You're allowed to be inconsistent

I often see friends run into a failure mode I call "false consistency," especially in the Effective Altruism and Rationality circles, where consistency is an important virtue. The False Consistency error is committed when someone has conflicting desires, thoughts, or beliefs, and bludgeons all but one of them

I often see friends run into a failure mode I call "false consistency," especially in the Effective Altruism and Rationality circles, where consistency is an important virtue. The False Consistency error is committed when someone has conflicting desires, thoughts, or beliefs, and bludgeons all but one of them into silence, in the name of "consistency." This has the effect of robbing that person of the ability to use inarticulable intuition and gut-level analysis, and I suspect that it leads to the accumulation of resentment and frustration. For example, imagine that Alice is pressuring Bob to

saved by

• Klaudia U.
• Elizabeth Qiu
• Cole Killian

related reading

• Deliberate Oncemindingourway.com
• Dark Arts of Rationality — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Not because you "should"mindingourway.com
• The rare people who are solidsashachapin.substack.com
• Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Internal Double Crux — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Fake thinking and real thinking - Joe Carlsmithjoecarlsmith.com
• Failures in Kindness — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Post 35: Your Standards are Too High - Neel Nandaneelnanda.io
• Bad Problems Don't Stop Being Bad Because Somebody's Wrong About Fault Analysis — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Aim high, even if you fall shortforum.effectivealtruism.org
• The hostile telepaths problem — LessWronglesswrong.com