3 ms·

> it goes against their personal values when dealing with other people It's my impression as well that this is the main motive behind those reactions. I don't

> it goes against their personal values when dealing with other people It's my impression as well that this is the main motive behind those reactions. I don't see why though. It's as if thinking about humans as actors in a model, or thinking about them as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will etc automatically makes you a Bond villain that want's to enslave humanity. I don't see how that follows. Understanding humans better, their behavior, reactions, emotions etc enables you to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc. Re relatedness to loneliness: possibly. My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition. Naturally, they'd think (and write) about what they don't understand. I don't believe you can turn that around though. Similarly to learning to read a language forces you to read a language (short of closing your eyes or looking away, you cannot escape recognizing and interpreting the characters and words that are in front of you), you can't just say "oh, so because I understand the world to function this way, I'm lonely? Cool, I'll just pick a different mental model of the world".

watwut 7y ago
It is that thinking about humans as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will makes you unable to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc. > My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition. They are emotional too. Pretty common phenomenon about contemporary people who lean heavily towards intellectualism is that they rationalize and explain away their feelings and emotions based decisions. What you call being happy with intuition is sometimes taking into account complexities that can not be neatly simplified. For example, the honest truth is that they did something out of anger, fear, wish to show up, but they will go out of their way to frame action as thought out and logical. Their opinion may be actually subjective, based on sympathies and feelings, but they will spend hours constructing elaborate arguments for why the feeling was actually objective. This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do. You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way, and understanding that people do things for reasons other than what they say (or even think themselves), and that those reasons are usually pretty basic enables you to react to their actions and opinions differently. That's another thing I've noticed: almost everybody starts to think about humans in that way once they start thinking about humans and human behavior. That's similar with the "does human life have a value" idea, where even those that shriek at the thought and claim that you it's immeasurable will usually agree that you should put children (and women) into the life-boats first (which, of course, isn't possible if it's immeasurable). To me, it just looks like they don't want to acknowledge their thoughts and intuitions, like somebody not accepting their personal desires and rationalizing it with increasingly strange explanations instead of just saying "I want ice cream". I don't believe that's a healthy approach.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way This is simply not true. What I wrote has literally nothing to do with whether humans are special or not. It is literally you who will flip and frame pretty much any verbal explanation of anything that way.

watwut 7y ago

It is that thinking about humans as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will makes you unable to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc. > My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition. They are emotional too. Pretty common phenomenon about contemporary people who lean heavily towards intellectualism is that they rationalize and explain away their feelings and emotions based decisions. What you call being happy with intuition is sometimes taking into account complexities that can not be neatly simplified. For example, the honest truth is that they did something out of anger, fear, wish to show up, but they will go out of their way to frame action as thought out and logical. Their opinion may be actually subjective, based on sympathies and feelings, but they will spend hours constructing elaborate arguments for why the feeling was actually objective. This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do.

luckylion 7y ago
> This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do. You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way, and understanding that people do things for reasons other than what they say (or even think themselves), and that those reasons are usually pretty basic enables you to react to their actions and opinions differently. That's another thing I've noticed: almost everybody starts to think about humans in that way once they start thinking about humans and human behavior. That's similar with the "does human life have a value" idea, where even those that shriek at the thought and claim that you it's immeasurable will usually agree that you should put children (and women) into the life-boats first (which, of course, isn't possible if it's immeasurable). To me, it just looks like they don't want to acknowledge their thoughts and intuitions, like somebody not accepting their personal desires and rationalizing it with increasingly strange explanations instead of just saying "I want ice cream". I don't believe that's a healthy approach.
- watwut 7y ago
  > You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way This is simply not true. What I wrote has literally nothing to do with whether humans are special or not. It is literally you who will flip and frame pretty much any verbal explanation of anything that way.