I’m curious if you have any ideas for what to say to someone who isn’t being wholesome in some context—who is avoiding looking at some part of reality. For instance, in the above example, what could someone say to me when I’m ignoring my impacts upon them?
A standard line people say is “you don’t care about hurting my feelings” and that’s not quite the right response, because I would then argue that your feelings are less important than serving the mission.
I’m looking for something like “You don’t seem to be aware of the impacts you’re having on me”. Or maybe “You don’t seem to understand what he impact of your speech”. But I’m not sure either of these would successfully communicate with the self-blinded Ben I describe, and I’d appreciate hearing another’s thoughts on how to communicate here.
Often the effect of being blinded is that you take suboptimal actions. As you pointed out in your example, if you see the problem then all sorts of cheap ways to reduce the harmful impact occur to you. So perhaps one way of getting to the issue could be to point at that: “I know you care about my feelings, and it wouldn’t have made this meeting any less effective to have had it more privately, so I’m surprised that you didn’t”?
I’d be tempted to make it a question, and ask something like “what do you think the impacts of this on [me/person] are?”.
It might be that question would already do work by getting them to think about the thing they haven’t been thinking about. But it could also elicit a defence like “it doesn’t matter because the mission is more important” in which case I’d follow up with an argument that it’s likely worth at least understanding the impacts because it might help to find actions which are better on those grounds while being comparably good—or even better—for the mission. Or it might elicit a mistaken model of the impacts, in which case I’d follow up by saying that I thought it was mistaken and explaining how.
I’m curious if you have any ideas for what to say to someone who isn’t being wholesome in some context—who is avoiding looking at some part of reality. For instance, in the above example, what could someone say to me when I’m ignoring my impacts upon them?
A standard line people say is “you don’t care about hurting my feelings” and that’s not quite the right response, because I would then argue that your feelings are less important than serving the mission.
I’m looking for something like “You don’t seem to be aware of the impacts you’re having on me”. Or maybe “You don’t seem to understand what he impact of your speech”. But I’m not sure either of these would successfully communicate with the self-blinded Ben I describe, and I’d appreciate hearing another’s thoughts on how to communicate here.
Often the effect of being blinded is that you take suboptimal actions. As you pointed out in your example, if you see the problem then all sorts of cheap ways to reduce the harmful impact occur to you. So perhaps one way of getting to the issue could be to point at that: “I know you care about my feelings, and it wouldn’t have made this meeting any less effective to have had it more privately, so I’m surprised that you didn’t”?
I’d be tempted to make it a question, and ask something like “what do you think the impacts of this on [me/person] are?”.
It might be that question would already do work by getting them to think about the thing they haven’t been thinking about. But it could also elicit a defence like “it doesn’t matter because the mission is more important” in which case I’d follow up with an argument that it’s likely worth at least understanding the impacts because it might help to find actions which are better on those grounds while being comparably good—or even better—for the mission. Or it might elicit a mistaken model of the impacts, in which case I’d follow up by saying that I thought it was mistaken and explaining how.