So, starting this off with “punch to the face” seems to me like a pretty straightforward instance of strawmanning, and is at least a change-of-topic.
I’m not much interested in discussing [responses to violent attacks] here, but if you’d like to say something about reneging on agreements, or my suggestions for how to do so prosocially, I’d be happy to respond to that.
Ah, that part was meant as a sort of amplification to make the point, which is that making all these friendship-point-computations explicit has much larger mental health and social costs than you believe. If someone reneged on me and pro-actively acknowledged that I’m just a tiny bit less their friend, I would feel offended by the implication that my friendship is tit-for-tat. My point is essentially that people should be doing your point 5 subconsciously, and that bringing these computations up to the conscious level imposes a cost that pretty much overwhelms what benefits could be acquired here.
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.
pro-actively acknowledged that I’m just a tiny bit less their friend
I didn’t advocate for this anywhere. I went back and checked, just to be sure. Somewhere, I’ve said something that you rounded off to this, but I’ll go ahead and agree: saying “I’m a tiny bit less your friend now because of this” seems crazy bad to me.
This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. You advocate for externally recognizing a formula that basically amounts to what Razied is getting at, and pretending otherwise by saying he missed the point is, in my submission, obfuscation.
As you have noted, social interactions exist on a spectrum and it’s unwise to disregard that context while discussing your proposal. However, I don’t think there’s any situation where formally acknowledging something to the effect of—
”I realize that, from now on, you will—naturally—be less inclined to invest your resources in me, lower your expectations of me accordingly, have less faith in me, see me as less reliable and generally distrust social engagements of this nature”
- doesn’t reduce your relationship with the recipient to something a little more calculated than most people are comfortable with in most social situations. Seems like you’re taking umbrage at the way this calculation was ‘rounded off’, but I don’t see why. All of the categories you’ve established are the basis of a decent friendship. Since you’re encouraging people to acknowledge that, by breaking an agreement, they are going to take a hit in every category, being just “a tiny bit less their friend” seems like a fair summary of the transaction.
So, look, I realize that what you’re advocating for is obviously a nuanced application of the underlying principles here. In fact, I enjoyed the post and found the whole analysis insightful. Put simply, you’re advocating that people acknowledge when they have betrayed somebody else’s expectations, specifically when they were complicit in establishing those expectations. However, the way that you’ve broken things down invites the sort of itchy palms interpretation that Razied made.
Just because you’re advocating for a more graceful implementation doesn’t mean you get to deny that your analysis reduces social exchanges in a way that will obviously make people uncomfortable on a theoretical level.
tl;dr: The way Razied ‘rounded off’ what you said is a fair interpretation, and shouldn’t be written off.
So, starting this off with “punch to the face” seems to me like a pretty straightforward instance of strawmanning, and is at least a change-of-topic.
I’m not much interested in discussing [responses to violent attacks] here, but if you’d like to say something about reneging on agreements, or my suggestions for how to do so prosocially, I’d be happy to respond to that.
Ah, that part was meant as a sort of amplification to make the point, which is that making all these friendship-point-computations explicit has much larger mental health and social costs than you believe. If someone reneged on me and pro-actively acknowledged that I’m just a tiny bit less their friend, I would feel offended by the implication that my friendship is tit-for-tat. My point is essentially that people should be doing your point 5 subconsciously, and that bringing these computations up to the conscious level imposes a cost that pretty much overwhelms what benefits could be acquired here.
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.
(Separating this bit out)
I didn’t advocate for this anywhere. I went back and checked, just to be sure. Somewhere, I’ve said something that you rounded off to this, but I’ll go ahead and agree: saying “I’m a tiny bit less your friend now because of this” seems crazy bad to me.
This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. You advocate for externally recognizing a formula that basically amounts to what Razied is getting at, and pretending otherwise by saying he missed the point is, in my submission, obfuscation.
As you have noted, social interactions exist on a spectrum and it’s unwise to disregard that context while discussing your proposal. However, I don’t think there’s any situation where formally acknowledging something to the effect of—
”I realize that, from now on, you will—naturally—be less inclined to invest your resources in me, lower your expectations of me accordingly, have less faith in me, see me as less reliable and generally distrust social engagements of this nature”
- doesn’t reduce your relationship with the recipient to something a little more calculated than most people are comfortable with in most social situations. Seems like you’re taking umbrage at the way this calculation was ‘rounded off’, but I don’t see why. All of the categories you’ve established are the basis of a decent friendship. Since you’re encouraging people to acknowledge that, by breaking an agreement, they are going to take a hit in every category, being just “a tiny bit less their friend” seems like a fair summary of the transaction.
So, look, I realize that what you’re advocating for is obviously a nuanced application of the underlying principles here. In fact, I enjoyed the post and found the whole analysis insightful. Put simply, you’re advocating that people acknowledge when they have betrayed somebody else’s expectations, specifically when they were complicit in establishing those expectations. However, the way that you’ve broken things down invites the sort of itchy palms interpretation that Razied made.
Just because you’re advocating for a more graceful implementation doesn’t mean you get to deny that your analysis reduces social exchanges in a way that will obviously make people uncomfortable on a theoretical level.
tl;dr: The way Razied ‘rounded off’ what you said is a fair interpretation, and shouldn’t be written off.