I tried to directly respond to the points in this post. But the framing of this post is so off-kilter from mine that it’s confusing to try to “meet” your frame while maintaining my own.
I’m just going to have to give my own take, and let people be confused how the two integrate.
//
I’m the middle manager with the widget factory. I imagine ~two possible scenarios:
My higher-ups actually would want me to make the saner choice, but I am personally very confused, or there’s been a lot of miscommunication / lack of clarity. Maybe my ability to read their signals of what they’d want is very wrong, or they just don’t give much feedback at all. (I’ve seen this happen lots. This seems totally plausible to me.) In MY world, the higher-ups need me to demonstrate loyalty by showing an ability to make the worse decision. I am desperate for their approval and am confused about how to get it. In REALITY, the game of dishing out approval is not something the company optimizes for, and so the higher-ups haven’t a clue about my internal drama. If they could read my mind, they’d pity me. They assume that I’m just learning the ropes, and they’re willing to eat the cost of some middle manager making mistakes, and they don’t have time to fix all the errors. They let it go without comment (perhaps a sign of the problem). I am twiddling my fingers in anxiety, hoping they like me / don’t fire me.
My higher-ups will in fact promote me for making the insane choice, and my read about that is totally correct. In this world, lots of systems and people are corrupt. Bribery, cheating, scams, embezzling, etc. are prevalent. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to choice-making because people can NOT be expected to be rewarded for doing good work; the only reward is having the right connections. If you don’t have the right connections, you’re probably fucked. Think the USSR under Stalin. In this world, basically everyone is insane. They’ve let integrity go out the window. “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Clean effort does not result in reward. People resort to other means.
I honestly don’t see the example making any sense outside of something similar to the above scenarios, unless you remove information from the system (e.g. I don’t know that the water-poisoning factory costs the SAME as the not-water-poisoning factory) or there’s info left out (“no additional cost” isn’t taking into account things like legibility or robustness or something).
//
I’m the spouse planning dinner. I can imagine the following scenarios, which carry some element of insanity:
I have some core belief that Love = Suffering or Love = Sacrifice. (“Core belief” is a technical term here.) This leads me to doing some insane things like always doing the thing I don’t want to do, whenever I get a sense my partner wants that something, with the expectation that this is “how love works” or something. My partner does not want me to do this, but I’m kind of stuck / can’t get distance from the pattern.
My partner is stuck in a zero-sum mentality about romantic relationships. They get upset when I don’t make grand gestures or display active self-sacrifice. They feel insecure in the relationship. When I seem happy at their “expense”, they assume I don’t love them / care about them. I feel obligated to pick places they like even when I don’t like them, and I am carrying some slight resentment about it. It doesn’t feel worth rocking the boat. In fact, they do seem more relaxed when I seem “less openly excited or happy”—because to them, this means I need them more, and they feel less likely to be abandoned or rejected. (In this case, let’s say that this is the wrong assumption in this particular relationship, but hasn’t been wrong in past relationships, and they are dealing with trauma in the area.)
Or, as is all too common, both me and my partner are carrying some kind of trauma-based insanity about relationships. We’re codependent and playing out a weird stereotypical trope of sacrificing our own preferences for the sake of the other. We don’t see a problem actually, with this, if you asked us, but we’re both suffering more than otherwise.
I can imagine the following scenarios, which are not insane:
I enjoy giving my spouse the gift of taking them to their beloved restaurant, regardless of my own preferences. I see this as practicing generosity. I put my preference aside, but this leaves no negative residue. I’m genuinely happy to take them to a restaurant they love. In our relationship, we don’t prioritize “having good experiences” as much as we do giving / building / quality attention / etc.
I am practicing relinquishing my preferences because I want to be able to enjoy myself regardless of particular external circumstances. I believe it’s good to take each moment as it is and appreciate the present, over necessarily trying to make myself experience particular things. Giving my spouse a nice dinner is an excellent bonus.
If we always went to the restaurant we both love, we’d get less variety of restaurant choices for our romantic dinners. So sometimes I pick the restaurant they love, and sometimes they pick the restaurant I love, and sometimes we pick the restaurant we both love. Overall, this is value-positive in the long term.
//
These examples are outputs from my model of how reality works, from what I can tell.
I don’t like what the post is trying to reify because I think it predicts reality less well than whatever I am using to predict reality
Or
Maybe it predicts reality “okay” but I feel it adds an unnecessary layer of being bitter / cynical / paranoid when this is not particularly healthy or useful.
The latter thing feels like a serious cost to me.
I’m not trying to promote naive optimism either.
But the world this post paints feels “dark” in a way that seems less accurate than available alternatives.
And also seems a bit more likely to lead to adversarial dynamics / Game A / finite games / giving up on oneself and others / less love / less faith / less goodwill / less trying. That is a serious cost to me.
I’m guessing that the counterpoint is… NOT seeing the world this way will lead to getting taken advantage of, good guys losing, needless loss, value degradation, etc. ?
I tried to directly respond to the points in this post. But the framing of this post is so off-kilter from mine that it’s confusing to try to “meet” your frame while maintaining my own.
I’m just going to have to give my own take, and let people be confused how the two integrate.
//
I’m the middle manager with the widget factory. I imagine ~two possible scenarios:
My higher-ups actually would want me to make the saner choice, but I am personally very confused, or there’s been a lot of miscommunication / lack of clarity. Maybe my ability to read their signals of what they’d want is very wrong, or they just don’t give much feedback at all. (I’ve seen this happen lots. This seems totally plausible to me.) In MY world, the higher-ups need me to demonstrate loyalty by showing an ability to make the worse decision. I am desperate for their approval and am confused about how to get it. In REALITY, the game of dishing out approval is not something the company optimizes for, and so the higher-ups haven’t a clue about my internal drama. If they could read my mind, they’d pity me. They assume that I’m just learning the ropes, and they’re willing to eat the cost of some middle manager making mistakes, and they don’t have time to fix all the errors. They let it go without comment (perhaps a sign of the problem). I am twiddling my fingers in anxiety, hoping they like me / don’t fire me.
My higher-ups will in fact promote me for making the insane choice, and my read about that is totally correct. In this world, lots of systems and people are corrupt. Bribery, cheating, scams, embezzling, etc. are prevalent. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to choice-making because people can NOT be expected to be rewarded for doing good work; the only reward is having the right connections. If you don’t have the right connections, you’re probably fucked. Think the USSR under Stalin. In this world, basically everyone is insane. They’ve let integrity go out the window. “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Clean effort does not result in reward. People resort to other means.
I honestly don’t see the example making any sense outside of something similar to the above scenarios, unless you remove information from the system (e.g. I don’t know that the water-poisoning factory costs the SAME as the not-water-poisoning factory) or there’s info left out (“no additional cost” isn’t taking into account things like legibility or robustness or something).
//
I’m the spouse planning dinner. I can imagine the following scenarios, which carry some element of insanity:
I have some core belief that Love = Suffering or Love = Sacrifice. (“Core belief” is a technical term here.) This leads me to doing some insane things like always doing the thing I don’t want to do, whenever I get a sense my partner wants that something, with the expectation that this is “how love works” or something. My partner does not want me to do this, but I’m kind of stuck / can’t get distance from the pattern.
My partner is stuck in a zero-sum mentality about romantic relationships. They get upset when I don’t make grand gestures or display active self-sacrifice. They feel insecure in the relationship. When I seem happy at their “expense”, they assume I don’t love them / care about them. I feel obligated to pick places they like even when I don’t like them, and I am carrying some slight resentment about it. It doesn’t feel worth rocking the boat. In fact, they do seem more relaxed when I seem “less openly excited or happy”—because to them, this means I need them more, and they feel less likely to be abandoned or rejected. (In this case, let’s say that this is the wrong assumption in this particular relationship, but hasn’t been wrong in past relationships, and they are dealing with trauma in the area.)
Or, as is all too common, both me and my partner are carrying some kind of trauma-based insanity about relationships. We’re codependent and playing out a weird stereotypical trope of sacrificing our own preferences for the sake of the other. We don’t see a problem actually, with this, if you asked us, but we’re both suffering more than otherwise.
I can imagine the following scenarios, which are not insane:
I enjoy giving my spouse the gift of taking them to their beloved restaurant, regardless of my own preferences. I see this as practicing generosity. I put my preference aside, but this leaves no negative residue. I’m genuinely happy to take them to a restaurant they love. In our relationship, we don’t prioritize “having good experiences” as much as we do giving / building / quality attention / etc.
I am practicing relinquishing my preferences because I want to be able to enjoy myself regardless of particular external circumstances. I believe it’s good to take each moment as it is and appreciate the present, over necessarily trying to make myself experience particular things. Giving my spouse a nice dinner is an excellent bonus.
If we always went to the restaurant we both love, we’d get less variety of restaurant choices for our romantic dinners. So sometimes I pick the restaurant they love, and sometimes they pick the restaurant I love, and sometimes we pick the restaurant we both love. Overall, this is value-positive in the long term.
//
These examples are outputs from my model of how reality works, from what I can tell.
Oh, hm, I think I am noticing something:
I don’t like what the post is trying to reify because I think it predicts reality less well than whatever I am using to predict reality
Or
Maybe it predicts reality “okay” but I feel it adds an unnecessary layer of being bitter / cynical / paranoid when this is not particularly healthy or useful.
The latter thing feels like a serious cost to me.
I’m not trying to promote naive optimism either.
But the world this post paints feels “dark” in a way that seems less accurate than available alternatives.
And also seems a bit more likely to lead to adversarial dynamics / Game A / finite games / giving up on oneself and others / less love / less faith / less goodwill / less trying. That is a serious cost to me.
I’m guessing that the counterpoint is… NOT seeing the world this way will lead to getting taken advantage of, good guys losing, needless loss, value degradation, etc. ?