Well, he might be right—and I align with his views more than with many others—but you still have to realize that you can’t literally predict the future.
I think there’s a difference between not wanting to elicit false hope and taking out your negative emotions on others (even if it’s about a reasonable expectation of the world). Of course, he has a right to experience these emotions—but I believe it would be more considerate to do that in private.
I should say that I have great respect to him and his efforts and insights. This is not a critique of the person, just of a concrete behavior.
There is a misalignment hazard to this framing: the person who decides to withhold the truth is not the audience who’d care to have their feelings spared. So the question of whether it’s “more important” might be ill-posed.
Thanks for bringing this up. Yes I think that is very important and is not what I’m trying to criticize. I will update the previous comment to clarify.
That doesn’t matter for the points I was responding to, a matter of policy for what things to claim, given what your own understanding of the world happens to be.
you still have to realize that you can’t literally predict the future
There are claims about the facts of the world being made, apart from any emotions. Presence of emotional correlates doesn’t make corresponding events in the concrete physical world irrelevant.
Well, he might be right—and I align with his views more than with many others—but you still have to realize that you can’t literally predict the future.
I think there’s a difference between not wanting to elicit false hope and taking out your negative emotions on others (even if it’s about a reasonable expectation of the world). Of course, he has a right to experience these emotions—but I believe it would be more considerate to do that in private.
I should say that I have great respect to him and his efforts and insights. This is not a critique of the person, just of a concrete behavior.
Maybe making people realize the reality of the situation and telling the truth is more important than sparing their feelings.
There is a misalignment hazard to this framing: the person who decides to withhold the truth is not the audience who’d care to have their feelings spared. So the question of whether it’s “more important” might be ill-posed.
Thanks for bringing this up. Yes I think that is very important and is not what I’m trying to criticize. I will update the previous comment to clarify.
That doesn’t matter for the points I was responding to, a matter of policy for what things to claim, given what your own understanding of the world happens to be.
You can’t know the future with certainty, but you can predict it. The sun will rise tomorrow. I’m much less certain that it will rise in 20 years, and not because there is nobody to observe it.
There are claims about the facts of the world being made, apart from any emotions. Presence of emotional correlates doesn’t make corresponding events in the concrete physical world irrelevant.