Ultimately, I think we all have to do that! I think you could look at my heuristics as complementary to yours. Something like: In order to know how to behave with people, you need to gather information. But while you're gathering information, you have to deploy some interaction model. I use my heuristics during that information gathering phase because "recall" is more important to me than "precision" in terms of recognizing reasonable people. (I'd rather risk having things go off the rails with an unreasonable person than risk looking untrustworthy to someone who *is* reasonable.)
Where I feel we depart more than you do is that I don't think there are "reasonable" vs. "unreasonable" meta-archetypes. I think what we consider "reasonable/unreasonable" is more a factor of how close/far they align with our value stacks. I feel like sorting people into "unreasonable" is more akin to saying "I cannot identify this archetype" whereas I feel that this is something that is achievable in every instance.
Therefore, in my heuristics, I do not have an "unreasonable" target. They are merely "archetype X" which has its own distinct interaction models.
To be clear, there are a few archetypes where my interaction model is "do not engage" -- and this is because these archetypes are so distant to mine that they resemble your "unreasonable" label but I do think they are quite reasonable in their own context; it's just that the dynamics between my and their contexts is far too vast to effectively engage.
maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me that there exists a state of objective unreasonableness. If Alice leaves a trail of broken relationships and makes enemies everywhere she goes, why can't society label her negatively?
I don't think you're old-fashioned. I just think it's more complex than that.
Alice may in fact have left a trail of broken relationships and made enemies everywhere she went, however, there was something about Alice that enabled people to be attracted to her in the first place that created said relationships; and there were things she did that gave people such a negative experience that she created enemies. That's a lot of complex stuff inside those outcomes, but inside that complexity was probably some things that others felt good about in the moment (otherwise, why would there be relationships to be lost in the first place?).
Perhaps Alice is a narcissist and can't process other people as mattering except as tools for her daily psychic survival. Or, perhaps she's autistic and just doesn't have the capacity to care what people think. I personally don't really care for narcissists, but they are basically as challenged as autistic people (just in very different ways). Should we also consider people with down syndrome "unreasonable?" I honestly don't think so. I think it's a different dynamic. I think all of these brain-related syndromes create variances in brain/mind dynamics that we'd be better off understanding vs. judging.
But, yes, in the end, of course you have every right to judge anyone you'd like however you'd like. I just think there are more effective and useful ways to navigate people, that's all.
I'm reading this more as niggling over semantics than as a true distinction. By your own admission, there are archetypes that exist beyond your personal Overton window for adaptive socialization models. The result is the same - you still avoid these people - you're just proscribing the stigmatizing language.
The whole point of the article as I read it was to presume innocence until proven guilty, or try to minimize the number of people you're writing off. You're obviously in agreement with that position, but you think it's important to extend empathy even to those you're writing off, so you insist that we should call it something else.
Don't worry Jon, I'm not 'writing you off', it's just that I've thought deeply about each of our archetypes and concluded that we're maximally incompatible. I'm still going to avoid you, but I'm not making a value judgement. At least, not in any sense that I'd feel morally accountable for. No, I made an objective assessment of your social conduct and - unfortunately - my comprehensive models suggest that we really are just that different.
There is something a little bit disingenuous about trying to destigmatize conclusions that are, inherently, stigmatizing. In your haste to take issue with the language here, I feel that you've reduced the actual argument. You're missing the forest for the trees, I think. And sometimes you really ought to call a spade by its rightful name.
If you don't mind a little joust, I respectfully disagree that it's merely semantics. And I also don't agree that I feel that the language is stigmatizing per se. I mean, it might be, but that isn't my issue with it.
I suspect you're interpreting my comments via the Woke Left Sensitivity Index, which, if you knew me (alas, you do not), you would realize that that is not an index that I trade in, nor hold in very high regard.
My broader point in my first comment is that I don't see the navigation challenge as a binary one as @dynomight suggested in their article: I see it far more as blocking and tackling, based on a more precise assessment of the interaction target.
My more nuanced point later in this thread is that a gap analysis between you and the target will likely you get further and improve navigation as a result than simply assuming the best and hoping not for the worst.
I don't want to spend time on what you think about what you think I think about you, so I won't be responding to any more of that, but I wasn't trying to paint you up as woke.
I want you to consider that I might already understand what you're trying to say, and not to treat my difference of opinion as an invitation to elaborate on points you've already made.
Your approach is not substantively different, you're just eschewing binary metatags. Dynomight's social interaction heuristic is Generous Tit for Tat - it suggests that we make an assumption of compatibility until somebody is provably outside our Overton window. It's simple, which is the point of a heuristic. Gap analysis reintroduces the complexity for no ostensible benefit.
(However you want to dress it up, your 'do not engage' archetypes are categorically equivalent to 'unreasonable' people, except insofar as you're explicitly avoiding calling them unreasonable.)
Unless you're assuming that the prescription here is to slap a permanent stamp on each person's forehead after a single interaction, which seems like the least generous possible construction.
Fair warning: If you don't explain how your approach produces materially different outcomes, and you don't deal with the criticism that you're effectively reintroducing all the complexity the heuristic was meant to alleviate, I'll be fairly disinclined to respond further.
"if you assume everyone else is a sneaky snake, then you might come off that way to everyone else. Ultimately, people are smart and they will figure you out. (If there’s one thing human intelligence is optimized for, it’s that.)"
I've heard this argument before (that people are good at detecting dishonesty), but I think there are too many exceptions. Think of the roughly 40% of the American public who support Donald Trump. Think of all the scammers out there who prey on innocent people. I recently fell for a scammer myself, though it was a low-stakes scam.
How good people really are at detecting dishonesty would be an interesting topic to research. (I'm sure there's a pretty extensive literature on the subject.)
My theory is that for *most* people interacting in long-term relationships, being sneaky doesn't pay high dividends. There's definitely exceptions (some people are really good at being sneaky, and it's hard to figure people out quickly) But over time, I do think it's pretty hard to get one over on people that you interact with a lot.
People are VERY BAD at detecting dishonesty. Like, awful. But you're right that most personality traits will emerge over time. Things like being overbearing or manipulative or a braggart or an exaggerator or selfish or petty or temperamental or irrational will definitely become apparent.
But those aren't really the same thing as being able to detect it when someone is purposely concealing something from you, lying, and intent on not being caught. In that case, it is totally undetectable for most people, moat of the time, unless they screw up or someone else ruins their plan. There's a small portion of people who are really poor liars, and another small portion who are unusually good at detecting them. But most people are very adept at lying and very poor at detection.
While I agree that it's very hard to detect lying in individual cases, I think (possibly erroneously!) that we're quite good about figuring out how people lie in repeated interactions. Like, if I say I flaked on your dinner party because my dog was sick, you'll hopefully believe me. But if I'm always flaking with weird excuses, surely you'll eventually revise your mental rating of how trustworthy I am, even if you never "catch" me.
Okay, yes I agree with that, but that's sort of what I consider a white lie, i.e. it doesn't do any real harm and is just intended to smooth social relations and prevent hurt feelings. That person may even HOPE you eventually get the picture after they repeatedly come up with excuses for bowing out, and stop inviting them to things.
I was thinking of more serious dishonesty where the concealer is very dedicated to not being found out. I.e. someone committing ongoing infidelity or embezzling from their company or who falsified their resume. I think it's virtually impossible to detect that type of dishonesty unless they get caught by extrinsic evidence. I've witnessed enough examples of fairly ordinary people giving Oscar actress worthy performances of maintaining their innocence...tears and all... even when caught virtually red handed, til they're positive there's no chance of getting out of it, that I think it's an intuitive and fairly easily achieved skill for most people.
I have chosen to navigate people quite differently.
I essentially sort the people in my life into archetypes, and deploy interaction models based on each archetype to optimize the outcomes.
Ultimately, I think we all have to do that! I think you could look at my heuristics as complementary to yours. Something like: In order to know how to behave with people, you need to gather information. But while you're gathering information, you have to deploy some interaction model. I use my heuristics during that information gathering phase because "recall" is more important to me than "precision" in terms of recognizing reasonable people. (I'd rather risk having things go off the rails with an unreasonable person than risk looking untrustworthy to someone who *is* reasonable.)
Where I feel we depart more than you do is that I don't think there are "reasonable" vs. "unreasonable" meta-archetypes. I think what we consider "reasonable/unreasonable" is more a factor of how close/far they align with our value stacks. I feel like sorting people into "unreasonable" is more akin to saying "I cannot identify this archetype" whereas I feel that this is something that is achievable in every instance.
Therefore, in my heuristics, I do not have an "unreasonable" target. They are merely "archetype X" which has its own distinct interaction models.
To be clear, there are a few archetypes where my interaction model is "do not engage" -- and this is because these archetypes are so distant to mine that they resemble your "unreasonable" label but I do think they are quite reasonable in their own context; it's just that the dynamics between my and their contexts is far too vast to effectively engage.
"The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons."
awful/wonderful.
maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me that there exists a state of objective unreasonableness. If Alice leaves a trail of broken relationships and makes enemies everywhere she goes, why can't society label her negatively?
I don't think you're old-fashioned. I just think it's more complex than that.
Alice may in fact have left a trail of broken relationships and made enemies everywhere she went, however, there was something about Alice that enabled people to be attracted to her in the first place that created said relationships; and there were things she did that gave people such a negative experience that she created enemies. That's a lot of complex stuff inside those outcomes, but inside that complexity was probably some things that others felt good about in the moment (otherwise, why would there be relationships to be lost in the first place?).
Perhaps Alice is a narcissist and can't process other people as mattering except as tools for her daily psychic survival. Or, perhaps she's autistic and just doesn't have the capacity to care what people think. I personally don't really care for narcissists, but they are basically as challenged as autistic people (just in very different ways). Should we also consider people with down syndrome "unreasonable?" I honestly don't think so. I think it's a different dynamic. I think all of these brain-related syndromes create variances in brain/mind dynamics that we'd be better off understanding vs. judging.
But, yes, in the end, of course you have every right to judge anyone you'd like however you'd like. I just think there are more effective and useful ways to navigate people, that's all.
I'm reading this more as niggling over semantics than as a true distinction. By your own admission, there are archetypes that exist beyond your personal Overton window for adaptive socialization models. The result is the same - you still avoid these people - you're just proscribing the stigmatizing language.
The whole point of the article as I read it was to presume innocence until proven guilty, or try to minimize the number of people you're writing off. You're obviously in agreement with that position, but you think it's important to extend empathy even to those you're writing off, so you insist that we should call it something else.
Don't worry Jon, I'm not 'writing you off', it's just that I've thought deeply about each of our archetypes and concluded that we're maximally incompatible. I'm still going to avoid you, but I'm not making a value judgement. At least, not in any sense that I'd feel morally accountable for. No, I made an objective assessment of your social conduct and - unfortunately - my comprehensive models suggest that we really are just that different.
There is something a little bit disingenuous about trying to destigmatize conclusions that are, inherently, stigmatizing. In your haste to take issue with the language here, I feel that you've reduced the actual argument. You're missing the forest for the trees, I think. And sometimes you really ought to call a spade by its rightful name.
If you don't mind a little joust, I respectfully disagree that it's merely semantics. And I also don't agree that I feel that the language is stigmatizing per se. I mean, it might be, but that isn't my issue with it.
I suspect you're interpreting my comments via the Woke Left Sensitivity Index, which, if you knew me (alas, you do not), you would realize that that is not an index that I trade in, nor hold in very high regard.
My broader point in my first comment is that I don't see the navigation challenge as a binary one as @dynomight suggested in their article: I see it far more as blocking and tackling, based on a more precise assessment of the interaction target.
My more nuanced point later in this thread is that a gap analysis between you and the target will likely you get further and improve navigation as a result than simply assuming the best and hoping not for the worst.
I don't want to spend time on what you think about what you think I think about you, so I won't be responding to any more of that, but I wasn't trying to paint you up as woke.
I want you to consider that I might already understand what you're trying to say, and not to treat my difference of opinion as an invitation to elaborate on points you've already made.
Your approach is not substantively different, you're just eschewing binary metatags. Dynomight's social interaction heuristic is Generous Tit for Tat - it suggests that we make an assumption of compatibility until somebody is provably outside our Overton window. It's simple, which is the point of a heuristic. Gap analysis reintroduces the complexity for no ostensible benefit.
(However you want to dress it up, your 'do not engage' archetypes are categorically equivalent to 'unreasonable' people, except insofar as you're explicitly avoiding calling them unreasonable.)
Unless you're assuming that the prescription here is to slap a permanent stamp on each person's forehead after a single interaction, which seems like the least generous possible construction.
Fair warning: If you don't explain how your approach produces materially different outcomes, and you don't deal with the criticism that you're effectively reintroducing all the complexity the heuristic was meant to alleviate, I'll be fairly disinclined to respond further.
Thanks for this, I feel personally attacked but that's a good thing lol.
"if you assume everyone else is a sneaky snake, then you might come off that way to everyone else. Ultimately, people are smart and they will figure you out. (If there’s one thing human intelligence is optimized for, it’s that.)"
I've heard this argument before (that people are good at detecting dishonesty), but I think there are too many exceptions. Think of the roughly 40% of the American public who support Donald Trump. Think of all the scammers out there who prey on innocent people. I recently fell for a scammer myself, though it was a low-stakes scam.
How good people really are at detecting dishonesty would be an interesting topic to research. (I'm sure there's a pretty extensive literature on the subject.)
My theory is that for *most* people interacting in long-term relationships, being sneaky doesn't pay high dividends. There's definitely exceptions (some people are really good at being sneaky, and it's hard to figure people out quickly) But over time, I do think it's pretty hard to get one over on people that you interact with a lot.
People are VERY BAD at detecting dishonesty. Like, awful. But you're right that most personality traits will emerge over time. Things like being overbearing or manipulative or a braggart or an exaggerator or selfish or petty or temperamental or irrational will definitely become apparent.
But those aren't really the same thing as being able to detect it when someone is purposely concealing something from you, lying, and intent on not being caught. In that case, it is totally undetectable for most people, moat of the time, unless they screw up or someone else ruins their plan. There's a small portion of people who are really poor liars, and another small portion who are unusually good at detecting them. But most people are very adept at lying and very poor at detection.
While I agree that it's very hard to detect lying in individual cases, I think (possibly erroneously!) that we're quite good about figuring out how people lie in repeated interactions. Like, if I say I flaked on your dinner party because my dog was sick, you'll hopefully believe me. But if I'm always flaking with weird excuses, surely you'll eventually revise your mental rating of how trustworthy I am, even if you never "catch" me.
Okay, yes I agree with that, but that's sort of what I consider a white lie, i.e. it doesn't do any real harm and is just intended to smooth social relations and prevent hurt feelings. That person may even HOPE you eventually get the picture after they repeatedly come up with excuses for bowing out, and stop inviting them to things.
I was thinking of more serious dishonesty where the concealer is very dedicated to not being found out. I.e. someone committing ongoing infidelity or embezzling from their company or who falsified their resume. I think it's virtually impossible to detect that type of dishonesty unless they get caught by extrinsic evidence. I've witnessed enough examples of fairly ordinary people giving Oscar actress worthy performances of maintaining their innocence...tears and all... even when caught virtually red handed, til they're positive there's no chance of getting out of it, that I think it's an intuitive and fairly easily achieved skill for most people.