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"It means mutual empathy — they get you and you get them. It's discovering similar values, experiences and perspectives. It's a feeling of trust and comfort whe
by nntwozz 1y ago
"It means mutual empathy — they get you and you get them. It's discovering similar values, experiences and perspectives. It's a feeling of trust and comfort where you both feel safe to say what is truly on your mind."
Ah, sounds all fine and dandy!
But what do you do when you discover you don't have similar values?
Maybe there's no answer in todays polarized world; personally aspire to this:
I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.
— Abraham Lincoln
- daymanstep 1y ago[flagged]
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoUsing one of the most of extreme of examples to discredit an argument that is meant to bring unity, makes me not like you, and not wanting to know you better ;)_
- optimlayer 1y agowhich would make you not like him even more, and thus wanting to know him better :D
- dang 1y agoThis is offtopic but can you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to ask you about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523452.
- throwaway290 1y agoMaybe if you understand how that happened you would have an idea how to make the world have fewer people like that?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoOne of the most important things, in my experience, when in an adversarial relationship, is to understand, and, quite often, to respect my opponent. I need to understand why they are doing what they do, so I can make plans to counter them. Often, I can find ways to defuse the conflict, by negotiating compromises. A pithy way to put it, is if you want to understand rats, talk to an exterminator.
- tuvang 1y agoI get this is sarcastic but getting to know people like that is literally how the field of criminal psychology was born and helped stop many people like Bundy.
- dang 1y ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- daymanstep 1y agoSorry if I came across as criticizing a weak version of the rule. But I have had trouble trying to think of what a strong version might look like: "In most cases, if you don't like someone, then it just means you don't know them well enough" ? The assumption here seems to be that if you get to know someone well, then you will come to like them most of the time? I get that people are complicated but I don't think coming to understand a person more fully will necessarily lead to liking them more - but I suppose this depends on what type of person you are - someone who generally doesn't like people, or someone who is very picky etc, likely will not ever come to like most people even if they gain full knowledge of them, which makes the rule even more subjective. On the other hand, some may argue that not liking someone means that you ought to study them more, which makes sense in the general sense of "you ought to know your enemy", but this seems incongruent with the original context of the quote. I suppose I did oversimplify the rule in order to make it easier to apply, which reduces it to absurdity. But trying to find a way to make the rule work is also making my head hurt. In any case I hereby apologize if I have broken any rules.
- dang 1y agoNo worries! If you had added a version of this current comment to the original one, i.e. if you had spelled out your underlying thinking more, it would have been fine. The issue from a moderation point of view is the reductionist/snarkyy/inflammatory style. It's not what we're going for, and it evokes worse from others. In other words I think this is a case of the 'rebound' thing I posted about earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44687473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44687473. p.s. Btw, I don't think the "I must get to know him better" line is intended as a rule (maybe the word 'must' is a bit misleading in there). It's more an expression of an attitude that one can choose to take or not. To quote that line is to say "this is how I want to be".
- scarface_74 1y agoI have no desire to get to know someone who is racist or homophobic. We can disagree on supply side economics or universal healthcare all day long. I don’t owe my energy to get to know assholes.
- idiotsecant 1y agoThere's little better than helping someone like that expand their understanding of the world and their place in it. In the end, influencing hearts and minds is one of the few things you can do that will have a lasting impact after you're gone.
- em-bee 1y agowe should all aspire to be a little bit like daryl davis. just a bit. i am not going out of my way to seek out people like that, like he did, but when i discover that one of my friends is leaning into that direction, then i look to daryl davis for inspiration.
- JustExAWS 1y agoWhy do I have the feeling you are not a minority, have never been stopped or questioned for being some place you “didn’t belong” or had to tell your six foot 3 step son to make sure that he and his other Black friend (two of five Black guys in the entire school) didn’t walk to the Waffle House to meet their friends after the football game unless their White friend was going with them because they would get harassed by the police? No I’m not saying “everyone is racist”. But it’s not my responsibility to spend my energy educating racist and to proffer myself as “one of the good ones”.
- anonymars 1y agoThe Daryl Davis that was mentioned is a black man who befriended many KKK members and resulted in them giving up their robes https://www.ted.com/talks/daryl_davis_klan_we_talk https://www.ted.com/talks/daryl_davis_klan_we_talk
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI believe that another quote attributed to Honest Abe, is ”The best way to destroy an enemy, is to make him your friend.” In my own life, I regularly interact (and connect) with folks that are notoriously difficult to deal with. This had significant advantages in my career. The folks in the office —regardless of their proclivities— were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.
- absoluteunit1 1y ago> This had significant advantages in my career. The folks in the office —regardless of their proclivities— were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time. Could expand on this? What advantages in your career? Also, what do you mean by: > were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time. Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago> Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree? Sort of. I like to develop good relationships with people that have a hard time getting along with others. I consider it to be a bit of a "challenge," and I like to live a life, where I'm constantly challenging myself. Also, I participate in an organization that is focused on helping people recover from significant life trauma. It's sort of my job. Part of it, is because I'm "on the spectrum," myself, and come from a childhood fraught with atomic wedgies. I have some empathy for outsiders. I don't come from a "superior position," I have very much been an outlier, for most of my life. I know what it feels like. It's been my experience that people that are difficult to deal with, come from some kind of personal trauma. I have found that they are often quite open to getting along with folks that are willing to accept the idiosyncrasies that arise from their coping mechanisms. So if I can accept, and even be close friends with, someone that has spent significant time in Ossining, for violent offenses, having an employee throw a minor tantrum because I said "no," is a cakewalk.
- xelxebar 1y ago> But what do you do when you discover you don't have similar values? Look deeper? Explicitly held beliefs are just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg that constitutes our experience as humans. The US, in particular, seems particularly fond of declarations of identity, so it helps to understand that such things are about as fundamental as the health of your pancreas. IMHO, polarizing reactions, whether in others or yourself, look like obvious fear responses, which often respond to empathy and understanding. More than fear, certainty smells like the mind killer to me.
- op00to 1y agoI’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to get through to my Trump loving, racist, hateful father in law using compassion and shared understanding. At some point you need to accept that some people don’t respond to that, and usually it’s the people who lean towards the authoritative that are not receptive.
- FearNotDaniel 1y agoYour comment is very confusing. The article is about making a connection with someone, the measure of which is that you have achieved a shared understanding. It sounds as if you have managed that. And yet it seems that this is not enough for you and you are expecting to “get through” to him in some other sense, that he will be “receptive” to something more that goes beyond mutual understanding, that he will “respond to that” shared understanding with something that goes beyond personal connection. What is it you are looking for, that would make that connection complete? That he recants all of his views and changes them to be in line with your own? Or is there something else that you expect shared understanding to lead to, rather than being a goal in itself?
- BobaFloutist 1y agoThey were pretty clearly responding to the previous comment more than to the article directly??
- op00to 1y ago
- joules77 1y agoGot to go beyond shared values/experiences/perspective. The deeper commonality lies in the messy hardware we all share - the human mind. If you take a Philosophy or Psychology class, it usually starts by showing how incoherent and conflict-ridden the mind is. From Plato’s tripartite soul (reason vs. appetite vs. spirit), to Hume’s (reason is just a slave to our passions), to Freud’s (id vs ego vs superego), to Kahneman (System 1 vs. System 2) there’s a constant theme running - the mind is not unified. It’s a battlefield of impulses, instincts, ideals, and rationalizations. And because we all live inside this strange ridiculous machine, one that can easily go off balance, we’re all vulnerable in the same essential way. We all know what it’s like to be overwhelmed, to act irrationally, to feel pulled in opposite directions. That’s the real basis for connection: shared fragility, not shared ideology. That’s why systems(and relationships) that are grounded in patience, forgiveness, empathy, compassion etc survive the long term. They don’t depend on sameness, they depend on the recognition that everyone is doing battle with themselves. When that realization dawns it get easier to speak to the other person showing you understand this fact. And then we get the possibility of connection even across radical differences.
- taneq 1y agoMaybe you don't need to connect with everyone? If someone has a few different opinions to me, that's fine, I'm sure there's plenty of other things we agree on. Maybe we can find common ground and connect over that. If someone has fundamentally incompatible values to mine about things that I consider important, then I probably consider them a bad person. Like, I don't know how else to define "bad person". Definitely not someone I want to connect with.