Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)
“Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t.”
This is how I have come to think of beliefs. It’s like refactoring code. You should do it when you spot regularities you can eke efficiency out of. But you should do this only if it does not make the code unwieldy or unnatural, and only if it does not make the code fragile. Beliefs should be the same thing. When your rules of thumb seem to respect some regularity in reality, I’m perfectly happy to call that “truth”. So long as that does not break my tools.
If useful doesn’t equal accurate then you have biased your map.
The most useful beliefs to have are almost always accurate ones so in almost all situations useful=accurate. But most people have an innate desire to bias their map in a way that harms them over the long-run. Restated, most people have harmful emotional urges that do their damage by causing them to have inaccurate maps that “feel” useful but really are not. Drilling into yourself the value of having an accurate map in part by changing your emotions to make accuracy a short-term emotional urge will cause you to ultimately have more useful beliefs than if you have the short-term emotional urge of having useful beliefs.
A Bayesian super-intelligence could go for both useful beliefs and emotions. But given the limitations of the human brain I’m better off programming the emotional part of mine to look for accuracy in beliefs rather than usefulness.
useful may not be accurate, depending on one’s motives. A ‘useful’ belief may be one that allows you to do what you really want to unburdened by ethical/logistic/moral considerations. e.g., belief that non-europeans aren’t really human permits one to colonise their land without qualms.
I suppose that’s why, as a rationalist, one would prefer accurate beliefs- they don’t give you the liberty of lying to yourself like that. And as a rationalist, accurate beliefs will be far more useful than inaccurate ones.
Good point about beliefs possibly only “feeling” useful. But that applies to accuracy as well. Privileging accuracy can also lead you to overstate its usefulness. In fact, I find it’s often better to not even have beliefs at all. Rather than trying to contort my beliefs to be useful, a bunch of non map-based heuristics gets the job done handily. Remember, the map-territory distinction is itself but a useful meta-heuristic.
A useful belief is an accurate one. It is, however, easy to believe a belief is useful without testing its veracity. Therefore it is optimal to test for accuracy in beliefs, as opposed to querying one’s belief in its usefulness.
Conversely, why not both accurate beliefs and emotions?
Let useful come into play when choosing your actions. This can include framing your emotions—but if you just go around changing your emotions to whatever’s useful, you’re not being yourself.
“being yourself”:
A metaphor for a feeling which is so far removed from modern language’s ability to describe, that it’s a local impossibility for all but a tiny portion of the people in the world to taboo it.
It’s purpose is to illicit the associated feeling in the listener, and not to be used as a descriptive reference. It is a feeling that is so deeply ingrained in 50% of people, that those people don’t realize the other 50% of people don’t know what it is; and so had never thought to even begin to try to explain it, much less taboo it.
tabooing the word as if it describes an action is an inadequate representation of the true meaning of the word. The same is true of tabooing the word as if it describes an emotion, a thought, a belief, or an identity.
“being yourself” is a conglomeration of two concepts. The first, “being”, requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a “state of being”, as an all-encompassing description of something that describes it’s non-physical properties as a snapshot of a single moment; and that said description is unlikely to change over time. The second, “oneself”, requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a spark of consciousness at the source of any mental processes, or related, of any living creature. This concept is reminiscent of the concept of a “soul”.
I personally find the concept of “being oneself” to be of the fallacious origin of the assumption that the spark of consciousness is separate from the current state of being, and that said state and spark do not flux and change continuously.
However, the context of the phrase “being yourself”, in this instance, requires not that this phrase be tabooed, but instead that “changing your emotions” be tabooed, along with “useful”.
The question in regards to “changing your emotions” is if the author meant that truly changing one’s emotions would be “not being oneself”; or if the author meant something else, such as putting on a facade of an emotion that one is not experiencing is “not being oneself”.
“Useful” is a word that has different definitions for many people, and often changes based on context.
The comment in question is likely a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word “useful”. This implies the possibility that many people have misunderstood what is meant by the word “useful”, perhaps even including the original poster of the quote.
So, the useful thing to do would not be to taboo “being yourself”, but to instead taboo “useful”.
In my case, I am using “useful” to mean an action which produces a generalized and averaged value for all involved and all observers. In this case, I consider the “value” in question to be an increase in communication ability for all posters, and a general increase in all readers’ ability to progress their own mental abilities. I could taboo further, but I don’t see any proportionally significant value in doing so.
Why not both useful beliefs and useful emotions?
Why privilege beliefs?
This is addressed by several Sequence posts, e.g. Why truth? And..., Dark Side Epistemology, and Focus Your Uncertainty.
Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)
“Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t.”
This is how I have come to think of beliefs. It’s like refactoring code. You should do it when you spot regularities you can eke efficiency out of. But you should do this only if it does not make the code unwieldy or unnatural, and only if it does not make the code fragile. Beliefs should be the same thing. When your rules of thumb seem to respect some regularity in reality, I’m perfectly happy to call that “truth”. So long as that does not break my tools.
“Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t.” Superb point that. And thanks for the links.
If useful doesn’t equal accurate then you have biased your map.
The most useful beliefs to have are almost always accurate ones so in almost all situations useful=accurate. But most people have an innate desire to bias their map in a way that harms them over the long-run. Restated, most people have harmful emotional urges that do their damage by causing them to have inaccurate maps that “feel” useful but really are not. Drilling into yourself the value of having an accurate map in part by changing your emotions to make accuracy a short-term emotional urge will cause you to ultimately have more useful beliefs than if you have the short-term emotional urge of having useful beliefs.
A Bayesian super-intelligence could go for both useful beliefs and emotions. But given the limitations of the human brain I’m better off programming the emotional part of mine to look for accuracy in beliefs rather than usefulness.
useful may not be accurate, depending on one’s motives. A ‘useful’ belief may be one that allows you to do what you really want to unburdened by ethical/logistic/moral considerations. e.g., belief that non-europeans aren’t really human permits one to colonise their land without qualms.
I suppose that’s why, as a rationalist, one would prefer accurate beliefs- they don’t give you the liberty of lying to yourself like that. And as a rationalist, accurate beliefs will be far more useful than inaccurate ones.
Good point about beliefs possibly only “feeling” useful. But that applies to accuracy as well. Privileging accuracy can also lead you to overstate its usefulness. In fact, I find it’s often better to not even have beliefs at all. Rather than trying to contort my beliefs to be useful, a bunch of non map-based heuristics gets the job done handily. Remember, the map-territory distinction is itself but a useful meta-heuristic.
A useful belief is an accurate one. It is, however, easy to believe a belief is useful without testing its veracity. Therefore it is optimal to test for accuracy in beliefs, as opposed to querying one’s belief in its usefulness.
Conversely, why not both accurate beliefs and emotions?
Let useful come into play when choosing your actions. This can include framing your emotions—but if you just go around changing your emotions to whatever’s useful, you’re not being yourself.
Taboo “being yourself”.
“being yourself”: A metaphor for a feeling which is so far removed from modern language’s ability to describe, that it’s a local impossibility for all but a tiny portion of the people in the world to taboo it. It’s purpose is to illicit the associated feeling in the listener, and not to be used as a descriptive reference. It is a feeling that is so deeply ingrained in 50% of people, that those people don’t realize the other 50% of people don’t know what it is; and so had never thought to even begin to try to explain it, much less taboo it.
tabooing the word as if it describes an action is an inadequate representation of the true meaning of the word. The same is true of tabooing the word as if it describes an emotion, a thought, a belief, or an identity.
“being yourself” is a conglomeration of two concepts. The first, “being”, requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a “state of being”, as an all-encompassing description of something that describes it’s non-physical properties as a snapshot of a single moment; and that said description is unlikely to change over time. The second, “oneself”, requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a spark of consciousness at the source of any mental processes, or related, of any living creature. This concept is reminiscent of the concept of a “soul”.
I personally find the concept of “being oneself” to be of the fallacious origin of the assumption that the spark of consciousness is separate from the current state of being, and that said state and spark do not flux and change continuously.
However, the context of the phrase “being yourself”, in this instance, requires not that this phrase be tabooed, but instead that “changing your emotions” be tabooed, along with “useful”. The question in regards to “changing your emotions” is if the author meant that truly changing one’s emotions would be “not being oneself”; or if the author meant something else, such as putting on a facade of an emotion that one is not experiencing is “not being oneself”.
“Useful” is a word that has different definitions for many people, and often changes based on context. The comment in question is likely a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word “useful”. This implies the possibility that many people have misunderstood what is meant by the word “useful”, perhaps even including the original poster of the quote.
So, the useful thing to do would not be to taboo “being yourself”, but to instead taboo “useful”.
In my case, I am using “useful” to mean an action which produces a generalized and averaged value for all involved and all observers. In this case, I consider the “value” in question to be an increase in communication ability for all posters, and a general increase in all readers’ ability to progress their own mental abilities. I could taboo further, but I don’t see any proportionally significant value in doing so.
Attempting to override your utility function. Effectively, a stab at wetware wireheading.