And if that’s your reply, go back and reread all my posts replacing “primary goal” with “actual goal,” because the wording isn’t specific.
It doesn’t make any more sense with that. Pretty much nobody would say that because they wouldn’t do Y if X wasn’t true, X is their actual goal for Y. Any term that they would use is such that substituting it in makes your original statement not very insightful.
(For instance, most people wouldn’t call X a primary goal or an actual goal, but they might call X a necessary condition. But if you were to say “people found something other than healing to be a necessary condition for buying a report”, that would not really say much that isn’t already obvious.)
The relevant comparison is more like this one: suppose you preferred a poorly reviewed book with a superior cover to a well reviewed book with an inferior cover.
I prefer a poorly reviewed book that costs $10 to a well reviewed book that costs $5000. By your reasoning I “care more about the price than about the reviews”.
(I will note, though, that one can view many college classes as the equivalent of “spending $5000 to read a good book.”)
Pretty much nobody would say that because they wouldn’t do Y if X wasn’t true, X is their actual goal for Y.
I think this reveals our fundamental disagreement: I am describing people, not repeating people’s self-descriptions, and since I am claiming that people are systematically mistaken about their self-descriptions, of course there should be a disagreement between them!
That is, suppose Alice “goes to restaurants for the food” but won’t go to any restaurants that have poor decor / ambiance, but will go to restaurants that have good ambiance and poor food. If Bob suggests to Alice that they go to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with great food, and Alice doesn’t like it or doesn’t go, then an outside observer seems correct in saying that Alice’s actual goal is the ambiance.
Now, sure, Alice could be assessing the experience along many dimensions and summing them in some way. But typically there is a dominant feature that overrides other concerns, or the tradeoffs seem to heavily favor one dimension (perhaps there need to be five units of food quality increase to outweigh one unit of ambiance quality decrease), which cashes out to the same thing when there’s a restricted range.
I prefer a poorly reviewed book that costs $10 to a well reviewed book that costs $5000. By your reasoning I “care more about the price than about the reviews”.
I think you do care more about the price than about the reviews? That is, if there were a book that cost $5k and there were a bunch of people who had read it and said that the experience of reading it was life-changingly good and totally worth $5k, and you decided not to spend the money on the book, it’s clear that you’re not in the most hardcore set of story-chasers, but instead you’re a budget-conscious story-chaser.
To bring it back to MetaMed, oftentimes the work that they did was definitely worth the cost. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment of serious conditions, and so the idea of paying five thousand dollars to get more diagnostic work done to make sure the other money is well-spent is not obviously a strange or bad idea, whereas paying $5k for a novel is outlandish.
That’s fighting the hypothetical.
I don’t see why you think that. You could argue it’s reference class tennis, but if your point is “people don’t do weird thing X” and in fact people do weird thing X in a slightly different context, then we need to reevaluate what is generating the weirdness. If people do actually spend thousands of dollars in order to read a book (and be credentialed for having read it), then a claim that you don’t want to spend for it becomes a statement about you instead of about people in general, or a statement about what features you find most relevant.
(I don’t know your educational history, but suppose I was having this conversation with an English major who voluntarily took college classes on reading books; clearly the class experience of discussing the book, or the pressure to read the book by Monday, is what they’re after in a deeper way than they were after reading the bookt. If they just cared about reading the book, they would just read the book.)
I am describing people, not repeating people’s self-descriptions, and since I am claiming that people are systematically mistaken about their self-descriptions, of course there should be a disagreement between them!
I’m complaining about your terminology. Terminology is about which meaning your words communicate. Being wrong about one’s self-description is about whether the meaning you intend to communicate by your words is accurate. These are not the same thing and you can easily get one of them wrong independently of the other.
I think you do care more about the price than about the reviews? That is...
The sentence after the “that is” is a nonstandard definition of “caring more about the price than about the reviews”.
That’s fighting the hypothetical.
I don’t see why you think that.
It’s fighting the hypothetical because the hypothetical is that I do not want to pay $5000 for a book. Pointing out that there are situations where people want to pay $5000 for a book disputes whether the situation laid out in the hypothetical actually happens. That’s fighting the hypothetical. Even if you’re correct, whether the situation described in the hypothetical can actually happen is irrelevant to the point the hypothetical is being used to make.
but if your point is “people don’t do weird thing X”
My point is not “people don’t do weird thing X”, my point is that people do not use the term X for the type of situation described in the hypothetical. A situation does not have to actually happen in order for people to use terms to describe it.
It doesn’t make any more sense with that. Pretty much nobody would say that because they wouldn’t do Y if X wasn’t true, X is their actual goal for Y. Any term that they would use is such that substituting it in makes your original statement not very insightful.
(For instance, most people wouldn’t call X a primary goal or an actual goal, but they might call X a necessary condition. But if you were to say “people found something other than healing to be a necessary condition for buying a report”, that would not really say much that isn’t already obvious.)
I prefer a poorly reviewed book that costs $10 to a well reviewed book that costs $5000. By your reasoning I “care more about the price than about the reviews”.
That’s fighting the hypothetical.
I think this reveals our fundamental disagreement: I am describing people, not repeating people’s self-descriptions, and since I am claiming that people are systematically mistaken about their self-descriptions, of course there should be a disagreement between them!
That is, suppose Alice “goes to restaurants for the food” but won’t go to any restaurants that have poor decor / ambiance, but will go to restaurants that have good ambiance and poor food. If Bob suggests to Alice that they go to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with great food, and Alice doesn’t like it or doesn’t go, then an outside observer seems correct in saying that Alice’s actual goal is the ambiance.
Now, sure, Alice could be assessing the experience along many dimensions and summing them in some way. But typically there is a dominant feature that overrides other concerns, or the tradeoffs seem to heavily favor one dimension (perhaps there need to be five units of food quality increase to outweigh one unit of ambiance quality decrease), which cashes out to the same thing when there’s a restricted range.
I think you do care more about the price than about the reviews? That is, if there were a book that cost $5k and there were a bunch of people who had read it and said that the experience of reading it was life-changingly good and totally worth $5k, and you decided not to spend the money on the book, it’s clear that you’re not in the most hardcore set of story-chasers, but instead you’re a budget-conscious story-chaser.
To bring it back to MetaMed, oftentimes the work that they did was definitely worth the cost. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment of serious conditions, and so the idea of paying five thousand dollars to get more diagnostic work done to make sure the other money is well-spent is not obviously a strange or bad idea, whereas paying $5k for a novel is outlandish.
I don’t see why you think that. You could argue it’s reference class tennis, but if your point is “people don’t do weird thing X” and in fact people do weird thing X in a slightly different context, then we need to reevaluate what is generating the weirdness. If people do actually spend thousands of dollars in order to read a book (and be credentialed for having read it), then a claim that you don’t want to spend for it becomes a statement about you instead of about people in general, or a statement about what features you find most relevant.
(I don’t know your educational history, but suppose I was having this conversation with an English major who voluntarily took college classes on reading books; clearly the class experience of discussing the book, or the pressure to read the book by Monday, is what they’re after in a deeper way than they were after reading the bookt. If they just cared about reading the book, they would just read the book.)
I’m complaining about your terminology. Terminology is about which meaning your words communicate. Being wrong about one’s self-description is about whether the meaning you intend to communicate by your words is accurate. These are not the same thing and you can easily get one of them wrong independently of the other.
The sentence after the “that is” is a nonstandard definition of “caring more about the price than about the reviews”.
It’s fighting the hypothetical because the hypothetical is that I do not want to pay $5000 for a book. Pointing out that there are situations where people want to pay $5000 for a book disputes whether the situation laid out in the hypothetical actually happens. That’s fighting the hypothetical. Even if you’re correct, whether the situation described in the hypothetical can actually happen is irrelevant to the point the hypothetical is being used to make.
My point is not “people don’t do weird thing X”, my point is that people do not use the term X for the type of situation described in the hypothetical. A situation does not have to actually happen in order for people to use terms to describe it.