Please don’t falsify your preferences

There’s a trap that I notice some people fall into — one that the most conscientious among us are often most drawn to, and that seems widespread in tell culture.

• i’d like to know what your preferences are
• there are often positive-sum, pareto-positive trades that could be made, but these are difficult to find unless peoples’ preferences are known
  • e.g. both of us wanting to go to a particular restaurant, but going to a different one bc we both thought the other wanted to go there
• more fundamentally: you’re lying! lying is bad! you should at least have an extremely compelling story for why you’re lying before you do so! you should not do so out of habit!
• also:
  • you become heavily incentivized to mislead yourself about your preferences, which leads to a whole host of issues, the strongest among them looking something like “i hate everything in my life, but i’m supposed to like it all, but i can’t say i don’t like it or even think i don’t like it”
    • also means you grow to understand your preferences less & less, which feeds into the above — and makes it harder to keep your outward preferences matching your inward ones
  • it forces others to guess at your preferences w limited info, which is straightforwardly more & unnecessary work for them
  • creating a pattern of falsifying your preferences means that even when you’re telling the truth, i don’t know what your preferences are — which can be really frustrating for you, because your internal experience is “i’m telling the truth, finally, and he STILL doesn’t believe me,” but my internal experience is “your statements about your preferences give me fairly little indication of what your true preferences are”

caveats:

• a lot of ppl are in ask culture — where preference falsification is common — which makes me think there’s something to it i’m missing.
• this can often come off as rude. stating your true preferences in a straightforward & honest way w/o coming off as rude to the other person is a skill, and requires a lot of tact. the corollary is that by default, you’ll probably make others angry in ways that are difficult to notice by stating your true preferences — feedback loops commonly are slow & difficult to notice, here.
  • there’s a way of doing this where you say, “I want to go to McDonald’s for dinner.” and another way where you say, “I sorta want to go to McDonald’s for dinner, but mostly I’m just hungry & want to go somewhere that has a burger. If you would rather go to In-n-Out or a steakhouse or something, that’s fine by me — but I’d really rather not go to a vegan restaurant. Let’s go to McDonald’s by-default, but feel free to point me in the direction of a different restaurant that would have a burger.”
  • this requires a lot of well-built social skills, which some folks don’t have.
• this requires knowing your preferences quite well, which itself is a skill that requires a lot of introspection & metacognition.

(This is another Failure in Kindness.)