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.
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.