Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Information and emotion are orthogonal. If you want to connect them you can, but you don't have to. In other words, you can use more or less information to make yourself happier or unhappier.

The ability to manage your emotions is different than the ability to process information, but it can be learned just as well, they just don't teach it in school.



I couldn't agree more.

I can demonstrate that time passed and population create a common trend line, but it's absurd for me to state that time is responsible for creating people.


Why they are orthogonal? When I read a news story, it affects my emotions, it makes me draw correlations with my previous experiences. This is unconciouss and barely manageable. This may even be necessary, to survive we need to learn from other people experiences. We need to feel empathy.


Well There is less to be tought on emotions, it all depends with how we react on different issues in life that brings about emotional reactions.


Of course you can. But the unexamined life is not worth living.


Ignorance is bliss


[Rational] ignorance [can be a qualified] bliss.


There you go again, trying to make everyone more informed.

Stop it.


One person's rational is another person's irrational.


In perception, yes, but not in reality. If you want to be alive tomorrow, jumping off a tall building will be irrational even if you think it's the last step in a convoluted ritual to grant yourself immortality. That's an exaggerated example, but the principle holds in general: people's desires may differ, but the rationality of any actions taken in the pursuit of those desires is something you can evaluate objectively, at least in principle.


What about jumping off a building with a parachute or because it's on fire?

I think real life contains many situations where the most rational situation isn't always clear.


In that case, there is a rational answer; that it's hard to figure out in a hurry doesn't make it subjective.


I am not sure there is a rational answer when it comes to possibly jumping from a building and breaking your legs or maybe even dying versus staying in the building and possibly dying from smoke inhalation or burning to death. It would be very hard, even in hindsight to figure out what was the more rational decision.

If you want technological examples, say someone calls someone else irrational for basing their website off PHP instead of Ruby. Someone calls the printer industry irrational for making it cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy ink cartridges or that someone buys a new computer because their computer is infested with malware instead of re-installing Windows. You could say those are irrational choices, but the people who are making those choices probably have reasons for doing so which may make sense to them. The person with PHP may not know Ruby and would have to invest significant time in learning it. The printer companies bottom line will make their decision rational to many. The person buying a new computer may not have the skills to perform the task, the local computer shop wants hundreds of dollars to do the work & the computer is old.

So on the surface we say "that's irrational", but then later after learning more, maybe our opinion would change to "that's actually rational".

Also this does bring up the point that we often have to make a choice on what to do without the power of hindsight or with incomplete data. This can make our choices look irrational to those who are not in our shoes.


provided all the connections are consciously made




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: