It’s possible that I’m completely missing the point here, but… the idea of
you can’t actually know what others think of you, so why focus on that?
Seems deeply confused to me.
I think that if I admit that I can’t “know” what others think of me, I’d have to say I also can’t “know” whether they’re sentient, or whether they’re likely to have a good time if they come over for dinner, or whether they’re about to inflict physical violence on me. And these are all questions I care about the answer to, in that I might change my plans if I learned the answer; and two of them are questions I’ve focused on at times and endorse having done so. So this doesn’t seem like an argument against focusing on it.
And in a more normal sense, of course I can know what others think of me, on some level. The guy who, frequently when we spoke, we were kind of hostile towards each other; and when he met my partner, he told them I was a bellend? Pretty sure he didn’t like me. The partner who’s slept by my side most nights for five years even though I sometimes snore, looked after me when I’ve been sick, cheered me up when I’ve felt down, and frequently gives me random compliments? Pretty sure they do like me. These are fairly extreme examples, but suffice it to say that I think I’m capable of picking up on smaller quantities of evidence, too.
And of course it matters what someone thinks of me, because it affects questions like “are they likely to invite me to their next party” and “will they say yes if I ask them on a date” and “if I ask them to mediate a dispute with someone else, will they be biased against me” and “are their friends likely to become my friends”.
Obviously it’s possible to focus too much on the question. But the right amount of focus probably isn’t “zero, ever”, and this specific argument for not focusing doesn’t hold.
But the right amount of focus probably isn’t “zero, ever”,
I agree! And I’m not saying that anyone should spend zero amount of focus on the question. Sometimes it is a relevant question to be thinking about.
But just as the right amount of focus probably isn’t zero ever, the right amount of focus is probably also not “keep obsessing over it all the time”. As you said, it’s possible to focus too much on it. What I’m describing is a shift where it becomes possible to drop the question in the kinds of situations where it isn’t useful, as opposed to being compelled to constantly run a (rather stressful) analysis about it, regardless of whether that’s going to produce any useful information or not.
I agree (and I expect the person who originally asked this question to agree) that you can know what other people think about you on some level. With the experience that I call “being secure”, you are content with having a sense of what other people think of you on that kind of a rough level, and also okay with the fact that in most cases you should have reasonably wide error bars on that estimate. With the experience that I call “being insecure”, having reasonably wide error bars does not feel okay, and you are trying to get a much more narrow estimate than is usually realistic to extract from the available data, with the general consequence that you become oversensitive to noise.
It’s possible that I’m completely missing the point here, but… the idea of
Seems deeply confused to me.
I think that if I admit that I can’t “know” what others think of me, I’d have to say I also can’t “know” whether they’re sentient, or whether they’re likely to have a good time if they come over for dinner, or whether they’re about to inflict physical violence on me. And these are all questions I care about the answer to, in that I might change my plans if I learned the answer; and two of them are questions I’ve focused on at times and endorse having done so. So this doesn’t seem like an argument against focusing on it.
And in a more normal sense, of course I can know what others think of me, on some level. The guy who, frequently when we spoke, we were kind of hostile towards each other; and when he met my partner, he told them I was a bellend? Pretty sure he didn’t like me. The partner who’s slept by my side most nights for five years even though I sometimes snore, looked after me when I’ve been sick, cheered me up when I’ve felt down, and frequently gives me random compliments? Pretty sure they do like me. These are fairly extreme examples, but suffice it to say that I think I’m capable of picking up on smaller quantities of evidence, too.
And of course it matters what someone thinks of me, because it affects questions like “are they likely to invite me to their next party” and “will they say yes if I ask them on a date” and “if I ask them to mediate a dispute with someone else, will they be biased against me” and “are their friends likely to become my friends”.
Obviously it’s possible to focus too much on the question. But the right amount of focus probably isn’t “zero, ever”, and this specific argument for not focusing doesn’t hold.
I agree! And I’m not saying that anyone should spend zero amount of focus on the question. Sometimes it is a relevant question to be thinking about.
But just as the right amount of focus probably isn’t zero ever, the right amount of focus is probably also not “keep obsessing over it all the time”. As you said, it’s possible to focus too much on it. What I’m describing is a shift where it becomes possible to drop the question in the kinds of situations where it isn’t useful, as opposed to being compelled to constantly run a (rather stressful) analysis about it, regardless of whether that’s going to produce any useful information or not.
I agree (and I expect the person who originally asked this question to agree) that you can know what other people think about you on some level. With the experience that I call “being secure”, you are content with having a sense of what other people think of you on that kind of a rough level, and also okay with the fact that in most cases you should have reasonably wide error bars on that estimate. With the experience that I call “being insecure”, having reasonably wide error bars does not feel okay, and you are trying to get a much more narrow estimate than is usually realistic to extract from the available data, with the general consequence that you become oversensitive to noise.