I understand the sentiment, but I’d caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don’t intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what’s on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Perhaps part of what you’re objecting to is not that the person prefers you to lie, but that they prefer a world that can’t exist to exist. If this were really what’s going on, that would be a severe lapse of rationality. But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it’s quite possible to decide to like the play. The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you’re willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship.
The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she’s worked hard on and probably partially identifies with.
Please note that I’m not saying this is easy or obvious. Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
(and now, the other part of my reply to your comment, with a quite intentional difference in tone)
I understand the sentiment, but I’d caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person.
Certainly. I’m not suggesting that you ought to just run your mouth about any opinion that pops into your head, especially without giving any thought to whether expressing that opinion would be tactful, how the other person will feel about it (especially if it’s a person you care about), etc. Often the best policy is just to shut up.
The problem comes when someone asks you for an opinion, and communicates that they really want it. If they then take offense at honesty, then I am strongly tempted to despise them immediately and without reservation. (Tempted, note; there may be mitigating factors; we all act unreasonably on occasion; but patterns of behavior are another thing.)
One of the issues with behaving like this is: so what happens when you really do want the person’s opinion? How do you communicate that? You’ve already taught your partner that they should lie, tell you the pleasing falsehood, rather than be honest; how do you put that on hold? “No, honey, I know that I usually prefer falsehood to truth despite my protestations to the contrary, but this time I really do want the truth! Honest!” It erodes communication and trust — and I can think of few more important things in a relationship.
Behavior like this also makes your partner not trust your rationality, your honesty with yourself; I don’t think I could be with a person whom I could not trust, on such a basic level, to reason honestly. I couldn’t respect them.
This is bad even if you don’t intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what’s on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Yes. Certainly. Heck, I sometimes don’t want to hear the truth, or someone’s honest opinion of me. Not because I am necessarily in denial, or any such thing, but because I don’t want to think about it at the moment; or any number of reasons.
But you know what I don’t do in that case? I don’t ask them for their honest opinion! I don’t do what the girlfriend in the anecdote did, which is essentially demand that someone close to her to lie to her, and furthermore without acknowledging that this is what she was asking! To demand that your partner subvert their reason, and engage in doublethink to support your own irrationality… I really have a hard time finding words strong enough to express how much the very idea revolts me.
But then, this might be one of those “different people have different values/preferences” things.
demand that someone close to her to lie to her, and furthermore without acknowledging that this is what she was asking! To demand that your partner subvert their reason, and engage in doublethink
One scary thought I had a while back is that this is essentially what friendship and especially love is, i.e., sabotaging one’s rationality, specifically one’s ability to honestly asses one’s friend’s/lover’s usefulness as an ally as a costly way to signal one’s precommitment not to defect against the friend/lover even when it would be in one’s interest to do so.
On the other hand, it’s just as easy to make up a story in the opposite direction: friendship and love are what we call having a true judgement of a person’s fundamental virtue that is unswayed by transient, day to day circumstances.
But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it’s quite possible to decide to like the play.
Possible, but utterly abhorrent.
whether you’re willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake
Doublespeak for “doublethink, self-deception, and lies”.
The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she’s worked hard on
One can acknowledge hard work without lying about outcomes. Approval given regardless of worth is meaningless and devalues itself (because if I approve of what you made, even if it’s crap, then my approval is worthless, because it does not distinguish good work from bad, good results from dreck).
and probably partially identifies with.
Perhaps, then, she should heed Paul Graham’s advice to keep her identity small; and apply the Litany of Tarski to whether the thing she worked on was good.
Please note that I’m not saying this is easy or obvious.
Sure, but something can be difficult, non-obvious, and undesirable.
Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
I strongly disapprove of equating empathy with deception and tacit support for irrationality and emotional manipulation. They are not the same.
The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you’re willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship.
That is something the people do have actual conversations about, something that is, indeed, important to consider and a good reason to adopt the practice of emphasising positive things. However, it is not the kind of conversation that SaidAchmiz was talking about unless you read it extremely uncharitably.
There is a rather distinct and obvious difference between emphasizing the positive aspects of something and emphasizing something that does not exist. In fact, choosing to emphasize something to exists entails outright failing to emphasize a positive aspect of the the thing in question. Sometimes that is necessary to do, but doing so does not constitute a converstation of the type you describe.
You’re right, I made some assumptions that probably don’t apply to SaidAchmiz, and I realize my comment comes off poorly. I apologize. I was trying to refer to the situation from the OP, but found it difficult to write about without using a hypothetical “you” and I’m not entirely satisfied with the result.
What I was trying to get across is that this kind of situation can be complex and that the girlfriend in the scenario can have legitimate emotional justification for behaving this way. I agree that wishing you’d lied is a bad situation to be in. I agree that the OP’s story is not a very good mode of interaction even if handled the way Sam Harris would. I agree that people should be able to have explicit conversations about emphasizing positives rather than veiled ones (which I was trying to get at when I said the conversation was “actually” about that).
I don’t mean to imply that SaidAchmiz wants to feel completely free to say anything regardless of consequences. I’m trying to say that I have felt that tendency myself and have unintentionally taken advantage of a “we should be able to say anything to each other” policy as an excuse not to think about the effects of my speech.
Hopefully this is clearer. I’m only trying to relay what I’ve learned from my experiences, but maybe I’ve failed at that.
I understand the sentiment, but I’d caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don’t intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what’s on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Perhaps part of what you’re objecting to is not that the person prefers you to lie, but that they prefer a world that can’t exist to exist. If this were really what’s going on, that would be a severe lapse of rationality. But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it’s quite possible to decide to like the play. The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you’re willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship.
The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she’s worked hard on and probably partially identifies with.
Please note that I’m not saying this is easy or obvious. Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
(and now, the other part of my reply to your comment, with a quite intentional difference in tone)
Certainly. I’m not suggesting that you ought to just run your mouth about any opinion that pops into your head, especially without giving any thought to whether expressing that opinion would be tactful, how the other person will feel about it (especially if it’s a person you care about), etc. Often the best policy is just to shut up.
The problem comes when someone asks you for an opinion, and communicates that they really want it. If they then take offense at honesty, then I am strongly tempted to despise them immediately and without reservation. (Tempted, note; there may be mitigating factors; we all act unreasonably on occasion; but patterns of behavior are another thing.)
One of the issues with behaving like this is: so what happens when you really do want the person’s opinion? How do you communicate that? You’ve already taught your partner that they should lie, tell you the pleasing falsehood, rather than be honest; how do you put that on hold? “No, honey, I know that I usually prefer falsehood to truth despite my protestations to the contrary, but this time I really do want the truth! Honest!” It erodes communication and trust — and I can think of few more important things in a relationship.
Behavior like this also makes your partner not trust your rationality, your honesty with yourself; I don’t think I could be with a person whom I could not trust, on such a basic level, to reason honestly. I couldn’t respect them.
Yes. Certainly. Heck, I sometimes don’t want to hear the truth, or someone’s honest opinion of me. Not because I am necessarily in denial, or any such thing, but because I don’t want to think about it at the moment; or any number of reasons.
But you know what I don’t do in that case? I don’t ask them for their honest opinion! I don’t do what the girlfriend in the anecdote did, which is essentially demand that someone close to her to lie to her, and furthermore without acknowledging that this is what she was asking! To demand that your partner subvert their reason, and engage in doublethink to support your own irrationality… I really have a hard time finding words strong enough to express how much the very idea revolts me.
But then, this might be one of those “different people have different values/preferences” things.
One scary thought I had a while back is that this is essentially what friendship and especially love is, i.e., sabotaging one’s rationality, specifically one’s ability to honestly asses one’s friend’s/lover’s usefulness as an ally as a costly way to signal one’s precommitment not to defect against the friend/lover even when it would be in one’s interest to do so.
On the other hand, it’s just as easy to make up a story in the opposite direction: friendship and love are what we call having a true judgement of a person’s fundamental virtue that is unswayed by transient, day to day circumstances.
“Love is the inability to follow a logical argument concerning the object of one’s affection.”
… is a quote along those lines, from a former classmate; with which I do not actually agree.
But “usefulness as an ally” does not at all fully capture a loved one’s value to me, even absent any failures of rationality.
(Not that you said it does, I’m just pre-empting likely replies.)
Feel free to substitute whatever you feel is appropriate for “usefulness as an ally”.
The difference is that I explain it in terms of game theory.
Possible, but utterly abhorrent.
Doublespeak for “doublethink, self-deception, and lies”.
One can acknowledge hard work without lying about outcomes. Approval given regardless of worth is meaningless and devalues itself (because if I approve of what you made, even if it’s crap, then my approval is worthless, because it does not distinguish good work from bad, good results from dreck).
Perhaps, then, she should heed Paul Graham’s advice to keep her identity small; and apply the Litany of Tarski to whether the thing she worked on was good.
Sure, but something can be difficult, non-obvious, and undesirable.
I strongly disapprove of equating empathy with deception and tacit support for irrationality and emotional manipulation. They are not the same.
That is something the people do have actual conversations about, something that is, indeed, important to consider and a good reason to adopt the practice of emphasising positive things. However, it is not the kind of conversation that SaidAchmiz was talking about unless you read it extremely uncharitably.
There is a rather distinct and obvious difference between emphasizing the positive aspects of something and emphasizing something that does not exist. In fact, choosing to emphasize something to exists entails outright failing to emphasize a positive aspect of the the thing in question. Sometimes that is necessary to do, but doing so does not constitute a converstation of the type you describe.
Your reply has distinct “straw man” tendencies.
You’re right, I made some assumptions that probably don’t apply to SaidAchmiz, and I realize my comment comes off poorly. I apologize. I was trying to refer to the situation from the OP, but found it difficult to write about without using a hypothetical “you” and I’m not entirely satisfied with the result.
What I was trying to get across is that this kind of situation can be complex and that the girlfriend in the scenario can have legitimate emotional justification for behaving this way. I agree that wishing you’d lied is a bad situation to be in. I agree that the OP’s story is not a very good mode of interaction even if handled the way Sam Harris would. I agree that people should be able to have explicit conversations about emphasizing positives rather than veiled ones (which I was trying to get at when I said the conversation was “actually” about that).
I don’t mean to imply that SaidAchmiz wants to feel completely free to say anything regardless of consequences. I’m trying to say that I have felt that tendency myself and have unintentionally taken advantage of a “we should be able to say anything to each other” policy as an excuse not to think about the effects of my speech.
Hopefully this is clearer. I’m only trying to relay what I’ve learned from my experiences, but maybe I’ve failed at that.