Anger and fear: ten years of research in the lab and field | Hacker News Reader

Anger and fear: ten years of research in the lab and field

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69 pointsswibbler26 comments

> Risks associated with war will begin to look smaller. This is not a "cognitive bias" but a design feature of a mind shifting from navigating a prestige-based world to a dominance-based world.

That's absolutely a cognitive bias, and that's exactly the manner in which cognitive biases emerge over time. It being a "normal" biological or social adaptation does not mean it is not a cognitive bias: all cognitive biases are "normal" adaptations (although they are often maladaptive).

> Your psychology was designed for a world of small-group aggression. Not a world of nukes. This mismatch means that your intuitions are not always optimal guides. Balancing emotions for group-aggression with cold reason is key over the next days and, possibly, years.

Case in point.

> Emotions are coordination systems designed to refocus your entire cognitive architecture towards a specific task

This is a really powerful way of looking at emotion. Of course emotion serves an evolutionary purpose, but it's such a basic part of our lived experience that it's hard to view it critically like that.

Emotions do not serve any purpose. It's a abstract concept describing certain psychogical process in human that is not characterized by so-called rational thinking.

Most non artificial things are not serving any purpose, they are coincidents filtered through natural selection.

Most artificial things serve some purpose of its makers.

I understand why you're being downvoted, but I do think there is value in your comment. It's perhaps not the most artful articulation of ideas, but it points to serious (afaik) philosophical questions. Whether emotions have a purpose is both a semantic and a philosophical question.

I would point anyone who thinks this comment is unreasonable to discussions about teleology and science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Science

They may certainly be counterproductive at times, but if they truly served no purpose it seems unlikely we'd have them? Also there's at least mixed evidence for the existence of similar states in animals[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_in_animals

An important part of the question is semantic: what do we mean when we say that something has a "purpose"?

This is very much a live (and possibly a dead-end) question in evolutionary biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology

Hmm, that feels a bit like the difference between verifiability and falsifiability to me. It doesn't seem like adaptations need to be goal-driven, but if they were flat-out bad/destructive/unhelpful to the species, I would tend to expect them to fade over time? Pointing to any specific trait and saying it's useless, though, opens you up to arguments that you just haven't found the use yet.

There are a lot of accidents of evolution that don't have a "purpose". The shape/trajectory of the vagus nerve, the appendix, the human tailbone, etc...

This goes to the root of what we mean when we say "purpose". Are we saying the trait is "helping" to "achieve" some "goal", or are we really just saying that there's some relationship between the trait and the individual's environment, or that the existence of the trait can be explained by properties of the environment? If the latter, then are we stretching the meaning of the word "purpose"?

It's a bit like how some people say "everything happens for a reason" (in this sense reason points to a purpose), whereas I'm more of the mind that no, most things more or less happen for no particular reason (ie.: serving no particular purpose).

I would argue that it's not exactly clear whether you could even say that evolution itself has a "purpose". It's just something that happens, given a bunch of organisms competing for resources.

emotions give reasons to live and reasons to end life.

there is no purpose without emotions.

From a purely rational point of view, isn't it safer to assume that by default every element of our species is purposeful unless proven otherwise ?

No more "purposeful" than a bag of chemicals, or molecules in a gas, bumping into each other at random, really.

There have been studies that have associated emotion with decision making - people who, for some reason, lack an emotional state, find it basically impossible to make a decision.

That’s interesting. Any chance you remember which study it was?

I wish I did. I'll take a look later and see if I can dig them up.

It's from a book by Antonio Damasio called Descartes' Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

The first known case is Phineas Gage, but I'm pretty sure Damasio documented more contemporary patients he had studied live (been a while since I read this book).

Phineas Gage is a terrible example: he suffered incredible frontal lobe injuries. Neuroanatomy is much more complex than "part A performs job X", but the frontal lobe is particularly important in executive functions. More caudal structures are more closely associated with emotion, in general.

Damasio bases his conclusions on his own patients, not Phineas Gage, who is provided as a famous example for historical context. The only reason I'm mentioning only him by name is I remember his name and I do not remember the names of Damasio's patients. I actually think he doesn't even give their real names since they're patients and subject to confidentiality laws.

Fair enough! I'm not familiar with the book.

Not OP but I also looked into it and agree: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2019.0001...

context on what kind of decision, at that time of day or night, under what mental conditions.. would be very telling.. too broad as stated

> BUT: Your psychology was designed for a world of small-group aggression. Not a world of nukes. This mismatch means that your intuitions are not always optimal guides. Balancing emotions for group-aggression with cold reason is key over the next days and, possibly, years.

I think it’s problematic to reduce human emotions and the human experience to mere cause/effect. Is the Mona Lisa paint on a canvas, a representation of one man’s artistic expression? Or is it a window into the soul of humanity? It can be dangerous to overly simplify consciousness.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1498199978640084993.html

There seems to be an oblique critique of people that are suddenly pro-intervention and pro-war that are classified as traditional anti-war/peacenik.

This analysis may be true, but seems to be trending here because of that undercurrent running through discussions of Russia/Ukraine.

I do not think this is some irrational fear stirring within people in the abstract sense. There are very good reasons to see this as far more than just another regional conflict.

Ukraine is a line in the sand against the very idea of modern authoritarianism. What has been occurring for the last 10 years politically is a disturbing trend towards authoritarianism. China is now much more authoritarian under Xi. "Populism" movements with leaders openly admiring Putin.

Putin is the perverse hero of these ambitious strongmen.

Putin's cult of personality among wannabe far right wing movements is a disturbing trend undermining not just some idealistic dream of true liberal democracy, but even the more mundane functional republic we generally have.

Here we have Putin nakedly expressing aggression, as a sort of apex achievement of decades of psy-ops, "fomenting despair", and other KGB manipulations.

What's important here is not to just rebuke Putin's ambitions in the realist/actual political and power sense, in the immediate sense. What is important here is to destroy this god of the dangerous radical far right, embarrass his armies, shame him, show him impotent and powerless before a nascent Ukrainian national identity that should have no fighting chance.

As an interesting allude performing the following substitutions and the content reads exactly the same with exactly the same result, because it isn't about war but behavior.

    "war" => "writing JavaScript"
    "cold war" => "age of software"
    locations => JavaScript framework names

human psyche rhymes in time

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