Personal philosophy calibration.

[snarp]

I am naturally inclined to be a mean, judgmental jerk who writes people off entirely, which I do not like. I believe in the concept of a Bad Person fervently on an emotional level after about 11:00 PM, but not really in any other set of circumstances. So for the past few years, I've been trying to do like this:

If I find I'm thinking of someone as Bad, I try to nail down exactly what thing(s) they did that made me form that opinion.

And if they're justified, I go like, "okay, but what specific area of Badness is this?" And I try to recategorize the person, in my brain-spreadsheet, as "Cannot Presently Be Trusted To Make Decisions In This Area": and then there's a sub-table containing the list of things they are Bad at. If I have the mental energy for it, this table includes the dates of last observed failure of judgment, because maybe [name] has learned a valuable life lesson about [not hurting [category of person]] in between [date of last observed failure/defense of earlier failure matching category and] and [today's date].

(Spreadsheets obviously aren't the right format for this, maybe it'll get easier once I'm better at SQL.)

Comments

[vass]

Sometimes keeping receipts on people can be for their own benefit. Compared to the ugh field of I Can't Remember What Their Deal Is, I Just Know They Suck For Some Reason. If for no other reason than that sometimes the receipt turns out to say "okay, actually that was ten years ago and they haven't done anything comparable since," or "I heard about that incident from X, who later turned out to make shit like that up."

LJ-notes, while not as flexible as a database or a spreadsheet, also has its uses, and can help one disambiguate Well Meaning But Terminally Obtuse, Flips Out And Attacks Whenever They Can Justify It, and A Noted Pedant From The Plain Of Mans.