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by hi-im-mi-ih 3061 days ago
The point of the list is to reduce the best human behavior into a small cheat sheet. It's like boilerplate that includes all the important functions.

The complexity of the environment created by and occupied by human experiences is infinite. There are infinite scenarios that humans find themselves in, and there are infinite positive responses to those scenarios. You can take any positive human response to a given scenario and "disprove" the response's positive outcome by changing something about the scenario. But once you do that, you introduce other positive responses that could taken instead.

The principles boil down it into 25 patterns of human behavior that tend to result in success for the individual and his/her greater community. The list is an optimum solution: lowest number of characters for the highest amount of good outcome if followed. When confronting the complexity of existence, a set of guidelines is useful to refer to.

However, anyone that consults a list of principles when their family is in danger is likely not smart enough to comprehend the list anyways, so it does not apply to them.

2 comments

Not using absolute terms like "never", and instead using terms like "almost never" or "except in emergencies", would acknowledge and allow for the complex realities you describe, without adding significantly to the number of characters (an absurd metric) and without sacrificing clarity.

In fact JP acknowledges reality when he excepts lies of omission. So the fact that he doesn't do so in other obvious places is strange.

You're left with some rules that are easy to prove nonsensical and easily dismissed. Which is unfortunate.

More correctly, it is someone's opinion about what an optimum solution might be.

I disagree with that opinion, for reasons that I explained above.

You're also not interested in debating your opinions, which is your right but also frustrating.