underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think tit for tat was written from the perspective of nation vs nation decision-making.
It assumes you have roughly equivalent power, i.e. person vs person or business vs business.
I don’t think it applies in person vs boss, or mom 'n pop shop vs international conglomerate.
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It depends on how you abstract. I believe that small patterns are strongly indicative of larger patterns. My life experiences have largely reflected this pattern. All of my worst business encounters were with people that cheated on their partners in their personal life. They ultimately showed the same types of behavior in business. The best people I have worked for were exactly the opposite. This includes both while running my own business for years and many people I have worked for as an employee.
The concept is also an extension of my realization that anyone that likes to talk about everyone else negatively at work when one on one, is doing the exact same thing with every other individual when I am not around and is saying the same negative stuff about me. Such a person appears to be everyone’s friend on a personal level, but is actually stabbing everyone in the back equally to elevate themselves and increase their own awareness of weaknesses they might highlight or play against others. The act of talking negatively about everyone else is a strike or vector that will later manifest if given the opportunity or under pressure.
I am metaphorically applying Newton’s premise that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, to the probability of future human behavior. If the person indicates a certain vector of thought that causes damage, they tilt the scales of future interaction and are therefore some degree more likely than not to produce a suboptimal future compared to others with a more positive track record, character, and ethics.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
As long as they punch down and kiss up to the right people, assholes can usually reduce “tit for tat” to “tit for slap-on-the-wrist”.
I agree you that they are more likely than not to produce a suboptimal future.
I just disagree with the premise that “winning less” is the same as tit for tat.
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I totally respect anyone that chooses to limit their perspective scope.
For me, everything in life is a messy statistical abstraction. I would not go out of my way to make decisions or inconvenience myself in instances where I see vectors of negativity and small errors in ethical disposition. These are simply elements I passively note, and when faced with a choice, such past occurrences will weigh into my decisions.
For me, I struggle to recall specifics like memorized trivia, instances of certain behaviors, or even people’s names in conversational real time. I can recall most of this information if I try, but I must focus on it to do so. I instantly have access to my abstracted thoughts and oversimplifications that exist on something like a three dimensional roadmap. When I note these types of behaviors, it is like I am painting a picture of what driving down a familiar street feels like, and I remember that picture and place well, only that imagery is the actions of the person. It takes me a while to think about all the features that make up that place, but I know where I am and what that means just by visiting. The person is not any feature but an ambiance that exists in my mind. It is their identity to me. I may not recall the name feature well, but this is not who they are to me; they are an abstraction like everything else; a likely set of probabilities, but one where I’m always curious how they evolve or add new features. No one is static after all, unless they are dead. Still I weigh negative vectors into those statistics objectively and make predictions based upon them.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Fair enough. I get overwhelmed by all the ethical questions that come with being in the real world.
My partner outsourced most of that mental work and focused on trying to be a good person from moment to moment. I think she would’ve broadly agreed with you from a karma standpoint.