making all these friendship-point-computations explicit has much larger mental health and social costs than you believe
This is a valid hypothesis, but I’m curious why you are so confident in it. I’ve had (no exaggeration) dozens of interactions of the form described above, either because I myself had to renege or because I was helping some pair of other people navigate a broken agreement, and there has not once been an instance of people claiming that it made things worse, and there have been multiple (5+?) instances of people specifically coming back later, unsolicited, to note how those unusual features of my method were unusually helpful.
I think that “I would feel offended by the implication that my friendship is tit-for-tat” is more (accidental) strawmanning. I share the sense that friendships which are explicitly tit-for-tat are weaker/broken in some important way; for instance, I tend to completely ignore debts of under $10. I buy my friend dinner. At some point in the future, they’ll buy me dinner. It’s all close-enough-to-even. The cool part is feeling comfortable and like there’s abundance of goodwill.
Yet while feeling that, I nevertheless wrote the above post, and strongly advocate for it.
This makes me think that there’s somewhere in the post (e.g. in point 5) where you’re … leaping ahead? Extrapolating out from what I said, to something you think is an implication or consequence of it, that I don’t think is an implication or consequence.
My first guess is that you think that I think that the advice in 5 should generalize out across all aspects of the relationship, rather than being largely confined to the narrow domain of “here I am breaking an agreement.”
As for the “should” in “they should be doing it subconsciously,” I note that I think you’ve got a pretty strong typical mind thing going on. You make a bunch of very strong universal claims in your first comment that are straightforwardly false for somewhere between 10% and 60% of the population, i.e. a non-negligible swath.
Ah, good points, I think I was basically arguing against improper implementations and misunderstandings of your advice. I know a lot of people who could read this post, start implementing it improperly and have their relationships worse of because of it. Reading this comment I don’t really see where we disagree.
This is a valid hypothesis, but I’m curious why you are so confident in it. I’ve had (no exaggeration) dozens of interactions of the form described above, either because I myself had to renege or because I was helping some pair of other people navigate a broken agreement, and there has not once been an instance of people claiming that it made things worse, and there have been multiple (5+?) instances of people specifically coming back later, unsolicited, to note how those unusual features of my method were unusually helpful.
I think that “I would feel offended by the implication that my friendship is tit-for-tat” is more (accidental) strawmanning. I share the sense that friendships which are explicitly tit-for-tat are weaker/broken in some important way; for instance, I tend to completely ignore debts of under $10. I buy my friend dinner. At some point in the future, they’ll buy me dinner. It’s all close-enough-to-even. The cool part is feeling comfortable and like there’s abundance of goodwill.
Yet while feeling that, I nevertheless wrote the above post, and strongly advocate for it.
This makes me think that there’s somewhere in the post (e.g. in point 5) where you’re … leaping ahead? Extrapolating out from what I said, to something you think is an implication or consequence of it, that I don’t think is an implication or consequence.
My first guess is that you think that I think that the advice in 5 should generalize out across all aspects of the relationship, rather than being largely confined to the narrow domain of “here I am breaking an agreement.”
As for the “should” in “they should be doing it subconsciously,” I note that I think you’ve got a pretty strong typical mind thing going on. You make a bunch of very strong universal claims in your first comment that are straightforwardly false for somewhere between 10% and 60% of the population, i.e. a non-negligible swath.
Ah, good points, I think I was basically arguing against improper implementations and misunderstandings of your advice. I know a lot of people who could read this post, start implementing it improperly and have their relationships worse of because of it. Reading this comment I don’t really see where we disagree.