Toxic Positivity • Hacker News Board

Re: Toxic Positivity

#151

Post by MockObject » Tue, May 24, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #148

MockObject wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invalidation of Lived Experience is also what we do, and should do, to Targeted Individuals [0], people who boast of having diseases cured by crank medicine, and con game victims certain that they're beloved by overseas supermodels. Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/mind-games-the-tortured-lives-of...

Great. In agreement, but help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine and con game victims? I added that boundary specifically so that cases like this wouldn't be brought up and used to counter-example. > Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit. Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Dis…

> help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine

There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fancy way of saying "you're wrong, and I'm right!" or "you're not allowed to say that I'm wrong."

Re: Toxic Positivity

#152

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

wreath wrote: post #147

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I had a team of mature, experienced developers. They all had decades of experience, and at least a couple of them, were smarter than me. I stressed that we respect each other, and I also managed each as an individual. When there was conflict, I generally looked for common goals, and stressed them. I treated them as family. I made sure they all understood that the company's goals were always foremost to me…

Holy cow, a team running for 25 years? Thats almost an entire career. I appreciate you being straightforward with priorities/goals (company’s THEN the individuals’). I think an awful lot of managers fail because they try to act like friends with their team and then get hit by the reality of whats expected of them and it gets real awkward at best.

Yeah. The company didn't pay especially well, so it was important to keep people, and new hiring was always painful.

Rigorous Honesty is critical in my management. I need to be honest with myself, my superiors, my coworkers, and my employees.

It's quite possible to keep things confidential without lying. I've done it for many years.

Another drawback of my style, is the employees become loyal to me, not the company. If I had left, they probably would have lost the whole team, fairly quickly. The company didn't seem to mind that.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#153

Post by samhw » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

antiverse wrote: post #133

lauraekelly_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you have any self-awareness about the toxicity of making a presumptuous and insulting comment about me, someone you don't know, based only on an article I wrote about toxicity... Or maybe you are just that uncaring about the impact you may have on someone's day? I can take valid criticism and have read the critique on here with genuine interest. However, I don't believe this comment about 'the writer' is…

>I don't see anywhere I've talked about our "incredible journey" on the post either? This is a little baffling. I'll step in to defend the OP because I know where they are coming from: your article is a drop in an ocean of a certain genre of article that HN has encountered over the years and we've devised certain aphorisms to describe them, and by association, describe the authors. One of those is that the author is…

I suspect, as with other writing I've seen before, that (a) they have no real thoughts about this topic (indeed it strikes me as very difficult for anyone to form a genuine thought about), and (b) therefore they are mechanically churning out 'content' (euch), emulating whatever examples they have seen. That's what explains so many in the comments feeling that it was produced by GPT-3.

And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.

The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.

It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#154

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

Whenever I hear "Toxic Positivity", I think of the character Mr Peanut Butter from Bojack Horseman. He's the icon for toxic positivity.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#155

Post by kelseyfrog » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

MockObject wrote: post #151

kelseyfrog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. In agreement, but help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine and con game victims? I added that boundary specifically so that cases like this wouldn't be brought up and used to counter-example. > Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit. Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Dis…

> help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fa…

That's so interesting. For me, it's a reminder to "pause twice before telling someone how they should be interpreting their experiences relating to bigotry and abuse. Get curious instead." I guess for some people it gets translated into "You're not allowed to say I'm wrong." I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?

As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line between abuse and other topics isn't so much of a problem for me. It is a form of Sorites paradox that we deal with in other topics all the time.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#156

Post by sbarbarian » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #140

slowmovintarget wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That phrase is often used to move goalposts when someone is using an anecdote to justify actions they've taken, or policy they're advocating. This can include leveling accusations at other people. It is a linguistic tactic that attempts to bypass debate through appeal to emotion. "You can't tell me I don't feel this way!" Correct, you feel that way, but your feelings don't magically turn assertions into fact. The obj…

Really good example. Thank you. This is precisely the type of thinking that goes into invalidating lived experience. The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. I…

It appears that the end point of debates around this end in both parties having their own "lived experiences" based on fundamentally different "truths". How can anyone reach agreement on anything under these rules?

Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful voice (and is less likely to be silenced as a vocal one-off) when citing research. Similar to how academic papers don't reference the author exclusively, but rather peer papers.

Everyone has a unique and relevant perspective - lived reality is reality! But with so much noise, its far easier to dismiss individual voices than reporting on the aggregated voices of others. This filters out confounding variables and roots the hypothesis in fact (e.g. Consider an individual reporting of a nearby road keeping them awake at night. It could be they have an uncomfortable mattress, a light on in the room, or any other factor. Only when other neighbors report the same issue is the proposed cause worth a serious look).

Obviously this is more difficult in lower incident / harder to measure areas - e.g. bias, harassment, etc. Don't have a good answer here other than the burden of hard proof is unfortunately on the accuser, which leads to so many of the troubles society is grappling with today. Things like police bodycams seem to help, but resolving all disputes based on 'lived experience' doesn't seem like the best outcome.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#157

Post by MockObject » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #155

MockObject wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> help me understand how we went from lived experiences involving bigotry and abuse to crank medicine There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fa…

That's so interesting. For me, it's a reminder to "pause twice before telling someone how they should be interpreting their experiences relating to bigotry and abuse. Get curious instead." I guess for some people it gets translated into "You're not allowed to say I'm wrong." I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you? As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line b…

I don't exempt perceptions of bigotry from any other reported phenomena, and I think they're as valid a target for skepticism as any other.

Personally, I am liable to refrain from such discussions because they are universally fruitless, but not because of delicacy.

> I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?

As a member of a group subject to bigotry, I see exaggerated stories deliberately weaponized, and legitimate critical thought silenced with thought-terminating cliches that include the one under discussion.

I also see folks boast "I listen to People of X!", but only paying attention to the most lurid stories, totally ignoring those who report the absence of bigotry. They're motivated by something other than the search for objective truth.

I encourage skepticism and independence of thought for all. Your curiosity should include the possibility that they're experiencing something you've never considered, but also the possibility that they're really mistaken, or exaggerating for any number of reasons.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#158

Post by kelseyfrog » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

sbarbarian wrote: post #156

kelseyfrog wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really good example. Thank you. This is precisely the type of thinking that goes into invalidating lived experience. The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. I…

It appears that the end point of debates around this end in both parties having their own "lived experiences" based on fundamentally different "truths". How can anyone reach agreement on anything under these rules? Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful…

It's rather frustrating that I specifically added in cases of "bigotry and abuse" and we're detouring into abstract epistemological discussions and trying to back fill those generalizations into the specific.

Invalidating lived experience is overwhelmingly used to describe a pattern of behavior which occurs in the realm of bias, harassment, and interpersonal conflict, not arriving at scientific or universal truths through debate.

This is much more about "Your Dad didn't hit you. That never happened," than "In my experience the Earth is flat." The suggested change in behavior also isn't "You're never wrong." It's merely the suggestion to get genuinely curious, and pausing to listen before framing someone's experience. Maybe the body cam shows otherwise, great. Getting curious tends to have a humanizing effect - the body cam evidence can wait 15 minutes.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#159

Post by robertlagrant » Tue, May 24, 2022, 6:55 PM UTC

mattcwilson wrote: post #37

lwhi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my mind, I think toxic is a byword for 'extreme behaviour'; and furthermore, extreme behaviour is often a symptom of a personality disorder at its most pronounced.

Except then it also becomes a label to classify the undesirable as extremist.

"Extremist" is a problem too. In 1787 banning slavery was an extremist position in the world.

Re: Toxic Positivity

#160

Post by samhw » Tue, May 24, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #130

samhw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're illustrating that person's point. I'm a liberal, with-the-times person in a liberal, with-the-times city, and I cringe at the thought of ever uttering the words "invalidate someone's lived experience". Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I don't think it's a bad rule of writing to speak in simple, clear, plain words, not glutinous agglomerations of abstract verbiage which evoke n…

> Aside from anything else, what the fuck does it even mean? I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding. Invalidating someone's lived experience is the process by which someone more or less says, "that didn't happen to you", or "your interpretation of events that happened to you is wrong." Before we start to find edge cases like "they clearly left the door unlocked and belie…

> I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding.

I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:

I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.

In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.

> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them

This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.

I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.

My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.

> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify

Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.