Would a perfectly rational B be offended at all by an incorrect guess?
I eventually come out with a contingent “yes” to this question, but it took me a while to get there, and I don’t entirely trust my reasoning.
As stated, I wasn’t sure how to go about answering that question.
But when A guesses about B, this reveals facts about A’s priors with respect to B. So this question seemed isomorphic to “Would B be offended by A believing certain things about B?” which seemed a little more accessible.
But I wasn’t exactly sure what “offended” means, at this level of description. The best unpacking I could come up with was that I’m offended by an expressed belief when I subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal my strong rejection of that belief.
If that’s true, then I can rephrase the question as “Would a perfectly rational B subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal strong rejection of certain beliefs about B?”
If B has saliently limited conscious processing ability (limited either by speed or capacity) then my answer is a contingent “yes.”
For example, a perfectly rational B might reason as follows: “Consider the proposition P1: ‘B is willing to cheat’. Within a community that lends weight to my signaling, there is value to my signaling a strong rejection of P1. Expressing offense at P1 signals that rejection. Expressing offense successfully depends on very rapid response; if I am seen as taking time to think about it first, my offense won’t signal as effectively. So I do better to not think about it first, but instead instinctively express offense without thinking. In other words, I do better to be offended by the suggestion of P1. OK, let me go implement that.”
In this example, B’s conscious processing speed forms the salient limitation, but what’s important here is the general condition that an unconscious result has value relative to a conscious one.
The specific value provided in this example is less important; there are lots of different equivalent examples.
I eventually come out with a contingent “yes” to this question, but it took me a while to get there, and I don’t entirely trust my reasoning.
As stated, I wasn’t sure how to go about answering that question.
But when A guesses about B, this reveals facts about A’s priors with respect to B. So this question seemed isomorphic to “Would B be offended by A believing certain things about B?” which seemed a little more accessible.
But I wasn’t exactly sure what “offended” means, at this level of description. The best unpacking I could come up with was that I’m offended by an expressed belief when I subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal my strong rejection of that belief.
If that’s true, then I can rephrase the question as “Would a perfectly rational B subconsciously or instinctively choose to signal strong rejection of certain beliefs about B?”
If B has saliently limited conscious processing ability (limited either by speed or capacity) then my answer is a contingent “yes.”
For example, a perfectly rational B might reason as follows: “Consider the proposition P1: ‘B is willing to cheat’. Within a community that lends weight to my signaling, there is value to my signaling a strong rejection of P1. Expressing offense at P1 signals that rejection. Expressing offense successfully depends on very rapid response; if I am seen as taking time to think about it first, my offense won’t signal as effectively. So I do better to not think about it first, but instead instinctively express offense without thinking. In other words, I do better to be offended by the suggestion of P1. OK, let me go implement that.”
In this example, B’s conscious processing speed forms the salient limitation, but what’s important here is the general condition that an unconscious result has value relative to a conscious one.
The specific value provided in this example is less important; there are lots of different equivalent examples.