That someone would say that they did their best is considerable evidence that they are confused about determinism because if they actually understood it they would know that they couldn’t have done anything else, and thus remarking that they didn’t do their best suggests they still believe the world could have been otherwise.
I’m not sure that they’re likely to get more confused about agency since it seems like nearly everyone is confused about just how to define agency in a way that both conforms with intuitions and doesn’t rely on things like metaphysical claims to free will.
Thinking about the subjective, counterfactual best is sometimes useful as a side effect of how we figure things, but in the context of speaking about how the feeling of regret is optional it makes sense to emphasize the latter sense in which best/worst/etc. has no real meaning.
So it sounded to me like you understand what I would say is the normal meaning of the phrase “I didn’t do my best”, you just think that in this particular case it’s helpful to use some other meaning; where I claim that that other meaning is unhelpful.
But from this reply, it sounds like… you don’t understand what I would say is the normal meaning? Or you think it’s a niche meaning, such that someone who says “I didn’t do my best” is more likely to be confused about determinism than to be using that meaning?
Both of those would be surprising to me.
(I am admittedly confused about agency, and I agree that probably most people are. But it still seems entirely possible to make someone more confused or less confused, so “most people are confused about agency, so I’m unlikely to make them more confused” doesn’t follow.)
Or you think it’s a niche meaning, such that someone who says “I didn’t do my best” is more likely to be confused about determinism than to be using that meaning?
Roughly, yes. “[N]iche” doesn’t quite make sense here. I might say it’s more like the naive meaning. If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different from “I didn’t do my best” like “next time I want to do better” or “I have a lot to learn” that expresses roughly the same meaning as counterfactual “regret” but also making it clear that in that past instance it wasn’t possible to have done anything differently.
If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different from “I didn’t do my best”
This just doesn’t seem true to me. Also, neither “next time I want to do better” nor “I have a lot to learn” seems like a suitable replacement, and “I didn’t do my best” doesn’t seem synonymous with “regret” although they overlap in circumstance.
My current sense is that you don’t understand what I consider the normal meaning of the phrase, but also my model of the conversation is that if I try to explain you’ll reply with what I consider to be gotchas that completely miss the point.
(And it’s not super easy to explain because yeah, it involves agency and I’m confused about agency. But I predict that it all adds up to normality, and that our disagreement here does not come from you understanding agency better than I do.)
I’m happy to drop the conversation, but if you want to continue it (it’s fine if you don’t), I’d suggest one way to continue might be for you to try to explain what I think the normal meaning is, and why I think it’s valuable to keep around rather than e.g. trying to replace it with the things you suggest.
Quick edit, as a note: at this point I’m not saying “the way you use the phrase is bad”. Like, that kind of is a thing I think, and my first two comments were indeed criticizing your use of it, but if you were like “yeah it’s kind of weird but I think it’s valuable” then I don’t think I’d have much to say to that. But the conversation shifted to you not simply defending your use, but criticizing other uses (“That someone would say that they did their best is considerable evidence that they are confused about determinism”, “If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different”), and that seems completely wrongheaded to me.
Sure, I totally get why people typically say “I didn’t do my best”. It’s a recognition of a counterfactual world that wasn’t realized: if they had counterfactually done something else they reckon that the outcome would have been better than what they got. It also expresses a wish, something like “I wish I had done something else that had a better result”. And there’s also a bit of something that I’d consider reasonable: an expression that you didn’t do as well as you’d expect against your base rate of performance in similar situations.
I also get that saying this is psychologically necessary for many people given how they reason about counterfactuals, and that they wouldn’t actually get better at things unless they were able to think about counterfactual pasts and pretend that they could have happened.
Thus I don’t actually think we shouldn’t keep around this meaning! Many people need it in order to live their lives. My point here is if you hold to this meaning of regret then you’re confused about causality.
Yeah, this seems to me to be missing something big. Here are some things we might say I could have done last night:
Read a book
Read The Iliad in ancient Greek
Played ukulele
Played a 10⁄10 rendition of We Are the Crystal Gems on ukulele, singing along in tune
Played theremin
Gone to the pub
Gone to Milton Keynes
Gone to France
Gone to the moon
Gone to Alpha Centauri
Turned into a small cat
Doodled some math symbols on a piece of paper
Written a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis
Drunk a liter of coffee
… and fallen straight to sleep
Successfully performed open-heart surgery
Continued playing Baba Is You
Finished Baba Is You without looking up any hints or solutions
As it happens I only did one of these. So there’s a sense in which there was only one I could have done, and it’s the one I actually did.
But there’s another, very reasonable and important sense, in which some of these are things that yes, I could have done; and some are things that no, I could not have done. I can read, but I can’t read ancient Greek. I don’t own a theremin, though maybe I could have gotten one delivered if I really wanted? I’m not good at ukulele or singing. I could probably have found a train to Milton Keynes and likely even France; but I don’t think all the money in the world would have gotten me to the moon on that short notice; and Alpha Centauri is simply too far away to go in one night. It’s plausible that there’s a proof of the Riemann hypothesis short enough for me to have written it down in an evening, but it’s not plausible that I would have produced it. And so on.
I claim that when most people talk about whether they did their best, they’re thinking about other things they could have done in this very reasonable and important sense.
Of course, it’s not always obvious whether something is a thing I could have done or not, in this sense. So sometimes it might not be clear whether I did my best or not. That’s fine. It still leaves the phrase much more useful than a phrase that means “as a being of physics, I did the only thing I possibly could have done as dictated by the evolution of the quantum waveform or whatever, which is all that anyone ever does”.
This doesn’t seem like anything different than what I said. Everything you’re talking about is a counterfactual things someone could have counterfactually done but didn’t.
… you claim that I counterfactually could have gone to Alpha Centauri last night? And that there’s no meaningful sense in which this is different from how I counterfactually could have played Baba Is You last night?
Sorry but if that’s what you’re saying I can’t take it seriously, and if it’s not what you’re saying I have no idea what you’re saying instead of that.
The only difference between these two counterfactuals is how likely we should believe each one could have happened. There is a non-zero probability you could have gone to Alpha Centauri last night, just as there is that you played Baba is You. They don’t have the same probability of having happened and one is much more likely than the other, but they are still of the same kind.
It’s up to you, but to be frank I’m also frustrated with how you’ve approached this discussion. You’ve only provided a vague and extensional explanation of what you mean by regret, whereas I’ve provided more detailed models of what I’m thinking that you’ve objected to by roughly saying “idk doesn’t match my intuitions”, which is not something we can build an actual productive discussion on unless you dig into your intuitions more and provide of model for why they are useful.
I disagree that you’ve provided detailed models. I don’t think I have, either; I think it’s mostly been us butting heads over “these two things are different” / “these two things are the same”.
It’s probably the case that I haven’t been very helpful. If I’m honest, I think a lot of this is because I remember multiple conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to me to be saying something confused; and by the end neither of us seemed to have changed our minds. (At least one of these was also a case of you saying that two obviously-to-me different things are actually the same.) I remember zero conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to be saying something confused; and by the end either you’d convinced me or I’d convinced you. Which doesn’t mean it’s never happened, but like. The track record of our past conversations does not bode well for our future conversations.
So when you say something that seems to me confused, I’m not sure how to react. I can just downvote/disagree/react and let it go—there’s another LW user who I do that fairly often with—but I think your confusion is often subtle enough to be worth pointing out. (Recall that this thread started when I thought you might be saying one of two things. I thought one was wrong and the other was silly but mostly harmless. It took a few messages to even reach the actual thing we’ve been disagreeing about.) I can try to approach with an open mind and consider that you might have something to teach me just as I think I have something to teach you; but that’s not what I’m actually feeling.
I think my most-common approach in situations like this, and what I went for this time, was roughly “avoid being openly antagonistic, but don’t put lots of effort in; don’t particularly expect to deconfuse you; do try to make it clear to the audience what the disagreement is about, so they can make up their own minds”. (One theoretically good thing about this is that if it does turn out to be me who’s confused, then hopefully it becomes easier for an audience member to step in and explain it to me differently. But so far this hasn’t happened, to my recollection.[1] Nor do I recall someone stepping in to agree with me and try a different approach of explaining my perspective to you.)
(On “avoid being openly antagonistic”, I’m not currently sure whether “I can’t take it seriously” was toeing the line or over it.)
My current sense is that where the thread really went wrong is when I said “if you want to continue it”. I think I was a bit surprised that you did. And you put in what seemed to me to be some effort, even though history said that you were unlikely to change my mind (it said this to me, dunno if it said it to you); and I would have felt bad if I didn’t put in a bit of effort myself, even though history said I was unlikely to change your mind. My current guess is that I should have just dropped things there.
Also, you say I haven’t been clear about what I mean by regret, but I have not been talking about regret. The only time I’ve used that word so far has been to say that it’s not what I’m talking about. I dunno if this is a particularly important detail, but it sure seems like a metaphor.
Part of me anticipates you-or-someone-else thinking that my thread with Matt Goldenberg was this. But it seems to me that Matt agrees with me, on the thing that you and I have mostly been disagreeing about.
That someone would say that they did their best is considerable evidence that they are confused about determinism because if they actually understood it they would know that they couldn’t have done anything else, and thus remarking that they didn’t do their best suggests they still believe the world could have been otherwise.
I’m not sure that they’re likely to get more confused about agency since it seems like nearly everyone is confused about just how to define agency in a way that both conforms with intuitions and doesn’t rely on things like metaphysical claims to free will.
I’m confused. Previously you said
So it sounded to me like you understand what I would say is the normal meaning of the phrase “I didn’t do my best”, you just think that in this particular case it’s helpful to use some other meaning; where I claim that that other meaning is unhelpful.
But from this reply, it sounds like… you don’t understand what I would say is the normal meaning? Or you think it’s a niche meaning, such that someone who says “I didn’t do my best” is more likely to be confused about determinism than to be using that meaning?
Both of those would be surprising to me.
(I am admittedly confused about agency, and I agree that probably most people are. But it still seems entirely possible to make someone more confused or less confused, so “most people are confused about agency, so I’m unlikely to make them more confused” doesn’t follow.)
Roughly, yes. “[N]iche” doesn’t quite make sense here. I might say it’s more like the naive meaning. If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different from “I didn’t do my best” like “next time I want to do better” or “I have a lot to learn” that expresses roughly the same meaning as counterfactual “regret” but also making it clear that in that past instance it wasn’t possible to have done anything differently.
This just doesn’t seem true to me. Also, neither “next time I want to do better” nor “I have a lot to learn” seems like a suitable replacement, and “I didn’t do my best” doesn’t seem synonymous with “regret” although they overlap in circumstance.
My current sense is that you don’t understand what I consider the normal meaning of the phrase, but also my model of the conversation is that if I try to explain you’ll reply with what I consider to be gotchas that completely miss the point.
(And it’s not super easy to explain because yeah, it involves agency and I’m confused about agency. But I predict that it all adds up to normality, and that our disagreement here does not come from you understanding agency better than I do.)
I’m happy to drop the conversation, but if you want to continue it (it’s fine if you don’t), I’d suggest one way to continue might be for you to try to explain what I think the normal meaning is, and why I think it’s valuable to keep around rather than e.g. trying to replace it with the things you suggest.
Quick edit, as a note: at this point I’m not saying “the way you use the phrase is bad”. Like, that kind of is a thing I think, and my first two comments were indeed criticizing your use of it, but if you were like “yeah it’s kind of weird but I think it’s valuable” then I don’t think I’d have much to say to that. But the conversation shifted to you not simply defending your use, but criticizing other uses (“That someone would say that they did their best is considerable evidence that they are confused about determinism”, “If you really get that the things couldn’t have been otherwise you’d say something different”), and that seems completely wrongheaded to me.
Sure, I totally get why people typically say “I didn’t do my best”. It’s a recognition of a counterfactual world that wasn’t realized: if they had counterfactually done something else they reckon that the outcome would have been better than what they got. It also expresses a wish, something like “I wish I had done something else that had a better result”. And there’s also a bit of something that I’d consider reasonable: an expression that you didn’t do as well as you’d expect against your base rate of performance in similar situations.
I also get that saying this is psychologically necessary for many people given how they reason about counterfactuals, and that they wouldn’t actually get better at things unless they were able to think about counterfactual pasts and pretend that they could have happened.
Thus I don’t actually think we shouldn’t keep around this meaning! Many people need it in order to live their lives. My point here is if you hold to this meaning of regret then you’re confused about causality.
Yeah, this seems to me to be missing something big. Here are some things we might say I could have done last night:
Read a book
Read The Iliad in ancient Greek
Played ukulele
Played a 10⁄10 rendition of We Are the Crystal Gems on ukulele, singing along in tune
Played theremin
Gone to the pub
Gone to Milton Keynes
Gone to France
Gone to the moon
Gone to Alpha Centauri
Turned into a small cat
Doodled some math symbols on a piece of paper
Written a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis
Drunk a liter of coffee
… and fallen straight to sleep
Successfully performed open-heart surgery
Continued playing Baba Is You
Finished Baba Is You without looking up any hints or solutions
As it happens I only did one of these. So there’s a sense in which there was only one I could have done, and it’s the one I actually did.
But there’s another, very reasonable and important sense, in which some of these are things that yes, I could have done; and some are things that no, I could not have done. I can read, but I can’t read ancient Greek. I don’t own a theremin, though maybe I could have gotten one delivered if I really wanted? I’m not good at ukulele or singing. I could probably have found a train to Milton Keynes and likely even France; but I don’t think all the money in the world would have gotten me to the moon on that short notice; and Alpha Centauri is simply too far away to go in one night. It’s plausible that there’s a proof of the Riemann hypothesis short enough for me to have written it down in an evening, but it’s not plausible that I would have produced it. And so on.
I claim that when most people talk about whether they did their best, they’re thinking about other things they could have done in this very reasonable and important sense.
Of course, it’s not always obvious whether something is a thing I could have done or not, in this sense. So sometimes it might not be clear whether I did my best or not. That’s fine. It still leaves the phrase much more useful than a phrase that means “as a being of physics, I did the only thing I possibly could have done as dictated by the evolution of the quantum waveform or whatever, which is all that anyone ever does”.
This doesn’t seem like anything different than what I said. Everything you’re talking about is a counterfactual things someone could have counterfactually done but didn’t.
… you claim that I counterfactually could have gone to Alpha Centauri last night? And that there’s no meaningful sense in which this is different from how I counterfactually could have played Baba Is You last night?
Sorry but if that’s what you’re saying I can’t take it seriously, and if it’s not what you’re saying I have no idea what you’re saying instead of that.
The only difference between these two counterfactuals is how likely we should believe each one could have happened. There is a non-zero probability you could have gone to Alpha Centauri last night, just as there is that you played Baba is You. They don’t have the same probability of having happened and one is much more likely than the other, but they are still of the same kind.
(This seems obviously wrong to me but I don’t have any hope that continuing will be productive.)
It’s up to you, but to be frank I’m also frustrated with how you’ve approached this discussion. You’ve only provided a vague and extensional explanation of what you mean by regret, whereas I’ve provided more detailed models of what I’m thinking that you’ve objected to by roughly saying “idk doesn’t match my intuitions”, which is not something we can build an actual productive discussion on unless you dig into your intuitions more and provide of model for why they are useful.
Alright, to go meta:
I disagree that you’ve provided detailed models. I don’t think I have, either; I think it’s mostly been us butting heads over “these two things are different” / “these two things are the same”.
It’s probably the case that I haven’t been very helpful. If I’m honest, I think a lot of this is because I remember multiple conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to me to be saying something confused; and by the end neither of us seemed to have changed our minds. (At least one of these was also a case of you saying that two obviously-to-me different things are actually the same.) I remember zero conversations with you where: in the beginning you seemed to be saying something confused; and by the end either you’d convinced me or I’d convinced you. Which doesn’t mean it’s never happened, but like. The track record of our past conversations does not bode well for our future conversations.
So when you say something that seems to me confused, I’m not sure how to react. I can just downvote/disagree/react and let it go—there’s another LW user who I do that fairly often with—but I think your confusion is often subtle enough to be worth pointing out. (Recall that this thread started when I thought you might be saying one of two things. I thought one was wrong and the other was silly but mostly harmless. It took a few messages to even reach the actual thing we’ve been disagreeing about.) I can try to approach with an open mind and consider that you might have something to teach me just as I think I have something to teach you; but that’s not what I’m actually feeling.
I think my most-common approach in situations like this, and what I went for this time, was roughly “avoid being openly antagonistic, but don’t put lots of effort in; don’t particularly expect to deconfuse you; do try to make it clear to the audience what the disagreement is about, so they can make up their own minds”. (One theoretically good thing about this is that if it does turn out to be me who’s confused, then hopefully it becomes easier for an audience member to step in and explain it to me differently. But so far this hasn’t happened, to my recollection.[1] Nor do I recall someone stepping in to agree with me and try a different approach of explaining my perspective to you.)
(On “avoid being openly antagonistic”, I’m not currently sure whether “I can’t take it seriously” was toeing the line or over it.)
My current sense is that where the thread really went wrong is when I said “if you want to continue it”. I think I was a bit surprised that you did. And you put in what seemed to me to be some effort, even though history said that you were unlikely to change my mind (it said this to me, dunno if it said it to you); and I would have felt bad if I didn’t put in a bit of effort myself, even though history said I was unlikely to change your mind. My current guess is that I should have just dropped things there.
Also, you say I haven’t been clear about what I mean by regret, but I have not been talking about regret. The only time I’ve used that word so far has been to say that it’s not what I’m talking about. I dunno if this is a particularly important detail, but it sure seems like a metaphor.
Part of me anticipates you-or-someone-else thinking that my thread with Matt Goldenberg was this. But it seems to me that Matt agrees with me, on the thing that you and I have mostly been disagreeing about.