The Awkward Silence - 2020-12-01

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IPS Comment Bot

2:25 AM

Don’t worry about it. In my experience anyone who says something as loaded an passive aggressive as “Don't forget about us when you make it big!” is really not worth dealing with. It is a button pushing statement and — in my experience — that adds up to someone you barely know just being a bit of jerk. — Giacomo1968 1 min ago

#26507 Giacomo1968 (1418 rep) | Q: I am doing well in business and someone recently wrote, publicly: "Don't forget about us when you make it big!" What is an appropriate reply? (score: 1) | posted 16 hours ago by user31900 (19 rep) | Toxicity 0.8355208 | High toxicity | tps/fps: 0/0

Matched regex(es) ["possible-aic"]

4 hours later…

6:50 AM

morning!

@IPSCommentBot tp

user435118

@Tinkeringbell Morning!

Hey! :) How are you?

user435118

I'm alright. Looking forward to the winter break. You?

Much the same. :) Also looking forward to the days off around Christmas.

Just 3 more weeks ;)

user435118

7:05 AM

Yeah. :) It's really annoying though that my school decided to do exams after Christmas instead of before Christmas so now I have to spend some of Christmas revising. :(

user435118

As the exams are right at the beginning of January.

Oof, yeah. That's weird planning, if I remember correctly we always had ours before Christmas.

(but that's loooong ago so... don't take my word for it :P)

1 hour later…

8:32 AM

I once had exam period where it was some part of exams before Christmas and some part after. I felt it was really the worst case scenario because I felt anxious for soooo long.

1 hour later…

9:50 AM

Oof, that sounds even worse than just having all of them after Christmas.

I've registered to be a listener at 7cups. It's basically a counseling app people can talk their problems to. I have a mixed feeling about it. It was stressful as hell. People bring up very serious issues they sometimes should discuss with a psychiatrist. At the same time it feel very nice to be there for them.

And the guidelines are very strict about advising so its hard to feel helpful.

It sounds like those strict guidelines make sense though: You're a listener, not a professional that can give advice?

Completely true, that's why i try to respect them.

But it's putting us at more stress that i would expect. It's like going to fight a dragon with a wood stick.

And surprisingly, sometimes it works.

10:30 AM

Yeah, just listening can be very stressful. Remember to take care of yourself too!

Seeing it work can be very rewarding :)

1 hour later…

11:45 AM

morning!

12:32 PM

@CaldeiraG good morning!

\o

'fternoon

2 hours later…

2:25 PM

I found time to listen to the podcast again and do some transcribing! It was a podcast by a professor of law, and it was titled 'why a fairytale always wins from an argument'. It was just a 15 minute podcast, and as such I can probably summarize it in a few sentences :)

- There's a battle between argumentation and persuasion: persuasion doesn't often happen through logic.
- When you present an argument rhetorically, people will be more easily persuaded.
- That's where enthymemes come in: there's a form of syllogism where the premise is supplied by the audience. E.g. Socrates is a wise man,…

@Tinkeringbell wow. I learned something interesting today :)

The podcast series I'm listening to (It's Dutch, translation would be something like "The university of The Netherlands) is very nice and informative! It's 14-18 minute lectures (sometimes they have 45 minute specials) by a professor from one of the Dutch universities on a specific subject... and a lot of those subjects are related to humanities, which interest me a lot :)

The most boring one I had so far was 'how to 3d print an eyeball' and that was just boring because the density of new information was very, very low to me :D

I'm learning something new everyday too... though a lot of the podcasts seem to also have one major similarity: They all boil down to 'people will believe/do what makes them happy'.

2:41 PM

I think people have beliefs that are really harmful for them. And there are also people that self-hurt. But I get that in the sense you said "makes them happy" you mean that they choose to, and to some people self-hurt can find some relief etc.

The reason people choose these sub-optimal strategies often boils down to trauma and psychiatry tho

Sure, beliefs can be very harmful. And they don't even need trauma or psychiatry to surface... religions wars or world wars come to mind.

oh yea. I have such a hard time understanding this collective madness.

I feel like I'm falling into repeats but... I attended an interesting lecture about why people make wars by a psychology professor last week XD

Though I don't have a transcript and I don't remember the main points all that well...

hmm

I can think of many reasons actually

But here has apparently been research done on how people are more willing to sacrifice for 'defending' than for 'attacking', and that's why most wars are mainly fueled by a 'defense' against some 'other group'.

2:47 PM

But the result is still beyond understanding

Yeah. I don't think anyone will ever understand everything ;)

I think leaders that go to war are disconnected to the consequences of their action, they fear for the national safety as you pointed out as well, and they don't imagine an empathic solution could be possible with a rival state

but it's not just the leaders, its also that the chain of command behind them, makes this possible

with a lot of people in the army in the end just being willing to sacrifice themselves or others for a variety of issue

It's the people willing to fight that makes wars possible, yes. And not just command or leaders, also the foot soldiers and cannon fodder! That last category is also mostly what the lecture focused on :)

I think the most interesting point of that lecture for me was that humans will probably always divide the people they come into contact with into two categories at least: Harmless, and unsafe to be around.

And then they can/might use the people from their 'unsafe' categories as representatives.

And that grows to putting people into categories like LGBT or straight, and then labelling one as 'safe' and the other as 'unsafe'.

Which is something that we always say 'we'll never do that again!' and then humanity starts again, just with different categories :P

That part is called judgement in NVC. We call that violence. So pieces kind of connect

Tragically, people not only label the others, they also label themselves

Sure. But how would I handle someone consistently mistreating me, without labelling them as someone that continually does so? If I don't come up with that conclusion and label for that person, I'm just being a doormat (letting them walk all over me).

I recently came to the conclusion that no matter what explanation someone may have for their behavior, it can not be an excuse for me to let myself be treated like shit.

3:00 PM

You can always have choices for your interactions. NVC afaik do not presume empathy is possible for every pair of individuals.

Sure, but those choices need judgment and labels of some kind?

I find that in the need to protect yourself, violence is often unecessary though.

Hmm. Perhaps, as you can often just avoid interactions and as such the need to resort to violence. I'm just confused as you seem to say that NVC calls judgments violent?

Well, it's not violent really, it's a could be violent kind of thing. In the end, we often find judgement near suffering.

I once listened to someone saying she felt horribly because she always told herself she was not good enough. In my opinion the judgement is self-harm

When you apply judgement to others and label them, it's equally painful. When you say you are lazy to someone, you unnecessarily degrade their self-image.

Ah. Perhaps. The second one makes more sense than the first (the first is a necessary premise to believe if you want to be open to improving yourself), but the second yeah, that's understandably lazy feedback :P

3:07 PM

Improving, sound good on the paper, but toward what. We all will die, I would better live being a lazy schmuck than striving to be the new Mozart and live a life of pain (and odds are nobody will care anyway, we already have one Mozart)

OH NOES PHILOSOPHY AGAIN :D

Hahaha philosophy is kinda fun :P

You're right that being the next Mozart isn't really as much of a goal

I don't know. I think I have a 'I want to be happy first, but then I want to make as many people around me happy as well' attitude, and as such, if there's anything I can do to improve myself and achieve that goal, I will probably try to do it.

It's... maybe a bit like a symbiosis? Humans all need to live together and it's nice if other humans do their best so I can be happy, so I do my best so they can be happy? A golden rule?

There's too many humans though.

"I wasn't trying to make nobody feel bad" as I quoted yesterday :P

It's being willing to give and being empathic

NVC assume this universal more or less, although here I would still think we're unequally funded :P

@ArthurHv It's definitely not universal.

Honnestly after reading some psychopathology I trust you on that

I also think one thing I dislike about empathy is that it requires you to place yourself in another's position... While I find it much more useful to observe from the outside.

@ArthurHv Heh. I think just the wikipedia article on empathy confirms enough there :P I don't read a lot of psychopathology, do you know any interesting books?

3:18 PM

Oh well I did browse the NIH at some point, it expresses with scientific accuracy what are some common pathology about. Wikipedia also, and the linked sources are dull but scientific reads. I've read about Narcissistic personality disorder on Wikipedia for example.

Some example of interesting data nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/personality-disorders.shtml

Ah, that looks interesting! I might check that out tomorrow. Right now it's almost time to start walking again ;)

It's not very scientific, but at one point I read a lot of 'dsmmeisjes', a dutch blog website where girls would blog about their psychological troubles (as diagnosed by the DSM). A coworker with anorexia recommended a few posts to me as they illustrated her feelings and disorder accurately as well.

It was also interesting to see how many disorders there were, and I would often look up something more about those disorders on wikipedia. I never really dove into the scientific literature though.

1 hour later…

Extroverted Main Man

4:32 PM

0

Q: She’s having a party with her two lovers attending

My friend with benefits is having a birthday party, she’s married living with her husband. She invited me, should I go?

awkward-situations

@ExtrovertedMainMan flag flag flag :D

3 hours later…

8:08 PM

@Tinkeringbell Funnily enough, now #startcisshaming is trending on Twitter. Says something about the world these days :|

8:32 PM

I've read a long story on reddit about someone rejected of a lgbtq+ group because they were heterosexual against all lesbian stereotype... so after some girl of the group got rejected she got named straggot and breeder and snowflake etc.

I didn't know we did reach that point before, but this is quite unsurprising, I just wondered when that would happen

IPS Comment Bot

8:46 PM

Do you want to? Why not? — guest 1 min ago

#26511 guest (158 rep) | Q: She’s having a party with her two lovers attending (score: 0) | posted 4 hours ago by louphil (11 rep) | Toxicity 0.06847944 | tps/fps: 0/0

Matched regex(es) ["possible-aic"]

@ArthurHv huh wait? Someone got kicked out of a lgbt group for being heterosexual? Or because they weren't a stereotypical lesbian but more stereotypical hetero?

The latter case... Sadly makes sense from a sociological point of view. It's called a purity spiral and describes a pattern of behavior where groups are exclusionary of other groups, and there are always groups within groups that want to be more exclusionary

@Tinkeringbell She was fitting the lesbian stereotype, short hair, quite tall, no makeup, that kind of thing, and she got bullied and shamed by the group for being "actually" heterosexual. Now I don't know if it was a friends group or a formal group with membership. Either case it's never supposed to exclude people like this.

@Tinkeringbell groups and exclusion kind of walk hand in hand. So does labeling and conflict, flags and wars.

@ArthurHv No, that's true! Well, that one sounds a bit more like gatekeeping than a purity spiral then, though the latter can result in the former and vice versa

@ArthurHv I think there are at least moments in a group's lifecycle where they are actually inclusionary, up until a point... You need members to be group ;)

And without any kind of labels, communication is rendered meaningless. I can't communicate the idea of coffee if I'm not allowed to label it coffee!

But you're right, every benefit has a downside.. and every downside has a benefit, like a Dutch soccer player put the latter ;)

9:02 PM

exactly

Well, with that... I bid you goodnight :) ttyl!

I like the soccer quote, we need more of these

goodnight

@ArthurHv I'll get you a list, I think he had more ;) but tomorrow. Bye!

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Dec '201

The Awkward Silence

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