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Comment by itsdavesanders | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t take it that way at all. I took it as “I was blinded from the actual solution because my vision was artificially narrow due to my past experiences with this person.” They didn’t ask for help, their partner intervened for them with a completely different and more direct approach.

I have a kid going thru this right now. It’s very disheartening and frustrating to see, because even with coaching and help, they don’t see the help and suggestions as solutions because they simply can’t see it. And as a parent you don’t want to have to intervene, you want them to learn how to dig their way out of it. But it’s tough to get them to dig when they don’t believe in shovels.

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I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.

You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.

To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.

What if the cops, the friend, and the consulate all said, "we do not care about a random mentally ill stranger, on a different continent, sending threats. You said he's been doing this for years and has done nothing yet? Sounds like you're safe. We have real crimes to solve. We have real murders to figure out. Call back if he shows up at your house, but he most certainly never will." Or maybe the FBI is like "oh, okay. Thanks. We'll keep an eye out but now this guy's part of an investigation so we can't talk about him to you." and then they do nothing, the friend doesn't reply, and the consulate is like "we're not obligated to reply." Those seem like super likely conclusions to the husband helping, too. So then would that have no longer been the "actual solution?" It seems that the "actual solution" is only determined after the fact once there is a success, and that's used as a proxy for whether or not the actions were really trying. If she had never replied and then the guy stopped texting after a year, would that have also been Actually Trying? Maybe it would've, because one could come up with a post-hoc explanation as to why that was an Actual Try. It feels sloppy to not distinguish what makes something a form of an Actual Try vs a successful try, because Actually Trying should be able to count failures as part of sincere attempts. Otherwise, Actually Trying collapses into being a synonym for success.

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