Imagine that someone you know has a reaction that you consider disproportionate to the severity of the event that caused it. If your friend loses their comb, and they get weirdly angry about it, and you persuade them into calming down with rational argument, and then it happens again, say, many months later, and they get just as angry as they did the first time, is that person unteachable? Is it a waste of your time to try to persuade them using rationality?
I think a lot of people would have an expectation that the friend would not have another outburst, and that when the friend had another outburst, that expectation would be violated.
And for some reason, at this turn, it seems like a lot of people think, “I tried to teach this person once, and it didn’t work. They’re the kind of person who can’t be persuaded. I should direct my efforts elsewhere.” Maybe you even make it look more ‘rational’ by name-dropping expected utility.
Or maybe it doesn’t feel like stubbornness; maybe it feels like they just forgot. Like they were pretending to listen when they looked like they were listening to your arguments, but really they were just waiting for you to finish talking.
That does happen sometimes, if you fail to emotionally engage someone or if you’re hanging out with all the wrong kinds of people.
You made your first rational argument with the implicit expectation that it would prevent all future outbursts over combs. But it happens again. You shouldn’t stop at your first attempt. It may be that circumstances are different this time and an outburst is warranted, or it may be that your friend is not in a state in which your previous arguments are at the level of their attention. Or maybe they feel righteous anger and you need to get them to have less self-confidence and more confidence in you, and maybe you need to encourage them to control that in the future, instead of only the previous object-level impulse.
The point is, you expected your first argument to generalize more than it actually did. People often respond to situations like this as though the fact that their first attempt to instill a very general behavior in another person is strong evidence that the person can never be made to instill that general behavior. It’s only strong evidence that your first attempt to instill a general behavior was less successful than you expected it to be.
Fake Amnesia
Followup to: Tonic Judo
Related to: Correspondence Bias
Imagine that someone you know has a reaction that you consider disproportionate to the severity of the event that caused it. If your friend loses their comb, and they get weirdly angry about it, and you persuade them into calming down with rational argument, and then it happens again, say, many months later, and they get just as angry as they did the first time, is that person unteachable? Is it a waste of your time to try to persuade them using rationality?
I think a lot of people would have an expectation that the friend would not have another outburst, and that when the friend had another outburst, that expectation would be violated.
And for some reason, at this turn, it seems like a lot of people think, “I tried to teach this person once, and it didn’t work. They’re the kind of person who can’t be persuaded. I should direct my efforts elsewhere.” Maybe you even make it look more ‘rational’ by name-dropping expected utility.
Or maybe it doesn’t feel like stubbornness; maybe it feels like they just forgot. Like they were pretending to listen when they looked like they were listening to your arguments, but really they were just waiting for you to finish talking.
That does happen sometimes, if you fail to emotionally engage someone or if you’re hanging out with all the wrong kinds of people.
But most of the time, when you’re dealing with the majority of the human race, with all of the people who care about how they behave, the right way to go is to realize that a violation of expectations is a sign that your model is wrong.
You made your first rational argument with the implicit expectation that it would prevent all future outbursts over combs. But it happens again. You shouldn’t stop at your first attempt. It may be that circumstances are different this time and an outburst is warranted, or it may be that your friend is not in a state in which your previous arguments are at the level of their attention. Or maybe they feel righteous anger and you need to get them to have less self-confidence and more confidence in you, and maybe you need to encourage them to control that in the future, instead of only the previous object-level impulse.
The point is, you expected your first argument to generalize more than it actually did. People often respond to situations like this as though the fact that their first attempt to instill a very general behavior in another person is strong evidence that the person can never be made to instill that general behavior. It’s only strong evidence that your first attempt to instill a general behavior was less successful than you expected it to be.
The idea is to keep up your rational arguments, to give them enough feedback to actually learn the complicated thing that you’re trying to teach them. From the fact that you see that your arguments generalize in certain situations, it does not follow that you have successfully given others the ability to see the generalizations that you can see.
(Content note: Inspired by this comment by user:jimmy. Highly recommended reading.)