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What’s something you wish more people understood?
Please avoid hot takes or flippant answers.
I want to know, genuinely, what you want others to know or realize.
Please avoid hot takes or flippant answers.
I want to know, genuinely, what you want others to know or realize.
Quantitative does not mean the same thing as objective. Many measures are objective and quantitative -- it's 50°F outside, this rock weighs seven pounds, that tree is 80 years old. Many measures are subjective and qualitative -- that painting is beautiful, this person is kind. Lots of people miss the fact that measures can be objective and qualitative. I remember my college chemistry course a decade ago had a unit on qualitative analysis, where you would mix reagents with an unknown compound and determine visually how it responded (the solution turns blue, a white precipitate forms, orange fumes rise up...). Those are qualitative assessments, but it's not just an opinion that the solution turned blue rather than red.
The category I really wish people would recognize more is the measures that are both quantitative and subjective. When Roger Ebert says a film is a four star film, that doesn't mean it's an objectively good film. Even though he used a number, it's still just his opinion. I read an op-ed last week whining that schools should only be using objective measures to choose who to admit, like SAT scores. SAT scores are quantitative, yes, but they are subjective. They are the opinion of College Board Incorporated, based on a couple of hours of observation. They reflect all the preferences, biases, and limitations of the people designing and grading the assessment. Similarly, a person's GPA is quantitative and subjective. The teachers give a number to represent their opinion of a student's ability. Sure, you could say "the student's GPA is objectively 3.5", but that's just like saying "the film's Ebert score is objectively four stars". Neither of these is an objective measure of merit.
This is not to say it's wrong to use subjective measures. Subjective measures are great. When well-used they can meet you directly at the level of sensation, bypassing the interpretation step of "hang on, is seven pounds a heavy rock or a light rock?" At the end of the day we all can only understand things by relating to our own subjective experience, so it is helpful to hear about other people's subjective experiences. Just don't mistake them for objective facts when an opinion has a number attached.
That excuse and explanation are two different things.
I have this need to understand why people do stuff, why stuff happens. I like understanding how people's brains tick, or why an airport screws up a person's refund. But all too often, people say "that's no excuse" when it's not an excuse, it's an explanation. I have to preface points with "I am NOT defending or justifying X" because I'll often be accused of doing just that.
I'm also annoyed at people who hear an explanation for shitty behavior as part of an apology, and react along the lines of "that excuse doesn't justify what they did." So what? You'd rather not know why the heck someone was being a jerk? Or why this person was late? Soemtimes it IS an excuse, but sometimes it's just an explanation. I for one would like closure with apologies, and sometimes that entails the person explaining why they did the thing.
Not all explanations are excuses. Sometimes they're just explanations.
I find this most frustrating in a work environment. I always tell my team that perfect is the enemy of good so mistakes will happen and that's fine as long as we learn from them.
So when they make a mistake I try to unpack that mistake with them to learn and part of that is having them explain what happened from their perspective. Just about everyone struggles with this step when they first start working with me because they don't know the difference between an explanation and an excuse.
My guess for why is that most places they worked before would only blame them for mistakes so they got used to making excuses. Unwinding that mentality is time consuming but at least I know to look for it now.
That's one of the things I really like about where I work. Individuals don't always stick to it, but the company and management put a lot of effort into fostering an environment without blame, and treats "assume positive intent" as a mantra. (Which is good life advise in general.)
The concern with outages or other failures is always in fixing the problem first, and then understanding why it happened to it can be avoided in the future, not finding someone to blame. This is definitely common practice in the industry, though probably not universal, which is in stark contrast to social media erupting in "somehow better be fired over this" when some random service they use (probably for free) has an issue.
I like this a lot.
That's great and definitely a mantra I have adopted as well. I truly believe most people want to do a good job so it's usually a knowledge gap instead of malice that caused that mistake/issue, at least in my field.
Throw in the difference between positive and normative statements - i.e. descriptions of "is" vs "ought". Just because I describe a deplorable situation in completely neutral (factual) tone doesn't mean I support or even accept it. I've learned to preface such descriptions with a disclaimer along these lines, but arguably that shouldn't even be needed.
I find it ironic that this and the subthread with the apologetics for being irrational are in the same thread. This pattern of behavior is one of the greatest sources of frustration in my life, and one of the biggest things that soured me on Reddit over time. It's poison to discussion and is simply spreading stress around.
When people don't want to understand things, and simply want to take out their impotent ire about situations on others, it's not productive discussion...and it's exactly what leads to people being asshats to public-facing employees.
Step one of finding a solution to a situation is understanding why it happened and gathering facts. Then you logically analyze what you know, and in the case of conflict, avoid assuming negative intent of other parties and attempt to resolve it.
But no, people want to be irrational, reject knowledge and wallow in needless anger they're addicted to, and drag others down.
Eh, on the being late thing, it depends. If it’s my friend, sure, tell me while you’re late, I’ll listen.
If it’s an employee I manage, and they give me an explanation for why they’re late, I’m expecting that they’re doing it for leniency. I always tell them that I really don’t care why they’re late. It’s not relevant to me, it doesn’t affect the job, and I’d rather not have everyone’s personal details at work anyway.
It doesn’t bother me if someone is late once in a while. Things happen to everyone. If you’re consistently late though it’s a problem, you really do need to explain yourself with an excuse, and we need to figure out how to fix it, or there will be issues.
In a recent comment, I referenced an interesting idea:
I think that contextualizing one's actions and thoughts makes it easier to feel less upset about them.
Once I realized what this comment was from, I really questioned its usefulness. With the context of killing ones spouse, it feels more like an excuse than an explanation.
But perhaps it just feels in poor taste for him to discuss marriage and divorce while serving a life sentence. The advice itself out of that context isn't bad, but man I'd rather quote pretty much anyone else in the topic.
Isn't that quote in the context of "this might have helped me not kill my wife"? Yes, he did some very bad things, but if we can learn from that and prevent it from happening to others, shouldn't we? Emotional guidance isn't something we get a lot of at school here in North America, and I think he has some good points.
On the other hand, he is up for parole soon, so maybe this wasn't said in good faith and he doesn't actually believe it.
I didn't read everything so maybe. But does he actually know what would have prevented him then? And it feels like he's saying he killed her out of his pain which, I would have suspected already, but doesn't make it better.
Just one of those "why pick this individual to quote" situations for me.
Again, the point isn't absolution, but explaination. Understanding why you did something in hindsight does not absolve the deed. This is exactly what @CannibalisticApple is talking about.
IMO, Reiser isn't giving excuses seeking forgiveness, they are providing an explaination, and some thanks for people who helped him realize this explaination he had not seen for himself before...and encouraging more people to learn these skills.
I think you're talking past each other slightly. I believe @DefinitelyNotAFae is asking why wee should use his quote when there are other people who we could quote who come with less baggage, and I think your answer provides the support for the answer to that question without explicitly answering it.
So the answer would be that he is speaking from personal experience. He can't be absolved by the explanation, but he understands the importance of the explanation, both as someone whose actions need to be understood and whose actions may have been prevented by understanding.
Correct. It also isn't clear to me, though I haven't 'read more deeply, from the available context that his comment was actually an explanation not some sort of general "advice" thing.
The fights that divorced people get in are absolutely coming from places of pain, and I do think that someone who kills someone else is almost certainly in pain. But, I don't know if that's useful information in the abstract and it reads as not even an explanation. I hope that helps clarify some @vord ...
I've worked in parole and with juvenile sex offenders and "Explanations are not excuses" is a big thing. But the paroled murderers I've worked with took way more responsibility than that. I haven't read his whole thing, so I am not saying he's not taking responsibility for the harm he caused, but it's a bit like (though more extreme) the IL congresswoman quoting HItler about youth being the future instead of literally any other quote.
Who better to say what would have prevented a murder than the murderer? I honestly can’t think of a better person to answer that question about this specific case. He’s the only one with access to his own thoughts after all.
The comment was apparently not about his individual case if I understood the fuller context correctly.
I noted elsewhere that makes this feel like a poor example of "explanation vs excuse" as he wasn't doing either.
To the contrary, I think that an excellent testimonial on emotional awareness is one from someone who has experienced the extreme consequences of the lack thereof and is capable of reflecting on it.
The vast majority of people with only a medium level of emotional awareness are able to skate through life without being made to confront their deficiencies because the consequences are never severe enough to amount to a reckoning.
Interesting. When you phrase it that way, it's clear that disregarding the quote because Reiser said it is fallacious. It's basically a tu quoque.
If someone who is a smoker tells you to not smoke, calling them a hypocrite is nonsensical, because someone with deleterious health problems from smoking merely has experience that solidifies their knowledge that it's a bad thing to start doing.
In this case, Reiser suggests he is now more empathetic to the other side of his divorce and personally knows how not evaluating that can escalate.
I feel like it's possible to read into it quite a bit one way or the other. I'm not dismissing the advice because it's from him, I'm saying there's a bunch of much more qualified people to get that advice from and it feels distasteful without a lot more indication that he's actually more empathetic.
I think after talking about it this much, it's a bad example of an explanation - he didn't actually explain why he did it, he made a vague comment that reads closer to "both sides are hurting" which while true doesn't explain his choices, it sort of tries to equalize his pain and hers. It's something you learn in "how to have empathy" class. As I said above, I've taught those classes so I absolutely acknowledge I'm possibly coming from that bias.
ETA: So I read more, it looks like he was not talking about his specific crime there, possibly and it was a separate thought which to me, confirms it's a bad "Explainer" but not nearly so problematic in my mind. I'm less uncomfortable with it in that context.
I'm not sure it really does demonstrate that - it doesn't give me any new information for example- but it is not something I'm willing to interpret in a vacuum. I may simply be operating on biases from my previous employment with people on parole but in isolation the quote less like acknowledging his wife's pain and more trying to deflect his responsibility. It also feels like something he's repeating from a class and he's up for parole relatively soon. Obviously he and she were both in pain.
But as I said, this may be my bias from teaching those classes. I'd rather take the lesson from someone who didn't learn it by getting classes on not being anti-social in prison.
I saw this point and thought, “well yeah they’re in pain, they’re getting a fucking divorce.” If I could wave a magic wand I’d bring back those who were unjustly murdered.
That emotion and logic/reason are not diametrically opposed and having both involved in decision making is the ideal and in my opinion truly necessary to making wise choices. I see far too many people assume that being emotional - including passionate - about something, especially when done by women/femme folks, is a sign of poor decision making. Alongside that is that it is factual that humans don't make rational decisions on the whole, they actively make choices that harm themselves, are less economically wise, etc. every day. So when planning or assuming what people will do, never assume "rational behavior".
It's as I tell my kids:
It's OK to be mad when I tell you no. It's not ok to hit people because you are mad.
Emotions are good and important. However you must channel them appropriately instead of impulsively.
And therin is the difference. When people say "don't be so emotional" they should be saying "don't be so impulsive."
Impulsive anger results in witch hunts and lynchings. Controlled anger results in justice (theoretically).
The thing is, generally IME, that language is directed at people not being impulsive at all. But yes I agree, the answer isn't to remove the anger but acknowledge it.
I agree, and if it doesn't make sense substituting it as such...they are probably wrong.
This is always a confusing one to see from people, for me. “It’s just logic!” - if it is a question of internal consistency, sure, but our emotions are the cause to our propositions, and the weights and values we associate with them, such that we can resolve them in a way that aligns with what we want!
It’s also interesting that this kind of statement occurs with cause either on account of blind incomprehension of one’s own emotions, or cynical argument by abuse, intentionally implying an argument with lack of internal consistency, and as such, an argument only someone illogical would consider or believe. Moreover, implying an opponent incapable of conceiving a consistent or worthwhile argument, Or some kind of combination of both, I suppose…
I definitely agree. We're emotional beings whether we realise it or not, and we have to acknowledge and embrace that to best understand ourselves.
People very often trick themselves into thinking a decision they're making is based entirely on reason, when their conclusion is actually heavily influenced by their emotions. We've all seen how good people can be at mental gymnastics and how easily they can bear cognitive dissonance when the end result is what they want - attempts to be logical or rational can fall victim to this just as easily. We all do it sometimes - we assume our conclusions and we unconsciously construct post-hoc arguments for them. It's rare the person who actually builds their opinions from the ground up.
One can also do this on purpose - claiming that your opinion or idea is rational is a great rhetorical trick to appeal to just the people you're talking about, Fae, who believe logic and wisdom are equivalent. But that's just a claim, you very often don't have to prove it - saying it is enough for many people.
And just because an idea is backed by a set of predicates that seem objective doesn't mean it actually is. Most of us are not that good at logical analysis, and it's more than possible to hide a sleight of hand in an argument. The fact that there's an argument purporting to be rationally based, doesn't mean there's no emotional or ideological root to it.
Logic, reason and science are excellent tools for helping us understand this chaotic world and decide what's best for us. But they're just tools, and they can be misused, abused or weaponised just as easily as emotions can. That's what I wish more people would understand.
Indeed, we're so bad at re-assessing our underlying assumptions when we make our rational decisions that we often don't even realize we've made any!
We're beings of emotion and empathy as much as we're beings capable of logical analysis. And I think it only benefits people to pretend that the latter is the only thing that matters when they know that using the former would lead to being deeply upset.
Distinguishing between reasoning and rationalizing is definitely a challenge. I have members of my family who are practically experts at rationalizing, so it's easier to spot with them, but that's not always the case.
There are a lot of really good sounding arguments that are actually just elaborate exercises in post-hoc rationalization. If that happens to be in alignment with rationality, that's great, but there's no guarantee of it.
I like to think of emotions as highly optimized logic shortcuts. Like sure, sometimes you can think something through and realize that you're overreacting, but the vast majority of the time your gut is in the right ballpark. We evolved to have emotions for a reason! Imagine having to "rationally justify" every single decision, eg whether it's good or bad that your parents were just eaten by hyenas.
I get Chidi in the Good Place vibes.from your example lol
But yes I don't even think about it evolutionarily, because sometimes you just get stuff with evolution. Like panic attacks and menstrual cramps. Things that may or may not have a reason or just come along with other useful bits.
But I do think our "gut" is that decision shortcut process. I just am not sure if I fully toss "gut" into emotion vs logic rather than a blend of the two. ( Not that anything IMO can actually be fully one or the other). I think my gut decisions are basically me compiling all the knowledge and feelings I have and doing what "feels" right from that without thinking about it too much in advance.
I know I'm talking about it like a dichotomy when I don't actually think they're separable but thats the vocab that seems to work for it.
I think this might have come from the book by neurologist Oliver Sacks the Man Who Mistook his wife for a hat, but I read that when an injury takes out the emotional center of the brain that it becomes crippling and people struggle to have preferences or make decisions.
Not my field, could be wrong but that's what I remember
I was going to post this as a reply to the root of the thread, but your comment is the most directly relevant to what I was going to say. Logic & reason are useful for determining how to achieve our goals; emotions are necessary to select our goals. Some goals seem like they were chosen by logic. Those goals are, in fact, merely stepping stones to some greater goal.
It's certainly possible, I'd need to look it up for the specifics but TBI can definitely cause that. Not sure I'll dig through neurological stuff this morning but you never know
Sounds like you have expertise.
Oliver Sacks wrote for non doctors and his books are interesting
Counseling degree, not neuro so much but partner's TBI and neuro issues have made me one of those people that's soaked a bunch of stuff up like a sponge. Definitely not an expert in that particular area though. I'll check him out.
But we evolved in conditions extremely different than modern society. There are plenty of these logic shortcuts that are incompatible with how the vast majority of us would like society to function and we all need to make a conscious effort to override them. Xenophobia, for example, is an emotional response that was completely justified when humans lived in small tribes and it made sense for them to be wary of any strangers.
There's a whole book on this (as well as shortcuts that humans take which aren't emotionally based) called thinking fast and slow. Daniel Kahneman, the author, received a nobel prize for his collaborative work in this field with Amos Tversky and others (of note, behavioral economics is a field born of the joining of psychology and economy/math). For more of the economics side of things the book misbehaving talks in depth about these two figures as well as pulls from Thaler's life and body of work (another nobel laureate). If you have the time both are fascinating reads, the former more focused on the science itself and how it can be useful/applied to life and the latter as more of a historical accounting of how this all unfolded with important studies and take away knowledge sprinkled into the storytelling.
Back in college, this use to drive my Psychology of Emotions Professor bonkers.
Having said that, I will second u/Gaywallet's recommendation for Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
It's been a long time since I read the book, but the general point is that Kahneman conceptualizes two hypothetical systems that govern our thinking:
Therefore, broadly speaking, "emotions" are System 1 processes and "reason" is a System 2 process. System 1 is not categorically wrong about everything. Sometimes our subconscious insights are actually quite accurate. However, System 1 is even easier to influence than System 2.
For example, positive emotions can simplify decision-making by making options look more attractive and increasing the propensity to accept immediate rewards. Imagine feeling excited about a vacation—you might be more likely to book it spontaneously, even if it's not the most budget-friendly option.
Similarly, negative emotions can act as warning signals, prompting caution and risk aversion; feeling anxious about a job interview might lead you to prepare more diligently, even though it's uncomfortable.
However, emotions can be influenced by how information is presented. A news story framed as "threat" might elicit fear and lead to harsher punishment judgments, compared to framing it as "tragedy." Elizabeth Loftus famously provides examples of how memory can be influenced by leading, emotionally-charged language. Quoting from Wikipedia here…
Another major example that comes to mind is when people assess the danger of leaving children unattended. Their feelings about how immoral it is greatly informs their belief and how risky the behavior is. (Whereas you would think it would go the other way around.) This NPR article goes into great detail about it.
Having said all that, without emotion, we would never do anything. It's absolutely essential to human life. I don't know that we, as a society, have a good grasp on exactly what role they play in decision-making, good or bad. As Kahneman was keen to point out repeatedly in the book, System 1 and System 2 don't literally exist. All of our decision-making is a blend of both of them. Emotions are always part of our decision-making.
An important note for neurobiology nerds, system one and two aren't physical objects either. Even when we look at brain patterns in response to something heavily influenced by evolution like predator recognition/fear, while there are pathways (we know fear goes to the amygdala), exactly how signals reach said pathway and which pathways activate at what speed is so incredibly diverse among individuals that we don't have a physical concept of these systems. We can prove high level things like the fact that signals reach areas of the brain known for emotional processing (signals hit the brainstem first, processing paths can be modulated by the neocortex, etc) but conscious recognition also takes so long that it can be hard to know everything that was considered at the point of conscious awareness or even precisely when conscious awareness happens in many cases. That's a long way of saying modern literature doesn't support the existence of a system 1 and 2, it's purely a tool by which it is much easier to frame broad patterns of brain activity and human behavior or biases that emerge as a response to various stimulii on a population level.
Yeah, as I recall, Kahneman goes to great lengths to make it clear that the System 1/2 thing is just a paradigm to understand thought and behavior.
On a related note, it's interesting to see what happens to people who lose access to one of their emotions. As crippling as anxiety can be for someone highly neurotic like myself, completely losing fear can actually be quite dangerous. But not necessarily in the ways you would expect. This NPR story on one such case was quite fascinating.
If I'm honest, I'm still a little jealous of SM. I would rather like it, I think, if, say, 75% of my amygdala could be calcified.
Very much agree! When I hear someone claim that they're making a "purely logical decision without emotion", it makes me suspect they're more irrational because they're less aware of their own cognitive bias. I also consider "suppressing emotions" as an emotional response in itself, and as a sign of emotional immaturity.
I agree with a caveat that sometimes that's a temporary solution or a trauma response to suppress emotions. Mostly I feel folks just have been raised or trained to think that way, especially men, who are allowed to be assertive and angry but rarely socially encouraged to experience other emotions strongly (even joy usually has to come out aggressively). I myself was weird kid who liked Spock, Data, Ivanova, Dax and Tuvok so I can relate even not being a dude. This lesson is one I had to learn from both internal and external sources.
But sometimes yeah it's a willful and proud thing to suppress emotions and brag about one's rationality. Which to me just means they'll be far more exhausting to talk to than any emotional person.
I think unfortunately the aesthetic of purely logical thinking is perfectly made to appeal to immature social media users.
"I was just stating facts" is an extremely common shield against valid criticism that betrays the actual motive of the logical aesthetic: emotionally insulating yourself against criticism. "I'm not wrong, I was just stating facts, not thinly rationalised opinions. The people criticising me are denying facts."
There's also the unfortunate problem that the most dispassionate person in the room is probably the one who knows nothing about the topic, which allows complete amateurs to jump into a subject and convince themselves they're thinking clearer than actual experts with portions of their life invested in learning, based entirely on how neutral of a demeanor they can maintain while discussing it.
Then there's obviously things that just rely on empathy as a core premise. Covid turned up a lot of people willing to leave certain demographics die. There's no theorem or logic that proves the value of a life, but it's priceless all the same.
One thing I hardly ever see explored is that it's possible to make statements that are purely factual on the face of it while still having an incomplete perspective.
I agree, and I think that's why I'm as sensitive to it as I am, is being of that generation that grew up online and saw the rise of much of this sort of interaction.
I would add that when people deride emotion, they often deride specific kinds of emotion while allowing others. For example, the idea that men are less emotional than women is absurd. What is really at display in many cases is a double standard. Concepts of toxic masculinity allow men to be excessively emotional and irrational in the display of anger because that is a "masculine" emotion, while compassion is perceived as "weak" and "feminine".
Absolutely, the derision of emotion is incredibly gendered. Women who are too angry are framed as a "bitch", men who are too compassionate are called euphemism for female genitalia. The term "hysterical" is literally referring to a how woman's uterus makes her susceptible to irrational behavior, which included such things as "refusing to get married" and "not bearing children" and was caused by a variety of things like "not enough sex" and "demonic possession" and my favorite the "wandering uterus." (As an aside the fact that some people thought women couldn't ride trains because their uteri would yeet out of their bodies at high speeds is my actual favorite "fun fact" about the history of sexism.)
In modern times I do tend to see the insistence on cold hard facts with no emotion or empathy coming from men. And I do think it's a socialization because the one acceptable emotion - anger - isn't acceptable in professional environments, so drop it. And it's worse in male dominant spaces, like internet forums or certain professions/schools, because it's self-reinforcing. This is all just me spitballing a bit, but it seems to line up with what I've seen and read.
Excellent examples! Western culture has a very bad handle on gender and emotion. (As a very emotional/neurotic man, I know this entirely too well.)
Interestingly, I thought this as well, but "pussy" actually comes from "pussycat" (and therefore is conceptually similar to being a "fraidy cat"). While it might have later morphed into a misogynistic insult, it didn't start off that way. Having said that, the association with femininity goes back to the sixteenth century (!), so it's basically moot at this point. I just think the etymology is interesting.
Emotional conformity is a complex issue in both male and female-dominated environments. Generally speaking, emotional conformity is required for the functioning of any social environment and it hurts people of all genders and identities.
A level of emotional restraint is a requirement for proper reasoning, and a lot of what humans do is reasoning. However, I would like to highlight that calls for emotional restraint are often emotional themselves, and ignoring this fundamental contradiction is likely to give rise to unfair hierarchies and oppression.
I have been in many situations in which a greater level of emotion was expected from me, and deriding introspection can be just as oppressive as deriding emotion.
Ultimately, emotion should inform our reasoning in the same way that reasoning about our emotions can provide valuable insight into how to manage them. And, of course, we should always strive for greater acceptance of difference kinds and levels of emotional expression.
I think I've tried to be consistent overall in saying that we need to both think and feel, and evaluate both aspects when making decisions. As someone who sees more criticism of emotion being used (even elsewhere in this thread, I'm apparently writing apologia for irrationality) it felt important to highlight for me.
I'd absolutely not object to someone highlighting the same from another angle.
I'm not really sure why you would think we're in disagreement? I was just completing the thought. "Covering more bases", so to speak. I wasn't trying to counter or correct anything you said.
I was also doing that, sorry!
That's okay!
I don't know if that's what produced the confusion, but, when jumping back and forth from Reddit to Tildes, sometimes my brain fails to adjust, and I remain in "battle mode".
Speaking in MMORPG terms, Reddit is more of a PvP server, while Tildes is more like PvE :P
Haha I do understand those terms.
Sometimes I get in the weeds and want to "yes and also" forever. This is more of a raid party than a battleground. 😅
I agree, perhaps to a point. From your perspective are there scenarios where emotions are non productive or even detrimental? That's not to say the solution is not empathetic.
I tend to think of engineering problems, where it is really important to be objective with fast feedback loops. Emotions, ego, pride will get in the way and be detrimental to the end result.
Perhaps I'm missing something?
Emotions can absolutely negatively influence our decisions, but so can logic. I'm not saying if you're doing essentially a math problem that you have to think about how the numbers feel or anything. But you need to be aware that you've got both going on as a human and that other people do too.
I focus on the "decisions shouldn't be fully logic without emotion" angle because I feel most people acknowledge a wholey emotional response to a serious issue isn't particularly useful - we all know that eating the whole cake after a breakup will make us feel sick right? The US decision to invade Afghanistan and its broad public support at the time was a much larger decision borne of pain and wanting revenge that could have used some rational tempering in hindsight. But many people in my experience extoll the virtue of being exclusively rational and denigrate those who aren't.
If you're doing engineering problem solving and a) don't consider the real world impact of said problem on people you may end up causing harm. This could vary wildly depending on the field of engineering and the scope of the problem. Or b) think that you're being emotionless when your ego and pride are actually right up in there driving your answers, you could be making some harmful mistakes.
Thinking the poor use up resources and should be sent to workhouses or die and stop taking from the rest of society (h/t to Ebeneezer Scrooge) has always been an example of unempathetic, "rational" thought that I think of, and still see in modern forms today.
The second part if your statement is absolutely true. I think engineers are, ironically, especially vulnerable to "emotions, ego, pride" getting in the way.
I am a software engineer, and my experience with engineers is that they will often hide emotional responses behind so-called "logical thinking". I see this a lot in meetings where people are arguing the merits of engineering decisions.
People tend to think of engineering as objective, but I would argue that engineering is all about choosing tradeoffs in a decision space, often with incomplete data. In that situation, different people's experiences will color how they weight different factors.
For example, if there is trade off between complexity and performance (more complex, faster code or simpler, slower code), people who have been burned by performance issues will favor the former while people who have been burned by unmaintainable code will favor the latter.
Neither is a "wrong" position, but both engineers might argue their position is factual or logical instead of recognizing that it is colored by their emotional experience. Thus it often ends up with people "talking past each other" and other frustrating communication dysfunctions.
*not every engineer all the time, of course, but many and often)
I agree with this, and an added point is that imo it is not possible to be happy in the long term unless you learn to acknowledge your own emotions.
But as with everything there are two sides to this. It's also necessary to learn that your brain is telling you bullshit with relative regularity, that bullshit in the form of strong emotions is difficult to ignore or dismantle (after acknowledging it), but it is sometimes the best solution.
I think it's most important to always think about the outcome of your actions. Passion is a great thing, but it can blind you from seeing that what you're doing likely will not lead to what you wish to achieve. And I'd say that is where the (irrational) dislike for being emotional in general comes from.
Yeah as I noted elsewhere, I think most people acknowledge that decisions led purely or almost entirely out of emotion can be a bad idea. I don't see that extolled as a virtue like I do rationality. I also don't see folks shut down for using any logic at all in their decision and told they're over(under?)reacting. It's particularly gendered but not exclusively.
I agree with this observation, but I think that despite not directly being considered virtuous it's a very common problem nonetheless. In my opinion the majority of activist movements are led by passion (or anger or even hate, though sometimes justified) more than by attempts to achieve a specific outcome and choosing (and regularly evaluating) their actions based on that, and it has regularly led to them sort of fizzling out and achieving much less than they could have.
In my opinion this was one of the big issues with Occupy or BLM in the US. In my country the Extinction Rebellion utterly failed because of this, they refused to consider that our society is somewhat cynical towards the spectacles that worked for them relatively well in western Europe and kicked out a part of the leadership who pointed that out and pushed for doing it differently. Just Stop Oil has been doing the same thing here so far.
And actually I do think that simply "being passionate" is usually considered to be a very positive thing.
I think that passion comes with strong rational reasons and plans in most cases. But I think those groups are often made up of relatively powerless people whose biggest point of making change comes from protest, media coverage, and then convincing others of the harm done. Occupy I'm less familiar with.
But I don't think BLM "failed" or anything. They did cause some change and have altered the dialogue around policing in the US permanently. George Floyd's killers were actually prosecuted. It didn't solve systemic racism but I know my university police department has made changes and continues to make them. I'd have to look more at the organization and the people who started it to say whether they weren't reviewing outcomes and changing tactics.
Being happy is too! Plenty of people like individual emotions. Especially when they agree with the outcome. But some groups of people - minorities in particular, women in particular - are criticized for passion more often, and their other emotions even more so.
Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow popularized revolutionary groundbreaking work about emotion. I remember when emotional responses were habitually denigrated in favor of logic and it was used to denigrate women.
I think it might be a generational thing as young students internalize the new paradigm and become older themselves
I think it highly depends on the question being asked. If you need to decide whether you want to marry someone or which music you want to listen to, you should definitely get emotional about it. But for other questions, emotions are only getting in the way. I may feel strongly that foreigners are the root cause of many societal issues, but that doesn't make any sense if you think about it rationally.
More importantly, you can't argue about emotions. The Israel/Palestine conflict is not going to get solved by each side expressing their emotions. They have tried that for decades and it's only getting worse. You can only solve differences like that by finding some basis of facts that both sides can agree and start a rational discussion from there. As soon as one side gets emotional, you are straying from the path to a solution.
I'm not saying feelings shouldn't be examined, but in your example about foreigners, the thought is that foreigners are the root cause of societal issues, the feeling is distrust, fear and maybe disgust towards foreigners. Said person could probably provide lots of reasons why they think that way, but would probably struggle to express their emotions.
Feelings definitely can be examined critically and talked about. You can argue about them, but that's missing the point. They generally need to be acknowledged though. Because I can't factually debate you out of your thoughts about foreigners if I don't understand why you think it and how you feel.
The dehumanization that occurs on the worst ends of the Israel/Palestine conflict is actually why I would advocate for more understanding of the emotions experienced by people on all sides of it. Empathy is powerful. Reconnecting the "other side" with the concept of "people" in their heads is a good thing. But if you try to eliminate emotion from the conversation, you'll never come up with something people can agree on, because those people are full of emotions. When those come up in discussion, negotiation or debate, they need to be given space, acknowledged and then the facts from them pulled out or discussed.
Think of a divorce, both people have lots of emotions that certainly make things more difficult to negotiate, but those emotions aren't going away and it's better to understand that an item is particularly meaningful, that someone feels slighted for having stayed at home and raised the kids, that the dog reminds them of their mom, whatever. Because otherwise everyone's just annoyed at how "irrational" the two parties are.
OK, now I better understand what you mean. Thank you.
I agree that you can't ignore emotions and you need to take them into account when trying to find a solution. Accepting the emotions of the other side as a fact is important. But it's also important to acknowledge that emotions, especially one's own, aren't reasonable and need to be questioned rationally.
I'd add the caveat that emotions can be very reasonable - they often serve a purpose. They should be interrogated and thought through when they're part of a conflict but they usually tell us something. Anger can be a sign we're seeing injustice or feeling slighted. Those may be irrational feelings or they might be reasonable responses to our experiences. Or they might be both!
On the other hand, fbi terrorist negotiator Vos in the book Never Split the Difference wants the emotional aspects of each side's position to be disclosed. I'm going to leave it there as I'm not an expert.
If you want to support biodiversity and natural spaces, dense urban cities are way better than sprawling suburbs. It's easy to add greenery to cities too if you take away space from cars.
I see this repeated time and time again in the argument for more housing where I live. Yes, high density cities may house more people. Yes, they use less land. But I don’t want to live on top of other people. I want space from other people. I want to be able to step outside and be surrounded by greenery, not pavement, concrete, steel, and glass.
High density cities are ideal for a certain set of efficiency and environmental metrics. They aren’t ideal for everyone’s mental health.
As someone living in a suburb currently, I get where you’re coming from, but some of these things could actually be addressed in dense environments with different approaches to architecture and infrastructure. The greenery problem for sure, but improvements could also be made in optimizing for personal peace in living spaces — proper soundproofing of apartments/condos for example and steep fines for people modding their vehicles to be as noisy as possible. Properly implemented green spaces would also help with claustrophobia.
Even with all of that, cities still won’t suit everyone but they’d be livable for a considerably broader range of people.
Increasing the average square footage of units would also help. I don't want to pare down and share with strangers (IME, the physically closer your neighbors, the likelier they are to be relatively transient strangers). Then again, I'm a percussionist (we're famously territorial).
In my area roads take up about 1/2 to 2/3rds of the street width. Presumably that means if the city was car-free (via ubiquitous public transport) it would feel as crowded or less crowded outside, even with double the amount of people.
The kind of livable dense city I could see working is one where everyone has the same floor space in their home as they do now, but it's located in a 6 - 8 story building, which is much more efficient to heat and cool than an equivalent number of detatched or semi-detatched houses. Think how much space is saved by that: even assuming each home is two-story, they're now stacked 3 or 4 high, so roughly 70% of housing land area saved, on top of the space reclaimed from cars. You then have more room in between buildings for parks, green walkways and other things to stop the area from feeling like a concrete wasteland.
If you'd like to put your mental health above the efficiency and environmental metrics and live outside a city, I think you should be allowed to do so. Proscriptive policies that don't allow for a personal weighing of the options is bad. However, this is about a balance between personal preferences and societal benefit. I take it as true that the Earth cannot support everyone living the inefficient lives of NA style non-urbanity. Writ large, society should want moderately dense cities otherwise we're all probably screwed. Current NA policies currently heavily discount the externalities of non-city living. I view city density measures as trying to incrementally fix some of those incentive structures and make the personal calculation about where to live more closely match the true costs of that choice. They aren't about prescribing what any one person has to do, but about making the externalities aligned with the cost and subsidizing choices which, in aggregate, we should ideally prefer.
Without more context I’m afraid I’ll remain in the “people who don’t understand group”.
From what I’ve seen, suburbs != suburbs and dense cities != dense cities. The blanket statement therefore is difficult to understand for me. Suburbs around Boston for instance are nothing like the cookie cutter suburbs you’ll see in the movies. Would your statement still hold true there? I’ve seen deer, coyotes, skunks, snakes, all kinds of birds etc. Too much to name. There so much natural space that isn’t cultivated fully, wildlife seems to find its way there nicely.
But I think I might just be missing your point. So I’m interested to hear your point of view.
I think I’m somewhat familiar with the Massachusetts style of suburbs you’re talking about. I’m picturing the suburban and exurban neighbourhoods with many large, older trees/shrubs wrapping between each property, and occasional remnant forest patches. Lots of critters at night especially, and the birds can be shockingly LOUD.
Sustainable urban planning has to balance a lot of different goals. Different urban planning solutions aren’t going to be binary in terms of achieving ‘sustainability’, but might support one goal only a little bit and another goal a lot, and yet might be detrimental to another goal.
The MA sub-/ex-urbs I’m thinking of support some habitat and species, and certain species are no doubt thriving. They undoubtedly do a much better job at this than the ‘cookie-cutter’ suburbs that raze forests to the ground and compact the native soil structure before construction. But, they also still drive habitat loss, cause habitat fragmentation, and increase human-wildlife interactions; these changes may have positive, neutral, or negative pressures on different species. A couple examples of different impacts to consider: Ex 1 of a bird species in western MA. Ex 2 of invasive species in New England. Ex 3 of a turtle around Chesapeake Bay.
What I’d say the MA suburbs and movie-style cookie-cutter suburbs do have in common are the effects of low-density housing on human behaviour. For example, walkability is typically low, removing opportunities for physical activity and making cars a necessity. ICE vehicles are a large source of carbon emissions (example, exurb vs. urban emissions), but electric vehicles also have challenges to overcome (example, ICE vs. electric life cycle assessment); a denser, mixed living environment would mean that neither are needed (or at least, as much). ETA: Also, sub-/ex-urbs tend to be single-family, rather than multifamily, dwellings, driving up residential energy use (example, impact of US policy on residential energy use).
I don't think all cities as they currently stand are perfect either. Different cities may be variously plagued by (e.g.,) light/noise/air pollution, heat-island effect, loss of greenery, water and run-off problems, social problems, poor transit/infrastructure, etc. That said, I struggled to find research promoting exurbs/suburbs as the most sustainable solution over cities. I did find this to article to present an interesting discussion on finding the right balance of urban density.
Caveat: rather than removing opportunities for physical activities, I’d say they enable different physical activities. Instead of carrying groceries home, there is a walk to the mailbox, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, shoveling snow, a walk in the woods, gardening, and so on. People can use their outdoor space to do things.
(Yes, sometimes people hire others to do these things or don’t do them, but in the city you can have groceries delivered and order takeout, too.)
Thank you for the insightful answer. These are great details and give body to the discussion.
I was intentionally a bit broad. The basic idea is that high population density cities are really good for surrounding nature. I really like the Solarpunk aesthetic which encourages dense green developments like the plant covered Bosco Verticale.
Low population density suburban developments with highways sprawl out into nature and often provide illusions of greenery with lawns and the occasional tree. The biodiversity that manicured lawns and a few trees can support is totally different from a natural growth forest. If you live in the right place, you'll definitely see some wildlife, but that wildlife is at much greater risk of being struck by cars or otherwise having their natural lifecycle interrupted by human development. That said, I'm all for big parks within cities!
American-style suburbs are unsustainable due to infrastructure costs versus population density (think about how much utility piping is required in a condo tower vs a suburb). In terms of legislation, urban growth boundaries are great at preventing sprawl. I'm also in favour of greatly increasing or removing height limits on buildings; when done correctly, tall buildings still allow plenty of light and airflow in the city centre.
In that case I’ll have to disagree. The broad statement makes it impossible for me to agree with. Even in America, not all suburbs are the way you describe it. So saying “suburbs are xyz” immediately falls short, in my opinion.
City planning is incredibly difficult and there are so many failed attempts at creating the kind of city you’re describing, that I would find it hard to say flat out that that kind of city is better. I read stories about a green forest building that turned into a mosquito plagued hell, there are high rises surrounded with lots of green that turned into ghettos, etc. Too many examples that these ideas are nice in theory, but hard to get right. Just like some suburbs suck, others are perfect, and there’s a lot in between. It’s just not only extremes.
What’s an example of a “perfect suburb?”
Not OP, but the closest to perfect would be the streetcar suburbs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were generally built in a gird pattern, are walkable, and in some cases have been annexed into the city they were suburbs to.
Those kinds of suburbs were generally much denser than most modern car-oriented suburbs though which kind of supports my point. I'm not dogmatically opposed to all suburbs; I just want denser developments that focus on people and nature instead of cars.
Edit: forgot a word
I don’t think it’s actually possible to have “perfect” suburbs for biodiversity. The fact is, suburbs are made of roads, houses, and cars. Paving and otherwise covering surface area almost inescapably leads to lowered biodiversity, largely owing to habitat fragmentation and reduction of surface permeability.
Just to echo u/lackofaname's comment and elaborate a bit. Cities can definitely have problems, but there are plenty of desirable cities internationally that do a fantastic job supporting humans living their best lives.
My ecological point was that nature is best preserved when humans live in denser developments and cities. Low density sprawl and even farmland destroys pre-existing ecosystems.
This topic fascinates me (I guess I'd call it sustainable city planning), have any particular resources on the topic?
The books Strong Towns and it's "prequel" Confessions Of a Recovering Engineer are not particularly about environmentally-friendly planning, but they are really great books about urban planning in general.
I know that there are people here on Tildes who could answer this question, but they might not be in this thread.
You could add generally about books or podcasts or videos
However, i can suggest the book Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg. The citations within the book might take you further yet
There are a lot of popular YouTube channels on it, some that I like, others that I hate, but they often include sources.
Which ones do you like?
I like Climate Town, which (despite the name) isn't directly about town planning, but sometimes touches on it. They do have newsletters to discuss the things they couldn't cover in their YouTube videos.
A lot of people like Not Just Bikes, but I think the guy seems like a smug asshole, so it's pretty off-putting for me.
I think he's been sniffing the farts of his success. I don't remember being put off by his earlier videos, though perhaps he hasn't changed and I just got sick of him.
To his credit, he doesn't tend to blame individuals for their car-centric behaviour, but systems and cities and design.
I agree to a point, and disagree as well.
Density creates its own sets of problems. One person burying their shit spread over an acre is a lot less of a problem than 10,000 people buring their shit over an acre. The need for constantly lighting a dense area at night (because people refuse to walk in the dark) also causes immense ecosystem problems. A rural area with no streetlights is much less hostile to wildlife.
What I would argue, is that density is important to a point. Having a 10,000 person town is fine, even if everyone has a 1/2 acre or more of land, provided that the amenities supporting that town are intelligently clustered around mass transit hubs that makes travelling to other towns trivial. And that the land isn't a monoculture of imported grass and shrubberies.
There's also no reason people can't coexist with wildlife...but it does mean having a tolerance for bugs and other creatures around your house. If anything, this is a good thing, because if you have a thriving ecosystem it means you can have the predators of bugs living nearby, not just the mosquittos and flies.
The problem comes when the suburbs are low-density and hostile to nature.
A suburban area that has 1/2 acre of land per house could also grow most of its own food, reducing the need to import from elsewhere. The same can not be said for city-evel density.
I would like more software engineers, doctors, accountants, and other members of highly specialized professions to understand that "All you have to do..." explanations given to laypeople often reflect gross failures of professional duty and empathy. It may be that the professional failure is so systemic and impossible for a single person to resolve (e.g. entire hardware, operating system, and software stacks plus network communications) that the best immediate effort and advice can only be a lengthy, complicated series of workarounds. But somehow, the underlying failure is never acknowledged or addressed.
"All you have to do..." waives the need to resolve fundamental problems. It's condescending in its implication that only lesser people would have difficulty following the instructions given, or that their time isn't valued.
As we've seen recently with decades of extremely difficult-to-follow or actively harmful weight loss advice, which boils down to "All you have to do is eat less and exercise more", the medical profession never stopped to answer basic questions of appetite regulation and metabolism. [I can say from observation and experience that attainment of medical degrees actively filters out people who might have had conditions that could provide empathy for patients, like obesity or chronic illness.]
As a recent case in point for software engineering, there were a great many "all you have to do..." style prescriptions which completely ignored the context of the question. "Just use Linux" might have been the most infuriating and tone-deaf example. Most people don't problem-solve computer issues for fun; they want reliable tools for accomplishing other worthwhile and necessary tasks.
I'm not saying this from an outsider's perspective. I can point to the content of a meeting this past week where product managers were blithering on about user personas when it was clear that they, the UI/UX designers, and the Dev team engineers had never spoken with end users, never followed up on feedback from beta testing, never considered reprioritizing their backlog to fix bugs or add features the users found critical... because "All you have to do...".
I'm going to leave this right now because it's a somewhat hot take in danger of becoming a rant, perhaps deserving of its own topic.
I would welcome a rant, because this is a major disappointment of mine.
I have a special and lovely job, where I get to spend more than an hour (sometimes several) with neurology patients who nearly all have complex medical, socioeconomic, and mental health histories. They get to see their neurologists for maybe 20 minutes every few months, and many are handed off from PA to resident to APRN over the years. Our medical providers are great, and the schedule is perverse, but many never do the work to develop the skill it takes to help a person make changes in that short amount of time (it is possible, believe it or not). Some don't even learn how to adequately introduce and help process a diagnosis, even a horrific one. So I get to spend part of my "assessment" appointment listening, validating, educating, problem-solving, processing grief, and just getting to know my patients. I'm just glad my job exists and isn't micromanaged in the same way.
I'm also here for a "fucking medical system" rant along with a "fucking doctors who think they're god and see you for 20 minutes" rant any time.
It's one of the reasons I like my non-clinical case management/mental health work so much, because navigating these systems is SO difficult and sometimes they need a reminder that the patient is a person.
I don't want to demonize people in any of the specialist professions, either. I'm calling out a particular kind of monofocus that's more fixated on the known solutions and practices than the people they're intended for, that ceases to consider opportunities for improvement and lessons learned in favor of handing off work, often to those least able to do it.
I fully agree! But I definitely was getting off-topic from your original point the "all you need to do" attitude. So my apologies.
I'm glad you have that job too, because allied health professionals do a great deal of work to mitigate the problems at the "top" tiers of healthcare. Having seen the training M.D.'s undergo, there's far too little effort spent on one of the highest impact events in the doctor-patient interaction - effective communication. Again, this is a systemic professional failure - I've seen doctors place enormous medical, emotional, financial, and logistics burdens on patients and families without the slightest effort to determine whether they're bearable or could be modified. If patients are fortunate, they're treated in institutions that have a supportive framework of adjunct specialists - social workers, therapists, financial navigators, etc. who can do that work. Feedback to drive research and treatments is also important.
In the context of computing, people working in large institutions have a supportive framework of specialized service desk personnel, project managers, solution architects, and implementors, who can translate among end users and other specialists. But the specialists have an obligation to resolve problems where possible, design cooperatively, and communicate effectively, rather than just leaving it to users and intermediates to work around them. And heaven help the general public users, who have few avenues of safe recourse, and are too frequently treated like idiots in online discourse.
A mantra oft repeated in my fields is "simple doesn't mean easy."
This is an excellent example of it. The steps to weight loss are simple but not at all easy and the difficulty varies a lot based on individual biology and demands in life.
I guess if I were to reinterpret what you've said; there's a big difference between a solution and the implementation of a solution. Experts shouldn't just provide a carte-blanche solution, but provide assistance and be involved with stakeholders so that their knowledge can be used to adapt implementation to the intricacies of real life.
Anything can be simplified if you just ignore or are ignorant of the complexity, like has been the case for weight loss for decades. Getting to the moon is simple, all you have to do is fly there.
The complexities of how people are supposed to actually "eat less than they burn" are often just ignored, as if wanting something immediately makes it possible. There's no deeper discussion about the reasons for the decisions people are making, the things they feel like they don't get a decision in, etc. Barriers like mental health, food quality and affordability, social pressure, stronger or weaker gut signals, and a hundred others are all just hand waved away to pretend that weight loss is "simple".
Not just the stakeholder involvement, but the responsibility to continue investigating root causes and design better solutions. It isn't enough to say, "well, this works for whoever can gut it through". You can place all kinds of responsibilities on patients, end users, and other consumers of professional advice. But if the results aren't consistently acceptable, it's not necessarily due to non-compliance, PEBCAK, or any of the other denials of professional responsibility.
My very employment is predicated on the idea of 'all you have to do' in multiple directions. I'm a jack of all trades, master of none in healthcare. I speak enough tech, enough clinical, enough finance, and enough business to help bring these groups, and others, together and help translate the needs and desires of each group into the language that they speak. I share a similar frustration, especially as I've spent more and more time in FOSS spaces online, on seeing people talk about what is simple and easy to them as a solution to someone who clearly has little to no tech background. "Oh, it's really easy, just spin up a stack and install this" as a solution to 'what's the best note taking app' is so ignorant of the fact that there are people who have never touched Linux in their lives on FOSS social media. Luckily we're past the days where looking down on others for asking simple questions won you easy internet brownie points, but we're definitely not at a point yet where people realize they need to ask some questions about needs and skills before offering a solution.
We have had very, very, similar jobs, if memory serves me. I've managed to shed most of the finance and business parts in recent years, which suits me fine, but now I'm working more directly with product development. And you've reiterated why "All you have to do..." is becoming something of a hobby-horse of mine.
But again, it's not just tech - I've seen similar phenomena in medicine, law, finance, culinary trades, home maintenance (!) - essentially any field where professionals have forgotten what it's like to be standing outside the knowledge gates, with no map of the territory on the other side.
We do, yes! And yeah, it's certainly not only tech that falls prey to this. I think culturally, at least, we're slowly learning that this kind of unhelpfulness (often accompanied by rude or dismissive behavior) is not desirable, especially since it proliferated so much on the internet for such a long time, and we're starting to push back against it. Or at least, that's the vibe I've gotten from the last decade or so watching online and real life behavior change.
Replace this with "just buy a Mac," and you have my go-to blowoff when people come to me to fix their cheap Windows laptops because "you're super smart with tech." However, it is a legitimate solution in terms of preventing future wasted troubleshooting time (compared to Windows & GNU/Linux), provided you're willing to learn Mac OS keyboard shortcuts.
I'm turning 36 and many people I know my age and younger often complain about "feeling old". And I get it, I do too on some days, but I try to remind myself "this is the youngest I'll ever be, I'll just enjoy it and make the most of it". I wish more people in my age range would realize this and stop acting like they're in their 80s 😂 and this is a reminder for myself too, to make the most of the present and to not prematurely fret over a future state.
I get that hyperfocusing on some grievance is unhealthy. But still, I feel that aging is a horror which is often dismissed.
I'm 46 years old, and I'd happily loose an arm in exchange for youth. To me, aging is just horrible. Your body is breaking down at an accelerating pace (because that's what aging is), your mind deteriorate, your golden years (hah!) and the majority of your life is behind you, your death is something you need to begin planning for, you're weaker, you're slower, you're uglier, and you feel like an alien because society is evolving into something you just can't relate to.
If I had JUST lost an arm, people wouldn't go around saying "Cheer up! you have the most arms you'll ever have!" Nope, this would be a legit grievance. But for some reason, aging is something we just have to suck up and be happy about.
I'd also like to mention the cultural assumption that if you're not aging imperceptibly, you must not have taken care of yourself. "Healthy" isn't an absolute - it's more like "healthy given your age, profession, ordinary wear-and-tear, genetics, environmental exposures, and accidents". Every illness and infirmity is not attributable to vice and sloth, whatever our Puritan-influenced culture might imply.
Also, getting old has some "gradually, then suddenly" events. You're getting along okay, then some critical system goes awry - your immune system decides influenza or COVID is too much effort, your pancreas isn't doing blood sugar control anymore, your heart rhythm marches to the beat of a different drum, whatever. "Old" happens after events like that, where there's an obvious break point between what you used to be capable of and the new reality.
This is definitely something I worry about myself! But what can I do about it, I can't stop aging, I can just try to take care of my health, which includes trying not to worry too much or prematurely. Also just hoping that dignified deaths will be more socially accepted and supported when I get to a point where I can't take care of myself anymore.
It genuinely drives me crazy when people (mostly on Reddit in the past) would say shit like "now that I'm 30 it hurts to sit up too fast."
I've always assumed it's people who were either severely joking or had horribly back breaking manual labor jobs for most of their adult life, because I'm nearly 32 and feel pretty much the same as I did at 18.
It's the opposite, it's the people that lived on nothing but doritos and mountain dew for 30 years of their life and never exercised a moment in their life.
Athletes reach their physical prime in their early 30s for a reason.
Sometimes I shudder to think of how I’d be if I hadn’t been rescued by some coworkers who helped be start an exercise routine. My parents never exercise and eat poorly, so as a kid I was not trained to take good care of my body.
Almost 35 here and I’d say that overall I’m in markedly better physical shape than I was when I was 18.
The main changes are that sleep can be more annoying (though usually is fine) and that I can’t as easily induce tunnel-focus/flow state on work as I could back then. Both probably have more to do with increased responsibilities and stressors that come with adulthood than physiology though.
I feel like given that I started exercising at 24 and have been steadily improving and expanding my routine I can counter-act perceived aging decline with a gradual fitness increase. Not that I’ll be as fit at 35 as I could have been at 25, but I wasn’t super fit then so it’s an easy bar to clear.
I'm planning to run an ultramarathon in a month but I still feel like I was so much more fit at 18. I don't understand how I can run so much and be so much slower than I was back then.
Nice to hear! Are you proactive about maintaining healthy diet and exercise habits, and have you done so since your younger years?
I’m far from perfect in this sense but try.
Up until about 27 or so I was your stereotypical skinny computer nerd who didn’t exercise at all (and didn’t eat enough, not intentionally but out of habit from being too tied up on computer with work or play). Was doing ok but knew this wasn’t going to play nicely with aging so I made a new years’ resolution and started going to the gym.
Amazingly the resolution stuck and for 3 years I worked out for an hour 3 days a week. Did wonders for posture and general strength and fixed my eating habits, bringing my weight up to something more healthy/normal for my body size and basically eliminated the after-lunch energy crashes I’d been experiencing prior.
The pandemic put a stop to working out and there was a year where I wasn’t doing much again, but then I got into playing Beat Saber custom maps which has served well for cardio and keeping me moving. Would like to start working out again but that’ll have to happen after I’ve cleared a thing or two off of my plate.
I was surprised how much better my posture got from doing pull ups. It turns out lats are important!
Same! It helps so much with my wrists too.
That's great to hear! And yeah it's nice to feel the difference from working out. I also didn't exercise much until maybe my college days. I do wish I'd started earlier, but still satisfied with where I am now.
Wow, great for you! I definitely felt the difference when I turned 30. I get tired more easily now. But I'm still feeling pretty good at my age so I don't really mind yet, so far.
It bothers me too! I'm the same age and I'm in a great place in life. Same for a lot of my friends. Sure there are some downsides, but way more positive. My brother is almost a decade older and that seems rougher. I understand everyone's life is different, but 30's is generally a good time
That people's behaviour is often driven by incentives, whether conscious/direct or not. In turn, hoping to drive societal change by appealing to people's good nature is a futile exercise. This can be viewed as selfish and cynical, and perhaps it is. But I see it everywhere.
I'm fuzzy on the details.
I think that's true in some situations, but I'd add a caveat: incentives can be powerful, but they don't guarantee results. People can be unruly and often don't think strategically, or they may have a different understanding of their incentives. And then we will be surprised.
…or they're responding to different incentives than the ones we set out for them, to the same surprise of the rest of us. See also: the comment in this thread complaining that people love to spam "explanations aren't excuses." The kind of people that commenter is complaining about are the unimaginative types who can't imagine other incentive systems than the one(s) they personally subscribe to.
Pretty sure it's more complicated than that. I'm reading a generalist psychology book called sway that talks about how selfish incentives and altruistic motivation can interfere with each other but that doesn't mean altruism doesn't exist.
One of the studies they quoted on altruism is from Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007) Tankersley, Stowe and Huettel.
Another study quoted about altruism was from American Economic Review 87 (1997) Frey and Oberholzer Gee
I don't think altruism doesn't exist, I just think we are far too quick to label behaviour as immoral, especially when it comes to large groups.
Thank you for your reply! I will take a look at Sway.
A bit meta: the appeal to ignorance. People go "this object is unidentified, therefore I identify it as an extraterrestrial spacecraft", or "I don't understand the science behind it, therefore it can't be real", or "the jump from step 1 to step 100 is unfathomable, so surely the process of making each step is impossible".
I wish people would recognize it, especially in themselves.
Yes, and I think a problem alongside it is that people just are not curious. If I don't understand the science behind something I love trying to learn it. I'll never be a scientist but I can usually get to the point that I understand how something works. It is, in my opinion, the best part of the internet. My ability to look up and understand complex ideas. I'm not saying people should do it all the time, sometimes you just want to relax but many people have lost their curiosity.
I like to put in a good word for curiosity too, but I think this is something different: most of us have limited curiosity about most things, and it’s important to recognize this.
There’s a common pattern of not being satisfied with that and trying to replace ignorance by speculating and pretending it’s an answer. A better habit is to turn it into a question and not try to answer it. It’s a gap. Noted.
That's a fair point. I do delve into trying to understand a thing as much as I can when I am in the right mood for it but I am sure that's not everyone.
It's a core personality trait called "openness to experience" (a name that I think is somewhat misleading).
There has been a huge focus on the importance of communication in a relationship throughout social media for years. This is of course not bad advice in general, but it's gotten to the point where I believe communication has actually become overrated.
Communication is just a tool that doesn't help your relationship on its own, you need to be capable of self-reflection, acknowledging your emotions, dealing with negative ones like fear or uncertainty, disappointment, frustration and others. When you're not being able to deal with yourself well (and many people are not, especially in dysfunctional relationships), focusing on communication is a red herring.
I think this is a bit like saying that we focus too much on whether a given element is a metal or nonmetal when organic chemistry is much more important. That's technically true, but we need to learn one skill first in order to speak the common language that lets us describe and understand the other one. Learning to communicate how you are feeling is the first step to introspection for many people; it's not until they hear feedback from others that they can start to see another perspective on what's going on inside them.
There is likely a connection and communication is definitely necessary, but I do believe that the introspective skills do not come on their own and usually you need to actually work on them knowingly. The strong focus on communication is serving as a distraction in my opinion, I think we need to just walk back a bit and not focus on it as the one main thing, because I've been seeing people whose situation could be simplified to "well I'm communicating, why is this relationship not working?" both online and irl a bit too often.
Is the problem that we focus on communication or that we e.g., start couple's counseling, learn that we need to communicate, and then stop going before we learn to address our own issues? Yes, communication shouldn't be held as a miracle panacea, but it does bring about greater empathy, which is a cure for many problems.
But I also think this is okay. When communication alone doesn't cure everything, people should start to look into what else is going on, encouraging a deeper dive into curing these issues. Some people won't have that realization and will just give up when communication doesn't fix everything, but some people will always fail to understand anything no matter how much effort you put into explaining.
So communication isn't a distraction; it's those people's only look into the world of therapy and if you overcomplicate it, you will lose them entirely.
I tend to agree that communication (i.e. just talking) without some framework for what to say can do as much harm as good.
A practical piece of relationship advice that has served me well is "draw a circle around yourself and work on everyone in that circle."
In that context, communication should not be "here is what is wrong with you, please fix it" but rather "here is how your behavior affects me, and here are my needs that you might help meet." Coupled with listening to other person doing the same, this can be very effective.
Sometimes it takes time for everyone to embrace a pattern like this. It might take one person to model this (hopefully with the support of canceling) for the other person to come around or "get it". But I am not claiming it is a universal strategy, especially if one party is not acting in good faith or is being emotionally manipulative or abusive.
If you read or watch something online and feel outraged, try to notice that outrage and invite skepticism and curiosity about other explanations or framing. Given the same facts, what other headlines might have been chosen? This is especially true where there appears to be some evil or incompetent guy/organization/institution to blame.
Regardless of whether you're on the left, right, or something uncategorizable, I believe most of us have a tendency to jump on these outrage bandwagons, and it takes intentional effort and humility to resist this.
Yes, and for link-sharing sites, consider if you want to share that article or look around for a better one.
I wish more people understood the concept of exponential growth. I wish people knew how to sum the doubling time from growth rates, and made an effort to find the growth rates for things discussed in articles. I wish all the articles about resources, consumption and population came with doubling times and real projections of growth built in so that we can easily see just how much we have left and how long that will last us. We should really be thinking about resources in terms of "at our current rate of growth, how long until our rate of consumption exceeds the amount of resource that exists?" I wish that was a common way of thinking that everybody shared. Humans are great at thinking linearly. We have that process hard-wired, and mastered. But we need to actively engage our brains to do the calculations to understand exponential growth and what it means for our future and planning.
If anyone who reads this hasn't seen it, it is worth watching the hyperbolically-titled Most Important Video You'll Ever See to understand what I'm referencing here. His example of the bacteria in the bottle is what drove home the fact that my intuition on estimating resource usage when growth is involved is just wildly inaccurate. Up until then, I sort of assumed that I could trust my gut to be accurate to a useful degree. Now I know better.
I also wish that people stopped using "exponential growth" to refer to anything which grows quickly. Quite often people refer to quadratic growth as "exponential" because both are fast. This article outlines why this isn't true for software startups but there are lots of examples.
My biggest problem with this is that we've basically had linear population growth since WWII. It absolutely has not been exponential. Population growth has slightly increased in absolute numbers, but the percentage increase has not stayed the same, which means that it is not exponential growth.
one billion in 1804
two billion in 1927
three billion in 1960
four billion in 1974
five billion in 1987
six billion in 1999
seven billion in 2011
eight billion in 2022
Population vs growth rate chart
Seeing how spiky the growth rate got before calming back down, it suddenly makes sense why treatises such as The Population Bomb and China's one child policy were published in such a similar cohort. I wonder if there are specific reasons for the relatively large fluctuations in the growth rate while it was at its peak or if the inherent random noise was simply magnified.
Bit of a disclaimer
I was originally writing a long comment on the thread about ChatGPT's response to controversial topics, but that got nuked before I could submit. Probably for the best, but there was one point I wanted to make that would also fit here, so I'm going to go ahead and do so. If this crosses a line, feel free to remove it.I wish people had more respect or a least left more room for neutral and dispassionate sources, including or perhaps especially on controversial topics. Too many in my estimation seem outright hostile to anything that doesn't affirm their own take on a topic, even if it's not affirming any position at all.
There's more than enough places and people trying to tell you or me what and how to think, and honestly, at a certain point it just feels like a disrespect to my intelligence. It was bullshit when I grew up in a home with Fox News on the television and Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and it's still bullshit when it's some "thought leader" or "influencer" posting on social media, even if I largely agree on where they're coming from.
I like to think I'm confident enough in my beliefs and values to look at the "hard facts" or even opinions contrary to my own while still holding firm to or even strengthening what I hold dear. So should us all--have some respect for yourself and your values, you don't need someone else to point out evil if the facts of the matter already make it plain to you.
I strongly agree. At least in online activist progressive circles, there is an unhealthy paranoia over accidentally ingesting right-wing centrist hate facts. It's exhausting having conversations derailed over complaints that some source did not say that fascism was bad hard enough or discussing the author's (possibly genuinely) bad opinions on an unrelated subject.
Even bad people can have correct analysis.
The problem I have is that there are too few neutral sources, or maybe I have reached point where I am too cynical or suspicious that a source presenting as neutral is not.
That said, I think we can make an effort to avoid being "outright hostile to anything that doesn't affirm [our] own take" even if the source is not neutral. Trying to understand someone else's viewpoint, what they think is important, what kind of information they are relying on, etc. even if we don't agree with those things or their conclusions can give us empathy and help bridge divides.
However, this requires a certain amount of good faith on the part of the source. It's difficult for me to engage with someone who is lying about the facts, misrepresenting their goals, or deliberately sowing FUD. Finding the line for this exclusion is hard in proportion to how strongly I disagree with what is being said.
Yeah, it definitely feels like we have a terrible cycle of less genuine sources existing leading to less trust in sources leading to less demand for genuine sources and so on. So, what I said ends up being easier in theory than in practice.
But when I see someone appear offended at the mere existence of takes that don't line up with their own, I often see a lack of confidence in their own convictions. That's why I feel popular calls for deplatforming can get excessive--it's doesn't just look like that folks think these ideas are immoral, it's looks like they think the ideas are too powerful and compelling.
Re: confidence in one's ideas:
I would say that if we were talking about a true marketplace of ideas, where things with merit float to the top, then sure. Don't deplatform, let the toxic bad stuff rot on the vine. I think Tildes is a pretty good example of that mostly working.
But that's not the world we live in or (for the most part) the platforms we have. Algorithms manipulate the conversation to create engagement. People exist in bubbles where certain voices are all they hear. I think that is incredibly toxic to discourse. The best thing would be to fix the algorithms, but the second best thing is to get the very worst stuff off there entirely, so that the algorithms can't push it to drive engagement.
I ask this in good faith, not in "dEfiNe nEUtrAL" internet pedant fashion - what do you define as neutral? Any examples? To my mind, truth and lack of bias are not the same thing - omitting or including facts can paint different pictures. The importance of those facts can be a grey area depending on the values of both source and audience. "Including both sides" is not a good universal metric in my opinion - Overton windows shift; some voices are more valued than others (according to whom?); sometimes there are multiple sides; sometimes it's just too damn hard to fit it all in! That last one is perhaps outside the scope of neutrality and more about format.
I'm running on a lack of sleep so I hope I make sense.
Going off the cuff, I would say a neutral source would be one that does not omit information that they know might change how people understand the topic, and that if there are multiple reasonable viewpoints, they would acknowledge those viewpoints. Or at least provide pointers to them. I agree with you that a neutral viewpoint is not the same as "both sides get equal air" when one side is unreasonable or harmful.
But even this definition is problematic in the polarized world (I am in the US). Reasonable to who? Harmful to who? My overarching point is that there are no neutral speakers, and when someone presents themselves as neutral I am automatically suspicious.
I'm not sure if it's that the overton window is so wide that there's no longer any basis for common understanding, or that the preference for polarized views (by with algorithms and those with more traditional forms of control over content) in the race for engagement has starved the neutral viewpoints that are still possible.
That ownership is state defined. People often seem to believe that making a purchase entitles them, in perpetuity, to use and dispose of that thing however they please. But it has never been the case in western civilization, except perhaps for the King, that anyone obtains any inalienable and absolute relationship with trades. The state defines what uses your purchases entitle you to. And it redefines them based on political processes.
I often see people claim to prefer physical media because it gives them “ownership.” As a practical matter, it is more difficult for a state or other party to restrict your use vs. streaming. But as a legal matter, the state can amend, limit or rescend your right to use it in amy way.
At least in the US, contract also limits and modifies the rights the state might allow.
I'm sure you know that, but spelling it out
Exactly. Possession is 90% of the law, even if the paper pushers say otherwise.
Doubly so with land. People act like they have some divine right protecting land ownership, transcending government in their libertarian fantasy, but a title deed is literally just saying "the
crowndemocratic government grants you the title oflordlandowner of this section of its land by its authority." Some terms have changed in some countries, but it's the same concept descending from the feudal system: all land within the borders of the nation belongs to the state, and it delegates the responsibility of operating it to individuals who hold a title (which is passed to descendants). There's no reason it can't be rescinded, or the terms of its use changed.It's not a right, let alone a divine right, but there is a version of land ownership that even applies to animals: your territory is what you defend. Some kinds of warfare were about driving people from desired hunting grounds and getting them to move somewhere else.
Legal rights are what allow you to leave and not have the land taken from you, because it's guaranteed by the state. But since the state is often far away and certainly can't be there all the time, physical barriers (locking your door, building fences) are still important. Leaving a place vacant a long time, without someone looking after it, is a risk. And if you want to keep invasive plants or animals out, it's up to you. (Maybe with some assistance from animal control, or someone you hire.)
States and nations are abstractions. The relevant part of the state is the courts, backed by the police - consider how an eviction notice works.
I don't believe the US courts consider all US land to "belong to the state?" Maybe some other countries do? In principle, a legal system could work differently than it does, but in practice, they don't.
There is also the possibility of adverse possession if someone else publicly occupies your land for significant time and you don't defend your ownership rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
affects a lot of people (maybe 5-10%) but seems to almost be a secret. You can get a psych evaluation where you can mark 4 or 5 signs in the first paragraph but they’ll miss the Dx. If you were bullied as a kid or are self diagnosed with autism, ADHD or something fashionable you might very well have the common neurodivergence that hides in plain sight.
This is an interesting conceptual paradigm for mental health but I'm not actually seeing in a quick review that it's an actual diagnosis nor more than a proposed POV. I'll read the rest of the wiki article but this is not in the DSM. Unless I'm missing something.
It is, but it's called schizotypal personality disorder. The DSM-5 put the proposed "dimensional model" of personality (where disorders are extremes of dimensions that interfere with your life) in an appendix because psychiatrists weren't ready to change. They didn't make the discussion underlying that decision public, which is foul in my opinion.
Interesting fact: Tom Widiger, one of the dimensional model originators (and an immensely talented and productive researcher) was the lead editor of the DSM-IV/DSM-IV-TR sourcebook, which chronicled all of the scientific basis of all the discussions and decisions leading to that edition. It wouldn't have existed if he hadn't insisted, and he took on the challenge of "fine, if you want it, you do it." That included sitting in on ALL of the section committees. I think he was the only person to attend all of them, and he's one of the few contributors who was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. For the DSM-5 they ditched that process and the sourcebook, and made Widiger and co's new approach to personality disorders an appendix. The regression in transparency pissed off so many people in the field, and yet here we are.
I've seen many schizotypal patients over the years, and only two who ended up inpatient because they became dangerously psychotic. Overall a super interesting and fun sort of person to get to know.
I'll have to read more about it, because the wiki article started with "don't confuse this with schizotypal" up top. It's definitely past my time in grad school, and I don't work clinically currently so I have not kept up on all the changes and on new theories/paradigms etc.
I love my non-clinical work but it keeps me more tangential to dx.
Reading the description, it's most likely because schizotypy is a spectrum, and the disorder is only if it is a chronic, life-interfering level of schizotypy. The DSM doesn't address traits so much as the disorders that can result from traits, so schizotypy researchers don't want to pathologize it. I'm thinking like autism spectrum vs autism spectrum disorder, performance anxiety vs an anxiety disorder, etc.
Which makes sense, but I am not familiar enough with it to speak to its validity.
It makes it hard to engage with a "no one diagnoses people with this thing" that as linked isn't actually a diagnosis. I get the concept of schizotypy as a spectrum, it's just an area I'll need to poke at more to understand more fully.
So how do you know why they did it?
Because it was a proposed change that they thought merited inclusion based on the science, but they didn't change the categorical system from prior editions. "They" being the psychiatrists who were on the DSM committee. Also because people wrote a lot of editorials and public comments at the time.
I work in the bureaucratic (not patient facing) side of patient safety. For many years my focus has been on suicide prevention.
I need people to understand these things:
When talking about data, any data but especially suicide statistics, I want people to ask "What is being counted, and how is it being counted?" Definition for suicide can vary across countries. For example, in the UK a death by suicide is "death after self-harm where the intent is unknown", if the person was above a certain age. In the US the definition is something like "death after self-harm where the intent was known to be to end life" (and again, with an age limit, but a lower age). These are different!! Definition can also be different within a country. As an example, in the UK we have a definition used by coroners when they issue a conclusion, and we have a definition used by the Office for National Statistics.
I really want people to understand that suicide prevention measures are a broad package that should be implemented together. But when we talk about a measure we tend to focus the discussion on that individual thing. We might talk about reducing access to means and methods and about reducing the quantity of certain meds that people can buy. And people unfamiliar with the convo will say, perfectly reasonably, "but what about housing, what about poverty, what about violence, how do we tackle despair? How is reducing the pack size of meds a meaningful response?" and they're right, on its own it isn't, but as part of a broad package of measures that look to address all the antecedents of death by suicide it's a useful intervention.
"The purity of your ideals does not equate to being either right or virtuous."
"An argument is like a machine: additional moving parts increase the odds of malfunction."
"If an argument feels hard to defend you should probably throw it out."
"When an artist is adamant about being original, they usually fail. Originality is grossly overrated. "
"You shouldn't listen to someone who is always certain."
The broad impact their actions have. Even and especially actions that are automatic and not given much thought. That while the actions of the individual are not significant to the global state of things they are important.
Personally I tend to think about it as such: lets say for the sake of argument that an average person has something like a hundred billionth of the global potential for change and that they use something like a half of it to push a direction(even and especially in actions that they do not ascribe any significance to or even think about). In my opinion it is more productive to think that the person uses half of their potential to push that change instead of that the change is two hundred billionth.
And also very importantly the impact those choices have on the person themselves.
That we all have experienced violence in the past, and are thus often "overreacting" in the present, and not seeing all the options we have in terms of action and reaction.
I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but being conservative is just being progressive but 50 years too late. Time progresses, so does society. We need new solutions to new problems. And while yes, sometimes new isn't always better, generally it's best to go with the times instead of sticking your heels in the sand.
Change is tough and can be scary, but distancing yourself from it might make it harder to get along with it down the line even more.
Being open minded and listening to others is generally more favorable than ignoring it and only minding your own business.
This question is deliberately open-ended. Which people are we talking about, and how much influence on them should I pretend I have? If I had that kind of influence on millions of Americans, one simple message might be that your vote is a drop in the bucket, but you should do it anyway, because they add up.
But, usually I don't think I have that kind of influence, and if I had that opportunity then I'd have to think about it more seriously.
I intended "people" to be a broad, general category, but if you (or anyone else answering) want to specify a specific audience or assume a level of influence for yourself, go for it! I think that makes for interesting answers as well (e.g. @patience_limited specifies a particular audience in their response, which adds a lot of depth to their answer).