I don’t understand the OP’s point at all, but just wanted to remark on
there isn’t an obvious decision-theoretic reason why someone might not want to think about possibilities they don’t want to come true
There absolutely are reasons like that. Beliefs affect “reality”, like in the folk theorem. If everyone believes that everyone else cooperates, then everyone would cooperate. (And defectors get severely punished.)
If I had to summarize: “Talking about feeling is often perceived as a failure of separation-of-concerns by people who are skilled at various other cognitive separations-of-concerns; but, it isn’t necessarily. In fact, if you’re really good at separation-of-concerns, you should be able to talk about feelings a lot more than otherwise. This is probably just a good thing to do, because people care about other people’s feelings”
Ah, that makes sense. Talking about feelings, to a degree, is essential to being human and being relatable. If anything, people’s minds are 90% or more about feelings.
Considering a possibility doesn’t automatically make you believe it. Why not think about the different possible Nash equilibria in order to select the best one?
Yep, thinking about different possibilities changes reality. In this particular case, it makes it worse, since mutual cooperation (super-rationality, twin prisoner’s dilemma, etc.) has by definition the highest payoff in symmetric games.
Wait. Some thoughts enable actions, which can change reality. Some thoughts may be directly detectable and thereby change reality (say, pausing before answering a question, or viewers watching an fMRI as you’re thinking different things). But very few hypothetical and counterfactual thoughts in today’s humans actually effect reality in either of these ways.
Are you claiming that someone who understands cooperation and superrationality can change reality by thinking more about it than usual, or just that knowledge increases the search space and selection power over potential actions?
In practice, a lot of things about one person’s attitudes toward cooperation ‘leak out’ to others (as in, are moderately detectable). This includes reading things like pauses before making decisions, which means that merely thinking about an alternative can end up changing the outcome of a situation.
I don’t understand the OP’s point at all, but just wanted to remark on
There absolutely are reasons like that. Beliefs affect “reality”, like in the folk theorem. If everyone believes that everyone else cooperates, then everyone would cooperate. (And defectors get severely punished.)
If I had to summarize: “Talking about feeling is often perceived as a failure of separation-of-concerns by people who are skilled at various other cognitive separations-of-concerns; but, it isn’t necessarily. In fact, if you’re really good at separation-of-concerns, you should be able to talk about feelings a lot more than otherwise. This is probably just a good thing to do, because people care about other people’s feelings”
Ah, that makes sense. Talking about feelings, to a degree, is essential to being human and being relatable. If anything, people’s minds are 90% or more about feelings.
Considering a possibility doesn’t automatically make you believe it. Why not think about the different possible Nash equilibria in order to select the best one?
Yep, thinking about different possibilities changes reality. In this particular case, it makes it worse, since mutual cooperation (super-rationality, twin prisoner’s dilemma, etc.) has by definition the highest payoff in symmetric games.
Wait. Some thoughts enable actions, which can change reality. Some thoughts may be directly detectable and thereby change reality (say, pausing before answering a question, or viewers watching an fMRI as you’re thinking different things). But very few hypothetical and counterfactual thoughts in today’s humans actually effect reality in either of these ways.
Are you claiming that someone who understands cooperation and superrationality can change reality by thinking more about it than usual, or just that knowledge increases the search space and selection power over potential actions?
In practice, a lot of things about one person’s attitudes toward cooperation ‘leak out’ to others (as in, are moderately detectable). This includes reading things like pauses before making decisions, which means that merely thinking about an alternative can end up changing the outcome of a situation.