12 ms·

Good, Kind, Caring People Became the Bad Guys

135 points by kmdupree 2y ago

ConfusedDog 2y ago
In effort to avoid biases, you might create another type of bias - trusting all complainers unconditionally.
subjectsigma 2y ago
Couldn’t make it past the Reddit spacing and the pretentious tone
csours 2y ago
> There are so many bugs and glitches in the human psyche to explain what's happening and why it takes so much patience, and so much effort, to ever get anyone to take threats seriously or to change their behavior, for any reason. > "Bad news messengers may be prime candidates in recipients' search for antagonists to cast in accounts of unwanted outcomes." Bad news also motivates people to come up with "fallacious" causal explanations "often generated effortlessly, seemingly automatically." They generate these fallacious explanations through poor reasoning "characterized by shallow, unconscious thought." === I feel like it is much more productive to understand what is going on in people's minds when they say wrong things VS debunking and moralizing. It is a LOT of work though.
beachy 2y ago
The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  > not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. I see what the author suggests play out routinely on a smaller scale though. If you grew up with a narcissist, you can spot it in other people, when you see them taking over organizations if you speak up about it you're always the bad guy. Nobody wants to listen to it. Then everyone is surprised when it turns out badly in the end.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  > The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. We only have left, the problems we can't solve.
  - darth_avocado 2y ago
    We still have plenty of problems we can solve but don’t. The concept of food insecurity should not exist as a problem in 20th century, but we still have it around.
    - kelseyfrog 2y ago
      What do you think is standing in the way of solving the problem of food insecurity?
      - nuancebydefault 2y ago
        Solving conflicts between groups of people would solve it. But indeed that is just moving one problem to another.
        kelseyfrog 2y ago
        That's my point. Food insecurity isn't a solved problem because it also encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub-problem. It's a bit like saying, I found my keys so I solved my problem of getting to work whilst the battery is also still dead.
        darth_avocado 2y ago
        Well you’re framing it as a problem that can’t be solved. My point was food insecurity is a problem that CAN be solved, but we don’t. And the issue I take with the framing of “it encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub problem” is that if you use that excuse, a lot of things can be framed as unsolvable, including the ones that have been already solved. Going to the moon is a solved problem. But if you say we can no longer go to the moon because it would mean solving the conflict between people don’t want to spend on the project and people who do, then going to the moon becomes an unsolvable problem.
- llsf 2y ago
  I was thinking of lately to the people holding power these days and their responsibility and involvements into the current state of affairs (politics, large corporations, climate/energy crisis, etc.) I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth. That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in. Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >with little time left on this earth sadly there's at least a few more decades minimum, pending sudden turns of health or an abrupt event. 20 years is a lot of time to destabilize a nation.
gds44 2y ago
I dont know if they teach the Theory of Bounded Rationality anymore but it helped me when I was younger and got thrown into similar complex no win situations. The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do? You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive 2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
- MrLeap 2y ago
  This is a really powerful framing. Thank you for posting it. Not clinging to outcomes seems to help in every case, also.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it. As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it. Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher. Mistakes and failure are awesome and underrated.
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something. Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).
alwa 2y ago
At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person. I could imagine even the schizophrenic mother the author mentions describing her motivations in terms of good, kind, and caring intentions, e.g. to protect her family from the various space aliens and demonic possessions and so on. If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.” Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land
  - banannaise 2y ago
    Strangers in Their Own Land is an odd citation here - it doesn't really talk about convincing people so much as understanding their concerns. It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
From the article: Social workers started .. asked me if I felt safe in my home. They asked if I was okay. I lied because I'd been taught a valuable lesson ... When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake. Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker. My longish life repeatedly taught me the above is absolutely true. It also taught me a corollary: No one, anywhere, wants to clean up their own house. Political parties. Gov agencies. NGOs. 501c3. Worldwide religion. Local meeting house. Think tank. Grassroots org. When someone identifies dysfunction, entropy and corruption - when someone works out a legitimately better way and wants to be part of the solution: They can expect suspicion, accusation and being labeled. It's often couched at first. It's increasingly open if the 'troublemaker' persists. Size matters, in my experience. Large orgs can have lots of pragmatic folks who get reality. They try to not overly focus on how they contribute. Which I get. In Smaller/Local orgs, it's common for members to deny they'd ever discourage improvement - even while they actively marginalize 'troublemakers'. Which I have never understood. None of this is absolute and unvarying but it's common to the point of being the rule.
T3OU-736 2y ago
> When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake. Have to vehemently disagree there. It doesn't matter if you believe that thousands of lives are at stake. I will stipulate, readily, that being able to assert things about one's own life are within the easy realm. But thousands? Fate of humanity? Yeah, no, I am judging - because those seem like hyperbole/manipulative claims (even if made with the best intentions), and is the same conversation device as the use of 'they say' (who's the "they"? what, exactly, was said, and under what circumstances?)
- mandmandam 2y ago
  80-90% of climate scientists at bare minimum would vehemently disagree. The existential threat is very, very real. The ignorance and even aggression towards people saying so is also awfully real.
  - T3OU-736 2y ago
    Fair point. When there is proof (as there is with your example), it is a different story. But unsubstantiated claims? Still judging, by way of wanting proof.
madaxe_again 2y ago
As a kid, I was made to see a psychiatrist for “making up terrible stories about Mr Hart”. I was a troublemaker, a liar, a confabulator. This was a universal pattern. Report something, get the blame for it. Again and again, with escalating repercussions. Anyway. Mr Hart is now spending the rest of his life in prison for what he did to me and others. I have all but rejected all authority and have zero faith in any institutions. People with power over you can NEVER be trusted. So it goes.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  People with power eventually locked up Mr Hart. People with power have proven themselves to be less than trustworthy. But NEVER is too strong a word.
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    Yes, after he got away with it for 40 years. Also, it appears that he was released on compassionate grounds after a year of a 15 year term as they imprisoned him when he was almost 90. He’s back to enjoying his retirement at home. And no, nobody with power can be trusted. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t even trust myself with power, and so recuse myself. Find me a single system on earth that is fit for purpose, and doesn’t primarily serve the interests of those who control it. In my work I’ve peeled back the skin of enough charities, good causes, and entities that purport to exist for the public good to have a truly dreary view of any institution.
dimask 2y ago
I think it is good to bear in mind that the distinction between perception, cognition and action/behaviour is in reality a reduction. There is more to these categories about the way we communicate and organise our society rather than mapping to a corresponding reality. We cannot really handle incogruencies between these domains. The meanings we give to things, situations, people are not merely thoughts, they are stuff we enact on them. We can perceive something as unfair or destructive, but if nothing can be done to change it (or what can be done has too high a cost so it is practically inaccessible) we will tend to seek whatever sort of congruence we can. It is hard to think one way and act another, because that requires more energy which we are evolved to try to minimise. Hard realisations are that hard because they imply a sharp change in behaviour and way of living that we may not want, and because the implications span many domains that need to change. Author's family realising the reality of the mother would require changes in the perception of the family situation that was too uncomfortable. It is easier to hide things under the carpet to preserve the facade of a normal family life, than enact all the changes required. This is why such situations are so common when it is about families. So, I do not quite agree with the premise and conclusion of the article, in the sense that I do not think that there is anything ingrained in our primate brains regarding how we judge incoming negative information, but rather something ingrained in our cultural institutions and social reality, which is what makes them both stable and dysfunctional. Seemingly irrational behaviours make perfect sense once one can understand how to contextualise them.
quailfarmer 2y ago
> Now I'm an adult, watching this kind of thing play out on a global scale every single day with the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems. I must have missed the memo on this situation. But more seriously, there’s such a thing as constructive criticism, and there’s such a thing as fatalism. And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.
- hibernator149 2y ago
  Thank you for being such a great example of the exact behavior the article is talking about.
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    Hmm, looks like you are doing it too then. He’s complaining about the conclusions of the article and you are taking it out on him.
    - darig 2y ago
      [dead]
    - dandanua 2y ago
      Degrading public institutions is not the conclusion of the article, it's an objective fact. The conclusion of the article is that public don't want to do anything about it because people don't like bad news and prefer to shoot all the messengers. So, that commenter was just wrong, and his wrong assumptions are perfectly explained by the article.
      - mildconcern 2y ago
        Except it's not an objective fact. It's a widely held opinion, with a fair amount of strong evidence behind it, but there's nothing objective about measuring the strength of public institutions. There's folks who profit off panic, and prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
That anecdote at the beginning brought to mind a personal event recently that I keep meaning to write a proper blog about. A friend of mine, who is much younger than I am and to whom I've acted as something of a mentor for many years, has her first proper job in a long time. It's a blue-collar job for an understaffed place, and she's been working her ass off to keep things moving along smoothly. And she likes that! She likes holding things together, overcoming the challenges that workplace puts on her, being the one standing between them and the whole place falling apart. She likes doing a good job, and finds personal value in it. She asked me whether or not that was okay. Because, she reasoned, the harder she worked, the more her employers would just use that as an excuse not to hire the people they need. Every time she plugs a leak, she's removing pressure from the owners to fix it. Her hard work, she reasoned, isn't rewarded, it's exploited, and it paves the way for further exploitation of both my friend and her coworkers. That's horrifying! It's way beyond alienation from your product, it's punishment for pursuing virtue and excellence. Work is a good thing! It's a natural part of who we are, it can be a massive source of self-worth and self-esteem, it's a core defining part of human life to the point that a lot of our very names come from the labor of our ancestors. For me, it proved to be the cure to many of my mental health ills almost all by itself. Working hard at a job I liked turned my entire life around piece by piece, and not working for a bit afterward turned out to be poison to my well-being. I was so stressed about my current work I couldn't sleep last night, and it's still better than I felt not working, because work is that important to my stability and self-esteem. I ended up telling my friend that yeah, she should feel okay about it and try to better herself, because she can take every way she grows with her when she leaves. But it's hard to argue that she's wrong about the adversarial calculus, and I get why people check out. It's a painful thing to see.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I like your comment. When we feel bad in our jobs, we tend to put blame on coworkers, managers, or the organization's structure. But often the situation is not as bad as we think, we just feel bad and want to find a cause. As long as we feel good on the other hand, we tend to think, where's the catch? So indeed as long as she likes the job, she just should keep doing it and get personal growth out of it. I would be interested in reading mentioned personal blog.
Animats 2y ago
Perhaps the real message here is that just locking up the crazies works better than letting them be a problem for others.
- bovermyer 2y ago
  That's a little reductive, isn't it? Who decides who's crazy? Who decides whether they're crazy enough to lock up? What does "locking up" actually mean? What problem is this solving? Is that the right problem to solve?
  - narag 2y ago
    A judge, hearing witnesses and mental health professionals under oath, decides who is unable to behave peacefully. It's usually a last-resort measure, so when it comes to this, it's very clear cut. Locking up can mean a number of things, but for really bad cases it's just that. It solves the problem of people out of their mind hurting others because they forget or just refuse to take their medication. And it's a better problem to solve than dealing with dead bodies. You can still set as many controls as you deem reasonable, but sometimes families are put in impossible situations, just like in the article.
    - bovermyer 2y ago
      My point was not to answer those questions, it was to demonstrate the lack of nuance in the original post.
      - narag 2y ago
        I have been close to people in that kind of situation and I am happy to answer. We tend to see those questions from the nightmarish movie plot perspective in which someone is wrongfully institutionalized. Cuckcoo's Nest and all that. Also many families want to have their mentally ill members with them. With proper medication they can live a happy life. But there are terrible situations when they don't take the medication or there's an addiction problem. There's very little nuance in these cases, really.
nineplay 2y ago
I think this is really interesting and and I think it would have been stronger without digressing into current political events. It becomes a self-affirmation - "everyone who agrees with me is clear-eyed rational thinker, everyone who disagrees with me is laboring under from psychological shortcomings." We all sometimes fail to do a "good job of distinguishing between a threat and someone trying to warn" us. Pretending it only happens to people who disagree with us is just another delusion
flightster 2y ago
Author would do great in HR, compliance or IT
vyvyy 2y ago
> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future. The public tend to get annoyed at these protestors because their protests are ineffective and disrupt everyday working people. If the protestors brought their protests to the oil executives, I expect they'd be much more widely accepted. > It explains how university students have somehow wound up as the villains in so many people's eyes, instead of the governments sponsoring and committing genocide. If this is referring to Gaza, not everyone holds the view that Israel is committing genocide. Many see it as a justified response to a large-scale terrorist attack by Hamas. And either way, the students' protests aren't effective either. It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future. Oil companies aren't the cause of climate change. The people who burn the oil are. P.S. Oil replaced the slaughter of the whales and saved them from extinction. Oil also produces much less pollution than coal, which oil replaced. Coal saved the forests from extinction.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    And coal/oil marked (mostly) the end of slavery and other forms of indentured labour. But Jevons' paradox means that the efficiency of oil leads to its consumption at huge levels. You want the strength of 150 horses just to go to the shop and back? No problem, Average Guy, just pop the key in and off you go. Now imagine how rich you'd have to be in 1800 to have one hundred and fifty horses at your disposal. The expense and labour involved in keeping them fed and watered, and the labourers themselves fed and watered. And that's just a small truck. For a passenger airliner, you're looking at eight hundred horses per passenger that's typical of a long-haul jet aircraft.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      What do you prefer? Short lives, famines, etc.? That was ended by the industrial revolution. I suggest touring Washington's Mt Vernon estate. He was probably the richest man in America at the time. I wouldn't trade my current standard of living for his.
deleted 2y ago
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sickofparadox 2y ago
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ― C. S. Lewis
- ldehaan 2y ago
  [dead]
Bengalilol 2y ago
Amazing read, nothing to add but the silence of approbation.
rootsudo 2y ago
This is a great article, it made me realize it's better to say (write) nothing. Personal opinion doesn't matter, it only silos you. Personal feedback doesn't matter, you hurt someone. No one really is interested in how you are, it's just generic speech. It is the reason why I don't partcipiate in many conversations anymore. It's just easier to not reply, or worse, if I have to, reply with what the person wants to hear. Glad to know it isn't just me. Sad to know that it's easier to go along then really be a maverick and be different.
- darig 2y ago
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WalterBright 2y ago
Most of the evil done in the world comes from people with the best of intentions. The trouble comes from thinking that their ideas are so right they are entitled to force them on everyone else.
h2odragon 2y ago
If "you have to trick people into doing the right thing"; you might have to take the news with a grain of salt: other may be doing the same to you. Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent?
- fargle 2y ago
  yes, exactly. "other may be doing the same to you" and they might not even be tricking you into doing the "right thing", just the thing that they want.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  I weighed 300 pounds at one point, and I lived - was there any imminent need to change? I've got a buddy who's smoked since he was 14 and he's fine today - I guess all those critics who told him to quit were just shrill doomers.
- amag 2y ago
  > Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent? Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?
throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche. They are adaptations to primarily social environments. They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong. Neither of them is an explanation for the author’s perceived vilification of his worldview. Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought, they influence it but any amount of examination or second thought is enough to balance their contribution. If we want to psychologize then I would add that the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life. Generally this will resolve with more experience and interaction with a broader range of ideas and people. It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Dear lord, there are many people missing the point of the article but this entire comment is egregious. > Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche. They can be, and those situations were what was described. The author never claimed that these failings are not sometimes or even often a useful heuristic - in fact, they linked to a research article which shows that these processes are even separate from our evaluations of people (the evil bananas study). > They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong Maybe - but knowing they're there so you can understand and prevent the wrongness is important, not just in your life but to the future of our species. > Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought Author never claimed they do. > If we want to psychologize What? > the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life. What the fuck? > It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning. The author linked to important and interesting research, and wrote about it in a very engaging way. At no point anywhere did they make logical leaps, or insist that one conclusion or another was the only right way to think. The stone cold fact is that this phenomenon, which shows up in multiple studies, explains a lot about our biggest current problems, from corrupt politicians to alarming climate research. Attacking the messenger and even pathologizing them is completely unwarranted, actively unhelpful, and a perfect example of the author's point.
flanked-evergl 2y ago
This is happening because, for decades, the western intelligentsia has been telling people to abandon normality because normality is bad — and being abnormal, radical, extreme, an outlier is good. This is how you destroy the social fabric, how you make everyone hate each other, how you ensure there can be no unity on anything other than grievances, and that unity can at best be tenuous and fleeting, and that the only constant that will remain is disunity. The consequences of this is civilizational collapse, there is no stopping it any more, we are in the dying days of the west, of the Christian world order. What comes next will be antithetical to western values.
davesque 2y ago
Though this article does point out what I think is a real effect in human psychology, it bothers me that the author ends up using the whole narrative to inject her own opinions on world affairs in a context where we should feel guilty for questioning them, as though we're just as bad as her father or the police that wouldn't intervene to mitigate her mother's schizophrenia. That's a really rotten trick.
- Nathanba 2y ago
  The article becomes ironic because it's an example of the very thing she is complaining about. All the decent, kind, caring people are vastly outnumbered by people like the writer who apparently tread the exact mainstream line on things like climate change, the Gaza conflict and "Trump is bad" (she writes: "The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us"). One of her covid articles mentions how "we were waiting on the FDA to approve vaccines for children under five". She couldn't be more mainstream if she tried, I couldn't find a meat=bad article but maybe that's still coming. How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption. because as we saw with the 2016 US elections, majorities don't always make for the path forward. Numbers may be bigger, but invested parties put a lot more care, time, and money into pushing their cause. And a cornered rat bites back. "the mainstream" got too comfortable and the counter culture is biting back hard. his can lead to just as many regresssions are there are progressions in humanity.
ineedaj0b 2y ago
The Author lists many psych studies. Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them. There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those. I appreciate he’s up front with his doom. I’d likely be a doomer too if I was in my 20s-30s with a schizophrenic mom and reading psych abstracts. I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground. Also reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
- Clubber 2y ago
  There's a stretch between 1914 and around 1955 that I wouldn't want to live through for anything.
- Quarrelsome 2y ago
  I think its a "she" FWIW.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them. There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those. Do tell. Which three?
- Willish42 2y ago
  > I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground. While I share some of your sentiment here (truly), I think 90% is way too high a number for the field as a whole, and also believe you're likely discounting "emotional intelligence" and the boots-on-ground work that non-academic psychology specialists are doing for public health and mental health in general. IOW, I am *equally* skeptical of armchair psychology people who are so dismissive about "real" psychology people. Everybody has an opinion, and peer reviews etc. are how we root out "intuition" from clinically proven phenomena. EMDR is a great example of a recent-ish innovation that is still being tested clinically on its efficacy, but shows some promising signs thus far AFAICT. I'm certainly glad somebody is testing it etc. so that we can incorporate it into folks' care, and would not consider the people doing so "90% charlatans" nor would I find them exclusively in some alleged 10% of "non-charlatans"
keybored 2y ago
Unlike The World Is Ending Doomerism, Cognitive Bias Doomerism transcends generations; the viewpoint that the brain is wholly defined by a list of biases. And I don’t trust that the author is able to constructively and positively deal with all of the idiots (their words), in part because (according to them) they also have such a faulty brain.
recursive 2y ago
Whistle-blowing is hard to distinguish from complaining about others and deflecting blame. These are staples of the narcissist's playbook. If you sound like a narcissist, people quite reasonably might suspect you of being one. My take is this. If you need to give someone some bad or unsavory news, ease into it gently. Start with the gentlest form of the information. Have documentation and receipts to back up all your allegations. But don't reveal them unless questioned repeatedly.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > Whistle-blowing is hard to distinguish from complaining about others and deflecting blame. I suggest examining the whistleblower's evidence.
  - recursive 2y ago
    Sure. That's why I say this. > Have documentation and receipts to back up all your allegations But you won't be dealing exclusively with reasonable people like you and me.
AlbertCory 2y ago
> the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems. Her mother was schizophrenic. OK, we get that. People like to deny problems and sweep them under the rug. We get that, too. However, generalizing her mother's illness to the "collapse of global industrial civilization" is a bridge too far. People can reasonably differ about that, in general, and specifically about what should be done about it if it IS true.
- abbadadda 2y ago
  I don’t think you understood. The mother’s illness was not generalized to the collapse of global civilization. The author’s experience with the former is being generalized to the experience of others as it relates to the “collapse” of global civilization.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > "collapse of global industrial civilization" Would intentional restraint of civilization be a better descriptor? How about neutering by design? My wife needs long term, in-patient treatment and therapy. After centuries we can finally do it fairly well. And then we put a moat around it that very few can cross. My wife is not in the small, privileged class that can cross that moat. After a lot of damage, she eventually left us to become homeless. The last I heard she's 2k miles away. Her sister died unexpectedly yesterday. I sent word but it's not likely to reach her.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  In fact he/she implies that they have the talent of spotting upcoming collapses well.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  You people are all missing the point: Your loved one's decline is something you have superior insight into. "Global decline": no, you probably do not. The former is something that an outsider can't argue with you about, unless they know the person. The latter: yes, they can. Their facts and opinions might well be better than yours.
neilv 2y ago
> Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker. I used to assume the expression "Kill The Messenger" meant that the receiver of the message was angry about the message, and simply lashed out unfairly at the person who said it, though they knew the messenger was innocent. But more recently, I've realized that the receiver of the bad news often seems to genuinely feel suspicion towards the messenger -- not merely lashing out at the nearest convenient punching bag. I'll distinguish two variants of suspicion towards messenger: * Only the receiver's beliefs are threatened (e.g., doesn't want to believe they made a mistake, or that things aren't so rosy, or that so-and-so did something terrible). * The receiver is more concretely threatened (e.g., could lose their job/bonus/promotion, or could be tainted by bad PR, or could be implicated in past enabling). For things like the abuse case to which the article alludes, the kind could vary by person involved involved in a case. The latter kind, concretely threatened, obviously there is also a concrete, rational, reason to lash out at the messenger, but not to genuinely suspect them, yet AFAICT they might genuinely suspect the messenger anyway.
throwaway98797 2y ago
it’s true that no one likes a whinier that’s why if you do it, you better be right there’s no should in life, just is rage not against the world for it will crush you
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
Very cringe pep talk for self-appointed saviors of humanity. Stay strong in your futile struggles that make you feel like you're worth something, comrades! Topkek
Out_of_Characte 2y ago
His comparison to global warming and hurricanes was on point. The issues with his mom and global warming seemed equally difficult to resolve. With the obvious issue that there does not seem to be an adult in the room that solves the issue.
tqi 2y ago
Thinking that you alone know "the right thing", that you are surrounded by "idiots", that people "call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk" and not because they (correctly) feel that you have no respect for them is simply hubris. Maybe this is the "dry humor" the author mentioned, but a) in my experience, people who hide behind the "it's just a joke" defense are rarely actually joking, and b) if your goal is to influence people then how your humor lands is in fact your problem. As they say, if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met at an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole. > It comes down to this: > You have to find a way to be the smart, positive, compassionate, mature, respectful, charming one. You have to do that even if everyone around you is acting like a complete idiot. > You have to achieve a fine balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. A lot of people won't listen at first. > You often have to trick people into doing the right thing. > It's exhausting. > It takes a lot out of you to be respectful to idiots all day long, especially when many of them go out of their way to do you harm. Despite the audacious tone of my writing (my dry humor is often mistaken for bitterness or anger), I try to remain calm and compassionate when dealing with people right in front of me. > And of course, a lot of people will call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk. > It's a lot to deal with.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  Yeah, the author comes across as being incredibly sanctimonious. The three "featured" articles on their blog are headlined "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", and "A Matter of When, Not If". They have a family history of schizophrenia but they seem to lack the humility to realise that they don't seem to be engaging with people with a view to understanding them. With that context, trying to convince people that they're simply attacking the messenger feels disingenuous.
mandmandam 2y ago
I'm surprised and disappointed at how so many of the comments here have jumped to completely unwarranted conclusions. I can only guess that people are feeling vulnerable after seeing part of themselves described so succinctly, and are lashing out in response. Thanks OP, and big ups to Jessica Wildfire for a very interesting and important story. I feel like I understand the world a bit better now.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  For a crowd that likes to believe they are more analytical and less emotional than the plebs they sure do take criticism badly.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    Or they simply disagree.
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      I have no problem with disagreement when it's at least coherent and based on actual fact. But I can't see any legitimate criticism in the entire post, just a load of people jumping to conclusions and even attacking the author. Misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and disturbing assumptions are all over the place. It's weird. So many people very obviously missed the entire point, and are mad about stuff they invented entirely.
    - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
      And apparently react badly.
rayiner 2y ago
The application of this psychobabble to current events lacks support. People aren’t getting mad at climate protesters because they think the protesters caused climate change. Likewise, people aren’t getting mad at college protesters because they think the caused the problems in the Middle East. Those are actually examples of value disagreements. I.e. when you prominently put your values on display, you invite reaction from people with different values. That has nothing to do with the “blaming the messenger” problem discussed earlier in the article.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  Indeed. I think that another way to look at it would be that protestors are not simply messengers, they are people who have specific goals which they would like to effect. The war reporters, scientists, or perhaps the journalists reporting on the protests are the messengers here, and whilst I think they do receive a fair amount of cynicism, usually that's linked to the perceived attempt at influence. i.e. Okay, you want me to change what I'm doing for you. I don't know you, and my natural tendency is to decline such requests until I determine that you're trustworthy, because otherwise I'd simply be under a constant DoS attack.
- volkk 2y ago
  this article started out so strongly too--found it pretty interesting. and then just deteriorated. like, within a few sentences in the later half you already know the leftist stance with little nuance on any of the topics being brushed with broad boring strokes
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  Protesters are not only bringing a message, but almost always proposing a solution. And in both cases you mention they are vigorously pointing out the frying pan while being willfully blind to the fact that they're trying to get us to jump in the fire. It's possible to have a protest movement over somebody protecting an ox, but most protests are about issues that aren't solved because there is no good solution. If there is an answer why hasn't it been done?
nuancebydefault 2y ago
I wonder if the reasoning in the article could explain following, for me incomprehensible, events. - My brother in law shouting about young adults who were protesting for climate action, that their proper place is at school. - The fact that a delusional former US president got more than zero votes.
disambiguation 2y ago
If I disagree with OP, then am I guilty of spontaneous trait transference?
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  Only if you attribute the OP with negative traits because she is bearing bad news.
rawgabbit 2y ago
Over the years, I have come up with this framework. I label three possible responses when I, the messenger, bring bad news or contradicts someone: (a) the RATIONAL RESPONDER believes the messenger is trying to be helpful by sharing their information and may re-formulate their position. (b) the PATRONIZING PARENT believes the messenger is an ass, patronizes the messenger, and dismisses everything they say. (c) the DANGEROUS DELUSIONAL believes they are always right and the messenger is a threat who needs to be silenced. With patronizing parent, I try to be calm and hopefully by sheer persistence they will come around one day and listen to reason. With dangerous delusional, I mostly try to limit the amount of damage they can do to me. I don't have any better ideas.
gary_0 2y ago
People are really missing the point of the sick mom metaphor. When people were acknowledging the problem and the mom was getting treatment, things were better. When the author was pointing out there was a serious problem and people resented them for saying so and ignored it, that was bad. If people acknowledge there are certain serious problems in the world and that something needs to be done, things will get better. If people keep shooting the messenger, that is bad.
ldehaan 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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DonHopkins 2y ago
>Yes, you can condition someone to believe that bananas are evil. Well that explains "The Atheist's Nightmare"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A

135 points by kmdupree 2y ago

ConfusedDog 2y ago

In effort to avoid biases, you might create another type of bias - trusting all complainers unconditionally.

subjectsigma 2y ago

Couldn’t make it past the Reddit spacing and the pretentious tone

csours 2y ago

> There are so many bugs and glitches in the human psyche to explain what's happening and why it takes so much patience, and so much effort, to ever get anyone to take threats seriously or to change their behavior, for any reason. > "Bad news messengers may be prime candidates in recipients' search for antagonists to cast in accounts of unwanted outcomes." Bad news also motivates people to come up with "fallacious" causal explanations "often generated effortlessly, seemingly automatically." They generate these fallacious explanations through poor reasoning "characterized by shallow, unconscious thought." === I feel like it is much more productive to understand what is going on in people's minds when they say wrong things VS debunking and moralizing. It is a LOT of work though.

beachy 2y ago

The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.

lamontcg 2y ago
> not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. I see what the author suggests play out routinely on a smaller scale though. If you grew up with a narcissist, you can spot it in other people, when you see them taking over organizations if you speak up about it you're always the bad guy. Nobody wants to listen to it. Then everyone is surprised when it turns out badly in the end.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
> The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change. We only have left, the problems we can't solve.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  We still have plenty of problems we can solve but don’t. The concept of food insecurity should not exist as a problem in 20th century, but we still have it around.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    What do you think is standing in the way of solving the problem of food insecurity?
    - nuancebydefault 2y ago
      Solving conflicts between groups of people would solve it. But indeed that is just moving one problem to another.
      - kelseyfrog 2y ago
        That's my point. Food insecurity isn't a solved problem because it also encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub-problem. It's a bit like saying, I found my keys so I solved my problem of getting to work whilst the battery is also still dead.
        darth_avocado 2y ago
        Well you’re framing it as a problem that can’t be solved. My point was food insecurity is a problem that CAN be solved, but we don’t. And the issue I take with the framing of “it encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub problem” is that if you use that excuse, a lot of things can be framed as unsolvable, including the ones that have been already solved. Going to the moon is a solved problem. But if you say we can no longer go to the moon because it would mean solving the conflict between people don’t want to spend on the project and people who do, then going to the moon becomes an unsolvable problem.
llsf 2y ago
I was thinking of lately to the people holding power these days and their responsibility and involvements into the current state of affairs (politics, large corporations, climate/energy crisis, etc.) I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth. That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in. Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>with little time left on this earth sadly there's at least a few more decades minimum, pending sudden turns of health or an abrupt event. 20 years is a lot of time to destabilize a nation.

gds44 2y ago

I dont know if they teach the Theory of Bounded Rationality anymore but it helped me when I was younger and got thrown into similar complex no win situations. The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do? You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive 2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.

MrLeap 2y ago
This is a really powerful framing. Thank you for posting it. Not clinging to outcomes seems to help in every case, also.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it. As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it. Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher. Mistakes and failure are awesome and underrated.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something. Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).

alwa 2y ago

At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person. I could imagine even the schizophrenic mother the author mentions describing her motivations in terms of good, kind, and caring intentions, e.g. to protect her family from the various space aliens and demonic possessions and so on. If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.” Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?

the_snooze 2y ago
>Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land
- banannaise 2y ago
  Strangers in Their Own Land is an odd citation here - it doesn't really talk about convincing people so much as understanding their concerns. It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

From the article: Social workers started .. asked me if I felt safe in my home. They asked if I was okay. I lied because I'd been taught a valuable lesson ... When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake. Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker. My longish life repeatedly taught me the above is absolutely true. It also taught me a corollary: No one, anywhere, wants to clean up their own house. Political parties. Gov agencies. NGOs. 501c3. Worldwide religion. Local meeting house. Think tank. Grassroots org. When someone identifies dysfunction, entropy and corruption - when someone works out a legitimately better way and wants to be part of the solution: They can expect suspicion, accusation and being labeled. It's often couched at first. It's increasingly open if the 'troublemaker' persists. Size matters, in my experience. Large orgs can have lots of pragmatic folks who get reality. They try to not overly focus on how they contribute. Which I get. In Smaller/Local orgs, it's common for members to deny they'd ever discourage improvement - even while they actively marginalize 'troublemakers'. Which I have never understood. None of this is absolute and unvarying but it's common to the point of being the rule.

T3OU-736 2y ago

> When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake. Have to vehemently disagree there. It doesn't matter if you believe that thousands of lives are at stake. I will stipulate, readily, that being able to assert things about one's own life are within the easy realm. But thousands? Fate of humanity? Yeah, no, I am judging - because those seem like hyperbole/manipulative claims (even if made with the best intentions), and is the same conversation device as the use of 'they say' (who's the "they"? what, exactly, was said, and under what circumstances?)

mandmandam 2y ago
80-90% of climate scientists at bare minimum would vehemently disagree. The existential threat is very, very real. The ignorance and even aggression towards people saying so is also awfully real.
- T3OU-736 2y ago
  Fair point. When there is proof (as there is with your example), it is a different story. But unsubstantiated claims? Still judging, by way of wanting proof.

madaxe_again 2y ago

As a kid, I was made to see a psychiatrist for “making up terrible stories about Mr Hart”. I was a troublemaker, a liar, a confabulator. This was a universal pattern. Report something, get the blame for it. Again and again, with escalating repercussions. Anyway. Mr Hart is now spending the rest of his life in prison for what he did to me and others. I have all but rejected all authority and have zero faith in any institutions. People with power over you can NEVER be trusted. So it goes.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
People with power eventually locked up Mr Hart. People with power have proven themselves to be less than trustworthy. But NEVER is too strong a word.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Yes, after he got away with it for 40 years. Also, it appears that he was released on compassionate grounds after a year of a 15 year term as they imprisoned him when he was almost 90. He’s back to enjoying his retirement at home. And no, nobody with power can be trusted. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t even trust myself with power, and so recuse myself. Find me a single system on earth that is fit for purpose, and doesn’t primarily serve the interests of those who control it. In my work I’ve peeled back the skin of enough charities, good causes, and entities that purport to exist for the public good to have a truly dreary view of any institution.

dimask 2y ago

I think it is good to bear in mind that the distinction between perception, cognition and action/behaviour is in reality a reduction. There is more to these categories about the way we communicate and organise our society rather than mapping to a corresponding reality. We cannot really handle incogruencies between these domains. The meanings we give to things, situations, people are not merely thoughts, they are stuff we enact on them. We can perceive something as unfair or destructive, but if nothing can be done to change it (or what can be done has too high a cost so it is practically inaccessible) we will tend to seek whatever sort of congruence we can. It is hard to think one way and act another, because that requires more energy which we are evolved to try to minimise. Hard realisations are that hard because they imply a sharp change in behaviour and way of living that we may not want, and because the implications span many domains that need to change. Author's family realising the reality of the mother would require changes in the perception of the family situation that was too uncomfortable. It is easier to hide things under the carpet to preserve the facade of a normal family life, than enact all the changes required. This is why such situations are so common when it is about families. So, I do not quite agree with the premise and conclusion of the article, in the sense that I do not think that there is anything ingrained in our primate brains regarding how we judge incoming negative information, but rather something ingrained in our cultural institutions and social reality, which is what makes them both stable and dysfunctional. Seemingly irrational behaviours make perfect sense once one can understand how to contextualise them.

quailfarmer 2y ago

> Now I'm an adult, watching this kind of thing play out on a global scale every single day with the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems. I must have missed the memo on this situation. But more seriously, there’s such a thing as constructive criticism, and there’s such a thing as fatalism. And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.

hibernator149 2y ago
Thank you for being such a great example of the exact behavior the article is talking about.
- WrongAssumption 2y ago
  Hmm, looks like you are doing it too then. He’s complaining about the conclusions of the article and you are taking it out on him.
  - darig 2y ago
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  - dandanua 2y ago
    Degrading public institutions is not the conclusion of the article, it's an objective fact. The conclusion of the article is that public don't want to do anything about it because people don't like bad news and prefer to shoot all the messengers. So, that commenter was just wrong, and his wrong assumptions are perfectly explained by the article.
    - mildconcern 2y ago
      Except it's not an objective fact. It's a widely held opinion, with a fair amount of strong evidence behind it, but there's nothing objective about measuring the strength of public institutions. There's folks who profit off panic, and prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.

rachofsunshine 2y ago

That anecdote at the beginning brought to mind a personal event recently that I keep meaning to write a proper blog about. A friend of mine, who is much younger than I am and to whom I've acted as something of a mentor for many years, has her first proper job in a long time. It's a blue-collar job for an understaffed place, and she's been working her ass off to keep things moving along smoothly. And she likes that! She likes holding things together, overcoming the challenges that workplace puts on her, being the one standing between them and the whole place falling apart. She likes doing a good job, and finds personal value in it. She asked me whether or not that was okay. Because, she reasoned, the harder she worked, the more her employers would just use that as an excuse not to hire the people they need. Every time she plugs a leak, she's removing pressure from the owners to fix it. Her hard work, she reasoned, isn't rewarded, it's exploited, and it paves the way for further exploitation of both my friend and her coworkers. That's horrifying! It's way beyond alienation from your product, it's punishment for pursuing virtue and excellence. Work is a good thing! It's a natural part of who we are, it can be a massive source of self-worth and self-esteem, it's a core defining part of human life to the point that a lot of our very names come from the labor of our ancestors. For me, it proved to be the cure to many of my mental health ills almost all by itself. Working hard at a job I liked turned my entire life around piece by piece, and not working for a bit afterward turned out to be poison to my well-being. I was so stressed about my current work I couldn't sleep last night, and it's still better than I felt not working, because work is that important to my stability and self-esteem. I ended up telling my friend that yeah, she should feel okay about it and try to better herself, because she can take every way she grows with her when she leaves. But it's hard to argue that she's wrong about the adversarial calculus, and I get why people check out. It's a painful thing to see.

nuancebydefault 2y ago
I like your comment. When we feel bad in our jobs, we tend to put blame on coworkers, managers, or the organization's structure. But often the situation is not as bad as we think, we just feel bad and want to find a cause. As long as we feel good on the other hand, we tend to think, where's the catch? So indeed as long as she likes the job, she just should keep doing it and get personal growth out of it. I would be interested in reading mentioned personal blog.

Animats 2y ago

Perhaps the real message here is that just locking up the crazies works better than letting them be a problem for others.

bovermyer 2y ago
That's a little reductive, isn't it? Who decides who's crazy? Who decides whether they're crazy enough to lock up? What does "locking up" actually mean? What problem is this solving? Is that the right problem to solve?
- narag 2y ago
  A judge, hearing witnesses and mental health professionals under oath, decides who is unable to behave peacefully. It's usually a last-resort measure, so when it comes to this, it's very clear cut. Locking up can mean a number of things, but for really bad cases it's just that. It solves the problem of people out of their mind hurting others because they forget or just refuse to take their medication. And it's a better problem to solve than dealing with dead bodies. You can still set as many controls as you deem reasonable, but sometimes families are put in impossible situations, just like in the article.
  - bovermyer 2y ago
    My point was not to answer those questions, it was to demonstrate the lack of nuance in the original post.
    - narag 2y ago
      I have been close to people in that kind of situation and I am happy to answer. We tend to see those questions from the nightmarish movie plot perspective in which someone is wrongfully institutionalized. Cuckcoo's Nest and all that. Also many families want to have their mentally ill members with them. With proper medication they can live a happy life. But there are terrible situations when they don't take the medication or there's an addiction problem. There's very little nuance in these cases, really.

nineplay 2y ago

I think this is really interesting and and I think it would have been stronger without digressing into current political events. It becomes a self-affirmation - "everyone who agrees with me is clear-eyed rational thinker, everyone who disagrees with me is laboring under from psychological shortcomings." We all sometimes fail to do a "good job of distinguishing between a threat and someone trying to warn" us. Pretending it only happens to people who disagree with us is just another delusion

flightster 2y ago

Author would do great in HR, compliance or IT

vyvyy 2y ago

> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future. The public tend to get annoyed at these protestors because their protests are ineffective and disrupt everyday working people. If the protestors brought their protests to the oil executives, I expect they'd be much more widely accepted. > It explains how university students have somehow wound up as the villains in so many people's eyes, instead of the governments sponsoring and committing genocide. If this is referring to Gaza, not everyone holds the view that Israel is committing genocide. Many see it as a justified response to a large-scale terrorist attack by Hamas. And either way, the students' protests aren't effective either. It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.

WalterBright 2y ago
> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future. Oil companies aren't the cause of climate change. The people who burn the oil are. P.S. Oil replaced the slaughter of the whales and saved them from extinction. Oil also produces much less pollution than coal, which oil replaced. Coal saved the forests from extinction.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  And coal/oil marked (mostly) the end of slavery and other forms of indentured labour. But Jevons' paradox means that the efficiency of oil leads to its consumption at huge levels. You want the strength of 150 horses just to go to the shop and back? No problem, Average Guy, just pop the key in and off you go. Now imagine how rich you'd have to be in 1800 to have one hundred and fifty horses at your disposal. The expense and labour involved in keeping them fed and watered, and the labourers themselves fed and watered. And that's just a small truck. For a passenger airliner, you're looking at eight hundred horses per passenger that's typical of a long-haul jet aircraft.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    What do you prefer? Short lives, famines, etc.? That was ended by the industrial revolution. I suggest touring Washington's Mt Vernon estate. He was probably the richest man in America at the time. I wouldn't trade my current standard of living for his.

deleted 2y ago

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sickofparadox 2y ago

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ― C. S. Lewis

ldehaan 2y ago
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Bengalilol 2y ago

Amazing read, nothing to add but the silence of approbation.

rootsudo 2y ago

This is a great article, it made me realize it's better to say (write) nothing. Personal opinion doesn't matter, it only silos you. Personal feedback doesn't matter, you hurt someone. No one really is interested in how you are, it's just generic speech. It is the reason why I don't partcipiate in many conversations anymore. It's just easier to not reply, or worse, if I have to, reply with what the person wants to hear. Glad to know it isn't just me. Sad to know that it's easier to go along then really be a maverick and be different.

darig 2y ago
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WalterBright 2y ago

Most of the evil done in the world comes from people with the best of intentions. The trouble comes from thinking that their ideas are so right they are entitled to force them on everyone else.

h2odragon 2y ago

If "you have to trick people into doing the right thing"; you might have to take the news with a grain of salt: other may be doing the same to you. Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent?

fargle 2y ago
yes, exactly. "other may be doing the same to you" and they might not even be tricking you into doing the "right thing", just the thing that they want.
silverquiet 2y ago
I weighed 300 pounds at one point, and I lived - was there any imminent need to change? I've got a buddy who's smoked since he was 14 and he's fine today - I guess all those critics who told him to quit were just shrill doomers.
amag 2y ago
> Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent? Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?

throwthrowuknow 2y ago

Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche. They are adaptations to primarily social environments. They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong. Neither of them is an explanation for the author’s perceived vilification of his worldview. Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought, they influence it but any amount of examination or second thought is enough to balance their contribution. If we want to psychologize then I would add that the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life. Generally this will resolve with more experience and interaction with a broader range of ideas and people. It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning.

mandmandam 2y ago
Dear lord, there are many people missing the point of the article but this entire comment is egregious. > Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche. They can be, and those situations were what was described. The author never claimed that these failings are not sometimes or even often a useful heuristic - in fact, they linked to a research article which shows that these processes are even separate from our evaluations of people (the evil bananas study). > They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong Maybe - but knowing they're there so you can understand and prevent the wrongness is important, not just in your life but to the future of our species. > Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought Author never claimed they do. > If we want to psychologize What? > the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life. What the fuck? > It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning. The author linked to important and interesting research, and wrote about it in a very engaging way. At no point anywhere did they make logical leaps, or insist that one conclusion or another was the only right way to think. The stone cold fact is that this phenomenon, which shows up in multiple studies, explains a lot about our biggest current problems, from corrupt politicians to alarming climate research. Attacking the messenger and even pathologizing them is completely unwarranted, actively unhelpful, and a perfect example of the author's point.

flanked-evergl 2y ago

This is happening because, for decades, the western intelligentsia has been telling people to abandon normality because normality is bad — and being abnormal, radical, extreme, an outlier is good. This is how you destroy the social fabric, how you make everyone hate each other, how you ensure there can be no unity on anything other than grievances, and that unity can at best be tenuous and fleeting, and that the only constant that will remain is disunity. The consequences of this is civilizational collapse, there is no stopping it any more, we are in the dying days of the west, of the Christian world order. What comes next will be antithetical to western values.

davesque 2y ago

Though this article does point out what I think is a real effect in human psychology, it bothers me that the author ends up using the whole narrative to inject her own opinions on world affairs in a context where we should feel guilty for questioning them, as though we're just as bad as her father or the police that wouldn't intervene to mitigate her mother's schizophrenia. That's a really rotten trick.

Nathanba 2y ago
The article becomes ironic because it's an example of the very thing she is complaining about. All the decent, kind, caring people are vastly outnumbered by people like the writer who apparently tread the exact mainstream line on things like climate change, the Gaza conflict and "Trump is bad" (she writes: "The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us"). One of her covid articles mentions how "we were waiting on the FDA to approve vaccines for children under five". She couldn't be more mainstream if she tried, I couldn't find a meat=bad article but maybe that's still coming. How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption. because as we saw with the 2016 US elections, majorities don't always make for the path forward. Numbers may be bigger, but invested parties put a lot more care, time, and money into pushing their cause. And a cornered rat bites back. "the mainstream" got too comfortable and the counter culture is biting back hard. his can lead to just as many regresssions are there are progressions in humanity.

ineedaj0b 2y ago

The Author lists many psych studies. Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them. There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those. I appreciate he’s up front with his doom. I’d likely be a doomer too if I was in my 20s-30s with a schizophrenic mom and reading psych abstracts. I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground. Also reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.

Clubber 2y ago
There's a stretch between 1914 and around 1955 that I wouldn't want to live through for anything.
Quarrelsome 2y ago
I think its a "she" FWIW.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them. There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those. Do tell. Which three?
Willish42 2y ago
> I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground. While I share some of your sentiment here (truly), I think 90% is way too high a number for the field as a whole, and also believe you're likely discounting "emotional intelligence" and the boots-on-ground work that non-academic psychology specialists are doing for public health and mental health in general. IOW, I am *equally* skeptical of armchair psychology people who are so dismissive about "real" psychology people. Everybody has an opinion, and peer reviews etc. are how we root out "intuition" from clinically proven phenomena. EMDR is a great example of a recent-ish innovation that is still being tested clinically on its efficacy, but shows some promising signs thus far AFAICT. I'm certainly glad somebody is testing it etc. so that we can incorporate it into folks' care, and would not consider the people doing so "90% charlatans" nor would I find them exclusively in some alleged 10% of "non-charlatans"

keybored 2y ago

Unlike The World Is Ending Doomerism, Cognitive Bias Doomerism transcends generations; the viewpoint that the brain is wholly defined by a list of biases. And I don’t trust that the author is able to constructively and positively deal with all of the idiots (their words), in part because (according to them) they also have such a faulty brain.

recursive 2y ago

Whistle-blowing is hard to distinguish from complaining about others and deflecting blame. These are staples of the narcissist's playbook. If you sound like a narcissist, people quite reasonably might suspect you of being one. My take is this. If you need to give someone some bad or unsavory news, ease into it gently. Start with the gentlest form of the information. Have documentation and receipts to back up all your allegations. But don't reveal them unless questioned repeatedly.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> Whistle-blowing is hard to distinguish from complaining about others and deflecting blame. I suggest examining the whistleblower's evidence.
- recursive 2y ago
  Sure. That's why I say this. > Have documentation and receipts to back up all your allegations But you won't be dealing exclusively with reasonable people like you and me.

AlbertCory 2y ago

> the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems. Her mother was schizophrenic. OK, we get that. People like to deny problems and sweep them under the rug. We get that, too. However, generalizing her mother's illness to the "collapse of global industrial civilization" is a bridge too far. People can reasonably differ about that, in general, and specifically about what should be done about it if it IS true.

abbadadda 2y ago
I don’t think you understood. The mother’s illness was not generalized to the collapse of global civilization. The author’s experience with the former is being generalized to the experience of others as it relates to the “collapse” of global civilization.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> "collapse of global industrial civilization" Would intentional restraint of civilization be a better descriptor? How about neutering by design? My wife needs long term, in-patient treatment and therapy. After centuries we can finally do it fairly well. And then we put a moat around it that very few can cross. My wife is not in the small, privileged class that can cross that moat. After a lot of damage, she eventually left us to become homeless. The last I heard she's 2k miles away. Her sister died unexpectedly yesterday. I sent word but it's not likely to reach her.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
In fact he/she implies that they have the talent of spotting upcoming collapses well.
AlbertCory 2y ago
You people are all missing the point: Your loved one's decline is something you have superior insight into. "Global decline": no, you probably do not. The former is something that an outsider can't argue with you about, unless they know the person. The latter: yes, they can. Their facts and opinions might well be better than yours.

neilv 2y ago

> Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker. I used to assume the expression "Kill The Messenger" meant that the receiver of the message was angry about the message, and simply lashed out unfairly at the person who said it, though they knew the messenger was innocent. But more recently, I've realized that the receiver of the bad news often seems to genuinely feel suspicion towards the messenger -- not merely lashing out at the nearest convenient punching bag. I'll distinguish two variants of suspicion towards messenger: * Only the receiver's beliefs are threatened (e.g., doesn't want to believe they made a mistake, or that things aren't so rosy, or that so-and-so did something terrible). * The receiver is more concretely threatened (e.g., could lose their job/bonus/promotion, or could be tainted by bad PR, or could be implicated in past enabling). For things like the abuse case to which the article alludes, the kind could vary by person involved involved in a case. The latter kind, concretely threatened, obviously there is also a concrete, rational, reason to lash out at the messenger, but not to genuinely suspect them, yet AFAICT they might genuinely suspect the messenger anyway.

throwaway98797 2y ago

it’s true that no one likes a whinier that’s why if you do it, you better be right there’s no should in life, just is rage not against the world for it will crush you

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

Very cringe pep talk for self-appointed saviors of humanity. Stay strong in your futile struggles that make you feel like you're worth something, comrades! Topkek

Out_of_Characte 2y ago

His comparison to global warming and hurricanes was on point. The issues with his mom and global warming seemed equally difficult to resolve. With the obvious issue that there does not seem to be an adult in the room that solves the issue.

tqi 2y ago

Thinking that you alone know "the right thing", that you are surrounded by "idiots", that people "call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk" and not because they (correctly) feel that you have no respect for them is simply hubris. Maybe this is the "dry humor" the author mentioned, but a) in my experience, people who hide behind the "it's just a joke" defense are rarely actually joking, and b) if your goal is to influence people then how your humor lands is in fact your problem. As they say, if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met at an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole. > It comes down to this: > You have to find a way to be the smart, positive, compassionate, mature, respectful, charming one. You have to do that even if everyone around you is acting like a complete idiot. > You have to achieve a fine balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. A lot of people won't listen at first. > You often have to trick people into doing the right thing. > It's exhausting. > It takes a lot out of you to be respectful to idiots all day long, especially when many of them go out of their way to do you harm. Despite the audacious tone of my writing (my dry humor is often mistaken for bitterness or anger), I try to remain calm and compassionate when dealing with people right in front of me. > And of course, a lot of people will call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk. > It's a lot to deal with.

throwaway22032 2y ago
Yeah, the author comes across as being incredibly sanctimonious. The three "featured" articles on their blog are headlined "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", and "A Matter of When, Not If". They have a family history of schizophrenia but they seem to lack the humility to realise that they don't seem to be engaging with people with a view to understanding them. With that context, trying to convince people that they're simply attacking the messenger feels disingenuous.

mandmandam 2y ago

I'm surprised and disappointed at how so many of the comments here have jumped to completely unwarranted conclusions. I can only guess that people are feeling vulnerable after seeing part of themselves described so succinctly, and are lashing out in response. Thanks OP, and big ups to Jessica Wildfire for a very interesting and important story. I feel like I understand the world a bit better now.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago
For a crowd that likes to believe they are more analytical and less emotional than the plebs they sure do take criticism badly.
- kbelder 2y ago
  Or they simply disagree.
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    I have no problem with disagreement when it's at least coherent and based on actual fact. But I can't see any legitimate criticism in the entire post, just a load of people jumping to conclusions and even attacking the author. Misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and disturbing assumptions are all over the place. It's weird. So many people very obviously missed the entire point, and are mad about stuff they invented entirely.
  - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    And apparently react badly.

rayiner 2y ago

The application of this psychobabble to current events lacks support. People aren’t getting mad at climate protesters because they think the protesters caused climate change. Likewise, people aren’t getting mad at college protesters because they think the caused the problems in the Middle East. Those are actually examples of value disagreements. I.e. when you prominently put your values on display, you invite reaction from people with different values. That has nothing to do with the “blaming the messenger” problem discussed earlier in the article.

throwaway22032 2y ago
Indeed. I think that another way to look at it would be that protestors are not simply messengers, they are people who have specific goals which they would like to effect. The war reporters, scientists, or perhaps the journalists reporting on the protests are the messengers here, and whilst I think they do receive a fair amount of cynicism, usually that's linked to the perceived attempt at influence. i.e. Okay, you want me to change what I'm doing for you. I don't know you, and my natural tendency is to decline such requests until I determine that you're trustworthy, because otherwise I'd simply be under a constant DoS attack.
volkk 2y ago
this article started out so strongly too--found it pretty interesting. and then just deteriorated. like, within a few sentences in the later half you already know the leftist stance with little nuance on any of the topics being brushed with broad boring strokes
LorenPechtel 2y ago
Protesters are not only bringing a message, but almost always proposing a solution. And in both cases you mention they are vigorously pointing out the frying pan while being willfully blind to the fact that they're trying to get us to jump in the fire. It's possible to have a protest movement over somebody protecting an ox, but most protests are about issues that aren't solved because there is no good solution. If there is an answer why hasn't it been done?

nuancebydefault 2y ago

I wonder if the reasoning in the article could explain following, for me incomprehensible, events. - My brother in law shouting about young adults who were protesting for climate action, that their proper place is at school. - The fact that a delusional former US president got more than zero votes.

disambiguation 2y ago

If I disagree with OP, then am I guilty of spontaneous trait transference?

rawgabbit 2y ago
Only if you attribute the OP with negative traits because she is bearing bad news.

rawgabbit 2y ago

Over the years, I have come up with this framework. I label three possible responses when I, the messenger, bring bad news or contradicts someone: (a) the RATIONAL RESPONDER believes the messenger is trying to be helpful by sharing their information and may re-formulate their position. (b) the PATRONIZING PARENT believes the messenger is an ass, patronizes the messenger, and dismisses everything they say. (c) the DANGEROUS DELUSIONAL believes they are always right and the messenger is a threat who needs to be silenced. With patronizing parent, I try to be calm and hopefully by sheer persistence they will come around one day and listen to reason. With dangerous delusional, I mostly try to limit the amount of damage they can do to me. I don't have any better ideas.

gary_0 2y ago

People are really missing the point of the sick mom metaphor. When people were acknowledging the problem and the mom was getting treatment, things were better. When the author was pointing out there was a serious problem and people resented them for saying so and ignored it, that was bad. If people acknowledge there are certain serious problems in the world and that something needs to be done, things will get better. If people keep shooting the messenger, that is bad.

ldehaan 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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DonHopkins 2y ago

>Yes, you can condition someone to believe that bananas are evil. Well that explains "The Atheist's Nightmare"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A