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It's a good mental practice to always be aware that stated intentions and actual reasons are entirely separate things. They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coi
by BurningFrog 4y ago
It's a good mental practice to always be aware that stated intentions and actual reasons are entirely separate things.
They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coincide.
The advanced level of this is to be aware this applies even to your own actions.
- llamataboot 4y agoThe super advanced level is to realize it applies to all of your /thoughts/ which is mostly a pattern matching brain and personality built around the ways it found to make sense of some things justifying the chaos in retrospect :D
- hallway_monitor 4y agoCorrect but this is a different phenomenon. You are talking about post hoc justification for your behavior, where your brain is very good at making up stories that have nothing to do with the original motivation. I believe GP is referring to the fact that the true aim of much of this legislation had nothing to do with protecting kids from the beginning. They use that rhetoric because it's easy to get people on board and much more difficult to explain the real world implications for security.
- dcow 4y agoI didn’t get that impression. You’re not wrong that something can be justified “for the children” but have an ulterior motive. But I think what’s being argued is that the initial motive is actually honestly for the children and that that goal blinds people to the reality of how bad or pointless or even perversely harmful the proposed solution is.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI think it's a mix of cynical PR campaigns and honest activism, and I'm not smart enough to say which is the biggest factor in each instance. Separately, the honest activists are often lying to themselves, in the sense that their real motives are not what the they tell themselves and others.
- yboris 4y agoA great book to realize that the reasons people give for what they do are not the real reasons is Elephant in the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda... A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adaptive-Unconscious/dp/0674013824 https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...
- BurningFrog 4y agoYes, I learned much of this from Elephant In The Brain. Biggest shock to my belief systems this century. May have to read Strangers to Ourselves as well.