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.
1Our 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.
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.