You Can't Fix People
blackhole12.blogspot.com
blackhole12.blogspot.com
I apologize for the following but: Are you fucking kidding me?!?
Does he truly believe that he is alone in dealing with people? Do we not all deal with people? Is this not a core component of life and of cough growing up cough?!?!?
Have not many individuals over the ages dealt with their differences in various ways? Some dealings being better than others?
>I can never escape these problems, because they are people.
Why are "people" the problem? Why do you overgeneralize so easily? Yet, you ask so hypocritically:
>How do you get people to stop making terrible assumptions about other people?
This article should not be upvoted. If you are "tired" of dealing with people, as the author, I can almost guarantee that you have not spent enough time searching. Don't end your search to find good people with premature conclusions that sadly this author has jumped too.
People are not:
* linear time-invariant
* rational
* abstractable
By the first, I mean two things. People do not react proportionally to a change in input--raising your voice slightly or disagreeing somewhat harder may suddenly get you punched in the nose instead of just yelled back at somewhat more, or being even nicer to somebody may not return any change whatsoever. Moreover, the same input applied at a later time may completely change the reaction of a person--a harmless text message repeated at a later date could set a person off.
By the second, I mean that people simply do not follow a logical chain in most situation. Given a set of rules and inputs, you'd think that a person (and even their mental state) would behave predictably; this is obviously false if you've ever done business or sold to consumers or dated.
By the third (possibly the largest), I mean that people can't be reasoned about at a high level. You simply can't ignore or approximate all of the little minutiae that make up that person's background, and if you try you'll find that everything falls to pieces. "Every girl likes compliments" fails, "every customer wants the cheapest goods" fails, every abstraction falls over in contact with the enemy.
EDIT:
People seem to be reacting negatively to the opening statements of the article. When I read it, I interpreted it as the author trying to express the idea that even massively difficult technical problems are still amendable to standard problem-solving techniques, in implicit contrast to "people problems" which the author finds elusive.
A correct reading, I suggest, would be that the opening is more an attempt at example than braggadocio.
The responsibility of getting to know an INDIVIDUAL for who THEY are is a beautiful and expensive journey. Which is why we can only afford it in a minimalist sense i.e. MAYBE one person to fall in love with, MAYBE a family to love, and MAYBE a handful of friends to truly love as well.
However, if what the author seeks (hidden in an array of emotions) is the key to Utopia then that is a different issue. I am honestly not sure if the authors intentions were honestly stated. I am not sure if the author is truly frustrated with people or himself. I do know that taking this article point blank, word for word, as an objectively true and necessary outlook on life is very dangerous.
I think it's a shame that more people don't try to get to know others better; everyone has a life and a history, and it's quite fascinating to hear the stories of how another has come to intersect your path in life.
The trend that distresses me most, though, is that we've forsaken modeling people (which is bad) to instead simply bowing to statistics to do our reasoning for us (which is worse). Treating people as knowable agents using a flawed model is still more respectful of the human condition than saying "Well, they tend to do this given that, so, um, yeah."
People are not robots, but they also sure as hell aren't dice.
Even better, some people don't even need fixing. Devote your time to just a few people and the problem disappears.
Sadly false. All you can do is send messages and hope that their internal state matches what they show you, and that what they show you is what you want.
Dealing with people is incredibly hard because everyone has biases, experiences, and lives of their own -- and regardless of how much you try to put yourself into someone else's shoes -- to understand why this person is the way they are -- there is simply no way to ever truly understand how someone feels and acts.
People can be hateful, ignorant, and mean to one another -- but at the same time, people can also be kinda, loving, and compassionate.
I've found that the best way to get around the constant anxiety that goes along with wanting to help and fix everyone I come across is to try my best to be accepting of people the way they are.
Nowadays when I meet new people, I try to have no expectations: instead of building up a mental image of this person in my head, and assigning them an identity (this person is nice, or this person is smart, or whatever) -- I instead try to be fully present in the moment and let things happen as they will.
Not only does this help me deal with social anxiety a lot, but also helps me relax and feel more comfortable about myself, knowing that I'm constantly trying to live in the moment, accept reality (and people) as they are, and live my life the way I choose regardless of outside influences.
It's incredibly hard to do this, but all the effort pays off (at least it does for me).
Thank you for sharing your story.
Imagine you're fixing a car. There's a (relatively) clear spec on when it's considered fixed, and you strive to get there. You can get there by following instructions, or you can get there by experimentation.
Without knowledge of what is considered fixed, you're making shots in the dark. A lot of people are, and you have a chaotic system.
Comming up with a framework for what a person should strive to be is technically a job for philosophy, but that's not working, is it? We seem to be naturally change averse, and a lot of philosophical works boil down to rationalizing what you are doing is right. Kant reads like the bible of irresponsibility (What is the "Kathegorischer Imperativ" exept absolving responsibility to a higher mandate?), and Nietsche reads like he's trying to give you a free pass for everything provided you're the Supermensch (and who doesn't class themselves that way?).
No, creating frameworks is a dangerous game, and I've stopped trusting anyone to do a proper job at it. All religions I know of failed at it to various degrees (look at that track record for gods sake! They're still being used to justify murder). Most philosophers had their ideas tried out (as far as that was viable), and those approaches again didn't work out perfectly.
And here we're sitting, no idea how to do things, but hellbent on doing something. It's amazing we figured out science, which is why we can figure out those problems easily. But philosophy? We don't seem to have progressed there.
So yeah, fixing people is about as futile (right now) as physics has been before the scientific method.
Just as a counter point..
They will do everything in their power to destroy all my efforts at building a better world
...and it just becomes kind of pathetic.
I would have rather had a more fleshed out point about people and a sentence about how the author is a problem solver than so much about what he can do and then some stuff about other people.
I didn't take it as the author bragging--rather, the author was attempting tho show that even these supposedly impossible and ungainly issues can fall to properly-applied methodologies; in short, that technical problems are never hopeless regardless of how outgunned you might think you are at the start.
$557 Billion USD, of fixes just this year alone.
http://nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/global-ad-spend-grows...
We fix people all the time.
If certain people bother you, then the best you can do is try to change your own outlook and circumstances to deal better with the negativity you feel towards their behaviour.
Or to put it another way, the only person you're responsible for fixing is yourself.
I personally think only few people can be fixed, those who are very intelligent and who know how to get over human nature and their cognitive biases.
Google's cache of the article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ti31eUM...
Other than that...I'm not sure what else to comment. Of course you can't fix people. If we could, we'd live in a utopia where everyone was happy and operated efficiently.