drafting "Accidentally Misleading People Should Be Embarrassing"

diff --git a/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md b/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md
index fa36bd0d431a4738df86f5b13aa4f7ab062b188b..924bd139b7a73840417d3e0999a53a3a7a616048 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md
+++ b/content/drafts/accidentally_misleading_people_should_be_embarrassing.md
@@ -4,9 +4,21 @@ Status: draft
 Category: philosophy
 Tags: honesty
 
-Sometimes we say things that we think we have reason to be true, but turn out to be false.
+Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ true—which end up causing others to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be [judged](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/Oct/the-relationship-between-social-punishment-and-shared-maps/) for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't _being misleading_ just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
 
- * Someone claims a paper says something: I ctrl-F and didn't find it, and accuse them of linking a cite that doesn't support their claim. It turns out that the claim is there, but my ctrl-F search missed it. That's embarrassing. "Yeah, well, what I meant was that I ctrl-F'd for it" would not be a good excuse
+The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is _embarrassment_ rather than defensiveness. Visibly embarrassed people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing what they say next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong.
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+Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: the text of their claim linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the paper justified the claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and a Discord DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay _did_ contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page.
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+I was _so embarrassed._ I was embarrassed even though I knew I was innocent in my soul: the browser UX bug wasn't my fault, and if the browser hadn't been buggy, then my initial search would have succeeded and I never would have complained.
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+ * "Yeah, well, what I meant was that I ctrl-F'd for it" would not be a good excuse
  * If the person hadn't been my enemy, would I have been more likely to find it
 
  * journalist who mis-paraphrases someone's actual views and then says, "But I wasn't there; is that what she said to me?" Even if we can't prove that he's mis-paraphrasing what she actually said, the journalist should be embarrassed that the paraphrase doesn't match actual views