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.
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.