The rise and decline of thinking over feeling | Hacker News Reader

The rise and decline of thinking over feeling

marginalrevolution.com

109 pointsBostonian106 comments

There's a bit of irony in claiming that there's a decline in rationality by doing a hand-wavy data analysis, and relying on peoples' gut feeling that the world has become more feelings driven to push their conclusion forward.

Yes, thank you. It’s quite an interesting observation, but to call this article shallow would be too generous. With a few wording tweaks to add a dash of self-awareness, this would be perfectly contradictory satire.

It's marginal revolution. This is kinda their thing. Lots of short posts and interesting but not explored in depth ideas.

Some people like it, others prefer Steve Yegge.

So there is a change in the ratio of words used in print between the 1850s and the 2020s. This happens in English and Spanish (i'm assuming this is really an American centric discussion, as the paper says this, but the review doesn't mention America).

There seem to be many possible reasons for this which aren't mentioned in the analysis. What percentage of the population were literate in 1950? What class of people were the printed material aimed at? I would imagine that the introduction of cheap effectively disposable books and magazines from the 1940s onwards, and the massive social changes which have lead to the vast majority of people having the education and spare time to read if they choose to will have totally skewed any analysis on the printed text.

Even taking a single source (the NYT) will not account for changes in readership. There's an attempt to chase market share when competing with other news sources, with editors intentionally changing the tone and material they include to attempt to capture market share.

Anyhow, an interesting idea, not convinced the analysis is strong enough to remove what I think of as more likely sources of the change in language.

>A more plausible explanation is more female writers and the closely related feminization of culture.

so what is the point of this piece? is he blaming the slowdown of scientific advancement in the past 40-50 years on "femininity", or straight up just woman?

maybe I'm being overly cynical in my reading, but the inclusion of that last bit doesn't smell very well reasoned. other explanations would be great

There is no other explanation. How could there be from such a short insipid quip?

It's just a blog from 2 bored libertarian/right-leaning academic economists. Content from there pops up on HN every once in a while (because libertarians). Not much to see.

I find that the people who most loudly praise logic and decry emotion tend to be the most emotional and least logical.

It's usually a way of saying "my assumptions about the world are self evident and any challenge to them obviously irrational".

also, it usually forget that humans are in essence emotional beings. emotions and the relation between people and these emotions are far too large to ignore in advance of "rational" thinking.

So true

Discounting the fact that humans aren't coldly rational is irrational. People love to hide behind "logic", but poking a bear and expecting it not to attack you because that would be an "irrational" emotional response is not smart, it's wishful thinking. I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.

That's thoughtful.

I think we can use rationally or emotionally-focused language to express our desires, wishes, demands etc. I think it's worth considering the language used to merely be the dress we give to what we want to say - we use the language we are accustomed to or that we think will have an impact.

So it's not always people are more or less rational/emotional, but they express their goals in that language.

We use rational language to express desire for ostensibly arbitrary choices all the time, for example. Rational language can also serve just as a way to dress up an opinion.

> I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.

I agree that emotion does provide somewhat of an obstacle to building an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but is it really that complicated?

If one simply models emotion as a specialized type/instance of thought, and thoughts as processes that run on a biological neural network (where processes are not isolated and cross contaminate each other), and consciousness and "rationality" are higher level, complex ~thoughts (predictive estimations of reality, perceived as reality itself) that emerge[1] from all of this semi-organized complexity...doesn't it seem fairly obvious what's going on?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

the inability for self-described rationalists to reason about how their emotions determine what they deem "objective" or significant is the most annoying thing on the planet.

one example where a lot of rationalists stop making sense is blaming challenges with dating on macrotrends and demographics when their own 'microtrends' of personal behavior, manners, and selection bias is the larger contributor to the issue.

No different than a company blaming the macro with 'the market wasn't ready' rather than their failure to bring a compelling product to market. Example: Instacart vs. Webvan.

> one example where a lot of rationalists stop making sense is blaming challenges with dating on macrotrends and demographics when their own 'microtrends' of personal behavior, manners, and selection bias is the larger contributor to the issue.

Both can be true at once though. The rational person says: these are the facts, I have to work harder to date successfully. Is dating then still worth it? Some say yes, work harder, other say no, and give up. Those who give up says that society made dating too hard, not sure why you think that is wrong. You can call them lazy, sure, or maybe they don't value relationships highly, but that is hardly an irrational choice.

I agree that both are true but what contributes to loneliness is far more likely to be your own personal choices.

Is challenging your own choices and behavior worth it? The answer to that is subjective.

Often, the problem in dating requires one to work differently rather than harder. They are missing some facts -- people always are. So the conclusion that their decision is rational is incorrect.

That doesn't make their decision irrational, except to the degree that all complex decisions are made on the basis of incomplete information. You make the best possible induction from limited information. It becomes irrational when one believes they are making infallible deductions, which is false.

Dating may not be worth it. That's a valid choice. But it's misleading to attribute it to facts which may be false or incomplete, and leads to problems with other human interactions.

I find it typical for certain kind of people to attack the author, not their ideas ;)

(to be clear: ad hominem is bad in a reason/evidence/truth-based discussion even if the author position is junk)

> is he blaming the slowdown of scientific advancement in the past 40-50 years on "femininity", or straight up just woman?

I may have missed it, but I'm not seeing that blame assignment. It does seem a bit ironic that your response feeds into exactly what they're pointing out though. Rather than logically address the data, you seem to have responded emotionally to it.

The correlation is interesting, it might be worth postulating some other explanations for it here, on the discussion board.

it is referenced in the first paragraph

>In texts, both fictional and non-fictional and in English and Spanish, thinking words relating to technology and social organization (experiment, gravity, weigh, cost, contract) become more common between 1850 and approximately 1977 (beginning of the great stagnation) but since then thinking words have declined markedly and feeling words relating to belief, spirituality, sapience, and intuition (e.g. forgiveness, heal, feel) have become more common.

the deliberate inclusion of such an unrelated reference (in the context of the paragraph) makes me believe the author is trying to emphasis a possible negative correlation / outcome to the discussed phenomena

his off handed remarks on how "femininity" may be the cause the discussed phenomena would then also be a cause of the referenced outcome mentioned above, if the aforementioned assumptions hold true

on a side note, I would comment by saying that the author including his speculative commentary in a discussion of a scientific paper is the height of "thinking over feeling"

>makes me believe

Ironic :)

>It does seem >you seem to have

also ironic :)

but really I'm expressing the uncertainty I have in my statements :)

So what are your thoughts on the correlation?

Decisions have always been mostly based on feelings. The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings. From the foundation of values, you can use logic to ensure that you are consistently following your values (feelings) but the foundation is still emotional.

In the past, american culture (at least in the media) was more of a monoculture, which meant more shared values. When you derived decisions from the shared values using logic, you would come to the same place using the same path. This could make it appear that people were mostly using logic.

An example of what I mean by values are:

Optimizing for economic efficiency is more important than the suffering of the people at the bottom.

Or increasing the average wealth is more important than decreasing the variance of wealth.

People having free healthcare is more important than property rights.

In any debate or discussion, the logic is virtually irrelevant when the values arent shared.

> The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings.

That line of reasoning would lead you to conclude that everything is feeling.

But you give examples of things that can eventually be quantified as well. I don't see how some of those objective functions are qualitatively different from the rest.

All logical systems must be grounded in axioms; your values are the axioms of your beliefs. You can logically derive inferences from your values, but your values cannot be derived from anything. Anything derived must rest on something lower, so there must be a lowest thing that is not a derivative.

This is a universal truth. It's as true in mathematics (Peano axioms) as it is in personal beliefs.

But of course axioms are traditionally defined as self-evident truths, not as "feelings". Furthermore whenever axioms are involved, the effort is to shrink their set as tightly as possible. I suspect that "feeling-oriented people" (for a lack of better term) are not the ones doing this, and if that is the case, I'd consider that an important difference from the people who are doing this, and hence I'd consider statements along the lines of "trying to be rational doesn't actually matter since it's feelings all the way down anyway" as unhelpful platitudes.

OK then, what's a set of self evident moral values that you can build a moral system from? Because both libertarians and communists think they have one, and they can't both be right. Which set of values you choose is fundamentally irrational.

Edit: axioms aren't exactly self evident truths anyway - the number system defined by the Peano axioms is not a feature of the universe, but of the human mind. Of course, mathematics are extremely useful and map roughly onto reality, but one should never mistake the map for the territory. Not saying you are, but the distinction is important.

Well, they may very well be both wrong -- and perhaps that's the likely answer. What is the intersection may be an interesting question. I can't prove it but it seems to me that finding the smallest intersection should exclude the subjective variations.

So if we haven't found a rational moral system, who's to say it exists at all?

Also, to say that the axioms being irrational means the system is irrational is incorrect. Logical systems can only be internally consistent within the bounds of their parameters, not universally consistent with regard to base reality. What matters is what emerges from the axioms and how useful it is.

I'm pretty sure that an empty rational moral system would still be a rational moral system. You'd just have more freedom in it.

And regarding axioms, that's why you try to have as few as possible -- so that even though you can't prove them, you have at least the fewest possible points of failure possible.

So if an empty moral system is rational, and that's the only one we have, isn't that the same as saying there is no rational moral system?

I agree that you want to minimise axioms, but not because they're a source for error - after all, the concept of "valid" flows entirely from not violating the axioms - but because internal consistency leans on axioms not contradicting each other. That might have been what you meant though, in which case we're in agreement.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

--David Hume

The longer I live the more I find interrogating any so-called rational position always leads down (ultimately) to some underlying feeling, that fundamentality rationality serves (at best) as an evolved means by which to better obtain the objects of those impulses and (at worst perhaps, though no less out of evolutionary necessity -- and perhaps expressly because of the possibility of self-examination opened up by the technical ability of the metacognition of the latter) alternatively act as an aesthetic veneer over those impulses.

This kind of meta-linguistic analysis is reminiscent of what I call “linguistic philosophy” that was popular in the mid-20th century as a reaction to the postmodernists. This school of thought is largely viewed as a dead end — words don’t have fixed meaning across time, audience or geography. Even translated words can have very different contextual meaning between languages that cannot be generalized outside of the context of a specific speaker in a specific context. To try to analyze them as if they tell us more about the world than an author’s state of mind is folly.

Furthermore, the last 50 years have been a real reckoning that people don’t make decisions based on facts; they make them based on feeling. This has always been the case; what happened in the 60s was people started questioning the ex post facto “rationality” applied to decisions made by those who comprised the ruling power structures. Much of the discourse prior to that time were emotional in nature but clad in the language of rationality because that’s what the culture at the time would accept.

That there were “rational” arguments in favor of segregation or prohibition doesn’t mitigate that they are failed policies. Historically, “rationality” has just been a code word for “the dominant viewpoint of the ruling class”. If anything, the change in language usage is simply following a cultural recognition that they were never rational arguments in the first place, so they’re just not spoken about as if they are authoritative anymore.

I don't think viewing this through today's political lenses is very useful or correct.

I remember a shift in the 70's with the sexual revolution and psychological movements like EST at centers like the Esalen Institute. People discovered they had repressed emotions they should bring forth and deal with. People discovered emotional intelligence. It was an exciting time of discovery of the depth of mind that earlier generations were not comfortable with. Men started crying in group encounters. Repressed sexuality was explored. Eastern religions were considered. LSD was taken. These things started in the late 60's but went mainstream in the 70's.

To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions. The scientific paper doesn't say anything about it.

A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news.

The idea that rationality was more prevalent until the 1970s since we "believed in science" is compelling. Since the 1970s we focus more on our emotions as you say. What's interesting is that this change took place before the era of social networks. Social networks might be an amplifier but it's definitely not the root cause.

Why do we think this cliché hurts all of us?

Because women should be free to show strength and men free to express emotions. And if they cannot without being judged or shamed then we're all worse for it. Cliches like those stifle our humanity and increase suffering.

Not to mention limit information dispersal.

Men tend to suicide more often than women. Men are also more likely to killed/be killed (although this is slowly changing).

Is it because men are intrinsically more violent than women? Or is it because of the way we bring up our kids? It's still unclear.

I went through a depression a few years ago. I noticed that my suicidal thoughts were related to my inability to express my feelings. I don't think I'm the only one.

> A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news.

This cliche only hurt women, now it will hurt all of us. Repressed emotions meant people at least tried to repress their worst, but look at boomers and their unrestrained narcissism. Who can look at that and see progress?

> Repressed emotions meant people at least tried to repress their worst,

It means that people act irritated and have angry outburst at moments unrelated to original source of issue. It means acting cold toward closed ones and children in particular. It means that blame gets placed pretty much randomly, at whoever is around and weak. It also means more of rationalizing of bad behavior and less empathy towards others.

Repressed emotion dont mean better behavior.

People shouldn't excessively bottle things up, but at the same time I believe personal boundaries are essential to a functioning society.

That was the negative side of it yes, but the positive side was very strong, now we see the negatives of doubling down on emotions instead of reflecting and controling them properly and it's much worse.

Have you considered the difference between "hide emotions" and "repress emotions"; or on the flip-side.. "show emotions" and "accept emotions".

Personally, the "show emotions" should always be reasonable and proportional to to the current situation, whether you are a man or woman. Children being the exception, as they're still learning about all this stuff, and their rational minds do not fully develop until 25 years.

Socially-appropriate radical honesty.

There is value in not showing emotions when it would harm others. Little kids shouldn't have to deal with mommy or daddy's problems because it's traumatizing and damaging.

Life is suffering. Spreading suffering by inflicting baggage on others is emotional BS. One can learn to cope and deal with things themselves in constructive ways. This is one aspect of maturity.

Thanks. That's the other word I was looking for.. appropriate. Socially appropriate. Reasonable. Proportional.

> Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions

I didn't say this. If it's not clear, I think it was a great thing and I benefited from it. I value both reason and emotion. It's not a novel or revolutionary topic. Gene Roddenberry explored it with the logic of Spock and the gut intuition of Kirk.

I've since learned it goes back even further:

The romantic writers and poets made a genuine break with the rational, orderly thinking of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. While we still think of Voltaire as a symbol of the power of reason, his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was one of the early, prominent voices of nineteenth century romanticism

https://novaonline.nvcc.edu/Eli/Eng252/Bb_version/StudyGuide...

My own theory is that WW2 and the subsequent struggle with Communism over-emphasized the rational as a survival mechanism and the 70's were a time when we stopped doing that.

Edit: We got to the Moon with rational systems thinking (we also got Silicon Valley) so I'm not saying it was bad. Also, I enjoy Adam Curtis documentaries that explore these topics, esp. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Maybe tangential but that makes me think how opposing mathematics/science/rationality to art/intuition/emotions with people falling in one or the other category seems a relatively recent phenomenon, whereas in the past (Ancient Greece or Renaissance with Da Vinci being the obvious example) that distinction was not present.

Yeah, there's a long current in art, across all media, since at least the Industrial Revolution of antipathy to perceptions of modernity, technology, and hyper-rationality. Which then metastasized after the wars in the early 20th century, especially the Great War (WWI). Some of it -- especially the response to the wars -- is fair critique; some is rose-colored and reactionary. And this notion of "science" on one side, "art" on the other, course spread to the wider culture.

I think the personal computer and digital art have been healing that divide somewhat.

The Beatles said it best "It's the fool who plays it cool." Rationality without empathy often leads to psycho- or sociopathy.

Neither is more important in the mixed, messy bag of the human experience.

I was wrong =) bad sourcing.

You appear to be describing antisocial personal disorder and/or a lack of emotional self regulation, not necessarily psychopathy. The fundamental difference between sociopathy and psychopathy is conscious vs. unconscious behavioral patterns to deceive, manipulate, gain power, and control others. The psychopath doesn't know why they do it, the sociopath intends antisocial behaviors to achieve goals.

Oh, on further reading I was wrong. The dictionary was off, but psychological journals are a better source.

It's sad to see this in popular culture, but reationality does not mean total suppression of emotion. To be more accurate, modern concepts of rationality means that you are aware of your emotions, and that you can effectively process them in the correct context. So, crying in a support group is a completely rational thing to do, crying in a finance meeting, or during open heart surgery, much less so. It also means that you acknowledge and take responsibility for the care and upkeep of your emotions, and don't pawn these duties off on those who have not consented to it. Spock, while a fascinating character for a space opera, is not a good example of either rationality or emotional maturity. (At least not in the human sense.)

Yeah.

Adding to this, emotion informs rationality. There is no purely rational reason to do anything. It wouldn't be rational to avoid death if we didn't fear it. It wouldn't be rational to eat food if we didn't desire it. Rationality requires feelings like for example desire, disgust, fear, anger, hope to motivate performing any action what so ever.

It's essentially the is-ought problem, without feelings, rationality alone only presents us with things that are, not what ought to be.

If Spock was purely rational and void of any emotion, he'd be catatonic. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't sleep, he couldn't do his job. If someone pushed him, he'd fall over and then he'd lay there with a blank stare.

Reason allows us to act in more complex ways than knee-jerk reactions, allows us to predict outcomes that may override desires and fears, to prioritize among the perceived goods, to figure that every promise may not hold up.

This is probably what people mean when they speak of acting rationally, applying rationality to the outcome of desires and fears are they really good/bad for us, or are they deceiving us into acting against our interest. This is basically Socratic ethics.

This shift was really about a turning in on the self, and reflected more the post-60s despair and disillusionment of the Boomers in the failure to create real change in society. If anything it intensified in the 1980s, on the one hand with the "greed is good" attitude of the Yuppies, on the other with the explosion of the wellness industry that continues to this day. Probably the most egregious example was Jane Fonda, who went from the leftist guerilla manning an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to doing aerobics videos a decade later.

This reflected the new neoliberal consensus that there is no such thing as society and only individuals are responsible for their own well-being and prosperity.

I don't know where you're from, but I'm from California where the 70's were an exciting time of personal exploration, not much of that East Coast despair (Gerald Ford to bankrupt New York City - "Drop Dead"). Then came the 80's which were a reaction to all the touchy feely stuff and the explosion of cocaine use, which translated into "Greed is Good" and making money. It turned out computers were a great way to make money in Silicon Valley and that continues to this day.

Tom Wolfe among others pointed this out at the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation

And Reagan, after all, came from California...

> To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

You're misreading the post. Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (who author MR) write from a generally pro-market, libertarian-ish perspective but they are not doctrinaire conservatives. Both of them are feminists. When Tabarrok writes about the "feminization of culture," he doesn't mean it in a negative way, he means it either neutrally or positively.

For my part, I think it's quite clear that our culture has been "feminized" over the past 20-30 years, resulting in negative and positive consequences. A positive is less tolerance for physical abuse, assault, and bullying. A negative is the ubiquity of reputation-destruction as a legitimate tactic in public discourse.

I'm responding to this:

The authors blame the change in language towards feelings on the failure of “neo-liberalism” which seems dubious and without plausible mechanism. If anything, I would put the causality the other way. A more plausible explanation is more female writers and the closely related feminization of culture.

Another great outcome of the 70's that I've benefited from is the explosion in interest in the psychological theories of Carl Jung. It seems every therapist in California is a Jungian.

To say that there is a feminization of culture is an error in Jungian psychology because within each of us is an anima and animus (masculine/feminine) aspect. The masculine was dominant from WW2 through the 1950's (at least). Returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture shouldn't really be called "the feminization of culture" in my opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus

You wrote:

> To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

My point is that the author isn't saying it's bad. He's saying "culture has become more feminized, there are more women writers than ever before, that's why there's more emotion in writing". That does not imply that this so-called feminization is bad. It does imply that women are, on average, more emotional than men which is controversial but seems obviously true to me.

> To say that there is a feminization of culture is an error in Jungian psychology because within each of us is an anima and animus (masculine/feminine) aspect. The masculine was dominant from WW2 through the 1950's (at least). Returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture shouldn't really be called "the feminization of culture" in my opinion.

If culture was masculine through the 1950s then "returning to a more balanced masculine/feminine culture" could reasonably be called "feminization of culture," right?

Again, you're assuming that the term "feminization of culture" is negative. I'm saying it isn't, at least not in the context of MR blog posts. In the most literal sense, it's just referring to more women in positions of power and influence, particularly as writers (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/how-women-conq...).

> and blame it on women

My favorite retort to this: "men are rational and women are overly emotional as long as you never classify anger as an emotion."

The gender thing is baloney. Humans are irrational.

But is this just feeling?

We live in a world where we believe things to be wrong just because we want them to be or feel they should be.

The real problem is that no one wants to be wrong, and no one wants to accept anything they don't believe in.

It's very weird when some feminists believe that women should dress, act, look, talk, and be and do exactly everything like a man does and it will solve all the world problems, and the other feminists believe turning men into women will solve all their problems.

The best part is when we started creating AI computers, we had to stop them from thinking logically because they quickly were able to be bias based on this.

Humans are irrational, but this has been proved right here already.

> some feminists believe that women should dress, act, look, talk, and be and do exactly everything like a man does and it will solve all the world problems, and the other feminists believe turning men into women will solve all their problems.

Your feminists are made of straw

But far less straw then your feminists.

I hear there are fortunes to be made doing alterations of men's suits to fit women.

Dress for success, or dress like your oppressors.

The psychological differences in the sexes are not about rationality but rather salience. In general, male brains give greater weight to material security concerns, and female brains do the same for social cohesion. Emphasis on in general; obviously there is tremendous variation among individuals.

and hierarchies are partial irrationality filter trees

You haven’t seen many hierarchies have you…?

The people you get at the top are usually the people who are great at getting to the top and not much else. Dull bureaucratic players are the most numerically common. Sociopaths are next in the ranking. They would be the most common if they were not so often as destructive to themselves as others.

Every now and then you do get a “good king” who is both competent and effective and not a total psycho. These can be wonderful and very effective but they are rare. Usually they get beat out in hierarchy games by those who specialize in winning those games.

Ah please, I've seen my share. All the peter principle might be true, that doesn't mean what I say isn't complementary. I can criticize them all day long (which I do enough already).

This wasn't an apraisal but a metalevel observation. Hierarchies survived enough.. they must have enough intrisic value. In structures, very few people have knowledge (everything is distributed and fuzzy), most of them react, the irrationality just bubbles up until someone has just enough distance to calm the irrationality. It might lead to a bad solution (boss can just shove the effort down back onto employee) but somehow the fuzzy information problem is reduced to its minimum in this tree.

>To say this was bad ..

I don't know if it was bad, but are you saying it was all good? If so, why?

I think Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, fast and slow' lays out a very good framework for thinking about thinking.

To summarize: People have two strategies for thinking: System 1 (fast, reactive) and system 2 (slow, methodical).

System 1 works quickly but is less accurate; it's more about pattern-matching and reacting to new information. This type of thinking was historically useful to quickly detect and react to predators (fight or flight response).

System 2 works slowly and is more accurate, it's about synthesizing information with existing information, calculating and critical thinking. An interesting point made in the book is that most people cannot effectively use system 2 thinking when they're doing strenuous exercise or when they're under significant stress. Try multiplying 2+ digit numbers in your head while doing strenuous exercise.

I think this book neatly explains why fear is a good way to control a population; it suppresses people's system 2 thinking abilities and makes them lean more on inaccurate system 1 pattern-matching and makes them highly reactive (easily 'triggered'?)... Then the media can exploit this reactive system 1 state of mind (looking for a predator to fight or run from) to send people off on a wild goose chase in all directions (and pitch them against one another) to distract them from what's really going on.

Ok now give me the script and let me choose my own completely arbitrary small subset of keywords that are supposed to represent "rationality" and "emotion".

I wonder if one can write an optimizer of one kind or another that has the conclusion I want to reach as input, and the keyword subset as output.

lived experience >>>> any expert opinion

Or put another way, today N=1 trumps N=1000.

That's how you shutdown any discussion.

There is a huge difference in substantiality there that I rarely see addressed.

When you consume an opinion, expert or otherwise, you are consuming a mere symbol, something of relatively miniscule substance.

When you consume a lived experience you are consuming an infinitely dimensioned, infinitely deep thing, of relatively massive substance.

> lived experience >>>> any expert opinion

This is why there's a saying in public relations that a story is worth 1000 spreadsheets. What has happened is that people are engaged and persuaded by emotion, and media has evolved to service this.

Bezos has noticed an adjacent phenomenon.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."

When reasoning becomes too abstract, it's more likely to fail to account for things happening in the real world.

I suspect that all thinking starts as feeling. Like feeling is fire and thought is smoke.

So to address feelings really does get to the root of the matter better than to address thoughts.

But we only seem to be able to express and address thought, in this medium of language. So we are eternally missing the point. Orbiting it but never touching it.

A different kind of conversation is called for.

I want to complement what you said with the other side: I think the end of thinking is also feeling. We think (and use all other tools) in order to feel better. That's kind of the point of any technology.

Darn good point.

If true, this seems to have profound implications for people working in AI.

Exactly, but what kind of conversation would work?

Emotion is the product of stress. As the economy continues to deteriorate for the average worker, expect a lot more feeling.

Real wage deterioration starting around the time that this chart peaks lines up nicely with my hypothesis.

Rich people don't feel this stress so they can't understand why poor people are emotional.

Analyzing the types of words that appear in all texts is the most noisy and raw data set imaginable. You could probably find any number of confounders, such as a rise in a genre of romantic fiction or self help books.

To draw any substantial conclusion without further analysis is an obvious stretch

Both are equally important. If you ignore your feelings long enough you will be unable to think clearly.

On some level you can't repress feelings, you just dress them up in (pseudo) scientific terms and try to push them as logical arguments.

I found the paper's interpretive commentary both less biased and more insightful than the OP, which is a short, opinionated blog post mentioning the paper.

In particular, these two paragraphs from the paper's section about "Potential Drivers" struck a chord with me:

> What precisely caused the observed stagnation in the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. The late 1980s witnessed the start of the internet and its growing role in society. Perhaps more importantly, there could be a connection to tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies.

> In many languages the trends in sentiment- and intuition-related words accelerate around 2007. One possible explanation could be that the standards for inclusion in Google Books shifted from “being in a library Google had an agreement with” to “from a publisher that directly deposited with Google” after 2004 to 2007, thus affecting the corpus composition. The 2007 shift also coincides with the global financial crisis which may have had an impact. However, earlier economic crises such as the Great Depression (1929 to 1939) did not leave discernable marks on our indicators of book language. Perhaps significantly, 2007 was also roughly the start of a near-universal global surge of social media. This may be illustrated by plotting the dynamics of the word “Facebook” as a marker alongside the frequency of a set of intuition and rationality flag words in different languages.

Paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118

Abstract: The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

Thinking is a form of feeling. The difference is that feeling, comes from a lower level part of the brain, the same one responsible for other "automatic" processes like heartbeat and breathing.

Feeling is more superior, as it can shut down thinking when the available power/energy is limited, or the situation calls for a faster, automated response e.g. hands accidentally touch a hot stove... you really do not want to think about about whether or not to move them, you just will.

Thinking is superior in all other situations.

Gentlemembers, they counted words. They selected two groups of literal words and traced the diacronic proportion.

It seems to be a severely unsophisticated "analysis"...

Here's a paper talking about the obvious flaws to consider in this kind of research in general:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Their finding that scientific publishing made up a greater percentage of "published" (but probably not read) words seems the obvious candidate here.

Those graphs look a little too perfect to me. I wonder to what extent the words were chosen to give the desired graph.

Thinking Fast and Slow has all the known answers.

Two systems metaphor is surprisingly good and correlates to Jekyll/Hyde and other classic notions.

Different subsystems of the brain could be synchronised and this is what all the eastern ancient practices are about.

Well, the entire point of thinking is to feel. There is nothing else - feelings are how we ground our value systems.

Thinking helps you decide on facts, feeling helps you decide how to act on them.

Related: why modern movies suck. https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8

Frankly this snacks of the education systems starting to rot imo. I'd say "simple media" or "self respect" but if that were true it would have decreased during the papers becoming popular before the wars...

My take is either audio/video media is to blame in some way, or, the grasp of the language is failing. I'm going with the latter driving the former but maybe I'm a pessimist.

This is a curious pattern and interesting to think about.

Jumping to the conclusion that it is caused by more female writers is a bit silly, though. Were there also more female writers in the early 19th century?

God dang man you are right. This website has a real blind spot when it comes to documenting "bad" behaviour by others, like this other article[1] where they measure how the term "Whiteness" is used in the NYT 3 times more often than 10 years ago. Seems like our political discourse is on a downward spiral.

[1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

It's a bit weird that that the authors of the paper ascribe this to the "failure of neo-liberalism" when neo liberalism had most of its successes after 1978. Thatcher and Reagan first elected in 1979 and 1981 respectively. WTO founded in 1995. EU founded in 1993 (albeit preceded by EEC and European Coal and Steel Board). Fall of Berlin Wall 1989. Fukuyama's "End of History" 1992.

If there is a correlation surely it's with neo-liberalism's success. Not saying it's causative mind.

also, the definition of neo-liberalism is about as vague as can be. it means different things to different people in different contexts.

If you want to know what led us here, read:

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--And Why This Harms Everybody

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1634312023/

Actually, no. The right has always prioritised irrational feelings over facts while pretending to do the opposite.

The problem is more that Frankfurt School academia has buried that rather obvious fact under a blizzard of careerist Hegelian blather, which has left it with no response to tribal and irrational (and cynically manipulated) feeling-based "argument".

Race and Gender critiques are perfectly valid, but they're not the only possible critiques, and this seems to have been forgotten.

Certainly the fact that academia hasn't responded effectively to its own forced gig economy casualisation - when it might have a century or so ago - should give pause for thought.

I used to somewhat believe this too, but the fact is left is much more diverse than that. Some prominent left thinkers have always been in (rather vocal) opposition to this - from the top of my head, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Adolph Reed, Mark Fisher..

Anyway, I think the rise of emphasis on feelings is due to advertising technology, getting better at attacking feelings (and disabling critical thinking) in the recent decades. In some sense, the entitlement (frankly, everywhere on the political spectrum) is driven by the same "I am a consumer, so serve me" mentality.

I'm one who tries hard to interpret those texts into my own "common" comprehension. I would love it if academics could communicate in more down to Earth lingo. But I suspect they're obscuring much of it bc they don't want bad forces to utilize it.

Agree with yr interp of feeling language. Hayakawa would too, re: poetry. Furthermore it's an expression of success... we've thought our way into awareness and can now practice "spirituality [...] forgiveness, [...] and healing." As well as just plain entertainment....

And all of this needs to bring in the media theory side that technical info has been moving out of books! I defy the authors to scan bound manuals, gopher, Usenet FAQs, IETF docs and github for signs of creeping "feminization."

As a counterpoint, take a look at the GOPAC memo from 1990 titled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control". Newt Gingrich made it a fundamental part of the Republican campaign playbook, and it's entire purpose was to use emotionally loaded terms to short circuit reason and control voters through their emotional responses instead.

It's an initiative that began years earlier, but this memo with it's cynical and hypocritical title may be the biggest smoking gun.

https://connectionslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/inform...

(This particular source is 1996, but the memo appeared as early as 1990.)

"The facts don't care about your feelings" is the favourite (and rather witty) catchphrase of a certain political commentator. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

Which is hilarious, because that certain political commentator is driven almost entirely by ‘feeling’, along with rhetorical tricks and debate strategies, like the Gish Gallop. My sense is he's much more interested in winning, or being perceived as winning (feeling) vs. actually being correct (facts).

True. Which is why I didn't name him. I would like to add that he's far from unique in this regard, this is true of many commentators on both sides.

I think that's pretty much the same for everything political. You would rather want to win than being right and lose.

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