“Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don’t.” Superb point that. And thanks for the links.
sark
Karma: 452
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.
Why not both useful beliefs and useful emotions?
Why privilege beliefs?
I don’t think we have got the right explanation for our epiphany addiction here. We are “addicted” to epiphanies because that is what our community rewards its members. Even if the sport is ostensibly about optimizing one’s life, the actual sport is to come up with clever insights into how to optimize one’s life. The incentive structure is all wrong. The problem ultimately comes down to us being rewarded more status for coming up with and understanding epiphanies than for such epiphanies having a positive impact on our lives.
No problem. I’m here for the entire summer. You may choose to contact myself closer to time and we’ll organize a meetup then.
Hi. I will attend! I also wish to apologize for not having had the strength and courage to persist in organizing this meetup past the time it went fallow :P
Ok got it, thanks.
Hi. First of all thanks for the immensely helpful summary of the literature!
Since you have gone through so much of the literature, I was wondering if you have come across any theories about the functional role of happiness?
I’m currently only aware of Kaj Sotala’s post some time ago about how happiness regulates risk-taking. I personally think happiness does this because risk-taking is socially advantageous for high status folks. The theory is that happiness is basically a behavioural strategy pursued by those who have high status. As in, happiness is performed, not pursued. Depression and anxiety would be the opposite of happiness. I remember some studies showing how in primates the low status ones exhibit depression-like and anxious behavior.
It may simply be my ignorance of the literature, but it seems strange that all these (otherwise wonderful) empirical investigations into happiness are motivated only by a common folk theory of its function.
Hi, thanks for linking to your post here. It seems relevant to what I tweeted. But please help me understand what you are saying here. I think I’m having trouble at “Subgroups form that may value intentional suppression of their former values”. Why would they value suppression of former values?
I’m guessing you’re trying to say that subgroups will find their aesthetic more interesting because they experience their aesthetic as providing greater improvement in compressibility given preexisting inculcation in that aesthetic?
Surely the costs/benefits to everybody, including third-parties, counts. Surely the real issue is the ultimate economic efficiency of these prizes as a way to allocate our collective resources toward achieving the most collective benefit from solved problems.
Perhaps not what most religious folks would call its ‘essence’ (part of the problem that they won’t admit this really) but certain religion-based social norms which are still relevant in today’s world.
The question is not about philosophy but institutionalized philosophy.
a) Would those immature sciences not have been born if not for institutionalized philosophy? b) Do you expect new sciences to be born within the philosophy departments we have today?
Or do you expect rather that a new science is more likely to arise as a result of Big Questions being asked in the mundane disciplines of our empirical sciences?
I really like this. It emphasizes the fundamentally instrumental nature of rationality.
I was aware of that yes. But I was also assuming what you considered to be high prestige within this community was well calibrated.
What I has in mind was his devotion to the cause, even as it ultimately harmed it, we think more than compensates for his lack of strategic foresight and late graduation.
With that book, we think of him less for not contributing in a more direct way to the book, even as we abstractly understand what a vital job it was.
Though of course that may just be me.
How many such communities can you be part of (because surely you don’t only have one goal) and still not have them a diluted effect on yourself? How many such communities don’t fall prey to lost purposes? How many can monitor your life with enough fidelity that they can tell if you go astray?
I’m not so sure we accord Kaj less status overall for having taking more years to graduate and more status for helping Eliezer write that book. Are we so sure we do? We might think so, and then reveal otherwise by our behavior.
This is a difficult problem. I have come to realize there is no one solution. The general strategy I think is to have consistency checks on what you are doing. Your subconscious can only trick you into seeking status and away from optimizing your goals by hiding the contradictions from you. But as ‘willpower’ is not the answer, eternal vigilance isn’t either. But rather you pick up via a mass of observation the myriad ways in which you are led astray, and you fix these individually. Pay attention to something different you regularly do every day and check if this comports with your goals. If you are lucky, your subconscious cannot trick you the same way twice. Though it is quite ingenious.
In other words you try to legislate your actions. But your subconscious will find loopholes and enforcement will slip.
“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.