In my mental ontology, there’s a set of specific concepts and mental motions associated with accountability: viewing people as being responsible for their actions, being disappointed in or impressed by their choices, modeling the assignment of blame/credit as meaningful operations. Implicitly, this requires modeling other people as agents: types of systems which are usefully modeled as having control over their actions. To me, this is a prerequisite for being able to truly connect with someone.
When you apply the not-that-coherent-an-agent lens, you do lose that. Because, like, which parts of that person’s cognition should you interpret as the agent making choices, and which as parts of the malfunctioning exoskeleton the agent has no control over? You can make some decision about that, but this is usually pretty arbitrary. If someone is best modeled like this, they’re not well-modeled as an agent, and holding them accountable is a category error. They’re a type of system that does what it does.
You can still invoke the social rituals of “blame” and “responsibility” if you expect that to change their behavior, but the mental experience of doing so is very different. It’s more like calculating the nudges you need to make to prompt the desired mechanistic behavior, rather than as interfacing with a fellow person. In the latter case, you can sort of relax, communicate in a way focused on transferring information, instead of focusing on the form of communication, and trust them to make correct inferences. In the former case, you need to keep precise track of tone/wording/aesthetics/etc., and it’s less “communication” and more “optimization”.
I really dislike thinking of people in this way, and I try to adopt the viewing-them-as-a-person frame whenever it’s at all possible. But the other frame does unfortunately seem to be useful in many cases. Trying to do otherwise often feels like reaching out for someone’s hand and finding nothing there.
If this is what you meant by viewing others as cats, yeah, that tracks.
To expand on that...
In my mental ontology, there’s a set of specific concepts and mental motions associated with accountability: viewing people as being responsible for their actions, being disappointed in or impressed by their choices, modeling the assignment of blame/credit as meaningful operations. Implicitly, this requires modeling other people as agents: types of systems which are usefully modeled as having control over their actions. To me, this is a prerequisite for being able to truly connect with someone.
When you apply the not-that-coherent-an-agent lens, you do lose that. Because, like, which parts of that person’s cognition should you interpret as the agent making choices, and which as parts of the malfunctioning exoskeleton the agent has no control over? You can make some decision about that, but this is usually pretty arbitrary. If someone is best modeled like this, they’re not well-modeled as an agent, and holding them accountable is a category error. They’re a type of system that does what it does.
You can still invoke the social rituals of “blame” and “responsibility” if you expect that to change their behavior, but the mental experience of doing so is very different. It’s more like calculating the nudges you need to make to prompt the desired mechanistic behavior, rather than as interfacing with a fellow person. In the latter case, you can sort of relax, communicate in a way focused on transferring information, instead of focusing on the form of communication, and trust them to make correct inferences. In the former case, you need to keep precise track of tone/wording/aesthetics/etc., and it’s less “communication” and more “optimization”.
I really dislike thinking of people in this way, and I try to adopt the viewing-them-as-a-person frame whenever it’s at all possible. But the other frame does unfortunately seem to be useful in many cases. Trying to do otherwise often feels like reaching out for someone’s hand and finding nothing there.
If this is what you meant by viewing others as cats, yeah, that tracks.
Edit: Oh, nice timing.
Yeah, that.