Comment by coldtea
7 years ago
>It's weird to see you say "What matters to people is what people decide matters" and then assume the other party has no reasoning behind their actions. Peculiar indeed.
I don't assume that. If anything, I do the exact opposite.
The "other party" says that they have reasoning behind their actions (and only reasoning).
I point how they indeed have reasoning, but that this reasoning is based on an implicit value structure, and is not some "pure reasoning" as claimed, and that furthermore, that it is wrong, because their conclusion on "what matters" should have taken into account the Other.
Let me break it down to a number of statements to make it simpler:
1) if you think of yourself as a perfectly rational agent,
2) and your goal is to point a very bad habbit in someone, e.g. that their drinking/eating will kill them,
3) ig you say it without kindness and tailored to their personality
4) because you think only the fact that it's true shoiuld be enough
5) then you're undermining the success of your own intervention. The person could close down to you, double down on their habbit, etc because of the hurt of your words.
So a perfectly rational agent should include (5) in their calculations, as it's a fact about the world and how people react. Yet many (as in TFA) don't. Their rationality stops at first order thinking, and doesn't include people's reactions and other second order effects.
So, my whole point is: you're not really rational if you skip (5). You just have an incomplete model of the world, and your conclusions about "what matters" (just the truth, the delivery shouldn't count) is flawed under a rational utilitarian assessment.
You do assume that.
>By what logical reasoning / axiomatic induction etc did >they conclude that being correct is enough? > >I say there's none.
I don't think myself or people as perfectly rational. Tests have shown we are mostly subconscious beings. We are not masters in our own house.
Tailoring everything to the other person and being kind can lend into being straight up manipulative. We have an identity in the world that effects how people hear what is said. My kindness can be less effective than yours because of my identity. Wielding all of my outward facing tools to achieve a goal can include being just the right amount of challenging so that the content of what I say is heard as plausible, credible and valuable. Many attempts at kindness can leave the words in the wind, in one ear and out the other.
A value structure is taking all ideas in and bringing them into an order. Utilitarianism would be one idea that is ranked among others, as would rationality and politeness and kindness. There's light and dark to all of them, you couldn't pigeon hole someone as executing on just one of the tools or ideas listed.
>You do assume that.
The quote you pasted is about axiomatic reasoning not being able to conclude that "being correct is enough". Not that the people I mention didn't use any logical reasoning / axiomatic induction at all. As I wrote, they used some, but combined with ignoring some necessary steps (either because they didn't occur to them, or because of an implicit bias).
>I don't think myself or people as perfectly rational.
No, but some people do. In anycase, I wasn't talking about people who "think themselves as perfectly rational". I was talking about people who think that their reasoning that "truth trumps delivery" came in a perfectly rational way (whether they consider themselves otherwise rational in their other ideas/behavior or not).
>Tailoring everything to the other person and being kind can lend into being straight up manipulative.
Or it might not. It's how you use it. One can also use the truth manipulatively (e.g. to hurt the other, invoke some inferiority complex and numerous other ways), in cases when a little white lie would not have had the desired effect on the other.