Should you care about other people's judgements of you?

depends on leverage, competence, knowledge, and alignment

A perfect copy of yourself stares at you, two feet in front of you. It can see through your eyes, hear through your ears, and whatnot. Should you care about what you think about it? It is impossible to not care about your own judgement, if you didn’t, then you would not make any judgements at all.

So, a better question: should people’s spatial and ontological distance away from you influence whether you care about their thoughts? Extrapolating from this example, I’d say no. Then, the question is, what makes somebody’s judgement worth anything?

Let us assume you and your perfect clone no longer share sensory input, and have now separated and lived lives for three years, and meet up again. Should you care about what they think about you? Inevitably, due to the separatation in experience and knowledge, both of you will have taken on different paths in life and have different knowledge.

Imagine the same thought experiment but with an identical twin, then a sibling, then a cousin, a random person, and then a rock. What we see here is that the extent to which we trust a thing’s judgement depends on their proximity to us, particularly their proximity in values.

If two things have different values, then naturally they will make different judgements. Even if you acknowledge that values and perspective are relative, it’s impossible to believe anything different from what you believe. Your perspective will always dominate.

Now, imagine the same thought experiment, but the subjects — the copy, identical twin, and so on — are reasonably more intelligent than you and know 2x as much about the world than you do. You might not privilege their judgement more than yours, but you will inevitably take their higher levels of competence into account when evaluating it.

Now, imagine all of the judging subjects have guns pointed at your head. They will shoot you if you do not care about what they think about you. Unless your death drive dominates, you will probably end up caring, or at least pretending to care about what they think about you.

So

What I am trying to communicate is that the importance of a subject’s judgement to another subject depends on the following factors:

1. How similar their values are to yours.

2. How much they know about you.

3. How competent they are.

4. How much leverage they have over you.

When we meet people we do not know in real life, it doesn’t make sense to care about what they think — there’s no guarantee they share your values, have any leverage over you, are competent, and it is very unlikely they know anything about you. However, it is sensible to care about people’s opinions of you if they possess some of those factors — leverage is sufficient, otherwise, the other three are necessary and only sufficient when together.

Caring about what other people think of you is stigmatised as a result — it signals that other people have leverage over you. Or, that you are not properly recognising which people actually matter, which is quite common, sometimes I commit this error myself.

There's nothing inherently insecure about caring about other people’s opinions. In fact, I would argue that feeling insecure when somebody you care about negatively judges you is healthy — it leads you to confront the cause: is it value misalignment? Incomplete information? Poor cognition? Something else?

People don’t always have the best judgement regarding themselves, due to the inherent limitations of self-knowledge. Other people’s opinions can be grounding in that regard, but I generally think they are more misleading than guiding. As such, I would recommend trusting your own judgement by default.