The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture
aeon.co
aeon.co
Interesting how operating routinely in a certain 'mode' like this ends up spreading into other areas of your life.
I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen.
The thing non-programmers commented on was tendency to spot and comment on special cases in social situations where it is unusual. When someone says generic statement, a programmer tends to bring up that one case where generic statement fails. A programmer can even agree with that generic statement in general and has no malicious intent, but has fun finding out those special cases.
Once I was told this, yeah, it is true. It is even sometimes like bonding among programmers, but non programmers can be unsure why are you derailing.
Myself, when I want to take something seriously, it means I:
- Try to spot special cases so I can be explicit about whether or not they should be handled.
- Try to be precise in my language, to ensure I'm not (for example) conflating two issues with a subtle but meaningful difference.
- Try to check my understanding of things, even in cases where I'm 80% sure I've understood someone correctly. I want to get to 97%.
- Try to nail down unambiguously which things we are concluding as we go along.
If I don't do these things, it feels like I'm not taking the issue seriously. If someone says something and I spot an ambiguity in their words which seems relevant, I feel an urge to ask about it--both to convey that I'm Actively Listening and to ensure I really understand them. The less confident I am in a subject, the more likely I am to judge an ambiguity is worth asking about--maybe its minor, but I don't know if I don't ask! When I notice a special case, my intuition starts loudly blaring "Risk ahead! Risk ahead! If you're putting this risk out-of-scope, be explicit about it."
All of these habits, when applied to conversations about sexual assault, are generally interpreted as being pedantic. This arouses suspicion in other people: "why are you bringing this up?" "why are you trying to be so cut-and-dry?" "why are you trying to rules-lawyer consent?" The conclusion which normal people naturally answer that question with go: This person is trying to create social space for abusers to operate.
The lesson is: avoid conversations about sexual assault unless you know you are first aligned on broader conversational norms like like "How do we establish that we've agreed on something?" and "How do we talk about a nonzero probability of system failure?"
That the parent is highlighting sexual assault as where this line of questioning breaks down is indicative they haven't fully internalized the lesson: it applies everywhere, to everyone. There are times and places and people and topics for whom picking apart the argument is a good thing. There are also times and places and people and topics where that doesn't apply. It differs person to person and topic to topic.
It means we need to empathize with the people we're talking to and recognize the boundaries and when we're getting into non-productive territory.
I occasionally hang out with non-engineer hippies, and they don't get in these kinds of arguments (they get into different arguments). They're much more about feeling what the other person feels, and supporting them in their feelings, with maybe some edging around on solutions.
I still struggle with the need to pick apart the problem and try to solve it. Frequently, that is not what the other person is interested in at that time. Often enough, they've already attempted most of those lines of attack and they're just venting.
Sometimes we just need to be empathetic, sympathetic, and supportive.
Yeah, I could see how that might be rather annoying - "dude, I've already tried those things you're telling me about - why the f--k would you assume I didn't? Now you've hurt my feelings, too! Please, just go away."
These effects are not "glaring and tragic", they're actually quite beneficial. Sexual assault is something that's very often perpetrated by narcissists and sociopaths, and the best way of holding such folks accountable and keeping them on the tight leash they need to be kept on (for the sake of everyone else's safety) is precisely to carefully and methodically ask questions like yours. "Social space for abusers to operate" is the natural outcome when people don't ask these questions.
You should be very suspicious when you see someone taking offense at e.g. a request to be precise in their language, or confirm your understanding of something like consent - that's a narcissist's M.O. Keep these people at a distance, and you'll avert a lot of problems for you and those around you. Sometimes including sexual misconduct.
I actually find it a relief to know this is a common trait in programmers and may have it's alternate side of making me better at my craft.
Constructive criticism may help us improve, but compliments help us keep going.
Just this summer I was told I'm thinking too logically. Of course I wanted to protest and also to take it as a compliment, but the person who said this, what they really meant was that I was being, well, a square.
It's important to remember that most of the time people don't start a conversation because they want to get to the bottom of things. They're doing it because they want to say a couple of things without really thinking about them, just to have a nice time and to bond with their interlocutors.
So sometimes you have to forget about communicating accurately and focus on communicating productively. For another example, I had a big fight about the Deluge, last summer (I go see my family in the summer). An older relative was very vague about what he meant by "deluge" (did he mean just a flood? The Flood? A big flood? A small flood? A local flood? A global flood?). I was determined to be confused with his inexact terminology and in the end we had a fight. What was achieved? Nothing. I mean, I still don't know what he was talking about and I don't want to ask him because we'd just have another fight again.
So sometimes you just gotta let go. Most people don't like conversing like this, like we're all computers. And you don't want to sour your relations with friends and family. That's what I learned.
Seems as much about personality type being drawn to career path in the first place, as it is about bringing work habits home.
/$.02
When I'm in social mode (aka not programming for more than 2 weeks), I become less precise and can definitely enjoy those type of jokes.
Also, though, my debugging mentality helped me figure out what was wrong with my dad's pool heating setup with zero expertise, where he and the engineers he'd called out were failing.
(It was a domestic boiler with two circuits, one for heating the other for on-demand hot water. They'd been adjusting the wrong one)
Thinking back to my childhood, many of my parents' arguments were really caused because my dad was a programmer, and that mindset takes over your way of thinking.
I had a difficult childhood :P
I tried to not get sucked in, but in addition to approaching things logically, their trade is to get emotional hooks into people- a trait programmers eschew.
I'm with the author here, but the battle he's fighting has long since been lost.
Lets not give up on humanity just yet, merely because online social media is reactive and polarised.
In that case, maybe we should give up on this whole civilization idea and go back to being pre-literate hunter-gatherers.
Oh, wait, that would really suck.
Then with war brewing he engaged in the resistance, as what is the point of the study of history if you don’t learn from it and act?
His writing on contemporaneous events towards the untimely end of his life was so sympathetic just as his historical work had been.
>Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
I think a lot of what we're learning in this new era is that the pub/sub model of talking to each other has some real weaknesses compared to immediate dialogue (which has its own weaknesses). Unfortunately, twitter, facebook, blogs, reddit, the news, and really all social media I'm aware of is more pub/sub than dialogue. Without dialogue, you have to interpret and assume. With what I'll define as "real" dialogue here, you'd just ask for clarification until you're on the same page.
There is no way to know the answer to this
I suspect tenure may be a bigger factor personally - especially for those whose careers are mainly academic instead of industry where they can always leave for greener pastures if they get fed up with it.
There are toxic incentives to try to tear down rivals under any pretense so that sort of sniping may easily get embedded in the culture. It is just a theory of course.
Poetry can be empathetic, but it can also be selfish or impersonal, so I suppose we'd have to examine Stalin's poetry to find out how it might have related to his personality.
Four of his six poems are published here: https://historyradio.org/2018/06/17/historical-documents-the...
The first one doesn't mention any individual people, focusing on people-less descriptions of landscape, only making a reference to Iverians/Georgians in a nationalistic context. No real empathy here, but an instruction to a group of people about how to feel.
The second one is a lament about old age. While it involves an individual person, Stalin admires that person because of his previous machismo. There's a certain amount of empathy for his current frail state, but it's really focused on the ability of age to bring such a previously strong man low.
The third one is back to landscape, along with some religious references and a generic "oppressed man" who can be "exalted by hope". People seem to be an abstract concept to him. The final verse is in the first person.
The fourth poem is an ode to a Georgian poet and playwright who "sang hymns to the motherland" and who he hopes will have many like him "in the fatherland". There are two references to "the people".
In short, his poems seem to reveal the mind with nationalistic tendencies, who sees "the people" as an abstraction, with individuality being largely irrelevant except when it can serve as a useful example. The only such exemplar happens to be a hyper-masculine man.
Perhaps people should have paid more attention to his poetry, it could have saved a lot of trouble!