Beware of Being “Right”
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
That doesn't mean you let your partner make bad choices, if in fact the right/wrong dimension involves a meaningful choice (it usually does not). It just means you gently guide them towards a not bad choice without hurting their feelings.
Insisting on being right sets up the relationship as adversarial rather than cooperative. An adversarial relationship is all about ME whereas a cooperative relationship is all about YOU. Mutually cooperative relationships where each partner helps the other are the best kind of relationship.
There's a section in there about being right that basically sums it up as "always be worried when someone says 'you're right' as can mean they just want you to stop talking".
You probably want it to be something along the lines of "that's right" since it implies they also think that's the right outcome regardless of whether it's your or their idea.
In regards to the article, it's great content, but the thing that has bugged me for years about important information that will improve personal, work, leadership/subordinate relationships is, the people that really need to read them, never do...
It inevitably walks me through the critical thinking process of what defines success, what questions should I be asking, and am I standing in the way of that.
Having a partner who is always right is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone. Each day feels like a challenge to live without setting off the ticking time bomb that my wife is. Trouble is, I can't seem to find a way to communicate with my wife. She doesn't want to see a therapist. I am an immigrant in a foreign country and have no family or close friends I can turn to.
I'm just waiting for my kid to leave for college and then hopefully I can find a way out. I've reached a point where I detest people who are convinced they are right. The best thing anyone ever said to me when I told them that as I age I am less certain about everything and they said: "It means you are growing up". I wish someone would tell my wife that. She is dead certain about everything in life.
I am not a psychologist. I'm only speaking from my own experience, but it is helping me in a situation something like yours to look carefully at circumstance and hear criticism gently, less personally. I am finding that "a little less talk and a little more (compassionate) action" is key in my situation. I wish you the best of luck finding the key to yours.
Creating a face-to-face support group for yourself with even just one local friend might help (difficult right now with the pandemic). Or if that seemed impossible (you could ask yourself why), if you turned to a professional counselor just for yourself (given your wife won't go), after evaluating your situation (and charging you a bunch of money as essentially a paid friend), here are some things that maybe one might say depending on the circumstances? (Along with the many other great things people have posted in response to this article.)
You might find of interest books by John Gottman on marriage like "What Makes Love Last?" in trying to improve things -- or at least understand them better to accept or reject them. A key point Gottman makes (and which the article echoes) is that contempt (e.g. "belittling") is a bad sign in marriage. Ideally something could be done to turn that around. Many books talk about the importance of communication in relationships, but there are lots of happy marriages where people don't "communicate" or even may communicate badly -- but what they do usually have is mutual respect in some form (maybe even in unexpected and quirky ways specific to the relationship).
In theory living with someone who is always right (if such were indeed the case) could be an asset (e.g. an exponentially expanding stock portfolio, always the "right" thing to say to comfort someone, always choosing the right home improvement contractor, always buying the right car for changing family needs, etc.). So why does being right have to be coupled with the problematical behavior to you that makes you unhappy? The issue of lack of compassion and kindness seems a different one than being right. As one possible explanation, you might want to look into Asperger's and women, in case a poor "theory of mind" in terms of understanding someone else's feelings and perceptions is an aspect of this (and if such were the case, there are books on making the most of that).
A link to Gottman's work, Asperger's in women, and some other resources like for coping with stress (and even depression) are in this reading list I've put together: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
Books on using positive reinforcement to shape behavior as is done with dolphins (and profoundly autistic children) might also be of interest (e.g. Karen Pryor's "Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training"). A variation of that idea is changing your behavior when your wife does something to avoid reinforcing your wife's behaviors -- kind of like discussed in "Bullies to Buddies" by Izzy Kalman. That last may sound like "blaming the victim" but, as Izzy Kalman says, sadly and realistically "victims" are usually more motivated to change.
People generally do more of something when they feel rewarded for it and less of something when rewards are absent. The tricky thing about rewards is that rare random rewards tend to be the most reinforcing. So reacting to your wife's negative behavior some way only occasionally (say, one out of five times you react in a way she wants) can be highly reinforcing to your wife's behavior. Similarly when your wife occasionally does something that can be seen as kind or compassionate, how can that be appropriately reinforced?
Or maybe there are other underlying stresses in your wife's life unrelated to home that could be addressed somehow to reduce the problem -- like having a dog that reacts badly to certain situations and keeping them away from the situation? That at least might reduce the scale of the issue.
I once made a list of dozens of ways to shape behavior (including just accepting the problematical behavior and thinking of it as a reminder about other good things in the situation -- e.g. trying to see dirty dishes left in the sink as a reminder of overall goodness). Maybe you could make such a list to give yourself ideas? Still, while operant conditioning may help in theory smooth out some rough edges, humans are also more complex social, intellectual, and spiritual beings and there is a lot more to relationships and happiness than control (and of course being "right").
For example, Carol Dweck writes about how it is best to teach children that "the brain is like a muscle" and the more you use it, the smarter you get. She says kids who were told they were "smart" or "talented" as kids often become fearful of trying out new things where they might fail which would tarnish their self image of being "smart". Such children praised for being "smart" also often tend towards tearing others down in order to keep themselves feeling up as "image maintenance" (a possible origin of what was mentioned in the article). Thus it is better to praise effort or progress in kids (or adults). If it is the case with your wife's upbringing that she was praised as being "smart", I'm not sure what to suggest -- but maybe some reflection on that might lead to new possibilities? To create a situation where people can grow and accept imperfections as one way to help, maybe both of you trying something new together (swing dancing?) -- laughing together at your mistakes while learning?
In general, someone who thinks they are right all the time probably is avoiding personal growth by taking on new challenges. For example, one humbling experience for me was to play "World of Tanks" with my son when I was around age 50 and he was really getting into it. Even though I eventually battled my way up to tier ten American artillery through a lot of effort (and ~US$250 worth of "gold"), I had to accept was never very good at WOT relative to many other players in the game (even as for some tanks I was able to be about average). And compared to artillery, I am much worse at light tanks like my son usually plays which require quicker reactions (whereas artillery generally requires more patience and planning). One can look at the WOT stats for all players -- so it is hard to fool yourself about how good you are -- including for artillery guessing how tanks will move so you can lead your shots correctly. While there are activities in life I am good at (and tend to gravitate towards), it was a beneficial experience for me at my age to reinforce the need for continual learning. It was also a good reminder that one can be not that great at something and still have fun at it with someone you care about. That (challenging) WOT experience also helped me be a better employee with a new job going up multiple learning curves in new areas -- in terms of being more patient with my own current limits and also the current limits of others.
Even if someone was right all the time, one person can't be everywhere and do more than one or a few things at once. Thus the adage for perfectionists to contemplate of: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." Also, if your wife is right so often because she is a perfectionist, "perfectionism" has its own personal sorrows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfectionism_(psychology)
Ultimately, a problematical relationship doesn't necessarily mean the people in it are problems. It just means the particular match was challenging and the people involved did not have the skills or circumstance or priorities to make that particular combination of personalities work better. Sometimes skills can be upgraded or circumstances changed or priorities reevaluated. And, sadly sometimes not. The "Ann Landers question" was never "Can you find someone better?" since that is in theory always possible if unlikely, but "Are you better with or without them?" If you have already answered that question (all things considered, including kids) as "with", then hopefully some of the above could help make things a bit better.
Good luck with managing the situation as best as possible for the most happiness possible for yourself and your family.
And maybe all these ideas are wrong or inappropriate for your situation... :-)
We had a long chat about this today because I was losing my mind and I couldn't just take it any more. It got a bit heated sometimes but we are determined to resolve this. I'm having to face up to my own role in making her the person she is so that is hard.
But what we both realise is that we are both good people, but perhaps misguided. As life progresses, there seem to be more and more things which I regret and it is a constant battle to stay positive and look forward to the next day.
I was very ambitious when I was young. My wife allowed her career to take a backseat so she could look after the kids. I think I was so immersed in my career and trying to provide for my family that I neglected to see the stress she was under raising two kids largely by herself. I mistakenly thought that if I worked hard to provide financial security for my family it would matter a lot. I now realise that was not enough. My career has been okay-ish so far but not exactly the kind of resounding success I had dreamt of. I'm beginning to think that ambition is a curse as it is all consuming. And I also feel bad that I don't have a lot to show for all the time I spent working.
My parents weren't exactly great role models for a happy marriage. I somehow, very naively, assumed that a marriage would work if both partners had the best of intentions. Today has been exhausting but I still have hope that we will work this out.
I do believe the whole family will be better of "with" and I just need to find a way to make it work.
A friend of mine is a therapist, and through discussions with him about his job, I'm not sure anymore this is quite accurate. A friend may have other agendas, like maintaining their own image and status, or may unintentionally gossip, or just may not be appropriate to cover some subjects with. I now view a therapist as someone I'd pay to actually be outside of my circle of friends, as someone trusted in a completely different way to discuss questions and help process. Or perhaps, metaphorically, like having CI to test and a rubber duck to debug, before you deploy something to production.
I also appreciated reading your story, your determination to work together, and the advice from this HN crowd. I hope and pray it goes better for all involved.
Regret is a theme that everyone has to come to terms with at a certain point in life, don't you think? I'm finding it gets easier to have compassion with young-me, the good person who struggled and wanted and dreamed. Look how hard they worked. Look how young and earnest that person is and how little they really know and how much they honestly believe that more struggle, more desire and more dreams are going to take them where they want to go.
Today, I know better but that is only because in the past I didn't. Today, I am free to be different than I was back then -- I am even free to be different than I was yesterday. This is something important I know now.
I wish you and your wife all the goodness that comes to a marriage on the other side of your current struggle.
Something funny/ironic but all too often true about marriage -- and why everyone needs to work at it: "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-wi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCS6t6NUAGQ "We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition."
Another issue especially for raising kids is changing male/female social expectations in the last few decades. And there is also the socially isolating infrastructure we've build around ourselves (especially suburbs). That infrastructure makes it harder to be part of a face-to-face community as you have indicated has been a challenge for both yourself and your wife. See for example: "How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult" https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends...
So even if our parents were perfect role models for a happy marriage, what worked for them may not work for us given different social and physical circumstances a generation later.
And social isolation (in a face-to-face sense) caused by many modern trends (even before the pandemic) is a key aspect of stress and depression that can make everything else harder because it puts too much pressure on a marriage to be everything where in the past there were multiple sources of social support
See for example: "Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions" by Johann Hari. https://thelostconnections.com/ From the last chapter of the book: "You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated."
It's a long haul, but an "upward spiral" for marriage and also personal life is possible and is a worthwhile accomplishment to look back on someday. Finding just the right amount of self-reflection (not too little to be reckless, not too much to be paralyzed) can also be part of that challenge. Best of luck on your continuing journey to building a better life for yourself and everyone you care about around you.
This explains Twitter behavior in a nutshell.
Feels good to be right.
However being sad or afraid and correct could be healthier.
Managing one's life without awareness one is really transitively managing one's feelings can lead to disappointment and frustration when the world works differently than how one's feelings need the world to work.
At the same time, can be problematic at the workplace, when people listen to your sad/anxious voice, and disregard the actual words you speak, instead, based on your voice feel convinced you're wrong
If that's a tactic that is successful when there is contention, it shows a pretty high level of trust in a relationship. It says that you both believe you are right, and you're ok just leaving it without agreeing, you still get along in general and still love each other.
In places where this doesn't work, I find that it's a matter of confidence. If they cannot agree to disagree, and won't let go until you agree with them, it may point to their lack of confidence in your general thought processes. I.e., if you can't see it their way in this situation, there are likely many situations that you wouldn't see it their way and in aggregate, you'll behave in ways they cannot accept.
Depending on the specific topic, maybe that's understandable. Perhaps, for example, you repeatedly make bad investments and they want you to start getting their assent first. But if the matter is not of such significance, there is likely something else going on. It may be that they cannot bear the uncertainty of when and where you'll make choices they'd disagree with and they have a need to get alignment.
It's obvious to me that a person can care too much about being/seeming right. But can a person also care too little about it? What is the exact right amount, and how do you know?
When you try to have both, being right and having those people around you. You hurt them, so you have to do something to make them come close to you again. That cycle of abuse goes back and forth wearing away at your "victim" like car engine getting worn down. That's why victims abuse feel so worn out and exhausted without realizing what's hurting them. Sure their abuser makes up for it. There's so many wonderful things about them that make up for all the bad things. The more extreme these swings are, the faster the victim is worn down.
Not to mention all the manipulation and other awful stuff that can happen in an abusive relationship. This is just one slice that can be looked at.
So ultimately, the right amount is whatever amount keeps you in balance with the people you're right with.
I think it's best to ignore the original article which is mostly vacuous slogans and just think about the problem in general.
Here are some examples in ascending order of serious consequences:
0. Your partner put dishes away in a different drawer than they are normally stored.
1. Your partner did mental math to calculate a tip incorrectly; however, the result was still an adequate tip.
2. Your partner remembered the time to meet at a restaurant incorrectly causing them to be late.
3. Your partner wants to book a trip. You're worried that you may need to cancel, but your partner assures you that the trip can be canceled at no cost. When it comes time to cancel, it turns out, the trip is not refundable at all, and both of you are out a lot of money.
4. You and your partner agreed early on in the relationship that you would not live with or support either of your parents in their old age. Now your partner wants to move their parents into your shared house.
The more you are on the trivial side of the gradient, I think the better it is to be kind. IMO, it's still a bit worrisome if someone is consistently wrong in trivial things, as that could be a sign that they are wrong in more meaningful things as well.
However, the further you are on the serious side of the gradient, the less reasonable it is to be kind over being right. This is where people become doormats - when they value being nice over being right to their own serious detriment.
I'm not sure this is a foregone conclusion. It may just mean that they're mildly absent minded, or even just human. I'm that person in my household.
That's a fair point. I think it really depends on the specifics of the situation.
I've known a fair number of compulsive liars and bullshitters, so it certainly can be a red flag, but like you say - it doesn't have to be.
The story defends all sides, so you might leave being convinced that the way we do things today is better, but in the end it is just the familiarity.
The reason I thought of this story was due to each “upgrade” making it harder to be unprovably wrong. In an oral tradition, the words are only as good as our memories — written language takes that away. But we can still be wrong about things we do or say — the constant recording of memories (I guess we’re partially there already with video cameras) takes that away as well. There is aesthetic value to be found in being able to not know the truth, to not have to be right to not be wrong.
Wow it's long
This isn’t a curse of our times; it’s just how the brain works. It’s well documented that Humans get a chemical rush when they are in a position of power over someone else. I think the curse of our times is that so many modern Humans don’t try to be better than mammals.
Power over others. "Big I. Little you."
Power over other's suffering.
Power over what we get out our relationship with another person who may be being made to suffer.
Accepting one's own suffering relating to the limited and poisonous benefit of needing to relate to another person through making them suffer, and realizing healthy practices to mitigate that dysfunctional need.
Learning how to help others with their suffering, and seeing the roundabout positive impact on oneself.
Power over one's own suffering.
Being right all the time is dangerous, but where's the balance? How do you balance?
Does anyone have good resources for this?
Commercial resources from major publications are obvious garbage, but look at non-commercial ventures. Look at the kind of people who read LessWrong - do they become easier to talk to? Less arrogant and obtuse, more receptive to nuance? My experience is they're extremely dense & hard to talk to. Why is that? The content of the blog is fairly direct in telling them the risks & flaws in assuming they know better, right? IMO it's because the blog primarily acts as an identity reinforcement device. The content is irrelevant, from a psychological perspective it ends up being used to reinforce & defend the identity of "more rational than others".
and tell you what they think you want to hear.
But look, at least with friends there's a genuine understanding of you that you can try and dig out. An article by its nature has no insight into your presentation. It can't react to you.
I once wrote a piece of software specifically in the hopes that companies with shitty implementations would steal it just so I would never have to deal with the problem ever again.
If you are going to define purposes and motivations in life so narrowly, then I may as well take it to its extreme, get existential or nihilist and say nothing has any intrinsic value at all, so why do it? Of course we still do these things.
But contributing, in the context of work, without getting some real reward, over time ? Just seems really unfair, and I don't like that feeling.
Because having credit makes it easier to get trust and resources later. It allows you to take more risk without being affected when it fails. It gives you opportunities.
It sometimes appears to be a fundamental desire of ours for what we feel is relevant, our ability to be right about something, is the same as what other people want to be relevant.
It's what I've observed to be the crux of privilege. Those with privilege think that just because they think something is relevant, it is. They're just right, not necessarily relevant.
In the context of a relationship, constant demands for someone's rightness to be their relevance breeds contempt, which undermines the whole foundation of the relationship. Over time, love is replaced with contempt.
In response for not feeling valued or by hiding in the organisation due to their lack of skills, these people resort to building up a massive ego to compensate. Often, many of these individuals are not valued at home either - they tend to be divorced/living alone or with little personal value from another person. Pair that with no appreciation or value from work and you have a recipe for disaster.
"Unless you let me be right, you're not going to have a relationship"
At which point I would say it's not a much of a relationship.
I prefer: "Let's figure out together what the right answer is"
The value of truth is more important today than ever before, and modern society's interest in it seems to be lower than ever before.
That scares me, and I'm not willing to let truth be devalued. I will step on toes and be "right" if I am pushing truth, especially when pushing it on "deniers" and other politically- or otherwise-motivated falsehood peddlers.
But who’s truth is it?
Also the articles point is about having compassion for others not winning the argument.
- What if someone claims that your truth is based on different data or perspectives than their own?
- How can you reliably expect to cement truth when data or educated perspectives may change with time, especially if they are based on news or new events/research?
- Who gets to decide what truth is? Do you? Why? Is it because you're convinced that you're a "truthful" person as a subjective-experiential observation?
- How do you identify a liar? What is to be done with them? Who gets to decide?
My subjective experience is that the establishment of truth, or reconciliation with such questions, is a deeper topic than many are willing to credit.
I'll be controversial and offer that it may be helpful to view "truth" as just one more mental model; broken in some ways, just like any other mental model. (If this leads to fears of e.g. rampant dishonesty, maybe that also points to the fragility of the model)
If interest in truth is really lower than ever before, it may be related to aspects like these.
My concern is more with intellectual dishonesty and naive, shallow understanding.
An uneducated person who knows he is uneducated has more truth to him than an uneducated person who thinks he knows a lot and holds forth with BS.
There is more knowledge in the world than a single person ever learn.
Unfortunately if one has a mental model for this or that, and that model yields only a perception, that person has _maybe_ half a mental model. That means one can expect little traction and lots of frustration. The effective model will yield energy (instructive, actionable, or otherwise) toward the execution of this or that action or group of actions. Perceptions alone can be really concerning for sure...
> naive, shallow understanding
I'd say the same here, but add that there's usually a depth in there somewhere. For example, shallow understanding but deep empathy--_therefore_ that person showed up to support your opponent, for example. So can you expect to teach that person, in order to sway them? Probably not. Working the empathy side of things though--this could even be a really fruitful discussion for both sides.
Concerning, and frustrating, for sure...still, the journey may be worth the stretching and growing.
(I'll offer that these may be maddening perspectives, but that does not itself mean they are invalid)
If you want to reconcile or come to a shared understanding with flat-earthers, it may help to meet them where they are at, and show them why their mental models are effective and truth-yielding in some ways, while also limited in others. It may also help to understand their psychology, and work from a different angle. Wielding "wrong" as one's only tool can limit the opportunity to try a variety of such approaches, and test for effect.
Absolute truth is a mental model. It may have its uses, but its own absolute utility or validity is not guaranteed. Further it may do one great intellectual or psychological harm to remain caught in this logical trap: It feels so right, but its key doesn't fit all these locks (others' annoying positions). So why keep using it over and over? Humans can be amazingly flexible thinkers, holding contradicting mental models in the same mind. So why not take advantage of this? Absolutes and fixed thinking are a huge liability in this way.
Edited to add: In most cases the stakes are lower, too. Global warming probably won't be solved by one person's mental models, no matter how absolute or flexible and thoughtful. So there's also a misleading aspect, perhaps a falsehood-perspective, to the given examples. See also: Was so-and-so the dictator good in some ways, or pure evil, etc. These questions may belie the hyperbolic beginner mind more than they form a high-quality test of the framework.
It's difficult to accept that some individuals will never be open to a change of mind, or maybe that the patience required is too much.
And that's also a really good reason to have a simple framework to help with the moderation of effort, if the goal is to change a mind. For example, at the very least it may need to be understood that such a process could take years and years. It's not even just a logical precision or debater-quality question; it's also a question of energy, relationship values, and emotion.
I'd add that at an individual level there are also some leverage points that aren't available at a group level. For example, you can sometimes more quickly identify and speak to an individual's value system. E.g. are they afraid of being closed-minded in general, and as such do they get sucked up into every conspiracy that comes along? Usually there are a lot of little values that add up, within the individual. Walking through these can bring outside perspectives to an individual's awareness more quickly, as perhaps-unconscious motives are made conscious.
Your point about the value system is intriguing. In my experience, debate has always been more fulfilling on the individual level, since it feels like the exchange of ideas comes more easily. Trying to expand this to a wider audience takes much more effort like you described.
What are the ideas, and why isn't there any room for debate? It seems like a bit of an imaginative and wide-open perception to yield much traction for the purposes of this discussion.
> I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge
Hmm, is there "a" right way? What size is the bridge? For what use? I can build a Lego bridge that's pretty strong. Did I just meet nature at its bridge-building rules while not knowing your right way, or are those rules perhaps more nuanced than expected? Also, are we sure that the imaginary creative idea in question is in total disagreement with nature? What if it's fitting observed perceptions? Perhaps it has leverage in this way or that. Again there's not much else to be said in the conceptual zone here. I'd also add that dichotomous model like "adapt or suffer" is in my experience a common sign of a mental model which may be in need of further adaptation :-)
I would offer that the questions you ask do seem to point at a fixed mental position, around which theoretical and intractable constructs are arranged as seems most expeditious to the closure of the discussion. If that's what you really want, permission to go your way and think your thoughts without others butting in with details, then you don't really need a partner with whom to reach that decision. But there's also no guarantee that relevant and contextual details won't cause someone in your position considerable philosophical trouble in the future, around this fixed concept of truth...
I think there is truth and that we have to drop our egos and continually adapt and understand. To be honest I think that humanities ego has never been bigger, postmodernism is a symptom of this, and we are suffering more than we need to because of it.
So what you have to ask is, who's doing this thing, and why? What factors are involved? Details. Otherwise the solution will fail to the extent that it is divorced from context. And that's no way to develop policy, be it personal or public. This kind of fixed, non-adaptive thinking leads to the Judge Judy phenomenon, rewriting public policy discourse as shallow "common sense" pornography for what amounts to entertainment for armchair critics.
Your summary of my position as "no truth" is also unfair to the details, since I communicated upthread that multiple truths and perspectives may exist, and that this can create a smarter approach to problem-solving. This is true even in computer programming, where multiple, conflicting truths about an object can be reconciled, simulated and leveraged. But the trick is depth, and details. That's why there's no computer program that stops everyone from driving in oncoming traffic. By itself it's not a useful rule in that it fails to account for the exceptions.
What seems to be happening at the end of your comment is that you have a set of perceptions from your past, these exist as fixed labels or categories in your mind, and you are attempting to map them onto my words without so much as asking if they're relevant. Which, unfortunately, they're not. Postmodernism needn't be involved; these ideas predate it by quite a stretch. So while your conclusion seems to have felt therapeutic, it's also a communication of subjective-emotive values, and not quite ready for logical and useful public discourse.
Anyway, I'll continue to treat you as an equal and tell you straight that I think you are being dishonest throughout this exchange. Most people when asked the question about driving in the wrong lane would give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that it wasn't the highly unusual situation you describe. I think your know full well what I meant but you chose to come at it like a lawyer (which is what I mean by dishonest). In order to prevent that I'll try to lock it down:
Would you agree that if you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway when it is fully open to the public and there are cars driving against you in the lane that you are in that in that case you are likely to suffer as a result of your failure to adapt your model to that of the rest of the society around you?
Knee jerk black and white statements are very rarely correct.
This seems to get more and more emotional, but even if not so, I would suggest that people who feel it's an absolute truth that every lawyer is dishonest are really doing the legal world a disservice by not at least offering training via ethics courses.
I also admit to being frustrated at the unfairness of the argument, in which I've communicated several times a point that gets at the crux of the issue: Real context and details. Both are needed.
So what happened was: I encouraged you to think about real context, and instead you added more details to the fake example, turning it into a corner case and making it an exceptional situation as opposed to a workable general example justifying absolute truth. In effect you've further marginalized the reality and utility of the absolute truth idea.
Your sense of the existence of absolute truth is apparently held hostage by unrealistic conceptual examples, turning it into a straw man, which I hope you can understand I'm not interested in debating...
"There are, after all, no post-fact conversations when we talk about how to build a bridge, for example."
I don't know if I would be able to function in a world where this kind of statement had to be qualified every time. The editor of Die Zeit appears to think similarly. So it looks like there's at least three of us who think like this. But you're not alone either. Each to their own.
Only on perverse semantics. You can always provide a plausible-sounding semantic model of any proposition stated in natural language that renders that proposition true or false. But natural language utterances actually do mean things despite their inherent ambiguity. When someone says "Smoking causes cancer" they mean, "Smoking a lot produces a statistically significant increase in your risk of developing cancer." They do not mean, "Smoking one cigarette is guaranteed to give you cancer." Picking at semantic nits is counterproductive. There's probably even a name for it as a logical fallacy but I'm too lazy and frustrated at the general state of discourse in the world to bother looking it up right now.
Hmm. I'm curious as to the value of attaching such an archaic, subjective values-oriented term as "perverse" to the label here. What does "perverse" mean in this context, and is it really expected to sway opinions with what appears on its face to be rather emotional language?
> But natural language utterances actually do mean things despite their inherent ambiguity
This statement seems to work in anyone's favor, or no one's, where the argument is concerned...
> Smoking a lot produces a statistically significant increase in your risk of developing cancer
With an error rate of...zero? With a bell curve of...? With a qualitatively superior study based on the population of...? Let us have the study. Let us tear it apart. What do we have to lose by admitting that smoking may not cause cancer in this way or that one?
> They do not mean, "Smoking one cigarette is guaranteed to give you cancer"
Your assumption, but not mine. For all I know, smoking one cigarette may do the job.
> Picking at semantic nits is counterproductive.
Why? Details are important.
> There's probably even a name for it as a logical fallacy
Even logical fallacies are not fallacies when they are relevant to the discussion at hand. This is Logical Fallacy 101--see the "Fallacy Fallacy".
> I'm too lazy and frustrated at the general state of discourse in the world to bother looking it up right now.
This is discourse, right here. Bringing frustration into it is fine, but there's no guarantee it won't affect the quality of the discourse...
Shooting yourself in the head causes an early death.
Eating sugar causes an early death.
All of those are true in some cases and false for others. Nuance matters because that’s where the truth actually is. You don’t convince people who disagree with you by loudly yelling the generality - they know the generality and already disagree with it. Dig deeper.
Some prefer actionable predictions, so will favor beliefs which lead to higher quality predictions. Belief as optimization.
Which value is represented by statements such as there is no truth, truth is unknowable, we make our own reality?
Edit: Grateful for chance to articulate my own heuristics. Decided to add third category. All the stuff people do and say just to get thru their days. Knowingly or not, sincerely or not. Social graces, agreeability, cooperation in the form of habits, idioms, norms, and culture. Belief as social cognition.
Mathematics tells you what is not possible, but it tells you nothing about what exists. Every other discipline is separated from truth by bias in observation. And there are no perfect observers.
So, pushing "truth" is really pushing a specific perception.
That said.. you can fight against "false".
There is no collateral damage if half the planet believes the world is flat. You don't need to be "right" with these people.
Anti-vaxxers are a different story. Their "wrong" directly infringes on my liberty and, thus, yes, being "right" is extremely important.
Anti vaxxers don't seem to realistically cause terrible issues in the amounts of them (currently). People who believe HAES seems way more socially accepted yet has a larger impact on the healthcare system, consumer products and food offerings, yet there's way less dislike of them than anti vaxxers. Why is that?
yes... i think this boils down to basically the difference of "being right" vs "doing the right thing"
Telling your climate change denying uncle he's an idiot won't change his mind, but it will ruin thanksgiving. That's why it's important to consider if your emotions are leading you to do something counterproductive.
Usually it does change his mind if he respects you enough. It wont work on a stranger but it is very effective on long term friends.
Why is there selected group of people and opinions who can run their mouths and everyone else must shut up else they destroyed the event?
This is nice example how something completely different: social hierarchy where it is super importsnt to keep illusion that some people are right.
Climate, social change, technology, development, covid response etc..
Best example: Masks.
Do they help?
Probably somewhat, but possibly not. There was the very real concern overall that masks might give people a sense of confidence. Any 'reduction in hand-washing' would offset mask usage.
In the early stages, the plan was to not create 100x demand for masks (I mean, there was going to be 10x no matter what) by suppressing public need for them, so as to get the PPE to medical workers. (Not sure if that was the right move, but there's logic in it.)
Once the mask-making gears are moving into production, then the new perspective means 'masks can become more of a requirement for regular people'. So the equilibrium shifts, and then, 'as a whole, we should wear masks'. i.e. a 'new truth' to be propagated.
To any regular person sitting on the sidelines, it has to be confusing, and we should forgive people for being cynical that the press was screaming from day one 'don't use masks, you're not responsible enough and they need to go to doctors, they are in desperate short supply' to a few weeks later: 'wear a mask or you are an inconsiderate redneck'.
So 'new realities, create new 'truths'' in a way.
Even more nuanced 'truthiness':
Right now on CNN you see these graphs of COVID 'spiking' again in America --> 'scary'.
But - when you look at the graph of deaths it tells a completely different story. Mostly, it's still going down with a little bump recently.
Have a look [1]
The 'more complicated truth' is that the US has been expanding testing a lot, and possibly different kinds of people are getting infected (younger?), more people are taking it, and the rate fatality is dropping.
So what is the 'truth' there? Can we blame CNN for showing a chart every day, when technically speaking its 'factual'? But in reality it doesn't really tell the whole story at all and is potentially misleading? Or what about the responsibility of mass media to err on the side of being conservative (small 'c') so as to promote positive behaviour, in that people need to 'feel' the pandemic is material, or they won't wear masks.
For those people with the intelligence, means, education and wherewithal, ok, it's possible to 'sift through' the headlines, but most aren't in a position to do that, they have 'real jobs, real lives, diapers to change' and so the 'truth' is always going to be in flux.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ So it's often very complicated.
Where was this stated officially? I see this repeated a lot, but it would be nice to have a primary source.
CDC at the end of March was saying:
> If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers.
>Seeming to be right justifies disrespect, contempt, and other forms of emotional pollution
I don't think it's about being right per se, but that feeling that you are right often also makes you feel justified in being an awful jerk to other people. This is especially true online. In my experience, the people who pride themselves on being brutally honest are more interested in the "brutal" part.
And this behavior often hinders the spread of truth, because while rationally we should simple evaluate arguments on their own merits, in reality no one likes being treated badly and so people are going to be less receptive to even true statements delivered in an abusive way.
The facile response to this is to cry that we're supposed to never say anything or do that would upset people so we have to hide the truth, but this is ridiculous. There's a huge gulf between being an asshole and never saying anything. Being right isn't a license to be a terrible person, and it would serve those in interested in the truth to remember that.
A deontological ethic, doing the right thing regardless of the consequences is still my favourite, but nature is rolling over to a consequentialist maximization of profits at the expense of everybody.
Stating something that is empirically and objectively true will not change someone's belief if they're not already open to it. It will bounce right off them if they have a strong emotional attachment to their belief.
And some people are bad actors. They lie knowingly, and they cannot be debunked with facts, because they're playing a different game.
So much in politics and propaganda (and marketing, and elements of management) is about stock techniques for managing the emotions of groups and individuals. The emotional control provides leverage which can then be converted into beliefs, and eventually into desired actions.
This is a tough and unflattering lesson to learn, but - unfortunately - it seems to be how these things really do work.
"You can't convince a right person"
Once someone believes they are right it is rare to change their mind.
The author is trying to move knowledge off facts of things and intellectual processes and into the realm of emotion and kind compassion. A kind compassion is simply a mask which hides a different form of power seeking. Which is on-point for the current cultural shifts we are going through, he mirrors the nature of humans at this very moment.
The author seeks to replace existing knowledge in the reader, destroying all the knowledge of facts and feelings in an attempt to keep relationships on track. It is a mistake.
You can disagree and be right in a calm manner and also in an angry manner without changing the content or aim of your speech. The article aims too low at a reader who is willing to accept what is written without thinking critically or taking a higher perspective gleaned from education. Like most psychologists he risks undermining those that are experiencing these mental processes as a function of striving to achieve a goal. The undermining of useful definitions is supposedly necessary for maintaining a relationship without looking at other solutions first.
The second half has valuable advice for more than just spouses, although it's mostly talking about divorce. But also employee/employer relationships, friendships, and any other type: if you are not actually trying to make sure you fully understand the other person's position, you are working against unity with them.
But I have to disagree with the article's final word of advice:
> Spend less effort trying to control your partner's thinking and more trying to understand and appreciate differences in your perspectives.
Not that this is wrong, but that there's another step after it which must carefully be practiced: when you know for sure that you're right, and that the other person is objectively wrong in this situation, it's important to stand firm on what you must do, and not waver. All without losing kindness, compassion, patience, an attentive ear and everything else the article mentions.
St. Edith Stein once said something like without truth, there is no charity, and without charity, there is no truth. I see time and time again people make this very simple mistake: forfeit truth in order to preserve charity. But the two are not incompatible and never can be.
A person will say, "well in order to be accepting to this person, I must be willing to accept that maybe they are correct and I am incorrect," and they will stray from their objective certainty. That's why I'm not a fan of the quote in this article, "Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one." It either states or strongly implies that there is no objective truth, depending on the author's meaning. But there is objective truth, truth that is true no matter if nobody is alive to perceive it or not.
And when we stray from that truth, we abandon our only hope of helping people out of their own self-deceit and delusions. I have seen many people join in the delusions of others in order to comfort them or calm them down or give them hope in a false reality. This is not truly charitable behavior.
True charity, true selfless and sacrificial love for another, always wants to help them out of their self-destruction, which always comes from self-deceit. And this requires that we remain in the truth. A tree cannot help birds of the air if it uproots itself and tries to follow them, it needs to stand firmly planted.
How then do we execute our intentions (truly charitable) ones to bring about the maximum efficacy? Experience.
Sometimes, you need to take a step back to take 4 steps forward. Sometimes you need to be wrong to be right. It's like fishing/kite-flying, sometimes you need to lax sometimes you need to roll it in.
It's an art. Some can never truly master it.
Both spouses and parents are human and being like that all the time is not possible.
Dealing with someone you just described, arrogant and defensive focused on being right is highly stressful and tiring. Loved one being constantly arrogant to you lowers you self esteem and your self perception too. At some point, ressentment over conceding yet another hill while being nice and calm while getting arrogance thrown at you boils over.
Or it all turns onto one sided abusive relationship if you fail to set boundaries. You can't have one sided good relationship.
I found the idea of certainty being an emotional state especially interesting.
Even for scientific papers, this is not a sufficient reason for dismissal. Here is Einstein's original paper on Special Relativity:
http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein...
And the initial papers on General Relativity:
http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein...
http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein...
Number of references in these papers: 0.
Start with the opening sentence:
> Much of the emotional suffering in the world comes from the substitution of power for value.
From a casual POV that sounds like a meaningful statement, but from a scientific POV it's meaningless:
What's "emotional suffering"? How is it measured?
What's "power" in this context? How is it measured?
What's "value" in this context? How is it measured?
How much is "much"? How is it measured?
My point is that psychology is in an alchemical as opposed to chemical phase: people are telling themselves "just so" stories and then kinda-sorta dressing it up in pseudo-scientific verbiage. You might as well consult an astrologer or numerologist. They help a lot of people, and it's much easier to remember that their underlying theories are garbage.
Next sentence:
> The curse of our times is that so many people have developed the habit of seeking to feel temporarily more powerful when they feel devalued.
Our "times" are not "cursed" as measured by an enormous number of metrics. (E.g. violent crime is down globally, education has never been greater, etc.)
In re: "so many people have developed [a] habit", where is the poll data?
How do you know someone has a habit "of seeking to feel temporarily more powerful when they feel devalued"? Again, how do you measure feeling "powerful" or "devalued"?
Once "afflicted" with this "habit":
> They grow alienated from their more humane values, which makes them feel progressively less valuable.
Again, how is this measured? What's a "more humane value"? How does one "grow alienated" from a value? Is it a thing?
MY whole point, again, is that all of this sounds good until you actually try to analyse what the author is actually saying, and you find there's nothing there that you can't also get from e.g. the Psychic Friends Network.
This is not science, it's pop psychology.
I know what the author is getting at: You let go of the "attachment" to the "correctness" or "certainty" or "rightness" or "need to be right" and suddenly you're getting along with people much better.
That's an important and worthy thing to know. And we should do science to it. (But you're not getting a scientific treatment of it from TFA, and that's what I object to.)
In re: "Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one."
A more accurate way of saying that is that the word "certainty" can refer to emotional states as well as intellectual ones, and often they are interconnected. That's still not science, but it's less linguistically muddled.
I could pick a bone about how I don’t think it is quite as bad astrology , etc. (which literally has zero science behind), but I see your point.
I suppose I found the article interesting and useful, even if we don’t yet have robust science to support all of the arguments it makes.
Here’s to hoping future developments and research can make meaningful progress towards a deeper and robust understanding of what actually makes us tick :)
Back in high school one of my friends' moms was a semi-professional astrologer. More than once, when visiting his house, she would ask someone she just met for their "birth data", type it into her astrology program, and proceed to blow their minds by telling them all sorts of personal things about their personality just from their chart. She also gave pretty good advice some of the time.
One day we were looking at the computer and somehow got into the settings for the astrology program and we noticed that she had configured it wrong, so that none of the charts she was reading were valid according to the internal logic of astrology. The charts were wrong (not just in the sense that astrology is bullshit, but extra-wrong in the sense that they didn't even conform to the line of bullshit) yet she was "good" at astrology.
FWIW, I think she was just a good psychologist, but didn't know it.
Ciao!
Yes, there is a lot of questionable research and getting objective, repeatable results is extremely difficult. People don’t reduce to numbers easily.
At the same time, we shouldn’t throwing out the enormous amount of progress in the treatment of mental health in the last fifty years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The reproducibility crisis is a thing, but there's no information here. Shallow dismissals that are also grandiose are particularly low-quality.
I also don't believe psychology is an actual science (in the proper sense of the term) and is indeed more akin to religion or even astrology. (Not that that religion and astrology are not sometimes useful, they can be, as can psychology, just that they are something besides a science).
I can't vouch for the articles but PT submissions have led to high-quality HN discussions [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...