Hacker News Reader

Comment by czbond | Hacker News Reader

>> RE: It seems that I'm missing out something very important, but it really doesn't "click" for me.

edit: I'm addressing identity as a whole - not in the context of s3xual preferences.

I am no psychologist - but an engineer. I've noticed us engineers aren't feelers. More often we run our interpretation of the world through logic and thinking first, rather than feelings first.

Some people are heavy feelers and run events through feelings first, especially if extroverts which also means they might look to the external world for validation - and only then run their perspective through the logic domain of the brain.

Neither is right nor wrong; I've noticed feeling & sensor types seem to have 'higher highs, and lower lows' in life.

View on HN

That's not what I've noticed in engineers.

What I've noticed most often is engineers, who say they are logical and thinking-first unemotionally, exhibiting:

Anger, frustration, anxiety, exasperation, beligerence, smugness, laughter.

You've almost certainly met engineers who agitatedly tell you how much they are logical, beligerently "reason" with colleagues, or gleefully put down people they regard as soft and emotional.

Those are emotions.

This isn't true of everyone of course. Some people really seem like the emotion chip wasn't fitted. But I have noticed intense emotions in a number of engineers who explicitly describe themselves as being unemotional, logical, and thinking clearly.

It's an interesting blind spot.

Well put. My uneducated guess is that people who lack emotional intelligence tend to dismiss emotions as unimportant and tend to believe they are more rational than average precisely because their low emotional intelligence makes it harder for them to understand the importance of emotions in themselves and in others.

claps This is very, very true.

Engineers like to put on a front of "I am an logical being therefore I don't feel emotion like the lesser emotional beings". But they show all sorts of emotions like anger, frustrations, superiority, anxiety, etc.

Our peers just don't have very developed emotional intelligence, and don't view their emotions for what they are.

It's a big blind spot, and I think it is further blinded by the lack of emphasis on emotional intelligence that boys experience in growing up. There's also this odd societal view that you cannot be both emotional and intelligent/logical.

> I've noticed us engineers aren't feelers. More often we run our interpretation of the world through logic and thinking first, rather than feelings first.

Engineers process things emotionally, too—we’re all human. Often they just refuse to recognize or admit those emotions, and get really resentful when faced with them, or forced to question their own feelings.

>Neither is right nor wrong;

My friend, aren't you being a little too nice, here? How much do we bend backward to accommodate these 'feelers'. IMO option these 'feelers' are children who never grew up and continue to be parasites on the 'adults' around them. Granted that for many, their traits may be biologically innate, but the 'adults' have only so much of goodwill to spare...

And thinkers are automata with no empathy or compassion. Stop denigrating people for processing reality differently than you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com