I think that there’s a pretty important thing about “early in a relationship” … like, it is in fact the case that a tree can handle more weight than a sapling, and a sapling can handle more weight than a three-inch sprout, and it would be bad and wrong to say that there was something wrong with the three-inch sprout or the sapling just because it hadn’t had time to grow and strengthen into a tree yet.
To give a cheap and easy example, many people convert away from homophobia because they learn that someone they know personally and feel positively toward was quietly gay all along. Presumably, that update would have been impossible if the person had led with “btw I’m gay” and thus the relationship never became rich enough to cause the questioning of other assumptions.
That being said, though, I think there’s something actually Important about that list of questions, and similar lists like it.
I think you’re right to locate some fraction of the, uh, I’m going to call it “problem” even though some people would disagree, in the individual, as opposed to in the relationship itself. Like, you point out that some fraction of why-these-questions-could-be-destructive lies in people’s relationships to truth, and their ability to handle scary and confusing stuff. That seems correct, to me.
But I think that, even as I endorse pushback against my offhand comment above, I do stand fairly firmly behind “if you and your partner have had what seems like a good relationship for 6-12 mo+, and this list of questions would cause you problems, that’s strong evidence of a real problem somewhere, whether it be in you, or your partner, or the line between you.”
Like, I do in fact believe that there is some quality of Goodness (good, healthy relationship between good, healthy people) that smoothly-navigating-these-questions points at, and that an inability to smoothly navigate these questions points to a meaningful lack of a goodness property that is real and important.
I don’t think there exist relationships that I would agree are Okay, between people I agree are Okay, that are not able to take those questions in stride. If [questions are damaging], then [something was already genuinely wrong]. It’s not that the questions themselves are harmful, it’s that they expose something that’s already very much there.
How attached are you to the wording “take those questions in stride”? Because in order to fully agree with your comment, I’d want to replace it with something more like “make it through these questions without lastingly diminishing the strength of the relationship.” The re-wording would allow for outcomes like “one person or more feel terrible for having had an insecurity triggered, even though it doesn’t imply anything bad about relationship compatibility.”
Basically, I feel like there are two types of issues-that-cause-bad-feelings that can be unearthed via these questions:
Noticing you’re significantly less compatible than you thought
Triggering insecurities
I agree that there’s something wrong/sad about shrugging away from things around the first bullet point.
On the second bullet point, I’d say the nature of triggers/insecurities is precisely that they can give you a bad day even when there’s no rational reason to worry. Some of the phrasings you use (“in stride”, “navigate smoothly” – edit: though not all of them, because you also say “if these questions would cause you problems” at one point, and that seems like an appropriately strong wording to me!) suggests that you think finding the exercise emotionally very difficult means that there’s automatically something suboptimal with the relationship. I don’t agree that this follows. I concede that there’s a point above which too many or too strong insecurities will predictably impair the nature of a relationship. However, I think that point only comes significantly above “have zero triggers/insecurities.” The important part is to keep triggers/insecurities below the threshold where it incentivizes even the most considerate and trusted people in your life to white-lie to you or hide things from you to avoid causing you too much harm. I think the list of questions goes well past that level because it’s adversarially optimized to find people’s triggers. You don’t need that level of bullet-proofness to “live in truth” in a relationship.
This gets me to a bit of a tangential rant, but I think it’s a virtue-signalling-related failure mode among rationalists that there sometimes develop these pseudo-virtues in the vicinity of things that are truly important (like “living in truth”) where people push the truly important thing to outlandish extremes and thereby pass implicit judgment on others who don’t go to these extremes, implying that they’re less good rationalists. “Living in truth” is an important virtue, but it has very little to do with “you’re doing something wrong as a rationalist if you have significant triggers/insecurities.” (I’m not saying that you were claiming that in your post (see also my edit above!), or that your comment is evidence that you think that way, but based on my overall impression from reading your posts/comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if part of you thought something like that, perhaps in an unreflected fashion.) All else equal, it’s better not to have triggers/insecurities, yes. But people differ tremendously around dimensions like neuroticsm, and there are tons of other rationality-related skills one can practice, and then there’s a whole part of actually doing work that reduces suffering (or work that advances someone’s self-oriented goals in-real-life, if we’re talking about non-effective-altruist rationalists) instead of this perpetually-inward-focused work on “improving one’s rationality.”
No objection to people having short-term dips into negative feelings/reactions which they then successfully work through either alone or with their partner or with some outside help.
But I think that, even as I endorse pushback against my offhand comment above, I do stand fairly firmly behind “if you and your partner have had what seems like a good relationship for 6-12 mo+, and this list of questions would cause you problems, that’s strong evidence of a real problem somewhere, whether it be in you, or your partner, or the line between you.”
I suspect that this is both true, and also that for many if not most people, the best way of dealing with that problem is simply to avoid it.
General agreement with what you’re saying here.
I think that there’s a pretty important thing about “early in a relationship” … like, it is in fact the case that a tree can handle more weight than a sapling, and a sapling can handle more weight than a three-inch sprout, and it would be bad and wrong to say that there was something wrong with the three-inch sprout or the sapling just because it hadn’t had time to grow and strengthen into a tree yet.
To give a cheap and easy example, many people convert away from homophobia because they learn that someone they know personally and feel positively toward was quietly gay all along. Presumably, that update would have been impossible if the person had led with “btw I’m gay” and thus the relationship never became rich enough to cause the questioning of other assumptions.
That being said, though, I think there’s something actually Important about that list of questions, and similar lists like it.
I think you’re right to locate some fraction of the, uh, I’m going to call it “problem” even though some people would disagree, in the individual, as opposed to in the relationship itself. Like, you point out that some fraction of why-these-questions-could-be-destructive lies in people’s relationships to truth, and their ability to handle scary and confusing stuff. That seems correct, to me.
But I think that, even as I endorse pushback against my offhand comment above, I do stand fairly firmly behind “if you and your partner have had what seems like a good relationship for 6-12 mo+, and this list of questions would cause you problems, that’s strong evidence of a real problem somewhere, whether it be in you, or your partner, or the line between you.”
Like, I do in fact believe that there is some quality of Goodness (good, healthy relationship between good, healthy people) that smoothly-navigating-these-questions points at, and that an inability to smoothly navigate these questions points to a meaningful lack of a goodness property that is real and important.
I don’t think there exist relationships that I would agree are Okay, between people I agree are Okay, that are not able to take those questions in stride. If [questions are damaging], then [something was already genuinely wrong]. It’s not that the questions themselves are harmful, it’s that they expose something that’s already very much there.
(Which I have Gendlin-esque attitudes about.)
How attached are you to the wording “take those questions in stride”? Because in order to fully agree with your comment, I’d want to replace it with something more like “make it through these questions without lastingly diminishing the strength of the relationship.” The re-wording would allow for outcomes like “one person or more feel terrible for having had an insecurity triggered, even though it doesn’t imply anything bad about relationship compatibility.”
Basically, I feel like there are two types of issues-that-cause-bad-feelings that can be unearthed via these questions:
Noticing you’re significantly less compatible than you thought
Triggering insecurities
I agree that there’s something wrong/sad about shrugging away from things around the first bullet point.
On the second bullet point, I’d say the nature of triggers/insecurities is precisely that they can give you a bad day even when there’s no rational reason to worry. Some of the phrasings you use (“in stride”, “navigate smoothly” – edit: though not all of them, because you also say “if these questions would cause you problems” at one point, and that seems like an appropriately strong wording to me!) suggests that you think finding the exercise emotionally very difficult means that there’s automatically something suboptimal with the relationship. I don’t agree that this follows. I concede that there’s a point above which too many or too strong insecurities will predictably impair the nature of a relationship. However, I think that point only comes significantly above “have zero triggers/insecurities.” The important part is to keep triggers/insecurities below the threshold where it incentivizes even the most considerate and trusted people in your life to white-lie to you or hide things from you to avoid causing you too much harm. I think the list of questions goes well past that level because it’s adversarially optimized to find people’s triggers. You don’t need that level of bullet-proofness to “live in truth” in a relationship.
This gets me to a bit of a tangential rant, but I think it’s a virtue-signalling-related failure mode among rationalists that there sometimes develop these pseudo-virtues in the vicinity of things that are truly important (like “living in truth”) where people push the truly important thing to outlandish extremes and thereby pass implicit judgment on others who don’t go to these extremes, implying that they’re less good rationalists. “Living in truth” is an important virtue, but it has very little to do with “you’re doing something wrong as a rationalist if you have significant triggers/insecurities.” (I’m not saying that you were claiming that in your post (see also my edit above!), or that your comment is evidence that you think that way, but based on my overall impression from reading your posts/comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if part of you thought something like that, perhaps in an unreflected fashion.) All else equal, it’s better not to have triggers/insecurities, yes. But people differ tremendously around dimensions like neuroticsm, and there are tons of other rationality-related skills one can practice, and then there’s a whole part of actually doing work that reduces suffering (or work that advances someone’s self-oriented goals in-real-life, if we’re talking about non-effective-altruist rationalists) instead of this perpetually-inward-focused work on “improving one’s rationality.”
No objection to people having short-term dips into negative feelings/reactions which they then successfully work through either alone or with their partner or with some outside help.
I suspect that this is both true, and also that for many if not most people, the best way of dealing with that problem is simply to avoid it.