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Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situation

Something life and then later therapy has taught me is that intellect can paper over a lot of shortcomings, but it’s just paper. At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. And you stunt your growth (personal or organizational) if you try to pretend it isn’t the case. The problem with intellectualizing is that it’s very good at employing itself to avoid all other options. If you get too old pretending otherwise, the road back is full of brambles and many would rather double down than accept it. Once you understand this it’s easy to see the hollowness in what Rand offers, if it wasn’t already patently obvious to you before.

kibwen 2y ago
> At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this. I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them. We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description. And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.
  - hannasanarion 2y ago
    Thinking Fast and Slow's biggest issues are in the middle chapters that rely heavily on priming research, which has been pretty thoroughly disproven since the book's release. The general gist of the core idea: that there are multiple modes of thinking and some of them are more likely to produce the most rational decisions than others in a given circumstance, is pretty trivially true. I think where Kahneman's book does harm is in the implication (intended or otherwise) that "fast thinking" is bad. It's not. Thinking is expensive in time, attention, effort, and skill. We have instincts and emotional reactions for good reasons, they help us navigate crises when there isn't time for deep thought, and they are the consequences that reverberate through the complex web of interpersonal relations that makes up society. Your note about anger management is really interesting though. I think there may be a tendency for people to generalize emotions that they feel into flavors that are more externalizable and less actionable. Vulnerability and betrayal are things that inspire changes in behavior, like building up defenses or reorienting loyalties, but when you're angry, well then you're just angry, and the only thing that will make you stop being angry is the world being different. I think there's another version that I experience often, where I see my partner doing cool fun things with other people, and my brain triggers jealousy, which like anger is externalized and inflictive. If I slow down and spend some time with that feeling and drill down into it, I usually conclude that what I'm actually feeling is envy, which is more actionable: i can go get/do the thing that I am envious of (like make a plan to do the cool fun thing with my partner or somebody else in the future) and then I won't be envious anymore, without having to make the world change for me.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    > We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them This is much better covered in Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He goes into detail on when this happens and when it doesn't. What studies have shown (and jives well with my experience): For topics you believe involve morality, this is precisely what happens: You make the decision, and the rationale follows. It happens so fast even you believe the rationale comes first. One of the ways they tested it was by showing that moral decisions tend to have no cognitive load. If you ask someone something that requires cognitive load (e.g. analyzing some data), they slow down significantly while multitasking with trivial activities (e.g. putting lots of food in an organized way in the fridge). But when posed with issues of morality, they show no slowdown.
- 8bitsrule 2y ago
  > any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable. Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might be, for some if not all.
  - orwin 2y ago
    The issue is that what we often think as our 'reason' is often rather post-hoc rationalisation, which then becomes our beliefs, as our brain hate being wrong. People who can easily and often say 'i was wrong, it's my bad' without throwing shade at other people are nice. People who, during an argument, can say 'you're right, sorry'? Keep them close, or better, marry them.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  we spend most of our lives playing iterated prisoners dilemmas, a game which presumably can be cracked by some godlike intellect, but which is far beyond the capabilities of our current philosophy. Emotions, put well to use, do well at this task.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    That’s probably why we evolved emotions in the first place. First to create and protect your own offspring and then to allow allegiances against the elements and other creatures.
    - klank 2y ago
      To add to the conversation: If it is accurate to consider the philosophical concept of a valence as a fundamental building block of emotions, then I think I'm fairly comfortable going a step further from just the evolutionary explanation of emotions to a more positive directive around emotional development within ones self and the support of that development within others as being a deeply moral action as well.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable. What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an emotional process is something an individual might spend a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a problem in the first place. To suggest that people are fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  > any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment, coming at it from a neurological viewpoint. The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are responsible for our decision making. While I understand that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers' sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the actual scientific research where they came from) of how our decisions are heavily influenced by a lot of various things, in the context of your comment specifically - the processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call "emotions".
randysalami 2y ago
I think this exact phenomenon is shown pretty well in the series, Better Call Saul with Chuck McGill.
klank 2y ago
I had what I thought to be an immensely successful 25+ career and personal life based upon my intellect. And, as you mention, I grew older, wiser, and realized it was not at all what I thought it was. In my professional life alone I have caused immense harm. Indirectly, sure, but no less real, serious, harm and death. Being unable to escape this fact has caused depression and massive disruption to my personal life. But I am not unhappy that I have learned what I have, about myself, about this world. It's horrible, but a more clear, diverse understanding is worth the pain. And as a person, even with the pain, I'm far more comfortable with my newfound place in the world and I'm a far, far better person to the people around me.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I can't imagine what your career was. I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my head to think of any way I might have even slightly worsened someone's life.
  - klank 2y ago
    I (along with others) created pricing optimization software for the multi-family housing industry.
    - wileydragonfly 2y ago
      Let me gather some pitch forks..
    - readthenotes1 2y ago
      A good apology requires: - overt recognition that I have harmed someone else - following through on whatever reparations I can make to undo part of the harm - actively trying to change myself to avoid making the same type of mistake again. -- It sounds like you have taken this to heart.
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      As someone who has dabbled in real estate, this doesn't sound all that bad. Yes, some (most? not sure) such companies did some wrong stuff - and perhaps you were involved (you don't really say, so I'm guessing). But the category itself? It seems fine as long as they follow the regulations related to price fixing. When you said you caused great harm in your professional life, I was thinking more along the lines of "being a terrible person to work with", which is probably more in line with the original person you responded to was thinking.
zerealshadowban 2y ago
>the road back is full of brambles v.good image, thank you
zpeti 2y ago
I think you have to consider personality types when discussing things like this. Rand seems to me like she probably had Asperger’s, which explains why she is attracted to rationality, and her heroes are like that too. That works for some people. I read Nietzsche after rand and I thought his philosophy had some similarities to rand but from a more emotional perspective. They say very similar things about being yourself and being selfish, but one from rationality the other from emotions. For me the difference between musk and Steve jobs demonstrates this. One is an engineer entrepreneur the other an artist entrepreneur. Both incredibly successful but couldn’t be more different, but of course both are assholes too and took what they wanted from the world.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time. That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable. Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look. And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.
  - godsinhisheaven 2y ago
    People certainly can make themselves neurodivergent, but I think most people are born that way. I think there are lots of reasons why CS and tech at large is full of neurodivergent people, but I think people are joinging because they are neurodivergent, not the other way around. That being said, there are lots of neurodivergent people in finance and (the higher levels of) politics, they're just mostly psychopaths.
  - 2y ago
BosunoB 2y ago
I fell into Rand in high school and it took me a few years to climb out. The problem with believing in the primacy of reason is that it's incredibly distortionary. In reality, we all think and reason with respect to our ego and our emotions, and so if you believe that you are engaging in pure reason, it can lead you to pave over the ways in which your emotions are affecting your line of thought. In this way it can quickly become a very dogmatic, self-reinforcing way of thinking. The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but instead by learning to recognize and respect your own emotional responses.
- autoexec 2y ago
  Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but some of us are very good at quickly coming up with justifications and rationalizations for what we've just done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in control.
- wintermutestwin 2y ago
  Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness. The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the resultant rational failures.
- sevensor 2y ago
  Yeah, “think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that means you’re doing it wrong” is a heck of a way to run a school of philosophy. It’s no wonder she hates Plato, he’s constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Why did she (explicitly) hate Plato so much?
    - Avicebron 2y ago
      > The "extreme realists" or Platonists, . . . hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.) I think the concepts of forms and shapes rubbed her the wrong way. Here's a quote from Piekoff that I think explains why much better than what Rand would have written. > Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal "man," they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.
chubot 2y ago
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou This applies to so many things ... people don't remember what happened, or what's true. They remember how they felt! [1] And it makes from a psychological perspective - emotions are basically an evolutionary shortcut for remembering. You can compress a 5- or 10-year experience into an imprecise feeling [1] For anybody who thinks they are rational or objective, try keeping a journal for a few decades, and then reading it. Your memory is very selective!

kibwen 2y ago

> At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings. My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this. I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

hinkley 2y ago
I know some people are pushing back on Thinking, Fast and Slow’s assertions but whether everyone’s brains work that way or not, there’s at least a visible minority of people whose brains do, and I’m among them. We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them that doesn’t make us sound insane, or like five year olds. It’s part explanation/excuse and part description, but presented as description. And if you’ve read anything on anger management, there’s a split second where the angry individual is experiencing some other emotion, like vulnerability or betrayal, before they sublimate it into anger. The problem is in how fast and to what degree they perform the substitution, and often even they miss the event, which takes away their own agency in the response. Recovery involves clawing back that agency.
- hannasanarion 2y ago
  Thinking Fast and Slow's biggest issues are in the middle chapters that rely heavily on priming research, which has been pretty thoroughly disproven since the book's release. The general gist of the core idea: that there are multiple modes of thinking and some of them are more likely to produce the most rational decisions than others in a given circumstance, is pretty trivially true. I think where Kahneman's book does harm is in the implication (intended or otherwise) that "fast thinking" is bad. It's not. Thinking is expensive in time, attention, effort, and skill. We have instincts and emotional reactions for good reasons, they help us navigate crises when there isn't time for deep thought, and they are the consequences that reverberate through the complex web of interpersonal relations that makes up society. Your note about anger management is really interesting though. I think there may be a tendency for people to generalize emotions that they feel into flavors that are more externalizable and less actionable. Vulnerability and betrayal are things that inspire changes in behavior, like building up defenses or reorienting loyalties, but when you're angry, well then you're just angry, and the only thing that will make you stop being angry is the world being different. I think there's another version that I experience often, where I see my partner doing cool fun things with other people, and my brain triggers jealousy, which like anger is externalized and inflictive. If I slow down and spend some time with that feeling and drill down into it, I usually conclude that what I'm actually feeling is envy, which is more actionable: i can go get/do the thing that I am envious of (like make a plan to do the cool fun thing with my partner or somebody else in the future) and then I won't be envious anymore, without having to make the world change for me.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > We do many things based entirely on intuition, and then afterward gin up a reason for having done them This is much better covered in Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He goes into detail on when this happens and when it doesn't. What studies have shown (and jives well with my experience): For topics you believe involve morality, this is precisely what happens: You make the decision, and the rationale follows. It happens so fast even you believe the rationale comes first. One of the ways they tested it was by showing that moral decisions tend to have no cognitive load. If you ask someone something that requires cognitive load (e.g. analyzing some data), they slow down significantly while multitasking with trivial activities (e.g. putting lots of food in an organized way in the fridge). But when posed with issues of morality, they show no slowdown.
8bitsrule 2y ago
> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable. Hopes for mutual checks and balances between the two might be, for some if not all.
- orwin 2y ago
  The issue is that what we often think as our 'reason' is often rather post-hoc rationalisation, which then becomes our beliefs, as our brain hate being wrong. People who can easily and often say 'i was wrong, it's my bad' without throwing shade at other people are nice. People who, during an argument, can say 'you're right, sorry'? Keep them close, or better, marry them.
QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
we spend most of our lives playing iterated prisoners dilemmas, a game which presumably can be cracked by some godlike intellect, but which is far beyond the capabilities of our current philosophy. Emotions, put well to use, do well at this task.
- hinkley 2y ago
  That’s probably why we evolved emotions in the first place. First to create and protect your own offspring and then to allow allegiances against the elements and other creatures.
  - klank 2y ago
    To add to the conversation: If it is accurate to consider the philosophical concept of a valence as a fundamental building block of emotions, then I think I'm fairly comfortable going a step further from just the evolutionary explanation of emotions to a more positive directive around emotional development within ones self and the support of that development within others as being a deeply moral action as well.
BeetleB 2y ago
> What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable. What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an emotional process is something an individual might spend a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a problem in the first place. To suggest that people are fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.
drdaeman 2y ago
> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment, coming at it from a neurological viewpoint. The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are responsible for our decision making. While I understand that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers' sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the actual scientific research where they came from) of how our decisions are heavily influenced by a lot of various things, in the context of your comment specifically - the processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call "emotions".

randysalami 2y ago

I think this exact phenomenon is shown pretty well in the series, Better Call Saul with Chuck McGill.

klank 2y ago

I had what I thought to be an immensely successful 25+ career and personal life based upon my intellect. And, as you mention, I grew older, wiser, and realized it was not at all what I thought it was. In my professional life alone I have caused immense harm. Indirectly, sure, but no less real, serious, harm and death. Being unable to escape this fact has caused depression and massive disruption to my personal life. But I am not unhappy that I have learned what I have, about myself, about this world. It's horrible, but a more clear, diverse understanding is worth the pain. And as a person, even with the pain, I'm far more comfortable with my newfound place in the world and I'm a far, far better person to the people around me.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I can't imagine what your career was. I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my head to think of any way I might have even slightly worsened someone's life.
- klank 2y ago
  I (along with others) created pricing optimization software for the multi-family housing industry.
  - wileydragonfly 2y ago
    Let me gather some pitch forks..
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    A good apology requires: - overt recognition that I have harmed someone else - following through on whatever reparations I can make to undo part of the harm - actively trying to change myself to avoid making the same type of mistake again. -- It sounds like you have taken this to heart.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    As someone who has dabbled in real estate, this doesn't sound all that bad. Yes, some (most? not sure) such companies did some wrong stuff - and perhaps you were involved (you don't really say, so I'm guessing). But the category itself? It seems fine as long as they follow the regulations related to price fixing. When you said you caused great harm in your professional life, I was thinking more along the lines of "being a terrible person to work with", which is probably more in line with the original person you responded to was thinking.

zerealshadowban 2y ago

>the road back is full of brambles v.good image, thank you

zpeti 2y ago

I think you have to consider personality types when discussing things like this. Rand seems to me like she probably had Asperger’s, which explains why she is attracted to rationality, and her heroes are like that too. That works for some people. I read Nietzsche after rand and I thought his philosophy had some similarities to rand but from a more emotional perspective. They say very similar things about being yourself and being selfish, but one from rationality the other from emotions. For me the difference between musk and Steve jobs demonstrates this. One is an engineer entrepreneur the other an artist entrepreneur. Both incredibly successful but couldn’t be more different, but of course both are assholes too and took what they wanted from the world.

hinkley 2y ago
I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time. That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable. Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look. And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.
- godsinhisheaven 2y ago
  People certainly can make themselves neurodivergent, but I think most people are born that way. I think there are lots of reasons why CS and tech at large is full of neurodivergent people, but I think people are joinging because they are neurodivergent, not the other way around. That being said, there are lots of neurodivergent people in finance and (the higher levels of) politics, they're just mostly psychopaths.
- 2y ago

BosunoB 2y ago

I fell into Rand in high school and it took me a few years to climb out. The problem with believing in the primacy of reason is that it's incredibly distortionary. In reality, we all think and reason with respect to our ego and our emotions, and so if you believe that you are engaging in pure reason, it can lead you to pave over the ways in which your emotions are affecting your line of thought. In this way it can quickly become a very dogmatic, self-reinforcing way of thinking. The ironic thing is that becoming a better thinker is not done by studying logic, but instead by learning to recognize and respect your own emotional responses.

autoexec 2y ago
Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but some of us are very good at quickly coming up with justifications and rationalizations for what we've just done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in control.
wintermutestwin 2y ago
Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness. The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the resultant rational failures.
sevensor 2y ago
Yeah, “think for yourself, and if you disagree with me that means you’re doing it wrong” is a heck of a way to run a school of philosophy. It’s no wonder she hates Plato, he’s constantly challenging people in their settled beliefs.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Why did she (explicitly) hate Plato so much?
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    > The "extreme realists" or Platonists, . . . hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.) I think the concepts of forms and shapes rubbed her the wrong way. Here's a quote from Piekoff that I think explains why much better than what Rand would have written. > Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal "man," they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.

chubot 2y ago

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou This applies to so many things ... people don't remember what happened, or what's true. They remember how they felt! [1] And it makes from a psychological perspective - emotions are basically an evolutionary shortcut for remembering. You can compress a 5- or 10-year experience into an imprecise feeling [1] For anybody who thinks they are rational or objective, try keeping a journal for a few decades, and then reading it. Your memory is very selective!