Feeling Rational

It seems to me that social consensus accepts expression of strong feelings by women, just not by men.

Is it actually acceptance or just condescending dismissal?

Since they aren't part of the web of cause-and-effect (so they might be epiphenomenal), are norms impossible to be irrational about?

I don't think it's inevitable that having emotion causes irrationality, but I think there is a tendency for it to cloud your mind and restraining yourself is a good idea. Maybe after calmly examining things you can say to yourself "This appears to be an optimum situation in which to freak out".

I agree that strong emotions can be very appropriate to many situations, but also think there is wisdom in the usual expectation that bias is correlated with strength of emotions. So it is crucial for us to develop better cues for distinguishing more versus less biased emotions.

Well, at the very least women constitute half of society, it's certainly acceptance within that half. I actually think that it's actually acceptance more broadly though. Women are arguably not accepted my men in general, but in so far as they are accepted it is only in a few narrow domains, primarily science, engineering, and big business that women do best by adhering to men's norms. Actually though, emotional suppression is only normative among men in science, in the military, and in low status positions. Enthusiasm (irrational exuberance) is the ultimate business virtue. If one doesn't claim a level of confidence that can't possibly be justified one is simply not a contender for venture capital or angel investor money. In a hierarchy, one's not suitable for upper management or sales. Beyond that, almost all social elites are, in large measure, "emotional expression professionals". Actors and actresses are the most obvious example of this, but I would say that this is also true of athletes, artists, and other performers and entertainers, religious leaders, and politicians. Al Gore was dismissed with a characterization of "wooden". Hitler practiced his emotional expressions for hours in front of a mirror.

Great points Michael. IE Clinton and "I feel your pain". . .

This is one of those rare moments where the usually horribly heterodox economist, me, defends orthodox economic theory. So, looked at very closely, orthodox microeconomic says nothing at all about peoples' preferences themselves, which presumably involve their emotional reactions to various things. What is assumed is certain things about these preferences, that people know what they are, that they exhibit continuity, that they have a degree of internal consistency in the sense of exhibiting transitivity, and it also makes people behave more "rationall" and exhibit continuous demand functions if their utility functions exhibit convexity. So, rationality is not about what your preferences are or the degree to which they are based on one's emotions. They are that one know what they are, that they have a degree of internal coherence or consistency, and the, the biggie, that people actually act on the basis of their real preferences.

A lot of the problems regarding "irrationality" involve people behaving in internally consistent manners, especially over time. Behavioral economists are now arguing it out whether one should deal with this via multiple personality (or preference systems) models or approaches that stress focusing on "rationality" and keeping mind one's "real" preferences. Thus, hyperbolic discounting involves "time inconsistency." I want things now that I shall regret having wanted so much later. I eat the candy bar now and wake up fat later, etc. etc. Is this a combat of two preference systems or just "irrationality," People like Matthew Rabin who tend to use the latter approch, in fact say that the goal is to have people be "rational," to know their own real preferences and to act on them. If they really do not mind being fat, then go ahead and eat the candy bar. But in any case, it is perfectly OK either way to have the caring about being fat or not caring about being fat to be based on one's emotional reactions. One should undertand one's own emotional reactions. That is rationality.

It seems to me that social consensus accepts expression of strong feelings by women, just not by men.

Traditionaly, women were thought inferior to men precisely because they were thought to have stronger feelings.

It is not thought wise to have anyone "emotional" in any position of importance.

But "emotional" is usually interpreted to mean that your feelings are easily swayed.

Your thoughts on this would profit a lot from some reading of recent research in neuroscience--specifically people like D'Amasio, LeDoux, and Ramachandran, Sacks (there are lots others, too). The idea that rationality begins with some 'asking how-the-world is' as if that act itself were not completely shot through with emotional responses is hopelessly naive. Without an emotional response, one could never even form the judgment that the world-is-any-particular way. The brain lesion studies on this are pretty clear; it's an emotional response that both triggers and suffuses the judgments we make about the way-the-world-is. For sure strong emotional responses can get in the way of other emotionally charged inferences (those that are typically thought of as canonically rational), but the whole opposition of emotions and rationality, as if they were in any way exclusive, is wrong headed. There are some emotional responses to situations that we call rational, and there are others that get in the way of those. The normative evaluation of the judgments must be left up to some other valuative metric--e.g., conducive to other emotional attitudes, etc. In a word, Hume was right, righter than even he knew.

As I see it, what's most important is to make a division between rationality and emotions in terms of where they fit in the equations. Rationality describes the equations, emotions provide a source of evidence that must be applied correctly. If an outcome makes me happy, that should make me desire that outcome more, but not make me think that outcome more likely than if it made me sad (unless, of course, I'm evaluating the probability that I will be motivated to do something).

Unfortunately, I think this model of mind is not how the human mind actually works. Emotions appear to change the equations, not their arguments, so eliminating emotions seems like an appropriate measure to increase the human brain's approximation of a rational process. Maybe you can allow yourself feel happy or sad at an outcome without it affecting the outcome, but getting to that point may require an unemotional transition period as you change your thinking to match that of a rational process.

Stephan, it is important to establish normative separation between the roles that emotions play in perception (which may be part of the process of establishing truth) and the roles that emotions play in motivation (which should not normatively affect what we believe to be true). Yes, it may be the same emotion doing both things. But that doesn't change the normative difference in the roles.

When I say "rationality begins with" I am talking about deriving the normative criterion, not about the brain's real-world temporal order of evaluation.

(And yes, I'm read up on neuroscience to the level you specified.)

It's my impression that men and women are permitted somewhat different sets of emotions--men are freer to show anger, women are freer to show sadness. And that showing emotion is more permitted now than it was a few decades ago.

As far as I can tell, it's possible to be emotional (or at least fairly emotional) and logical at the same time, so long as the emotion isn't territorial attachment to an idea.

Eliezer: It may be rational to (choose to) feel, but feelings are not rooted in reason. Reason is a consistency-based mechanism which we use to validate new information based on previously validated information, or to derive new hypotheses based on information we have already interned. One can reason with great skill, and one can know a great deal about the reasoning process in general, and yet one's conclusions may be false or irrelevant if one has not validated all of the basic assumptions one's reasoning ultimately depends on. But validating these most fundamental assumptions is difficult and time consuming, and is a task most of us do not tend to, as we instead scurry about to achieve our daily goals and objectives, which in turn we determine by applying reason to data and attitudes we have previously interned, which in turn are based ultimately upon basic premises which we have never thorougly investigated.

These are the thoughts that I get after reading your eulogy for your brother, Yehuda. I get the impression that you are too busy studying how to defeat death, to stop and think why death should be bad in the first place. Of course, to stop and think about it would mean opening yourself to the possibility that death might be acceptable after all, which in turn would threaten to annihilate your innermost motivations.

Think about it this way. The past 28 years of your life are already dead, as history is not something living. The future years of your life, meanwhile, have yet to come into existence. You have already lost all of your past; and as soon as you "gain" your future, you already lose it. All you are is but an ever-changing state; the "now" that you inhabit is but an instruction pointer in the registers of a machine that is continually executing instructions.

What do you care if the machine stops processing at any point? Do you think you will notice? Does a program's thread of execution notice when the OS swaps it out and resumes execution on another thread? Does a thread of execution notice if it is never resumed?

I'm not claiming that we are but software running on the hardware of the universe, but this is what you seem to posit; and if this is so, then death is no more terrible than it's terrible that the sky appears blue, or that the grasses appear green, or that the Sun appears yellow.

And yet, you seem to believe that death is somehow "horrible", so you are sad when it takes place; and you believe that other things are somehow "good", so you are happy when they happen. This seems to be at odds with the things-just-are view that you otherwise represent, and it tells me that these feelings of yours are based on something more fundamental, something more axiomatic than reason. Reason is a consistency vehicle; but these feelings of yours, they are. Reason may help provoke them, but they exist independently of reason. And indeed, such feelings are known to distort the reasoning process in people substantially, causing them to delay validation of critical basic assumptions, thus causing them to reach and stick by invalid conclusions even though their reasoning process may be sound. Garbage in, garbage out.

This reason-distorting effect is why emotions are thought of as at odds with reason. And with good reasons. :)

I agree with Mr Bider. Humans get their terminal values from a combination of genetic transmission and cultural transmission. The former has been recently called on this blog the thousand shards of desire. Most people, even most extremely intelligent people, use their intelligence pursuing the values that have been transmitted to them genetically and culturally. What I find more virtuous than raw intelligence is the willingness of the person to turn his intelligence on these values, to question every one searchingly and to be prepared to throw them all out if that is what his intelligence and his studies instruct him to do. (Actually, if you throw them all out, you run into a problem staying motivated, but this is not the place . . .)

How I choose to conquer death is to redefine "me" to include not only my intelligence but also the effects of that intelligence on the world, so that when my body dies and my intelligence ends, "I" continue. The death of a mind is not the end of the world.

It seems to me that the basic irrationality implicated here is the assumption that there is such a thing as rationality.

Alright, I just wanted to put that in a clever contenentalist sounding quip but didn't quite manage. What I mean is this: It (usually) makes sense to talk about beliefs being true or false. We can even talk about tendencies as being more or less inclined to reach true beliefs (given background assumptions about the distributions of such truths). However, implicit in this post and many of the comments that follow is the idea that rationality is some kind of discipline that can be followed and applied.

Or to put the point differently I think many people here are making the implicit assumption that there is some objectively correct way to evaluate evidence (over and above the constraint of simple logical consistency). However, it's an entirely contingent fact that the sorts of rules we use to predict events in the world around us (scientific induction) actually succeed instead of a world where counter-induction holds (the more times a simple seeming pattern has occurred in the past the less chance it will occur in the future).

Worse, even if you believe that there are some magic objective facts about what the 'right' epistemic responses are to evidence at best rationality is a term that can be applied to a particular description, not to a person or a person's actions. To see why note that I can always describe the same actions by an infinite number of possible rules. For instance suppose my friend asks his computer to spit out a random claim about number theory and decides to put total faith in it's truth despite a widely accepted supposed proof of the converse. Sounds super irrational but yet the same behavior is also equally well described as saying my friend was following the rule of believing claim X about number theory with probability 1 upon first consideration. Since claim X is in fact a theorem that rule is perfectly rational.

I agree that you don't have to throw out emotion to be rational. You just have to put it in its proper place. Logical analysis has to be given a higher priority in forming a good picture of events. But once you have done it, emotion is what powers your actions and words, and gives them meaning.

If I did not have millions of years of evolution making me hate death, it would be less meaningful to talk about how much we need cryonics. I would have to appeal to its usefulness in special cases (preserving great minds or useful workers) rather than advocating the abolition of preventable death. It would not be so emotional, or so urgent.

Ironically, the fact that it is so emotional is what leads people in our society to doubt it. They think it promises something they could not hope for it to deliver. Many of them have had to work through the pain of several nearby deaths already, and thus would have to question the assumptions (afterlife, nonpreventability, survival of the species, whatever) that helped them work through it to a state of acceptance.

I agree that it's not necessarily irrational to feel, but I think the way we feel is clearly irrational. For example, our emotions don't seem to work in a time-consistent manner, and we often later regret actions that we take based on strong emotions, when those emotions eventually fade away. If we could modify the way our emotions work cheaply and safely, I think many of us would probably take advantage of the opportunity. A rational agent wouldn't wish to modify its mind like that.

Here's another, more specific example. I sometimes feel a sense of schadenfreude when someone that I might be in status competition with publicly makes a mistake or suffers a setback of some kind. By itself, this feeling may not be irrational (except perhaps on a group level), but I simultaneously feel a disgust for myself for feeling this way, and wish that I could edit away this ugly emotion. (Until then, I have to spend some effort to keep myself from being overly critical of others.) Would anyone claim that these emotions together do not constitute irrationality?

"P. C. Hodgell said: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." "

That sounds very much like a quote from a Russian anarchist which was I think mentioned in one of Turgenev's books, possibly "Fathers and Sons". Here we go:

"Anything that can be broken, should be broken." ~Dmitri Pisarev

Solomon says: nothing new under the sun.

Rationality destroys emotions.

Not always.

But here is a way in which it happens: My friends sometimes have very strong emotions that generate behavior that is completely imoral, sometimes self-contradictory etc... The natural response in me used to be to get mad at them back, creating a circle of anger for a while, which eventually fades away. When this happens, usually the one with more social credence "wins" and does not have to concede whatever is at stake.

Now, enters rationality. My friend goes super angry about something. I know the emotion works in such and such way, and as such it blinds him from the irrationality of his behavior, and it's imorality. Therefore I do not feel so strongly against him anymore, for I understand what he does not, why he does not etc....

Since I understand him, hating him is no longer natural, for I've detached my conception of the awful moral act from my conception of the "agent" of the act, I understand that it was not him, but what Dennett calls floating reasons, that have done the job.

This is one of the ways reason can and does destroy emotions.

Someone who takes rationality-as-attire (like Roddenberry's Spock) would avoid strong emotions because they are superficially irrational.

I'm particularly interested in the idea of rational emotion promoted by Objectivism:

"Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss."

From the Ayn Rand Lexicon

Recently, there were rape allegations cast at Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. Some people in positions of power saw fit to expose identifying personal information about the accusers to the Internet and therefore, the world at large. This resulted in the accusers receiving numerous death threats and other harassment.

When safety can be destroyed by truth, should it be?

In my entire team of Engineers, the one common look I get is a Poker face. It appears that this kind of expression is "default", and showing emotion is something foreign. I wish people would be OK with just expressing themselves - how they feel about any particular situation.

Then, the truth would quite often be out on the table, and everybody can then deal with it [along with the consequences!]

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I think that the saying "What can be destroyed by truth, should be" is a little bit too black and white to work well in all aspects of life. For example, a clumsy and fat person who thinks he is actually rather agile, might be a lot happier with this false belief than if he were aware of the truth*. Of course it could be said that if he knew the truth, he would start to exercise and eventually become healthier, but that's not necessarily the case. Another example would be, that if a not-so-good-looking person thinks he looks good, he might be encouraged by that false belief to ask someone he likes for a date.

*Here when I talk about truth, I mean that how things are in the physical reality. ( whatever that may mean. )

Having read Feeling Good, I have a different view on emotions than those posed thus far in the comments.

Anger might be a valid response to the little goblin tying your shoes together, but the rational person asks, "Does it benefit me or hurt me to feel anger?" Anger is generally a maladaptive response in today's environment of tremendous punishments for physical violence, and that's beside the fact that it is an extremely unpleasant feeling.

Instrumental rationality, remember? If it prevents you from fulfilling your goals to feel x, then x is unwarranted.

In Eliezer's case, "It benefits me to feel sad because my brother died," is uncertain. Maybe it motivates him to work really hard at creating Friendly AI and is thus warranted, but the impression I get is that he was already doing that.

I almost hope he doesn't see this comment, but I'd like to see his response. I have a vague feeling of something crucial I overlooked.

Edit: It seems Amanojack expressed this sentiment earlier, and I didn't really need to post this. Oops.

Emotions can result in conclusions that do not arise rationally. You don't CHOOSE to be angry, and this anger can make your decision for you.

We are also very well acquainted with hindsight. We can look back on a situation that resolved itself in a way we would have avoided, if only we hadn't been so emotional. I really feel that the emotionless state is the default.

Interesting post. I think something like that happened to me - I was only glad when I was right, or at least thought I was right, but... Doesn't rationality in general diminish sadness over non-acute things? Sure, wars are awful no matter how rational or irrational you are, but... For example, dealing with the fact that The Universe Doesn't Care seems very troublesome for a lot of my peers, to the point where they push it away, same with genetically-determined intelligence.

Same with, as I've noticed, a seeming lack of empathy towards people. Not sure how to deal with that, as I want to be right, and correct others, even when they don't like it. Ah, the dilemmas... And I can't think of a third alternative either.

"our emotions arise from our models of reality. If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy"

Fallacy of the single cause. Knowledge of the physical fact of his being alive does not completely determine your response of being happy, many other things come into this, of which at least a few are non-rational. Maybe your brother is a convicted serial killer who recently escaped from detention, killed a few more people according to his old habits and is now reported to be alive only by virtue of having escaped a police hunt through the nearby forest (with officers ordered to shoot on sight). Yet still you may be happy to hear he's alive (and here comes the usual explanation people give, the real explanation) "because he's your brother". This is considered to be the most important factor in your being happy in this case - "because he's your brother" - and it encodes some non-rational baggage together with some arguably rational things (like an evolutionary preference to support the survival of your kin's genes etc.).

The fact is that any human preference results from multiple causes and at least one of those will always be non-rational (which is to say I don't know of even one single example where this was not the case) and will open said preference to being labelled "non-rational".

Reason is just a tool. Before you decide what to use the tool for, you have to have non-rational preferences about which things to even try to do. For example, first you have the non-rational desire to predict the future behaviour of physical systems with high accuracy and only afterwards do you employ rational methods to achieve that (which leads to science). The only rational part is what you're doing after you've established your fundamental goal. The fundamental goal itself can't be rational insofar as it can't be derived logically from any antecedents. Even if your desire to predict things was based on your desire to survive and even if the desire of the individual to survive could be justified on the basis of the evolutionary goal for the species to survive, you still end up at a point where you can no longer offer any justifications. Why should your species survive and not others? Maybe you think your species has the highest capacity of ensuring the survival of life-in-general in the universe for the longest time? But even then, why should life-in-general survive? Just because. Non-rationally. :)

I was talking to someone the other day about our treatment of sexual offenders. She seemed to be insinuating that I didn't care about the plight of the victims because by proposed solutions were all aimed at reducing sexual violence rather than punishing the offenders.

I told her that the injustices visited upon the victims of sexual abuse made me very angry, which made me passionate about fixing the problem. Having set my goal of reducing sexual violence, it behooved me not to let my anger at the perpetrator distract me from the task of achieving that goal. If I'm ever presented with a choice where I can either punish the perpetrator or help the victim (or future potential victims), I chose the latter. You can't always do both at the same time.

So I suppose emotions can be rational in that they can arise from truth, but they can also be very irrational in that they prevent winning your goals.

An interesting perspective on the validity of emotional states vis-à-vis Rationality.

I have something of a fear of heights. This fear is, I realize, irrational. Certainly, Being afraid of falling and the resultant injury or death is reasonable and potentially useful. However, fear when it is completely unfounded…

I remember a spring break some years back, where I learned to ski and enjoyed it very much indeed. I was, however, held back by my visceral reaction, whenever approaching a portion of the trail where I could not see my path of travel, part of my brain was absolutely convinced that I would find myself plunging into the yawning crevice which awaited me. This was irrational as I well knew that were the designers of ski resorts prone to leaving yawning crevasses laying about they would find a definite limitation in their repeat business.

“Nothing doing,” said my brain, “there is the veritable Grand Canyon just beyond that hillock, and I am locking the legs in ‘Snow Plow’ position until I see different!”

Related Einstein Quote: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

what about applying rationality to the emotional situations themselves? when your family member dies by virtue of someone elses mistake/accident, does rationality require (in its purest sense) that we evaluate the situation without the emotions that a family member often feels? if not, what if a third party "rationally" evaluates the situation differently? (e.g. "your family member was equally at fault") . Can two different viewpoints about the same event be rational, taking into account each decision maker's relative emotions (or lack thereof)?

A somewhat related, incredibly badass quote.

"...I hear some one of my audience say,... ...you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it..."

"...Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him..."

"...At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. "

-Frederick Douglass, black Abolitionist leader, in What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

(Related, Richard Rorty on a pragmatist/postmodernist approach to human rights, solidarity and empathy.)

(P.S. Considered posting this in Rationality Quotes first... but I hoped that the context of EY's essay might help the quote look less provocative/trollish for LW.)

What is it with you and shoelaces?

Emotions, like any sensory input, can serve as a source of information to be rationally inspected and used to form beliefs about the external world. It is only when emotions interfere with the process of interpreting information that they become detrimental to rationality.

I don't think this covers the role of emotions in regard to instrumental rationality. The most negative consequences of emotions are how they control our behavior inspite of knowing the rational thing to do based on rational beliefs. I think there is far more merit to the idea of being able to completely control your emotions than you credit. Using emotions as a driving factor for motivation is counterproductive in many situations because you are not in control of how and how much they affect you.

I think you've wrongly interpreted being in control of your emotions to being emotionless.

"Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything."

I would strongly encourage anyone who wants a good counterexample to read Plato's Symposium, where the desire for wisdom is specifically linked with erotic desire.

I'm sleep deprived right now, things are getting 'weirder' lol. I 'should 'do this later... I seldom write in first person, but it seems easier right now. So I don' t think these comments exactly typical of mine. I hope there is some substance .
I try to keep two mental compartments, one where I do rational processing, the other where emotions occur. One is a noisy mess. From the other, rational thoughts flow. I struggle to 'rational-check' them, and form them into coherent sentences. I organize them later into subtopics since they jump between those uncontrollably. Inside the rational box there might be a sub-box I call the 'executive' area, that tries to make rational decisions about actions, instead of just streaming rational thoughts. There is also an executive area in the emotional box. But now after experience, I try to manage that box with the rational executive box. Actions need 'higher clearance'. So I don't consider myself especially 'spontaneous' lol.

Of emotions, I deem them all irrational in the most 'pure' sense of the term rational. That's an important basic distinction for rational thought. 'Thinking emotionally', if you know what I mean, can have negative consequences. We have different ways of describing emotions as rational or not, so I clarify mine. Emotions can have pragmatic utility, such a fear, but that isn't the same as my definition of rational. I know different people can have different, or even opposite emotions when placed in exactly the same situation. That also depends on the type of situation though. That inconsistency is one of the other factors I consider justification for classifying emotions as irrational.

There's a human context in which i deem caring (that kind of love) about others to be universally rational, and not caring universally irrational. It's deemed rational by pure rational thought itself. I mean that in the extended, justified, critical thinking sense of pure rational thought. Part of the justification is, that the emotion can potentially enhance a motivation to contribute to the primary purpose of life. That purpose, derived rationally, is to be healthy, as an individual and as a group. The term healthy has many implications, including being moral itself. So caring is an exception among emotions, it has a clear, consistent rational justification. The context is one I might call 'objective morality', a much longer discussion. So It's by rational choice I endeavor to 'actively' care, and empathize, more than I might 'passively'. Likewise self-caring is deemed rational and moral.

I can't exactly choose to quickly change an emotion to something other than what I'm feeling at a given moment, but I can quickly 'disempower' it sometimes, after my rational side reacts and judges 'appropriateness'. Over time, maybe this trains me to feel a bit more 'appropriately' to begin with, maybe. This is more true of transient situations than of my general emotional view of my overall life situation. But I work on that too, the same way.
I think of this all as 'rationally managing emotions'. I think it also helps me have more 'self awareness' psychologically.

I'm sleep deprived right now, things are getting 'weirder' lol. I 'should 'do this later... I seldom write in first person, but it seems easier right now. So I don' t think these comments exactly typical of mine. I hope there is some substance .

I try to keep two mental compartments, one where I do rational processing, the other where emotions occur. One is a noisy mess. From the other, rational thoughts flow. I struggle to 'rational-check' them, and form them into coherent sentences. I organize them later into subtopics they jump between uncontrollably. Inside the rational box there might be a sub-box I call the 'executive' area, that tries to make rational decisions about actions, instead of just streaming rational thoughts. There is also an executive area in the emotional box. But now after experience, I try to manage that box with the rational executive box. Actions need 'higher clearance'. So I don't consider myself especially 'spontaneous' lol.

Of emotions, I deem them all irrational in the most 'pure' sense of the term rational. That's an important basic distinction for rational thought. 'Thinking emotionally', if you know what I mean, can have negative consequences. We have different ways of describing emotions as rational or not, so I clarify mine. Emotions can have pragmatic utility, such a fear, but that isn't the same as my definition of rational. I know different people can have different, or even opposite emotions when placed in exactly the same situation. That also depends on the type of situation though. That inconsistency is one of the other factors I consider justification for classifying emotions as irrational.

There's a human context in which i deem caring (that kind of love) about others to be universally rational, and not caring universally irrational. It's deemed rational by pure rational thought itself. I mean that in the extended, justified, critical thinking sense of pure rational thought. Part of the justification is, that the emotion can potentially enhance a motivation to contribute to the primary purpose of life. That purpose, derived rationally, is to be healthy, as an individual and as a group. The term healthy has many implications, including being moral itself. So caring is an exception among emotions, it has a clear, consistent rational justification. The context is one I might call 'objective morality', a much longer discussion. So It's by rational choice I endeavor to 'actively' care, and empathize, more than I might 'passively'. Likewise self-caring is deemed rational and moral.

I can't exactly choose to quickly change an emotion to something other than what I'm feeling at a given moment, but I can quickly 'disempower' it sometimes, after my rational side reacts and judges 'appropriateness'. Over time, maybe this trains me to feel a bit more 'appropriately' to begin with, maybe. This is more true of transient situations than of my general emotional view of my overall life situation. But I work on that too, the same way.

I think of this all as 'rationally managing emotions'. I think it also helps me have more 'self awareness' psychologically.

something terrible happens link is broken. Was moved to http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda/

If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.

How does one go about this?

I have begun reading everything I can find by you on this page - I will probably also read other things, but it seems a foundation by (one of) the founder would be useful.

Still, while I see the ideas presented as very useful, I find myself wondering how do actually go about implementing them. Take any one thing as an example here, such as "Making Beliefs Pay Rent". (I hope you are not annoyed by this Outside The Box-Box^^)

One way of doing this seems to be to simply read or think about this over and over until I have the thought ingrained into my minds commonly used pathways, so as to enable me to have more opportunities to actually work on my beliefs/implement these ideas into my day.

This seems inefficient, even though I don't know if it simply is inefficient to start doing something like that.

Another way would probably be do sit down somewhere and try to let your beliefs flow through you while watching for inconsistencies.

This however appears to me to be unlikely to actually work / in my experience I start to either drift and/or probably) miss most things.

So, how does one study the skills of rationality and train oneself (not to deny facts/X/Y/..)?

If I missed something obvious and this annoys you, I hope I get an answer before you delete this and want to know that I would be feeling sad about having annoyed you without offering you my submission.

That invites a rather optimistic view of mind. If we have a mind deprived of emotions but similar to us in other we expect that it will on average fare better than ours. Not because emotion is somehow _underlyingly_ irrational but because it tends to intensify our biases (and be the main motivation for some of them - affective death spirals come to mind first).

You could respond that curiosity and having something to protect are both based on emotions - but that's human motivation for rationality not guarantee of its efficiency, and both, unless supported by a good model, can also be fulfilled by religion. Truth as an instrument could be sufficient for emotionless brain as well.

Reminded me of this blog post by Nicky Case, where they said "Trust, but verify". Emotions are often a good heuristic for truth: if we didn't feel pain, that would be bad.

I think this article wonderfully illustrates the primary relationship between emotions and epistemic rationality. Namely, that emotions can be downstream of false beliefs. Robin Hanson added in another comment that this relationship can go the other direction, when strong emotions bias us in ways that make us less epistemically rational.

But I think there is also a separate relationship between emotions and instrumental rationality. Namely, that emotions can influence which decisions you make. This includes but is not limited to epistemic bias.