With that, I could imagine another shape behind B’s reaction. Some betrayal in her past, where someone else had unilaterally changed an agreement because they thought the consequences were the same, when they were very much not the same to B, and then rejected B’s objections as invalid… that this situation was now reminding her of.
Why is it necessary (or even relevant) to imagine anything like this? It seems like this part is wholly superfluous (at best!); remove it from the reasoning you report, and… you still have your answer, right? You write:
B was insisting that what we had agreed upon before was important. A was saying that the previous agreement didn’t matter, because the consequences were the same. That was triggering to B; B perceived it as A saying that he could unilaterally change an agreement if he experienced the consequences to be the same (regardless of whether he had checked for B’s agreement first).
B was saying that it didn’t matter what move they ultimately played, that was all the same, but she needed A to acknowledge that he’d unilaterally changed an agreement, and she needed to be able to trust that A would not do that.
…
Viewed from that perspective, everything that B had said suddenly made sense. Indeed, what A actually played or didn’t play wasn’t the point. The point was that, as a matter of principle, A could not unilaterally declare a previous agreement to not matter without checking other people’s opinions first. Even if everyone did happen to agree in this case, sometimes they might not, with much more serious consequences. And if people always had nagging doubts about whether A’s commitments were trustworthy, that would be damaging.
This seems like a complete answer; no explanatory components are missing. As far as I can tell, the part about a “betrayal in [B’s] past … that this situation was now reminding her of” is, at best, a red herring—and at worst, a way to denigrate and dismiss a perspective which otherwise seems to be eminently reasonable, understandable, and (IMO) correct.
Also, as I mentioned, this is a slightly fictionalized account that I wrote based on my recollection of the essence of what happened. But the exact details of what was actually said were messier than this, and the logic of exactly what was going on didn’t seem as clear as it does in this narrative. Regenerating the events based on my memory of the essence of the issue makes things seem clearer than they actually were, because that generator doesn’t contain any of the details that made the essence of the issue harder to see at the time.
So if this conversation had actually taken place literally as I described it, then the hypothesis that you object to would have been more redundant. In the actual conversation that happened, things were less clear, and quite possibly the core of the issue may actually have been slightly different from what seems to make sense to me in retrospect when I try to recall it.
My read was that one might certainly just object to the thing on those grounds alone, but that the intensity of B’s objection was such that it seemed unlikely without some painful experience behind it. B also seemed to become especially agitated by some phrases (“it doesn’t matter”) in particular, in a way that looked to me like she was being reminded of some earlier experience where similar words had been used.
And then when I tried to explain things to A and suggested that there was about something like that going on, B confirmed this.
It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B’s perspective is “eminently reasonable” and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B’s perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).
Why is it necessary (or even relevant) to imagine anything like this? It seems like this part is wholly superfluous (at best!); remove it from the reasoning you report, and… you still have your answer, right? You write:
This seems like a complete answer; no explanatory components are missing. As far as I can tell, the part about a “betrayal in [B’s] past … that this situation was now reminding her of” is, at best, a red herring—and at worst, a way to denigrate and dismiss a perspective which otherwise seems to be eminently reasonable, understandable, and (IMO) correct.
Also, as I mentioned, this is a slightly fictionalized account that I wrote based on my recollection of the essence of what happened. But the exact details of what was actually said were messier than this, and the logic of exactly what was going on didn’t seem as clear as it does in this narrative. Regenerating the events based on my memory of the essence of the issue makes things seem clearer than they actually were, because that generator doesn’t contain any of the details that made the essence of the issue harder to see at the time.
So if this conversation had actually taken place literally as I described it, then the hypothesis that you object to would have been more redundant. In the actual conversation that happened, things were less clear, and quite possibly the core of the issue may actually have been slightly different from what seems to make sense to me in retrospect when I try to recall it.
My read was that one might certainly just object to the thing on those grounds alone, but that the intensity of B’s objection was such that it seemed unlikely without some painful experience behind it. B also seemed to become especially agitated by some phrases (“it doesn’t matter”) in particular, in a way that looked to me like she was being reminded of some earlier experience where similar words had been used.
And then when I tried to explain things to A and suggested that there was about something like that going on, B confirmed this.
It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B’s perspective is “eminently reasonable” and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B’s perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).