Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing.
Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading.
1st one requires that you actually care
2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software
3rd one, novelty for me
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.