[hans1729]

>it then makes sense (and is good) for principled people to trust their judgement, even if it makes them an outcast.

I don't get this. Being judgemental always seemed immature to me. Being curious and trying to understand why individuals or groups do seemingly irrational things: yes. Being judgemental (or "principled" (is this synonymous?)): no. To me, that was always a sign of someone who hasn't made sense of themselves yet. At what point have you made so much sense of anything that you can make a defining principle out of it? That just robs one of agency, reminding of religion and stubbornness.

I get that being fixated on some idiom is helpful in avoiding mental drift and maintaining focus, but that seems like the end of the road in terms of advantages. At the same time, that fixation limits your ability to go beyond the things you felt you understood years ago, whenever the principle was cemented into your cortex.

Is it a desire for deeper stability? For ground truth? Because if I look at what people actually are, no matter how intelligent they may be in some domain, what I see is not able to come up with general idioms. Not even close, actually. What I see is brains trying to make sense out of noise with extreme simplifications, rather fitting the data to their model than the other way around. I never got the advantage of saying "well now MY model fits this pattern, PERIOD!".

[flir]

I don't need to eat the whole apple to know it's rotten. Using your judgement saves a lot of time. Your way (an infinite loop of "trying to understand" with no actual conclusion) just leaves you open to being repeatedly bitten by the same dog.

[Bancakes]

Most people are not deep or interesting, and are easy to plot on a database. If silicon valley companies know being a consumer - for instance - is a wretched lifestyle, then so can the average person.

I don't need cutesy ways to understand it, I resent it. Having to send your kids to school with fancy clothes and shiny toys - what a setback in society.

At some point you need to have a set of axioms to ground yourself so that you do not shift from your optimal lifestyle. At some point, you should only be interested in people better than you.

[es7]

> Most people are not deep or interesting, and are easy to plot on a database

This strikes me as only very superficially true. In my own experience as a human, I've found that every person I meet is unique and interesting in meaningful ways. I didn't use the term "deep" because it seems ill-defined in this context. If one of the main ways you think about "most people" is "not deep", then it seems to me that you're letting arrogance blind you to reality.

What I mean by that is that there's an infinite number of ways for depth to emerge in our complex reality. Thinking deeply with the most linear and rational parts of our brains on a specific category of topics is just one of those many ways. Many times, the illusion of shallowness emerges when the "others" understand something intuitively that the judgmental person only knows how to think about logically.

Fancy clothes and toys are a status symbol. Within interpersonal hierarchies, status is incredibly important and many parents believe that it is important for their child to grow up with a sufficiently high feeling of status within their peer groups. That helps the child learn interpersonal interactions in a certain way, and it helps them develop their self-esteem and self-image in certain ways and it also reflects back on the parents. You might choose to dismiss status and social hierarchy and social development as irrelevant to the life you want to live, but it doesn't make the topic any less complex or interesting for the people who do value those things.

Reading to the end of your comment again, I'm hoping you're just a troll, because a worldview that groups people into categories like "better than you" and "worse than you" without context is a dangerous worldview. I hope for your own sake that you take the time to revisit that opinion.

[Bancakes]

Status used to be defined by achievements - it had weight back then. Consumerism is a modern phenomenon and to me seems to enable people to compensate for a lack of character and skill with abundance of inanimate objects. Suzy wears an artsy dress - can she draw one? Billy sports an expensive calculator - can he plot with it well?

I say people are not deep because often they cease growing, and instead develop sentimentality and culture around something which is mass-produced and soulless. Then human connections shift from direct and interpersonal to being routed over a net of purchased goods.

I don't like it either but humans are normally distributed over different metrics, and it makes sense to look above and climb up, instead of accepting yourself. People change, don't be yourself.

[watwut]

The issue here is, that good sounding high minded principle you describe in first paragraph fairly often amounts to enabling. It also puts great emphasis to understanding aggressor and literally none to understanding victim ... which turns into victim blaming and petty scrutiny of victim fairly often.

And I don't even have super big issues in mind. It happens in fairly normal abusive/low level corruption situations the most.

[dorgo]

So what? Blame the aggressor and stop thinking? It feels like another fallacy.

[somenameforme]

Might you be conflating the notion of a scientific principle with that of an ethical, moral, or otherwise 'social' principle. Should we treat animals humanely? I expect you think the answer is so obvious that this sounds like a rhetorical question.

Why? And I'm sure you and I could both give plenty of reasons, but ultimately it's just an opinion. Someone observing a cat torturing another animal solely for its own entertainment (with no intention of even eating it), might well argue why we then in turn feel so obligated to treat them so well - especially were roles reversed in terms of size, there's no doubt the cat would treat us as just another toy for its passing amusement. And such behavior is far from limited to our feline friends.

And this is what a principle is. It's an "ought" that isn't necessarily based on anything concrete. Do you value security or freedom more? There's no right or wrong answer there, it comes down to what your own personal values and principles. But the reason we hold the principles and values we do is because we believe them to be right. And so in this case, I see no reason to imagine we are not judging other people (even if we might like to imagine its not the case).

And yes, when principles come into contradiction with no room for a middle ground, conflict will eventually emerge. It's the story of humanity's past, present, and undoubtedly future - as much as we might want to not want it to be so.

[dorgo]

Have you ever looked at this as competing ideas fighting for domenance in the environment of human minds? We are not the protagonists in this. We are the resources these ideas are using in their endeavors.

[routerl]

> Being judgemental always seemed immature to me

This might just be a matter of vocabulary. I come from a tradition where "judgment" means pretty much the same thing as "inference", and it's not possible that inferential reasoning is "immature", so we probably disagree about definitions.

> At what point have you made so much sense of anything that you can make a defining principle out of it?

Well, there are certain fairly uncontroversial things. For example, I think that an argument's conclusions should follow, according to the rules of inference, from that argument's premises. This is just applying deduction to everyday life, as a principle. Of course, as with many real-life applications of general principles, it comes with caveats; in the case of deduction, for example, it calls for an understanding that most things in life don't lend themselves to formal, deductive arguments.

Nevertheless, the point here is that I haven't made "so much sense of anything", but have borrowed the best (as far as I can tell) tools my culture has provided me with, in order to make sense of things. At this general level of description, it should be recognizable that I'm talking about things like math, science, and many others.

> Is it a desire for deeper stability?

Sure, that's part of it. This is why medicine exists, for instance. The human desire to normalize the wild oscillations of nature is why we make clothing, build shelters, grow crops, etc etc.

> I never got the advantage of saying "well now MY model fits this pattern, PERIOD!".

When confronted with human goals, some models succeed, and some don't. A theory of infection that doesn't lead to vaccines will, probably, succumb to the brutal fact that "this pattern of thinking isn't useful".

[golergka]

Have you experienced a moment when most of your nation supports an unjust invasion, and many openly and proudly dream of genocide?

[waqf]

I think it's very useful in such a case to investigate, as scientifically and dispassionately as possible, exactly how such a moment came to be. And I think that would involve "getting into the heads" of the supporters of the cause. Do you not think so?

[golergka]

That's true, but that shouldn't stop you from being able to pass judgement.

Just in case you're wondering, that is NOT a hypothetical example for me.

[watwut]

Well, if you see that to be in dichotomy with being principled or judging, then it is less noble then you seem to imply.

[waqf]

If by "being principled or judging" you mean labelling people as evil and dismissing them then I don't accept that that's axiomatically noble.

If by "being principled or judging" you mean having any ethical values at all, then I don't see that it is inconsistent with striving to understand others' minds; I was asking because it appeared that the poster I was responding to thought so.

[watwut]

It is not noble to intentionally bias yourself toward "proudly dream of genocide" which is exactly what you propose is doing. You do propose to spend a lot of effort to get into the heads of perpetrators ... but there is no equivalent feeling of pressure to get into the head and reality of victims who need help, support and defense right now. There is also difference between explaining and rationalizing and what is proposed here sounds to me closer to "rationalizing" - because you start with assumption that analysis should not end in negative judgement.

The "how it came to be" in real world history tend to be fairly long complicated story. It gets to be explained and revised literally for years after the fact, as important document start surfacing or people who were afraid to talk starts to talk. Typically it starts 20 years ago, when some journalists ended up beaten and arrested and someone's business interests something.

You can in fact study history of holocaust with principled opinion and judgement that Holocaust was bad.

[waqf]

I am not "biasing myself toward" a point of view; you are putting words in my mouth. If you can't consider someone's point of view without agreeing with it, then I do see the miscommunication. I can, and I also think it's necessary and important.

I am interested in solving the long-term problem of preventing the next genocide.

You are interested in solving the short-term problem of alleviating the current one.

They are both important work. Likely they are good fits for our respective skillsets. I don't mean to stop you from solving your problem and I'm not mad at you. I don't know why you want to insult me and stop me from solving mine.

> You can in fact study history of holocaust with principled opinion and judgement that Holocaust was bad.

Yes. That's exactly what I am proposing to do.

[dorgo]

I think that to pass judgement bears responsibility. So if you want to judge your neighbours go above and beyond reasonable effort.

I'm not religious, but I like what Christians say: do not judge if you don't want to be judged.