I thought that the point of the clarification of an “honest” answer is that you are actually willing to take a “no” for an answer. A non-qualified opinion even if at surface level being an evaluation propably truly isn’t an evaluation. It might be interesting that even if you ask for an “honest” answer people might refuse to give one.
It might be interesting that even if you ask for an “honest” answer people might refuse to give one.
Well, of course this is exactly what happens. (Because many people will claim to want an “honest” answer, but nevertheless socially punish you if you give an answer other than the “correct” one… this is extremely unfortunate behavior, but such are people.)
I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious. A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer. Part of the reason why people add the qualifier is the belief that those kinds “give you more positive affect”.
If you try to shoot for an actual honest opinion you have to care to differentiate between asking for “dishonestly honest” opinions. For the kind of mindset that has “whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed” actually honest opinions are what to shoot for. But I have bad models on what attracts people to “dishonestly honest” opinions. I suspect that that mindset could benefit from different framing (“I have your back” vs “yes” ie forgo claims on state of the world in favour of explicit social moves).
This lesswrong post might make someone seek out more “dishonest positivity” by applying a “rejection danger” in pursuit of “belief strengthening”. I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
That is on the epistemic side there is a “conservation of expected evidence” but on the social side there is a “adherence to recieved choice”, you can’t give control of an area of life conditional on how that control would be used, if you censor someone you are not infact giving them a choice.
If people have a reason to lie, they may want to use intensifiers like “honestly” for the same reason. Likewise for asking others to lie while pretending to ask for the honest truth—if you’re already pretending, why should we start being surprised only once you use words like “honestly”?
There’s an underlying question of why this particular pretense, of course.
I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
10. Jill decides to face any “yes requires the possibility of no” situation by (ahem) eating it in the face. She is frequently happy with this decision, because it forces her to face the truth in situations where she otherwise wouldn’t, which makes her feel brave, and gives her more accurate information. However, she finds herself unsure whether she really wants to face the music every single time—not because she has any concrete reasons to doubt the quality of the policy, but because she isn’t sure she would be able to admit to herself if she did. Seeing the problem, she eventually stops forcing herself.
I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious.
Well, it’s “inevitable” and/or “obvious” only in the sense that it is quite commonplace human behavior. Certainly it’s not universal—thankfully!
A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer.
Indeed! They are not, in fact, looking for an honest answer. This is a thing people do, quite often.
But why would they say that they want an honest answer? Well, there are many reasons, ranging from self-deception to dominance/power games to various not-quite-so-disreputable reasons. Enumerating and analyzing all such things would be beyond the scope of this comment thread. The rest of your comment is… not so much mistaken, per se, as it is insufficiently built upon an understanding of the dynamics I have alluded to, their causes, their consequences, etc. There is a great deal of material, on Less Wrong and elsewhere, that discusses this sort of thing. (I do not have links handy, I’m afraid, nor time at the moment to locate them, but perhaps someone else can point you in the right direction.)
As might be typical of my neurotype when I see text such as ” an honest evaluation ” as in the top-level comment I resolve it to mean the uncommon case when a person actually effectively seeks a honest opinion as the plain english would suggest. The type of reading that interprets it as the common case could easily suggest that honest asking would be impossible or a irrelevant alternative. And indeed people are trained enough that even when asked for a “honest” opinion they will give the expected opinion. I didn’t really get the simulcranum levels and such but in such dynamics people have lost the meaning of honesty.
Making a token commitment to wanting honesty doesn’t prevent a person from feeling negative emotions when they hear the wrong answer. If you are dealing with a person who doesn’t act based on their intellectual commitments but based on what they feel, someone saying that they want an honest answer doesn’t go very far.
The intellectual commitment is so easy it is hardly the centerpiece of the issue. When you are asking for such an answer you are consenting to potentially feeling bad ie you are making a kind of emotional commitment. Sure receiving a bad answer sucks but whether you punish it’s expressor is part whether they feel safe in expressing their opinion. For example if you were to participate in boxing acting offended when your face hurts would be unreasonable unless it’s outside of the consent given by for example occuring outside of rounds.
Sure for some it might appear as emotional masoschism to allow others to hurt you while removing your possibility for retaliation. BUt setting it up is an emotional transaction and not a intellectual one.
I am not claiming it’s simple. But there is a distinct differrence between trying to make it work and just not giving a single thought for it.
In the boxing metaphor people do not react calmly to be beaten up but the agression is supposed to be channeled within rounds. If someone does punch outside of rounds people know what is happening and for example do not fear additional violence. But someone who consistently does that kind of outside-context punching can not really participate in the sport and would be liable to be charged with assault for those sorts of acts. It’s plausible that someone has so strong reflexes to being punched that they can not pass the emotional competence standard to participate. If they see all punches as personal attacks and not part of the sport it can be a disqualifying factor. And it’s plausible that more veteran boxers contextualise getting hit differently, ie having the right kind of attitude can be built up with practise.
It’s easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people. It’s easy to avoid boxing people.
On the other hand, there are a lot of fine decisions in social interactions about how to interact with other people. Without a lot of training people are not self-aware of how their emotions play into all the aspects of how they treat other people.
I did end up thinking about whether it’s always easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people.
You walk on the street and a passer by seem agitated and says “come at me bro”. Thinking it as play or in general just wanting to went rage from your daily stresses you approach and punch the person. They feel sore about the situation and later decide to chare you with assault. You plead that the situation was mutual understanding informal boxing match. It’s not a super strong defence but it’s not to my mind automaticallly failing one. In judging such a case there might be multiple interpretation questions. Is the idiom regularly known enough that it establishes a code of conduct? Is it reasonable to hear as a non-idiom. If heard as a non-idiom, does “bro” indicate playfulness? If a conduct, does it amount to consenting to be punched? Or does the conduct invite someone to be a first aggressor, merely amounting to guarantee a retaliation and that the sayer won’t first strike? Even if at the time of events the participants don’t think in the terms of a boxing match it’s different from an unannouced strike out of the blue.
As a person that does not find social situations intuitive I know social situations are not easy. In my experience my ignorance or disregard for social conventions has not really given me the benefit of a doubt. I feel that people that can intuitively mesh well with the social fabric without explicit modelling of it can have it kind of easy. When I painstakingly recreate behaviour which from my point of view is convoluted and arbitrary what the standard of acceptable behaviour is of great interest. Part of what makes that struggle easier that it’s not that its the deck stacked against me but a standard that everyone has to adhere to. If the rules are slightly inconvenient for somebody else I dont’ feel so bad in rules-laywering the conventions against them.
Sure you can’t expect perfect introspection from anyone but it’s not like total lack of introspection is allowed. There can be a duty to be informed. Say you are on the road and encounter a roadsign that you don’t recognise (and thus can’t obey). If you are driving abroad and it’s a type of sign that has no correlate in your homecountry and is a rare type of sign anyway, no big fault. But if it is a sign that is highly standardised across borders with a simple design that is a common occurence (like a stopsign) it’s a bigger issue. If you start driving a car on public roads without knowing streetsigns that would be reckless. And yet I don’t expect there to be many drivers that recognise all signs and that many of them are not reckless for driving.
There can be situations where the local driving culture can develop to be inconsistent with formal traffic laws. A responcible driver needs to take into account that this is a viable alternative how people might act. But it doesn’t mean that is how you should drive or really as an excuse for why they are driving the way thay are driving or that you need to be ambivalent about whether they do it or not. It’s perfectly fine to hold that they are wrong and that they shouldn’t be doing it. Recognising what the norm is doesn’t mean you need to normatively endorse others to uphold it.
As a person that does not find social situations intuitive I know social situations are not easy. In my experience my ignorance or disregard for social conventions has not really given me the benefit of a doubt.
That sounds to me like you often don’t recognize when people get punished for saying inconvenient truths as it doesn’t happen in explicit ways.
Yes that does mean I probably register more honest questions that go without hiccups when actually there are honest questions with minor hiccups. I do not find it terribly relevant to my findings or positions reliability. They would be assholes for forming a grudge in the situations and carrying an indirect revenge whether I detect it or not. “Nobody asked for your opinion” is a valid complain for unprompted negative bashing. But in this situation “No, you did ask my opinion” would be a relevant defence. Even if they did not mean to ask, since people are not mindreaders, I might be in a position where to my effective reality I was asked.
It might be relevant that my national culture might favour directness and frankness more than the median culture does. This makes it more probable and expected that someone would genuinely ask for an honest opinion and it not being an fringe edge case. Banks usually clarify to their customers that they do not ever ask for credentials via email which helps customers more confidently identify scam emails. I could see some close relationships that would establish something to the effect of “I want you to always be unwaveringly on my side. If I ever say something its never election for opinion”. Under this kind of understanding/assumption you would find every excuse to not find even explicit asking for opinions to actually be elections for opinion. But I could also see someone wanting to establish something to the effect of “If we had some issues you could tell me, right?”. So under some relationships you would genuinely ask for opinion.
They would be assholes for forming a grudge in the situations and carrying an indirect revenge whether I detect it or not.
“Revenge” is a phrase that implies intent.
Let’s say someone invites you for a dinner party. Then you comment on how their food could be improved when they ask for a honest opinion of their cooking.
Some time later the person thinks about throwing a dinner party and about who to invite. They are going to do this likely by thinking of possible invities and seeing what kind of emotional reaction they feel about whether it would be good to invite the person.
The act of having received your feedback does affect the emotional reaction even when the person doesn’t remember the incident. There’s likely some emotional tension and that makes it less likely that they invite you without them having any ill-will they reasoned about.
This can even happen when the person judges the feedback as welcome on a system II level.
I do point out that the emotional experience can also be positive which would increase my invitation chances.
I don’t know what would be good terminology but I think system 1 reactions are not above critisms. For example if someone feels genuine disgust towards ethnicities that are not their own but verbally and formally is commited to equal treatment of all people I would still be tempted use words like “concerning” or “ugly”.
Likewise in the use of deadly force for self-defence if you get easily frightened to “life in danger” levels it means more violence is permissible in more varied situations. If you get differentially more afraid towards certain groups of people it can weaken their right to life. I can undertstand how this could feel very unfair and in some non-staighforward way it is not fair. But on the other hand I would not want for person in fear of their life need to hesitate for fear of punishment. But I think there is such a thing as “fearing irresponcibly”. An arachnophobe going into a house full of spiders and he ends up burning the house because he was killing spiders with fire in panic I would not classify as a total accident.
What we are mainly discussing here is not that extreme but I still think it’s not automatically wrong to hold someone responcible for their feelings, althought it does need special care and in a signifcantly modified sense.
For example if I would feel negatively for not getting invited that would not be unproportionate responce.
Whether the emotional experience is positive depends on the ability of the person you are dealing with do deal with feedback and your own ability to give good feedback.
It doesn’t depend on whether the other person wants to get feedback on the system II level.
I think you are likely underrating how much unproductive social behavior most people engage in because of emotional reasons. Likely, including yourself.
Anecdotally, I’ve had friends who explicitly asked for an honest answer to these kinds of questions, and if given a positive answer would tell me “but you’d tell me if it was negative, right?”… and still, when given a negative answer, would absolutely take it as a personal attack and get angry.
Obviously those friendships were hard to maintain.
Often when people say they want an honest answer, what they mean is “I want you to say something positive and also mean it”, they’re not asking for something actionable.
I thought that the point of the clarification of an “honest” answer is that you are actually willing to take a “no” for an answer. A non-qualified opinion even if at surface level being an evaluation propably truly isn’t an evaluation. It might be interesting that even if you ask for an “honest” answer people might refuse to give one.
Well, of course this is exactly what happens. (Because many people will claim to want an “honest” answer, but nevertheless socially punish you if you give an answer other than the “correct” one… this is extremely unfortunate behavior, but such are people.)
I know it’s the typical outcome, but I don’t know why it would be inevitable or obvious. A person that verbally asks for an “honest” answer but punishes is not in fact asking for a honest answer. Part of the reason why people add the qualifier is the belief that those kinds “give you more positive affect”.
If you try to shoot for an actual honest opinion you have to care to differentiate between asking for “dishonestly honest” opinions. For the kind of mindset that has “whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed” actually honest opinions are what to shoot for. But I have bad models on what attracts people to “dishonestly honest” opinions. I suspect that that mindset could benefit from different framing (“I have your back” vs “yes” ie forgo claims on state of the world in favour of explicit social moves).
This lesswrong post might make someone seek out more “dishonest positivity” by applying a “rejection danger” in pursuit of “belief strengthening”. I feel that there is an argument to be made that when rejection danger realises you should just eat it in the face without resisting and the failure mode prominently features resisting the rejection. And on the balance if you can’t withstand a no then you will not have earned the yes and should not be asking the question in the first place.
That is on the epistemic side there is a “conservation of expected evidence” but on the social side there is a “adherence to recieved choice”, you can’t give control of an area of life conditional on how that control would be used, if you censor someone you are not infact giving them a choice.
If people have a reason to lie, they may want to use intensifiers like “honestly” for the same reason. Likewise for asking others to lie while pretending to ask for the honest truth—if you’re already pretending, why should we start being surprised only once you use words like “honestly”?
There’s an underlying question of why this particular pretense, of course.
10. Jill decides to face any “yes requires the possibility of no” situation by (ahem) eating it in the face. She is frequently happy with this decision, because it forces her to face the truth in situations where she otherwise wouldn’t, which makes her feel brave, and gives her more accurate information. However, she finds herself unsure whether she really wants to face the music every single time—not because she has any concrete reasons to doubt the quality of the policy, but because she isn’t sure she would be able to admit to herself if she did. Seeing the problem, she eventually stops forcing herself.
Well, it’s “inevitable” and/or “obvious” only in the sense that it is quite commonplace human behavior. Certainly it’s not universal—thankfully!
Indeed! They are not, in fact, looking for an honest answer. This is a thing people do, quite often.
But why would they say that they want an honest answer? Well, there are many reasons, ranging from self-deception to dominance/power games to various not-quite-so-disreputable reasons. Enumerating and analyzing all such things would be beyond the scope of this comment thread. The rest of your comment is… not so much mistaken, per se, as it is insufficiently built upon an understanding of the dynamics I have alluded to, their causes, their consequences, etc. There is a great deal of material, on Less Wrong and elsewhere, that discusses this sort of thing. (I do not have links handy, I’m afraid, nor time at the moment to locate them, but perhaps someone else can point you in the right direction.)
As might be typical of my neurotype when I see text such as ” an honest evaluation ” as in the top-level comment I resolve it to mean the uncommon case when a person actually effectively seeks a honest opinion as the plain english would suggest. The type of reading that interprets it as the common case could easily suggest that honest asking would be impossible or a irrelevant alternative. And indeed people are trained enough that even when asked for a “honest” opinion they will give the expected opinion. I didn’t really get the simulcranum levels and such but in such dynamics people have lost the meaning of honesty.
Making a token commitment to wanting honesty doesn’t prevent a person from feeling negative emotions when they hear the wrong answer. If you are dealing with a person who doesn’t act based on their intellectual commitments but based on what they feel, someone saying that they want an honest answer doesn’t go very far.
The intellectual commitment is so easy it is hardly the centerpiece of the issue. When you are asking for such an answer you are consenting to potentially feeling bad ie you are making a kind of emotional commitment. Sure receiving a bad answer sucks but whether you punish it’s expressor is part whether they feel safe in expressing their opinion. For example if you were to participate in boxing acting offended when your face hurts would be unreasonable unless it’s outside of the consent given by for example occuring outside of rounds.
Sure for some it might appear as emotional masoschism to allow others to hurt you while removing your possibility for retaliation. BUt setting it up is an emotional transaction and not a intellectual one.
It seems to me like you are assuming that people have a lot more emotional self control then they have in reality.
It’s not possible for 99% of the people to simply remove their ability to retaliate.
I am not claiming it’s simple. But there is a distinct differrence between trying to make it work and just not giving a single thought for it.
In the boxing metaphor people do not react calmly to be beaten up but the agression is supposed to be channeled within rounds. If someone does punch outside of rounds people know what is happening and for example do not fear additional violence. But someone who consistently does that kind of outside-context punching can not really participate in the sport and would be liable to be charged with assault for those sorts of acts. It’s plausible that someone has so strong reflexes to being punched that they can not pass the emotional competence standard to participate. If they see all punches as personal attacks and not part of the sport it can be a disqualifying factor. And it’s plausible that more veteran boxers contextualise getting hit differently, ie having the right kind of attitude can be built up with practise.
It’s easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people. It’s easy to avoid boxing people.
On the other hand, there are a lot of fine decisions in social interactions about how to interact with other people. Without a lot of training people are not self-aware of how their emotions play into all the aspects of how they treat other people.
I did end up thinking about whether it’s always easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people.
You walk on the street and a passer by seem agitated and says “come at me bro”. Thinking it as play or in general just wanting to went rage from your daily stresses you approach and punch the person. They feel sore about the situation and later decide to chare you with assault. You plead that the situation was mutual understanding informal boxing match. It’s not a super strong defence but it’s not to my mind automaticallly failing one. In judging such a case there might be multiple interpretation questions. Is the idiom regularly known enough that it establishes a code of conduct? Is it reasonable to hear as a non-idiom. If heard as a non-idiom, does “bro” indicate playfulness? If a conduct, does it amount to consenting to be punched? Or does the conduct invite someone to be a first aggressor, merely amounting to guarantee a retaliation and that the sayer won’t first strike? Even if at the time of events the participants don’t think in the terms of a boxing match it’s different from an unannouced strike out of the blue.
In your example it’s quite clear that boxing happened. Whether or not it was justified play or wasn’t is another question.
As a person that does not find social situations intuitive I know social situations are not easy. In my experience my ignorance or disregard for social conventions has not really given me the benefit of a doubt. I feel that people that can intuitively mesh well with the social fabric without explicit modelling of it can have it kind of easy. When I painstakingly recreate behaviour which from my point of view is convoluted and arbitrary what the standard of acceptable behaviour is of great interest. Part of what makes that struggle easier that it’s not that its the deck stacked against me but a standard that everyone has to adhere to. If the rules are slightly inconvenient for somebody else I dont’ feel so bad in rules-laywering the conventions against them.
Sure you can’t expect perfect introspection from anyone but it’s not like total lack of introspection is allowed. There can be a duty to be informed. Say you are on the road and encounter a roadsign that you don’t recognise (and thus can’t obey). If you are driving abroad and it’s a type of sign that has no correlate in your homecountry and is a rare type of sign anyway, no big fault. But if it is a sign that is highly standardised across borders with a simple design that is a common occurence (like a stopsign) it’s a bigger issue. If you start driving a car on public roads without knowing streetsigns that would be reckless. And yet I don’t expect there to be many drivers that recognise all signs and that many of them are not reckless for driving.
There can be situations where the local driving culture can develop to be inconsistent with formal traffic laws. A responcible driver needs to take into account that this is a viable alternative how people might act. But it doesn’t mean that is how you should drive or really as an excuse for why they are driving the way thay are driving or that you need to be ambivalent about whether they do it or not. It’s perfectly fine to hold that they are wrong and that they shouldn’t be doing it. Recognising what the norm is doesn’t mean you need to normatively endorse others to uphold it.
That sounds to me like you often don’t recognize when people get punished for saying inconvenient truths as it doesn’t happen in explicit ways.
Yes that does mean I probably register more honest questions that go without hiccups when actually there are honest questions with minor hiccups. I do not find it terribly relevant to my findings or positions reliability. They would be assholes for forming a grudge in the situations and carrying an indirect revenge whether I detect it or not. “Nobody asked for your opinion” is a valid complain for unprompted negative bashing. But in this situation “No, you did ask my opinion” would be a relevant defence. Even if they did not mean to ask, since people are not mindreaders, I might be in a position where to my effective reality I was asked.
It might be relevant that my national culture might favour directness and frankness more than the median culture does. This makes it more probable and expected that someone would genuinely ask for an honest opinion and it not being an fringe edge case. Banks usually clarify to their customers that they do not ever ask for credentials via email which helps customers more confidently identify scam emails. I could see some close relationships that would establish something to the effect of “I want you to always be unwaveringly on my side. If I ever say something its never election for opinion”. Under this kind of understanding/assumption you would find every excuse to not find even explicit asking for opinions to actually be elections for opinion. But I could also see someone wanting to establish something to the effect of “If we had some issues you could tell me, right?”. So under some relationships you would genuinely ask for opinion.
“Revenge” is a phrase that implies intent.
Let’s say someone invites you for a dinner party. Then you comment on how their food could be improved when they ask for a honest opinion of their cooking.
Some time later the person thinks about throwing a dinner party and about who to invite. They are going to do this likely by thinking of possible invities and seeing what kind of emotional reaction they feel about whether it would be good to invite the person.
The act of having received your feedback does affect the emotional reaction even when the person doesn’t remember the incident. There’s likely some emotional tension and that makes it less likely that they invite you without them having any ill-will they reasoned about.
This can even happen when the person judges the feedback as welcome on a system II level.
Well described important effect.
I do point out that the emotional experience can also be positive which would increase my invitation chances.
I don’t know what would be good terminology but I think system 1 reactions are not above critisms. For example if someone feels genuine disgust towards ethnicities that are not their own but verbally and formally is commited to equal treatment of all people I would still be tempted use words like “concerning” or “ugly”.
Likewise in the use of deadly force for self-defence if you get easily frightened to “life in danger” levels it means more violence is permissible in more varied situations. If you get differentially more afraid towards certain groups of people it can weaken their right to life. I can undertstand how this could feel very unfair and in some non-staighforward way it is not fair. But on the other hand I would not want for person in fear of their life need to hesitate for fear of punishment. But I think there is such a thing as “fearing irresponcibly”. An arachnophobe going into a house full of spiders and he ends up burning the house because he was killing spiders with fire in panic I would not classify as a total accident.
What we are mainly discussing here is not that extreme but I still think it’s not automatically wrong to hold someone responcible for their feelings, althought it does need special care and in a signifcantly modified sense.
For example if I would feel negatively for not getting invited that would not be unproportionate responce.
Whether the emotional experience is positive depends on the ability of the person you are dealing with do deal with feedback and your own ability to give good feedback.
It doesn’t depend on whether the other person wants to get feedback on the system II level.
I think you are likely underrating how much unproductive social behavior most people engage in because of emotional reasons. Likely, including yourself.
Anecdotally, I’ve had friends who explicitly asked for an honest answer to these kinds of questions, and if given a positive answer would tell me “but you’d tell me if it was negative, right?”… and still, when given a negative answer, would absolutely take it as a personal attack and get angry.
Obviously those friendships were hard to maintain.
Often when people say they want an honest answer, what they mean is “I want you to say something positive and also mean it”, they’re not asking for something actionable.