Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

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I believe emotion is useless because it is largely a distraction. By this I mean that if there are reasons other than emotional to take a course of action, the positive enforcement of emotion to push you in that direction is unnecessary. However, if there are no reasons other than emotional in order to undertake an action, that's a good indicator that the action is not a good path to take.

This doesn't mean that an action which we are compelled to undertake for emotional reasons is necessarily bad, merely that the emotional justification alone is not enough. Same with when we are compelled not to and negative emotions.

Emotion just serves to muddy the waters. I certainly agree with your position that it had an evolutionary advantage at one stage, however I think that has run its course. Frequently human society appears to be little more than an orgy of unthinking, emotionally charged activity. People think less and feel more, and they are guided by these emotions more than by their rational thoughts, to the extent that normal people even think at all.

I think that this is a bad thing. Look at our politics and advertisements, or more generally our levers of compulsion, what largely are the appeals in these arenas designed to target? Our emotions, because this is an extremely effective path for manipulation, the vast majority of humankind is enormously weak to this kind of thing. I believe there is value in making a conscious effort to reject this paradigm.

You may be very different from the typical person, but most people do not exhaustively record their actions, observe consequences, compare with goals, reflect, plan new actions, etc. This is because we already have a good part of this built into our hardware, so to speak.

We build a set of beliefs and act them out. Emotions are the feedback mechanism we use to determine whether the beliefs are serving us well enough to reach our goals. Many people stop there, I agree.

Higher-level individuals capable of greater introspection are aware that their initial belief system, as a child, was largely programmed by parents, relatives, friends, etc. These people monitor their beliefs and adjust them appropriately (e.g. getting angry about somebody not acting the way I'd like them to is pointless, so I'm going to change my belief), or they adjust the world (e.g. scientists researching medicines, engineers building things or software etc.)

EDIT To do so without taking advantage of our emotional processing subsystems would be very exhausting and tiring. I think it's also impossible to escape this characteristic of your humanity; you can learn to suppress your emotions but then you run the risk of not dealing with the cognitive dissonance that caused them in the first place, and this is very dangerous because in effect you are suppressing reality and disconnecting yourself from the world (I'm guessing this is a similar process to how people like the Unabomber create their dangerous belief systems - by ignoring reality they don't like).

I think the problem is not emotions -- the problem is the lack of awareness people have for the role emotions play in our lives, and their options for responding to the emotions (emotions are not facts because beliefs are not facts, yet the vast majority of people act on the basis of their emotions being facts about reality).

Actually no.

Emotions help us by allowing quick shortcuts in decision. Without them a person loses ability to think within normal limits. Remember last time you wrote your signature on a contract. Imagine taking half an hour to write your signature ? Impossible, well without emotion you will completely rationally debate whether or not to use blue, red or black pen, which ink color is better, etc.

Here is a quote:

For 30 minutes the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about. "He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop," Damasio wrote.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/feeling-our-way-to-decision-2...

Knowing when to keep your emotions in check is another thing.

I wish that went more in depth. It seems like a metareasoning reminder that taking time to decide is inefficient would turn into a quick choice. Unless someone without emotions is somehow incapable of picking random numbers.

> " Unless someone without emotions is somehow incapable of picking random numbers."

My wife once suffered from a mental illness that nerfed her emotions. I noticed her once, standing immobile in the kitchen. She'd been there for about 5 minutes. She wanted to make a peanut butter sandwich, but couldn't decide whether to get the knife or the bread first.

Someone without emotions is incapable of caring enough to make the decision. They might get stuck on the decision as to which color pen to use, and random numbers wouldn't help -- they wouldn't care enough to decide "I should just use an RNG because this decision is arbitrary". Someone with normal emotions would recognize that pen color doesn't matter while signing the contract matters; it is the emotion of caring that makes you capable of deciding that one decision isn't worth the effort while another is.

As NY Times columnist David Brooks once wrote, "People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth."

This is legitimately interesting but in the end it's very much away from the original point. Okay, caring/having motivation matters immensely. Even if you practice and learn logical prioritizing you still need to care enough to implement it. You won't get anything done if you see no problem with sitting still for hours on end.

But almost all other emotions can be ignored. When people talk about making decisions without emotion they mean without fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, trust, anticipation, surprise. You don't need any of those to arrive at a solid decision. Having a goal is something else. As far as wikipedia is concerned "Motivation is related to, but distinct from, emotion."

> "When people talk about making decisions without emotion they mean [list]"

This is exactly the kind of point-missing people engage in when they talk about decisions or rational thought without emotion. They recognize how some emotions can be distracting, without recognizing how some emotions (even the same ones) can be extremely useful. They say things like "almost all other emotions can be ignored" because they don't have a good grasp of what "almost all other emotions" are or the role they take in cognition.

Emotions like surprise, curiosity, and frustration are incredibly useful for rational thought -- they help you realize that some particular line of inquiry is worth pursuing. Emotions make you care about getting something right, or finding a hidden answer, or solving a mystery. Emotions can positively or negatively affect your level of attentiveness, as well as memory formation. Even supposedly bad emotions like anger can serve to focus your attention on "high value" problems (problems often get solved because people are angry or annoyed enough to direct their energy to solving them.)

You actually do need emotions to arrive at a solid decision -- some in making value judgments at the point of decision, others during the analytical processes leading up to the decision. The key is to have a healthy level of emotion contributing to your rational process.

> "I believe emotion is useless"

Some time ago, my wife suffered from an illness that nerfed her emotions. It was surprising just how much her ability to reason degraded.

Reasoning depends heavily upon emotional responses like feeling uncomfortable, surprised, curious, or frustrated by the data / facts / information. One with reduced emotions becomes disinterested; they simply stop caring about understanding. They stop caring enough to work through difficult problems. They don't care enough to search for better data or better ideas.

I would agree that it's unhealthy to be guided by emotion in the sense of "I feel this is true" or "I believe this because I want to". This sort of emotion is mostly a distraction from rationality. But it's entirely healthy to be guided by emotion in the sense of "I care about getting this right" or "I'm bothered by these details not fitting". Without that sort of emotion to push you into rationality, you end up settling for weak, halfhearted, and ultimately irrational explanations.

> there are reasons other than emotional to take a course of action

Which reasons? Why would you choose one action over another if no emotions are associated with any outcome?

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