Consider the possibility that when people say they’re seeing things differently than you do, that they might be telling you the truth. They could be making it up, they could be just annoying you for the fun of it, but they might actually be weirder than you think.
Do you have any examples? That’s a fascinating one.
(Corollary: if you’re angry at someone, and they ask why you’re angry, tell them. They might actually not know. Especially if they’re a child. I know I’m not the only one who was punished by one or more elementary school teachers for reasons that they refused to explain, since they assumed that I already knew. Oh how I seethed.)
Yeah, that pretty much describes growing up for me.
“Don’t do that.” Why not? ”How dare you disrespect my authority you little terr...” Oh, no, I’m perfectly fine with obeying, I just wanted to know the rationale so I can identify what kinds of things are off-limits … ”TIMEOUT! Now!”
Edit: Needless to say, even on this forum, there are people who have no qualms about telling others “Don’t do that” without bothering to spell out the boundary, or even understand why that would be necessary. I can’t understand what motivates such people beyond, “I like it when others are in a perpetual state of uncertainty and have to keep deferring to me for permission.”
“How dare you disrespect my authority you little terr...”
You raise an interesting point here. When a parent or teacher imposes their authority on a child, there are two very different goals they could have:
To get the child to comply, and/or
To establish their own dominance.
When you ask why you’re being ordered to do something, and you happen to be beneath the age that society considers you a real person, that’s taken as an attack on the dominance of the person bossing you around. Obedience isn’t enough; a lot of people won’t be satisfied with anything less than unquestioning obedience, at least from mere children. I suspect that this is what people are thinking most of the time when they use “because I say so” as a ‘reason’ for something. (The rest of the time, they’re probably using it because they’re feeling too harried to explain something to a mere child, and so they trot out that tired old line because it’s easy.)
I remember when I was young enough that adults dared to treat me that way. (Notice the emotionally charged phrasing? I’m still irritated.) Someone who gave reasonable orders and provided justifications for them on request, got cooperation from me. My parents were like this, and they say I was very well-behaved. Someone who told me to do things “because I said so” automatically gained my resentment, and I felt no need to cooperate with them. They were less effective because they insisted on unquestioning obedience.
I realize that not every child is as reasonable or cooperative as I was, but providing a reason for your instructions doesn’t hurt anything; at worst it’s useless, and at best it reinforces your authority by making people perceive you as a reasonable authority figure worthy of listening to.
providing a reason for your instructions doesn’t hurt anything
I tend to agree in most cases. However, not all instruction-givers have good reasons for their orders. If they must provide such reasons before they are obeyed, and only inconsistently have them, that means that a plausible motive for their subordinates to question them is the desire not to follow the instruction. (i.e. subordinate thinks there might be no good reason, feels compelled to obey only if there is one, and is checking.) The motive associated in this way with asking for reasons is therefore considered harmful by the instruction-giver.
When I was a kid and got an unobjectionable but confusing order, I usually agreed first and then asked questions, sometimes while in the process of obeying. This tended to work better than standing there asking “Why?” and behaving like I wanted the world to come to a halt until I had my questions answered. Objectionable orders I treated differently, but I was aware when I challenged them that I was setting myself up for a power struggle.
When you ask why you’re being ordered to do something, and you happen to be beneath the age that society considers you a real person, that’s taken as an attack on the dominance of the person bossing you around.
Harry may or may not get a chance to say this at some point, but it sure is going in my quotes file.
I realize that not every child is as reasonable or cooperative as I was, but providing a reason for your instructions doesn’t hurt anything; at worst it’s useless, and at best it reinforces your authority by making people perceive you as a reasonable authority figure worthy of listening to.
Not true. In many cases, there isn’t time (or some other resource) for spelling out your reasons. And when it’s a life-or-death situation, you want your child to comply with your orders unquestioningly, not stand there asking “why” and get eaten by a lion.
“because I say so” invokes the very fact of the demand as the supreme reason, rather than acting as a promissory note, saying “no time to explain now, but trust me there’s a good reason that I’ll explain later”
ie, “because I said so” is “bow to my authority, underling” rather than “in this specific circumstance, just do it, trust me (for now) there’s a reason, and ask later if it’s not obvious to you by then”
Okay, I will admit that there are some situations where telling someone why is impractical. I don’t think they’re too frequent, though, unless you live in a place with a lot of lions (or whatever).
For a comparison with modern adults who live in places with a lot of potentially-deadly situations requiring swift obedience, US military personnel are required to obey all lawful orders from those appointed over them, but have (from the order follower’s side) several channels for reporting abuses of authority, and (from the order giver’s side) official guidance with ways of explaining orders when time permits.
I am a parent and I have to disagree with you. The worst case scenario is not that it is worthless. If a child learns to question the “order” given out loud, it would suggest that the child is also questioning the “order” internally. This leads to the internal debate whether to ask for a justification for the “order” or internally decide if it is justifiable or not.
Now you have a situation where the child does not stop up and ask for the justification, but in stead decides that some situations cannot be justifiable and thus will not ask for said justification.
When the parents are around, this is problematic, but when no authoritative figure is close this leads to the child questioning already given “orders” and possible overruling any preexisting justification. They are children after all.
Now you have a child who actively disregards (or might disregard) “orders” given—with or without justification. Sure, you told your daughter not to go with strangers, but the stranger had candy and instead of seeking out parents to gain a justification for the rue of not going with strangers, the child will examine the justification itself and given an upbringing with minimal trauma, might follow the stranger with the candy.
You either have to demand absolute obedience or allow for your child to make its own decisions and accept the danger and risk involved with that, but it is a wrong simplification to say that the worst that can happen is that it is useless. After all—the way you parent your child shapes them—good or bad.
I agree Eudaimoniac (nice name by the way!). The worst case scenario is definitely less than worthless. The question of what is best in the average case would be an interesting one. My hunch is that it depends on the neurology of the child and also on the nature of the culture. Expectations of and relationship with
‘justification’ vary quite a lot between individuals in a way that I trace down to genetics.
providing a reason for your instructions doesn’t hurt anything; at worst it’s useless, and at best it reinforces your authority by making people perceive you as a reasonable authority figure worthy of listening to.
In addition to what others have said, I think the very concept of ‘authority figure’ for most people means ‘one who is obeyed without question’. The meaning of ‘order’ does not include a possibility of questioning it. An instruction that comes with explanations simply doesn’t belong in the category of ‘orders’.
This isn’t specific to child-adult relations. Whenever someone is in a position to give orders, asking for justification is seen as a challenge. Reasonable or rational people do, of course, ask for and give out reasons for their orders. But this doesn’t reinforce authority and obedience. It creates or reinforces cooperation between two people who are more nearly equals, than a giver and a taker of orders.
The emotional/social basis for giving orders is precisely “because I say so”—orders to establish dominance and obedience—and having to explain yourself automatically subtracts from your authority.
Your attempt to understand these people’s motivations seems to assume that these people understand that you don’t know the answer. Another possible motivation is that they think the explanation is obvious or common knowledge, and hence you must be asking to antagonize them, not out of actual ignorance.
Not to say that I don’t think some people’s motivation really is the one you’ve stated—they simply enjoy being in control of people.
If you’re talking about my complaints about the forum, that’s not the case. One time, numerous people asked for clarification from this person about which kinds of behavior that person was asking others to stop, so the person clearly knew it was an issue that the others didn’t know exactly which behavior was being criticized.
That person eventually resorted to, “I’ll tell you when I don’t like it, as will a few people I’ve selected.”
18 months later, he/she agreed his/her preferences were not typical.
I will provide the documentation privately if you wish, but I have no desire to start this publicly.
I think what got me into it was Psychetypes, a description of the Myers-Briggs types with some rather abstract theory about how they experience time and space differently than each other. [1] Anyway (and this should be a clue about how hard it can be to learn this sort of thing) when I first started reading the book, I got to the bit about there being many sorts of normal, and I put the book down for two years—it was that hard to get past the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.
Anyway, look at how a lot of people talk about taste—a lot of them really believe that everyone should like and dislike the same things they do.
Or people who believe that if some diet/exercise method worked for them, therefore it would work for everyone if they’d just try hard enough.
Or that allergies they haven’t got must be illusionnary.
[1] IIRC, SPs experience the present moment most vividly, NTs imagine time as evenly spaced along a ruler, NFs have vivid experience of past emotional moments, and someone (it’s got to be another N, and I can’t remember what SJs experience) are most aware of future possibilities. You double all this to get 8 types because some people think spacial boundaries are real and others don’t.
You mentioned Myers-Briggs types and “the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.” I think I had a similar experience but with a different analysis of the MBTI classifications. It was Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual by Lenore Thomson and there is a wiki discussion here.
I found the scientific basis fairly flimsy. She connects the 8 cognitive functions to various regions of the brain—left and right, anterior and posterior—but it seems like a just so story to me. However, I have found it immensely useful as a tool for self-improvement.
The main insight I got from it is that while other people are crazy, they are crazy in a fairly well-defined, reproducible way. Other people see things completely differently from you, but it’s fairly internally consistent and so you simulate it on your own hardware.
There are two ways I think about this:
One, your brain is is trying to constantly make sense of all this sensory data that comes in. So it determines that one part is the signal and one part is the noise. It tries to minimize the noise and focus on the signal. But then you realize there is a whole other signal in what you thought was noise and there are people tuning into that and think your signal is actually the noise. If you then turn into that signal, you can understand what other people have been listening to the whole time
The other is, we are all playing 8 board games simultaneously, where if we roll the dice our piece moves that amount in each of the games. In order to make sense of this, we focus on one of the games, trying to forget about the others, and try to win this one. But other people are focused on trying to win a different game. So when they try to talk to each other about who is winning, they completely talk past each other. But when you realize that someone thinks he is playing a different game and you figure out what it is, you can have a much more productive conversation/relationship.
But other people are focused on trying to win a different game. So when they try to talk to each other about who is winning, they completely talk past each other. But when you realize that someone thinks he is playing a different game and you figure out what it is, you can have a much more productive conversation/relationship.
This is an important insight. I’ll add that sometimes being able to understand the different way people think can simply allow us to realise that it is more productive to have no (or minimal) relationship without judging them to be poor thinkers. Judging them not to be ‘thinkers’ in your original sense at all can be a lesser judgement than concluding that they suck at it.
Thanks—that’s a lot more use than I’ve made of the system.
Does it make sense to think of yourself as crazy to the same extent that people of other psychetypes are?
Links need to be in a system called Markdown rather than the more usual html—the details for them are at the help link in the lower left corner that shows up when you start writing a reply.
If you take crazy to mean ’acting, thinking or feeling in a way disjointed from or opposed to reality - , I’d say it makes a lot of sense to think of yourself as just as crazy as anyone else (and it reduces the incidence of giving your own feelings and thoughts undue importance, IME.)
Does it make sense to think of yourself as crazy to the same extent that people of other psychetypes are?
I don’t think so. The term captures how radically different the another types are from your own. It’s about relative distance between you and others, not an absolute quality.
I think we should probably be very wary of taking anything based on the Myers Briggs classifications seriously. They seem to be based almost entirely on Forer Effect type predictions and almost impossible to falsify.
If I remember correctly, the Big Five tests are slightly more robust (eg, a Big Five profile has fairly high predictive power, and is fairly stable over time).
I think skeptical people are too quick to say “Forer Effect” when they first do Myers-Briggs. They notice that their type only partially describes them and assume that something fishy is going on. But if you switch all the letters and read the description of the exact opposite type, there is almost nothing that could apply to you. That in itself means that there is some non-trivial classification going on. San Francisco may not be LA, but it sure isn’t Moscow.
I don’t take the specifics very seriously—I don’t try to analyze everyone in terms of MB—nor the the Enneagram, which I also find somewhat useful. Occasionally, I find someone who seems to have a very strong tendency towards some of the traits described in a system, but most of what I get out of these systems is a clue that people are very varied, that it’s normal for people to be different from each other, and some ideas about possible differences.
Consider the possibility that when people say they’re seeing things differently than you do, that they might be telling you the truth. They could be making it up, they could be just annoying you for the fun of it, but they might actually be weirder than you think.
Do you have any examples? That’s a fascinating one.
(Corollary: if you’re angry at someone, and they ask why you’re angry, tell them. They might actually not know. Especially if they’re a child. I know I’m not the only one who was punished by one or more elementary school teachers for reasons that they refused to explain, since they assumed that I already knew. Oh how I seethed.)
Yeah, that pretty much describes growing up for me.
“Don’t do that.”
Why not?
”How dare you disrespect my authority you little terr...”
Oh, no, I’m perfectly fine with obeying, I just wanted to know the rationale so I can identify what kinds of things are off-limits …
”TIMEOUT! Now!”
Edit: Needless to say, even on this forum, there are people who have no qualms about telling others “Don’t do that” without bothering to spell out the boundary, or even understand why that would be necessary. I can’t understand what motivates such people beyond, “I like it when others are in a perpetual state of uncertainty and have to keep deferring to me for permission.”
You raise an interesting point here. When a parent or teacher imposes their authority on a child, there are two very different goals they could have:
To get the child to comply, and/or
To establish their own dominance.
When you ask why you’re being ordered to do something, and you happen to be beneath the age that society considers you a real person, that’s taken as an attack on the dominance of the person bossing you around. Obedience isn’t enough; a lot of people won’t be satisfied with anything less than unquestioning obedience, at least from mere children. I suspect that this is what people are thinking most of the time when they use “because I say so” as a ‘reason’ for something. (The rest of the time, they’re probably using it because they’re feeling too harried to explain something to a mere child, and so they trot out that tired old line because it’s easy.)
I remember when I was young enough that adults dared to treat me that way. (Notice the emotionally charged phrasing? I’m still irritated.) Someone who gave reasonable orders and provided justifications for them on request, got cooperation from me. My parents were like this, and they say I was very well-behaved. Someone who told me to do things “because I said so” automatically gained my resentment, and I felt no need to cooperate with them. They were less effective because they insisted on unquestioning obedience.
I realize that not every child is as reasonable or cooperative as I was, but providing a reason for your instructions doesn’t hurt anything; at worst it’s useless, and at best it reinforces your authority by making people perceive you as a reasonable authority figure worthy of listening to.
I tend to agree in most cases. However, not all instruction-givers have good reasons for their orders. If they must provide such reasons before they are obeyed, and only inconsistently have them, that means that a plausible motive for their subordinates to question them is the desire not to follow the instruction. (i.e. subordinate thinks there might be no good reason, feels compelled to obey only if there is one, and is checking.) The motive associated in this way with asking for reasons is therefore considered harmful by the instruction-giver.
When I was a kid and got an unobjectionable but confusing order, I usually agreed first and then asked questions, sometimes while in the process of obeying. This tended to work better than standing there asking “Why?” and behaving like I wanted the world to come to a halt until I had my questions answered. Objectionable orders I treated differently, but I was aware when I challenged them that I was setting myself up for a power struggle.
Harry may or may not get a chance to say this at some point, but it sure is going in my quotes file.
Not true. In many cases, there isn’t time (or some other resource) for spelling out your reasons. And when it’s a life-or-death situation, you want your child to comply with your orders unquestioningly, not stand there asking “why” and get eaten by a lion.
These concerns can be balanced better than they usually are by using something like a “Merlin says” rule.
Such a rule would include an expectation of later justification, of course.
The reference, in case anybody was wondering.
That sounds plausible, but I’ve never seen it attempted in practice.
Though it doesn’t sound very different from “Because I say so!” so I don’t see why it would work worse.
“because I say so” invokes the very fact of the demand as the supreme reason, rather than acting as a promissory note, saying “no time to explain now, but trust me there’s a good reason that I’ll explain later”
ie, “because I said so” is “bow to my authority, underling” rather than “in this specific circumstance, just do it, trust me (for now) there’s a reason, and ask later if it’s not obvious to you by then”
Okay, I will admit that there are some situations where telling someone why is impractical. I don’t think they’re too frequent, though, unless you live in a place with a lot of lions (or whatever).
Most parents and children live in places with a lot of potentially-deadly situations.
For a comparison with modern adults who live in places with a lot of potentially-deadly situations requiring swift obedience, US military personnel are required to obey all lawful orders from those appointed over them, but have (from the order follower’s side) several channels for reporting abuses of authority, and (from the order giver’s side) official guidance with ways of explaining orders when time permits.
I think that statement becomes a lot stronger if you say “most of your ancestors”.
Possibly, although most parents and children live in places with automobiles.
I am a parent and I have to disagree with you. The worst case scenario is not that it is worthless. If a child learns to question the “order” given out loud, it would suggest that the child is also questioning the “order” internally. This leads to the internal debate whether to ask for a justification for the “order” or internally decide if it is justifiable or not.
Now you have a situation where the child does not stop up and ask for the justification, but in stead decides that some situations cannot be justifiable and thus will not ask for said justification.
When the parents are around, this is problematic, but when no authoritative figure is close this leads to the child questioning already given “orders” and possible overruling any preexisting justification. They are children after all.
Now you have a child who actively disregards (or might disregard) “orders” given—with or without justification. Sure, you told your daughter not to go with strangers, but the stranger had candy and instead of seeking out parents to gain a justification for the rue of not going with strangers, the child will examine the justification itself and given an upbringing with minimal trauma, might follow the stranger with the candy.
You either have to demand absolute obedience or allow for your child to make its own decisions and accept the danger and risk involved with that, but it is a wrong simplification to say that the worst that can happen is that it is useless. After all—the way you parent your child shapes them—good or bad.
I agree Eudaimoniac (nice name by the way!). The worst case scenario is definitely less than worthless. The question of what is best in the average case would be an interesting one. My hunch is that it depends on the neurology of the child and also on the nature of the culture. Expectations of and relationship with ‘justification’ vary quite a lot between individuals in a way that I trace down to genetics.
In addition to what others have said, I think the very concept of ‘authority figure’ for most people means ‘one who is obeyed without question’. The meaning of ‘order’ does not include a possibility of questioning it. An instruction that comes with explanations simply doesn’t belong in the category of ‘orders’.
This isn’t specific to child-adult relations. Whenever someone is in a position to give orders, asking for justification is seen as a challenge. Reasonable or rational people do, of course, ask for and give out reasons for their orders. But this doesn’t reinforce authority and obedience. It creates or reinforces cooperation between two people who are more nearly equals, than a giver and a taker of orders.
The emotional/social basis for giving orders is precisely “because I say so”—orders to establish dominance and obedience—and having to explain yourself automatically subtracts from your authority.
Your attempt to understand these people’s motivations seems to assume that these people understand that you don’t know the answer. Another possible motivation is that they think the explanation is obvious or common knowledge, and hence you must be asking to antagonize them, not out of actual ignorance. Not to say that I don’t think some people’s motivation really is the one you’ve stated—they simply enjoy being in control of people.
If you’re talking about my complaints about the forum, that’s not the case. One time, numerous people asked for clarification from this person about which kinds of behavior that person was asking others to stop, so the person clearly knew it was an issue that the others didn’t know exactly which behavior was being criticized.
That person eventually resorted to, “I’ll tell you when I don’t like it, as will a few people I’ve selected.”
18 months later, he/she agreed his/her preferences were not typical.
I will provide the documentation privately if you wish, but I have no desire to start this publicly.
I think what got me into it was Psychetypes, a description of the Myers-Briggs types with some rather abstract theory about how they experience time and space differently than each other. [1] Anyway (and this should be a clue about how hard it can be to learn this sort of thing) when I first started reading the book, I got to the bit about there being many sorts of normal, and I put the book down for two years—it was that hard to get past the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.
Anyway, look at how a lot of people talk about taste—a lot of them really believe that everyone should like and dislike the same things they do.
Or people who believe that if some diet/exercise method worked for them, therefore it would work for everyone if they’d just try hard enough.
Or that allergies they haven’t got must be illusionnary.
[1] IIRC, SPs experience the present moment most vividly, NTs imagine time as evenly spaced along a ruler, NFs have vivid experience of past emotional moments, and someone (it’s got to be another N, and I can’t remember what SJs experience) are most aware of future possibilities. You double all this to get 8 types because some people think spacial boundaries are real and others don’t.
Generalizing From One Example. Top rated Less Wrong article of all time, and we see again and again why. :/
You mentioned Myers-Briggs types and “the idea that either I was crazy, or everyone else was.” I think I had a similar experience but with a different analysis of the MBTI classifications. It was Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual by Lenore Thomson and there is a wiki discussion here.
I found the scientific basis fairly flimsy. She connects the 8 cognitive functions to various regions of the brain—left and right, anterior and posterior—but it seems like a just so story to me. However, I have found it immensely useful as a tool for self-improvement.
The main insight I got from it is that while other people are crazy, they are crazy in a fairly well-defined, reproducible way. Other people see things completely differently from you, but it’s fairly internally consistent and so you simulate it on your own hardware.
There are two ways I think about this:
One, your brain is is trying to constantly make sense of all this sensory data that comes in. So it determines that one part is the signal and one part is the noise. It tries to minimize the noise and focus on the signal. But then you realize there is a whole other signal in what you thought was noise and there are people tuning into that and think your signal is actually the noise. If you then turn into that signal, you can understand what other people have been listening to the whole time
The other is, we are all playing 8 board games simultaneously, where if we roll the dice our piece moves that amount in each of the games. In order to make sense of this, we focus on one of the games, trying to forget about the others, and try to win this one. But other people are focused on trying to win a different game. So when they try to talk to each other about who is winning, they completely talk past each other. But when you realize that someone thinks he is playing a different game and you figure out what it is, you can have a much more productive conversation/relationship.
This is an important insight. I’ll add that sometimes being able to understand the different way people think can simply allow us to realise that it is more productive to have no (or minimal) relationship without judging them to be poor thinkers. Judging them not to be ‘thinkers’ in your original sense at all can be a lesser judgement than concluding that they suck at it.
Thanks—that’s a lot more use than I’ve made of the system.
Does it make sense to think of yourself as crazy to the same extent that people of other psychetypes are?
Links need to be in a system called Markdown rather than the more usual html—the details for them are at the help link in the lower left corner that shows up when you start writing a reply.
If you take crazy to mean ’acting, thinking or feeling in a way disjointed from or opposed to reality - , I’d say it makes a lot of sense to think of yourself as just as crazy as anyone else (and it reduces the incidence of giving your own feelings and thoughts undue importance, IME.)
Upvoted for giving technical help.
Fixed.
I don’t think so. The term captures how radically different the another types are from your own. It’s about relative distance between you and others, not an absolute quality.
Risto_Saarelma just posted a prime description of how hard it is to believe that other people mean what they’re saying about how they see the world—a woman who’d spent a long time in the New Age culture describes her conversion to skepticism.
Second link’s broken. You may have meant this?
Your second link is broken.
Thanks. It’s fixed.
Here’s the article in question.
I think we should probably be very wary of taking anything based on the Myers Briggs classifications seriously. They seem to be based almost entirely on Forer Effect type predictions and almost impossible to falsify.
If I remember correctly, the Big Five tests are slightly more robust (eg, a Big Five profile has fairly high predictive power, and is fairly stable over time).
I think skeptical people are too quick to say “Forer Effect” when they first do Myers-Briggs. They notice that their type only partially describes them and assume that something fishy is going on. But if you switch all the letters and read the description of the exact opposite type, there is almost nothing that could apply to you. That in itself means that there is some non-trivial classification going on. San Francisco may not be LA, but it sure isn’t Moscow.
I don’t take the specifics very seriously—I don’t try to analyze everyone in terms of MB—nor the the Enneagram, which I also find somewhat useful. Occasionally, I find someone who seems to have a very strong tendency towards some of the traits described in a system, but most of what I get out of these systems is a clue that people are very varied, that it’s normal for people to be different from each other, and some ideas about possible differences.
NP.
Not to omit the distinct (and surprising) possibility that YOU might be weirder than you think.