When consoling people, I try to avoid saying things like “none of this is your fault” or “there’s nothing you could have done.” Agency for blamelessness is a bad trade. More often than not, it helps most to have friends who see you as strong when you feel your weakest
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Suppose someone takes a big even-money bet that a die roll won't be 6, and they lose? Seems legit to console them with "You didn't do anything wrong"?
People behave in accordance with their expectations. Generally, they're not dealing with decisions with outcomes based entirely on probability and chance, but also on available information. We tend to sympathize more with people whose priors & evidence align with our own.
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I think that if you care primarily about helping the person, you can focus a bit less on the epistemology of knowledge (although, you know... as with all things, stay humble) and more on retaining that person's sense of ability to operate usefully within the world
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We may be at cross purposes, because I feel like that's just what this is about? To say "Yes, things went wrong, but you made the right call. You failed but you're still able to operate usefully in the world, because for humans, capability doesn't mean always winning"
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