Separately from my other comment, I have a question about this bit:
A zen master has no “bad days”
Could you elaborate on this? I’m not sure what this could mean.
The one hypothesis I can think of, for how to interpret this line, is something like: “A zen master, even if he were to experience a series of misfortunes and frustrations over the course of a day, would nonetheless remain perfectly calm and in control of his emotions, and would not be driven to acts of violence or outward expression of frustration, such as kicking a vending machine which ate his dollar.”
Now, let us say this is true of some zen master. It seems to me, however, that it would then be precisely accurate to say that this zen master “isn’t an angry person”, and that this is the reason why he doesn’t kick vending machines. (I mean, I have bad days aplenty, and yet—despite not being a zen master—I don’t kick vending machines; this is, of course, because I am not an angry person.)
If you had a different meaning in mind, could you explain?
I am not Jacob, but here is what I think it means:
The pipeline from misfortunes to vending-machine-kicking has the following stages. Misfortunes lead to frustration. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to kicking vending machines. Our hypothetical Zen master has cultivated habits of mind that break this pipeline in multiple ways. When misfortunes strike, he doesn’t become frustrated. Even if frustrated, he doesn’t become angry. Even if angry, he doesn’t kick vending machines. The early parts of this pipeline we call “having a bad day”. The later parts we call “being an angry person”, or at least acting like an angry person on a particular occasion. The Zen master’s non-kicking is overdetermined: it isn’t just because he has learned not to become so angry as to kick vending machines, but also because he has learned not to get into the mental states that would be precursors to this sort of anger.
It seems to me that that interpretation makes the statement that ‘a zen master has no “bad days”’ mere nonsense and I don’t think it’s likely that Jacob wrote mere nonsense. Hence my opinion that he meant “bad days” to be understood as something like “days that he finds unpleasant and frustrating on account of misfortunes”.
I guess there’s another possibility, which is that Jacob is thinking that the Zen master achieves a state of indifference-to-worldly-things deep enough that scarcely anything that the rest of us would consider misfortune plays any role in his preferences. If you literally don’t care what you eat, what sort of surroundings you live in, whether you are sick, whether anyone else likes you, how you spend your time, etc., then you’re immune to a lot of things usually regarded as bad. (But also to a lot of things usually regarded as good.)
Jacob, if you’re reading this, would you care to clarify?
I don’t have much to add to gjm’s description, but I’ll add a little bit of flavor to get at Said’s situational vs. dispositional dichotomy.
“Having a bad day” means something like experiencing a day in such a way that it causes mental suffering, and being an “angry person” is someone who reacts to mental suffering with violence. My claim is that those things aren’t clean categories: they are hard to separate from each other, and they are both situation and dispositional.
If you experience a lot of suffering from some external misfortune, you are more likely to react in a way that makes it worse, and also to build up a subconscious habit of reacting in this way, which in turn creates more chances for you to suffer and get angry and react and reinforce the pattern… eventually you will end up kicking a lot of vending machines.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to draw a circle around something called “bad day” or “angry person” and blame your machine kicking on that. These two things are causes and effects of each other, and of a million other situational and dispositional things. That’s what I mean by “bad day” and “angry person” being fake, and the definition of FAE that I googled doesn’t quite address this.
I disagree with your view for several reasons, but I think we’ve diverged from the topic enough that it’s probably not useful to continue down this tangent. (In any case, you’ve more or less explained what you mean to my satisfaction.)
It seems to me that that interpretation makes the statement that ‘a zen master has no “bad days”’ mere nonsense and I don’t think it’s likely that Jacob wrote mere nonsense. Hence my opinion that he meant “bad days” to be understood as something like “days that he finds unpleasant and frustrating on account of misfortunes”.
Indeed, I agree that it’s unlikely that Jacob wrote something that was, to him, obvious nonsense. What might yet be the case, however, is that he wrote something that seemed like not-nonsense, but is actually nonsense upon inspection.
Before we investigate this possibility, though, I do want to ask—you say that what you describe in your second paragraph is “another possibility”, which implies that what you had in mind in your first paragraph is something different. But this puzzles me. How would the Zen master manage to not have any “days that he finds unpleasant and frustrating on account of misfortunes”, if it’s not either “never having any days full of misfortunes”, or “achiev[ing] a state of indifference-to-worldly-things deep enough that scarcely anything that the rest of us would consider misfortune plays any role in his preferences”?
Is the idea that the Zen master has preferences, but does not experience the frustration[1] of those preferences as (emotionally) frustrating? If so, then I struggle to imagine what it might mean to describe such a person as “having preferences”. (“I like ice cream and hate cake, but if I never eat ice cream again and have to eat cake all the time, that’s ok and I don’t feel bad about this”—like that? Or what?)
Or is it something else?
[1] In the impersonal descriptive sense, i.e. “lack of satisfaction”.
Is the idea that the Zen master has preferences, but does not experience the frustration[1] of those preferences as (emotionally) frustrating? If so, then I struggle to imagine what it might mean to describe such a person as “having preferences”.
A person who feels no frustration can be said to have preferences if his choices exhibit those preferences. I.e you prefer ice cream to cake, if, given the choice, you always choose ice cream. Emotions have nothing to do with this. It doesn’t matter whether eating cake makes you feel bad. Hell, I can even prefer water to beer, even if drinking beer makes me happier (and even if it has no direct negative consequences for me).
There is also an issue where you conflate “getting frustrated” with “feeling bad”. Frustration is a very specific emotion. It is not at all clear, that in order to never feel frustration I must also get rid of all other emotions. Maybe the zen master is able to feel pleasure, and, on the day his house burns down, he simply feels less pleasure.
To summarize “having preferences that aren’t tied to negative emotions” and “not having preferences”, are indeed two different options.
Here are some possible ways—in principle, and I make no comment on how achievable they are—to have misfortunes without unpleasant frustration. The first is the “another possibility”, the others are different. (1) Indifference to what happens (i.e., no preference over outcomes). (2) Preferences largely detached from emotions (i.e., you consistently act to achieve X rather than Y, say X is better than Y, etc., but don’t feel anything much different depending on whether X or Y happens). (3) Preferences detached from negative but not from positive emotions (i.e., you feel satisfaction/joy/excitement/contentment/… when X happens, but when Y happens you just say “huh, too bad” and move on). (4) Other varieties of partial detachment of preferences from emotions; e.g., emotions associated with dispreferred outcomes are transient only and lack power to move you much.
First, I don’t think “does not experience the frustration” is quite accurate. It would be more accurate to say experiences it for 100 or 200 milliseconds when it comes up.
The emotion comes up but instead of letting it rest in the body it passes through.
Secondly, there are also Zen masters who have indifference-to-worldy-things and spent all their time meditating.
Is the idea that the Zen master has preferences, but does not experience the frustration[1] of those preferences as (emotionally) frustrating?
I believe this is in fact the deal here. I think this is the sort of thing in eastern philosophy (and I guess Stoicism too?) that are famously hard to grok.
(I do think we can delve into the details here and find something that legibly makes sense. In the past I’ve found it difficult to have this sort of conversation with you, because you seem to start with such a high prior that “it’s just nonsense that we’re confused about” as opposed to an outlook you don’t yet understand, that getting to the useful bits of the conversation doesn’t feel very rewarding.)
I’m willing to have this conversation, of course, but in this particular case I think it might actually be a moot point.
I’m entirely willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that such “zen masters” as described in this subthread (which, as we’re tentatively assuming, is the sort of thing Jacob had in mind) do indeed exist. Well, then wouldn’t describing such an individual as “not an angry person” be correct? (Incomplete, perhaps; imprecise, maybe; but basically on-target—yes?)
I mean, the original point was that the idea of the FAE / correspondence bias was missing something, that it didn’t capture the point Jacob made in this comment. This objection only makes sense, however, if “whether one does, or does not, have bad days” is not—unlike “is an angry person or not”—a dispositional property of the individual, but is instead something else (like what?—well, that was my question…).
But if the “zen masters” whom we’ve described in this subthread “don’t have bad days” precisely because they’re a certain sort of person. So Jacob’s objection doesn’t make sense after all.
In other words, by bringing up the “zen master” example, Jacob seems to be arguing (contra this comment) for an (at least partly) dispositional view of behavior after all—something like: “Alice kicked the vending machine because she experienced a series of misfortunes today and isn’t a zen master [and thus we may describe her as having ‘had a bad day’] and is an angry person; Bob didn’t kick the vending machine, despite having experienced a series of misfortunes today and also not being a zen master [and thus also having had what may be described as ‘a bad day’] because he isn’t an angry person; Carol didn’t kick the vending machine despite experiencing a series of misfortunes today because she is a zen master [and thus has not had anything which we may describe as ‘a bad day’]; Dave didn’t kick the vending machine because he has no reason to do so.”
What this doesn’t seem like, however, is any sort of move beyond a situational account of behavior, toward something which is neither situational nor dispositional. That is what was implied, but no such thing is in evidence.
(Of course, it’s entirely possible I’ve misunderstood or mischaracterized something at some point in my account.)
What this doesn’t seem like, however, is any sort of move beyond a situational account of behavior, toward something which is neither situational nor dispositional.
Do accounts that are neither situational nor dispositional exist? What would that even look like?
I don’t see where Jacob promised such an account. I do see where he explains to you, that FAE is not a wrong explanation, but he finds his own more accurate.
It seems to me, from the third-person view, that the disagreements in this comment thread are quite simple, and you might be overreacting to them.
Separately from my other comment, I have a question about this bit:
Could you elaborate on this? I’m not sure what this could mean.
The one hypothesis I can think of, for how to interpret this line, is something like: “A zen master, even if he were to experience a series of misfortunes and frustrations over the course of a day, would nonetheless remain perfectly calm and in control of his emotions, and would not be driven to acts of violence or outward expression of frustration, such as kicking a vending machine which ate his dollar.”
Now, let us say this is true of some zen master. It seems to me, however, that it would then be precisely accurate to say that this zen master “isn’t an angry person”, and that this is the reason why he doesn’t kick vending machines. (I mean, I have bad days aplenty, and yet—despite not being a zen master—I don’t kick vending machines; this is, of course, because I am not an angry person.)
If you had a different meaning in mind, could you explain?
I am not Jacob, but here is what I think it means:
The pipeline from misfortunes to vending-machine-kicking has the following stages. Misfortunes lead to frustration. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to kicking vending machines. Our hypothetical Zen master has cultivated habits of mind that break this pipeline in multiple ways. When misfortunes strike, he doesn’t become frustrated. Even if frustrated, he doesn’t become angry. Even if angry, he doesn’t kick vending machines. The early parts of this pipeline we call “having a bad day”. The later parts we call “being an angry person”, or at least acting like an angry person on a particular occasion. The Zen master’s non-kicking is overdetermined: it isn’t just because he has learned not to become so angry as to kick vending machines, but also because he has learned not to get into the mental states that would be precursors to this sort of anger.
It seems to me that the “misfortunes” part are what we call “having a bad day”. On that basis, my analysis (and my question) stands.
It seems to me that that interpretation makes the statement that ‘a zen master has no “bad days”’ mere nonsense and I don’t think it’s likely that Jacob wrote mere nonsense. Hence my opinion that he meant “bad days” to be understood as something like “days that he finds unpleasant and frustrating on account of misfortunes”.
I guess there’s another possibility, which is that Jacob is thinking that the Zen master achieves a state of indifference-to-worldly-things deep enough that scarcely anything that the rest of us would consider misfortune plays any role in his preferences. If you literally don’t care what you eat, what sort of surroundings you live in, whether you are sick, whether anyone else likes you, how you spend your time, etc., then you’re immune to a lot of things usually regarded as bad. (But also to a lot of things usually regarded as good.)
Jacob, if you’re reading this, would you care to clarify?
I don’t have much to add to gjm’s description, but I’ll add a little bit of flavor to get at Said’s situational vs. dispositional dichotomy.
“Having a bad day” means something like experiencing a day in such a way that it causes mental suffering, and being an “angry person” is someone who reacts to mental suffering with violence. My claim is that those things aren’t clean categories: they are hard to separate from each other, and they are both situation and dispositional.
If you experience a lot of suffering from some external misfortune, you are more likely to react in a way that makes it worse, and also to build up a subconscious habit of reacting in this way, which in turn creates more chances for you to suffer and get angry and react and reinforce the pattern… eventually you will end up kicking a lot of vending machines.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to draw a circle around something called “bad day” or “angry person” and blame your machine kicking on that. These two things are causes and effects of each other, and of a million other situational and dispositional things. That’s what I mean by “bad day” and “angry person” being fake, and the definition of FAE that I googled doesn’t quite address this.
I see, thanks.
I disagree with your view for several reasons, but I think we’ve diverged from the topic enough that it’s probably not useful to continue down this tangent. (In any case, you’ve more or less explained what you mean to my satisfaction.)
Indeed, I agree that it’s unlikely that Jacob wrote something that was, to him, obvious nonsense. What might yet be the case, however, is that he wrote something that seemed like not-nonsense, but is actually nonsense upon inspection.
Before we investigate this possibility, though, I do want to ask—you say that what you describe in your second paragraph is “another possibility”, which implies that what you had in mind in your first paragraph is something different. But this puzzles me. How would the Zen master manage to not have any “days that he finds unpleasant and frustrating on account of misfortunes”, if it’s not either “never having any days full of misfortunes”, or “achiev[ing] a state of indifference-to-worldly-things deep enough that scarcely anything that the rest of us would consider misfortune plays any role in his preferences”?
Is the idea that the Zen master has preferences, but does not experience the frustration[1] of those preferences as (emotionally) frustrating? If so, then I struggle to imagine what it might mean to describe such a person as “having preferences”. (“I like ice cream and hate cake, but if I never eat ice cream again and have to eat cake all the time, that’s ok and I don’t feel bad about this”—like that? Or what?)
Or is it something else?
[1] In the impersonal descriptive sense, i.e. “lack of satisfaction”.
A person who feels no frustration can be said to have preferences if his choices exhibit those preferences. I.e you prefer ice cream to cake, if, given the choice, you always choose ice cream. Emotions have nothing to do with this. It doesn’t matter whether eating cake makes you feel bad. Hell, I can even prefer water to beer, even if drinking beer makes me happier (and even if it has no direct negative consequences for me).
There is also an issue where you conflate “getting frustrated” with “feeling bad”. Frustration is a very specific emotion. It is not at all clear, that in order to never feel frustration I must also get rid of all other emotions. Maybe the zen master is able to feel pleasure, and, on the day his house burns down, he simply feels less pleasure.
To summarize “having preferences that aren’t tied to negative emotions” and “not having preferences”, are indeed two different options.
Here are some possible ways—in principle, and I make no comment on how achievable they are—to have misfortunes without unpleasant frustration. The first is the “another possibility”, the others are different. (1) Indifference to what happens (i.e., no preference over outcomes). (2) Preferences largely detached from emotions (i.e., you consistently act to achieve X rather than Y, say X is better than Y, etc., but don’t feel anything much different depending on whether X or Y happens). (3) Preferences detached from negative but not from positive emotions (i.e., you feel satisfaction/joy/excitement/contentment/… when X happens, but when Y happens you just say “huh, too bad” and move on). (4) Other varieties of partial detachment of preferences from emotions; e.g., emotions associated with dispreferred outcomes are transient only and lack power to move you much.
Two things.
First, I don’t think “does not experience the frustration” is quite accurate. It would be more accurate to say experiences it for 100 or 200 milliseconds when it comes up.
The emotion comes up but instead of letting it rest in the body it passes through.
Secondly, there are also Zen masters who have indifference-to-worldy-things and spent all their time meditating.
I believe this is in fact the deal here. I think this is the sort of thing in eastern philosophy (and I guess Stoicism too?) that are famously hard to grok.
(I do think we can delve into the details here and find something that legibly makes sense. In the past I’ve found it difficult to have this sort of conversation with you, because you seem to start with such a high prior that “it’s just nonsense that we’re confused about” as opposed to an outlook you don’t yet understand, that getting to the useful bits of the conversation doesn’t feel very rewarding.)
I’m willing to have this conversation, of course, but in this particular case I think it might actually be a moot point.
I’m entirely willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that such “zen masters” as described in this subthread (which, as we’re tentatively assuming, is the sort of thing Jacob had in mind) do indeed exist. Well, then wouldn’t describing such an individual as “not an angry person” be correct? (Incomplete, perhaps; imprecise, maybe; but basically on-target—yes?)
I mean, the original point was that the idea of the FAE / correspondence bias was missing something, that it didn’t capture the point Jacob made in this comment. This objection only makes sense, however, if “whether one does, or does not, have bad days” is not—unlike “is an angry person or not”—a dispositional property of the individual, but is instead something else (like what?—well, that was my question…).
But if the “zen masters” whom we’ve described in this subthread “don’t have bad days” precisely because they’re a certain sort of person. So Jacob’s objection doesn’t make sense after all.
In other words, by bringing up the “zen master” example, Jacob seems to be arguing (contra this comment) for an (at least partly) dispositional view of behavior after all—something like: “Alice kicked the vending machine because she experienced a series of misfortunes today and isn’t a zen master [and thus we may describe her as having ‘had a bad day’] and is an angry person; Bob didn’t kick the vending machine, despite having experienced a series of misfortunes today and also not being a zen master [and thus also having had what may be described as ‘a bad day’] because he isn’t an angry person; Carol didn’t kick the vending machine despite experiencing a series of misfortunes today because she is a zen master [and thus has not had anything which we may describe as ‘a bad day’]; Dave didn’t kick the vending machine because he has no reason to do so.”
What this doesn’t seem like, however, is any sort of move beyond a situational account of behavior, toward something which is neither situational nor dispositional. That is what was implied, but no such thing is in evidence.
(Of course, it’s entirely possible I’ve misunderstood or mischaracterized something at some point in my account.)
Do accounts that are neither situational nor dispositional exist? What would that even look like?
I don’t see where Jacob promised such an account. I do see where he explains to you, that FAE is not a wrong explanation, but he finds his own more accurate.
It seems to me, from the third-person view, that the disagreements in this comment thread are quite simple, and you might be overreacting to them.