Thoughts on Judging

Jun 24, 2019
Judging is a means for us to reduce the noise in a complicated world, extracting meaning amidst an overload of information. In this manner, to judge is to be human, and any attempt to completely forgo it is unnatural. While the inclination for the human mind is to judge, what also remains true is our ability to control their impact on our actions and belief—that we actively have the choice to believe or forgo what first appears to be true.

Since judgement is personal, it is inevitable that our interactions with it vary by person, the diversity spanning with two extremes. The first is a person who is unrealistically optimistic abou the world and individuals in their surroundings. They fail to recognize the fallibility of human character, leaving them vulnerable to the manipulations of others or likely to end up binded in relationships not based on mutual respect. The other extreme are the cynics, who assume ill about others at the slightest of their mistakes. Yet the cynics fall prey to the hypocrises of their own judgement as they are oblivious to their own fallibility.

From a moral standpoint, it may be slightly more preferable to be the naive person than the cynic. Everyone was once the former—their attitude primarily determined by a lack of experience or simple unawareness; while the latter usually comes from a place of arrogance or a tragic event that breeds mistrust in fellow human beings.

What appears to be most prudent is to be a realist—a healthy compromise between the two extremes. Unless the other person is in a position where we are in a state of dependence, we should attempt to see the good in them and give them the benefit of the doubt where different interpretations are possible. It is through this endeavor that we can most reliably absolve ourselves of moral hypocrisy. However, if past incidents are repeated and may afflict us in the future, it is best to assume that it will happen again out of prudence. If the past incidents have no possibility of directly influencing us, we are no longer granted the moral authority to assume ill about the other person; for they have not done any wrong to us.

Jun 25, 2019
Excerpt from The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. Human beings have a tendency to overfit, especially rare events and random noise into narrative explanations.

We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters…. The [narrative] fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.