[kibwen]

> 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]

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]

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]

> 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.

[kbelder]

Or, issues of morality are mostly trivial.

[drdaeman]

> 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".

[BeetleB]

> 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]

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.

[8bitsrule]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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.