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erratio(preamble: anyone who's a regular reader of LW can safely skip this post, it's nothing that hasn't been covered there a few hundred times)
There's a folk psychology idea that emotions and wisdom are opposed traits. There are lots of people who make really short-sighted impulsive decisions based on their emotions who would obviously benefit from stopping once in a while to think through the consequences of their actions. And on the other end of the spectrum is the Spock stereotype that most nerds are haunted by at some point or another**. Well, good news everyone! Turns out there's no dichotomy between the two! In fact, you need both!
Let's pick on Spock for a moment, and take the kind of scenario he might be faced with in a typical episode of Star Trek: there's a couple of crew members down on a planet who've been captured by the local bad guys. Those crew members will die if they're not rescued. Only problem is that they're being held in the middle of the bad guys' Fortress of Doom, and according to Spock's calculations a typical rescue attempt only has a 5% chance of succeeding and has a 50% chance of resulting in the deaths of the entire rescue team. What's the rational thing to do here? *
What if one of the crew members being held is Scotty, who they need to keep the ship running? What if it's Captain Kirk, who they need to seduce alien queens**? Is it more rational to mount a rescue then? Why? It's not like any of the numbers of the original estimate have changed. Dig into Spock's 'rationality' and it pretty clearly comes down to number of lives saved. A rescue attempt with a 5% chance of success and a 50% chance of more deaths is a lousy gamble. The perceived odds shift (even though the bare numbers haven't changed) when taking into account more important crew members because those people are essential to preventing more deaths further down the line. But why is it rational to save lives?
The real answer here is that Spock isn't actually ignoring his emotions at all. The only reason anyone would be interested in saving lives is if they value life over death. To unpack that further, we like it when people are alive and we don't like it when people die. Or maybe you do like it when people die but don't like it when everyone shuns you because you're a creepy death-loving weirdo, so you pretend to dislike death. The point here is that ultimately you act according to your values, and your values consist of emotional valencies towards certain concepts, eg. +10 life, -10 death, -20 being alone forever, +5 having a prestigious career, and so on. Without values, you have no mechanism to decide that thing A is a better decision than things B-Z. Some of these values are more common and deep-rooted than others, mostly because we only really have a small number of things we like and dislike, and so a value like "having a prestigious career" (which can change when you re-evaluate your life) is just a fancier version of "being liked by others" (which is much harder to shift and can be satisfied in lots of different ways).
Transient emotions can also affect our values. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, talked about some experiments on how arousal affects decision making. A bunch of young men were asked questions like "would you have sex without using protection?" and "would you enjoy being spanked?" while in a normal baseline state. Unsurprisingly, they all said they would always use protection, wouldn't engage in taboo or kink, would always get consent, and so forth. Then they were given a stack of porn and given similar questions while they were aroused, and lo and behold, suddenly things like consent and protection were less important. Not because they were originally lying***, but because arousal causes a temporary rearrangement of your values to encourage you to procreate.
This is getting longish, and I have a roleplaying game to go to, so I'll stop here. Next post will be about curiosity, humour, and the evolutionary importance of having good mental models.
* I should probably mention that I've watched very little of the original series, and it's been a long time since I wached any of The Next Generation, so really I'm just making stuff up here.
** ok fine, and also to get into punch-ups. And I suppose to command the ship occasionally
*** even if their original answers were just signalling, I would argue that that's still a strong indication of their values: namely that their actual values around sex were getting outranked by their values around appearing virtuous, and then arousal changes that ranking****
**** One of my current classes is all about analysing phonology using a ranking system called OT. I feel a bit like I have rankings on the brain as a result
There's a folk psychology idea that emotions and wisdom are opposed traits. There are lots of people who make really short-sighted impulsive decisions based on their emotions who would obviously benefit from stopping once in a while to think through the consequences of their actions. And on the other end of the spectrum is the Spock stereotype that most nerds are haunted by at some point or another**. Well, good news everyone! Turns out there's no dichotomy between the two! In fact, you need both!
Let's pick on Spock for a moment, and take the kind of scenario he might be faced with in a typical episode of Star Trek: there's a couple of crew members down on a planet who've been captured by the local bad guys. Those crew members will die if they're not rescued. Only problem is that they're being held in the middle of the bad guys' Fortress of Doom, and according to Spock's calculations a typical rescue attempt only has a 5% chance of succeeding and has a 50% chance of resulting in the deaths of the entire rescue team. What's the rational thing to do here? *
What if one of the crew members being held is Scotty, who they need to keep the ship running? What if it's Captain Kirk, who they need to seduce alien queens**? Is it more rational to mount a rescue then? Why? It's not like any of the numbers of the original estimate have changed. Dig into Spock's 'rationality' and it pretty clearly comes down to number of lives saved. A rescue attempt with a 5% chance of success and a 50% chance of more deaths is a lousy gamble. The perceived odds shift (even though the bare numbers haven't changed) when taking into account more important crew members because those people are essential to preventing more deaths further down the line. But why is it rational to save lives?
The real answer here is that Spock isn't actually ignoring his emotions at all. The only reason anyone would be interested in saving lives is if they value life over death. To unpack that further, we like it when people are alive and we don't like it when people die. Or maybe you do like it when people die but don't like it when everyone shuns you because you're a creepy death-loving weirdo, so you pretend to dislike death. The point here is that ultimately you act according to your values, and your values consist of emotional valencies towards certain concepts, eg. +10 life, -10 death, -20 being alone forever, +5 having a prestigious career, and so on. Without values, you have no mechanism to decide that thing A is a better decision than things B-Z. Some of these values are more common and deep-rooted than others, mostly because we only really have a small number of things we like and dislike, and so a value like "having a prestigious career" (which can change when you re-evaluate your life) is just a fancier version of "being liked by others" (which is much harder to shift and can be satisfied in lots of different ways).
Transient emotions can also affect our values. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, talked about some experiments on how arousal affects decision making. A bunch of young men were asked questions like "would you have sex without using protection?" and "would you enjoy being spanked?" while in a normal baseline state. Unsurprisingly, they all said they would always use protection, wouldn't engage in taboo or kink, would always get consent, and so forth. Then they were given a stack of porn and given similar questions while they were aroused, and lo and behold, suddenly things like consent and protection were less important. Not because they were originally lying***, but because arousal causes a temporary rearrangement of your values to encourage you to procreate.
This is getting longish, and I have a roleplaying game to go to, so I'll stop here. Next post will be about curiosity, humour, and the evolutionary importance of having good mental models.
* I should probably mention that I've watched very little of the original series, and it's been a long time since I wached any of The Next Generation, so really I'm just making stuff up here.
** ok fine, and also to get into punch-ups. And I suppose to command the ship occasionally
*** even if their original answers were just signalling, I would argue that that's still a strong indication of their values: namely that their actual values around sex were getting outranked by their values around appearing virtuous, and then arousal changes that ranking****
**** One of my current classes is all about analysing phonology using a ranking system called OT. I feel a bit like I have rankings on the brain as a result
