That’s not really a preference. A preference is, “I like strawberry ice cream better than vanilla”. I experience more utility from strawberry than vanilla, but this doesn’t make me feel bad if there’s only vanilla.
If I am forced to eat vanilla ice cream, it will not ruin my week. It will not even make me upset; it’s not like the term in my utility function for vanilla ice cream is negative. I prefer vanilla ice cream to nothing at all. I will, however, be generally happier if I eat chocolate ice cream than vanilla. I like it more. If I genuinely was as happy while/after eating vanilla ice cream as I am while/after eating chocolate, saying I had a “preference” in either direction would be meaningless.
my internal stream of consciousness may register the statement, “That is not acceptable. What should I do to try to improve the situation of the people in that country?” That is a negative “feeling”
No, that’s a statement. How you choose to feel about that statement is a separate event.
That statement never would have shown up in my stream of consciousness without some emotion causing it to appear. A person who genuinely does not have positive or negative emotions about a topic is extremely unlikely to use the term “not acceptable”. That statement was motivated by a feeling. In my case, if I hear about crimes against humanity, the immediate response is actually a small flash of anger towards the ruler, and sympathetic pain with regards to the population. Those feelings sparks the thought, “what can I do?”, and I think that’s how it should be.
That is, “people are suffering, I want to help them”, not “that’s unacceptable and bad.”
That statement, “people are suffering, I want to help” is sparked by sympathetic pain. If they didn’t feel any pain on behalf of others, that motivation to help wouldn’t have ever popped into their heads.
From my observation of some philanthropists I know, they do not appear to be feeling bad about people suffering in Africa; they instead feel good about being able to do something.
I hope I never get to the point where I think the statement, “Oh boy, people are hurting! What an exciting opportunity for me to do something that I find to be pleasurable!”
I don’t believe that’s how philanthropists typically think. I’m involved in biological research, trying to find cures and treatments for diseases. I enjoy that. The research is interesting, the people are fun to interact with, and I’m helping to increase the lifespans, happiness, and health of a lot of people. My motivations are twofold. There is the hedonic aspect; I like my job. There is also a moral motivation. I feel sympathetic pain when I see someone with Alzheimer’s, or cancer, or any other disease, and I feel sympathetic joy when those people get better. Now, if Omega were to drop down from the sky and offer me a cure for Alzheimer’s for $50, if my primary motivation was that I enjoyed the work of helping people, I wouldn’t pay. If I pay for it, I don’t get to do the work. However, what I enjoy more is actually people getting help. I fork over the cash immediately.
So, when somebody protests that they’ll become immoral if they don’t feel bad about something, my general impression is that the signaling part of their brain is currently running the show
Most people that say that probably are just trying to appear moral. I don’t condone moping around and enjoying the fact that you’re so emotional about the plight of the poor indigenous people, etc. But that little twinge of sympathetic pain you get when you hear about some tinpot dictator torturing his people is not something I’m particularly eager to remove from human brains. You’re right, feeling upset by an immoral situation isn’t doing anything, but that upsetness is what motivates us to do something.
Zen doesn’t have any objection to momentary twinges, so long as they don’t interfere with anything practical. (See, e.g., the story of the two monks whose punchline is “Are you still carrying her?”)
I think that Asimov’s “never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right” is a very Zen saying. ;-)
I hope I never get to the point where I think the statement, “Oh boy, people are hurting! What an exciting opportunity for me to do something that I find to be pleasurable!”
Come on now. Do you want to tell me that writing that sentence didn’t just give you an enjoyable feeling of righteous indignation?
See, there are many kinds of “feeling good” besides “pleasure”. Love and compassion feel good… and so too, unfortunately, does righteous indignation.
However, not all kinds of feeling good motivate the same kinds of actions—each comes with its own bias as to what type of actions are selected. Indignation and love, obviously, motivate different sorts of actions, despite both feeling good!
Notice, btw, that I’m speaking here of what actions are motivated by having the feeling, which is a different thing than the motivation to obtain the feeling. The pleasure of having ice cream is not the same as having a desire to get some.
This is because humans are not utility maximizers; we’re more like time-averaged satisficers. Desire arises when our time-averaged measurement of some physical or virtual property (like “blood sugar level” or “amount of interesting stuff to do”) drops below some reference point, and we then take action to restore that property to a perceived-safe or optimal level.
This is why trying to discuss humans behavior in terms of “utility” is a complete waste of time if you want to understand what’s actually going to happen when you self-modify.
At a fundamental level, we are not utility maximizers, even though we can certainly entertain the belief that we desire to be utility maximizers, or participate in competitive or co-operative frameworks that collectively aim towards maximizing something (e.g. corporations).
There is the hedonic aspect; I like my job. There is also a moral motivation.
Yeah… this is where we need to sort out the signaling.
See, here’s what I said:
From my observation of some philanthropists I know, they do not appear to be feeling bad about people suffering in Africa; they instead feel good about being able to do something.
You then basically said this is terrible, and that you have “moral” motivation instead. But then, you go on to say:
However, what I enjoy more is actually people getting help.
Uh, so how is that not feeling good “about being able to do something”?
You’re right, feeling upset by an immoral situation isn’t doing anything, but that upsetness is what motivates us to do something.
Really? Let’s test that, shall we.
Which of the following more closely matches your experience every day:
“Man, the world is full of diseased people. I feel awful. Better get to work right away...”
“Man, I’m glad I can make a difference. Let’s get to work!”
It’s really easy to test my hypothesis: different emotions bias people towards different types of action. (Actually, I’d guess that if you put it that broadly, there’s probably already plenty of research to support it.)
More specifically, though, my thesis is that most emotions we describe as “negative” do not support any sort of sustained activity over time, in the absence of a visceral, immediate threat. They especially don’t support creative or imaginative thinking, or indeed any sort of clear, non-rote thinking at all. (Also fairly-well documented.)
IOW, negative emotions bias towards short-term, rote and reactive behaviors, which make them far less useful for actually changing anything. They’re designed for emergency responses, not ambitious campaigns of action.
Sure, negative emotions can motivate us to “do something”… the problem is, it’s the sort of motivation that leads to the syllogism:
We must do something!
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
In other words, a short-term emergency response.
None of the philanthropists I know seem to view their activities as an emergency, and they take thoughtful and considered long-term actions. When they speak, they don’t seem to me to be experiencing any negative emotion. They say, “These people don’t have water. We can help them. Let’s do this!”
Now, there is one category of negative emotion that appears to produce motivation, and that’d be the category that contains moral signaling emotions, such as righteous indignation, disgust, disapproval, etc.
People under the influence of these emotions often appear to be “doing something”, but that “something” is usually something like protesting, “raising awareness”, or engaging in other “X is not about Y” activities.
That’s because these emotions bias us towards activities of protest and punishment. And, as I mentioned in the “offense” thread recently, such protest and punishment actions usually don’t accomplish anything, while making us feel like we’re accomplishing something… thus leading to a perverse form of covert procrastination.
(Like spending a lot of time being mad about having to take out the trash, instead of just taking the trash out already so you don’t have to think about it any more!)
For this reason, my most recent major change in mind-hacking heuristics is to look for a pattern of moral disapproval of something...
And then have the subject get rid of it.
Because when we’re under the influence of those “moral” feelings, our brains seem blocked from thinking about how to solve the actual problem, vs. just protesting it in some way, and maybe trying to get other people to do something about it!
Which means that Asimov really was right after all.
Because, as it turns out, our feelings of moral disapproval—our “sense of morals”, if you will—really does prevent us from doing what is right.
And that’s why you’re wrong about upset being motivating. The feeling of disapproval (“this is unacceptable”) is distinct from the feeling of sympathy or compassion evoked by someone else’s suffering, and each feeling will motivate you to do different things, over different time periods.
P.S. One secondary effect of moral feelings that I’ve noticed, is that they motivate us to speak out in favor of keeping the morals that generate them. Which makes sense if you think about tribal politics: anybody who suggests that maybe we shouldn’t get so upset about people pissing in the river is probably pissing in the river him/herself, and so should be publicly disapproved of—i.e., punish the advocate of non-punishing.
This happens with me too, with every stupid “moral” injunction I remove: my first emotional response is to protest that if I, say, stop disapproving of people who aren’t sufficiently perfectionistic, then somehow society will collapse and the world will be in chaos.
While that might’ve been the case in our ancestral environment, the truth in today’s world is that the only thing affected by me stopping my disapproval is that I’ll be nicer to people who weren’t going to change because of my disapproval anyway. ;-)
So… I suggest you consider whether your reaction to what the Buddhists said, and what I’m saying, is simply a protest from that part of your brain that motivates the maintenance of moral rules, whether or not there’s any real consequences for changing the rules.
In the modern world, where few of us hold any real punishment powers over most of the people we encounter, moral disapproval is by and large a maladaptive response.
I’m replying to a small part of a post which generally seems reasonable.
“This is unacceptable!” strikes me as a useful motivator for well-defined, achievable territorial defense. If I have a splinter in my foot, seeing it as unacceptable strikes me as part of the motivation for removing the splinter. I need to have enough calm mixed in to make sure I have good lighting, an appropriate tool, and the patience to make sure I get all of the splinter out, but I’m also served by having enough impatience that I’m not willing to put up with continuing to have any fraction of the splinter still in my foot.
The emotional state when I insisted that someone get his car out of a flea market space I’d rented doesn’t seem all that different. His car in that location wasn’t acceptable. I wasn’t planning on a crusade to get all inappropriately parked cars moved at that flea market, or at all flea markets.
Of course, it gets more complicated when there’s a large social issue really involved. Afaik, abolitionism really did work in Britain because a great many people thought slavery was unacceptable. The process took about a century.
And I’ve spent a lot of time on unproductive outrage, so I’m not saying you’re completely wrong, but either the question is more complex than you say, or there’s more than one flavor of “That’s unacceptable!”.
“This is unacceptable!” strikes me as a useful motivator for well-defined, achievable territorial defense.
Sure. That’s certainly what it’s arguably “for”, from an evolutionary point of view.
If I have a splinter in my foot, seeing it as unacceptable strikes me as part of the motivation for removing the splinter.
Do you see it as morally unacceptable? I expect that you are describing a different emotion here.
either the question is more complex than you say, or there’s more than one flavor of “That’s unacceptable!”
Both, actually. In the first place, the catch is that for moral outrage to be useful, you have to have enough people who share the same outrage, or at least have powerful people who share it.
And, on the second front, there are certainly many emotions that people might say, “that’s unacceptable” to, including situations with no emotional content at all. (e.g. “the terms you’re offering me to buy my house are unacceptable, because they won’t fulfill my goals”, vs. “that offer is unacceptable—how dare you insult me with such a low price”.)
In the present context, I took the original poster’s “unacceptable” to be about a feeling of moral judgment based on the other things they said around that statement.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of. I have very little temper most of the time—it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
Oddly enough, caffeine makes me more outraged/arrogant/grandiose/easily offended. I’ve had some very weird experiences with high doses of caffeine—it’s like being possessed by the Red Queen. The crippling fury of believing I’m superior to everyone around me and the mortals won’t recognize my dominion! Off with their heads! I don’t consume those quantities of caffeine anymore, since I figured out the bizarre effect it has on me. Of course, if I ever need to psych myself up for a confrontation, I can use caffeine as a handy chemical aid.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of.
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.)
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage?
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.”
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
I don’t think I’d have been as definite to the guy with his car in my flea market space if I didn’t think he was in the wrong. If it had been a minor loss to me and seemed like an honest mistake on his part, I might have let him have the space.
On the other hand, I think I felt more stubborn and determined than outraged, so it might not be the sort of thing you’re talking about. And I got what I wanted, and didn’t feel a huge need to talk about it afterwards, as I recall. (The felt need to keep talking about relatively minor offenses might be a topic worth pursuing.)
“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
Would you take a crack at the matter of political action? Suppose that the government decides that reviving frozen people is impossible, cryonics is based on fraud, and therefore freezing people is illegal. How could political action be taken without encouraging a sense of outrage?
“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
Well, they’re certainly different statements, and I can imagine people with either emotion saying either, so again it’s not about the words.
And I got what I wanted, and didn’t feel a huge need to talk about it afterwards, as I recall. (The felt need to keep talking about relatively minor offenses might be a topic worth pursuing.)
Yes, as I discuss in some of my courses, when you find yourself going over a situation over and over again, it’s an indication that you think something “shouldn’t have happened”, when in fact it DID happen… which is definitely a symptom of the category of emotion I’m talking about, as well as a failure of rationality. (i.e., arguing about what “should have” happened is not productive, vs. actually thinking about how you’d like things to happen in the future… After all, we can’t change the past.)
Would you take a crack at the matter of political action? Suppose that the government decides that reviving frozen people is impossible, cryonics is based on fraud, and therefore freezing people is illegal. How could political action be taken without encouraging a sense of outrage?
I’m not saying you can’t use outrage as a tactic. I’m just saying that having outrage be an automatic response to almost anything is a terribly bad idea. In programming terms, we’d call it a “code smell”… that is, something you should be suspicious of.
Some people might say, “ok, I’ll just be suspicious when I’m feeling outraged, and be extra careful”, except it just doesn’t work that way.
Because, when you’re already outraged, you feel certain that things shouldn’t have happened that way, and that you’re in the right, and that Someone Should Do Something. Self-suspicion simply isn’t going to happen when you’re already filled with a spirit of total self-righteousness.
What’s more, outrage is self-maintaining: under its influence, you are primed to defend whatever principle created the outrage, and the very idea that you should give up being outraged is, well, outrageous!
IOW, outrage is a form of not-very-pleasant wireheading that makes people not want to take out the wire, because they believe that terrible things will happen or society will collapse or some unspecified outrage will occur. If you think you want to keep the wire in, it’s almost certainly the wire talking.
So, IMO, one should not have the wire plugged in, when deciding whether it’s a good idea to have it plugged in! There may be valid game-theoretical reasons for you to want to precommit to be say, outraged about parking spots. However, you are not in a position to make that decision rationally, if you currently do not have the choice to not be outraged.
That is, if you automatically become outraged by situation X, then you are not in a good position to reflect rationally on whether it is a good idea to be outraged by situation X, because by the very nature of automatic outrage, you already vehemently believe it’s a good idea.
If you’re using outrage as a tactic, is that equivalent to trying to train other people to be automatically outraged about something you want changed?
Yes, so whatever you’re going after had better really be worth it.… or at least more important than whatever those people would have been outraged at instead!
(The media makes a living by provoking outrage, so it’s not like most people aren’t already being outraged by something.)
I think we’re going in circles here. I’m agreeing with almost everything you’re saying; I think we’re just using different terms for the same thing and the same term for different things.
Trying to make my point as simple and brief as possible: if I see someone hurting, I get a small twinge of sympathetic pain. That pain sparks the conscious response, “What needs to be done in order to help this person?”, and I start to think about how the problem arose, how to fix it, etc. If I see someone who was in pain and now has been helped by me, I feel a small spike in sympathetic joy.
I have no particular problems with this particular mental algorithm. But, the group of Buddhists I was talking to said that this algorithm was bad, and that I should get rid of it. My understanding from what you’ve said, and what other people have told me, is that this not the position of most Buddhists. Since that qualm about Buddhist meditation practices has now been satisfied, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the posts in this sequence.
If I am forced to eat vanilla ice cream, it will not ruin my week. It will not even make me upset; it’s not like the term in my utility function for vanilla ice cream is negative. I prefer vanilla ice cream to nothing at all. I will, however, be generally happier if I eat chocolate ice cream than vanilla. I like it more. If I genuinely was as happy while/after eating vanilla ice cream as I am while/after eating chocolate, saying I had a “preference” in either direction would be meaningless.
That statement never would have shown up in my stream of consciousness without some emotion causing it to appear. A person who genuinely does not have positive or negative emotions about a topic is extremely unlikely to use the term “not acceptable”. That statement was motivated by a feeling. In my case, if I hear about crimes against humanity, the immediate response is actually a small flash of anger towards the ruler, and sympathetic pain with regards to the population. Those feelings sparks the thought, “what can I do?”, and I think that’s how it should be.
That statement, “people are suffering, I want to help” is sparked by sympathetic pain. If they didn’t feel any pain on behalf of others, that motivation to help wouldn’t have ever popped into their heads.
I hope I never get to the point where I think the statement, “Oh boy, people are hurting! What an exciting opportunity for me to do something that I find to be pleasurable!”
I don’t believe that’s how philanthropists typically think. I’m involved in biological research, trying to find cures and treatments for diseases. I enjoy that. The research is interesting, the people are fun to interact with, and I’m helping to increase the lifespans, happiness, and health of a lot of people. My motivations are twofold. There is the hedonic aspect; I like my job. There is also a moral motivation. I feel sympathetic pain when I see someone with Alzheimer’s, or cancer, or any other disease, and I feel sympathetic joy when those people get better. Now, if Omega were to drop down from the sky and offer me a cure for Alzheimer’s for $50, if my primary motivation was that I enjoyed the work of helping people, I wouldn’t pay. If I pay for it, I don’t get to do the work. However, what I enjoy more is actually people getting help. I fork over the cash immediately.
Most people that say that probably are just trying to appear moral. I don’t condone moping around and enjoying the fact that you’re so emotional about the plight of the poor indigenous people, etc. But that little twinge of sympathetic pain you get when you hear about some tinpot dictator torturing his people is not something I’m particularly eager to remove from human brains. You’re right, feeling upset by an immoral situation isn’t doing anything, but that upsetness is what motivates us to do something.
Zen doesn’t have any objection to momentary twinges, so long as they don’t interfere with anything practical. (See, e.g., the story of the two monks whose punchline is “Are you still carrying her?”)
I think that Asimov’s “never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right” is a very Zen saying. ;-)
Come on now. Do you want to tell me that writing that sentence didn’t just give you an enjoyable feeling of righteous indignation?
See, there are many kinds of “feeling good” besides “pleasure”. Love and compassion feel good… and so too, unfortunately, does righteous indignation.
However, not all kinds of feeling good motivate the same kinds of actions—each comes with its own bias as to what type of actions are selected. Indignation and love, obviously, motivate different sorts of actions, despite both feeling good!
Notice, btw, that I’m speaking here of what actions are motivated by having the feeling, which is a different thing than the motivation to obtain the feeling. The pleasure of having ice cream is not the same as having a desire to get some.
This is because humans are not utility maximizers; we’re more like time-averaged satisficers. Desire arises when our time-averaged measurement of some physical or virtual property (like “blood sugar level” or “amount of interesting stuff to do”) drops below some reference point, and we then take action to restore that property to a perceived-safe or optimal level.
This is why trying to discuss humans behavior in terms of “utility” is a complete waste of time if you want to understand what’s actually going to happen when you self-modify.
At a fundamental level, we are not utility maximizers, even though we can certainly entertain the belief that we desire to be utility maximizers, or participate in competitive or co-operative frameworks that collectively aim towards maximizing something (e.g. corporations).
Yeah… this is where we need to sort out the signaling.
See, here’s what I said:
You then basically said this is terrible, and that you have “moral” motivation instead. But then, you go on to say:
Uh, so how is that not feeling good “about being able to do something”?
Really? Let’s test that, shall we.
Which of the following more closely matches your experience every day:
“Man, the world is full of diseased people. I feel awful. Better get to work right away...”
“Man, I’m glad I can make a difference. Let’s get to work!”
It’s really easy to test my hypothesis: different emotions bias people towards different types of action. (Actually, I’d guess that if you put it that broadly, there’s probably already plenty of research to support it.)
More specifically, though, my thesis is that most emotions we describe as “negative” do not support any sort of sustained activity over time, in the absence of a visceral, immediate threat. They especially don’t support creative or imaginative thinking, or indeed any sort of clear, non-rote thinking at all. (Also fairly-well documented.)
IOW, negative emotions bias towards short-term, rote and reactive behaviors, which make them far less useful for actually changing anything. They’re designed for emergency responses, not ambitious campaigns of action.
Sure, negative emotions can motivate us to “do something”… the problem is, it’s the sort of motivation that leads to the syllogism:
We must do something!
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
In other words, a short-term emergency response.
None of the philanthropists I know seem to view their activities as an emergency, and they take thoughtful and considered long-term actions. When they speak, they don’t seem to me to be experiencing any negative emotion. They say, “These people don’t have water. We can help them. Let’s do this!”
Now, there is one category of negative emotion that appears to produce motivation, and that’d be the category that contains moral signaling emotions, such as righteous indignation, disgust, disapproval, etc.
People under the influence of these emotions often appear to be “doing something”, but that “something” is usually something like protesting, “raising awareness”, or engaging in other “X is not about Y” activities.
That’s because these emotions bias us towards activities of protest and punishment. And, as I mentioned in the “offense” thread recently, such protest and punishment actions usually don’t accomplish anything, while making us feel like we’re accomplishing something… thus leading to a perverse form of covert procrastination.
(Like spending a lot of time being mad about having to take out the trash, instead of just taking the trash out already so you don’t have to think about it any more!)
For this reason, my most recent major change in mind-hacking heuristics is to look for a pattern of moral disapproval of something...
And then have the subject get rid of it.
Because when we’re under the influence of those “moral” feelings, our brains seem blocked from thinking about how to solve the actual problem, vs. just protesting it in some way, and maybe trying to get other people to do something about it!
Which means that Asimov really was right after all.
Because, as it turns out, our feelings of moral disapproval—our “sense of morals”, if you will—really does prevent us from doing what is right.
And that’s why you’re wrong about upset being motivating. The feeling of disapproval (“this is unacceptable”) is distinct from the feeling of sympathy or compassion evoked by someone else’s suffering, and each feeling will motivate you to do different things, over different time periods.
P.S. One secondary effect of moral feelings that I’ve noticed, is that they motivate us to speak out in favor of keeping the morals that generate them. Which makes sense if you think about tribal politics: anybody who suggests that maybe we shouldn’t get so upset about people pissing in the river is probably pissing in the river him/herself, and so should be publicly disapproved of—i.e., punish the advocate of non-punishing.
This happens with me too, with every stupid “moral” injunction I remove: my first emotional response is to protest that if I, say, stop disapproving of people who aren’t sufficiently perfectionistic, then somehow society will collapse and the world will be in chaos.
While that might’ve been the case in our ancestral environment, the truth in today’s world is that the only thing affected by me stopping my disapproval is that I’ll be nicer to people who weren’t going to change because of my disapproval anyway. ;-)
So… I suggest you consider whether your reaction to what the Buddhists said, and what I’m saying, is simply a protest from that part of your brain that motivates the maintenance of moral rules, whether or not there’s any real consequences for changing the rules.
In the modern world, where few of us hold any real punishment powers over most of the people we encounter, moral disapproval is by and large a maladaptive response.
I’m replying to a small part of a post which generally seems reasonable.
“This is unacceptable!” strikes me as a useful motivator for well-defined, achievable territorial defense. If I have a splinter in my foot, seeing it as unacceptable strikes me as part of the motivation for removing the splinter. I need to have enough calm mixed in to make sure I have good lighting, an appropriate tool, and the patience to make sure I get all of the splinter out, but I’m also served by having enough impatience that I’m not willing to put up with continuing to have any fraction of the splinter still in my foot.
The emotional state when I insisted that someone get his car out of a flea market space I’d rented doesn’t seem all that different. His car in that location wasn’t acceptable. I wasn’t planning on a crusade to get all inappropriately parked cars moved at that flea market, or at all flea markets.
Of course, it gets more complicated when there’s a large social issue really involved. Afaik, abolitionism really did work in Britain because a great many people thought slavery was unacceptable. The process took about a century.
And I’ve spent a lot of time on unproductive outrage, so I’m not saying you’re completely wrong, but either the question is more complex than you say, or there’s more than one flavor of “That’s unacceptable!”.
Sure. That’s certainly what it’s arguably “for”, from an evolutionary point of view.
Do you see it as morally unacceptable? I expect that you are describing a different emotion here.
Both, actually. In the first place, the catch is that for moral outrage to be useful, you have to have enough people who share the same outrage, or at least have powerful people who share it.
And, on the second front, there are certainly many emotions that people might say, “that’s unacceptable” to, including situations with no emotional content at all. (e.g. “the terms you’re offering me to buy my house are unacceptable, because they won’t fulfill my goals”, vs. “that offer is unacceptable—how dare you insult me with such a low price”.)
In the present context, I took the original poster’s “unacceptable” to be about a feeling of moral judgment based on the other things they said around that statement.
I’m actually going to agree with Nancy here.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of. I have very little temper most of the time—it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
Oddly enough, caffeine makes me more outraged/arrogant/grandiose/easily offended. I’ve had some very weird experiences with high doses of caffeine—it’s like being possessed by the Red Queen. The crippling fury of believing I’m superior to everyone around me and the mortals won’t recognize my dominion! Off with their heads! I don’t consume those quantities of caffeine anymore, since I figured out the bizarre effect it has on me. Of course, if I ever need to psych myself up for a confrontation, I can use caffeine as a handy chemical aid.
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
That’s probably a good insight.
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
(Just noting that you appear to be agreeing with what pjeby says in the comment you are replying to as well.)
I don’t think I’d have been as definite to the guy with his car in my flea market space if I didn’t think he was in the wrong. If it had been a minor loss to me and seemed like an honest mistake on his part, I might have let him have the space.
On the other hand, I think I felt more stubborn and determined than outraged, so it might not be the sort of thing you’re talking about. And I got what I wanted, and didn’t feel a huge need to talk about it afterwards, as I recall. (The felt need to keep talking about relatively minor offenses might be a topic worth pursuing.)
“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
Would you take a crack at the matter of political action? Suppose that the government decides that reviving frozen people is impossible, cryonics is based on fraud, and therefore freezing people is illegal. How could political action be taken without encouraging a sense of outrage?
Well, they’re certainly different statements, and I can imagine people with either emotion saying either, so again it’s not about the words.
Yes, as I discuss in some of my courses, when you find yourself going over a situation over and over again, it’s an indication that you think something “shouldn’t have happened”, when in fact it DID happen… which is definitely a symptom of the category of emotion I’m talking about, as well as a failure of rationality. (i.e., arguing about what “should have” happened is not productive, vs. actually thinking about how you’d like things to happen in the future… After all, we can’t change the past.)
I’m not saying you can’t use outrage as a tactic. I’m just saying that having outrage be an automatic response to almost anything is a terribly bad idea. In programming terms, we’d call it a “code smell”… that is, something you should be suspicious of.
Some people might say, “ok, I’ll just be suspicious when I’m feeling outraged, and be extra careful”, except it just doesn’t work that way.
Because, when you’re already outraged, you feel certain that things shouldn’t have happened that way, and that you’re in the right, and that Someone Should Do Something. Self-suspicion simply isn’t going to happen when you’re already filled with a spirit of total self-righteousness.
What’s more, outrage is self-maintaining: under its influence, you are primed to defend whatever principle created the outrage, and the very idea that you should give up being outraged is, well, outrageous!
IOW, outrage is a form of not-very-pleasant wireheading that makes people not want to take out the wire, because they believe that terrible things will happen or society will collapse or some unspecified outrage will occur. If you think you want to keep the wire in, it’s almost certainly the wire talking.
So, IMO, one should not have the wire plugged in, when deciding whether it’s a good idea to have it plugged in! There may be valid game-theoretical reasons for you to want to precommit to be say, outraged about parking spots. However, you are not in a position to make that decision rationally, if you currently do not have the choice to not be outraged.
That is, if you automatically become outraged by situation X, then you are not in a good position to reflect rationally on whether it is a good idea to be outraged by situation X, because by the very nature of automatic outrage, you already vehemently believe it’s a good idea.
If you’re using outrage as a tactic, is that equivalent to trying to train other people to be automatically outraged about something you want changed?
Yes, so whatever you’re going after had better really be worth it.… or at least more important than whatever those people would have been outraged at instead!
(The media makes a living by provoking outrage, so it’s not like most people aren’t already being outraged by something.)
I think we’re going in circles here. I’m agreeing with almost everything you’re saying; I think we’re just using different terms for the same thing and the same term for different things.
Trying to make my point as simple and brief as possible: if I see someone hurting, I get a small twinge of sympathetic pain. That pain sparks the conscious response, “What needs to be done in order to help this person?”, and I start to think about how the problem arose, how to fix it, etc. If I see someone who was in pain and now has been helped by me, I feel a small spike in sympathetic joy.
I have no particular problems with this particular mental algorithm. But, the group of Buddhists I was talking to said that this algorithm was bad, and that I should get rid of it. My understanding from what you’ve said, and what other people have told me, is that this not the position of most Buddhists. Since that qualm about Buddhist meditation practices has now been satisfied, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the posts in this sequence.