I was considering intangible benefits and those which cannot be trivially quantified to be the major ones.
It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend in order to get the favors from them that they willingly provide to their friends; disinformation and psychological tricks can still be inherently immoral, if they were before.
It depends on your ethical approach. At core, I think utilitarianism is true. But it’s complex to apply to dynamic situatuons, and as a practical rule of thumb for normal cases, virtue ethics helps. And in that model (as well as in any natural discussion), ‘being someone’s friend’ to get favours is not in fact being someone’s friend. It’s deceiving them, and possibly you.
Of being someone’s friend? Maybe: I guess the question is how the word is used in practice. Worth asking other people about; is someone who cultivate a relationship with someone for favours a friend? I think it’s almost the definition of not a friend, but I may be using words unusually.
It doesn’t uniquely determine it: but again, in any common usage sense it’s important. Phrases like ‘fair weather friend’ and similar stories etc. denote the basic human understanding that we see friendship motivated directly for favours isn’t friendship. If someone seemed to be my friend and it turned out they just like the fact I buy drinks, I would feel betrayed as they’d exploited what friendship is understood to be.
Are you saying that this view should be overturned, or that it isn’t actually the common understanding of friendship?
Would it not matter to you if a close friend turned out to be your ‘friend’ purely for the assoicated favours?
I think friendships can be instrumentally good, obviously. But there’s a distinction between ways in which friendships are instrumentally good. If I discovered a friend of mine revealing that they were only my friend for the fantastic conversation, the excellent company, the superb sense of humour etc. I wouldn’t feel cheated. If I found out they were only my friend because I drove a car and it was convenient for them to get around, I would feel cheated.
Suppose there were two people with equally good conversation, company, humor, &tc, one of whom had a car, and only enough time/resources for a hypothetical third party to develop a friendship with one of them? Would you feel cheated if your mundane instrumental utility was a factor at all?
You clearly implied “only”. The external favours were the basis of the motivation.
“It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend [b]in order to get the favors[/b] from them that they willingly provide to their friends”
In answer to your question: I’d still find it a little weird, tbh.
Are you at all familiar with the concepts of evolutionary psychology? Do you think we even have the capacity for friendship in some altruistic way, that while evolution was busy fine-tuning our eyes and our livers into remarkably efficient instruments, that it let the moral aspects of our personalities run open loop, disconnected from any benefit they might possibly bring to us?
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend that I am attracted to, and she knows it. She is in the process of helping me to get it right, because she wishes me to be attracted to her, she wishes to be attracted to me, and she wishes to have this all in the context of friendship.
You can be sure we are studying each other in detail and trying to optimize. We are both doing it and we both know we are doing it.
I don’t think contempt or deception are part of the equation, at least no at the core.
If it’s mutually decided then it’s clearly not deception, and whatever floats your boat, tbh.
Your other responses referring to evolutionary psychology, the chance of altruistic friendship etc. etc.: there is a difference between the evolutionary fact that your inclination to be friends with someone will be based on ultimately selfish goals, and being selfish yourself. The psychological make-up we have is a brute fact of existence and we need to take it into account. But selfish genes do not mean that the concept of human unselfishness is a busted flush.
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend
Why? IME time is best spent among people you can be friends with effortlessly.
(YMMV? So many people talk about “cultivating” friendships that I guess that they just don’t like “wild” ones for some reason—but I wonder what that reason is.)
First, I take objection with using “pretty” as a by-word for “stupid”, and second, reversed stupidity is not intelligence (just because a stupid pretty girl said that the sky is blue doesn’t mean the sky is green). So, what is wrong with her reasoning?
What is wrong with her reasoning is that she doesn’t take in to account that she has a sufficient number of men interested in her without her doing anything to increase the number, but that is NOT the case for the other women whom she thinks are screwing up by not just taking the men who come their way naturally.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article? Doing “things explicitly to attract men [in general]” might not be as good as strategy as locating those men whom it would be the easiest for her to attract and focussing on them specifically.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article?
Even there the lukeprog speaks of consciously choosing one’s marketing style. Another person who would be better off with the hunter-gatherer sexual style? Or evidence that to market oneself consciously towards relationships is the norm?
You sound like a pretty girl wondering why some other girls do things explicitly to attract men.
I agreed, until I saw the context. But it turns out Army wasn’t merely neglecting difficulty of social tasks. Instead he was talking about making things more difficult for yourself by actively constructing a notoriously toxic situation.
Not quite. (Note that I didn’t even quote the part mentioning that mwengler was attracted to that person.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that), odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her. (IOW, IME “love is like a fart” also applies to friendship; see this other comment of mine and guess whether I was happier back then or right now.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that)
I retract my defence. Mwengler interpreted your intent correctly and so his reply is applicable. My reply then constitutes a steel-man (which can not reasonably be used to reject rebuttals that use the intended meaning).
“To actually believe that you’ve made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you’re arguing with would have to admit that you’ve created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.”
That’s rather obviously false. But let’s consider the steel man where “could” is replaced with “happened to have done in the particular case being replied to” which makes the claim fairly straightforward and true rather being nearly exactly backwards.
As Hugh observes in his reply it is almost always pointless to use the steel man concept in adversarial debate. Even in the rare case where the person agrees they still find it condescending (because it approximately as close to the literal meaning of condescending as it is possible to be). The best uses of steel men that I have seen is when someone takes an argument that is for some reason important or valuable and presents it to an audience in an improved version and then responds to the improved argument. The original arguer need not be involved at all.
Do note that my reply was not intended as a steel man at all. It was made as a response to mwengler with the intended audience of mwengler and anyone who, like myself, would read the quote mwengler made more charitably in the expanded context. I assigned a probability of about 0.65 that your intent was at least partially influenced by the additional details in the example beyond the need for learning. (p = 0.65 is pretty damn high for confidence assigned by me to for an interpretation task.)
(I disagree that just because someone happens to give me a boner it’s a bad idea to be friends with them, so long as we get along well.)
I didn’t claim that either (ie. that is a straw man). I have plenty of friends who have happened to “give me a boner” at some point and there is no particular problem with that. In fact I merely weakened the claim you made (or implied). Consider:
IF “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
In other words while I don’t agree fully with the advice to avoid social relationships that require work (for the reasons mwengler has explained) I do agree that the principle applies in many cases. In particular, for those people that mwengler is talking about—those for whom ALL friendships take effort due to weaker social skills, etc—there will most likely be alternative effortful friendship opportunities that at least don’t have the additional overhead of “(sexual) relationship drama without (sexual) relationship”.
But… Is it harder to be friends with people one is attracted to than with people one is not attracted to, in the real world (as opposed to stereotypes and Hollywood movies)? ISTM that, if anything, IME it’s the other way round (though the effect is smaller when controlling for age and gender), which is what I’d theoretically expect given that there is such a thing as the halo effect.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
Huh? The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe—whereas P(AB|C) cannot possibly be greater than P(A|C), P(C|DE) can be less than, equal to, or greater than P(C|D). Am I missing something?
(In this particular example, I’d guess (with low confidence) that for A=“there are other people who would make better friends than her”, B=“ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her”, C=“there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama”, and D=“she is an accountant”, P(A|BCD) is slightly but not terribly lower than P(A|BC), by a reasoning that would be politically incorrect to fully explain but involves, among other things, looking at where “Accounting occs” are on this chart and wild-ass extrapolation from my personal experiences. :-))
The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe
The intended meaning of the link was “generalised lesson of reasoning with conjunctions”. Since it is indeed possible to reformulate the message from the “IF THEN” format to probability assignments I can see how this could be misleading.
(I removed the link and now endorse the unadorned text.)
Are you truly unaware that some people have lots of friends some of them very good friends, while others have very few or even no friends? To the extent I fall in that second category, is it truly rational on my part to NOT attempt to do some of what it seems to me leads to better friendships using my rational mind to go that way?
A pretty french royal girl. “Let them eat cake.” Thank you.
My point is that a different, and IME superior, way of solving the “very few or even no friends” problem (e.g. myself 10 years ago, see the comment I linked to above) than trying harder to be friends with the people you’ve already tried to be friends with is to move on and try to be friends with different people.
YMMV. (I had taken “currently in the process of figuring out” to imply that so far it hadn’t worked out very well, but now from the “it seems to me leads to better friendships” I guess I was wrong.)
I was considering intangible benefits and those which cannot be trivially quantified to be the major ones.
It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend in order to get the favors from them that they willingly provide to their friends; disinformation and psychological tricks can still be inherently immoral, if they were before.
It depends on your ethical approach. At core, I think utilitarianism is true. But it’s complex to apply to dynamic situatuons, and as a practical rule of thumb for normal cases, virtue ethics helps. And in that model (as well as in any natural discussion), ‘being someone’s friend’ to get favours is not in fact being someone’s friend. It’s deceiving them, and possibly you.
And now we’ve ventured into pure definition territory.
Of being someone’s friend? Maybe: I guess the question is how the word is used in practice. Worth asking other people about; is someone who cultivate a relationship with someone for favours a friend? I think it’s almost the definition of not a friend, but I may be using words unusually.
Why does the motivation for the relationship determine the nature of the relationship?
It doesn’t uniquely determine it: but again, in any common usage sense it’s important. Phrases like ‘fair weather friend’ and similar stories etc. denote the basic human understanding that we see friendship motivated directly for favours isn’t friendship. If someone seemed to be my friend and it turned out they just like the fact I buy drinks, I would feel betrayed as they’d exploited what friendship is understood to be.
Are you saying that this view should be overturned, or that it isn’t actually the common understanding of friendship?
Would it not matter to you if a close friend turned out to be your ‘friend’ purely for the assoicated favours?
So what’s wrong with fostering an “actual friendship” because it is instrumentally better to have them then to not have them?
I think friendships can be instrumentally good, obviously. But there’s a distinction between ways in which friendships are instrumentally good. If I discovered a friend of mine revealing that they were only my friend for the fantastic conversation, the excellent company, the superb sense of humour etc. I wouldn’t feel cheated. If I found out they were only my friend because I drove a car and it was convenient for them to get around, I would feel cheated.
I never specified ‘only’.
Suppose there were two people with equally good conversation, company, humor, &tc, one of whom had a car, and only enough time/resources for a hypothetical third party to develop a friendship with one of them? Would you feel cheated if your mundane instrumental utility was a factor at all?
You clearly implied “only”. The external favours were the basis of the motivation.
“It isn’t immoral to notice that someone values friendship, and then to be their friend [b]in order to get the favors[/b] from them that they willingly provide to their friends”
In answer to your question: I’d still find it a little weird, tbh.
Are you at all familiar with the concepts of evolutionary psychology? Do you think we even have the capacity for friendship in some altruistic way, that while evolution was busy fine-tuning our eyes and our livers into remarkably efficient instruments, that it let the moral aspects of our personalities run open loop, disconnected from any benefit they might possibly bring to us?
I am currently in the process of figuring out how to be somebody’s friend that I am attracted to, and she knows it. She is in the process of helping me to get it right, because she wishes me to be attracted to her, she wishes to be attracted to me, and she wishes to have this all in the context of friendship.
You can be sure we are studying each other in detail and trying to optimize. We are both doing it and we both know we are doing it.
I don’t think contempt or deception are part of the equation, at least no at the core.
If it’s mutually decided then it’s clearly not deception, and whatever floats your boat, tbh.
Your other responses referring to evolutionary psychology, the chance of altruistic friendship etc. etc.: there is a difference between the evolutionary fact that your inclination to be friends with someone will be based on ultimately selfish goals, and being selfish yourself. The psychological make-up we have is a brute fact of existence and we need to take it into account. But selfish genes do not mean that the concept of human unselfishness is a busted flush.
Why? IME time is best spent among people you can be friends with effortlessly.
(YMMV? So many people talk about “cultivating” friendships that I guess that they just don’t like “wild” ones for some reason—but I wonder what that reason is.)
You sound like a pretty girl wondering why some other girls do things explicitly to attract men.
First, I take objection with using “pretty” as a by-word for “stupid”, and second, reversed stupidity is not intelligence (just because a stupid pretty girl said that the sky is blue doesn’t mean the sky is green). So, what is wrong with her reasoning?
What is wrong with her reasoning is that she doesn’t take in to account that she has a sufficient number of men interested in her without her doing anything to increase the number, but that is NOT the case for the other women whom she thinks are screwing up by not just taking the men who come their way naturally.
Have you read the section about mean and variance of this article? Doing “things explicitly to attract men [in general]” might not be as good as strategy as locating those men whom it would be the easiest for her to attract and focussing on them specifically.
Even there the lukeprog speaks of consciously choosing one’s marketing style. Another person who would be better off with the hunter-gatherer sexual style? Or evidence that to market oneself consciously towards relationships is the norm?
My point is not about whether or not your marketing is conscious, but about who its target is.
I agreed, until I saw the context. But it turns out Army wasn’t merely neglecting difficulty of social tasks. Instead he was talking about making things more difficult for yourself by actively constructing a notoriously toxic situation.
Not quite. (Note that I didn’t even quote the part mentioning that mwengler was attracted to that person.)
More like, I meant that if ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her (whatever the reasons for that), odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her. (IOW, IME “love is like a fart” also applies to friendship; see this other comment of mine and guess whether I was happier back then or right now.)
I retract my defence. Mwengler interpreted your intent correctly and so his reply is applicable. My reply then constitutes a steel-man (which can not reasonably be used to reject rebuttals that use the intended meaning).
“To actually believe that you’ve made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you’re arguing with would have to admit that you’ve created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.”
(I disagree that just because someone happens to give me a boner it’s a bad idea to be friends with them, so long as we get along well.)
That’s rather obviously false. But let’s consider the steel man where “could” is replaced with “happened to have done in the particular case being replied to” which makes the claim fairly straightforward and true rather being nearly exactly backwards.
As Hugh observes in his reply it is almost always pointless to use the steel man concept in adversarial debate. Even in the rare case where the person agrees they still find it condescending (because it approximately as close to the literal meaning of condescending as it is possible to be). The best uses of steel men that I have seen is when someone takes an argument that is for some reason important or valuable and presents it to an audience in an improved version and then responds to the improved argument. The original arguer need not be involved at all.
Do note that my reply was not intended as a steel man at all. It was made as a response to mwengler with the intended audience of mwengler and anyone who, like myself, would read the quote mwengler made more charitably in the expanded context. I assigned a probability of about 0.65 that your intent was at least partially influenced by the additional details in the example beyond the need for learning. (p = 0.65 is pretty damn high for confidence assigned by me to for an interpretation task.)
I didn’t claim that either (ie. that is a straw man). I have plenty of friends who have happened to “give me a boner” at some point and there is no particular problem with that. In fact I merely weakened the claim you made (or implied). Consider:
IF “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
If “ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her” AND “there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama” AND “she is an accountant” THEN odds are there are other people who would make better friends than her.
In other words while I don’t agree fully with the advice to avoid social relationships that require work (for the reasons mwengler has explained) I do agree that the principle applies in many cases. In particular, for those people that mwengler is talking about—those for whom ALL friendships take effort due to weaker social skills, etc—there will most likely be alternative effortful friendship opportunities that at least don’t have the additional overhead of “(sexual) relationship drama without (sexual) relationship”.
But… Is it harder to be friends with people one is attracted to than with people one is not attracted to, in the real world (as opposed to stereotypes and Hollywood movies)? ISTM that, if anything, IME it’s the other way round (though the effect is smaller when controlling for age and gender), which is what I’d theoretically expect given that there is such a thing as the halo effect.
Huh? The conjunction fallacy doesn’t apply to the right of the pipe—whereas P(AB|C) cannot possibly be greater than P(A|C), P(C|DE) can be less than, equal to, or greater than P(C|D). Am I missing something?
(In this particular example, I’d guess (with low confidence) that for A=“there are other people who would make better friends than her”, B=“ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her”, C=“there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama”, and D=“she is an accountant”, P(A|BCD) is slightly but not terribly lower than P(A|BC), by a reasoning that would be politically incorrect to fully explain but involves, among other things, looking at where “Accounting occs” are on this chart and wild-ass extrapolation from my personal experiences. :-))
The intended meaning of the link was “generalised lesson of reasoning with conjunctions”. Since it is indeed possible to reformulate the message from the “IF THEN” format to probability assignments I can see how this could be misleading.
(I removed the link and now endorse the unadorned text.)
Are you truly unaware that some people have lots of friends some of them very good friends, while others have very few or even no friends? To the extent I fall in that second category, is it truly rational on my part to NOT attempt to do some of what it seems to me leads to better friendships using my rational mind to go that way?
A pretty french royal girl. “Let them eat cake.” Thank you.
My point is that a different, and IME superior, way of solving the “very few or even no friends” problem (e.g. myself 10 years ago, see the comment I linked to above) than trying harder to be friends with the people you’ve already tried to be friends with is to move on and try to be friends with different people.
YMMV. (I had taken “currently in the process of figuring out” to imply that so far it hadn’t worked out very well, but now from the “it seems to me leads to better friendships” I guess I was wrong.)