Thinking more on this topic, there’s a bullet to bite. The only reason that secrets and privacy is asked or honored is that people are adversarial on some topics at some times. If everyone was fully aligned, then the best policy would be full disclosure and public truth-sharing on all matters.
Once you’ve accepted that, keeping secrets seems to be more a matter of choosing sides than a question of absolute imperative. Plus some amount of judgement of value of information and likelihood of misuse among the different participants. Everyone is everyone else’s frenemy in these cases (intentionally or not). If you don’t particularly side with anyone, you probably want to act to reduce overall damage from the (mis)use of the information, whether that’s wrong decisions from lacking the data, or unpleasant/irrational/harmful uses of the data.
Also, this implies that trying to formalize and publish your policies is unlikely to be effective in avoiding opprobrium. Whether innocent or manipulative in intent, anyone harmed by publication of something told you in confidence is going to feel betrayed. On the other side, anyone hurt by your failure to tell them a relevant truth will feel you’ve conspired against them. These feelings on both sides are valid—in the conflict frame, you picked a side, and are responsible for the consequences.
I do like the view expressed here. There is a Occam’s Razor aspect that I think helps in thinking about the situation. That said, I do think there might still be some value to the formalizing and publishing policies here.
While one may well find one self on the opposite side from someone that has confided something to you that will often just be one aspect of the larger personal relationship. We often implicitly or explicitly assume that my friend is my friend universally and not just some “fair weather” type friend. Friends accept someone with all their flaws and strengths.
That is really a bit of a naive view though.
Perhaps by being more open in your own policy with people will make them consider the specifics of what’s being shared more critically rather than just assuming the friend is on the same page in this case as they have been in 100 other cases.
While it’s clear that once you have the information you either share or keep it confidential and so find you are on one side or the others. In other words, the person sharing imposes that problem on you—once told you must be on one side or the other. In some cases that might be a hard decision to make. By making known a policy position perhaps the will limit the number of times you are placed in a situation you would really like to have avoided (ignorance can be bliss ;-) ).
So perhaps publishing one’s policies is something of a optimal approach both helping reduce the stress in choosing a side and in even finding oneself in the position of having to make that choice.
There are also cases where the people are aligned but still keep secrets! The simple case is a surprise party, where everyone wants the target person not to know, including (though they aren’t likely to think of this out of the blue) the target themself. So even perfect alignment isn’t quite enough to get rid of secrets.
I think that example is either incorrect or part of a larger example class which may be weaker.
It might be wrong if the embarrassment reflects fear of social harm. This would still be adversarial/harm-causing, so it is part of Dagon’s framework.
If that’s not correct, I think the agent is simply acting irrationally and this is a larger class. An irrational agent can be mentally harmed by anything at all, so this class is much larger, but also a bit weaker to talk about (it probably best fits on a sliding scale as well).
Hmm, suppose an adult had urinary problems and wetted their bed regularly. Which category would you say that fits into? Or somebody whose parents had named them something that they didn’t like and they changed their name and didn’t want others to know their original given name due to aesthetic preferences and social implications of character traits related to that name?
There would be some social harm in sharing this either of these, but would it necessarily be adversarial? Even if others were aligned with the person with the secret, they couldn’t help but look at them a bit different knowing the secret.
You asking that question made me realize that I had mentally redefined “adversarial” underneath us!
I feel “adversarial” is not really a good pointer to the concept I was using, which is what causes this confusion. I was reading it like it meant “referring to potential harm by person A onto person B”, without any connotation of adversarial. I think that whether or not you accept this incredibly nonstandard definition is the deciding factor on this disagreement.
That said, you were right! Thanks for calling me on that weird move, I genuinely would not have seen what I’d done without that last clarification.
Thinking more on this topic, there’s a bullet to bite. The only reason that secrets and privacy is asked or honored is that people are adversarial on some topics at some times. If everyone was fully aligned, then the best policy would be full disclosure and public truth-sharing on all matters.
Once you’ve accepted that, keeping secrets seems to be more a matter of choosing sides than a question of absolute imperative. Plus some amount of judgement of value of information and likelihood of misuse among the different participants. Everyone is everyone else’s frenemy in these cases (intentionally or not). If you don’t particularly side with anyone, you probably want to act to reduce overall damage from the (mis)use of the information, whether that’s wrong decisions from lacking the data, or unpleasant/irrational/harmful uses of the data.
Also, this implies that trying to formalize and publish your policies is unlikely to be effective in avoiding opprobrium. Whether innocent or manipulative in intent, anyone harmed by publication of something told you in confidence is going to feel betrayed. On the other side, anyone hurt by your failure to tell them a relevant truth will feel you’ve conspired against them. These feelings on both sides are valid—in the conflict frame, you picked a side, and are responsible for the consequences.
I do like the view expressed here. There is a Occam’s Razor aspect that I think helps in thinking about the situation. That said, I do think there might still be some value to the formalizing and publishing policies here.
While one may well find one self on the opposite side from someone that has confided something to you that will often just be one aspect of the larger personal relationship. We often implicitly or explicitly assume that my friend is my friend universally and not just some “fair weather” type friend. Friends accept someone with all their flaws and strengths.
That is really a bit of a naive view though.
Perhaps by being more open in your own policy with people will make them consider the specifics of what’s being shared more critically rather than just assuming the friend is on the same page in this case as they have been in 100 other cases.
While it’s clear that once you have the information you either share or keep it confidential and so find you are on one side or the others. In other words, the person sharing imposes that problem on you—once told you must be on one side or the other. In some cases that might be a hard decision to make. By making known a policy position perhaps the will limit the number of times you are placed in a situation you would really like to have avoided (ignorance can be bliss ;-) ).
So perhaps publishing one’s policies is something of a optimal approach both helping reduce the stress in choosing a side and in even finding oneself in the position of having to make that choice.
There are also cases where the people are aligned but still keep secrets! The simple case is a surprise party, where everyone wants the target person not to know, including (though they aren’t likely to think of this out of the blue) the target themself. So even perfect alignment isn’t quite enough to get rid of secrets.
Another such case is if sharing something would embarrass somebody. They might be embarrassed in spite of others not acting adversarial towards them.
I think that example is either incorrect or part of a larger example class which may be weaker.
It might be wrong if the embarrassment reflects fear of social harm. This would still be adversarial/harm-causing, so it is part of Dagon’s framework.
If that’s not correct, I think the agent is simply acting irrationally and this is a larger class. An irrational agent can be mentally harmed by anything at all, so this class is much larger, but also a bit weaker to talk about (it probably best fits on a sliding scale as well).
Hmm, suppose an adult had urinary problems and wetted their bed regularly. Which category would you say that fits into? Or somebody whose parents had named them something that they didn’t like and they changed their name and didn’t want others to know their original given name due to aesthetic preferences and social implications of character traits related to that name?
There would be some social harm in sharing this either of these, but would it necessarily be adversarial? Even if others were aligned with the person with the secret, they couldn’t help but look at them a bit different knowing the secret.
You asking that question made me realize that I had mentally redefined “adversarial” underneath us!
I feel “adversarial” is not really a good pointer to the concept I was using, which is what causes this confusion. I was reading it like it meant “referring to potential harm by person A onto person B”, without any connotation of adversarial. I think that whether or not you accept this incredibly nonstandard definition is the deciding factor on this disagreement.
That said, you were right! Thanks for calling me on that weird move, I genuinely would not have seen what I’d done without that last clarification.
Yes, I agree that this nonstandard definition is a crux for this disagreement. Good analysis.