This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. You advocate for externally recognizing a formula that basically amounts to what Razied is getting at, and pretending otherwise by saying he missed the point is, in my submission, obfuscation.
As you have noted, social interactions exist on a spectrum and it’s unwise to disregard that context while discussing your proposal. However, I don’t think there’s any situation where formally acknowledging something to the effect of—
”I realize that, from now on, you will—naturally—be less inclined to invest your resources in me, lower your expectations of me accordingly, have less faith in me, see me as less reliable and generally distrust social engagements of this nature”
- doesn’t reduce your relationship with the recipient to something a little more calculated than most people are comfortable with in most social situations. Seems like you’re taking umbrage at the way this calculation was ‘rounded off’, but I don’t see why. All of the categories you’ve established are the basis of a decent friendship. Since you’re encouraging people to acknowledge that, by breaking an agreement, they are going to take a hit in every category, being just “a tiny bit less their friend” seems like a fair summary of the transaction.
So, look, I realize that what you’re advocating for is obviously a nuanced application of the underlying principles here. In fact, I enjoyed the post and found the whole analysis insightful. Put simply, you’re advocating that people acknowledge when they have betrayed somebody else’s expectations, specifically when they were complicit in establishing those expectations. However, the way that you’ve broken things down invites the sort of itchy palms interpretation that Razied made.
Just because you’re advocating for a more graceful implementation doesn’t mean you get to deny that your analysis reduces social exchanges in a way that will obviously make people uncomfortable on a theoretical level.
tl;dr: The way Razied ‘rounded off’ what you said is a fair interpretation, and shouldn’t be written off.
wslafleur
Karma: 59
These definitions of shame and guilt strike me as inherently dysfunctional because they seem to rely on direct external reference, rather than referencing some sort of internal ‘Ideal Observer’ which—in a healthy individual—should presumably be an amalgamate intuition, built on top of many disparate considerations and life experience.
Does anybody know if there have been any sleep-deprivation studies that attempt to control for belief effects? I’m think about this sort of thing. The knock-on ramifications in either direction seem like they could be potentially significant. Among other things, belief effects could help to explain the swaths of contradictory studies around this topic.