"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Honestly, I'm surprised that there aren't more posts tagged 'longevity' on this site. Cryonics is wildly popular here, as a way to continue one's existence in the future, after one's physical body gives out; however, simply surviving long enough for someone to invent a cure for aging seems to be another way to solve the same problem and, moreover, one which can be worked concurrently with cryonics.
Also, nobody knows whether people currently being cryonically preserved by current methods can ever be thawed and healed or uploaded into an emulator. It would suck to die and get frozen a year before they realise they were doing it all wrong.
'It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?'
It's not like that at all! 'Deceive' isn't a dirty word - i.e. it doesn't automatically mean something that is bad to do. 'Stabbing in the back', on the other hand, seems to. 'He kindly deceived me' may sound odd, but not at all self-contradictory like 'He kindly stabbed me in the back' (metaphorical meaning intended, of course). It seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that deception is sometimes a very decent, kind, considerate practice to engage in. The idea that it's automatically bad seems childish to me.
It's automatically hazardous to give someone a false map of the world. If you do it knowingly you have the responsibility to make sure no harm comes of it. Even if you take that responsibility seriously, and are competent to do so, taking it secretly without consent is an ethical problem.
My take on this:
There are no dirty words, but there are inaccurate ones. Use with care.
To clarify: regardless of whether you'll get something out of someone later, all else equal it's better to do things that satisfy their preferences than things that don't.
Which is why I said it was kind. It's still not necessarily a reasonable expectation.
Anyway, the hypothetical preference to be lied to is a bit suspicious, epistemologically. Let's distinguish it from a preference to never hear of anything you don't like, which is on its face unrealistic.
How would you experience getting your preference to be lied to without thereby knowing the unpleasant truth that you wanted to avoid? You want to know but you want to pretend the other person doesn't know that you know? It's a bit crazy.
How would you safely determine that someone prefers to be lied to, without exposing them to the truth they might not want? This isn't trivial: if you lie to someone who doesn't prefer it, I hope we can agree that's worse than the other way round.
Because she would have preferred to be lied to, I guess.
That's kind. But not all our preferences are reasonable expectations.
Anyway, maybe I weight things differently or it was a very short sucky play, but the downsides are still pretty compelling.
You're mixing metaphors. A stab in the back is better with a smaller knife, deliberately aimed at a non-vital area.
It's a dodgy metaphor at best anyway, but 'point' taken. :)
The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.
Why? Best case scenario is she keeps taking you to unenjoyable plays until you find you have to end the relationship yourself anyway or finally tell her the truth. Out of all the things in a relationship whose end was "a good thing for other reasons", one argument about whether a play was any good seems like a trivial thing to regret.
I can't favour lies as such. I am however on board with people honestly communicating the connotation that they care how you feel at the expense of the denotational literal meaning of their words.
In lies, the intention is not to soften but to deceive. So I don't even like the phrase "white lie". It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?
It made his life more interesting, and helped him socialize with classmates who believed in Santa.
I'm not going to criticise your decision, especially with regard to the social situation at school, which I can't speculate about. But I doubt it's more interesting to believe in the weird collection of junk memes that Santa Claus has become.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the truth is always more interesting, because there's aways more detail in it. Fake things are ultimately very boring; you poke at them a bit and there's nothing there. Flying reindeer are just pictures of approximately deer-like animals (usually more like red deer) positioned above the ground. Real reindeer are pretty amazing.
Thanks to everyone. I was winging it with the biblical phrasing, only because I thought it added a little style to the piece overall.
Congratulations - now you are less wrong about that ;)
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Unfortunately, psychology terms/traits are difficult to quantify, e.g. I can't know someone is "10% narcissistic" in the same way I know a glass of water is "10% full". I agree, different people have different levels of narcissism.
To test my narcissism detection mechanism, I will look at how narcissistic the main characters of a few other popular books are. This is a better test than looking for narcissism in other characters in HPMOR (where the most-frequently-observed character is the most narcissistic). The evidence against narcissism is the opposite of the traits listed: average or low sense of self-importance, primarily interested in others, goals are usually about others, many relationships, etc.
From these negative results I conclude that my narcissism detector is working adequately.
Hmm. Would I be wildly wrong in describing Mrs Bennett (Elizabeth's mother) as a terrible narcissist though? In which case Elizabeth should be more likely to be a narcissist herself, or a people-pleaser? Maybe she got lucky, because she's hardly either. Although her sisters, well...
Good fiction often rings true to real life, but it's no more than a bit of fun to analyse it as though it were a case study of something that actually happened. Still, I'm not against fun. I bet it was fun for Jane Austen to write the character of Mr Collins. Let's see your science explain him ;)