Comment on What comes before rationality

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:21:27 GMT

I don't know how to make someone feel less sad when they learn about child abuse, and I would not want to.

That's fine, and you don't have to solve that problem if you don't want to, but when people confess their psychological vulnerabilities, you do have to make a minimal effort to accommodate them.

Here, Byrnema openly confessed that zie currently lacks the mental/emotional tools for processing references to child abuse in a constructive way, and then asked for help building those tools. Instead of offering advice as to how to build the relevant toolkit, you basically advised Byrnema to shut up and try harder. This is probably very frustrating for Byrnema, because zie most likely has been trying, has noticed that zer efforts have not been very successful so far, and would like to try a different, more effective strategy. Perhaps inadvertently, you are emphasizing how important it is for Brynema to solve zer problem while doing nothing that would actually help zer do so.

Your repeated use of the first person together with the disclaimer "I know my advice is harsh" and the suggestion that your way "is the only way" also tends to make you look like you're on an ego trip. Whether you intended to do so or not, your language implicitly contrasts your resolute determination to follow the only correct path with byrnema's apparent weakness of will. By denying or ignoring the possibility that there are different strategies for dealing with emotional aversion to discussion of suffering, you make byrnema's problem seem to be more of a personal problem, and less of a technical problem.

To my mind, that's a huge party foul on Less Wrong. We shouldn't be pointing fingers about each others' personal problems; we should be diagnosing and solving them on a technical level. While spirited argument is great among people who are confident of their opinions, it's not appropriate to ram a specific idea down the throat of a person who wants help brainstorming alternatives to that idea.

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