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Comment by procaryote | Hacker News Reader

> The reduced engagement with the material reduces the emotional weight of the whole line of action. You mind is an engine that is fuelled by emotion. Without any emotion, you don’t think. Rather, you try to imitate thinking efficiently.

This doesn't sound true and they don't seem to offer any support for the claim.

There's a whole host of emotion-driven cognitive biases, where an effective counter is to reduce the emotional weight of the whole line of action.

Of course, to their credit, it's only by remembering those biases that I could see their error

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The first thing that happened in your mind when you read that sentence is (1) a bad feeling. That then triggered (2) a rational, conscious thought that interpreted that bad feeling: "this feels bad because it's not true, here are the reasons why it is not true.

There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 thinking etc).

There is no way to stop the emotional "thought" from happening before the "rational thought". What you can do is build a loop that self reflects to understand why that emotion was triggered (sometimes, instead of "this feels bad because it's wrong", it's "this feels bad because it points to an inconvenient truth" or "I am hungry and everything I am reading feels bad")

That's very hard to know without being in an FMRI machine while reading, which I wasn't, sadly.

Just functionally, it seems reasonable that something happened before that bad feeling to trigger it, e.g. "trying to fit this with already known things, and finding it doesn't".

this isn't a "it depends on what computation happens in this specific case" question, this is a "how does human cognition work".

Every website you visit has the payload delivered over the network before any JS is parsed. It has to, there's no other way. Same with intuition followed by rational thought

I'm not sure human cognition is that clear cut or linear.

I guess if you define all rapid cognition as Intuition and all slower conscious cognition as Rational Thought, you're right by definition, but while that might provide a happy feeling, it might not give you any useful insights upon deeper inspection.

For instance, it doesn't support or disprove the "less emotion is bad for thought" idea

Isn't your argument a support of his claim?

If emotions did not weigh on recall, surely there would be no "emotion-driven cognitive biases"

If the claim was "reducing the emotional weight of the action makes your thinking worse" – No.

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