Class 5: Value and Agency
In today’s reading and class, I will complete my argument that the signal/noise distinction is value-laden, anticipated all of the way back in chapter four in week three. Applying it correctly requires using value judgment. This is revealed in how people actually do apply this distinction. But we’ll also see that charity must be balanced by fit. And agency has to be balanced against the good. These two facts can explain systematic social imbalances in errors about the signal/noise distinction, coordination between discord about related topics, the allure of abusive narratives, and some kinds of transformative discovery in which we realize that we completely misunderstood someone else and our relationship with them.
The main assigned reading for today’s class is chapters 8 and 9 of When Things Get Personal. These chapters complete the argument anticipated in chapter four that the signal/noise distinction is value-laden.
As always, I have suggested background readings and some also recommended readings for thinking more about related things. This week’s suggested readings are my earliest and most recent papers about related themes, ‘Persons as Things’ and ‘Tipping Points: Abuse and Transformative Discovery’. If you’re patient enough to read these, you’ll find much of them redundant - ‘Persons as Things’ was my first attempt to think about related issues and it contains much sketchier versions of many of the ideas that you have already read, including a very short example illustrating the concept of discord. ‘Tipping Points’ was published as the first full-length article in the new journal Free & Equal this January. It follows, more-or-less, the whole arc of When Things Get Personal, with less detail but more footnotes, and framed in the same way as chapter nine.
My “also recommended” readings for this week include an unpublished paper that is about the significance of discord in the context of the kinds of ‘nits and spats’ examples explored in chapter eight. You may find it redundant or that its leading example provides a helpful contrasting example or that it goes slowly enough to be more instructive than chapter eight. They also include one of the key pieces offering an empirical argument that “true self” judgments are sensitive to evaluative judgment.