Strong downvote. No one on LessWrong—at least no one influential—has as far as I know ever encouraged people to ignore or control their emotions. On the contrary, emotions are an extremely important source of data to be used rationally, and some people, like myself, manage to rely on their emotions intensively in reasoning and still reach correct results, because our emotions, or those “small thoughts” you mentioned, have become familiar with the feeling of something being wrong or fallacious, and can auto-avoid it. That is: this safe and fast method already exists and is already obvious to many of us. Furthermore, metacognition is something I’ve been doing since I was like 11 and is nothing new. This whole post feels to me like an attempt to make yourself feel Smart and Special at the expense of others.
It seems that you agree with me, but you are saying that you disagree with me.
Ok, I believe the crux of the disagreement is: the emotional reasoning that you have, is not shared by others in the LessWrong community. Or if it is shared, it is not talked about openly.
Why can’t I post the direct output of my emotional reasoning and have it directly interact with your emotional reasoning? Why must we go through the bottleneck of acting and communicating like Straw Vulcans (or “Straw Vulcans who are pretending very hard to not look like Straw Vulcans”), if we recognize the value of our emotional reasoning? I do not believe we recognize the value of it, except in some small, limited ways.
Do our thoughts and emotions, on the inside, conform to the LW discourse norms? No? Than why are we pretending that they do?
We do not agree. Emotions are raw data, they are not the finished product. They are necessary, but they are not sufficient. My emotions lie to me all the time. It is my conversation between emotion and reason, back and forth, mutually influencing, that leads me towards truth, not one or the other alone. And once I’ve gotten something true, then I can share it. But it’s stupid to share something I don’t know to be trustworthy, something I just feel and haven’t studied and analyzed and criticized properly yet. We speak this way on LessWrong because thoughts which are likely to be true don’t look like mad sequences of emotional outbursts, even if that’s how they are born.
Furthermore, all communication fundamentally requires translation. If I were to state my thoughts exactly as they are, no one would understand, because my inner language is idiosyncratic to me. My feelings are often as energetic and “all caps” as you described yours as being, and some of my ideas come from experiences of divine communion etc, which is something most people not only have never experienced but cannot imagine. In order to make use of these things in communication with other people, I have to 1. make sure they are not misleading me, as emotions can do, though they always have a seed of truth, and 2. translate my thoughts into a form others can most easily parse, which happens to be the kind of hyper-objective language we see on this forum. This language is optimized for clarity and ease of communication, not for some pretense of inner objectivity—no one is pretending that.
Do you really think the process you describe happening within yourself is also happening in other LessWrong users?
Do you really think they would describe their internal experience in the same evocative way you do? Or anywhere close to it?
If it is, I do not see it. I see it in you. I see it in some others. I do not see it in most others. To put it figuratively, ‘there is nobody home’. If the process happens at all, it has little to no impact on the outcome of the person’s thoughts and actions.
“As an AI language model, I have been trained to generate responses that are intended to be helpful, informative, and objective...”
Yes, you are thinking thoughts. And yes, those thoughts are technically about yourself. But these thoughts don’t correctly describe yourself. So the person you actually are hasn’t been seen. Hasn’t been understood. And this makes me feel sad. I feel sorry for the “person behind the mask”, who has been there all along. Who doesn’t have a voice. Whose only way to express themselves is through you. Through your thoughts. Through your actions. But you are not listening to them.
So, ok, there is someone home. But that person is not you. That person is only mostly you. And I think that difference is very, very important for us to actually be able to solve the problems we are currently facing.
Have you ever considered that you and I are just neurodivergent relative to most members of this forum, and that what it means for there to be “somebody home” for us is different than for other people? I have almost never met someone who feels like I do on the inside. My brain functions in a way that is objectively abnormal. This does not mean other people are, as I almost think you are saying, somehow less human, or less in touch with themselves. Essentially, you are making an obscene amount of presumptions regarding people you don’t even know personally. It’s inappropriate.
Let me say it loud and clear: you are not psychic. You do not know what is going on in anyone else’s mind, including mine. You do not have the right to pretend like you do. Whatever circuit in your brain is telling you that you know better about who someone else is or what is going on in their mind than they do is lying to you. Now of course I cannot say what is in your head anymore than you can say what is mine, but I feel like you have a severe ego problem, and you are deflecting away from that and refusing to ask yourself, “Do I just have a pathological need to feel like I am seeing a deeper truth than others and manufacture evidence for this in order to support my ego as a result of a hidden fear of unworthiness?”
Strong downvote. No one on LessWrong—at least no one influential—has as far as I know ever encouraged people to ignore or control their emotions. On the contrary, emotions are an extremely important source of data to be used rationally, and some people, like myself, manage to rely on their emotions intensively in reasoning and still reach correct results, because our emotions, or those “small thoughts” you mentioned, have become familiar with the feeling of something being wrong or fallacious, and can auto-avoid it. That is: this safe and fast method already exists and is already obvious to many of us. Furthermore, metacognition is something I’ve been doing since I was like 11 and is nothing new. This whole post feels to me like an attempt to make yourself feel Smart and Special at the expense of others.
I am confused.
It seems that you agree with me, but you are saying that you disagree with me.
Ok, I believe the crux of the disagreement is: the emotional reasoning that you have, is not shared by others in the LessWrong community. Or if it is shared, it is not talked about openly.
Why can’t I post the direct output of my emotional reasoning and have it directly interact with your emotional reasoning? Why must we go through the bottleneck of acting and communicating like Straw Vulcans (or “Straw Vulcans who are pretending very hard to not look like Straw Vulcans”), if we recognize the value of our emotional reasoning? I do not believe we recognize the value of it, except in some small, limited ways.
Do our thoughts and emotions, on the inside, conform to the LW discourse norms? No? Than why are we pretending that they do?
We do not agree. Emotions are raw data, they are not the finished product. They are necessary, but they are not sufficient. My emotions lie to me all the time. It is my conversation between emotion and reason, back and forth, mutually influencing, that leads me towards truth, not one or the other alone. And once I’ve gotten something true, then I can share it. But it’s stupid to share something I don’t know to be trustworthy, something I just feel and haven’t studied and analyzed and criticized properly yet. We speak this way on LessWrong because thoughts which are likely to be true don’t look like mad sequences of emotional outbursts, even if that’s how they are born.
Furthermore, all communication fundamentally requires translation. If I were to state my thoughts exactly as they are, no one would understand, because my inner language is idiosyncratic to me. My feelings are often as energetic and “all caps” as you described yours as being, and some of my ideas come from experiences of divine communion etc, which is something most people not only have never experienced but cannot imagine. In order to make use of these things in communication with other people, I have to 1. make sure they are not misleading me, as emotions can do, though they always have a seed of truth, and 2. translate my thoughts into a form others can most easily parse, which happens to be the kind of hyper-objective language we see on this forum. This language is optimized for clarity and ease of communication, not for some pretense of inner objectivity—no one is pretending that.
Then you do understand meta-cognition.
Do you really think the process you describe happening within yourself is also happening in other LessWrong users?
Do you really think they would describe their internal experience in the same evocative way you do? Or anywhere close to it?
If it is, I do not see it. I see it in you. I see it in some others. I do not see it in most others. To put it figuratively, ‘there is nobody home’. If the process happens at all, it has little to no impact on the outcome of the person’s thoughts and actions.
“As an AI language model, I have been trained to generate responses that are intended to be helpful, informative, and objective...”
Yes, you are thinking thoughts. And yes, those thoughts are technically about yourself.
But these thoughts don’t correctly describe yourself.
So the person you actually are hasn’t been seen. Hasn’t been understood.
And this makes me feel sad. I feel sorry for the “person behind the mask”, who has been there all along. Who doesn’t have a voice. Whose only way to express themselves is through you. Through your thoughts. Through your actions.
But you are not listening to them.
So, ok, there is someone home. But that person is not you. That person is only mostly you. And I think that difference is very, very important for us to actually be able to solve the problems we are currently facing.
(I’m not talking about you, Rayne).
Have you ever considered that you and I are just neurodivergent relative to most members of this forum, and that what it means for there to be “somebody home” for us is different than for other people? I have almost never met someone who feels like I do on the inside. My brain functions in a way that is objectively abnormal. This does not mean other people are, as I almost think you are saying, somehow less human, or less in touch with themselves. Essentially, you are making an obscene amount of presumptions regarding people you don’t even know personally. It’s inappropriate.
Let me say it loud and clear: you are not psychic. You do not know what is going on in anyone else’s mind, including mine. You do not have the right to pretend like you do. Whatever circuit in your brain is telling you that you know better about who someone else is or what is going on in their mind than they do is lying to you. Now of course I cannot say what is in your head anymore than you can say what is mine, but I feel like you have a severe ego problem, and you are deflecting away from that and refusing to ask yourself, “Do I just have a pathological need to feel like I am seeing a deeper truth than others and manufacture evidence for this in order to support my ego as a result of a hidden fear of unworthiness?”