I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.
I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.