There ought to be a term for this and Claude recommends ”The Exculpation Fallacy”
Other candidates:
Culprit displacement as problem dissolution
ruphail
Karma: 18
The few recent times I‘ve gotten sick it’s been when I visited my dad’s kids. I didn’t think about it until now, but I’m going to see if I can meet them in outdoor gatherings instead.
Anecdotally speaking, I have avoided caffeine for this reason (as hard as it is to do that these days where I am). It lasts way longer than I want it to, and makes me a little compulsive well into the evening and night even when I take it in the morning. Although my internal reasoning was that I must have some genetic thing that makes caffeine last way longer than it’s supposed to. I also thought there might have been second order effects of alertness that are hard to wind down once they get going.
It’s interesting to read that there was always this alternative third explanation that I hadn‘t thought of. That it just works in a different way than what I originally understood. That it might be because it is metabolized into paraxantine which also blocks adenosine receptors.
Thank you for this post.
I’ve noticed this flaw in my own mind where I’m either skeptical of everybody, or basically trust everybody. If I’m skeptical of everybody I tend to say more false things, and if I basically trust everybody then I’m a lot more open and honest. Importantly, once I’m skeptical of everybody I start checking more and more, trying to verify things I once took on faith or contemplating exactly what I think I know and how I think I know that.
This is something that happens to me when I’ve been successfully lied to, and not so much when someone is lieng to me. Likewise for being punched.
Examples of when lying or punching is unexpected :
When a game of Avalon or Mafia completely got away from you. Everyone who you thought was someone was actually someone else, and once the game finishes I’m left disoriented for about half an hour.
A front desk person at a library telling me there are no iPhone chargers. When I asked someone else at the desk 5 minutes later, they showed me a bunch.
I’m playing pool with a cousin of mine with a mental impairment, and got punched in the face for seemingly no reason.
I’ve only been punched with warning once as a child (To prepare me for the future supposedly), and whilst it was disorienting and painful, I didn’t come to social interactions with a hair trigger as I remember it.
I’m sort of wondering if you are drawing more of a lesson about trust than about feebleness. There’s something to disentangle here I haven’t quite put my finger on atm.
There is the risk that you are the lemon, and selling warranties can also turn into its own lemon market (Analogizing this to insurance markets with high levels of fraud).
Some thoughts. Apologies if any of this is overconfident, trivial or otherwise unhelpful.
You did not go to the common man. You went to the confused philosophy enjoyer. By default this is what a philosophy meetup is since most of philosophy is confused.
It seems like you spent your time there caricaturing them instead of gathering information.
Perhaps this metaphor is flawed or irrelevant somehow, but you don’t get better at chess by discussing chess moves in a group (citation needed). I suspect that you have some expectations about group reasoning that are unrealistic.
Something you can do: Help others debug. You have the tools, maybe you can share them. Perhaps poll for a belief in belief?
It takes time to warm up to a group. This post is not unlike what I read from people describing first dates or going out to make friends (The disappointment part of it anyway). Object-level your first impressions are probably correct, but maybe you’d feel differently about your misanthropy later.
This is how I feel at rationalist meetups sometimes. I don’t hold as much contempt as you do though. If it was intellectual rigour, and seriousness for truth that really decided how I feel about people, I’d dislike much of my family, friends, coworkers, and myself. But my VP wrote me the sweetest letter after christmas break, and my brother makes excellent yerba matte tea that I still can’t replicate. Perhaps you are different though.
“I didn’t hear that” when people’s low level processing fails to parse words someone said despite being perfectly able to receive the audio. not usually playing fool, in my experience
That’s why I appreciate a “hey” or some other initial phrase before someone starts speaking to me. It gets me ready to parse words. For some people I talk to if I start speaking without that, I’ll mostly get a “what did you say?”.
In that case, I’d expect to be living in the early 20th century. Would you not say that WW1 & WW2 were especially random, unpredictable, and interesting? With the exception of AI development, I feel this time period was relatively more stable