"Overreacting" considered harmful
raganwald.posterous.com
raganwald.posterous.com
Added:
This comes up a lot in employer - employee conversations. If you want your team to function efficiently, you really have to create a safe environment for comments and discussion.
Well, they are! But those defined meanings are different for everybody who has a history with the word, and oftentimes you don't know that history going in. The problem with "straight white male" privilege, speaking as a straight white male myself, is that there are words which have enormous baggage for one group or another, yet I've simply never had to deal with such baggage myself.
That's where the overreacting canard comes from, and I don't think raganwald fully empathizes with this in his post. Some people simply don't understand why somebody might have a reason to be worked up about a particular issue because they've never had to care about that issue in their life. I don't just hear "you're overreacting" from people who can't comprehend that people have bad days sometimes. In fact, assuming that the only reason a situation might be personally charged is because somebody had a bad day can be just as frustrating: it really sucks, I've learned, to be "forgiven" for your bad mood when the forgiver has said something truly offensive. What's difficult, but also truly necessary, is to be able to understand why somebody's reacted the way they have – to be willing to admit to yourself that even if something you said didn't seem egregious to you, that you might have crossed a line somehow that you simply haven't learned to notice.
A lot of people forget that in any human-to-human interaction, the logical endpoints are the humans. Language, as all aspects of communication, is human-oriented; using it like it's a logical end unto itself is like trying to use Python phrases in a C script.
We're a species where two people can look at each other and with nothing more than eye contact convey complex thoughts and emotions.
Bottomline, there's no way in which telling someone they're overreacting is going to lead to a productive conversation. It's a nasty way of dismissing someone.
Whether it is polite to tell someone they are overreacting is a completely different issue.
Also if someone is reacting to faults in society.. they may be right but why are they getting angry now, specifically? They might be 'overreacting' to a current event which is equivalent to reacting to something they experienced at a different time instead. Is that legitimate? Well, sometimes. The answer isn't always clear. But that's not an excuse to go '50/50'.
To be more precise, is there any area in your life where you are fully aware of systematically having the deck stacked against you and are repeatedly and painfully confronted by it?
Let me put it this way. I understand that the world 'overreacting' is heavily abused. It is very often wrong. We need to fight the abuse of the word 'overreacting'. But don't counter it by being wrong in the opposite direction, and assuming that every single time someone is very upset that there is a good reason for it.
Also I'm prone to a pretty cold anger.
From there, of course, one can and should dig deeper. It's in the nature of probability that sometimes, reality will go against the likely outcome. But it's also in the nature of probability to hold often enough to be useful.
Overreacting? Well, that is what I would call an inappropriate reaction, and of course it's part of my job as a parent to provide some guidance.
But it's still 100% the genuine emotion of the moment, and for that reason I'm not going to use the word "overreacting" with a child or an adult. I'm going to say (as I said, roughly) "I understand this isn't what you'd like, however..."
Which is roughly what I'd say to an adult too.
Of course in this situation what I'd want to do is roar "AAAARGH! WHY CAN'T YOU BE REASONABLE?", but, alas, that doesn't work.
There is also a question of what makes the "genuine" qualifier necessary. It presupposes the idea of an emotional response that is not genuine: what would this mean? What would a "false" emotional response look like, to the one feeling it (and are they truly feeling it at all?) or to others?
It was from a five year old. Children haven't learnt how to regulate their emotions. That's part of the job of parenting.
If someone's emotional reaction is genuine, i.e. represents how they feel, then you or I may think it's 100% bogus and invalid, but their response to the word "overreacting" is still going to be negative.
Now what I meant by "genuine"--and I'm open to learning that I used the word incorrectly--is that it represents how they feel. The alternative, to me, is when someone feigns anger or distress in order to consciously manipulate people.
Funny enough for a post about word-usage, I only understood this point after reading half of it. I think this post should've started with this sentence (from the OP, posted as a comment in this thread): "Let me get the thesis of the post out of the way first. The post asserts that the word 'overreacting' is unproductive to discussion."
Having said that, I agree with the post and think it makes a very good point.
What about the a guy gets a call from his home monitoring system and starts yelling that his house has burned to the ground?
What about a guy who shouts "you aren't my manager and you never will be" to a coworker?
I made none of those up. They all happened, from 3 different people. (At the same company, for that matter.) Some people really do overreact and really do need to calm down.
The failure for those people to be removed led everyone else to leave.
By asking "where are the caramel colored men?", you are implying that there SHOULD be men, which further implies that it's the organizer's fault that there are not.
I'd be pretty surprised if such a tactless comment did not offend.
The end-goal of a productive discussion doesn't have to be me convincing her that there should have been a tall, handsome Canadian on the podium. Perhaps the end-goal could have been her convincing me that I need to see this from a new perspective.
Either way, the word "overreacting" is not a good start. That's my thesis.
I find the "overreacting" word incredibly annoying. What it basically amounts to is: "I don't care about you, your feelings or your opinion; I know better and I'm not going to have a rational conversation about it". It's an ugly thing to say, it changes the conversation from discussing objective reality to discussing the validity of someone's emotions. It's a very nasty and saddening kind of dismissal. I can't help but to think less of a person who uses this in a conversation.
In industries where there is a grotesque gender imbalance, one way you start to fix that imbalance is by acknowledging it and making efforts to pick women speakers when they're available – that both gives the speakers an opportunity that is being frequently denied them, and it indicates to other women that there is opportunity in this field, that they won't be passed over again and again by men for no merit other than their gender.
If we assume that no woman is as good as a man in this field, then your argument makes sense – but that's a silly argument, methinks.
There is not one caucasian person in the top 10 fastest 100m sprinters (http://www.toptens.com/sports-track-sprinters/). Do you believe that this is somehow problematic?
Genes and gene expression affect neurotransmitter levels and neurotrophic factors which, in turn, affect cognitive performance - just as Jamaicans and Africans are on average better at sprinting than English and French natives. Particular genetic groupings are going to fare better at task X, not too badly at task Y and terribly at task Z.
This is not privilege, it is reality.
http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20110809/genes-play-big-...
As to my post, what I would say is that you and I are having a productive conversation in part neither of us is labelling the other as overreacting. Instead, we're trading viewpoints and questions.
Another example:
> Different studies have found different results, but most have found above-average verbal and mathematical intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, along with below-average spatial intelligence. Some studies have found IQ scores amongst Ashkenazi Jews to be a fifth to one full standard deviation above average in mathematical and verbal tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#D...