I super agree it’s important not to conflate “do you keep actually-thoughtful promises you think people expected you to interpret as real commitments” and “do you take all superficially-promise-like-things as serious promises”! And while I generally want people to think harder about what they’re asking for wrt commitments, I don’t think going overboard on strict-promise interpretations is good. Good promises have a shared understanding between both parties. I think a big part of building trust with people is figuring out a good shared language and context for what you mean, including when making strong and weak commitments.
I wrote something related my first draft but removed since it seemed a little tangtial, but I’ll paste it here:
”It’s interesting that there are special kinds of ways of saying things that hold more weight than other ways of saying things. If I say “I absolutely promise I will come to your party”, you will probably have a much higher expectation that I’ll attend then if I say “yeah I’ll be there”. Humans have fallible memory, they sometimes set intentions and then can’t carry through. I think some of this is a bit bad and some is okay. I don’t think everyone would be better off if every time they said they would do something they treated this as an ironclad commitment and always followed through. But I do think it would be better if we could move at least somewhat in this direction.”
Which, based on your comment, I now think the thing to move for is not just “interpreting commitments as stronger” but rather “more clarity in communication about what kind of commitments are what type.”
I super agree it’s important not to conflate “do you keep actually-thoughtful promises you think people expected you to interpret as real commitments” and “do you take all superficially-promise-like-things as serious promises”! And while I generally want people to think harder about what they’re asking for wrt commitments, I don’t think going overboard on strict-promise interpretations is good. Good promises have a shared understanding between both parties. I think a big part of building trust with people is figuring out a good shared language and context for what you mean, including when making strong and weak commitments.
I wrote something related my first draft but removed since it seemed a little tangtial, but I’ll paste it here:
”It’s interesting that there are special kinds of ways of saying things that hold more weight than other ways of saying things. If I say “I absolutely promise I will come to your party”, you will probably have a much higher expectation that I’ll attend then if I say “yeah I’ll be there”. Humans have fallible memory, they sometimes set intentions and then can’t carry through. I think some of this is a bit bad and some is okay. I don’t think everyone would be better off if every time they said they would do something they treated this as an ironclad commitment and always followed through. But I do think it would be better if we could move at least somewhat in this direction.”
Which, based on your comment, I now think the thing to move for is not just “interpreting commitments as stronger” but rather “more clarity in communication about what kind of commitments are what type.”