Forensics meet last weekend. Yeah, I decided to join forensics for my last week of college. There was a brief period of time when I wondered if any of the events I was watching would make good fodder for doing philosophy of language on, but then I said to myself, “no, these are clearly deviant uses of the language.”

But in the car ride home, I did run into at least one bit of interesting language/social stuff: criticizing people for [criticizing people in front of other people] (I feel the need to use brackets to make my language unambiguous). I often hear people talk about the [criticizing people in front of other people] as if it were just obviously wrong, among the worst social faux pas imaginable.

Intuitively, I have no sympathy for this. I tend to be afraid to hear criticism, public or private, but once I get it, it never turns out as bad as I expected, even when it’s in front of other people. In fact, I’ve been complimented on taking criticism well. But from an evolutionary and game-theoretic perspective, the other position makes more sense. If someone has negative information about you, it’s advantageous for you to have that information, but disadvantageous for everyone else to know that weakness of yours, and perhaps worse for the weakness to become common knowledge in the sense that everyone knows that every one knows that everyone knows on ad infinitum. Therefore, hearing criticism in private should be preferable to having criticism announced publicly.

On the other hand, if the question is merely looking at potentially negative information that only you have access to, there’s no rational reason not to do it. Even if you worry that your own knowledge of the negative information could be used against you, there’s no reason to be honest with other people about whether you have that negative information, so you have an easy way to prevent your own knowledge from being used against you, and therefore no reason to not acquire the knowledge. In spite of this, I and apparently many other forensics competitors get scared to look at their ballots, even in private.

What’s really interesting, language wise is that public criticism isn’t treated as giving over of information to the enemy. It’s treated as a deep personal insult that transcends the cognitive (information, factual, truth-apt, or whatever) content of the message. Or worse, it’s treated as evidence that the critic is on a “power trip.” In world of relatively rational competing agents, though, it would only ever be regarded as (1) strategic malice or (2) strategic carelessness in giving away sensitive information. Instead, though, it’s treated through a largely non-cognitive lens, in an example of how the evolutionary purposes of behavior and how we think of them can diverge greatly.