Friends secretly haven’t liked you all these years.
God doesn’t exist. Everything you’ve built your worldview upon is worthless.
You have a deadly disease for which there is no cure, and you’re not the sort of person who would try to “live their life to the fullest” or anything if you knew you only had a year to live.
Your child isn’t yours—your wife had an affair, but that was long ago, it won’t be relevant, and your wife has and will continue to be faithful to you since.
Your child/friend/lover died, and it was your fault, but you are unlikely to repeat that mistake.
And the aforementioned: the world is a harsh, unfair place. No, harsher than that. Harsher still. Keep going. Billions of humans have suffered and died for no reason.
Your child isn’t yours—your wife had an affair, but that was long ago, it won’t be relevant, and your wife has and will continue to be faithful to you since.
OK, pick this one as a test case, since it’s among the easier ones. We can work up to the hard ones later.
How does owning up to it make it worse?
How does not being open about it make it go away?
If it is in fact true, in what way are you not already enduring it and interacting with it?
The idea, ISTM, is to carefully separate two things: the awfulness of the situation—I can entertain the idea that you have a preference for raising children which are genetically “yours”, as opposed to other people’s—and the consequences of being well or poorly informed about the situation.
Being in the dark about an awful situation (i.e. one contrary to your preferences) does not make it any less contrary to your preferences; all that it grants you is the inability to make informed decisions about the situation.
We may feel like knowing the truth would make us worse off in some circumstances, and I don’t dispute the feeling. But is that feeling the result of truth, or is it a cognitive illusion?
Calling pain a cognitive illusion doesn’t make it go away. (I’m about to post about how Typical Mind Fallacy seems to be influencing this discussion, where I’ll reply to this in more detail)
How does owning up to it make it worse?
Before, you trusted your wife, and your love for your child was untainted. Now it’s not. Immediately after understanding the situation, (the affair was long ago, your child is still yours for all intents and purposes) you will (at least I would) want to forgive my wife and accept the child as my own. I want everything to continue exactly as it would have been continuing in ignorance.
Except now doing those things is HARDER, because evolutionary-adaptations that I assign low value to (primal desires to father your own children, etc) are causing me to feel distress, and possibly make bad decisions. I may find myself noticing traits of my child than remind me of the affair and cause me flickers of jealousy that compel me to reprimand the child when I should have given a gentle reminder. If my wife needs to be out of town for legitimate reasons, I’ll be more quick to wonder if she’s having another affair, and even I can rationally remind myself that the affair was long ago and she is still worthy of trust I will have to make that mental effort every single time.
It will be, at the very least, annoying, if not painful, with no benefits other than aesthetic preference for truth, and in this case, for me, that aesthetic preference is vastly outweighed by the emotional consequences.
Let me suggest that you’re overweighing the long-term effects on your happiness of learning something painful (see Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness for research on that), and underweighing (in fact neglecting) the benefits that would result from knowing the truth.
For instance, learning the truth has placed you in a situation of greater autonomy with respect to your child: you have a greater degree of control over the moment when he/she will learn that truth.
With respect to your spouse, you are no longer being a victim of deception with each passing moment, but actively in control over whether it’s appropriate to penalize her, or forgive her, or whichever choice steers the future in the direction you prefer.
She, on the other hand, is no longer calling all the shots—maybe she has been raising that child altogether the wrong way all that time, under the influence of guilt and the cognitive effort of deception. This is now something you can be aware of and correct for if necessary; as you can compensate for your jealousy-derived impulses, which anyway (speaking as a father of three) are only one of the many emotion-driven ways you regularly fail to be the parent you ideally would prefer to be.
More generally, “aesthetic preference” my left foot—the truth here makes the difference between steering or being steered. To be content with not knowing is also to be content with being manipulated, and that’s something which I’d rank as strictly less acceptable than enduring the pain generated by my jealousy modules.
Yeah, Typical Mind Fallacy is definitely at work here. My issue with the Gendlin is not that it’s false for all people, but it’s false for some people. (I think I actually did update during this thread about how many people on Less Wrong respond emotionally to certain situations, or at least how they rank emotional distress compared to other negative things).
I can’t make very good predictions about how either of us would actually respond to this situation (I haven’t had a long term romantic partner, let alone a child). But I assume we would react very differently. In this situation, I don’t consider myself to be being manipulated. I WAS being manipulated a long time ago. In this scenario, which I devised specifically to test the issue, the wife went through a period of her own distress, subsequent self-evaluation and had been faithful ever since. (I realize our definitions of “faithful” are different.)
“Steering or being steered” is not something I care much about.
It would be different if the wife was still occasionally cheating or not respecting me in other ways. And I think in most real scenarios, people aren’t actually perfect and it’s safer for couples planning a long term commitment to be fully honest about things. (You can’t know whether you’re violating someone’s preferences about being manipulated unless you’ve had a conversation about what constitutes manipulation, at the very least, and DURING that conversation it’s rather dangerous to say “You know, if you cheat on me and then are sufficiently mopey about it and then you are faithful for 10 years, you don’t have to tell me.” Because I’d still rather her tell me RIGHT AWAY, so we can be mopey and deal with it together.)
But in the specific hypothetical, I would probably prefer not to know. At the very least, there would be a cost to knowing, and it would require years of work before it became worth it.
I doubt it. Men who discover this particular fact are diagnosed with PTSD at about the same rate as rape victims IIRC. Irresepctive of any normative statements about it, it is safe to say that it is quite traumatic emotionally.
Citation needed. Pardon my being blunt, but I think you’re merely recalling some Hansonisms that are not backed by actual fact.
The current (DSM-IV) diagnosis criteria of PTSD specifically require triggers that include threats to physical integrity, and events such as divorce or the ending of a romantic relationship are considered “sub-threshold”; based on this I strongly doubt that any study of the kind you refer to exists.
Friends secretly haven’t liked you all these years.
God doesn’t exist. Everything you’ve built your worldview upon is worthless.
You have a deadly disease for which there is no cure, and you’re not the sort of person who would try to “live their life to the fullest” or anything if you knew you only had a year to live.
Your child isn’t yours—your wife had an affair, but that was long ago, it won’t be relevant, and your wife has and will continue to be faithful to you since.
Your child/friend/lover died, and it was your fault, but you are unlikely to repeat that mistake.
And the aforementioned: the world is a harsh, unfair place. No, harsher than that. Harsher still. Keep going. Billions of humans have suffered and died for no reason.
OK, pick this one as a test case, since it’s among the easier ones. We can work up to the hard ones later.
How does owning up to it make it worse?
How does not being open about it make it go away?
If it is in fact true, in what way are you not already enduring it and interacting with it?
The idea, ISTM, is to carefully separate two things: the awfulness of the situation—I can entertain the idea that you have a preference for raising children which are genetically “yours”, as opposed to other people’s—and the consequences of being well or poorly informed about the situation.
Being in the dark about an awful situation (i.e. one contrary to your preferences) does not make it any less contrary to your preferences; all that it grants you is the inability to make informed decisions about the situation.
We may feel like knowing the truth would make us worse off in some circumstances, and I don’t dispute the feeling. But is that feeling the result of truth, or is it a cognitive illusion?
Calling pain a cognitive illusion doesn’t make it go away. (I’m about to post about how Typical Mind Fallacy seems to be influencing this discussion, where I’ll reply to this in more detail)
Before, you trusted your wife, and your love for your child was untainted. Now it’s not. Immediately after understanding the situation, (the affair was long ago, your child is still yours for all intents and purposes) you will (at least I would) want to forgive my wife and accept the child as my own. I want everything to continue exactly as it would have been continuing in ignorance.
Except now doing those things is HARDER, because evolutionary-adaptations that I assign low value to (primal desires to father your own children, etc) are causing me to feel distress, and possibly make bad decisions. I may find myself noticing traits of my child than remind me of the affair and cause me flickers of jealousy that compel me to reprimand the child when I should have given a gentle reminder. If my wife needs to be out of town for legitimate reasons, I’ll be more quick to wonder if she’s having another affair, and even I can rationally remind myself that the affair was long ago and she is still worthy of trust I will have to make that mental effort every single time.
It will be, at the very least, annoying, if not painful, with no benefits other than aesthetic preference for truth, and in this case, for me, that aesthetic preference is vastly outweighed by the emotional consequences.
Let me suggest that you’re overweighing the long-term effects on your happiness of learning something painful (see Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness for research on that), and underweighing (in fact neglecting) the benefits that would result from knowing the truth.
For instance, learning the truth has placed you in a situation of greater autonomy with respect to your child: you have a greater degree of control over the moment when he/she will learn that truth.
With respect to your spouse, you are no longer being a victim of deception with each passing moment, but actively in control over whether it’s appropriate to penalize her, or forgive her, or whichever choice steers the future in the direction you prefer.
She, on the other hand, is no longer calling all the shots—maybe she has been raising that child altogether the wrong way all that time, under the influence of guilt and the cognitive effort of deception. This is now something you can be aware of and correct for if necessary; as you can compensate for your jealousy-derived impulses, which anyway (speaking as a father of three) are only one of the many emotion-driven ways you regularly fail to be the parent you ideally would prefer to be.
More generally, “aesthetic preference” my left foot—the truth here makes the difference between steering or being steered. To be content with not knowing is also to be content with being manipulated, and that’s something which I’d rank as strictly less acceptable than enduring the pain generated by my jealousy modules.
Yeah, Typical Mind Fallacy is definitely at work here. My issue with the Gendlin is not that it’s false for all people, but it’s false for some people. (I think I actually did update during this thread about how many people on Less Wrong respond emotionally to certain situations, or at least how they rank emotional distress compared to other negative things).
I can’t make very good predictions about how either of us would actually respond to this situation (I haven’t had a long term romantic partner, let alone a child). But I assume we would react very differently. In this situation, I don’t consider myself to be being manipulated. I WAS being manipulated a long time ago. In this scenario, which I devised specifically to test the issue, the wife went through a period of her own distress, subsequent self-evaluation and had been faithful ever since. (I realize our definitions of “faithful” are different.)
“Steering or being steered” is not something I care much about.
It would be different if the wife was still occasionally cheating or not respecting me in other ways. And I think in most real scenarios, people aren’t actually perfect and it’s safer for couples planning a long term commitment to be fully honest about things. (You can’t know whether you’re violating someone’s preferences about being manipulated unless you’ve had a conversation about what constitutes manipulation, at the very least, and DURING that conversation it’s rather dangerous to say “You know, if you cheat on me and then are sufficiently mopey about it and then you are faithful for 10 years, you don’t have to tell me.” Because I’d still rather her tell me RIGHT AWAY, so we can be mopey and deal with it together.)
But in the specific hypothetical, I would probably prefer not to know. At the very least, there would be a cost to knowing, and it would require years of work before it became worth it.
I doubt it. Men who discover this particular fact are diagnosed with PTSD at about the same rate as rape victims IIRC. Irresepctive of any normative statements about it, it is safe to say that it is quite traumatic emotionally.
Citation needed. Pardon my being blunt, but I think you’re merely recalling some Hansonisms that are not backed by actual fact.
The current (DSM-IV) diagnosis criteria of PTSD specifically require triggers that include threats to physical integrity, and events such as divorce or the ending of a romantic relationship are considered “sub-threshold”; based on this I strongly doubt that any study of the kind you refer to exists.
good call. I was under the mistaken impression that Hanson had cited actual research.