I almost never employ it, based on the way I remember people. When I have been in a conflict with someone, I can recall a categorized list of every thing I dislike about them, and a few fights we have had quite easily, and vice versa for people I like. What this means essentially is… I have a very hard time remaining angry / happy with people, because it requires constant use of resources, and it also seems to effect my ability to remember meeting people at all. Since I store memories of other people using events instead of descriptions if I have never had a particularly eventful interaction with someone, remembering their names or any other info is almost impossible.
Occasional but rare. I have more of a problem where I have some feeling some reason and then find out I was wrong about that reason and then need to make effort to adjust my feelings to fit the data. But I generally remember the cause for my feelings. The only exception is that occasionally I’ll vaguely remember that some approach to a problem doesn’t work at all but won’t remember why (it generally turns out that I spent a few days at some point in the past trying to use that method to solve something and got negative results showing that the method wasn’t very useful.)
There is a reason for it. Current thinking is that memories of events are retrieved by a process in the hippocampus (until the memories become substantially re-consolidated). Memories of strong emotional experiences are also retrieved by a process in the amygdala. They are not memories of events but just a link between the emotion and the object that caused it. In recent memories these are usually connected—If the amygdala retreives it prompts the hippocampus to do so also—if the hippocampus does the retreiving it triggers the amygdala. But the two processes can be disconnected for a particular memory pair. You see X and feel the memory of fear or anger but not the episodic memory of when and where you felt that emotion towards X. The amygdala retrieves but the hippocampus fails to.
Yes, absolutely. Well, “hate” is too strong a word, but certainly it’s hard to explain to other people: “I have a mental black mark against Steve’s name, though I can’t tell you why”...
Generally I only remember the cause of my dispositions if I feel it’s important in itself. In the case of something like political beliefs I have a commitment to throwing out anything I can’t justify through verbal reasoning and reference to fundamental values. With likes and dislikes—from those fundamental values to flavors of ice cream—I don’t consider the path that got me there particularly important.
Sometimes I need the justification for ulterior or social reasons. It doesn’t particularly matter to me why I like the people I happen to like, but I try to examine them at least enough that I can give them substantive compliments when appropriate, even if this examination doesn’t come naturally to me. Cynically, most “debate topics” are like this—you need the justificatory reasoning in order to engage in cocktail conversations.
How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can’t remember why)?
Informal poll to ensure I’m not generalizing from one example:
How frequently do you find yourself able to remember how you feel about something, but unable to remember what produced the feeling in the first place (ie: you remember you hate steve but can’t remember why)?
It seems like this is a cognitive shortcut, giving us access only to the “answer” that’s already been computed (how to act vis-a-vis steve) instead of wasting energy and working memory re-accessing all the data and re-performing the calculation.
I don’t do this on LessWrong, but that may be because I don’t care enough about LW, and the stakes are too low.
On Wikipedia, though, there are at least 10 editors who, when I see their name come up on my watchlist, I briefly freeze up with a combination of fear, disgust, and anger.
Just curious: why do you consider LW to be lower stakes than wikipedia?
Fewer deletions. On Wikipedia, I have to fight tooth and nail for some things just to remain (and I often fail; I’m still a little bitter about the off-handed deletion of the Man-Faye article a few days ago); on LW, deletion of stuff is so rare that it’s a major event when Eliezer deletes an article.
I do this constantly. In fact, I do it a lot right here on LW—in reading comment threads, I see a comment by a certain user and have either a positive or negative reaction to the username, based on previous comments of theirs I’ve read, despite having no recollection of what those comments actually were
I’m not quite sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Yes—and I agree that it’s probably a cognitive shortcut, because it’s also something that happens with purely conceptual ideas. I’ll forget the definition of a word, but remember whether it’s basically a positive or negative notion. Yay/Boo is surprisingly efficient shorthand for describing anything.
I would say that most people I know easily fit this heuristic, but I almost never employ it, based on the way I remember people. When I have been in a conflict with someone, I can recall a categorized list of every thing I dislike about them, and a few fights we have had quite easily, and vice versa for people I like. What this means essentially is… I have a very hard time remaining angry / happy with people, because it requires constant use of resources, and it also seems to effect my ability to remember meeting people at all. Since I store memories of other people using events instead of descriptions if I have never had a particularly eventful interaction with someone, remembering their names or any other info is almost impossible.
Occasional but rare. I have more of a problem where I have some feeling some reason and then find out I was wrong about that reason and then need to make effort to adjust my feelings to fit the data. But I generally remember the cause for my feelings. The only exception is that occasionally I’ll vaguely remember that some approach to a problem doesn’t work at all but won’t remember why (it generally turns out that I spent a few days at some point in the past trying to use that method to solve something and got negative results showing that the method wasn’t very useful.)
This has happened to me but not often.
There is a reason for it. Current thinking is that memories of events are retrieved by a process in the hippocampus (until the memories become substantially re-consolidated). Memories of strong emotional experiences are also retrieved by a process in the amygdala. They are not memories of events but just a link between the emotion and the object that caused it. In recent memories these are usually connected—If the amygdala retreives it prompts the hippocampus to do so also—if the hippocampus does the retreiving it triggers the amygdala. But the two processes can be disconnected for a particular memory pair. You see X and feel the memory of fear or anger but not the episodic memory of when and where you felt that emotion towards X. The amygdala retrieves but the hippocampus fails to.
Thanks—I appreciate the explanation.
Yes, absolutely. Well, “hate” is too strong a word, but certainly it’s hard to explain to other people: “I have a mental black mark against Steve’s name, though I can’t tell you why”...
All the time.
Generally I only remember the cause of my dispositions if I feel it’s important in itself. In the case of something like political beliefs I have a commitment to throwing out anything I can’t justify through verbal reasoning and reference to fundamental values. With likes and dislikes—from those fundamental values to flavors of ice cream—I don’t consider the path that got me there particularly important.
Sometimes I need the justification for ulterior or social reasons. It doesn’t particularly matter to me why I like the people I happen to like, but I try to examine them at least enough that I can give them substantive compliments when appropriate, even if this examination doesn’t come naturally to me. Cynically, most “debate topics” are like this—you need the justificatory reasoning in order to engage in cocktail conversations.
Extremely rare, but I suspect I’m in the same boat as wedrifid in that I seem to have above-average memory.
Never. But I’m not typical.