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Judgments often smuggle in implicit standards — LessWrong

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Our brains often use sleight-of-hand to hide fear-based motivation behind a guise of objectivity. This is particularly linked to the word “good”, which does a lot of work in a lot of people’s psychologies. For example, people often think that they, or their work, is “not good enough”. By itself, that sentence doesn’t make sense: good enough for what? Imagine going on a hike and commenting along the way “this rock isn’t heavy enough” or “this stream isn’t wide enough” without any background context. That sounds bizarre, and rightly so—the relevant threshold is very different depending on the context of the judgment. In other words, judgments are inherently two-place functions: they take in both some property and some threshold, and evaluate whether the property is above the threshold. Of course, people often don’t need to make the threshold explicit—if the reason you’re gathering rocks is to anchor down your tent, you can just say “this rock isn’t heavy enough” without further elaborati

x Judgments often smuggle in implicit standards — LessWrong Replacing fear Motivations Rationality Frontpage 101 Judgments often smuggle in implicit standards by Richard_Ngo 15th May 2023 4 min read 5 101 Our brains often use sleight-of-hand to hide fear-based motivation behind a guise of objectivity. This is particularly linked to the word “good”, which does a lot of work in a lot of people’s psychologies. For example, people often think that they, or their work, is “not good enough”. By itself, that sentence doesn’t make sense: good enough for what ? Imagine going on a hike and commenting al

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