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I don't think the author was applying an explanation either dumbly or trying to reduce its significance. I think it is part of our human nature to try and cont

by physcab 17y ago

I don't think the author was applying an explanation either dumbly or trying to reduce its significance. I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. I'm not a therapist, but I sincerely believe this human trait persists in many people as a coping mechanism. That's why it makes sense (even as an academic myself) in some weird, comforting way.

flatline 17y ago
Exactly - for columbine, it was the video games and music, which is much more of a non-sequitur than working in the high pressure environments of academia and biotech startups. This did read like more of a human interest story though.
joe_the_user 17y ago
I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. Are you implying that tragedies have no cause. It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes. Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Tragedies usually have so many causes that it's impossible to point out a single cause in a 3-paragraph comment and have it mean anything. Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first. Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.

by physcab 17y ago

flatline 17y ago

Exactly - for columbine, it was the video games and music, which is much more of a non-sequitur than working in the high pressure environments of academia and biotech startups. This did read like more of a human interest story though.

joe_the_user 17y ago

I think it is part of our human nature to try and contain a tragedy by labeling or attributing some cause to it. Are you implying that tragedies have no cause. It seems like human to try understand tragedies as they are significant part of our human world. Moreover, tragedies usually do have causes. Claiming that there is no cause to an event may serve some psychological purpose...

nostrademons 17y ago
Tragedies usually have so many causes that it's impossible to point out a single cause in a 3-paragraph comment and have it mean anything. Usually, if you do a root cause analysis of anything, you come up with so many contributing factors that the resulting document is hundreds of pages long. Think of industrial postmortems or court proceedings. Everything is more complicated than it seems at first. Saying "This was because she was denied tenure" does a disservice to everyone involved. It was probably partly because she was denied tenure. It was probably partly also because she had easy access to guns, and she was super focused on her research, and she didn't get along with the school administration, and she had once accidentally killed her brother, and plenty of other factors that we could never know about.