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People aren't rational actors for a reason: Sometimes things are easy to argue for but aren't that great in practice. And so by following your heart instead of

People aren't rational actors for a reason: Sometimes things are easy to argue for but aren't that great in practice. And so by following your heart instead of your head, you sometimes make seemingly illogical but objectively better decisions. And I think that there is a case to be made about how C++ is efficient in theory, while C is effective in practice.

DarkKomunalec 9y ago
You hit my pet peeve right on the head - our instincts, such as fear of the dark, not wanting to touch dead bodies, etc., may be irrational, but there's usually a good reason we have them, and going against them without first understanding them is what is irrational. I still vastly prefer C++ over C though :P
kbenson 9y ago
> And so by following your heart instead of your head, you sometimes make seemingly illogical but objectively better decisions. And sometimes you make seemingly illogical decisions that end up being objectively worse decisions. The problem is that we don't really have a way to quantify our emotions usefully, which means we can use them accurately and are forced to allow for enormous amounts of error in our calculations when we provide any level of significance to them. That's why they are often seen as detrimental to rational decisions, not because they don't matter (obviously emotions do), but because including them sometimes leaves us no better off than flipping a coin (are the downsides really that bad, or is your fear of change in this instance vastly overwhelming the other considerations, and in an unwarranted way that you aren't entirely aware of?).
- strictfp 9y ago
  While you have a point that they might sometimes be counter-productive, I think that emotions are decision drivers which operate on a higher abstraction level and are a way for the mind to compile vasts amounts of experience and deliberation into a single really fast circuit able to perform split-second decisions. So I think that they are mostly correct. But it's really too bad that we cannot retoractively introspect them and quantify their grounds.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I agree, but possibly in a different way. The idea of interoception[1] (which I'm not sure how accepted it is) basically means that your feeling are just your body using a heuristic to assign a feeling to a physical state of your body (that is, there is no universal feeling for anger, just a physiological response you've trained your brain to think of as the concept of anger. Some culture's literally do not have certain feelings). Your body is changing physical states based on some subconscious reasoning (often remembered response), and your brain is then interpreting that physiological state broadly and assigning an emotion to it, and it doesn't always get it right (which is why we get angry or anxious sometimes and aren't exactly sure why). If that theory is true (not sure, I literally just learned about it this morning[1]), your emotions do have weight in something like this, but it's filtered through multiple lossy abstractions and has a propensity for false positives. That's a much less rosy interpretation of how useful they are, and if true, means we might be far better off trying to cultivate a better understanding of the nuances that are causing those reactions and assessing them rationally (to the degree possible) than to using the lossy abstraction itself with any significant weight. 1: http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/index.php/research-themes-projects/interoception/ http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/index.php/research-themes... 2: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia
thehardsphere 9y ago
What you're describing is actually rational behavior. You're describing the difference between what you'll imagine beforehand makes more sense vs. what you know will actually work afterwards. The key difference is that you know more than you did in the latter case, so your descisions later have more information to guide them and thus are more likely to be correct. To think you understood everything before you started and insist on sticking to that after you find it's not working out isn't rational, it's stubborn.

DarkKomunalec 9y ago

You hit my pet peeve right on the head - our instincts, such as fear of the dark, not wanting to touch dead bodies, etc., may be irrational, but there's usually a good reason we have them, and going against them without first understanding them is what is irrational. I still vastly prefer C++ over C though :P

kbenson 9y ago

> And so by following your heart instead of your head, you sometimes make seemingly illogical but objectively better decisions. And sometimes you make seemingly illogical decisions that end up being objectively worse decisions. The problem is that we don't really have a way to quantify our emotions usefully, which means we can use them accurately and are forced to allow for enormous amounts of error in our calculations when we provide any level of significance to them. That's why they are often seen as detrimental to rational decisions, not because they don't matter (obviously emotions do), but because including them sometimes leaves us no better off than flipping a coin (are the downsides really that bad, or is your fear of change in this instance vastly overwhelming the other considerations, and in an unwarranted way that you aren't entirely aware of?).

strictfp 9y ago
While you have a point that they might sometimes be counter-productive, I think that emotions are decision drivers which operate on a higher abstraction level and are a way for the mind to compile vasts amounts of experience and deliberation into a single really fast circuit able to perform split-second decisions. So I think that they are mostly correct. But it's really too bad that we cannot retoractively introspect them and quantify their grounds.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I agree, but possibly in a different way. The idea of interoception[1] (which I'm not sure how accepted it is) basically means that your feeling are just your body using a heuristic to assign a feeling to a physical state of your body (that is, there is no universal feeling for anger, just a physiological response you've trained your brain to think of as the concept of anger. Some culture's literally do not have certain feelings). Your body is changing physical states based on some subconscious reasoning (often remembered response), and your brain is then interpreting that physiological state broadly and assigning an emotion to it, and it doesn't always get it right (which is why we get angry or anxious sometimes and aren't exactly sure why). If that theory is true (not sure, I literally just learned about it this morning[1]), your emotions do have weight in something like this, but it's filtered through multiple lossy abstractions and has a propensity for false positives. That's a much less rosy interpretation of how useful they are, and if true, means we might be far better off trying to cultivate a better understanding of the nuances that are causing those reactions and assessing them rationally (to the degree possible) than to using the lossy abstraction itself with any significant weight. 1: http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/index.php/research-themes-projects/interoception/ http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/index.php/research-themes... 2: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia

thehardsphere 9y ago

What you're describing is actually rational behavior. You're describing the difference between what you'll imagine beforehand makes more sense vs. what you know will actually work afterwards. The key difference is that you know more than you did in the latter case, so your descisions later have more information to guide them and thus are more likely to be correct. To think you understood everything before you started and insist on sticking to that after you find it's not working out isn't rational, it's stubborn.