People have an annoying tendency to hear the word “rationalism” and think “Spock”, despite direct exhortation against that exact interpretation. But I don’t know of any source directly describing a stance toward emotions which rationalists-as-a-group typically do endorse. The goal of this post is to explain such a stance. It’s roughly the concept of hangriness, but generalized to other emotions.

That means this post is trying to do two things at once:

Illustrate a certain stance toward emotions, which I definitely take and which I think many people around me also often take. (Most of the post will focus on this part.)
Claim that the stance in question is fairly canonical or standard for rationalists-as-a-group, modulo disclaimers about rationalists never agreeing on anything.

Many people will no doubt disagree that the stance I describe is roughly-canonical among rationalists, and that’s a ~~useful~~ valid thing to argue about in the comments in proportion to how well you actually know many rationalists.

Central Example: “Hangry”

When we’re hangry, it feels like people around us are doing stupid, inconsiderate, or otherwise bad things. It feels like we’re justifiably angry about those things. But then we eat, and suddenly our previous anger doesn’t feel so justified any more.

When we’re hangry, our anger is importantly wrong, or false in some sense. The feelings are telling our brain that other people are doing stupid, inconsiderate, or otherwise egregious things. And later, on reflection, we will realize that our feelings were largely wrong about that; the feelings were not really justified by the supposed wrongdoings.

But the correct response is not to dismiss or ignore the feelings! Even if the feelings “tell us false things” in some sense, those feelings still result from an important unmet need: we need food! The correct response isn’t to ignore or dismiss the anger, the correct response is to realize that the anger is mostly caused by hunger, and to go eat.

The word “hangry” conveys this whole idea in two syllables. And crucially, the existence of “hangry” as a word normalizes the phenomenon - more on that later.

I consider the word “hangry” to be one of the main ways in which mainstream society has become more sane in the past ~10 years. In a single word, it perfectly captures the stance toward emotions which I want to descri...

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