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OH FFS. This person is pedantic at best, if not dumb. How can you call yourself academic and then proceed to completely mis-communicate with people. When the th

by proc0 11y ago

OH FFS. This person is pedantic at best, if not dumb. How can you call yourself academic and then proceed to completely mis-communicate with people. When the therapist asks, "Are you absolutely sure you're not going to hurt yourself later today?", she's asking it within a certain context. The therapist is obviously excluding out of the ordinary incidents that may happen. Apparently the author is completely missing the context because she's either a pedantic nerd, a foreigner still learning English, or just dumb, not because she's in her "academic" circle.

SilasX 11y ago
If you haven't been "trained" on what a psychiatrist's context is, how can you be expected to know what they "obviously" meant? I would think that it's the opposite: to the extent that the psychiatrist is unable to clarify their questions to arbitrary precision, spell out implications, etc, then s/he is the one with insufficient mastery to be taking on such a role (not that it matters in our "fake it till you make it" world).
- NamTaf 11y ago
  Saying 'if you are then I am obliged to have you taken to a psych ward' is incredibly threatening to people who need that supervision and can drive them to lie. This is why they ask the way they do.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    I meant clarifying what being "absolutely sure you're not going to kill yourself" means as a mental state, not what it would imply for their later treatment of you.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
theparanoid 11y ago
She was a foreigner learning English.
reddytowns 11y ago
The therapist said "absolutely" sure. Here is the definition: absolute 1. not qualified or diminished in any way; total. 2. viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative. Whether the therapist meant within a certain context or not, by saying "absolutely sure", she/he precluded that possibility. So, the therapist did overreact, (and considering it is a routine question in order to determine whether to commit someone, it is a systemic overreaction as well).
- proc0 11y ago
  Ok, so lets be pedantically logical. "Absolutely" is qualifying the word "sure". The definition of sure is: Sure: confident in what one thinks or knows; having no doubt that one is right. So to be 'absolutely sure' means you are totally 100% confident in your thinking, but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future. You can be sure of something and still be proven wrong. The therapist did not say "are you absolutely certain you will not under any circumstances kill yourself", she just asked if in her mind and from her perspective, she had the confidence of not killing herself (regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening).
  - reddytowns 11y ago
    First, there are a couple of straw man arguments here. I never said that "absolutely sure" meant you are predicting the future. I also never said that it was equivalent to "are you absolutely certain you will not under any circumstances kill yourself". But besides that, you said that "absolutely" qualifies "sure", which I agree with, and this seems to indicate that you have an idea of what a qualification is. It modifies, or limits something. Now, let me repeat definition 1 of "absolute": "not qualified or diminished in any way; total". In your two interpretations: * "'absolutely sure' means you are totally 100% confident in your thinking, but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future", and * "she just asked if in her mind and from her perspective, she had the confidence of not killing herself (regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening)," both contain qualifiers. In the first case you substitute "sure" with "confident in your thinking", but you still qualify it with "but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future" In the second case, you substitute "sure" with just "confident", and then qualify it twice: * ...if in her mind and from her perspective... * ...(regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening)... Finally, in your first post, you said "[the therapist is] asking it within a certain context", which is also a qualification. It seems to me that you are taking what the therapist said and interpreting in ways your brain can understand without paying precise attention to meaning, as indicated by your substitutions of the word "sure", three separate interpretations (across both posts) and not describing at all how the meaning of the individual words relate to each other, despite your attempt to be "pedantically logical". Therefore, I think you are a normal person, and do not get where the author is coming from. In the future, I wouldn't be so quick to tear down the ideas of perspectives you do not understand.
kaitai 11y ago
This is part of the point. Many of us are pedantic nerds. I had to train myself out of the exact same habits (the "what if"s, the "but you actually asked"s), but I could only do that once I realized when people habitually "lie". I also had to realize it wasn't exactly lying, it was cutting off the outliers... it's assumed that your answer to whether you will show up at 10 has silent riding disclaimers regarding being hit by a bus, being offered brunch with Beyonce, buildings collapsing due to earthquakes, etc. These are important questions to revisit from time to time, though. We train ourselves to give the easy answer in social and even medical conversation (or maybe you always knew to do that), but in some situations this is bad. I'm working on projects right now that focus on risk analysis -- focus on identifying and quantifying those outlier events. I now have to train the people I'm working with not to say, oh (I'm 95% sure) we'll be fine! but instead look at how bad things could be if they went bad, and think of all the creative ways things could go bad. I'm finding I have a bit of a talent there ;) And last, you don't seem to understand that in her/my "academic" circle, this is in fact a common trait. What does academic have to do with communicating, anyway? It has to do with writing papers!
- proc0 11y ago
  Sure, but maybe the article just has bad examples. I suffer from being too logical. I'm a software person, and have many times told my friends to pretend I'm a computer, simply because I just don't want to enter their world of illogical thinking. Things like "it's the same difference", for example, mean two things are the same, so there is NO difference! It's not the same difference (this implies there is one), there is NO difference. Anyway, in the end, I can see language is simply a tool, in which words and phrases take on different meaning depending on the context. To effectively communicate, it's important to see this context, which includes the _intentionality_ of the communicators. What did that person __mean__, when they said XYZ. I understand the article was about that, but I guess it gave bad examples. When the therapist asks "are you absolutely sure..", the therapist is not asking to predict the future. She is simply asking if you are 100% confident with your current knowledge, and assuming no unforeseen circumstances, that you will not harm yourself. It's actually logically sound. You can be absolutely sure, because it's qualifying your confidence in YOUR thinking. You can be absolutely sure of something and still be wrong. So the author wasn't even pedantic enough! Regardless, it was easy to simply ask what the therapist meant, and avoid whatever came after. But I guess the author of the article is also not a native English speaker, which I think is really the cause here, not that she's "academic".

by proc0 11y ago

SilasX 11y ago

If you haven't been "trained" on what a psychiatrist's context is, how can you be expected to know what they "obviously" meant? I would think that it's the opposite: to the extent that the psychiatrist is unable to clarify their questions to arbitrary precision, spell out implications, etc, then s/he is the one with insufficient mastery to be taking on such a role (not that it matters in our "fake it till you make it" world).

NamTaf 11y ago
Saying 'if you are then I am obliged to have you taken to a psych ward' is incredibly threatening to people who need that supervision and can drive them to lie. This is why they ask the way they do.
- SilasX 11y ago
  I meant clarifying what being "absolutely sure you're not going to kill yourself" means as a mental state, not what it would imply for their later treatment of you.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

theparanoid 11y ago

She was a foreigner learning English.

reddytowns 11y ago

The therapist said "absolutely" sure. Here is the definition: absolute 1. not qualified or diminished in any way; total. 2. viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative. Whether the therapist meant within a certain context or not, by saying "absolutely sure", she/he precluded that possibility. So, the therapist did overreact, (and considering it is a routine question in order to determine whether to commit someone, it is a systemic overreaction as well).

proc0 11y ago
Ok, so lets be pedantically logical. "Absolutely" is qualifying the word "sure". The definition of sure is: Sure: confident in what one thinks or knows; having no doubt that one is right. So to be 'absolutely sure' means you are totally 100% confident in your thinking, but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future. You can be sure of something and still be proven wrong. The therapist did not say "are you absolutely certain you will not under any circumstances kill yourself", she just asked if in her mind and from her perspective, she had the confidence of not killing herself (regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening).
- reddytowns 11y ago
  First, there are a couple of straw man arguments here. I never said that "absolutely sure" meant you are predicting the future. I also never said that it was equivalent to "are you absolutely certain you will not under any circumstances kill yourself". But besides that, you said that "absolutely" qualifies "sure", which I agree with, and this seems to indicate that you have an idea of what a qualification is. It modifies, or limits something. Now, let me repeat definition 1 of "absolute": "not qualified or diminished in any way; total". In your two interpretations: * "'absolutely sure' means you are totally 100% confident in your thinking, but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future", and * "she just asked if in her mind and from her perspective, she had the confidence of not killing herself (regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening)," both contain qualifiers. In the first case you substitute "sure" with "confident in your thinking", but you still qualify it with "but this does not necessarily mean you are predicting the future" In the second case, you substitute "sure" with just "confident", and then qualify it twice: * ...if in her mind and from her perspective... * ...(regardless of any unforeseen circumstances of say the apocalypse happening)... Finally, in your first post, you said "[the therapist is] asking it within a certain context", which is also a qualification. It seems to me that you are taking what the therapist said and interpreting in ways your brain can understand without paying precise attention to meaning, as indicated by your substitutions of the word "sure", three separate interpretations (across both posts) and not describing at all how the meaning of the individual words relate to each other, despite your attempt to be "pedantically logical". Therefore, I think you are a normal person, and do not get where the author is coming from. In the future, I wouldn't be so quick to tear down the ideas of perspectives you do not understand.

kaitai 11y ago

This is part of the point. Many of us are pedantic nerds. I had to train myself out of the exact same habits (the "what if"s, the "but you actually asked"s), but I could only do that once I realized when people habitually "lie". I also had to realize it wasn't exactly lying, it was cutting off the outliers... it's assumed that your answer to whether you will show up at 10 has silent riding disclaimers regarding being hit by a bus, being offered brunch with Beyonce, buildings collapsing due to earthquakes, etc. These are important questions to revisit from time to time, though. We train ourselves to give the easy answer in social and even medical conversation (or maybe you always knew to do that), but in some situations this is bad. I'm working on projects right now that focus on risk analysis -- focus on identifying and quantifying those outlier events. I now have to train the people I'm working with not to say, oh (I'm 95% sure) we'll be fine! but instead look at how bad things could be if they went bad, and think of all the creative ways things could go bad. I'm finding I have a bit of a talent there ;) And last, you don't seem to understand that in her/my "academic" circle, this is in fact a common trait. What does academic have to do with communicating, anyway? It has to do with writing papers!

proc0 11y ago
Sure, but maybe the article just has bad examples. I suffer from being too logical. I'm a software person, and have many times told my friends to pretend I'm a computer, simply because I just don't want to enter their world of illogical thinking. Things like "it's the same difference", for example, mean two things are the same, so there is NO difference! It's not the same difference (this implies there is one), there is NO difference. Anyway, in the end, I can see language is simply a tool, in which words and phrases take on different meaning depending on the context. To effectively communicate, it's important to see this context, which includes the _intentionality_ of the communicators. What did that person __mean__, when they said XYZ. I understand the article was about that, but I guess it gave bad examples. When the therapist asks "are you absolutely sure..", the therapist is not asking to predict the future. She is simply asking if you are 100% confident with your current knowledge, and assuming no unforeseen circumstances, that you will not harm yourself. It's actually logically sound. You can be absolutely sure, because it's qualifying your confidence in YOUR thinking. You can be absolutely sure of something and still be wrong. So the author wasn't even pedantic enough! Regardless, it was easy to simply ask what the therapist meant, and avoid whatever came after. But I guess the author of the article is also not a native English speaker, which I think is really the cause here, not that she's "academic".