Posiopaths: Positive only attitude can be toxic
gp.blaisemcrowly.com
gp.blaisemcrowly.com
People who are ready to end their lives sometimes just want to voice their grievances and not much else, at least initially. There are many parallels between this and other kinds of critical situations faced by individuals or institutions.
Here's a short guide to suicide prevention that's aimed at members of the public: https://www.zerosuicidealliance.com/training/
Some people may read this and think it is overly pessimistic. It is not. I think this may be misunderstood to mean positivity is always bad, but it isn’t.
Rather, this attitude is so pervasive that it’s hard to know what incidents in particular they might’ve come to this conclusion from. It may not perfectly fit every forum of discussion, but it is disturbing how much of this article applies to possibly the majority of serious discussions online these days.
> “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's. clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Mathew 7:15)
In a modern Internet environment where not only is one’s identity prominent but also the key to how they are considered, understood and validated, this quote could literally not be more poignant. If you don’t believe it, I say just pay close attention next time you see something suspicious on social media, a perfectly crafted narrative of BS that is backed by someone who’s own identity and presentation is equally fabricated. Of course, not everyone out there is full of crap, but I really do think a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
And, is that all ("just") it is?
Your "positive attitude" is toxic, because you're still sealioning, a technique you learned from Gamergate and brought here, where it's inappropriate and unwelcome, and which you have been repeatedly been warned NOT to do, but in spite of which you relentlessly continue to do, and for which your posts have been repeatedly flagged and deeply downvoted and frequently even killed and hidden, and because of which your account is well on its way to being banned.
Give it a break. Stop posting generic content-free comment spam like that, which look like you copied and pasted them out of a table in the appendix of "Sealioning for Dummies", and bear absolutely no relationship to the topic being discussed, and have no positive impact of the conversation.
And remember it will be easy to recognize you, and we will be on the lookout for you (plus the management has countermeasures in place that will detect you instantly), if you create a new sock puppet account, and continue sealioning after you're banned.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions#Sealioni...
Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless polite, reasonable questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation (e.g. "please prove sexism exists"). This tactic differs little from harassment; instead of discussion, the point is to derail discussion, receive criticism (for their ignorance) so as to look like a victim, or to make someone feel overwhelmed and quit talking. It is comparable to running a filibuster (or perhaps a filibustering technique) and preventing anything getting done. The nature of Twitter makes it particularly easy to sealion -- since everything is extremely compressed.
A particularly toxic thing about sealioning is that people who are genuine newbies asking serious questions are easy to mistake for sealions.
The term originally gained prominence for describing the Gamergate strategy of flooding people with a barrage of demands for proof that Gamergate was harassing people.
Somehow we get on together but our families are so different. In her family emotions outside of an accepted range are verboten. Growing up in my family was the exact opposite and emotion ruled everything. Neither are healthy.
The problem is the positive person is usually delusional and convinced to the bone their way is correct. There is very little introspection there. Usually when the positive person is in a situation where they're forced to be "negative" or defensive you see some of the nastiest most vindictive behavior.
So true.
me: people struggle with X, it doesn't really work.
he: I haven't heard any problems.
We all know that people don't want to talk to people who make them feel stupid. Either by claiming the problem is all them, or by claiming everything is amazing and there's nothing to worry about.
Meanwhile, I will call BS on stuff (even, much of the time, when it is mine) and generally be sympathetic. So I hear about way more (although it's still amazing sometimes the stuff I don't hear about until much later).
Peter and Paul work together but in quite different roles. Additionally Paul has a considerable amount more experience both at their company and in their industry, Peter got his job from a bit of good old fashioned nepotism and never before this one had ever held a corporate job.
Well one day Peter tries shutting down Paul venting one day with the types of refrains you mentioned “It’s not that bad I haven’t had to deal with that my manager does it differently why don’t you just move teams” and Paul I guess had enough of it too and goes “never mind I don’t want to talk about this with you right now” in a friendly bit very noticeably annoyed tone.
I enjoyed that way too much.
I think this is accurate.
The downside comes from a near perfect refusal to face challenges, problems, and other negative issues. The refusal seems to occur using a variety of strategies, from the observations the article here observes to simply refusing to acknowledge that a problem has been raised.
This is deadly in engineering disciplines where the day-to-day is centered almost entirely around problem solving, trade-offs and negotiations.
This encapsulates my objection to Christianity. If we are all saved by the love of Christ just for the asking, why strive? Why engage? How is the inner peace that is supposed to be the payoff for faith compatible with the inner turmoil needed to effect change?
I get called on by missionaries with some regularity. If they could actually deliver to me these benefits as they claim, I think it would lead me to exit the arena, to avoid conflict. It would diminish me. Like an opiate.
You are conflating Christianity with a particular flavor of protestant evangelicalism.
I recommend going and reading what Jesus actually said, not what pop culture equates to Christianity.
Really hard to find an objective source on this, isn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stercoranism
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/gun-maker-markets-chr...
Where do I sign up to get a dedicated fan club and PR department and propaganda machine and ideology enforcement army like that? Then I'd be more Christ-like.
In talking about individuals who have had profound religious experiences, he distinguishes two types. One is the "healthy-minded" type, like the kind of relentless positivity you get in American evangelical religion, and perhaps could be extended to modern New Age thinking.
He also describes another type of religious experience, the "sick soul". These are the types of people who constantly agonize and worry and wonder, and are very in tune with human suffering and cannot accept the evil in the world. This can involve a fear of damnation but not necessarily.
He's able to come up with Christians of both types -- Tolstoy, for example, as a "sick soul".
Your objection is spot on. It's a common critique and conundrum that Protestant Christians have been wrestling with and philosophizing about for quite some time.
The Christian bible is riddled with contradictions, absurd pronouncements, and obviously bad advice. However, my thinking is that those are where the meat of Christian practice lies. A bible, itself, is simply ink on lots of pages, while it is a spiritual practice to try deriving meaning and value from the jumble.
Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell's equations, Quantum Field Theories; all of these excellent descriptions of our world each contain absurd infities, false predictions, and sketchy philosophical foundations. However, the standard rhetoric is that these cracks are where all the interesting research happpens!
While I reject Christianity for personal reasons, in my experience, choosing some spiritual conundrum and working hard to resolve it goes a long way to generating personal spiritual growth, whatever that means. At the very least, many find such work deep and valuable and meaningful.
::fist bump::
However, there are also Christians who do your job well and embrace similar hobbies. They may not have changed much yet, or they have developed different motivations. For example, someone might have been working hard to spite someone and they learn to work hard to love their coworkers.
It’s hard to say whether you would change very little, change your motivations to do the same thing, or do something totally different.
Or... maybe I drank too much coffee this morning....
I get it to some degree, you want to make sure that morale in your team is good and that if people are feeling unhappy you try to fix it, but people aren't going to be maximally happy all the time, sometimes you just feel differently, and trying to get me to feel happy all the time drives me up the wall more than anything.
Look, I get it. All extremes are bad.
Myself - I trend more negative than positive. But I have a couple of friends that are positive bundles of joy and optimism. I find them invigorating and inspiring to be around and they push me to have a more pleasant outlook.
They are not posiopaths.
But my partner (who has long-term struggles with clinical depression) is positively nauseated by them. If she read this article, she'd probably start naming these people as posiopaths, even though they don't reflect the antipatterns described.
A part of me wants to send this article to her to show what TRUE positive-only attitudes look like, but I suspect she'll just map it directly to those whose positivity makes her feel worse about her own negativity, and consider the matter closed.
Small example: last weekend I was out in the wilderness camping by myself, no cell service. Accidentally locked my keys in my car. Someone in that situation might be upset/stressed/worried. Someone else in that situation might be totally at ease because they have a backup key/slim Jim hidden on the chassis. I was neither. I quickly realized I could bash a window in with a rock and did so.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-...
It's even more pervasive than that: conditioning
Especially online communities are generally enemy of free-thinking, which reflects the debates and focus.
-James Stockdale, Vietnam POW
What was your next reaction?
It's sad, in its own way, since I can see why a community would go this way: the relentlessness of criticism can wear you down, so why not avoid it all? In reality, you just pay a different price: those who are right but disagree in a fairly critical way will leave. They're often a great asset. There's a difference, and a fairly big one, between being negative and being mean, but people often conflate them as one and the same.
Personally I see this as a tool that authoritarians and small-minded people use to deflect criticism and/or control people. People who have control/power shut down conflict - ostensibly motivated by a desire to keep things "nice" or "positive" - but really it just compels people to accept the status quo.
I would actually argue that online communities and contemporary society in general skews posiopathic, in part because of these kinds of "hall monitor" type authority figures.
I should really get organized and put some anon email in my profile, particularly since it's me making the request, I figured I'd just send you a note here and see if it catches your eye first.
It'll be easier to talk off-site, in any event. I'm finding that the comments section of ycombinator is like a shittier version of Reddit (if that's even possible), where you get censored even harder for posting anything that power-users don't like.
Here's an interesting excerpt about the topic from a book called "Learned optimism":
Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically. This means that, on average, optimistic people will distort reality and pessimists, as Ambrose Bierce defined them, will “see the world aright.” The pessimist seems to be at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indifferent universe. It is important to remember, however that this relationship is statistical, and that pessimists do not have a lock on reality. Some realists, the minority, are optimists, and some distorters, also the minority, are pessimists.
Is depressive accuracy just a laboratory curiosity? I don’t think so. Rather it leads us to the very heart of what pessimism is really about. It is our first solid clue about why we have depression at all, the closest we’ve come to an answer to the question asked earlier: why evolution has allowed pessimism and depression to survive and prosper. If pessimism is at the base of depression and suicide, if it results in lower achievement, and as we will see, in poor immune function and in ill health, why didn’t it die out epochs ago? What counterweighting function does pessimism serve for the human species?
The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their capacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.
Sometimes and in some niches in modern life, this deep-seated pessimism works. Think about a successful large business. It has a diverse set of personalities serving different roles. First, there are the optimists. The researchers and developers, the planners, the marketers—all these need to be visionaries. They have to dream things that don’t yet exist, to explore boundaries beyond the company’s present reach. If they don’t, the competition will. But imagine a company that consisted only of optimists, all of them fixed upon the exciting possibilities ahead. It would be a disaster.
In the context of the above quote, extreme optimism has a place as long as it's tempered by the pessimist. Same with the extreme pessimist it has its place, as long as its uplifted by the optimist, though what I'm seeing in reality is that part of what it takes to be an optimist is to avoid looking at reality and avoid listening or even being in the vicinity of the pessimist.
Also, in my bouts of depression I always try to remember the concept of unfiltered perception.
It is what the depression at its peak looks like. Unfiltered perception. Pessimism is just a pale shade of that.
Thanks to Douglas Adams for introducing me to it.
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