Software developer and mindhacking instructor. Interested in intelligent feedback (especially of the empirical testing variety) on my new (temporarily free) ebook, A Minute To Unlimit You.
pjeby
Karma: 12,153
More specifically, the issue is that the img srcset attribute contains unescaped commas, causing the URLs to be broken. Deleting the srcset attributes fixes the image, or replacing all the
f_auto, q_autobits in the srcset withf_auto%2cq_autofixes it.It looks like maybe this is a bug in LW’s support for uploaded images?
I expect business and sales people would mostly not feel similarly, though to be fair it’s uncommon for business friendships/acquaintances to reach “best friend” or better status. The vibe of somebody putting you in a CRM to stay in touch without any direct/immediate monetary benefit is like, “oh, how thoughtful of you / props for being organized / I should really be doing that”.
Anyway, the important question isn’t how most people would feel, it’s how one’s desired friends in particular would feel. And many people might feel things like “honored this busy person with lots of friends wants to upgrade our friendship and is taking action to make sure it happens—how awesome”.
One of the reasons your question is challenging is that “fear of failure” is a phrase our brains use to stop thinking about the horrible thing they don’t want to think about. “Failure” is an abstract label, but the specific thing you fear isn’t the literal failure to accomplish your goal. It’s some concrete circumstance the situation will resemble, along with some defined meaning of the failure.
This is easier to see if you consider how many things you do every day that involve failure to accomplish a goal and yet do not provoke the same kind of emotion. Lots of things are “no big deal” and thus no big deal to fail at.
Things that are a “big deal” are a big deal because of some meaning we assign to them, either positively or negatively.
Mostly negatively.
More specifically: negatively, masquerading as positively. The “tell” for this is when your goals are suspiciously abstract or unclear. It’s a strong sign that the real motivation for the goals is signaling, specifically signaling that you aren’t something.
These days I call it GUPI Syndrome, for “Guilty Until Proven Innocent”. Common patterns I see in my practice:
Businessperson is obsessed with “taking their business to the next level” without any specific goals in mind… because what they really want is their family to finally acknowledge they’re capable of taking care of themselves and worthy of respect. (aka “Not a Disappointment”)
Guy is obsessed with learning PUA in order to talk to women… not because he wants to talk to any women in particular, but because he believes being uncomfortable talking to women means he’s “less of a man” than the other guys he grew up with
Entrepreneur is obsessed with improving their productivity, getting more done and building habits and whatever productivity buzzword is of the day. Turns out, their family doesn’t believe a person is good unless they are busy to the point of being stressed, so any time the entrepreneur starts improving their productivity enough to have free time, they start backsliding until they reach an appropriate level of stress.
Gifted kid grows up knowing they’re meant to change the world, quickly discovers that they should have been more specific. Upset they’re not “reaching their potential”, flounders between different goals but finds themselves unable to commit to anything for long. Complains of lack of motivation. Usually has issues with family not believing in their dreams or taking them seriously, feels need to do something big to justify their existence to the universe, if not themselves and their family.
So quite often, the phrase “fear of failure” actually unpacks to “fear I will fail at my lifelong mission to prove I’m not {lazy, a loser, incompetent, stupid, not a man, irresponsible, etc...}”.
And this can’t be addressed by advice that’s aimed at motivation or discipline or what-have-you, because the underlying emotional goal will never be satisfied. Ever.
You can never win enough to “prove” you’re not a loser.
You can’t prove a negative, and that is fundamentally what this syndrome is about: proving you’re not something that you’re afraid other people may see you as.
(To be clear here, this is the generic “you” of anyone who is experiencing this, which I’m not saying is “you”, the author of this question!)
Anyway, the solution to this problem is to stop trying to prove you’re not whatever bad thing you fear you already are (or that people do/might believe you are). This may involve several sub-steps such as:
Stop looking down on people who match the label you fear (e.g. stop thinking of people as irresponsible or lazy or whatever), or stop believing it’s a morally bad thing that justifies treating another human badly. (Because if you hate/fear/pity other people being it, you will also hate/fear/pity yourself.)
Realize that the interactions you learned this idea from were things done and said by other people, who have sole responsibility for their own actions, which you didn’t control. That their assessment of your character was not necessarily correct, or even if it was, it didn’t entitle them to treat you in the way that they did. (And even if it did, it would not require you to go along quietly with it, certainly not if this happened years ago and those people aren’t even around!)
Resolve the feelings of shame or guilt from not having anyone on your side when your family or whoever called you the things you did. Get support to realize, deep down, that people exist who would’ve stood up for you if they could, called out the insinuations, defended you, encouraged you, etc.
Is this a lot? Yes it is. But the payoff is that once you’re no longer trying to prove a negative to your emotional brain, you have a lot more mental energy available to spend on goals that no longer seem like such a “big deal”, and whose path to achievement feels much clearer.
(Also, it’s hard to overstate how big a deal it is to not be feeling every day like someone is going to uncover your horrible secrets or everyone will see you fall on your face, or whatever the thing is that’s going on.)
Benevolence towards others flows out of shared values; unconditional regard others-in-general is unnatural.
Now there’s a nice quotable quote. I don’t think it’s entirely accurate, unless people with certain kinds of lobe damage or meditation history count as “unnatural”. (Which I suppose they could.) On the other hand, those people arguably have brains that define others as themselves, and thus having shared values with said ohters as a matter of course. (Or alternately, I suppose they have a very expansive definition of “shared values”.)
But as a truism or proverb, this makes a lot of sense, and should be helpful to people who suffer from feeling like they should care more about others-in-general. Knowing that caring spreads by way of shared values makes it possible to find the caring one already has, before trying to extend it further. (Rather than constantly going to a well you’re told should be full, and always finding it dry.)
we don’t think that shutdown-seeking avoids every possible problem involved with reward misspecification
Seems like this is basically the alignment problem all over again, with the complexity just moved to “what does it mean to ‘shut down’ in the AI’s inner model”.
For example, if the inner-aligned goal is to prevent its own future operation, it might choose to say, start a nuclear war so nobody is around to start it back up, repair it, provide power, etc.
it doesn’t have the kind of insight into its motives that we do
Wait, human beings have insight into their own motives that’s better than GPTs have into theirs? When was the update released, and will it run on my brain? ;-)
Joking aside, though, I’d say the average person’s insight into their own motives is most of the time not much better than that of a GPT, because it’s usually generated in the same way: i.e. making up plausible stories.
What I was pointing out is that the barrier is asymmetrical: it’s biased towards AIs with more-easily-aligned utility functions. A paperclipper is more likely to be able to create an improved paperclipper that it’s certain enough will massively increase its utility, while a more human-aligned AI would have to be more conservative.
In other words, this paper seems to say, “if we can create human-aligned AI, it will be cautious about self-improvement, but dangerously unaligned AIs will probably have no issues.”
The first and most obvious issue here is that an AI that “solves alignment” sufficiently well to not fear self-improvement is not the same as an AI that’s actually aligned with humans. So there’s actually no protection there at all.
In fact, the phenomenon described here seems to make it more likely that an unaligned AI will be fine with self-improving, because the simpler the utility function the easier time it has guaranteeing the alignment of the improved version!
Last, but far from least, self-improvement of the form “get faster and run on more processors” is hardly challenging from an alignment perspective. And it’s far from unlikely an AI could find straightforward algorithmic improvements that it could mathematically prove safe relative to its own utility function.
In short, the overall approach seems like wishful thinking of the form, “maybe if it’s smart enough it won’t want to kill us.”
Nope—expression of feelings of friendship isn’t part of the explicit structure of friendship either. Lots of people are friends without saying anything about it.
All I’ve really said here is that the difference between VCFWB and a “romantic” relationship is difficult to discern, especially from the outside, and given that the nature of “romance” is both internal and optional to the relationship. If a pair of VCFWB’s stop having sex or hanging out or cuddling, it’s hard to say they’re still in a VCFWB relationship. But if people in a “romantic” relationship stop acting romantic with one another, they can still be said to be in a “romantic” relationship.
The overall point here is that describing “romantic” as if it is a property of a relationship rather than a property of people’s feelings is not a good carving of reality at the joints. People can have romantic feelings (or expression thereof) without having any relationship at all, let alone one with reciprocal romantic feelings.
(Indeed, romantic feelings are quite orthogonal to the type and nature of the relationship itself: the term “friend zone” highlights this point.)
So, from an epistemic view, my take is that it’s not only useless but confusing to describe a relationship as being romantic, since it’s not meaningfully a property of the relationship, but rather a set of feelings that come and go for (and about) parties in the relationship. How many feelings must happen? How often? Must they be reciprocal? Is it still romantic if neither party feels that way any more? What if they didn’t start out that way but are now?
I think that the bundle of things called “romantic relationship” are much better described structurally in terms of behavior, in order to avoid cultural projections and mismatched expectations between partners. One person might use it to mean “marriage for life”, while another might mean “passionate weekend affair”, after all! These more structurally-defined relationships can both be labeled a “romantic relationship” but this does not do a good job of defining a shared vision and expectations for the parties in said relationship.
IOW, I believe that everyone is better off taboo-ing the phrase “romantic relationship” in any serious discussion about relationships—especially a relationship they’ll personally be involved in!
I’m assuming “relationship” here means something like “the explicit structure and boundaries of behavior as agreed upon by the parties”—friends, friends with benefits, marriage, polycule etc. People’s romantic feelings and expressions are rarely something that’s part of a relationship’s explicit structure, even if people often have a lot of implicit expectations about them. (And any of those named structures can include romantic feelings, or a lack thereof.)
Direct quotes:
Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future.
And the footnote:
whatever I can do to make my world the one with FA in it, I can do to make my world the one with HA in it.
This is only trivially true in the sense of saying “whatever I can do to arrive at McDonalds, I can do to make my world the one where I walked in the direction of McDonalds”. This is ordinary reality and nothing to be “bothered” by—which obviates the original question’s apparent presupposition that something weird is going on.
If there’s something incoherent or contradictory about “either the propositions ‘HA happened, A is the current state, I will choose CA, FA will happen’ are all true, or the propositions ‘HB happened, B is the current state, I will choose CB, FB will happen’ are all true; the ones that aren’t all true are all false”, can you be specific about what it is?
It’s fine so long as HA/A and HB/B are understood to be the events and states during the actual decision-making process, and not referencing anything before that point, i.e.:
H → S → (HA ->A) → CA → FA
H → S → (HB ->B) → CB → FB
Think of H as events happening in the world, then written onto a read-only SD card labeled “S”. At this moment, the contents of S are already fixed. S is then fed into a device which will then operate upon the data and reveal its interpretation of the data by outputting the text “A” or “B”. The history of events occurring inside the device will be different according to whatever the content of the SD card was, but the content of the card isn’t “revealed” or “chosen” or “controlled” by this process.
How is ‘revealing something about the past’ retrocausal?
It isn’t; but neither is it actually revealing anything about the past that couldn’t have been ascertained prior to executing the decision procedure or in parallel with it. The decision procedure can only “reveal” the process and results of the decision procedure itself, since that process and result were not present in the history and state of the world before the procedure began.
I don’t know how to clarify this, because I don’t understand why you think I am. I do think we can narrow down a ‘moment of decision’ if we want to, meaning e.g. the point in time where the agent becomes conscious of which action they will take, or when something that looks to us like a point of no return is reached. But obviously the decision process is a process, and I don’t get why you think I don’t understand or have failed to account for this.
Here is the relevant text from your original post:
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
These definitions clearly state “I will choose”—i.e., the decision process has not yet begun. But if the decision process hasn’t yet begun, then there is only one world-state, and thus it is meaningless to give that single state two names (HA/A and HB/B).
Before you choose, you can literally examine any aspect of the current world-state that you like and confirm it to your heart’s content. You already know which events have happened and what the state of the world is, so there can’t be two such states, and your choice does not “reveal” anything about the world-state that existed prior to the start of the decision process.
This is why I’m describing HA/A and HB/B in your post as incoherent, and assuming that this description must be based on an instantaneous, outside-reality concept of “choice”, which seems to be the only way the stated model can make any sense (even in its own terms).
In contrast, if you label every point of the timeline as to what is happening, the only logically coherent timeline is H → S → ( H[A/B] → A/B ) → C[A/B] → F[A/B] -- where it’s obvious that this is just reality as normal, where the decision procedure neither “chooses” nor “reveals” anything about the history of the world prior to its beginning execution. (IOW, it can only “reveal” or “choose” or “control” the present and future, not the past.)
But if you were using that interpretation, then your original question appears to have no meaning: what would it mean to be bothered that the restaurant you eat at today will “reveal” which way you flipped the coin you used to decide?
I’m not sure how much that rephrasing would change the rest of your answer
Well, it makes the confusion more obvious, because now it’s clearer that HA/A and HB/B are complete balderdash. This will be apparent if you try to unpack exactly what the difference between them is, other than your choice. (Specifically, the algorithm used to compute your choice.)
Let’s say I give you a read-only SD card containing some data. You will insert this card into a device that will run some algorithm and output “A” or “B”. The data on the card will not change as a result of the device’s output, nor will the device’s output retroactively cause different data to have been entered on the card! All that will be revealed is the device’s interpretation of that data. To the extent there is any uncertainty about the entire process, it’s simply that the device is a black box—we don’t know what algorithm it uses to make the decision.
So, tl;dr: the choice you make does not reveal anything about the state or history of the world (SD card), except for the part that is your decision algorithm’s implementation. If we draw a box around “the parts of your brain that are involved in this decision”, then you could say that the output choice tells you something about the state and history of those parts of your brain. But even there, there’s no backward causality—it’s again simply resolving your uncertainty about the box, not doing anything to the actual contents, except to the extent that running the decision procedure makes changes to the device’s state.
broadly I’m not sure whether you are defending compatibilism or hard determinism
As other people have mentioned, rationalists don’t typically think in those terms. There isn’t actually any difference between those two ideas, and there’s really nothing to “defend”. As with a myriad other philosophical questions, the question itself is just map-territory confusion or a problem with word definitions.
Human brains have lots of places where it’s easy to slip on logical levels and end up with things that feel like questions or paradoxes when in fact what’s going on is really simple once you put back in the missing terms or expand the definitions properly. (This is often because brains don’t tend to include themselves as part of reality, so this is where the missing definitions can usually be found!)
In the particular case you’ve presented, that tendency manifests in the part where no part of your problem specification explicitly calls out the brain or its decision procedures as components of the process. Once you include those missing pieces, it’s straightforward to see that the only place where hypothetical alternative choices exist is in the decider’s brain, and that no retrocausality is involved.
In the parts of reality that do not include your brain, they are already in some state and already have some history. When you make a decision, you already know what state and history exist for those parts of reality, at least to the extent that state and history is decision-relevant. What you don’t know is which choice you will make.
You then can imagine CA and CB—i.e., picture them in your brain—as part of running your decision algorithm. Running this algorithm then makes changes to the history and state of your brain—but not to any of the inputs that your brain took in.
Suppose I follow the following decision procedure:
Make a list of alternatives
Give them a score from 1-10 and sort the list
Flip a coin
If it comes up heads, choose the first item
If it comes up tails, cross off that item and go back to step 3
None of these steps is retrocausal, in the sense of “revealing” or “choosing” anything about the past. As I perform these steps, I am altering H and S of my brain (and workspace) until a decision is arrived at. At no point is there an “A” or “B” here, except in the contents of the list.
Since there is a random element I don’t even know what choice I will make, but the only thing that was “revealed” is my scoring and which way the coin flips went—all of which happened as I went through the process. When I get to the “choice” part, it’s the result of the steps that went before, not something that determines the steps.
This is just an example, of course, but it literally doesn’t matter what your decision procedure is, because it’s still not changing the original inputs of the process. Nothing is retroactively chosen or revealed. Instead, the world-state is being changed by the process of making the decision, in normal forward causality.
As soon as you fully expand your terms to any specific decision procedure, and include your brain as part of the definition of “history” and “state”, the illusion of retrocausality vanishes.
A pair of timelines, showing two possible outcomes, with the decision procedure parenthesized:
H → S → (HA → SA) → CA
H → S → (HB → SB) → CB
The decision procedure operates on history H, state S as its initial input. During the process it will produce a new history and final state, following some path that will result in CA or CB. But CA and CB do not reveal or “choose” anything about the H or S that existed prior to beginning the decision procedure. Instead, the steps go forward in time creating HA or HB as they go along.
It’s as if you said, “isn’t it weird, how if I flip a coin and then go down street A or B accordingly, coming to whichever restaurant is on that street, that the cuisine of the restaurant I arrive at reveals which way my coin flip went?”
No. No. It’s not weird at all! That’s what you should expect to happen! The restaurant you arrived at does not determine the coin flip, the coin flip determines the restaurant.
As soon as you make the decision procedure a concrete procedure—be it flipping a coin or otherwise—it should hopefully become clear that the choice is the output of the steps taken; the steps taken are not retroactively caused by the output of the process.
The confusion in your original post is that you’re not treating “choice” as a process with steps that produce an output, but rather as something mysterious that happens instantaneously while somehow being outside of reality. If you properly place “choice” as a series of events in normal spacetime, there is no paradox or retrocausality to be had. It’s just normal things happening in the normal order.
LW compatibilism isn’t believing that choice magically happens outside of spacetime while everything else happens deterministically, but rather including your decision procedure as part of “things happening deterministically”.
The confusion is resolved if you realize that both A and B here are mental simulations. When you observe the ball moving, it allows you to discard some of your simulations, but this doesn’t affect the past or future, which already were whatever they were.
To view the ball as affecting the past is to confuse the territory (which already was in some definite state) with your map (which was in a state of uncertainty re: the territory).
It seems to me that your confusion is contending there are two past/present states (HA+A / HB+B) when in fact reality is simply H → S → C. There is one history, one state, and one choice that you will end up making. The idea that there is a HA and HB and so on is wrong, since that history H has already happened and produced state S.
Further, C is simply the output of your decision algorithm, which result we don’t know until the algorithm is run. Your choice could perhaps be said to reveal something previously not known about H and S, but it doesn’t distinguish between two histories or states, only your state of information about the single history/state that already existed. (It also doesn’t determine anything about H and S that isn’t “this decision algorithm outputs C under condition S”.)
Indeed, even presenting it as if there is actually a CA and CB from which you will choose is itself inaccurate: you’re already going to choose whatever you’re going to choose, and that output is already determined even if you have yet to run the algorithm that will let you find out what that choice is. The future states CA and CB never actually exist either—they are simulations you create in your mind as part of the decision algorithm.
Or to put it another way, since the future state C is a complex mix of your choice and other events taking place in the world, it will not actually match whatever simulated option you thought about. So the entire A/B disjunction throughout is about distinctions that only exist in your mental map, not in the territory outside your head.
So, the real world is H->S->C, and in your mind, you consider simulated or hypothetical A’s and B’s. Your decision process resolves which of A and B you feel accurately reflects H/S/C, but cannot affect anything but C. (And even there, the output was already determinable-in-principle before you started—you just didn’t know what the output was going to be.)
I’ve been married just under 27 years now, and ooey gooeyness has been on a long slow uptrend, so I don’t think that irrationality, drama, or short-livedness have anything to do with it. We were together for five years before that, and I asked her to marry me because at some point it became obvious that I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life without her.
Granted, the first year or two of knowing each other was rather turbulent, but during that time I mostly didn’t see her as The One or really even very Significant. That was something that took time, moving from FWBs to VCFWBs to romantic feels.
I think that drama is what we see portrayed in media as romantic, but that’s because the genre of said media is drama (or comedy). And just generally, things in media have to be made more dramatic in order to be entertaining. It’s usually not considered entertainment to see two people who are sweet on each other break into smiles every time they see each other and practically moan at any form of physical contact with one another—unless the genre of the piece is “slice of life” or “fluff”, and most popular media is not that.
I’m not aro and I 100% agree with the suggestion to taboo the concept of “romantic” (as attached to the word “relationship”, other than as a shorthand for “relationship where both parties experience romantic feelings”). Properly reduced, the things described as love and romance are experiences internal to individuals rather than a property of relationships. (Otherwise unrequited love would not be a thing.)
AFAICT, the thing that distinguishes very-close-friends-with-benefits is the ooey gooey feeling that one’s Other is very Significant, and that one would like to express that significance in sweet, silly, earnest, or otherwise excessive ways. But outside these feelings and the expression thereof, the relationship itself is not necessarily different from VCFWB in any practical respect!
Of course, some people have trouble with the concept that you can be VCFWB and not have romantic feelings about it, or believe you shouldn’t be FWB at all without it, or don’t know how you can even be VCF unless it’s a romantic relationship, etc. (I believe that is the confusion the post is pointing at, generally: that it’s common for the socialization of men in particular to license vulnerability or intimacy with VCFs only in a “romantic” context.)
But for people who are inclined to having VCF (with or without the B), talking about the relationship as being romantic makes little sense, since romantic feelings and expression are individual, non-obligatory, and indeed personally idiosyncratic (or else “love languages” would not be a thing).
Thiseems a bit overkill when there are such things as bookmarks and pinning sites to your home page. Also if you have a bookmark manager app you can just make that your home page.
“many people believe that they can control others when they can’t”
It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract:
The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary—they seem utterly unrelated to me.
For example, if one is thinking “I should have done this sooner”, how is that about controlling others?
Likewise, this isn’t about conscious “belief”: even when these things are directed at other people, we usually don’t even realize we’re trying to control anyone and would likely not say we believe we can control anyone. The way it feels from the inside is that something is wrong, in the sense of “someone is wrong on the internet”—i.e. that there is some moral outrage occurring which must be stopped or at least punished or protested.
(And also the belief “you can’t make yourself like anything”, in the case of the person feeling guilty about unproductiveness.)
What does liking have to do with anything? I’m seriously confused here. Ingvar’s scenario doesn’t say anything about liking anything?
The issue being presented there is that the moral outrage feeling blocks us from thinking strategically, because actually useful or practical actions don’t feel enough like they’re punishing the perpetrator of our feeling of moral outrage. Once the outrage feeling was shut off, “Ingvar” (not anything like their real name) immediately began to think of practical solutions, solutions they could not think of just a few moments before, and that they admitted they would’ve rejected as irrelevant, useless, or even insulting had anyone proposed them prior to removing the feeling.
the “Nice Guy” bits do seem not derivable from the above?
The nice guy concept is presented as an instance of a class of counterfactuals: one in which we should live up to an unrealistic standard so then people should respond differently. Therefore (our brains assume), if people are not responding correctly, then we must have done something wrong… and so need to be punished. (Or alternately, if we believe we are performing correctly, then others must be punished for not being sufficiently nice in return.)
i.e., once again illustrating how:
(from the abstract): our brains compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.
This is the central theme of the article, and is merely illustrated by various examples to show some of the variety of ways this happens, and contrasting before-and-after thought processes to illustrate how our thinking is derailed and misdirected by the generated desire to blame and punish.
This is important to me because it’s central to some rationality research I’m doing currently.
I’m not sure what “this” refers to here—the entire article, or one or more of the specific subtopics you raised. In general, though, if you are going to relate this to rationality-adjacent subjects, the relevant topics would be how feelings of moral judgment or outrage hijack our reasoning and motivation in various ways—that is literally all the article is about, aside from providing a lot of tips on how to switch the damn thing off.
On further reflection, I’m wondering if your confusion is actually related to this bit from the disclaimer:
To avoid confusion between object-level advice, and the meta-level issue of “how our moral judgment frames interfere with rational thinking”, I have intentionally omitted any description of how the fictionalized or composite clients actually solved the real-life problems implied by their stories. The examples in this article do not promote or recommend any specific object-level solutions for even those clients’ actual specific problems, let alone universal advice for people in similar situations.
That is, the things that you seem to be pulling from this sound like they could be projections of object-level advice or generic approaches to problems presented in the scenarios. But the scenarios don’t actually contain any object-level approaches or advice, which would explain why your comment is so confusing to me. They sound like perhaps you read the scenarios, drew your own conclusions about the situation(s), and then projected those conclusions back onto the article as summaries, while entirely ignoring the explicitly-stated themes and conclusions.
In my mind the difference is that “for signalling purposes” contains an aspect of a voluntary decision (and thus blame-worthiness for the consequences),
I was attributing the purpose to our brain/genes, not our selves. i.e., the ability to have such moods is a hardwired adaptation to support (sincere-and-not-consciously-planned) social signaling.
It’s not entirely divorced from consciousness, though, since you can realize you’re doing it and convince the machinery that it’s no longer of any benefit to keep doing it in response to a given trigger.
So it’s not 100% involuntary, it’s just a bit indirect, like the way we can’t consciously control blood pressure but can change our breathing or meditate or whatever and affect it that way.
alternate version “most long-lasting negative emotions and moods are caused by our social cognition”
That phrasing seems to prompt a response of “So?” or “Yes, and?” It certainly wouldn’t qualify as a fact most people aren’t ready to accept. ;-)
More diplomatically: people are terrified of disapproval and will do anything to avoid feeling they deserve it, so if you must point out that something isn’t working, try to do so in such a way that the easiest way for them to resolve their cognitive dissonance isn’t “blow you off” or “get mad at you”. i.e., find a way for them to “save face”.
(As a lot of people associate being incorrect with being deserving of disapproval.)