I would put it this way: being vulnerable is a probably-unfortunate side-effect of a means to an end, not an end in itself, and it’s usually worth tracking just what end you have in mind. (And, yes, if you had a cost-free alternative means that achieved the same result but didn’t make you vulnerable, then that would be an improvement.) For example: “telling someone a secret that would enable them to shame you for it”, or “letting yourself rely on someone else to take care of a thing for you [such that if they fell through, it would hurt you]”, or “letting yourself care about someone else’s judgment of you”. There are situations where each of these is an unavoidable part of a plan with positive expected value, and situations where they create needless risks with no benefit.
Let’s see if I can capture the good parts of potential counter-stances:
It is imaginable that someone is so afraid of the negative consequences that they can’t really think rationally about them, in which case it’s plausibly good to deliberately create those situations in relatively safe circumstances and teach your brain that it’s actually not that bad (“exposure therapy”).
Here, you want situations in which your brain thinks you’re much more vulnerable than your rational mind believes. Having picked a situation to expose yourself to, you’d like the actual chance of getting hurt to be as close to zero as possible.
You could deliberately make yourself vulnerable to person X’s actions for the purpose of evaluating person X: can you actually trust them to treat you well?
In this case, the important thing is that person X believes you’re vulnerable and has the opportunity to do something about it. If you are secretly emotionally ironclad, or fully able to intercept/punish X’s misbehavior, or whatever, then so much the better. It could be good to find ways to make yourself look more vulnerable than you are, to enable this kind of testing. On the other hand, fooling them in this way could either be impossible or carry its own risks.
On “shame-able secrets”, it can be ideal to take a stance of, “Some people will shame me and others don’t care. I’m fine with cutting the first group out of my life and dealing solely with the second group. This is most efficiently accomplished by being completely open about this secret (and possibly deliberately broadcasting it).”
In this case, after the initial phase of dealing with the haters you already know, you have made yourself invulnerable to any future social shaming for this secret. And since you’re erring on the side of filtering out any new haters before they become socially important to you, you’re essentially doing your best to keep yourself invulnerable.
There are also lesser versions of this, where you “out” yourself to a particular group (such as writing about your fetishes to a niche online forum), or even a single person, to “get it over with” at a time and place of your choosing.
There are also greater versions of this, where you do it with lots of “shame-able secrets”. There tend to be “economies of scale” here: there tends to be overlap from one secret to the next among the people you cut out, the steps you take to prepare yourself for the fallout, etc.
I think the conclusion stands: in all circumstances, actual vulnerability is something you’d like to minimize; sometimes it’s correct to do things that look like seeking out vulnerability, but on closer examination you’re always seeking out something else that happens to be correlated (or to look like it’s correlated) with actual vulnerability, which is something you tolerate if, and only if, there aren’t better choices.
I would put it this way: being vulnerable is a probably-unfortunate side-effect of a means to an end, not an end in itself, and it’s usually worth tracking just what end you have in mind. (And, yes, if you had a cost-free alternative means that achieved the same result but didn’t make you vulnerable, then that would be an improvement.) For example: “telling someone a secret that would enable them to shame you for it”, or “letting yourself rely on someone else to take care of a thing for you [such that if they fell through, it would hurt you]”, or “letting yourself care about someone else’s judgment of you”. There are situations where each of these is an unavoidable part of a plan with positive expected value, and situations where they create needless risks with no benefit.
Let’s see if I can capture the good parts of potential counter-stances:
It is imaginable that someone is so afraid of the negative consequences that they can’t really think rationally about them, in which case it’s plausibly good to deliberately create those situations in relatively safe circumstances and teach your brain that it’s actually not that bad (“exposure therapy”).
Here, you want situations in which your brain thinks you’re much more vulnerable than your rational mind believes. Having picked a situation to expose yourself to, you’d like the actual chance of getting hurt to be as close to zero as possible.
You could deliberately make yourself vulnerable to person X’s actions for the purpose of evaluating person X: can you actually trust them to treat you well?
In this case, the important thing is that person X believes you’re vulnerable and has the opportunity to do something about it. If you are secretly emotionally ironclad, or fully able to intercept/punish X’s misbehavior, or whatever, then so much the better. It could be good to find ways to make yourself look more vulnerable than you are, to enable this kind of testing. On the other hand, fooling them in this way could either be impossible or carry its own risks.
On “shame-able secrets”, it can be ideal to take a stance of, “Some people will shame me and others don’t care. I’m fine with cutting the first group out of my life and dealing solely with the second group. This is most efficiently accomplished by being completely open about this secret (and possibly deliberately broadcasting it).”
In this case, after the initial phase of dealing with the haters you already know, you have made yourself invulnerable to any future social shaming for this secret. And since you’re erring on the side of filtering out any new haters before they become socially important to you, you’re essentially doing your best to keep yourself invulnerable.
There are also lesser versions of this, where you “out” yourself to a particular group (such as writing about your fetishes to a niche online forum), or even a single person, to “get it over with” at a time and place of your choosing.
There are also greater versions of this, where you do it with lots of “shame-able secrets”. There tend to be “economies of scale” here: there tends to be overlap from one secret to the next among the people you cut out, the steps you take to prepare yourself for the fallout, etc.
I think the conclusion stands: in all circumstances, actual vulnerability is something you’d like to minimize; sometimes it’s correct to do things that look like seeking out vulnerability, but on closer examination you’re always seeking out something else that happens to be correlated (or to look like it’s correlated) with actual vulnerability, which is something you tolerate if, and only if, there aren’t better choices.