Comment by restalis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by restalis | Hacker News Reader

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"if I could experiment with inducing autism in myself I totally would"

You can. You distance yourself from people, suggesting yourself over and over that you don't really need much social interaction, communicate with people only outside perceptions and feelings and the entire world around you starts to change. Each time you'll catch yourself analyzing emotions you'll stop due to its error-prone nature and switch to analyzing facts and social mechanics. There are of course many other things but this should do for a start.

My belief is that emotions were a capability developed in social creatures to cope with social intricacies given the limited rational capabilities. Emotional behavior is a kind of mechanisms to produce simplified response out of vast amounts of information that had to be processed fast (and not necessarily in great detail). Things changed a lot since then and nowadays the game-of-life competition includes a lot of gimmickry which relies heavily on exploiting emotions¹! The said autistic nature may be as well the direction in which the entire humanity is heading to.

¹ This started long ago before Edward Bernays and it will get more and more intense with time.

I have taken this approach myself, to some extent, but I'd advise a more mixed approach to those who are interested in trying this.

I've spent most of my twenties pursuing social interaction because I felt that I should and that it would be healthy. I even had a few girlfriends, which was all kinds of agonizing. At the end of my twenties I 'took a break'. To my surprise I discovered that I felt so much happier with a life that, too outsiders, was lonely and sad. The 'break' became a new way of life for me.

However, first of all I don't regret pushing myself to socialize. I learned many skills that I feel I wouldn't have learned had I not pushed myself. I can be comfortably normal when I need to, and that gives me many advantages.

Second, even though I'm quite happy being mostly alone, I definitely notice that I a more healthy person if I force myself into some social interaction (including deeper personal and emotional connections).

For me it's a bit like eating. Much of the time I don't really eat well or enough unless I force myself to. But when I do, I have more energy and and a better general sense of well-being. Similarly, when I forego socializing and/or fostering some deeper emotional connections, I have a tendency to spend way too much time thinking about unimportant things, I forget to properly verbalize or structure my thoughts into something 'worthwhile', and my rhythm and structure disappears, including normal sleep. Even minimal interaction with others in the form of flatmates or meetups significantly alleviates much of the bad stuff.

Well I already do that pretty much. I would not recommend it. Social interaction can be very rewarding, sometimes.

I don't agree with your spock like view of emotions. As if they were the enemy of the rational. You can be rational and emotional. They are orthogonal.

I think of emotions are sort of a utility function. They tell you what you want. Rationality just tells you how to get what you want. They complement each other. Without emotions there'd be no point in doing anything.

"Without emotions there'd be no point in doing anything."

This is a mantra supported by the (still) majority of our current society. I presume that people who believe it don't really bother to investigate other beliefs or if there might be another base for "doing anything". To give you a hint, "emotion" and "feeling" are not the same (and "feeling" is more than "sensation"). For example, curiosity made you want to learn about the world around you and logical (mental) stimulation is the expected reason for wanting challenge and accomplishment. Emotions are just another kind of mental stimulation, one that (as I've mentioned before) played out its role and become a liability for far too many.

As a side note, when you'll drop again references in the future, don't make it too hard for your audience to pick them up. As a non-native English speaker it wasn't obvious to me that "spock" is a character (whose name I would have capitalized) instead of a less used word.

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