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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, the best antidote is to always use logical, intellectual responses to problems, rather than an emotional response.

Let me guess: engineer?

There's absolutely a personality type that prefers to solve all problems with logic and clear thinking, which is a very good thing when you're dealing with engineering problems.

When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic.

Not all people and all problems are amenable to "logical" solutions.

Controlling negative emotions is a very good thing. But there are many ways to achieve that. Turning to rational problem solving is just one mental tool, but it's not fit for all occasions.

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> When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic.

Nonsense! As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help. There's nothing illogical or non-intellectual about realizing that, it's just a matter of learning from experience. In fact, people who regularly turn to problem solving and annoy their significant others are probably too driven by their own emotions of frustration and empathy.

A better example of how logical, intellectual approaches to people problems don't always work might be with character judgments. Many people can derive intuitions about people without consciously recognizing where those intuitions are coming from, and deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy is often impossible to break down to logical terms until it's too late.

Logically speaking, surely we need your wife's (honest) opinion on your approach here?

As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help.

Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less stressful for your wife if she could take about things before she was emotional about them.

This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.

I mean, sometimes people just come home emotional. I don't really want to dissect my marriage on here or anything--my point is that there is nothing illogical or non-logical about dealing with other people's feelings.

Funnily, I've been reading a book by a psychologist who developed EFT, a type of couple's therapy.

One scenario that stood out was how somebody would be emotional and that the partner immediately turns to problem solving to try and "fix it" when in fact the number 1 need is emotional support and to know they're there. The problem solver makes things worse by shunning the emotional needs and working to minimise them - perhaps as an internal reaction to difficult emotions.

The goal of the therapy is to admit to each other that you depend on each other and that's alright. Moving forward, expressing this need for closeness and dependence. This runs counter to traditional couples therapy, which has indeed focused on problem solving and a supposed need for independence.

I've been applying some of the ideas to my own relationship that has, especially over the last 6 months, been quite turbulent. The results are looking good.

The book is called 'Hold Me Tight'. Very interesting.

> logical, clear-thinking

To what extent?

So in technical terms:

> I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent,

Signal processing? Capacity management?

> that the best way to improve her mental state

State change management/processing?

But psychological thinking has it's very strange non-mathemalical logic... and vocabulary ;)

> As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help. There's nothing illogical or non-intellectual about realizing that, it's just a matter of learning from experience.

In the context of the parent comment, providing emotional support for your wife is an emotional response, even if you decided to take that response for logical reasons. A logical response in this context would be ignoring the feelings your wife has and focussing on what can be done to solve the problem.

It depends on how far your logic goes. If you have sufficient experience with people, you could see the logic solution to your example as avoiding direct problem solving proposals, as you might expect the person to react negatively.

Of course, the natural way of achieving the correct response is by "simulating" the other person's emotional state to try to predict the best outcome (which includes their future emotional state) -- this is what I understand people generally mean when talking about empathy, and this is what the article refers as 'Emotional contagion'. However, as the article argues, it shouldn't be the only way. You should in principle be able to build a sufficient model of people's emotions and reactions without having to use your own "emotional engine" and being impacted yourself (which may in turn affect your own capability to make good decisions).

> Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic.

If you run in to that (I have many times, still do occasionally), it means that you're not solving the right problem, or you're trying to solve it in the wrong way. The way to solve the problem in that case is by listening and offering emotional support, but it's still not productive to react with negative emotions.

The rational reaction to such situations would be to recognize that this approach yields bad results and to try something different instead, e.g. the emotional manipulation you seem to be implicitly recommending.

One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are. Unfortunately the desire to empathize and treat others like oneself makes this a difficult lesson to learn.

   > One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do 
   > is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The 
   > more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov 
   > chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my 
   > life outcomes are.

Consider that a lot of "irrational decisions" made by others are only irrational from your perspective.

The people making those decisions may simply value vastly different things than you do. A lot of people would say us engineer types are completely irrational for wanting to spend large portions of our lives staring at computer screens.

I'm aware of differing utility functions and this is not what I'm talking about. I get better results by assuming most people don't maximize any utility function but merely respond to stimuli in a probabilistic manner (with emotional state as a hidden variable).

I think that's the right line of thinking. To me it seems that people build and update rationality models and base the rationality of their decisions and thoughts on their personal model, not on some universal model. Conflict occurs when people's models don't intersect. People with good social skills probably recognize this. Unfortunately I have no data to refute this.

> Unfortunately the desire to empathize and treat others like oneself makes this a difficult lesson to learn.

Thinking that others are like us is narcissism. Feeling other people's pain as our own is empathy.

You -> Others ( bad )

Others -> You ( good, in limited quantities )

> The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are.

I think all humans are emotion optimizers, trying to maximize the good ones while avoiding the bad ones. But:

  1. Some do it by hacking the world to make it feel better.
  2. Some do it by hacking their perception of the world to make it feel better.
  3. Some do it by trusting others to make them feel better.

The people you call "markov chains" are probably number 3. They tend to live in reasonable consensus with majority of their peers, which means that people help them and things usually turn good enough for them, to great frustration of some elitist engineers who can't imagine how such dumb people manage to survive :)

Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.

> 2 are clinically insane

Or buddhists.

> Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.

There is definitely genius in realizing the distinction between number 1 and number 2 is finer than it might initially look.

I was under impression that Buddhism is about giving up on 2.

By "hacking perception" I meant things like hiding thoughts from your consciousness so that other can't learn about them, masking unwanted emotions with others, forcing yourself to feel particular emotions in order to achieve some external goals - pretty un-Buddhist things to do, if my understanding of Buddhism is worth anything.

The distinction between 1 and 2 as I meant them is influencing emotions directly vs. influencing external factors which those emotions have evolved to benchmark, if that makes sense. I'm a (recovering) nerd, not a Buddhist :)

I can't help but link to "It's not about the Nail": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

I'm not sure if there's really a difference in the English language but I'm inclined to say

regulating rather than controlling

to move this even more away from the current technical main-stream (mis)understanding ;) ... this is as well a more realistic, natural and humane way to think about it, i think.

On an different note, it looks like there is still a huge mental wall built up between "the rational" and "the emotional" which actually is just a mental one or cultural and and bears less and less factual indications the more we learn about our mental inner workings.

I think we need to tackle that wall from both sides: techies need to accept and deal with "the emotional", which would change the way they work and their products

and

on the other side "the rational" needs to lose its tag of being simply cold, inhumane and not appropriate in certain domains. The most "social" areas of our society need a certain level of "the rational".

Looking forward to the generation capable to spark a "social silicon valley" ;) ...

Yes, I was mostly talking about problems where a logical solution makes sense.

For dealing with people, you're right, an intellectual response alone is not the solution. I was more just pointing out that it is the negative emotions that appear be the cause of the burnout.

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