I found Taber’s radical honesty workshops very useful for a framing of how to deal with telling the truth.
According to him telling the truth is usually about choosing pain now instead of pain in the future. However not all kinds of pain are equal. A person who practices yoga has to be able to tell the pain from stretching from the pain of hurting their joints. In the same way a person who speaks in a radical honest way should be aware of the pain that the statement produces and be able to distinguish whether it’s healthy or isn’t.
Courage is only valuable when it comes with the wisdom to know when the pain you are exposing yourself is healthy and when it isn’t. The teenager who expresses courage to signal courage to his friends without any sense of whether the risk he takes is worth it isn’t mature.
Building up thick emotional walls and telling “the truth” without any consideration of the effects of the act of communication doesn’t lead to honest conversation in the radical honesty sense. As it turns out, it also doesn’t have much to do with real courage as it’s still avoiding the conversations that are actually difficult.
One difference is that different types of pain come with slightly different qualia. This allows communication that’s in contact with what’s felt in the moment which isn’t there in ideas of maturity where maturity is about following rules that certain things shouldn’t be spoken.
I found Taber’s radical honesty workshops very useful for a framing of how to deal with telling the truth.
According to him telling the truth is usually about choosing pain now instead of pain in the future. However not all kinds of pain are equal. A person who practices yoga has to be able to tell the pain from stretching from the pain of hurting their joints. In the same way a person who speaks in a radical honest way should be aware of the pain that the statement produces and be able to distinguish whether it’s healthy or isn’t.
Courage is only valuable when it comes with the wisdom to know when the pain you are exposing yourself is healthy and when it isn’t. The teenager who expresses courage to signal courage to his friends without any sense of whether the risk he takes is worth it isn’t mature.
Building up thick emotional walls and telling “the truth” without any consideration of the effects of the act of communication doesn’t lead to honest conversation in the radical honesty sense. As it turns out, it also doesn’t have much to do with real courage as it’s still avoiding the conversations that are actually difficult.
I like this framing, the idea of useful and nonuseful pain. It seems like a similary useful definition of maturity.
One difference is that different types of pain come with slightly different qualia. This allows communication that’s in contact with what’s felt in the moment which isn’t there in ideas of maturity where maturity is about following rules that certain things shouldn’t be spoken.