But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interaction… like if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with them… you might want to avoid that.
In such cases, it seems to me that a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality. For example:
If someone asks you to join a new business venture, verify that they are reliable by asking around, check their track record of past ventures, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, etc.
If someone asks you out (and you find them attractive or are otherwise inclined to accept; otherwise, vibes don’t matter, you just say “no thanks”), stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.
If you’re considering sharing something private with someone you don’t know well, don’t.
These approaches work well with people you get bad vibes from and also with people you get good vibes from.
I think this approach is reasonable for things where failure is low stakes. But I really think it makes sense to be extremely conservative about who you start businesses with. Your ability to verify things is limited, and there may still be information in vibes even after updating on the results of all feasible efforts to verify someone’s trustworthiness.
But I really think it makes sense to be extremely conservative about who you start businesses with.
Yes, you should check carefully.
To put it another way: sure, use all the information you have access to (so long as you have good reason to believe that it is reliable, and not misleading)… but adopt a strategy that would still work well even if you ignored “vibes”.
I’m surprised to see this take so disagree-voted, given how sensible the policy of adopting a vibes-invariant strategy is. Anyone who disagree-voted care to explain?
If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it’s also ignoring useful information. It’s not sensible to use an X-invariant strategy unless you believe X carries no information whatsoever. And that’s kind of what the OP is arguing, that vibes do carry information. If you disagree with that, argue that directly! Arguing that you can adopt an invariant strategy without tossing away information is not correct or useful.
It’s not sensible to use an X-invariant strategy unless you believe X carries no information whatsoever.
This is not the case. It is sufficient for the X input channel to be very noisy, biased, or both, or for mistakes in measurement of X to be asymmetrically costly.
Separately, you may note that I did not, in fact, argue for a “vibes-invariant strategy”; that was @Mo Putera’s gloss, which I do not endorse. What I wrote was:
a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality
and:
sure, use all the information you have access to (so long as you have good reason to believe that it is reliable, and not misleading)… but adopt a strategy that would still work well even if you ignored “vibes”
This is explicitly not an argument that you should “toss away information”.
If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it’s also ignoring useful information.
I am not one to suggest ignoring useful information if you’re able to process it in order to get a better answer. However, I think all the examples above were examples where people do not expect to be acting more effectively after processing the information.
That is, I agree with you for a perfect Bayesian that you shouldn’t ignore anything ever, but I read Said Achmiz as saying “If you get bad vibes from someone, be safer around them through planning”, which is not actually a qualitative difference from what Kaj Sotala suggested.
I’ve been in two high-stakes bad-vibe situations. (In one of them, someone else initially got the bad vibes, but I know enough details to comment on it.) In both cases, asking around would have revealed the issue. However, in both cases the people who knew the problematic person well, had either a good impression of them, or a very bad impression of them. Because there’s a pattern where someone who’s problematic in some way is also charismatic, or good at making up for it in other ways, etc. So my very rough model of these situations is that there were a bunch of people you could have asked about them and gotten “looks fine” with 60% probability or “stay the fuck away” with 40% probability. If you have only have a few data points of this variety, you’d want to trust your vibes because false negatives can be very costly.
stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.
These mitigations would do nothing against a lot of real relationship failures. Imagine that everything goes swimmingly for the first year. Then you start to realize that even though everything your partner has been doing makes sense on the surface, if you step back and look at the big picture their actions tend to have the effect of separating you from your friends and blaming yourself for a lot of things, and it just doesn’t seem healthy. When you finally decide to break up, it’s an extremely painful process because: (i) your partner is better at weaving stories than you, and from their perspective you’re the problematic person (ii) your friends all know your partner, and they’ve made a good impression, (iii) you will continue to see them at social events, and (iv) even after all of this, you don’t think they ever purposefully acted maliciously toward you.
These mitigations would do nothing against a lot of real relationship failures. Imagine that everything goes swimmingly for the first year.
OP talked about someone asking you on a date. The suggested strategy was about mitigating problems that might be encountered when going on a date.
An analogous strategy for a long-term relationship might be something like “establish boundaries, ensure that the relationship does not crowd out contact with your friends, regularly check in with friends/family, talk to trusted confidantes about problems in the relationship to get a third-party opinion”, etc.
“This solution to problem X doesn’t also solve problem Y” is not a strike against said solution.
P.S.: The anecdotes are useful, but “data” is one thing they definitely aren’t.
In such cases, it seems to me that a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality. For example:
If someone asks you to join a new business venture, verify that they are reliable by asking around, check their track record of past ventures, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, etc.
If someone asks you out (and you find them attractive or are otherwise inclined to accept; otherwise, vibes don’t matter, you just say “no thanks”), stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.
If you’re considering sharing something private with someone you don’t know well, don’t.
These approaches work well with people you get bad vibes from and also with people you get good vibes from.
In short: trust, but verify.
I think this approach is reasonable for things where failure is low stakes. But I really think it makes sense to be extremely conservative about who you start businesses with. Your ability to verify things is limited, and there may still be information in vibes even after updating on the results of all feasible efforts to verify someone’s trustworthiness.
Yes, you should check carefully.
To put it another way: sure, use all the information you have access to (so long as you have good reason to believe that it is reliable, and not misleading)… but adopt a strategy that would still work well even if you ignored “vibes”.
I’m surprised to see this take so disagree-voted, given how sensible the policy of adopting a vibes-invariant strategy is. Anyone who disagree-voted care to explain?
If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it’s also ignoring useful information. It’s not sensible to use an X-invariant strategy unless you believe X carries no information whatsoever. And that’s kind of what the OP is arguing, that vibes do carry information. If you disagree with that, argue that directly! Arguing that you can adopt an invariant strategy without tossing away information is not correct or useful.
This is not the case. It is sufficient for the X input channel to be very noisy, biased, or both, or for mistakes in measurement of X to be asymmetrically costly.
Separately, you may note that I did not, in fact, argue for a “vibes-invariant strategy”; that was @Mo Putera’s gloss, which I do not endorse. What I wrote was:
and:
This is explicitly not an argument that you should “toss away information”.
You’re right, I mis-paraphrased. Thanks for the correction Said.
I am not one to suggest ignoring useful information if you’re able to process it in order to get a better answer. However, I think all the examples above were examples where people do not expect to be acting more effectively after processing the information.
That is, I agree with you for a perfect Bayesian that you shouldn’t ignore anything ever, but I read Said Achmiz as saying “If you get bad vibes from someone, be safer around them through planning”, which is not actually a qualitative difference from what Kaj Sotala suggested.
Let’s apply some data to this!
I’ve been in two high-stakes bad-vibe situations. (In one of them, someone else initially got the bad vibes, but I know enough details to comment on it.) In both cases, asking around would have revealed the issue. However, in both cases the people who knew the problematic person well, had either a good impression of them, or a very bad impression of them. Because there’s a pattern where someone who’s problematic in some way is also charismatic, or good at making up for it in other ways, etc. So my very rough model of these situations is that there were a bunch of people you could have asked about them and gotten “looks fine” with 60% probability or “stay the fuck away” with 40% probability. If you have only have a few data points of this variety, you’d want to trust your vibes because false negatives can be very costly.
These mitigations would do nothing against a lot of real relationship failures. Imagine that everything goes swimmingly for the first year. Then you start to realize that even though everything your partner has been doing makes sense on the surface, if you step back and look at the big picture their actions tend to have the effect of separating you from your friends and blaming yourself for a lot of things, and it just doesn’t seem healthy. When you finally decide to break up, it’s an extremely painful process because: (i) your partner is better at weaving stories than you, and from their perspective you’re the problematic person (ii) your friends all know your partner, and they’ve made a good impression, (iii) you will continue to see them at social events, and (iv) even after all of this, you don’t think they ever purposefully acted maliciously toward you.
OP talked about someone asking you on a date. The suggested strategy was about mitigating problems that might be encountered when going on a date.
An analogous strategy for a long-term relationship might be something like “establish boundaries, ensure that the relationship does not crowd out contact with your friends, regularly check in with friends/family, talk to trusted confidantes about problems in the relationship to get a third-party opinion”, etc.
“This solution to problem X doesn’t also solve problem Y” is not a strike against said solution.
P.S.: The anecdotes are useful, but “data” is one thing they definitely aren’t.