[newsletter]
Defining the elusive 'emotion' and lots of updates to the site
8 Aug 2020
Hello!
Some major changes to the site composition to announce. It’s difficult to produce little self-contained articles when the more interesting ideas are so sprawling, and they also aren’t the most popular content. Long form articles are preferred.
As such, I’ve started to publish articles that are more iterative, reflecting my thinking on a particular topic to date. These will get broken out into smaller articles over time, and the credenda article will eventually tie all the pieces together.
The newest is On Emotion and isn’t finished, but is coherent. The last one, On Attraction and Love has been updated and I think that’s going to remain fairly stable for a while.
This will allow a more focused and project-oriented approach to ideas. To help draw attention to the interesting changes on the site, I’m now publishing my changelog here.
Many of the changes are inspired by gwern.net. Worth a look if you’re into rabbitholes.
You can find out more about why these changes on the new about page.
On to the articles.
New articles:
Emotion is an impossible term to define. Seems important though, so let’s try anyway.
This article actually arose from directly from a course I have been teaching. With learning moving online, handouts have to become online resources. There are really three broad categories to the human experience: feeling, acting, and thinking. This article is on feeling.
Updated articles:
How to never get mad again (kind of)
Trying to define ‘emotion’ is an almost futile enterprise. It’s a vague concept that continues to trouble researchers today. That said, some models have more practical utility than others, and the ‘interruption theory’ of emotion is one of the more beautiful in its simplicity.
Some minor updates to:
- Learning isn’t all about memory
- You don’t understand negative reinforcement
- How to never get mad again (kind of) (part two)
- What’s Love Got to do With It?
- Psychologist’s secret - four rules for diagnosing the brain
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You can find links to all my previous emails to you here.
That’s all from me.
Warm regards,
Dorian