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there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because

there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire content of a thing was what i understood about it in my oh-so logical way. what i was missing was experience (and often context), which is not neatly captured by syllogisms and facts. e.g. ask the jews who's entitled to palestine. now ask the palestinians. there is no theorem prover that will enable you to resolve that one no matter how many historical facts you feed it because ultimately the significance of each fact is refracted through personal experience (i.e. feelings). this was as a result of being young and arrogant. i had the luxury of dispassion because none of these things had affected me in any way - i was lacking in experience of the injustices of the world that can't be written down using a set of "objective" facts. in retrospect it's a shameful mistake to have made. this kind of bullying with "logic" is abhorrent to me now, especially when coming from someone who abuses their "logical" authority ("i'm very logical at x so trust me when i reason about completely unrelated y"). i always do my best to fight that kind of fire with fire. i believe if you have abilities (oratory, "logical") your responsibility is to aid those that don't, that don't get the same kind of attention, room to speak, credence, that you do simply because what they've experienced can't be formalized.

viklove 7y ago
I think you summed it up really well, but reached the wrong conclusion. Who cares who is entitled to Palestine? It's a boring and pointless problem to try and solve. People who are interested in spending their lives productively are understandably fed up with others who want to squabble over their pointless feelings that contribute nothing to society.
- mlevental 7y ago
  >Who cares who is entitled to Palestine? ~5 million people. how can you be so blithe as to completely discount the existence/experience of that many people. i challenge you to empathize with someone living there. truly imagine it and then tell me it's completely trivial.
- osdiab 7y ago
  As someone with friends and family personally impacted by that conflict, I’d wager quite a few people care and think that resolving that geopolitical issue is very contributive to society.
mr_woozy 7y ago
The only progress you seem to have made is allow your feelings of abhorrent-ness to disregard all logical arguments that come your way which you decide are abusing their logical authority. Pretty self-reinforcing thought pattern you've built there.
- hailk 7y ago
  What even is a logical authority? Someone who is right factually? Is that bad somehow now?
- osdiab 7y ago
  Why so black and white? OP’s saying that there are other things besides “logic” (which is often itself just masked “feelings” from someone unaware of their own biases) that are relevant to the problems of the world; not saying that logic altogether is abhorrent and shutting “all logical arguments that come their way” down. You ought to inspect why you yourself are getting defensive over that statement.
  - mr_woozy 7y ago
    I'm not getting defensive I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion, since they are not axioms for discussion but subjective. The OP starts out dismissing logical arguments and then pats himself on the back for seeing through the grand conspiracy of analytical thought.
    - osdiab 7y ago
      I don’t really want to discuss further, but after rereading OPs post I don’t really see how he’s making an argument exclusively supported by feelings that flatly dismisses logic as a tool for discussion. I encourage you to step away from this for some time, and calmly reread the comment later. In particular, OP does not claim that logic is not a useful tool for discussion. OP seems to claim that it’s use to shut down important voices and experience that isn’t framed in those terms, by people who don’t have the power to be heard, allows those who do to deny those people inclusion into discussion. OP even says that he fights fire with fire, ie uses logic against logical people to try to bring those silenced people’s experiences into conversation. I see your dismissal of OP’s argument, as an example of OP’s point. Not only does the “facts” your pointing out seem awfully defensive to a personal, emotional image of “logicalness” that OP’s point calls into question (ie your “facts” aren’t just “facts”), but the next step is to call for that line of thought to be dismissed entirely because it stands outside your personally invested framework. Nor do I fundamentally agree that statements made from feelings have no place in discussion just because they aren’t framed in the same logical framework as the hyper rational people who shoot those types of statements down. People’s feelings are typically based on lived experience relevant to a topic and contain content that, while not neatly packaged into the cogent, easily digestible logical argument you’re looking for, remain informative for ethically ambiguous topics. To tie it to the literal situation that Stallman has found himself in, he has made dispassionate arguments about things like children being able to consent to sexual encounters with adults. If you’re expecting an abused child to give you a well formed, logical argument for why those actions are or are not ethical, then you’ve found quite the exceptional victim. Otherwise, the lack of that argument effectively silences the child’s ability to convey the importance of their trauma, and empowers influential people like Stallman to make those hyper-rational arguments that ignore and actively erode those people’s legitimate experiences. It’s the adults who listen to the incoherent pain of those children, who are able to have those children’s voices heard in discussion, and therein lies the value of listening to, not dismissing, “emotional” appeal in debate. Stallman’s case is a very cut and dry example of the kind of dispassion that represents my take of OP’s post, about how excessive application of “logic” corrodes productive discussion. This doesn’t just happen to children, this happens to capable adults whose cultural backgrounds (non-Western bluntness? doesn’t speak your language?), or complicated circumstances (traumatized rape victim?) make speaking clearly, logically and dispassionately about an ethical issue difficult.
kelnos 7y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted; I think you're exactly correct. Certainly we can't discount logic, but praising logic as some sort of solution, while ignoring people's emotions, is a great way to be completely ineffective at, well, nearly everything.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were. I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt. I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but rather that there's some subjacent right, "logical" system that we should strive to discover and apply. My opinion is simply my best effort at trying to discover that subjacent truth.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources. But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm. There are times when we need not investigate rigorously, because by picking apart someone we might do them harm. There are times when we should accept that there might not be a logical underpinning to a behavior, because we will never be capable of operating free from emotions. And most importantly, there are times where you need not pursue a truth. That sometimes the quest to understand can be much more harmful than simply being present and accepting. I used to be a hardline 'logic only, logic always, efficiency above all' person. I'd plan my routes to optimize path efficiency. My relationships left me scrutinizing every interaction, guessing at double meanings and challenging assertions by people. It was unbearable to be around me. I've had to learn that sometimes people want to engage with me in diving deep, sometimes people really hate doing that, and rarely it's for everyone's best interest to override those interests.
  - mattcaldwell 7y ago
    Thank you!
  - mattsfrey 7y ago
    But ultimately in those alienating conclusions you were _right_, how do we forget this? What does it make us to disregard uncomfortable truths?
overgard 7y ago
The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. If a persons feelings trump logic and they cant have a level headed discussion because of that, then frankly they shouldn’t be treated as an adult, they should be treated like a child.
- mlevental 7y ago
  >I mean lets pretend its true. So what? there are things you don't know that you can find out by listening to people.
  - overgard 7y ago
    Sure. Agreed. But the entire point of the "you can't possibly know" is that they're saying the exact opposite. That it's a waste of time for them to explain anything to you because you are apparently incapable of human empathy.
- JabavuAdams 7y ago
  May I ask how old you are?
- JabavuAdams 7y ago
  People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.
  - overgard 7y ago
    Ok, but you can also "win" a debate by beating people to death with strong feelings. Ever watch a toddler throw a temper tantrum?
JabavuAdams 7y ago
I'm amused that this very wise very true comment is downvoted on HN. 20 year old me would have downvoted it. 40 year old me recognizes it as obvious and has a divorce to show for it. There's no way 20 year old me would have believed 40 year old me, though.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  This was very much my take on the comment. I also think that, if you're over 30 and don't look back on a lot of what you thought at 20 and cringe a bit, you're probably missing something. Same goes for being over 40 and looking back at 30, etc., etc.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Both points of view are “wrong.” As always a balance taking context into account is best.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  From my perspective, it did not seem wise to make a reductionist analogy to how Israelis feel about Palestinians, and vice versa.
  - mlevental 7y ago
    what exactly was reductionist about my analogy? which features of the conflict did i reduce? is it not the case that both sides having contrary perspectives on many of the same objects facts? did i imply somewhere that i endorse one side or the other? (which i do but i haven't in any way let on which).
matz1 7y ago
Similarly, what you wrote hurt my feeling.
panzagl 7y ago
Hell is sitting in a meeting where a consensus decision is reached that is demonstrably wrong, and everybody treats you like the asshole because your very real and verifiable reasons are making everyone else feel bad or stupid.
- bitL 7y ago
  The worst thing when that inevitably fails, sometimes with loss of innocent life if stakes are high, you can't even feel good you were right. Being right is completely useless and pointless there.
breuleux 7y ago
> i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. Indeed, and that deserves some emphasis, I think. Applying "logic" to complex issues in real life is fraught with difficulties, because there aren't really any obviously and fully true premises to base logical arguments on in the first place, and a lot of common sense or "self-evident" inferences are either false or only weakly or unreliably true. Experience and feelings encode a lot of implicit knowledge about how the world works. When someone makes a dispassionate "logical" argument, they essentially throw these heuristics away and instead work their way up from axioms. Which sounds good in theory, until you realize these axioms are simplistic assumptions that often fail. For example, you might base an economic theory upon the axiom that economic actors are rational. In reality, though, that's not true, and you'd be better off incorporating some of your personal experiences and feelings because they may give you an intuitive grasp of when to trust the axiom, and when not to. Logical, dispassionate arguments are (not always, but often) like arguments about spherical cows. Sure, they are technically valid, but they rely on simplifying assumptions, sometimes to the point of uselessness. The people who do that have undue confidence in a lot of platitudes, which makes them blind to the fact they are building their arguments on sand.

viklove 7y ago

I think you summed it up really well, but reached the wrong conclusion. Who cares who is entitled to Palestine? It's a boring and pointless problem to try and solve. People who are interested in spending their lives productively are understandably fed up with others who want to squabble over their pointless feelings that contribute nothing to society.

mlevental 7y ago
>Who cares who is entitled to Palestine? ~5 million people. how can you be so blithe as to completely discount the existence/experience of that many people. i challenge you to empathize with someone living there. truly imagine it and then tell me it's completely trivial.
osdiab 7y ago
As someone with friends and family personally impacted by that conflict, I’d wager quite a few people care and think that resolving that geopolitical issue is very contributive to society.

mr_woozy 7y ago

The only progress you seem to have made is allow your feelings of abhorrent-ness to disregard all logical arguments that come your way which you decide are abusing their logical authority. Pretty self-reinforcing thought pattern you've built there.

hailk 7y ago
What even is a logical authority? Someone who is right factually? Is that bad somehow now?
osdiab 7y ago
Why so black and white? OP’s saying that there are other things besides “logic” (which is often itself just masked “feelings” from someone unaware of their own biases) that are relevant to the problems of the world; not saying that logic altogether is abhorrent and shutting “all logical arguments that come their way” down. You ought to inspect why you yourself are getting defensive over that statement.
- mr_woozy 7y ago
  I'm not getting defensive I'm pointing out an argument that stems from feelings and is only supported by feelings has no basis in discussion, since they are not axioms for discussion but subjective. The OP starts out dismissing logical arguments and then pats himself on the back for seeing through the grand conspiracy of analytical thought.
  - osdiab 7y ago
    I don’t really want to discuss further, but after rereading OPs post I don’t really see how he’s making an argument exclusively supported by feelings that flatly dismisses logic as a tool for discussion. I encourage you to step away from this for some time, and calmly reread the comment later. In particular, OP does not claim that logic is not a useful tool for discussion. OP seems to claim that it’s use to shut down important voices and experience that isn’t framed in those terms, by people who don’t have the power to be heard, allows those who do to deny those people inclusion into discussion. OP even says that he fights fire with fire, ie uses logic against logical people to try to bring those silenced people’s experiences into conversation. I see your dismissal of OP’s argument, as an example of OP’s point. Not only does the “facts” your pointing out seem awfully defensive to a personal, emotional image of “logicalness” that OP’s point calls into question (ie your “facts” aren’t just “facts”), but the next step is to call for that line of thought to be dismissed entirely because it stands outside your personally invested framework. Nor do I fundamentally agree that statements made from feelings have no place in discussion just because they aren’t framed in the same logical framework as the hyper rational people who shoot those types of statements down. People’s feelings are typically based on lived experience relevant to a topic and contain content that, while not neatly packaged into the cogent, easily digestible logical argument you’re looking for, remain informative for ethically ambiguous topics. To tie it to the literal situation that Stallman has found himself in, he has made dispassionate arguments about things like children being able to consent to sexual encounters with adults. If you’re expecting an abused child to give you a well formed, logical argument for why those actions are or are not ethical, then you’ve found quite the exceptional victim. Otherwise, the lack of that argument effectively silences the child’s ability to convey the importance of their trauma, and empowers influential people like Stallman to make those hyper-rational arguments that ignore and actively erode those people’s legitimate experiences. It’s the adults who listen to the incoherent pain of those children, who are able to have those children’s voices heard in discussion, and therein lies the value of listening to, not dismissing, “emotional” appeal in debate. Stallman’s case is a very cut and dry example of the kind of dispassion that represents my take of OP’s post, about how excessive application of “logic” corrodes productive discussion. This doesn’t just happen to children, this happens to capable adults whose cultural backgrounds (non-Western bluntness? doesn’t speak your language?), or complicated circumstances (traumatized rape victim?) make speaking clearly, logically and dispassionately about an ethical issue difficult.

kelnos 7y ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted; I think you're exactly correct. Certainly we can't discount logic, but praising logic as some sort of solution, while ignoring people's emotions, is a great way to be completely ineffective at, well, nearly everything.

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were. I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt. I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but rather that there's some subjacent right, "logical" system that we should strive to discover and apply. My opinion is simply my best effort at trying to discover that subjacent truth.

Pfhreak 7y ago
You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources. But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm. There are times when we need not investigate rigorously, because by picking apart someone we might do them harm. There are times when we should accept that there might not be a logical underpinning to a behavior, because we will never be capable of operating free from emotions. And most importantly, there are times where you need not pursue a truth. That sometimes the quest to understand can be much more harmful than simply being present and accepting. I used to be a hardline 'logic only, logic always, efficiency above all' person. I'd plan my routes to optimize path efficiency. My relationships left me scrutinizing every interaction, guessing at double meanings and challenging assertions by people. It was unbearable to be around me. I've had to learn that sometimes people want to engage with me in diving deep, sometimes people really hate doing that, and rarely it's for everyone's best interest to override those interests.
- mattcaldwell 7y ago
  Thank you!
- mattsfrey 7y ago
  But ultimately in those alienating conclusions you were _right_, how do we forget this? What does it make us to disregard uncomfortable truths?

overgard 7y ago

The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. If a persons feelings trump logic and they cant have a level headed discussion because of that, then frankly they shouldn’t be treated as an adult, they should be treated like a child.

mlevental 7y ago
>I mean lets pretend its true. So what? there are things you don't know that you can find out by listening to people.
- overgard 7y ago
  Sure. Agreed. But the entire point of the "you can't possibly know" is that they're saying the exact opposite. That it's a waste of time for them to explain anything to you because you are apparently incapable of human empathy.
JabavuAdams 7y ago
May I ask how old you are?
JabavuAdams 7y ago
People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.
- overgard 7y ago
  Ok, but you can also "win" a debate by beating people to death with strong feelings. Ever watch a toddler throw a temper tantrum?

JabavuAdams 7y ago

I'm amused that this very wise very true comment is downvoted on HN. 20 year old me would have downvoted it. 40 year old me recognizes it as obvious and has a divorce to show for it. There's no way 20 year old me would have believed 40 year old me, though.

ineedasername 7y ago
This was very much my take on the comment. I also think that, if you're over 30 and don't look back on a lot of what you thought at 20 and cringe a bit, you're probably missing something. Same goes for being over 40 and looking back at 30, etc., etc.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Both points of view are “wrong.” As always a balance taking context into account is best.
yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
From my perspective, it did not seem wise to make a reductionist analogy to how Israelis feel about Palestinians, and vice versa.
- mlevental 7y ago
  what exactly was reductionist about my analogy? which features of the conflict did i reduce? is it not the case that both sides having contrary perspectives on many of the same objects facts? did i imply somewhere that i endorse one side or the other? (which i do but i haven't in any way let on which).

matz1 7y ago

Similarly, what you wrote hurt my feeling.

panzagl 7y ago

Hell is sitting in a meeting where a consensus decision is reached that is demonstrably wrong, and everybody treats you like the asshole because your very real and verifiable reasons are making everyone else feel bad or stupid.

bitL 7y ago
The worst thing when that inevitably fails, sometimes with loss of innocent life if stakes are high, you can't even feel good you were right. Being right is completely useless and pointless there.

breuleux 7y ago

> i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. Indeed, and that deserves some emphasis, I think. Applying "logic" to complex issues in real life is fraught with difficulties, because there aren't really any obviously and fully true premises to base logical arguments on in the first place, and a lot of common sense or "self-evident" inferences are either false or only weakly or unreliably true. Experience and feelings encode a lot of implicit knowledge about how the world works. When someone makes a dispassionate "logical" argument, they essentially throw these heuristics away and instead work their way up from axioms. Which sounds good in theory, until you realize these axioms are simplistic assumptions that often fail. For example, you might base an economic theory upon the axiom that economic actors are rational. In reality, though, that's not true, and you'd be better off incorporating some of your personal experiences and feelings because they may give you an intuitive grasp of when to trust the axiom, and when not to. Logical, dispassionate arguments are (not always, but often) like arguments about spherical cows. Sure, they are technically valid, but they rely on simplifying assumptions, sometimes to the point of uselessness. The people who do that have undue confidence in a lot of platitudes, which makes them blind to the fact they are building their arguments on sand.