With some thought over the past few days, I think I’m saying I am increasingly treating people as more or less predictable systems based on past behaviour and stimulus/response, and ignoring the noises that come out of their mouths. I used to treat the noises as having anything much to do with what the people do, but the evidence is scant.
So it’s conversational cynicism-signaling, but with a slightly useful point ;-)
Ah! Yeah, agreed that the stuff people say is often unrelated to our other behaviors, and in particular our accounts of why we do what we do are often simply false. In fact, often the narratives we accept as accounts of why we do what we do aren’t any such thing in the first place, even false ones.
With some thought over the past few days, I think I’m saying I am increasingly treating people as more or less predictable systems based on past behaviour and stimulus/response, and ignoring the noises that come out of their mouths. I used to treat the noises as having anything much to do with what the people do, but the evidence is scant.
So it’s conversational cynicism-signaling, but with a slightly useful point ;-)
Ah! Yeah, agreed that the stuff people say is often unrelated to our other behaviors, and in particular our accounts of why we do what we do are often simply false. In fact, often the narratives we accept as accounts of why we do what we do aren’t any such thing in the first place, even false ones.