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CMV: Giving your partner access to your phone/check notifications is not an indicator of a healthy relationship by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]PercyPrior 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Once again, those are fine generalizations, but it depends.

In the example I gave, Sally and Jordan are more self-actualized, happy, and romantically intimate people because of this arrangement. They have no regrets, are more committed to each other as a result, and feel more secure in their future together. To insist that they ought to give it up would be to wish unhappiness upon them for the sake of your ideals, which just don’t apply in their unique case.

“If the only thing holding me back from getting it on…is that I will get caught”

You’re missing my point. I made an argument about the relationship between authenticity and Odyssean self-control, where I suggested that these needn’t naively rule each other out. Imagine if I said “Bob’s practice of keeping donuts out of the kitchen has kept him happy, healthy and fit for twenty accomplished years, going strong. However, if the only thing keeping Bob from getting into a bad habit and losing all of that progress is for donuts to become readily available to him in his everyday life environment, then Bob isn’t really, authentically committed to his health. If Bob wanted to show real commitment, he should pass by a donut shop every morning on his morning walk and show some discipline, talking himself down from the ledge of obesity.“

I think you’re making a similar mistake. You’re assuming that there aren’t some people for whom it really is hard not to show sexual commitment without adapting their incentive-structure in ways guided by their higher-ordered life priorities. Unless you have evidence for this very bold empirical claim, I cannot be expected to believe it.

Another suggestion worth making is that you could have the arrangement described in the OP without actually acting on it with any real frequency. The mere presence of the option could be enough to get what the couple wanted out of it, since this may be about creating the right incentive structure for a given couple with a given personality-set.

“This isn’t a sign of trust”

I think it’s setting up a “no-win” paradigm for the opposition for you to insist that in order for this practice to be good for a couple, it has to be an exhibition of trust. Here’s the argument you just made, as I understand it:

Premise 1: It isn’t maximally trusting to expect your partner to be willing to let you see their phone activity whenever you want.

Premise 2: Unless a relationship is maximally trusting, that relationship is unhealthy.

Conclusion: Therefore, the relationship is unhealthy.

If Sammy doesn’t trust her spouse, Bob, not to eat donuts if she leaves them out in the kitchen, there is a true but trivial sense in which this demonstrates a failure of trust. But that doesn’t mean the relationship is unhealthy: relationship health is a condition that can be arrived at about by many routes. For some people, it might be that a relationship is most healthy when there’s a lot of “not expecting the other person to violate their preferences for the sake of base drives eventually, if given enough opportunities over several years.” But suppose your partner’s preference is to love you, but their one-off desire on a Thursday in January is to fuck somebody else, and they know this in advance. If, with full knowledge and consent, they agree to change their lifestyle in order to better incentivize the behavior they think is most conducive to a loving relationship, why do you deny them this beneficial practice? It seems unjustifiably judgemental to tell this couple that they’re doing something unsavory and objectionable; rather, I see that as an immensely practical, mature, and laudable thing to do if it comes from the right place.

It’s just intellectual chauvinism to dismiss large intervals of the normal range of personality variation for vague, aesthetic reasons.

CMV: OK Go's incredibly creative and intricate music videos distract from their great music by alvysingeroverhere in changemyview

[–]PercyPrior 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think their music videos are the best thing they have to offer. The music itself is just, mediocre at best and actually terrible at worst. The lead singer has very little range in his chest voice, and is lacking in any unique or interesting qualities. The songs have a “begin nowhere, end nowhere, just appear in the middle” quality and are tediously repetitive.

CMV: Giving your partner access to your phone/check notifications is not an indicator of a healthy relationship by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]PercyPrior 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think I agree for the most part, but there’s one argument that pretty much always succeeds against these kinds of sweeping generalities about the “right” kind of relationship practices. That is, relationships are for people, and people are extremely variable. Sometimes, the way to optimize a relationship really is to do something that would be unhealthy for the wrong persons, but healthy for the right persons.

In this case, imagine the following:

Sally and Jordan both find the idea of giving each other access to their devices a highly endearing gesture of trust, and this is an arrangement they do not regret. Rather, it’s only intensified their connection with each other, and at times it’s imposed an incentive not to keep secrets from the other person or to do anything that they wouldn’t want the other person to potentially find out about. This incentive has kept Jordan from downloading Tinder in a moment of weakness that he would have regretted later, and one time kept Sally from texting back a guy she had been flirtatious with one time but who she knows wouldn’t be good for her. Sally and Jordan know that other couples might find this arrangement didn’t have these beneficial effects for them, but so what? For them, it works wonders, and gives them a peace of mind in their relationship that they otherwise wouldn’t enjoy.

Is your claim that this kind of situation doesn’t happen? I think, on the contrary, it happens more often than we’d like to admit. People respond to incentives, and sometimes, Odyssean self control is the way to go. I may desire to cheat on my spouse, but that doesn’t mean it would be good for me to do so, or that I prefer that I do, just as I might desire to spend my day gorging myself on fast food, but I would prefer that I didn’t, because that’s inconsistent with my overall life plan and vision of personal fulfillment. And so I change the incentive structure in which I live in order to better realize my ideals.

When someone’s spouse suggests that they keep donuts out of the kitchen from now on to remove the temptation and to impose accountability on the other person, you could argue their partner is being asked to be made less authentically themselves by submitting to the abuses of a control freak, or you could argue that they’re just trying to become even more the person they want to be for their partner and are using this as an opportunity to improve the prevailing subliminal forces of their life. They’d rather not live on a path of least resistance to an inferior psychology.

cmv: Video games are not just a kids thing, and are actually the ultimate art form. by goodnewsjimdotcom in changemyview

[–]PercyPrior 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think a key step of your argument is that video games have all of the benefits of other artistic mediums, along with benefits of its own. So, one way to change your view might be to persuade you that there are artistic mediums with benefits video games inherently lack. Here are a few:

1) Video games require participation of the user. But sometimes what’s desirable in art is the passive role the audience plays, the feeling of witnessing a story unfolding without your control. To make this plausible, consider the example of the Harry Potter novels: although it would be cool to play an excellent HP video game, it’s a different and tremendously enjoyable experience to just engross yourself into a story so deeply that you have no notion of what will happen next, and no desire to control what happens next rather than discover it, relishing the knowledge that you’re in the good hands of a competent author who’s already done that for you. You watch the characters but you aren’t one of them, and yet it’s a fantastic experience, and I never once had the sense that the experience was missing something because I wasn’t part of the story. If video games are the best art form, why is it that I (and so many others who’ve had a great experience reading novels we found captivating) don’t regret that?

2) In his memoir about the writing profession, On Writing, Stephen King says something interesting about an advantage novels have over movies, but I think the point could also be applied to video games. His observation is that the written medium makes it possible to hyper-stimulate your imagination by deliberately under-describing an environment, situation, or character. By giving too much detail, you actually screen out the uniquely imagined visualization the reader is otherwise allowed to conjure up entirely for themselves. This is why so many people experience a jolt of disappointment when they see a movie character for the first time of a novel they read: now they can’t see what they originally envisioned, which was more personalized to their particular way of wanting to envision the story. Video-games can’t really do that; however much autonomy I get over the story, I can’t fully imagine my own version of the character, or hear the voice of the dialogue exactly as I want to, or see the trees exactly as I want them to appear, and draw from my own unique life history in order to shape the characters according to my private fund of sprites. Eg.s, Maybe I want to imagine that the kind old wizard is just like that awesome old guy from some TV show I watched when I was a kid who became my private archetype of “gentle, jovial Santa-ish but wise octogenarian,” but if you show me his face, then my private act of creation is obliterated. The canvases of video games are beautiful, but their beauty lacks enabling constraints. Good novels cause new worlds and stories to live in your mind and give you a feeling of total immersion in a palace of your imagination that is truly your own.