hannahelisabeth

Karma: 71

hannahelisabeth Nov 13, 2012, 3:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
Sure, that’s true. I suppose you could have a split-brain person who is happy in one hemisphere and not in the other, or some such type of situation. I guess it just depends on what you’re looking for when you ask “is someone happy?” If you want a subjective feeling, then self-report data will be reliable. If you’re looking for specific physiological states or such, then self-report data may not be necessary, and may even contradict your findings. But it seems suspect to me that you would call it happiness if it did not correspond to a subjective feeling of happiness.

hannahelisabeth Nov 12, 2012, 9:57 AM
1 point
in reply to: raptortech97’s comment on: Belief in Self-Deception
I think when you parse this out you realize that there are a lot of other factors at play here, it’s not just a “belief in belief” thing.

Treating someone nicely has an influence on how they subsequently treat you and others. So it’s not so much that you’re believing someone is nice when they’re not, it’s that you’re believing that they do not have a fixed property state of “niceness”, that it is variable dependent on conditions, which you can then manipulate to promote niceness, for the benefit of yourself and others.

None of this is belief in belief. When you look closer you see that you are comparing two different things: how nice Bob has been in the past and how nice Bob will be in the present/future, dependent on what type of environment he is in, and you are thus modifying your behavior on the assumption that your contribution to the environment can make it such that Bob will be nice, or at least nicer. And there is evidence to support this assumption, so it’s not irrational to expect Bob to be(come) nice when treat him nicely accordingly.

It’s just misleading to phrase it as “I benefit from believing perople are nicer than they are,” because what you mean by the first “are” (will be) is not the same as what you mean by the second “are” (have been).

hannahelisabeth Nov 12, 2012, 9:49 AM
8 points
in reply to: pure-awesome’s comment on: Belief in Self-Deception
I think the idea behind this is that he wishes reality played out in such a way that, to a rational observer, it would engender belief. It’s a roundabout way of saying “I wish reality were such that...”

hannahelisabeth Nov 12, 2012, 8:40 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
Only retroactively. Our memories are easy to corrupt. But no, I don’t think you can be happy or unhappy at any given moment and simultaneously believe the opposite is true. There’s probably room for the whole “belief in belief” thing here, though. That is, you could want to believe you’re happy when you’re not, and could maybe even convince yourself that you had convinced yourself that you were happy, but I don’t think you’d actually believe it.

hannahelisabeth Nov 12, 2012, 8:37 AM
0 points
in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
True. Still, the method of measuring serotonin and dopamine levels would offer no benefit over a self-evaluation, since you can’t implement it retroactively.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 11:18 PM
1 point
in reply to: J_Thomas’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
Not everyone can be hypnotized. About a quarter of people can’t be hypnotized, according to research at Stanford.

I’ve tried to be hypnotized before and it didn’t work. I think I’m just not capable of making myself that open to suggestion, even though I would have liked to have been hypnotized.

I heard from one of my psychology professors that those on the extreme ends of the IQ spectrum (both high and low) have more trouble being hypnotized, but I’m not sure if this is actually true. The Stanford research showed that hypnotizability wasn’t correlated with any personality traits, but I probably wouldn’t consider IQ a personality trait.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 10:37 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Tiiba2’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
I think it’s not underconfident because our over-confidence is so high that it really is hard to be pessimistic enough to match reality. Depressed people seem to have just enough pessimism to compensate (but not overcompensate) for this bias. I don’t think that necessarily makes them have more common sense. Even just in terms of being more realistic, this is only one bias that they compensate for. It’s not like depression magically cures any of the other biases.

Depressed people also have a tendency to have an external locus of control, and that is not necessarily rational. You may not be able to control the situations you’re in, but it’s often the case that your actions do have a significant impact on them, so believing that you have very little or no control is often not rational.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 10:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: Tom_Breton’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
I’d heard of the connection between depression and more accurate perceptions (notably, more accurate predictions due to less overconfidence), but I wasn’t aware of the causal direction. It had been portrayed to me as being that the improved perception of reality was the cause of the depression. Or maybe I just mistakenly inferred it and didn’t notice. I didn’t know it actually went the other way, though now that I think about it, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I find that imroved map-territory correspondence leads to more happiness, at least the improved rationality which results from learning Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. It’s not just losing illusions that helps. It’s better understanding yourself, better understanding what is actually causing your emotions, and realizing that you have a more internal locus of control rather than external regarding your emotions. It’s liberating to be able to stop an emotional reaction in its tracks, analyze it, recognize it as following from an irrational belief, and consequently substitute the irrational emotion for a rational one. It helps especially with anger and anxiety, as those have a tendency to result from irrational, dogmatic beliefs.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 10:19 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: Acidmind’s comment on: Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
How would you calibrate a brain scan machine to happiness except by comparing it to self-evaluated happiness? You only know that certain neural pathways correspond to happiness because people report being happy while these pathways are activated. If someone had different brain circuitry (like, say, someone born with only half a brain), you wouldn’t be able to use this metric except by first seeing how their brain pattern corresponded to their self-reported happiness. It seems to me that happiness simply is the perception of happiness. There is no difference between “believing you’re happy” and “being happy.” You can’t be secretly happy or unhappy and not know it, ’cause that wouldn’t constitute happiness.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 9:20 PM
5 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Dark Side Epistemology
Hm… You make a good point. I’m not sure I understand this conceptually well enough to have any sort of coherent response.

hannahelisabeth Nov 11, 2012, 7:25 PM
3 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Dark Side Epistemology
I think knowing a prior constitutes evidence. If you know that the lottery has one million numbers, that is a piece of evidence.

hannahelisabeth Nov 10, 2012, 10:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: candyfromastranger’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I like your description of yourself. You remind me a bit of myself, actually. I think I’d enjoy conversing with you. Though I have nothing on my mind at the moment that I feel like discussing.

Hm, I kind of feel like my comment ought to have a bit more content than “you seem interesting” but that’s really all I’ve got.

hannahelisabeth Nov 10, 2012, 10:08 PM
15 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Hi,

My name is Hannah. I’m an American living in Oslo, Norway (my husband is Norwegian). I am 24 (soon to be 25) years old. I am currently unemployed, but I have a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Truman State University. My intention is to find a job working at a day care, at least until I have children of my own. When that happens, I intend to be a stay-at-home mother and homeschool my children. Anything beyond that is too far into the future to be worth trying to figure out at this point in my life.

I was referred to LessWrong by some German guy on OkCupid. I don’t know his name or who he is or anything about him, really, and I don’t know why he messaged me randomly. I suppose something in my profile seemed to indicate that I might like it here or might already be familiar with it, and that sparked his interest. I really can’t say. I just got a message asking if I was familiar with LessWrong or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I was not), and if so, what I thought of them. So I decided to check them out. I thought the HP fanfiction was excellent, and I’ve been reading through some of the major series here for the past week or so. At one point I had a comment I wanted to make, so I decided to join in order to be able to post the comment. I figure I may as well be part of the group, since I am interested in continuing reading and discussing here. :-)

As for more about my background in rationality and such, I like to think I’ve always been oriented towards rationality. Well, when I was younger I was probably less adept at reasoning and certainly less aware of cognitive biases and such, but I’ve always believed in following the evidence to find the truth. That’s something I think my mother helped to instill in me. My acute interest in rationality, however, probably occurred when I was around 18-19 years old. It was at this point that I became an atheist and also when I began Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

I had been raised as a Christian, more or less. My mother is very religious, but also very intelligent, and she believes fervently in following the evidence wherever it leads (despite the fact that, in practice, she does not actually do this). The shift in my religious perspective initially occurred around when I first began dating my husband. He was not religious, and I had the idea in my head that it was important that he be religious, in order for us to be properly compatible. But I observed that he was very open-minded and sensible, so I believed that the only requirement for him to become a Christian was for me to formulate a sufficiently compelling argument for why it was the true religion. And if this had been possible, it’s likely he would have converted, but alas, this was a task I could not succeed at. It was by examining my own religion and trying to answer his honest questions that I came to realize that I didn’t actually know what any good reasons for being a Christian were, and that I had merely assumed there must be good reasons, since my mother and many other intelligent relgious people that I knew were convinced of the religion. So I tried to find out what these reasons were, and they came up lacking.

When I found that I couldn’t find any obvious reasons that Christianity had to be the right religion, I realized that I didn’t have enough information to come to that conclusion. When I reflected on all my religious beliefs, it occured to me that I didn’t even know where most of them came from. So I decided to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. This was somewhat difficult for me emotionally, since I was honestly afraid that I was giving up something important that I might not get back. I mean, what if Christianity were the true religion and I gave it up and never came back? So I prayed to God (whichever god(s) he was, if any) to lead me on a path towards the truth. I figured if I followed evidence and reason, then I would end up at the truth, whatever it was. If that meant losing my religion, then my religion wasn’t worth having. I trusted that anything worth believing would come back to me. And that even if I was led astray and ended up believing the wrong thing, God would judge me based on my intent and on my deeds. A god who is good will not punish me for seeking the truth, even if I am unsuccessful in my quest. And a god who is not good is not worth worshipping. I know this idea has been voiced by many others before me, but for me this was an original conclusion at the time, not something I’d heard as a quote from someone else.

Another pertinent influence of rationality on my life occured during my second year of college. I had decided to see a counselor for problems with anxiety and depression. The therapy that counselor used was Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and we often engaged in a lot of meaningful discussions. I found the therapy and that particular approach extremely helpful in managing my emotions and excellent practice in thinking rationally. I think it really helped me become a better thinker in addition to being more emotionally stable.

So it’s been sort of a cumulative effect, losing my religion, going to college, going through counseling, etc. As I get older, I expose myself to more and more ideas (mostly through reading, but also through some discussion) and I feel that I get better and better at reasoning, understanding biases, and being more rational. A lot of the things I’ve read here are things that I had either encountered before or seemed obvious to me already. Although, there is plenty of new stuff too. So I feel that this community will be a good fit for me, and I hope that I will be a positive addition to it.

I have a lot of unorthodox ideas and such that I’d be happy to discuss. My interests are parenting (roughly in line with Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn), schooling/education (I support a Sudbury type model), diet (I’m paleo), relationships (I don’t follow anyone here; I’ve got my own ideas in this area), emotions and emotional regulation (REBT, humanistic approach, and my own experience/ideas) and pretty much anything about or related to psychology (I’m reasonably educated in this area, but I can always learn more!). I’m open to having my ideas challenged and I don’t shy away from changing my mind when the evidence points in the opposite direction. I used to have more of a problem with this, in so far as I was concerned about saving face (I didn’t want to look bad by publicly admitting I was wrong, even if I privately realized it), but I’ve since reasoned that changing my mind is actually a better way of saving face. You look a lot stupider clinging to a demonstrably wrong position than simply admitting that you were mistaken and changing your ideas accordingly.

Anyway, I hope that wasn’t too long an introduction. I have a tendency to write a lot and invest a lot of time and effort in to my writings. I care a lot about effective communication, and I like to think I’m good at expressing myself and explaining things. That seems to be something valued here too, so that’s good.

hannahelisabeth Nov 9, 2012, 8:58 PM
5 points
on: Priming and Contamination

The fascinating thing about priming is that it occurs at such a low level—priming speeds up identifying letters as forming a word, which one would expect to take place before you deliberate on the word’s meaning.

I would not expect this to take place before deliberating on a word’s meaning. Think about it. How would you know if a string of letters is a word? If it corresponds to a meaning. Thus you have to search for a meaning in order to determine if the string of letters is a word. If it were a string of letters like alskjdfljasdfl, it would be obvious sooner, since it’s unpronouncable and visually jarring, but something like “banack” could be a word, if it only had a meaning attached to it. So you have to check to see if there is a meaning there. So it doesn’t seem all that strange to me that if you prime the neural pathways of a word’s meaning, you’d recognize it as a word sooner.