6 ms·

The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture

72 points by Vigier 7y ago

kwoff 7y ago
"His most recent book" - does anyone read beyond that?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- danharaj 7y ago
  The article has little to do with his book.
westoncb 7y ago
> They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: ‘I am always looking for the Freudian slip.’ He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work. Interesting how operating routinely in a certain 'mode' like this ends up spreading into other areas of your life. I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen.
- donw 7y ago
  This is one of the reasons I recommend that when reviewing any body of work -- code reviews, reviewing a resume, etc. -- you make it a point to highlight the bad and the good. Constructive criticism may help us improve, but compliments help us keep going.
  - westoncb 7y ago
    Yes. I also need to remember when sharing projects with programmers to ask for similar: I appreciate your help spotting the many flaws—but I'd be curious to hear about any bits you liked, too!
  - afarrell 7y ago
    This also helps a person have more confidence in the things they should do. This greater confidence will motivate them to do them in the face of distraction and difficulty.
- watwut 7y ago
  > I wonder how many programmers can relate The thing non-programmers commented on was tendency to spot and comment on special cases in social situations where it is unusual. When someone says generic statement, a programmer tends to bring up that one case where generic statement fails. A programmer can even agree with that generic statement in general and has no malicious intent, but has fun finding out those special cases. Once I was told this, yeah, it is true. It is even sometimes like bonding among programmers, but non programmers can be unsure why are you derailing.
  - precisioncoder 7y ago
    Thank you for this, I've been doing this since I was a child, it often ends up being taken badly and I have a lot of trouble with it. I'm still struggling decades later to rein in this habit. I actually find it a relief to know this is a common trait in programmers and may have it's alternate side of making me better at my craft.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    This tendency is has particularly glaring and tragic effects in discussions of how communities should handle reports of and design systems to prevent sexual assault. Myself, when I want to take something seriously, it means I: - Try to spot special cases so I can be explicit about whether or not they should be handled. - Try to be precise in my language, to ensure I'm not (for example) conflating two issues with a subtle but meaningful difference. - Try to check my understanding of things, even in cases where I'm 80% sure I've understood someone correctly. I want to get to 97%. - Try to nail down unambiguously which things we are concluding as we go along. If I don't do these things, it feels like I'm not taking the issue seriously. If someone says something and I spot an ambiguity in their words which seems relevant, I feel an urge to ask about it--both to convey that I'm Actively Listening and to ensure I really understand them. The less confident I am in a subject, the more likely I am to judge an ambiguity is worth asking about--maybe its minor, but I don't know if I don't ask! When I notice a special case, my intuition starts loudly blaring "Risk ahead! Risk ahead! If you're putting this risk out-of-scope, be explicit about it." All of these habits, when applied to conversations about sexual assault, are generally interpreted as being pedantic. This arouses suspicion in other people: "why are you bringing this up?" "why are you trying to be so cut-and-dry?" "why are you trying to rules-lawyer consent?" The conclusion which normal people naturally answer that question with go: This person is trying to create social space for abusers to operate. The lesson is: avoid conversations about sexual assault unless you know you are first aligned on broader conversational norms like like "How do we establish that we've agreed on something?" and "How do we talk about a nonzero probability of system failure?"
- mettamage 7y ago
  Haha, are you kidding me? When I'm in programmer mode and diehard in a code base, I can't even function at a birthday party. With any joke I'm hearing, I hear too many incorrect things. When I'm in social mode (aka not programming for more than 2 weeks), I become less precise and can definitely enjoy those type of jokes.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Not programming is impossible. I have practically integrated my routine with the command line. e.g diary is a command that will directly lead to editing today’s diary.
- Nursie 7y ago
  Yeah... when I've had to be extra critical and picky about proposals and implementation at work for a prolonged period, it tends to wash over into my attitude to a lot of stuff in life. I know that sometime when I'm like this I can be a little ... difficult, because I shoot down ideas and pick holes all over the place. Also, though, my debugging mentality helped me figure out what was wrong with my dad's pool heating setup with zero expertise, where he and the engineers he'd called out were failing. (It was a domestic boiler with two circuits, one for heating the other for on-demand hot water. They'd been adjusting the wrong one)
- mcphage 7y ago
  > I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen. Thinking back to my childhood, many of my parents' arguments were really caused because my dad was a programmer, and that mindset takes over your way of thinking.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    I sympathise. My dad is a lawyer. It's like, his job is to wittle down peoples' objections with tedious arguments. I had a difficult childhood :P
    - chillingeffect 7y ago
      yeah i had a lawyer for an intimate partner.. as a habit, she would argue stuff she didn't even care about. so when she lost, i would be exhausted and she would just blow it off bc she wasn't invested. I tried to not get sucked in, but in addition to approaching things logically, their trade is to get emotional hooks into people- a trait programmers eschew.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
        Only because computers don't have emotions though :)
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  IME the persistence of "problem-solving mode" for engineers outside of work certainly exists, but pales in comparison to lawyers' tendencies toward argument outside the courtroom. Actually, this pattern exists everywhere (teachers -> instruction mode, politicians -> schmoozing...) Seems as much about personality type being drawn to career path in the first place, as it is about bringing work habits home. /$.02
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen. Just this summer I was told I'm thinking too logically. Of course I wanted to protest and also to take it as a compliment, but the person who said this, what they really meant was that I was being, well, a square. It's important to remember that most of the time people don't start a conversation because they want to get to the bottom of things. They're doing it because they want to say a couple of things without really thinking about them, just to have a nice time and to bond with their interlocutors. So sometimes you have to forget about communicating accurately and focus on communicating productively. For another example, I had a big fight about the Deluge, last summer (I go see my family in the summer). An older relative was very vague about what he meant by "deluge" (did he mean just a flood? The Flood? A big flood? A small flood? A local flood? A global flood?). I was determined to be confused with his inexact terminology and in the end we had a fight. What was achieved? Nothing. I mean, I still don't know what he was talking about and I don't want to ask him because we'd just have another fight again. So sometimes you just gotta let go. Most people don't like conversing like this, like we're all computers. And you don't want to sour your relations with friends and family. That's what I learned.
ptah 7y ago
> Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? There is no way to know the answer to this
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  We may identify potential contributors and give relative rankings at least though. Although it is fuzzy we are pretty certain that it isn't because of say changes in underwear technology. I suspect tenure may be a bigger factor personally - especially for those whose careers are mainly academic instead of industry where they can always leave for greener pastures if they get fed up with it. There are toxic incentives to try to tear down rivals under any pretense so that sort of sniping may easily get embedded in the culture. It is just a theory of course.
- danaliv 7y ago
  It’s rhetorical.
gumby 7y ago
Marc Bloch has been a hero of mine since I first encountered him in my late teens. He was an early practitioner of a movement away from the “great man” view of history, studying everyday medieval life and then teasing from that surprisingly significant insights. Then with war brewing he engaged in the resistance, as what is the point of the study of history if you don’t learn from it and act? His writing on contemporaneous events towards the untimely end of his life was so sympathetic just as his historical work had been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch
booleandilemma 7y ago
Hitler painted and Stalin wrote poetry...just throwing that out there...
- krageon 7y ago
  What is the point you are trying to make with this?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jalla 7y ago
    Stop being so adversarial.
- antonvs 7y ago
  The article mentions subjects like history and philosophy. The only reference to art is in the context of art history. Poetry can be empathetic, but it can also be selfish or impersonal, so I suppose we'd have to examine Stalin's poetry to find out how it might have related to his personality. Four of his six poems are published here: https://historyradio.org/2018/06/17/historical-documents-the-poetry-of-joseph-stalin/ https://historyradio.org/2018/06/17/historical-documents-the... The first one doesn't mention any individual people, focusing on people-less descriptions of landscape, only making a reference to Iverians/Georgians in a nationalistic context. No real empathy here, but an instruction to a group of people about how to feel. The second one is a lament about old age. While it involves an individual person, Stalin admires that person because of his previous machismo. There's a certain amount of empathy for his current frail state, but it's really focused on the ability of age to bring such a previously strong man low. The third one is back to landscape, along with some religious references and a generic "oppressed man" who can be "exalted by hope". People seem to be an abstract concept to him. The final verse is in the first person. The fourth poem is an ode to a Georgian poet and playwright who "sang hymns to the motherland" and who he hopes will have many like him "in the fatherland". There are two references to "the people". In short, his poems seem to reveal the mind with nationalistic tendencies, who sees "the people" as an abstraction, with individuality being largely irrelevant except when it can serve as a useful example. The only such exemplar happens to be a hyper-masculine man. Perhaps people should have paid more attention to his poetry, it could have saved a lot of trouble!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
knzhou 7y ago
Over time I've gotten completely disenchanted with "empathy" as a slogan. Growing up, I thought it meant striving to see things from multiple sides. In practice it is a demand that you see things from only one side -- offering empathy at all to the other side is apparently the most unempathetic thing you can do. Like so much else, it started as a grand principle and ended up as a tribal bludgeon. I'm with the author here, but the battle he's fighting has long since been lost.
- dbspin 7y ago
  Online 'culture' is not the world. It doesn't represent anything like a majority of human culture, and it's been demonstrated time and time again the even those who heavily participate in online communities have radically more subtle and contradictory opinions offline. Lets not give up on humanity just yet, merely because online social media is reactive and polarised.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Lost? Permanently? In that case, maybe we should give up on this whole civilization idea and go back to being pre-literate hunter-gatherers. Oh, wait, that would really suck.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
It makes me think of Socrates's old thing about how static writing is, and how the back and forth of dialogue is so important >Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. I think a lot of what we're learning in this new era is that the pub/sub model of talking to each other has some real weaknesses compared to immediate dialogue (which has its own weaknesses). Unfortunately, twitter, facebook, blogs, reddit, the news, and really all social media I'm aware of is more pub/sub than dialogue. Without dialogue, you have to interpret and assume. With what I'll define as "real" dialogue here, you'd just ask for clarification until you're on the same page.

72 points by Vigier 7y ago

kwoff 7y ago

"His most recent book" - does anyone read beyond that?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danharaj 7y ago
The article has little to do with his book.

westoncb 7y ago

> They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: ‘I am always looking for the Freudian slip.’ He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work. Interesting how operating routinely in a certain 'mode' like this ends up spreading into other areas of your life. I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen.

donw 7y ago
This is one of the reasons I recommend that when reviewing any body of work -- code reviews, reviewing a resume, etc. -- you make it a point to highlight the bad and the good. Constructive criticism may help us improve, but compliments help us keep going.
- westoncb 7y ago
  Yes. I also need to remember when sharing projects with programmers to ask for similar: I appreciate your help spotting the many flaws—but I'd be curious to hear about any bits you liked, too!
- afarrell 7y ago
  This also helps a person have more confidence in the things they should do. This greater confidence will motivate them to do them in the face of distraction and difficulty.
watwut 7y ago
> I wonder how many programmers can relate The thing non-programmers commented on was tendency to spot and comment on special cases in social situations where it is unusual. When someone says generic statement, a programmer tends to bring up that one case where generic statement fails. A programmer can even agree with that generic statement in general and has no malicious intent, but has fun finding out those special cases. Once I was told this, yeah, it is true. It is even sometimes like bonding among programmers, but non programmers can be unsure why are you derailing.
- precisioncoder 7y ago
  Thank you for this, I've been doing this since I was a child, it often ends up being taken badly and I have a lot of trouble with it. I'm still struggling decades later to rein in this habit. I actually find it a relief to know this is a common trait in programmers and may have it's alternate side of making me better at my craft.
- afarrell 7y ago
  This tendency is has particularly glaring and tragic effects in discussions of how communities should handle reports of and design systems to prevent sexual assault. Myself, when I want to take something seriously, it means I: - Try to spot special cases so I can be explicit about whether or not they should be handled. - Try to be precise in my language, to ensure I'm not (for example) conflating two issues with a subtle but meaningful difference. - Try to check my understanding of things, even in cases where I'm 80% sure I've understood someone correctly. I want to get to 97%. - Try to nail down unambiguously which things we are concluding as we go along. If I don't do these things, it feels like I'm not taking the issue seriously. If someone says something and I spot an ambiguity in their words which seems relevant, I feel an urge to ask about it--both to convey that I'm Actively Listening and to ensure I really understand them. The less confident I am in a subject, the more likely I am to judge an ambiguity is worth asking about--maybe its minor, but I don't know if I don't ask! When I notice a special case, my intuition starts loudly blaring "Risk ahead! Risk ahead! If you're putting this risk out-of-scope, be explicit about it." All of these habits, when applied to conversations about sexual assault, are generally interpreted as being pedantic. This arouses suspicion in other people: "why are you bringing this up?" "why are you trying to be so cut-and-dry?" "why are you trying to rules-lawyer consent?" The conclusion which normal people naturally answer that question with go: This person is trying to create social space for abusers to operate. The lesson is: avoid conversations about sexual assault unless you know you are first aligned on broader conversational norms like like "How do we establish that we've agreed on something?" and "How do we talk about a nonzero probability of system failure?"
mettamage 7y ago
Haha, are you kidding me? When I'm in programmer mode and diehard in a code base, I can't even function at a birthday party. With any joke I'm hearing, I hear too many incorrect things. When I'm in social mode (aka not programming for more than 2 weeks), I become less precise and can definitely enjoy those type of jokes.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Not programming is impossible. I have practically integrated my routine with the command line. e.g diary is a command that will directly lead to editing today’s diary.
Nursie 7y ago
Yeah... when I've had to be extra critical and picky about proposals and implementation at work for a prolonged period, it tends to wash over into my attitude to a lot of stuff in life. I know that sometime when I'm like this I can be a little ... difficult, because I shoot down ideas and pick holes all over the place. Also, though, my debugging mentality helped me figure out what was wrong with my dad's pool heating setup with zero expertise, where he and the engineers he'd called out were failing. (It was a domestic boiler with two circuits, one for heating the other for on-demand hot water. They'd been adjusting the wrong one)
mcphage 7y ago
> I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen. Thinking back to my childhood, many of my parents' arguments were really caused because my dad was a programmer, and that mindset takes over your way of thinking.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I sympathise. My dad is a lawyer. It's like, his job is to wittle down peoples' objections with tedious arguments. I had a difficult childhood :P
  - chillingeffect 7y ago
    yeah i had a lawyer for an intimate partner.. as a habit, she would argue stuff she didn't even care about. so when she lost, i would be exhausted and she would just blow it off bc she wasn't invested. I tried to not get sucked in, but in addition to approaching things logically, their trade is to get emotional hooks into people- a trait programmers eschew.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      Only because computers don't have emotions though :)
chrisweekly 7y ago
IME the persistence of "problem-solving mode" for engineers outside of work certainly exists, but pales in comparison to lawyers' tendencies toward argument outside the courtroom. Actually, this pattern exists everywhere (teachers -> instruction mode, politicians -> schmoozing...) Seems as much about personality type being drawn to career path in the first place, as it is about bringing work habits home. /$.02
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> I wonder how many programmers can relate who've found their tendency toward problem solving extending beyond the computer screen. Just this summer I was told I'm thinking too logically. Of course I wanted to protest and also to take it as a compliment, but the person who said this, what they really meant was that I was being, well, a square. It's important to remember that most of the time people don't start a conversation because they want to get to the bottom of things. They're doing it because they want to say a couple of things without really thinking about them, just to have a nice time and to bond with their interlocutors. So sometimes you have to forget about communicating accurately and focus on communicating productively. For another example, I had a big fight about the Deluge, last summer (I go see my family in the summer). An older relative was very vague about what he meant by "deluge" (did he mean just a flood? The Flood? A big flood? A small flood? A local flood? A global flood?). I was determined to be confused with his inexact terminology and in the end we had a fight. What was achieved? Nothing. I mean, I still don't know what he was talking about and I don't want to ask him because we'd just have another fight again. So sometimes you just gotta let go. Most people don't like conversing like this, like we're all computers. And you don't want to sour your relations with friends and family. That's what I learned.

ptah 7y ago

> Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? There is no way to know the answer to this

Nasrudith 7y ago
We may identify potential contributors and give relative rankings at least though. Although it is fuzzy we are pretty certain that it isn't because of say changes in underwear technology. I suspect tenure may be a bigger factor personally - especially for those whose careers are mainly academic instead of industry where they can always leave for greener pastures if they get fed up with it. There are toxic incentives to try to tear down rivals under any pretense so that sort of sniping may easily get embedded in the culture. It is just a theory of course.
danaliv 7y ago
It’s rhetorical.

gumby 7y ago

Marc Bloch has been a hero of mine since I first encountered him in my late teens. He was an early practitioner of a movement away from the “great man” view of history, studying everyday medieval life and then teasing from that surprisingly significant insights. Then with war brewing he engaged in the resistance, as what is the point of the study of history if you don’t learn from it and act? His writing on contemporaneous events towards the untimely end of his life was so sympathetic just as his historical work had been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bloch

booleandilemma 7y ago

Hitler painted and Stalin wrote poetry...just throwing that out there...

krageon 7y ago
What is the point you are trying to make with this?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jalla 7y ago
  Stop being so adversarial.
antonvs 7y ago
The article mentions subjects like history and philosophy. The only reference to art is in the context of art history. Poetry can be empathetic, but it can also be selfish or impersonal, so I suppose we'd have to examine Stalin's poetry to find out how it might have related to his personality. Four of his six poems are published here: https://historyradio.org/2018/06/17/historical-documents-the-poetry-of-joseph-stalin/ https://historyradio.org/2018/06/17/historical-documents-the... The first one doesn't mention any individual people, focusing on people-less descriptions of landscape, only making a reference to Iverians/Georgians in a nationalistic context. No real empathy here, but an instruction to a group of people about how to feel. The second one is a lament about old age. While it involves an individual person, Stalin admires that person because of his previous machismo. There's a certain amount of empathy for his current frail state, but it's really focused on the ability of age to bring such a previously strong man low. The third one is back to landscape, along with some religious references and a generic "oppressed man" who can be "exalted by hope". People seem to be an abstract concept to him. The final verse is in the first person. The fourth poem is an ode to a Georgian poet and playwright who "sang hymns to the motherland" and who he hopes will have many like him "in the fatherland". There are two references to "the people". In short, his poems seem to reveal the mind with nationalistic tendencies, who sees "the people" as an abstraction, with individuality being largely irrelevant except when it can serve as a useful example. The only such exemplar happens to be a hyper-masculine man. Perhaps people should have paid more attention to his poetry, it could have saved a lot of trouble!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

knzhou 7y ago

Over time I've gotten completely disenchanted with "empathy" as a slogan. Growing up, I thought it meant striving to see things from multiple sides. In practice it is a demand that you see things from only one side -- offering empathy at all to the other side is apparently the most unempathetic thing you can do. Like so much else, it started as a grand principle and ended up as a tribal bludgeon. I'm with the author here, but the battle he's fighting has long since been lost.

dbspin 7y ago
Online 'culture' is not the world. It doesn't represent anything like a majority of human culture, and it's been demonstrated time and time again the even those who heavily participate in online communities have radically more subtle and contradictory opinions offline. Lets not give up on humanity just yet, merely because online social media is reactive and polarised.
mcguire 7y ago
Lost? Permanently? In that case, maybe we should give up on this whole civilization idea and go back to being pre-literate hunter-gatherers. Oh, wait, that would really suck.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

It makes me think of Socrates's old thing about how static writing is, and how the back and forth of dialogue is so important >Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. I think a lot of what we're learning in this new era is that the pub/sub model of talking to each other has some real weaknesses compared to immediate dialogue (which has its own weaknesses). Unfortunately, twitter, facebook, blogs, reddit, the news, and really all social media I'm aware of is more pub/sub than dialogue. Without dialogue, you have to interpret and assume. With what I'll define as "real" dialogue here, you'd just ask for clarification until you're on the same page.