171–180 of 282 posts
>Even if my words are accurate, rational, and true, the way I deliver them may color that truth with an entirely different message. A doctor can deliver bad news of a terminal diagnosis with seriousness and sympathy. Or they can just glibly say "Don't bother buying green bananas."
A: knock knock B: who's there? A: insensitive doctor B: insensitive doctor wh-- A (interrupting): you have cancer.
There is a time and a place for all things. In teaching, teaching the wrong thing is not merely suboptimal but actively evil. So therefore while it is best to be both right and helpful, if one must give way, then helpfulness must give way. Otherwise you are just being successful at being evil. In comforting someone in a time of crisis, say, then obviously truth can sometimes give way (but that's not always the soluti…
The truth is obviously necessary, but not sufficient. When lecturing, sure a collection of facts is nice, but most people don’t do well with a bunch of facts. Our brains can only handle a couple things at a time. If the facts aren’t combined into a single cohesive narrative that can be considered “a thing,” they are much harder to keep hold of. And building a narrative is a much a thing of subjective tastes, as objective truth.
When talking to students one-on-one, if they make a wrong statement, it is usually not enough to just tell them the alternative correct thing. A wrong statement is a symptom. It is the start of a journey. You may have to travel with them down some fairly winding paths, to get to the nexus of misunderstanding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let‘s go and start gaslighting everyone
" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My 2¢: Don't tell someone they're wrong. You'll never convince them, even when you're right. It's not worth the ink (or the blood pressure). Instead, guide them towards the path to figuring out for themselves that they're wrong. Build a foundation of truths and facts they can evaluate their own beliefs against. If they change their mind, great. If they don't learn, you're no worse off than you were before (and your b…
Broadly speaking "Don't tell someone they're wrong." is an effective high-status technique. But it also degenerates badly towards groupthink and tolerance of damaging idiocy if that is the only tactic acceptable to a group of people. There needs to be diversity.
Everyone knows a "I just say it like it is" guy. Most times that guy is just an asshole, and doesn't get the hint that no one needs their wisdom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because leading people to believe untrue things about themselves leads to horrific and often untimely realisations and disappointment later in life? Or maybe I'm just a cunt.
Well, I'm not interested in labeling you a cunt, but I think I see where the remark is coming from, and I know what it's like to say something on the internet and now there's just a firehouse of criticism with a lot of it not being in great faith, and I can sympathize with that. I don't know how reflective the examples you gave are of things you actually say to people, but if you think you know that someone is object…
> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.
Genuine beauty exists is a strong indicator of health and fertility, extremes of human state (such as the anorexic or obese forms) are not only not beautiful but are profoundly unhealthy.
(Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry if it came across too blunt, I actually mostly agree with parents point but just wanted to highlight the thin/ill-defined line betwee his approach and what I think people mean by gaslighting. This is interesting in my opinion because they seem to be so similar conceptually but are actually connotated in a very positive and negative way respectively.
This reminds me of: “People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.” Richard J. Needham
It's important not to transform the advice for speakers to speak the truth in love, into advice for listeners that they can ignore any truth not spoken in love. Any excuse for ignoring truth reinforces the post-truth world that so many are falling into. Ignoring the truth for any reason is suicide.
So yes, when speaking the truth, you are responsible for doing what you can to help the listener understand. If not, the rest of us are free to point out both that you are handling the truth poorly, and that the listener is a fool for not handling it anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm not interested in labeling you a cunt, but I think I see where the remark is coming from, and I know what it's like to say something on the internet and now there's just a firehouse of criticism with a lot of it not being in great faith, and I can sympathize with that. I don't know how reflective the examples you gave are of things you actually say to people, but if you think you know that someone is object…
> but if you think you know that someone is objectively beautiful or smart and that you telling them that is some kind of bandaid to rip off for them - that is something to reflect on, these are textbook examples of socially constructed ideas. > Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. Genuine beauty exists is a strong indicator of health and fertility, extremes of human state (such as the anorexic or obese…
Plenty of people find extremely skinny people attractive - it's one of the reasons anorexia can be a problem, people feel compelled to go without food because they're trying to attain a body shape that isn't achievable while staying healthy in order to conform to a beauty standard. Plenty of people find larger people attractive, and at other times in history this was the dominant attitude.
This is just smuggling your preferences into a frame of objectivity with some spurious comparisons. You're ignoring the is-ought problem [1]. You can tell me a long stream of "is" claims ("this person is obese, this person is anorexic") but you can't actually come to a conclusion about beauty without making or implying an "ought" claim ("you ought to look a certain way"). The rhetorical game here is that, if you leave it implied as if it were obvious and required no justification, then you can pretend that it is an "is" claim instead of an "ought" claim in a trenchcoat. And if you pretend that you've made your argument using only "is" claims we can all agree on, then you can pass it off as objective. But it's mere sophistry, and once you understand how it works, it stops being convincing.
Even if we accepted your framing here, very few people are anorexic or obese or in another extreme state at a given time. So by your logic, surely the vast majority of people are beautiful, and we still don't need to go around policing who gets to feel beautiful.
> (Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)
This is does not contradict any claim I made. I'm guessing you've conflated "socal construct" with "fictional," but that's not so. Voting and being elected are both social constructs, that doesn't mean Joe Biden isn't the president of the US. Being smart is real, as a concept, but reasonable people may disagree about the definition or about who is smart, and it's possible for none of them to be wrong.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem