Sirducer comments on Instrumental vs. Epistemic -- A Bardic Perspective - Less Wrong

66 Post author: MBlume 25 April 2009 07:41AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 25 April 2009 09:21:52PM 9 points [-]

What makes human interaction interesting is our attempts to control each other's minds, and I don't see how you can eliminate salesmanship without eliminating those things we value about human relationships.

I disagree vehemently with this statement. I don't want other people to approve of me for my salesmanship. I'm working on systematically eradicating dishonesty, secrecy, manipulation, and other forms of "salesmanship" from my personal relationships. I'm quite sure that this is going to result in me having fewer personal relationships over time, but they seem to be of higher quality. Since I started this project, I have not lost any friends to whom I was already close and someone has fallen in love with me. I have not turned into a "cold mechanical robot". Among the things I am honest about are my emotions.

Another, purely pragmatic, trouble with personal salesmanship is that it confuses feedback. If you are being duplicitous in this way and someone disapproves of you, it could reflect either on your salesmanship or your actual characteristics and you don't know what to change if approval is your goal - and changing your sales pitch won't actually improve you for the better, which ought to be the real function of feedback. If I am honest and garner disapproval, I have the facts about what the disapproval was about and I can decide whether I value the disapproved characteristic over the potential approval or not.