5 ms·

>If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life

• unityByFreedom 5y ago
  I think the parent commenter is suggesting that employee may have experienced some past trauma before that event. None of that excuses the behavior, nor does it excuse them from the consequences. Also, I would not call it "rational". I think that comment is just saying the hate could come from some past incident, and that it can be helpful for society to know the roots of violent behavior.
• thrashh 5y ago
  You can be 100% rational but 100% wrong. A computer is 100% rational but whether the output is right or wrong depends entirely on its input. I make this distinction because if you want to change someone's mind or behavior, assuming that they are irrational is a non-starter. You won't make any progress. Once you get past that, you realize that they are actually being rational and that there are deeper obstacles that need attention.
  • treis 5y ago
    >You can be 100% rational but 100% wrong. A computer is 100% rational but whether the output is right or wrong depends entirely on its input. Yes, but people are not computers. They are, at times, driven by emotion and impulse.
• legacynl 5y ago
  > I disagree with this. As an example, a video came out the other day of a Chicago Transit Authority employee getting into an altercation with some guy. "Some guy" pushed him to the ground and walked away. The employee very slowly (he was quite obese) rose to his feet, pulled a gun, walked after the guy, and then shot 14 times hitting him 3 times. In short, he murdered the guy on video in the middle of a crowded station. There's no way that's not irrational behavior. "If someone seems irrational, it's because you don't understand the person" "Thats not true, because I didn't understand why somebody did something, so he must be irrational." IDK if you know what circular reasoning is, but you're suffering from it. The video in your example doesn't fully explain the situation. You don't know these people, you don't know what happened before, you don't know if they know each other, you don't know what the other guy said/etc. I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad daylight. > There's no way that's not irrational behavior. There's a book called 'Thinking fast & slow' that talks about questions like these. "Is someone's behavior rational?", is a very hard question to answer for your brain, unanswerable even. Still your brain quickly comes up with an answer: 'it's irrational', disregarding the fact that this by itself might arguably be irrational, how does the brain do this? What is this answer based on exactly? To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'. So basically your brain is transplanting your own experience, your own set of learned behavior, yourself, into the situation that you saw in the video, and then decides: "Well, I wouldn't do that, so conclusion: this guy is crazy". But ofcourse out of all the possible upbringings, experiences, lifes you could have, you only have 1. So you will never truly know how it is to be someone else. The only way to know if the shooter in your video was rational or not, is to ask why he did it.
  • treis 5y ago
    >"If someone seems irrational, it's because you don't understand the person" "Thats not true, because I didn't understand why somebody did something, so he must be irrational." Who said I didn't understand why the guy shot him? I certainly didn't. >To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'. Uh, no that's not what I did. >I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad dayligh In this case there isn't.