I think this is right, but I am uncomfortable with the framing of the last paragraph.
YES, you have to choose between “maybe not truly knowing what I want” and “maybe discovering that I want something I would much much rather not want”.
But, at least on the face of it, that’s symmetrical. Turning “you can’t have both A and B” into “In order to have A, you have to give up B” seems like it presupposes that A-and-not-B is a better option than B-and-not-A. Which might be true in this case, but—for the reasons Karl Kruger’s reply describes—it might not.
I think that if I had to choose between having a deeply-repressed sexual attraction to children, so deeply repressed that I didn’t even know I had it, or having an entirely-apparent sexual attraction to children, one that I was aware of and couldn’t ignore, I would choose the former. The latter might mean another highly unwelcome choice: between constant frustration and doing things that are likely extremely harmful and certainly illegal, socially unacceptable, and contrary to my values.
Which, yes, means that I might not be able to know for certain whether or not I have some sort of deeply-repressed sexual attraction to children, or a deeply-repressed desire to murder everyone around me, or all sorts of other possible deeply-repressed nasties. And I’m OK with that. What I do know with some confidence is that I don’t have a not-so-deeply-repressed desire to murder people or rape children or whatever, and that seems enough for practical purposes.
Maybe for some people (maybe for me, in some circumstances) self-knowledge is so vital that it’s worth making whatever efforts one might have to make[1] to discover whether one has such deeply-repressed nasties, even though the case in which this tells you something new is also the case in which discovering it might have very bad consequences. But I wouldn’t expect that situation to be so common that “in order to know … you need to …” to be a good way of putting it.
[1] Assuming that there is actually a reliable way to find out. There might not be.
This even assumes that human preferences are something fixed, read-only. Everything either already exists deep down inside you, or it won’t exist regardless of how much self-exploration and self-experimentation you do.
Then there is an opposite model saying that you get more of what you feed by paying attention to.
I don’t feel it is entirely like “whatever you think about, it becomes true”, but I also think that contemplating things at least makes them feel more familiar. If you spend too much time searching for traces of X in your psyche, you will probably find them… not necessarily because they were there all the time, but maybe because they grew up as a result of you obsessing about X constantly. I think it is better not to privilege a hypothesis.
I think we can be quite sure that people’s preferences are not fixed.
People develop tastes, kinks, obsessions, traumas, fond memories, resentments, habits, lusts, hatreds, addictions, etc. that they did not previously have. These are, broadly, not discoveries of something preëxisting about the self; they are rather alterations or developments of the self.
If someone becomes addicted to heroin, it’s not just that they discovered a preëxisting preference for heroin; the effects of the drug and their use of it altered their preferences. The same person, if they hadn’t decided to take heroin, would have ended up with different preferences.
And if someone gets into meditation or therapy, and undoes some of their hangups or anxieties, it’s not that they discovered they really didn’t care about those things. They altered themselves into someone who doesn’t care about them.
(The same goes for more mundane preferences. If you have a favorite book, movie, game, dessert, etc., well, in the alternate timeline where you weren’t ever exposed to that particular thing, you would have a different favorite. Your preference was created, not discovered.)
This could probably be split to multiple categories.
For things like heroin, there is a pre-existing potential in my body to get addicted to it. (Which does not exist for some other things. For example, if I tried to eat chalk, it would probably just be disgusting.)
For things like sugar, the addiction was already activated. Now I have an internal conflict about eating or avoiding sugar, which luckily I do not have about heroin (yet). I couldn’t agree to stop eating sweets forever, but if there is a version of me in the parallel universe who never tried sugar, I envy them.
For things like social networks, it’s like the more I use them, the more I want to use them, but if I manage to stop using them for a week, it is relatively simple to keep avoiding them. So it is a kind of addiction that can easily be extinguished. (As opposed to the sweets, where I can stay a month without them, and yet I keep dreaming about them every day.)
Then there are urges that happen on their own, such as hunger or sexual desire.
Then urges that evolve as a result of conditioning. If I imagine a society where people wear green scarves during sex but otherwise the color green is taboo, I would probably be strongly excited by the color green.
tl;dr—there is a difference between
my body spontaneously develops a desire
a desire can be introduced by the environment, but then it remains internalized (and it either already happened to me, or it did not)
a desire needs to be reinforced by the environment (and it either is happening, or it is not)
There is pretty strong evidence for this effect in female bisexuality identification:
In BRFSS data, the share of women ages 18 to 24 identifying as bisexual rose from 8% in 2015 to 23% in 2022, then fell to less than 18% by 2025, a 23% decline in 3 years.
I wonder if it matters who’s asking? That’s a US federal government survey, and the expressed attitudes of the federal government (or even specifically the CDC) towards LGBTQ+ people have changed a good deal over the course of the years described. I can imagine some people freely say “yeah, I’m kinda bi” to their friends and family, but are more hesitant to say that to the government.
I think this is right, but I am uncomfortable with the framing of the last paragraph.
YES, you have to choose between “maybe not truly knowing what I want” and “maybe discovering that I want something I would much much rather not want”.
But, at least on the face of it, that’s symmetrical. Turning “you can’t have both A and B” into “In order to have A, you have to give up B” seems like it presupposes that A-and-not-B is a better option than B-and-not-A. Which might be true in this case, but—for the reasons Karl Kruger’s reply describes—it might not.
I think that if I had to choose between having a deeply-repressed sexual attraction to children, so deeply repressed that I didn’t even know I had it, or having an entirely-apparent sexual attraction to children, one that I was aware of and couldn’t ignore, I would choose the former. The latter might mean another highly unwelcome choice: between constant frustration and doing things that are likely extremely harmful and certainly illegal, socially unacceptable, and contrary to my values.
Which, yes, means that I might not be able to know for certain whether or not I have some sort of deeply-repressed sexual attraction to children, or a deeply-repressed desire to murder everyone around me, or all sorts of other possible deeply-repressed nasties. And I’m OK with that. What I do know with some confidence is that I don’t have a not-so-deeply-repressed desire to murder people or rape children or whatever, and that seems enough for practical purposes.
Maybe for some people (maybe for me, in some circumstances) self-knowledge is so vital that it’s worth making whatever efforts one might have to make[1] to discover whether one has such deeply-repressed nasties, even though the case in which this tells you something new is also the case in which discovering it might have very bad consequences. But I wouldn’t expect that situation to be so common that “in order to know … you need to …” to be a good way of putting it.
[1] Assuming that there is actually a reliable way to find out. There might not be.
This even assumes that human preferences are something fixed, read-only. Everything either already exists deep down inside you, or it won’t exist regardless of how much self-exploration and self-experimentation you do.
Then there is an opposite model saying that you get more of what you feed by paying attention to.
I don’t feel it is entirely like “whatever you think about, it becomes true”, but I also think that contemplating things at least makes them feel more familiar. If you spend too much time searching for traces of X in your psyche, you will probably find them… not necessarily because they were there all the time, but maybe because they grew up as a result of you obsessing about X constantly. I think it is better not to privilege a hypothesis.
I think we can be quite sure that people’s preferences are not fixed.
People develop tastes, kinks, obsessions, traumas, fond memories, resentments, habits, lusts, hatreds, addictions, etc. that they did not previously have. These are, broadly, not discoveries of something preëxisting about the self; they are rather alterations or developments of the self.
If someone becomes addicted to heroin, it’s not just that they discovered a preëxisting preference for heroin; the effects of the drug and their use of it altered their preferences. The same person, if they hadn’t decided to take heroin, would have ended up with different preferences.
And if someone gets into meditation or therapy, and undoes some of their hangups or anxieties, it’s not that they discovered they really didn’t care about those things. They altered themselves into someone who doesn’t care about them.
(The same goes for more mundane preferences. If you have a favorite book, movie, game, dessert, etc., well, in the alternate timeline where you weren’t ever exposed to that particular thing, you would have a different favorite. Your preference was created, not discovered.)
This could probably be split to multiple categories.
For things like heroin, there is a pre-existing potential in my body to get addicted to it. (Which does not exist for some other things. For example, if I tried to eat chalk, it would probably just be disgusting.)
For things like sugar, the addiction was already activated. Now I have an internal conflict about eating or avoiding sugar, which luckily I do not have about heroin (yet). I couldn’t agree to stop eating sweets forever, but if there is a version of me in the parallel universe who never tried sugar, I envy them.
For things like social networks, it’s like the more I use them, the more I want to use them, but if I manage to stop using them for a week, it is relatively simple to keep avoiding them. So it is a kind of addiction that can easily be extinguished. (As opposed to the sweets, where I can stay a month without them, and yet I keep dreaming about them every day.)
Then there are urges that happen on their own, such as hunger or sexual desire.
Then urges that evolve as a result of conditioning. If I imagine a society where people wear green scarves during sex but otherwise the color green is taboo, I would probably be strongly excited by the color green.
tl;dr—there is a difference between
my body spontaneously develops a desire
a desire can be introduced by the environment, but then it remains internalized (and it either already happened to me, or it did not)
a desire needs to be reinforced by the environment (and it either is happening, or it is not)
There is pretty strong evidence for this effect in female bisexuality identification:
(source)
I wonder if it matters who’s asking? That’s a US federal government survey, and the expressed attitudes of the federal government (or even specifically the CDC) towards LGBTQ+ people have changed a good deal over the course of the years described. I can imagine some people freely say “yeah, I’m kinda bi” to their friends and family, but are more hesitant to say that to the government.