The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
status451.com
The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
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Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#2[deleted]
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#3The notion that affective empathy is present in any complete way in text-only communication is misguided at best. Affective empathy gets communicated f2f via voice quality, body posture, tonus et al. The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly.
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#4Glad to be able to upvote an article like this.
The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking, combined with the site's increased popularity lowering the bar for technical content to be considered worthwhile, and its occupancy of a critical position in the cultural namespace ("hacker news" is a really good name but not descriptive of the actual focus of the site--the hacker ethic is anticapitalist rather than neoliberal), make HN a really tragic institution these days.
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#5Glad to be able to upvote an article like this. The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking, combined with the site's increased popularity lowering the bar for technical content to be considered worthwhile, and its occupancy of a critical position in the cultural namespace ("hacker news" is a really good name but not descriptive of the actual focus of the site--the hacker ethic is…
"Glad to be able to upvote an article like this."
"The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking"
"tragic"
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#6The notion that affective empathy is present in any complete way in text-only communication is misguided at best. Affective empathy gets communicated f2f via voice quality, body posture, tonus et al. The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly.
It's very easy to assume the worst about someone if they're not seated across from you and you don't have those other cues.
In fact, if we don't share that person's viewpoint, I'll wager it's our default to assume the worst.
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#7The notion that affective empathy is present in any complete way in text-only communication is misguided at best. Affective empathy gets communicated f2f via voice quality, body posture, tonus et al. The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly.
> The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly.
I don't agree with that. As someone who has communicated primarily online since childhood, I feel as though I am much more attenuated to some group of people's emotional state through text, whereas in person, I feel like my emotions are obvious to everyone besides me, which makes them feel like they are much more able to be subject to manipulation. I as well feel as though my own 'truthful understanding' is concrete in real life, but online, it is easily manipulated in the attempt to see eye to eye.
Style develops - humor, sensitivity, all this is information depending on who you associate with and whether you are reflective of another intuitively, or whether it requires gradual understanding and a developed awareness / sensitivity, coupled together with time and observation.
I find that text discussions go off the rails because people aren't trying to see eye to eye. They either latch onto a specific point (irony) or a key phrase that doesn't jive appropriately with their perspective, and that constructs the direction of the discussion. People can have whole conversations without actually understanding another, and you can actually examine these arguments and decompose them into parts that once again, become mostly linear.
Part of that I think is because, a conversation sequence can actually be composed of many people, which can make it seem like a dialogue, but a dialogue it is often not. This can also happen to individuals, I can see in myself, I consistently contradict myself in a most convoluted way, through the attempt to balance multiple perspectives of awareness - perhaps in the attempt to coalesce those perspectives into some understanding that resonates as true to myself. But I find that to be a problem with no solution, because as soon as resonance seems to be found, the understanding escapes me through repetition - a sort of semantic satiation of concepts. So care must be taken.
The problems(?) of life.
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#8Glad to be able to upvote an article like this. The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking, combined with the site's increased popularity lowering the bar for technical content to be considered worthwhile, and its occupancy of a critical position in the cultural namespace ("hacker news" is a really good name but not descriptive of the actual focus of the site--the hacker ethic is…
"Glad to be able to upvote an article like this." "The prevalence of articles about things that aren't software or hardware hacking" "tragic"
What's your point?
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#9Leaving aside how poorly written this is ("spergonaut"? really?), I don't really see its claims about flagging borne out. Heavily political articles are often flagged regardless of which side of the aisle they come from. Certainly in the case of articles like this, which are more or less the definition of "more heat than light."
Re: The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
#10The notion that affective empathy is present in any complete way in text-only communication is misguided at best. Affective empathy gets communicated f2f via voice quality, body posture, tonus et al. The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly.
> The lack of a medium for affective information is a primary reason why text-only discussions go off the rails so quickly. I don't agree with that. As someone who has communicated primarily online since childhood, I feel as though I am much more attenuated to some group of people's emotional state through text, whereas in person, I feel like my emotions are obvious to everyone besides me, which makes them feel like…
I'm trying to understand the first part of your argument... it sounds like you are saying that it is much easier to understand people's emotions face to face, even too easy, but this is exactly what the parent comment was claiming with the term "affective empathy" (although it's worth discussing the difference between cognitive and affective empathy).
> They either latch onto a specific point (irony) or a key phrase that doesn't jive appropriately with their perspective, and that constructs the direction of the discussion.
This is a good way of putting it. If you are trying to make some kind of point or to say something, then you don't want me to mechanically react to some word you used or a particular choice of phrasing or example. What you do want is for me to:
1. Understand what you are trying to communicate, what you had in mind rather than the particulars of how you express it, and
2. React appropriately.
This is not too far from a textbook definition of "affective empathy".
I'm sorry to hear that you feel you are manipulated in face-to-face discussions. For a long time I tried to maintain a neutral affect to avoid similar kinds of things. These days I consider a consistently neutral affect in the face of changing internal emotional states to be more of a liability and an unhealthy habit than anything else. The reason that we express our emotions so strongly in our body language is because our ancestors that did so were more likely to survive than our ancestors that didn't, in spite of the fact that this made them easier to manipulate. The fact that you feel like this makes you vulnerable to manipulation may either be a completely rational response to an unhealthy environment or a maladaptive response to a normal environment.