#intent and predictability

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the valuable but annoying things with thinking in probabilities is like ....

Sometimes you say something to a person, and you're actually consciously, deliberately saying words that have different meanings in the different possibilities... words that would mean different possible things or invoke different associations or feelings, depending on which of the different possibilities is true of who they are, where they're at, what mood they're in.

Because sometimes that's better than just flinging the same intended meaning at all possibilities of who they are in that moment. In fact sometimes meaning one thing is impossible. Sometimes within the possibilities you see, you can't see any statement you could make that would get taken the same way in all possibilities and which also fits all your relevant values.

But like, some people don't get that - they don't think like that, so they can't really put themselves in those shoes, or maybe they have never even consciously conceived of the experience, or of it being practically doable by humans in the real world.

So then if one of those people asks you "what did you mean by that?", it's like... (very tired sigh).

[mentalisttraceur]

There's a kind of person who will insist that when they say words, their meaning is always solely a question of what they intended. I used to be one of them.

The persective is: there is enough of a knowable consensus for what words mean and what the rules are for combining words into richer meanings, so if I did my part to encode my meaning in words, then

any deviation in your interpretation from my meaning was your fault, and

any bad emotional reactions you have that are inaccurate to what I meant are your fault.

..or if not your "fault", then at least self-inflicted - the result of something that you ought to fix in your cognition.

But.

Sometimes "but I didn't mean it that way, it's not my fault it was interpreted like that!" has the same logical shape as "but I didn't mean for that piano to fall on him, it's not my fault he didn't have the awareness or ability to move out of the way!" Not everyone can process words the way you need them to be processed to not have them hit wrongly. And sometimes the relevant lack of knowledge or interpretation skill is discernible in advance.

And as I said about intent and predictability: you cannot make a choice with known results and then say you didn't intend those results. You cannot see a person walking below and drop the piano anyway and then say you didn't mean it. And if you choose to not look, that's just willful negligence.

The more we can predict what someone's interpretation will be, the less we can claim that our intended meaning is just what we want it to be.

[mentalisttraceur]

Intent and Predictability

If you know in advance that a choice will have a result, you cannot make that choice and then say you did not intend the result.

You can say you didn't want the result. You can say that you deeply regret the result. You can say that it was not a goal of yours, not part of the target result. You can say that result actually weighed against making that choice. You can say you wish there was any other way. But you intended it.

Some people genuinely misunderstand "intent" to mean one of those other distinctions. But we need to distinguish knowingly choosing to set in motion a causal ripple while sufficiently confidently predicting that ripple, versus setting in motion one that you did not predict was certain enough to happen. "Intent" is the best word we currently have for that.

More importantly, some social values, people's justifications for their actions, and even popular understandings of certain concepts, implicitly rely on dodging this, and part of fixing that is to point out that if you have enough certainty about a likely effect, the only way to not "intend" that effect is to stick your head in the sand about what it will be.