I’m glad to see that somebody beat me to it.
Christopher Hitchens used to call this The Argument From Personal Incredulity—i.e. “I can’t imagine an alternative, therefore there mustn’t be an alternative!”, which I always thought had a certain ring to it. But this ‘counterargument’ sort of hinges on the degree to which your interlocutor was actually suffering from a lack of imagination.
At some point, when you are surrounded by people feeding you information adversarially and sabotaging your plans, you just start purging people until you feel like you know what is going on again.
One of my friends—who was the target of a vicious online witch hunt over their political beliefs—eventually adopted this strategy while vetting new members for their Discord server. Entryism (real or imagined) creates a multipolar trap where both sides are maximally insulated against outside beliefs.
There’s a good example of this in the Andrew Wilson VS Destiny Jan 6th debate. Andrew posits a (noncentral) hypothetical marijuana insurrection to undercut Destiny’s proposed definition.
Bang he said they wouldn’t fire she replied it happened anyway they concurred.
If the author wants this sentence to be interpreted one way or the other, they should utilize standard punctuation. Your avant garde approach to literature notwithstanding.
Our common agreement is that it’s imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.
This worries me because I’m not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper issues and potential consequences for ignoring them. At the same time it’s tricky to argue against the sort of framing you, and others, have presented without seeming to advocate for simple ‘buck up, Chuck’ style tough love, which is not my position either.
I feel that there must be a good number of silent readers who share my trepidation, but recognize the topic as too thorny to seem worth getting into.
While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a lot like conflating kindness with coddling and then presenting that as a sort of moral injunction against asshatery.
Nobody wants to be shy, insecure and socially anxious. These are not attributes that anybody sets out to cultivate in themselves. I think they are properly seen as vices worth overcoming. And the more we push the idea that well-adjusted, polite society communicate in such a way as to remove friction for peoples’ purely detrimental neuroses, the less incentive there is for people to recalibrate towards confidence, assertiveness and a deep sense of the right to exist as much as anyone else. In other words, the more we enable pathological social anxieties.
The answer to this is obviously not to embrace obliviousness and lionize tactless communication, but this current paradigm of talking about shyness, insecurity and social anxiety as though they are intractable or essential personality traits that we should all learn to appreciate reeks of misguided affirmation culture propaganda to me.
This comment is probably too severe, but I’ve seen a lot of this sort of sentiment floating around lately and it strikes me as unnecessarily fatalistic. We need to work with those who have somehow landed in a place where they experience unnecessary social anxieties so that they cam eventually grow out of it, not coddle them. There are times that I feel being good to somebody is mutually exclusive with being kind to them.
Might be an uncharitable read of what’s being recommended here. In particular, it might be worth revisiting the section that details what Deep Honesty is not. There’s a large contingent of folks online who self-describe as ‘borderline autistic’, and one of their hallmark characteristics is blunt honesty, specifically the sort that’s associated with an inability to pick up on ordinary social cues. My friend group is disproportionately comprised of this sort of person. So I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe a few things about how honesty works.
Speaking as somebody who is inclined to say too much myself, it’s taken a long time to realize that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t always the most honest thing. And it’s surprising how easy it is to think of honesty that way. It’s obvious when you think about it in retrospect how that would be a fraught definition of honesty but, in my experience, it doesn’t prevent you from falling into that trap over and over.
Deep Honesty, if I’m understanding the authors properly, isn’t anything like trying to be universally candid, or being blunt. It’s more like searching for opportunities where you’ve been too conservative and trying to unlock the potential value of establishing more honest communication in those situations.
Look, all you need to do is have a discussion that is about the most efficient means of transporting dinosaurs by train. Then you’re talking about both trains and dinosaurs.
On the one hand, I appreciate you articulating these models. On the other, I’m annoyed by the presupposition of conflict over consilience. I don’t know that it would be helpful to whatever point you’re trying to make, but the lack of any mention of synthesis-oriented behavioral models/approaches is easy to misconstrue as a failure of imagination. The zero-sum fallacy gives me a headache.
This seems like a bunch of noise to me. It’s not that difficult to distinguish between truth claims and a figure of speech expressing confidence in a subject. Doing so ‘deceptively’, consciously or otherwise, is just an example of virtue-signaling.
Surely it’s obvious that these are all examples of what we in the business call a figure of speech. When somebody says “I believe in you!” they’re offering reassurance by expressing confidence in you, as a person, or your abilities.
This is covered under most definitions of belief as:
2. Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something. (a la Oxford Languages)
I’m not a board game buff, but I think their critique applies to video-games as well, where I feel much more confident asserting that there is a dearth of such games as do not fall into some sort of zero-sum or adversarial paradigm. Where they do not, they are increasingly strapping on extrinsic reward frameworks that are almost equally harmful to effectance motivation in the sense of being diametrically opposed.
I too would be interested in any examples you have to the contrary, mostly to see what you think constitutes a contradiction here. This is a pretty undernourished subject and the way that people think about these concepts is often fuzzy to the extent that it’s worth exploring common definitions before exchanging conclusions.
“I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players.”
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y’know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you’ve, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
Though I suspect there are mortality risks in being that isolated that are on the order of 1⁄30,000 a year too.
For some reason, I find this implication particularly irksome. First of all, it’s borderline non sequitur speculative analysis. Second, it’s broadcasting contempt for an elective lifestyle, which seems to be the whole motivation for including it. Unless you really think this sort of statistical prestidigitation supports the point you’re trying to make(?)
Would you accept a similar argument based on how fucking dangerous people are to each other? Going outside to touch grass, breath fresh air and get a little sunshine might have associated health benefits, but there’s also traffic, radiation, wild animals and muggers depending upon where you live. All this epidemiology is a massive headache; just try establishing a baseline and see how well you think that data reflects on you, personally.
The average American has $130k in debt, watches 33hr/wk television, spends 2hr/day on social media, 5hr/day on their cellphone, consumes 11 alcoholic beverages weekly and exercises only 17m/day. And you want us to evaluate associated comorbidities of an introverted lifestyle against that?
I apologize for the rant. I know that everybody has a different bright line for this sort of thing, but at some point playing with numbers and interpreting data slips into the realms of less-than-helpful intellectualizing and this… well, it just felt over the line to me.
Your comment seems like a related aside, which I guess you admitted in a follow-up comment? But anyway, it makes me curious what the axiomatic precepts are for trade. The perception of mutual benefit and a shared ability to communicate this fact?
Also OP doesn’t clearly distinguish between broader forms of quid pro quo and trade, so I’m just sort of adopting the broadest possible definition I can imagine.
I’m trying to decide to what extent this applies to my lived experience, but finding it difficult to distinguish between maintaining a healthy tranquility and cultivating habitual impassivity. My intuition is that I’ve had both experiences, but the internal feedback for either is very similar. Both seem to involve putting a functional amount of distance between yourself and your emotional response, and—in my experience—the healthy habit does reinforce itself, just like the negative version. But then, sometimes, I find myself noticing the lack of an emotional response in certain situations where I used to have one. Internally, it’s difficult to say whether it’s truly absent or simply impotent, but whether through healthy practice or perverse self-denial it’s lost its power over me.
Neither seems to stem from a particularly unhealthy cognitive locus. I wouldn’t say it’s maladaptive, for instance, to watch somebody lose their temper and subsequently decide you’d rather not embody that particular vice. Although it’s probably pernicious to foster latent contempt towards anybody who fails to exhibit perfect self-control. So, if the impetus and effects are similar then what are we left with? Because I really do feel like there’s a difference, and it’s one that feels obvious in hindsight. Unfortunately, “deep down in your secret heart of hearts you’ll just know” isn’t a very satisfying heuristic and, as I mentioned, it only seems obvious in hindsight.
For anybody who understands this better than I do, the question is: Can you articulate what internal heuristics you’re using to ensure that you can practice healthy stoicism without accidentally running over into unhealthy repression?
The latter, although I don’t think the gruesome details (beyond that) are really topical. I suspect that oral supplementation of this nature is significantly less effective and, other than a little mechanical discomfort, I don’t know why anyone would opt for an oblique approach. The desired bacterial translocation is pretty straight-forward and you can achieve it in a similarly direct manner.
If your desire for details extends beyond mere curiosity, I’ll respond to a DM. Just trying to be courteous to other uses.
This is relatable. I’m was diagnosed ASPD as a child, but never had any follow-up treatment or therapy. One noteworthy aspect of my transition into adulthood is the sheer amount of deliberate practice that went into learning how to properly socialize. Standing on the other side of all that effort, I feel that I’ve become more empathic than half my neurotypical friends and family members, quicker to accurately and elaborately imagine (in a humanizing fashion) another person’s perspective. People regard me as eloquent and charming to be around, confident and outgoing, etc. Honestly, it’s just a lot of hard work. My tendency is toward seclusion, I’m strongly introverted, and social gatherings of more than, say, three-to-five close friends can easily spike my blood pressure.
When it comes to certain things, I’m definitely having a qualitatively different experience than some of my more neurotypical friends. You brought up lying and that’s one good example. I think that a common manifestation of neurodivergence is an obsession with the true shape of things, so that it’s easy to become hyperfocused, to a detriment, on distinctions that seem very important to the individual.
That’s super useful. Thank-you, I’ll definitely follow-up on this. I imagine it would be.
Facile to the extent that it doesn’t acknowledge the nuance of withholding judgement. One does not have to pretend at virtue for demanding a higher standard of rigor before committing to one position or another. This is especially true nowadays, when it is quick and cheap to track down the strongest arguments for, or against, any position and exceedingly difficult to thoroughly debunk them; when misinformation is everywhere and having domain specific expertise doesn’t protect a source from bias.
The sort of pretention you’re describing is contemptible, but—unless I’m misunderstanding something—not for the sake of withholding judgement. I cannot help but feel that, in most of the situations you’ve described, there is an implication that the authoritative party is not only negligent, but aware of that negligence. This adds an element of deliberate cognitive dissonance to the list of recriminations against such an actor. Together they make a much more convincing reason to despise your hypothetical fence-sitter than their withholding judgement or the presumption that they’re posturing.
You seem to have a problem with feigning neutrality as a trendy means of signaling sophistication, but what you’ve written here reads to me as more of a criticism against ever thinking better of yourself for withholding judgement. Perhaps I’m misreading, but I don’t think that was your intention. Assigning a confidence rating to your position is often a difficult evaluation, especially given a contentious topic, and withholding judgement is (probably) often the proper course of action. Shouldn’t it should be fine to feel virtuous for withholding judgement when you’ve honestly judged it to be proper?
Much as a vibe with the overall sentiment here, I am annoyed that this entire post is effectively propaganda for free market capitalism. I am willing to bet that despite the supererogatory behavior of these volunteers, the company and executives profited disproportionately.
This sort of post-hoc justification feels (to me) like elaborate apologism for having a society based on scarcity mindset, and if we could just eradicate that then maybe we’d be one step closer to solving the collective action problem at scale, and one step closer to a global utopia.
These guys are heroes and I don’t wanna bring down the vibe.