8 ms·

Posiopaths: Positive only attitude can be toxic

• ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
  Read bright sided by Barbara ehrenreich. Great read on how pervasive and damaging this kind of thinking is in America.
• kylek 7y ago
  I feel like this applies to "influencers"
• kylebenzle 7y ago
  Reading Fantasyland [1] right now. A great book similar to this topic. When we (in the West) allow and even encourage people to "live the life they want" some will end up living in a fantasy. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History-ebook/dp/B004J4WNJE https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-...
• RandomInteger4 7y ago
  Honestly I find the constantly negative cynical fuckers to be the real assholes in nearly every work environment. Like seriously, these beligerant dipshits are far more prevalent than anyone enforcing positive only anything.
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    It’s almost as if either extreme is damaging.
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• hirundo 7y ago
  > The dire need for us to start calling out people for using “positive things only” to silence and enforce apathy has never been greater. This encapsulates my objection to Christianity. If we are all saved by the love of Christ just for the asking, why strive? Why engage? How is the inner peace that is supposed to be the payoff for faith compatible with the inner turmoil needed to effect change? I get called on by missionaries with some regularity. If they could actually deliver to me these benefits as they claim, I think it would lead me to exit the arena, to avoid conflict. It would diminish me. Like an opiate.
  • vearwhershuh 7y ago
    Because faith without works is dead. You are conflating Christianity with a particular flavor of protestant evangelicalism.
    • hirundo 7y ago
      A sect that emphasizes damnation along with salvation is less posiopathic. But the cudgel of damnation exacerbates other pathologies. Fewer lotus eaters but more obedient crusaders.
      • vearwhershuh 7y ago
        “What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”
  • rubidium 7y ago
    The goal is to become like Christ. To heal the sick, fight for righteousness, proclaim mercy, and sacrifice oneself for others even to the point of death. I recommend going and reading what Jesus actually said, not what pop culture equates to Christianity.
    • viklove 7y ago
      > what Jesus actually said Really hard to find an objective source on this, isn't it?
• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I once had a girlfriend whose mom would allow only positive things to be said. The children were all emotionally stunted to some degree and the whole family had this huge layer of dark feelings beneath the surface of perfect happiness. Extreme positivity is just another form of control and oppression.
  • mistermann 7y ago
    It can be a form of control and oppression, but is it always? And, is that all ("just") it is?
    • bigDinosaur 7y ago
      Yes.
      • mistermann 7y ago
        I was not aware of this, but this sort of thing is one of my personal interests. If you don't mind me asking, where did you learn the answer to that question?
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        • DonHopkins 7y ago
          Apparently he does mind you asking, and so do a lot of other people, since nobody replied. Your "positive attitude" is toxic, because you're still sealioning, a technique you learned from Gamergate and brought here, where it's inappropriate and unwelcome, and which you have been repeatedly been warned NOT to do, but in spite of which you relentlessly continue to do, and for which your posts have been repeatedly flagged and deeply downvoted and frequently even killed and hidden, and because of which your account is well on its way to being banned. Give it a break. Stop posting generic content-free comment spam like that, which look like you copied and pasted them out of a table in the appendix of "Sealioning for Dummies", and bear absolutely no relationship to the topic being discussed, and have no positive impact of the conversation. And remember it will be easy to recognize you, and we will be on the lookout for you (plus the management has countermeasures in place that will detect you instantly), if you create a new sock puppet account, and continue sealioning after you're banned. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions#Sealioning https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions#Sealioni... Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless polite, reasonable questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation (e.g. "please prove sexism exists"). This tactic differs little from harassment; instead of discussion, the point is to derail discussion, receive criticism (for their ignorance) so as to look like a victim, or to make someone feel overwhelmed and quit talking. It is comparable to running a filibuster (or perhaps a filibustering technique) and preventing anything getting done. The nature of Twitter makes it particularly easy to sealion -- since everything is extremely compressed. A particularly toxic thing about sealioning is that people who are genuine newbies asking serious questions are easy to mistake for sealions. The term originally gained prominence for describing the Gamergate strategy of flooding people with a barrage of demands for proof that Gamergate was harassing people.
• hinkley 7y ago
  I had a couple of conversations recently that made this pretty real for me. me: people struggle with X, it doesn't really work. he: I haven't heard any problems. We all know that people don't want to talk to people who make them feel stupid. Either by claiming the problem is all them, or by claiming everything is amazing and there's nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, I will call BS on stuff (even, much of the time, when it is mine) and generally be sympathetic. So I hear about way more (although it's still amazing sometimes the stuff I don't hear about until much later).
  • dvtrn 7y ago
    I have a friend (let’s say Peter) who is pretty bad about this and I’ve long found it to be pretty damn annoying. Watched recently as they started doing exactly what you described to a mutual friend (let’s say Paul) who was just wanting to vent about work over some beers and food while we played Uno. Peter and Paul work together but in quite different roles. Additionally Paul has a considerable amount more experience both at their company and in their industry, Peter got his job from a bit of good old fashioned nepotism and never before this one had ever held a corporate job. Well one day Peter tries shutting down Paul venting one day with the types of refrains you mentioned “It’s not that bad I haven’t had to deal with that my manager does it differently why don’t you just move teams” and Paul I guess had enough of it too and goes “never mind I don’t want to talk about this with you right now” in a friendly bit very noticeably annoyed tone. I enjoyed that way too much.
• egypturnash 7y ago
  I am reading this and a little voice in the back of my head is asking "okay, what forums did you just get kicked out of in the past couple of months, and why?".
  • pdonis 7y ago
    My reaction was similar; I kept waiting for some specific example of the problem being complained about, but never found one. Which, if I were in a conversation with the author of the post, would probably lead me to say something along the lines of "let's not be so negative..."
    • dvtrn 7y ago
      I kept waiting for some specific example of the problem being complained about, but never found one What was your next reaction?
    • bigDinosaur 7y ago
      You see these kinds of problems in things like the Elm community, where any critical tone is interpreted as a real attack against people. Predictably, the real problems just don't get addressed because the owner(s) are simply incapable of handling conflict or disagreement, and tend to shut it down rather than really respond to it. It's sad, in its own way, since I can see why a community would go this way: the relentlessness of criticism can wear you down, so why not avoid it all? In reality, you just pay a different price: those who are right but disagree in a fairly critical way will leave. They're often a great asset. There's a difference, and a fairly big one, between being negative and being mean, but people often conflate them as one and the same.
      • RoseCrypto 7y ago
        I've experienced this. I play & stream a game called DCSS and the developers of that game utilize a form of posiopathy to shut down any criticism. That is to say, any criticism of their development decisions is - similar to what you described - reframed as a "personal attack." Personally I see this as a tool that authoritarians and small-minded people use to deflect criticism and/or control people. People who have control/power shut down conflict - ostensibly motivated by a desire to keep things "nice" or "positive" - but really it just compels people to accept the status quo. I would actually argue that online communities and contemporary society in general skews posiopathic, in part because of these kinds of "hall monitor" type authority figures.
• bane 7y ago
  This is really insightful. I've noticed something like this as well, but with some slight variations on theme. From time to time I've encountered people who come off as incessantly positive, almost cheerleader-like personalities. They often have very large numbers of admirers from previous workplaces. The downside comes from a near perfect refusal to face challenges, problems, and other negative issues. The refusal seems to occur using a variety of strategies, from the observations the article here observes to simply refusing to acknowledge that a problem has been raised. This is deadly in engineering disciplines where the day-to-day is centered almost entirely around problem solving, trade-offs and negotiations.
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• Tade0 7y ago
  My friend is a psychologist and he defines mental health as "the ability to feel/express the full spectrum of emotions". I think this is accurate.
  • threatofrain 7y ago
    As opposed to whether a person has an effective relationship with the world given their personal limitations?
    • Tade0 7y ago
      Perhaps there's more than one school here. I don't know because it's not my field.
• deanCommie 7y ago
  Ugh, this is just going to feed the pessimists. Look, I get it. All extremes are bad. Myself - I trend more negative than positive. But I have a couple of friends that are positive bundles of joy and optimism. I find them invigorating and inspiring to be around and they push me to have a more pleasant outlook. They are not posiopaths. But my partner (who has long-term struggles with clinical depression) is positively nauseated by them. If she read this article, she'd probably start naming these people as posiopaths, even though they don't reflect the antipatterns described. A part of me wants to send this article to her to show what TRUE positive-only attitudes look like, but I suspect she'll just map it directly to those whose positivity makes her feel worse about her own negativity, and consider the matter closed.
• CPLX 7y ago
  The “hide hypocrisy and privilege” paragraph is a very deft and succinct summation of why people really hate a certain element of Silicon Valley culture.
• slfnflctd 7y ago
  A tangent of this can be found in more serious efforts at suicide prevention. You are strongly exhorted in these situations to avoid saying things like "it gets better"-- because you don't know that it will, and saying this can make things worse for the suffering. [I've argued with moderators about how much this rule need be enforced in more casual forums open to the public, but the answer is definitely more than zero.] People who are ready to end their lives sometimes just want to voice their grievances and not much else, at least initially. There are many parallels between this and other kinds of critical situations faced by individuals or institutions.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    Yes. This is a really important point. People have a natural desire to provide help, and often they think that means fixing problems. But that can be harmful. Here's a short guide to suicide prevention that's aimed at members of the public: https://www.zerosuicidealliance.com/training/ https://www.zerosuicidealliance.com/training/
• crimsonalucard 7y ago
  Everyone has a place on a team, an excess of one can be toxic in a certain sense. What interests me is more the pessimist. Pessimism is certainly the minority but it has been found that the pessimist view point is more in line with reality. Here's an interesting excerpt about the topic from a book called "Learned optimism": Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically. This means that, on average, optimistic people will distort reality and pessimists, as Ambrose Bierce defined them, will “see the world aright.” The pessimist seems to be at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indifferent universe. It is important to remember, however that this relationship is statistical, and that pessimists do not have a lock on reality. Some realists, the minority, are optimists, and some distorters, also the minority, are pessimists. Is depressive accuracy just a laboratory curiosity? I don’t think so. Rather it leads us to the very heart of what pessimism is really about. It is our first solid clue about why we have depression at all, the closest we’ve come to an answer to the question asked earlier: why evolution has allowed pessimism and depression to survive and prosper. If pessimism is at the base of depression and suicide, if it results in lower achievement, and as we will see, in poor immune function and in ill health, why didn’t it die out epochs ago? What counterweighting function does pessimism serve for the human species? The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their capacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining. Sometimes and in some niches in modern life, this deep-seated pessimism works. Think about a successful large business. It has a diverse set of personalities serving different roles. First, there are the optimists. The researchers and developers, the planners, the marketers—all these need to be visionaries. They have to dream things that don’t yet exist, to explore boundaries beyond the company’s present reach. If they don’t, the competition will. But imagine a company that consisted only of optimists, all of them fixed upon the exciting possibilities ahead. It would be a disaster. In the context of the above quote, extreme optimism has a place as long as it's tempered by the pessimist. Same with the extreme pessimist it has its place, as long as its uplifted by the optimist, though what I'm seeing in reality is that part of what it takes to be an optimist is to avoid looking at reality and avoid listening or even being in the vicinity of the pessimist.
• jchw 7y ago
  Shocking. Some people may read this and think it is overly pessimistic. It is not. I think this may be misunderstood to mean positivity is always bad, but it isn’t. Rather, this attitude is so pervasive that it’s hard to know what incidents in particular they might’ve come to this conclusion from. It may not perfectly fit every forum of discussion, but it is disturbing how much of this article applies to possibly the majority of serious discussions online these days. > “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's. clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Mathew 7:15) In a modern Internet environment where not only is one’s identity prominent but also the key to how they are considered, understood and validated, this quote could literally not be more poignant. If you don’t believe it, I say just pay close attention next time you see something suspicious on social media, a perfectly crafted narrative of BS that is backed by someone who’s own identity and presentation is equally fabricated. Of course, not everyone out there is full of crap, but I really do think a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  So, I know at least one 'Posiopath'. He's a successful speaker, 'influencer', writer of a bunch of self help books and talks a mile a minute about seeing chances, opportunities and wins. Behind the scenes he's an immature frightened little boy with a big mouth, and his whole outward demeanor notwithstanding he is super fragile. I never could figure out why there is such a need to be perceived as successful, even the smallest wins get blown up way beyond their ability to be sustained by reason. But I also can't deny that it worked for him commercially, people lap up this false positivity as though it will somehow make them a success.
  • verylittlemeat 7y ago
    Without going full armchair psychologist I would assume it has a lot to do with how they were raised. I find that most true believers get that attitude very early in life vs reading a book that told them to "fake it till they make it".
  • overgard 7y ago
    I think a lot of charisma really boils down to enthusiasm and positivity; hence why sometimes the most charismatic people can also be fairly awkward and sometimes even kind of stupid in a lot of senses. I think it boils down to most people wanting to believe their efforts are at least towards something, and a person that can give them the feeling that that's true is going to be well liked.
• lazylizard 7y ago
  Are positive people lucky or something? Because on the opposite side of the fence, i function along the lines of "what can go wrong, whats plan B, whats mitigation, whats actionable?" and i cannot imagine life otherwise.
  • jakear 7y ago
    Maybe it’s a matter of not letting things that go wrong bother you? Or being able to think in your feet and mitigate as events roll in, rather than thinking out myriad possible mitigations for things that will never happen. Small example: last weekend I was out in the wilderness camping by myself, no cell service. Accidentally locked my keys in my car. Someone in that situation might be upset/stressed/worried. Someone else in that situation might be totally at ease because they have a backup key/slim Jim hidden on the chassis. I was neither. I quickly realized I could bash a window in with a rock and did so.
• FridgeSeal 7y ago
  Feels like this is what's going on in my team, our boss is perpetually trying to make sure everyone is "psyched" and happy and as soon as people feel almost anything else or aren't _super_ excited for what they're working on, it either gets brought up in a 1-1 "why aren't you more excited? What's wrong?" or they get the whole team together and we have a "workshop" on why we aren't as happy as we were last week. I get it to some degree, you want to make sure that morale in your team is good and that if people are feeling unhappy you try to fix it, but people aren't going to be maximally happy all the time, sometimes you just feel differently, and trying to get me to feel happy all the time drives me up the wall more than anything.
• loopz 7y ago
  Another word for it: cognitive dissonance It's even more pervasive than that: conditioning Especially online communities are generally enemy of free-thinking, which reflects the debates and focus.
• rendall 7y ago
  Nice rant. I would like specific examples, though. At first I thought it was talking about New Age hippie healing gurus, and then suddenly it's talking about politicians and business leaders. I would like to know the specific context of this article
• gbell12 7y ago
  “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose– with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." -James Stockdale, Vietnam POW