I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious. A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer. Part of the reason why people add the qualifier is the belief that those kinds “give you more positive affect”.
If you try to shoot for an actual honest opinion you have to care to differentiate between asking for “dishonestly honest” opinions. For the kind of mindset that has “whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed” actually honest opinions are what to shoot for. But I have bad models on what attracts people to “dishonestly honest” opinions. I suspect that that mindset could benefit from different framing (“I have your back” vs “yes” ie forgo claims on state of the world in favour of explicit social moves).
This lesswrong post might make someone seek out more “dishonest positivity” by applying a “rejection danger” in pursuit of “belief strengthening”. I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
That is on the epistemic side there is a “conservation of expected evidence” but on the social side there is a “adherence to recieved choice”, you can’t give control of an area of life conditional on how that control would be used, if you censor someone you are not infact giving them a choice.
If people have a reason to lie, they may want to use intensifiers like “honestly” for the same reason. Likewise for asking others to lie while pretending to ask for the honest truth—if you’re already pretending, why should we start being surprised only once you use words like “honestly”?
There’s an underlying question of why this particular pretense, of course.
I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
10. Jill decides to face any “yes requires the possibility of no” situation by (ahem) eating it in the face. She is frequently happy with this decision, because it forces her to face the truth in situations where she otherwise wouldn’t, which makes her feel brave, and gives her more accurate information. However, she finds herself unsure whether she really wants to face the music every single time—not because she has any concrete reasons to doubt the quality of the policy, but because she isn’t sure she would be able to admit to herself if she did. Seeing the problem, she eventually stops forcing herself.
I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious.
Well, it’s “inevitable” and/or “obvious” only in the sense that it is quite commonplace human behavior. Certainly it’s not universal—thankfully!
A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer.
Indeed! They are not, in fact, looking for an honest answer. This is a thing people do, quite often.
But why would they say that they want an honest answer? Well, there are many reasons, ranging from self-deception to dominance/power games to various not-quite-so-disreputable reasons. Enumerating and analyzing all such things would be beyond the scope of this comment thread. The rest of your comment is… not so much mistaken, per se, as it is insufficiently built upon an understanding of the dynamics I have alluded to, their causes, their consequences, etc. There is a great deal of material, on Less Wrong and elsewhere, that discusses this sort of thing. (I do not have links handy, I’m afraid, nor time at the moment to locate them, but perhaps someone else can point you in the right direction.)
As might be typical of my neurotype when I see text such as ” an honest evaluation ” as in the top-level comment I resolve it to mean the uncommon case when a person actually effectively seeks a honest opinion as the plain english would suggest. The type of reading that interprets it as the common case could easily suggest that honest asking would be impossible or a irrelevant alternative. And indeed people are trained enough that even when asked for a “honest” opinion they will give the expected opinion. I didn’t really get the simulcranum levels and such but in such dynamics people have lost the meaning of honesty.
I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious. A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer. Part of the reason why people add the qualifier is the belief that those kinds “give you more positive affect”.
If you try to shoot for an actual honest opinion you have to care to differentiate between asking for “dishonestly honest” opinions. For the kind of mindset that has “whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed” actually honest opinions are what to shoot for. But I have bad models on what attracts people to “dishonestly honest” opinions. I suspect that that mindset could benefit from different framing (“I have your back” vs “yes” ie forgo claims on state of the world in favour of explicit social moves).
This lesswrong post might make someone seek out more “dishonest positivity” by applying a “rejection danger” in pursuit of “belief strengthening”. I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
That is on the epistemic side there is a “conservation of expected evidence” but on the social side there is a “adherence to recieved choice”, you can’t give control of an area of life conditional on how that control would be used, if you censor someone you are not infact giving them a choice.
If people have a reason to lie, they may want to use intensifiers like “honestly” for the same reason. Likewise for asking others to lie while pretending to ask for the honest truth—if you’re already pretending, why should we start being surprised only once you use words like “honestly”?
There’s an underlying question of why this particular pretense, of course.
10. Jill decides to face any “yes requires the possibility of no” situation by (ahem) eating it in the face. She is frequently happy with this decision, because it forces her to face the truth in situations where she otherwise wouldn’t, which makes her feel brave, and gives her more accurate information. However, she finds herself unsure whether she really wants to face the music every single time—not because she has any concrete reasons to doubt the quality of the policy, but because she isn’t sure she would be able to admit to herself if she did. Seeing the problem, she eventually stops forcing herself.
Well, it’s “inevitable” and/or “obvious” only in the sense that it is quite commonplace human behavior. Certainly it’s not universal—thankfully!
Indeed! They are not, in fact, looking for an honest answer. This is a thing people do, quite often.
But why would they say that they want an honest answer? Well, there are many reasons, ranging from self-deception to dominance/power games to various not-quite-so-disreputable reasons. Enumerating and analyzing all such things would be beyond the scope of this comment thread. The rest of your comment is… not so much mistaken, per se, as it is insufficiently built upon an understanding of the dynamics I have alluded to, their causes, their consequences, etc. There is a great deal of material, on Less Wrong and elsewhere, that discusses this sort of thing. (I do not have links handy, I’m afraid, nor time at the moment to locate them, but perhaps someone else can point you in the right direction.)
As might be typical of my neurotype when I see text such as ” an honest evaluation ” as in the top-level comment I resolve it to mean the uncommon case when a person actually effectively seeks a honest opinion as the plain english would suggest. The type of reading that interprets it as the common case could easily suggest that honest asking would be impossible or a irrelevant alternative. And indeed people are trained enough that even when asked for a “honest” opinion they will give the expected opinion. I didn’t really get the simulcranum levels and such but in such dynamics people have lost the meaning of honesty.