Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> What in such a scenario gives the impetus to the charitable interpretation (that they simply could not get tickets)?

The cognitive distortion is taking uncertainty and replacing it with the worst possible interpretation.

Or, inserting artificial uncertainty into a direction and using that opening to pretend that an alternate explanation is true.

> People can intend one thing and harmful outcomes still result. One could drive drunk without any intention of anything bad happening and still get into an accident. One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone.

Your examples aren't really relevant, though, because they have concrete and definitive harms.

The article is about imagined harms that only arise from different subjective interpretations of something. There is no subjective interpretation of getting hit by a bullet or killed by a drunk driver in which the person isn't harmed. Claiming good intent doesn't bring someone back from the dead.

You're making the mistake of equating speech with violence, which is explicitly discussed in the paper.

View on HN

The cognitive distortion is taking uncertainty and replacing it with the worst possible interpretation.

Nah, it seems the designers of this test, along with X percentage of HN, suffer from "low social intelligence". If there's an event where you expect to go with your friends and they call and say they you can't come, they have dissed you. There are no good reasons. If there's an event where I'd normally go with friends and we can't get enough tickets, we go elsewhere. That's how actual friends behave. If we can't get enough tickets and we want to go, we just don't tell the person, called a "white lie" - it's shitty but not as shitty as just saying "oh sorry, this event matters more than you".

The article is about imagined harms that only arise from different subjective interpretations of something.

Human society is based on a lot of subjective but well established interpretations of actions. The people who don't know or understand these are generally considered socially inept.

Nobody (that matters in psychology) considers "social intelligence" as an official metric. Most (minus maybe the genetic researchers) agree that various childhood traumas usually explain strange behavior.

What if Kim had a traumatic childhood, and had common issues with this like abandonment anxiety and poor boundaries? She could not see how her group could make decisions without her and her negative childhood experiences are projected onto the situation causing anxiety.

What if Kim was a healthy adult? She would maybe not have negative experiences projected onto the scenario and perhaps could easily switch to making plans by herself without her group with healthy boundaries.

What if the group was traumatized as well? The group would probably treat Kim like they were forced to treat their parents: giving Kim their full focus and emotional libido in order to avoid a fallout. This group would certainly project their insecurity onto Kim and assume her devastation.

What if the group was healthy and had healthy boundaries? The group would, perhaps, know they could not assume how the other individual would react and video call her to see if she was OK and negotiate on-call. (Any assumption of Kim's response is just projection - and studies show that the older and more experienced with social situations a person becomes the more they know they can't accurately assume how a person reacts) Positive feelings are projected onto the situation and no one projects negative experiences.

"Low social intelligence" isn't considered by most people, but childhood trauma is - and childhood trauma would clearly affect what happens. Childhood trauma causes negative affective emotions in social situations, good-enough parents cause positive affect in social situations - *NOT* social intelligence pseudoscience.

I think your response kind of shows that you aren’t grasping the pretty standard social construct that she likely got dissed by her friends by most socialized peoples metrics (within the confined context of the original papers scenario). The person you replied to laid it out as clearly as possible. Also, by referring to emotional intelligence as pseudoscience, do you mean to dismiss it as a valid concept? Surely you realize some people are better in social situations than others.

>Surely you realize some people are better in social situations than others

Absolutely, and the cause of poor social function is almost only childhood trauma.

Being sensitive to others emotions (pop-culture empathy) is not equal to actually knowing another person's emotions. There are many many such studies that prove this, here is a random one I found on page 1 of Google: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c5968c1 Many more actually negatively correlate being sensitive to others emotions with accurately gauging others' emotions. I also mentioned there's a study that correlates age (accumulated social experience?) with the knowledge of how little they themselves can infer from other people (can't remember the exact topic, but it goes something like that). Side note, emotional sensitivity is linked with childhood trauma.

Therefore we can say being sensitive to, or thinking we know, other people's emotions has nothing to do with being good at social situations (at worst it actually impairs social function). At best being sensitive to others' perceived (not real: projected) emotions is poor boundaries.

This counter-intuitive reality needs to be clear when the topic of emotional intelligence is brought up. Emotional Intelligence is not a virtue, but yes, we can agree it exists and people that are healed (unfortunately, not all) can posses it. To tie it all in, would a truly emotionally intelligent person (in the academic and psychotherapeutic sense) know how Kim would respond, or would the emotionally intelligent Kim respond negatively or positively? It is not clear, and thinking one knows the objective answer to this scenario is suspect. We can obviously say "if I was Kim, I would feel..." but I argue nothing more can be said.

I think you have interesting points to make, but the conclusion is a cop-out. There's various useful ways you can answer beyond "if I were Kim".

In faithful observance of commenting praxis, I have not read TFA. But it seems TFA expects an answer instead of taking the opportunity to dig into the way different groups answer and their reasonning for doing so.

If the finding were that .75 of trauma-free people agree it's reasonable for Kim to feel like she wasn't included in the decision (the perception that the choice was made by her friends), would that change your mind?

I know I'd be interested to know why, if data showed the opposite interpretation is popular :)

I've plagarized Alice Miller here before, here are her thoughts on the subject of psychological surveys on the subject of childhood trauma in the book For Your Own Good:

Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research

Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.

That's an interesting perspective, thank you.

Though even as someone acutely atuned to the various forms trauma can take, wouldn't you agree there's such a thing as a reasonably trauma-free population? Or at least trauma-free to a degree that it makes sense to consider the bias induced by traumatic experiences minor for that population?

I think you get the perspective you have, that there's no ovjectivity, by focusing solely on the victims.

I agree with your point on subjectivity when it comes to abuse victims. Statistics want to average out individual differences, the exactly wrong thing if you're interested in understanding the specifics of individual cases. I'm with you on that.

But I think you have to go back up at some point, if you ever want to help more people than have the privilege of seeing you at a time.

Statistics as a discipline is aware of biases. It is not always applied with the appropriate carefulness, but there is tremendous, systemic good to be had as a reward for success.

I'm not convinced your criticism of current ideas in your field is something objective science cannot learn to address.

The problem I'm faced with is that empathy wants me to care, also, for people that can't directly see or reach me. They're out of sight, but not out of mind.

Empathic emotional responses are absolutely required for society to function healthily, just look at our species' dark past! Living in a not-empathic, insensitive society would absolutely suck. But the pendulum has swung past healthy empathy to being overly sensitive - there's a happy empathy middle lost to some academic cultures. Both over and underreaction to empathic emotional responses are destructive and unhealthy. Here's a good lecture on the extremes of empathic responses: including insensitive and overly sensitive empathic responses, and what healthy empathy might look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMw8Ua1953w

Being overstimulated by empathic responses renders one emotionally unavailable and unable to help just like the emotionally insensitive person. That's why people draw a line with some academic cultures: it resembles/promotes unhealthy relationship patterns.

Having empathy isn't a problem, it's just about getting the balance right. Too much or too little of a good thing is a bad thing

I think my point is only about whether any empathy you have should apply preferentially to people close to you, or whether you should endeavor to have it for everyone equally, all else equal.

I wouldn't agree there's anything particularly extreme about that. It's not a degree of empathy that I'm trying to make a point about, but how it's distributed.

If you're able to generalize things you learn with rigorous statistics, it starts to apply more broadly, and so you can help more people who don't necessarily have to see you personally to benefit.

The extra cost to you is small, and if providing help is your goal, making a rigorous science out of it will, in the happy case, increase efficiency tremendously.

- This is bizarrely reading things into the original question. The question is, essentially, "if a group of your friends announce they're doing something fun and give a fairly thin excuse for not including you and nothing else, should perceive your relationship with these people weakened". There's "emotional reaction", it's a judgement. Kim judges where Kim's friends priorities are.

The thing about this is, the only place emotions come is that most people with social bonds see things like doing activities together as a "good in itself". Even if someone isn't concerned with whether they go to a show, the person can see this group isn't too concerned with maintaining that particular bond. How a person reacts afterward isn't part the question, isn't part of my comment and seems like throwing your particular psychological baggage at the whole question.

In the real world, I have friends who couldn't get enough tickets for me to go see Hamilton with them, or even a better example, for us all to go to Playa Del Fuego (US east coast mini burning man), who then later ended up giving me their tickets. Both examples true stories, different circles of friends.

Your theory of human behavior arising from your claimed superior "social intelligence" does not explain this.

Yeah if I made plans with a group to go see a yet to be specified show and then got left out because they later decided on Hamilton, with no additional show planned for the full group, that is a sign about the friendship IMO. But it's completely different if the intent all along was to go see Hamilton. Everyone understands it is competitive to get tickets. If you waited to be able to go with your entire friend group you would never see the show.

It's also not necessarily even a "friend ranking" who does get picked when the goal is to see Hamilton. When choosing who to prioritize you're going to consider who would appreciate seeing Hamilton the most, who (of your close friends) it's been the longest since you did something with, who might have recently invited you to a similarly in-demand event, etc.

In other words, exactly what the article said.

The person you were responding to (and a few others in this thread) seemed confused about the distinction.

This seems like "what decent people do". "Social intelligence" might not have been the best word but the point is that people-who-function-society, people with actual friendships, make equality in those friendships important. These would be normal people with normal social abilities/intelligence/whatever.

Remember the point of the original is your friend calls you to say "you're coming to the show 'cause we couldn't get tickets" with no alternate plans/apologies explanations etc. And test was a "rational" person was supposed to see this an event having no impact on the friendship. I think it's someone with moderate social skills that this isn't the way things work and it seems like your example demonstrates. But oppositely, the people chiming in to say "what's the problem, things happen that way" likely just aren't tuned in this stuff.

Edit: I'll admit I mostly chose the term "social intelligence" to wave in the face of the HN fans of things like the anti-social "logic" of this study, since these types really value their competence and they tend to be very incompetent at the skill of being-a-decent-person, which might a better synonym for "social intelligence".

Eh, without any qualifying circumstances I think you have to be pretty naive to make a positive judgment in this type of circumstance. Kim got triaged out of a social gathering, other people were given tickets instead. While there could be other motivates, when this happens in general you take the friends you really like and cut people you like less. Is it the end of the world? No but it's a reliable signal about where you stand socially.

The concert example was was taken out of context. The paper used it in a section about people believing a specific, unlikely alternative explanation in the face of contradictory evidence of intent.

> People can believe something to be true because it “feels” that way. To illustrate, please read the following passages

> B.Ted’s boss told him that his performance at the company has been good. Yet, Ted wonders if he could have done better. In fact, he feels like a failure. Consequently, he starts to believe he is a failure

The point isn't about whether or not the statements are 100% factually true.

The point is that some people will discard the statements entirely and substitute their own worst-case alternative explanation, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

If you're focusing on the statements, you're missing the point of the paper. The point is about assuming the worst in the face of uncertainty.

What contradictory evidence is provided in the sample? It doesn't say that they drew lots. As the statement is presented it only sates that a group of people told one person they can't come. The number of tickets does not by itself justify why this particular person isn't going. With such a lack of evidence we could say the reason is unknown, intent is an unknown quantity, but that isn't the desired reasoning because the very fact of the unknowns implies ill intent as a possibility, which is not charitable, therefore the only implied correct position to hold is the actively non-negative one.

You’re missing the point of the example: The authors deliberate left the ground truth as vague but provided a not-100% but otherwise good faith explanation of one interpretation.

Then the listener discarded the explanation and inserted their own worst-case explanation instead.

Inserting the worst-case explanation as the certain explanation is the cognitive distortion the paper is talking about.

The point isn’t that ill intent is impossible.

The point is that it’s a mistake to be certain about the worst interpretation in the face of uncertainty.

You’re missing the point of the example: The authors deliberate left the ground truth as vague but provided a not-100% but otherwise good faith explanation of one interpretation.

The authors provided a world view and pathologized those who didn't follow that world view.

This sounds a lot like the 'catastrophizing' that depression often causes, which hurts people and puts them into downward cycles of depression.

Incidentally, if GP is worried about pathologizing, this may not be the answer most likely to change their mind.

The thing is, in my observations, depression pushes people into endless sets of no win conditions by punishing them for not obeying ever more restrictive and absurd rules. I don't want to claim what is/isn't a disease, but it's pretty obvious that some thought patterns hurt people a lot once you understand a little about how they work and get people to contort their lives around them. Getting out of that looks more like getting rid of the insecurities more than learning to walk a narrow path through endless fields of eggshells.

The thing about this you're engaging in a clear fallacy. Depressed people tend to draw negative conclusions and reinforce their conclusions, therefore if someone draws a negative conclusion (that you consider unwarranted), they are depressed and making themselves worse.

It's kind of logical for the entire bad-faith exercise involved in this article and the comments defending it. The whole thing is putting elaborate psycho-trappings on the "boomer" complaint of "you kids just too sensitive these days" (but just said about to things you consider fine).

> The thing about this you're engaging in a clear fallacy. Depressed people tend to draw negative conclusions and reinforce their conclusions, therefore if someone draws a negative conclusion (that you consider unwarranted), they are depressed and making themselves worse.

I claimed that depression often leads to catastrophizing, not that catastrophizing is somehow exclusive to depression.

So the "clear fallacy" here is reading a comment about how A sometimes implies B, then attacking the notion that B implies A, despite there being no logical connection between the two propositions.

I don't believe there's any evidence cognitive therapy works better than other forms of therapy for depression, which suggests to me the various claims of how the human mind works ("catastrophizing" or whatever) are not true.

"However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/#!po=0....

You don't need anything from CBT to think that depressed people tend to reach for explanations that mean everything is as horrible as possible preferentially.

Just being with one for a while will show you that bias very quickly when you hear about how every random person they passed on the street secretly hates them or thinks they're ugly or somehow did something that relates to their biggest insecurity.

It's true that I can't prove the world doesn't secretly hate them, but my own experience of literally never thinking about the random strangers I walk past informs my belief that this likely has more to do with the person's insecurity than the reality of what's going on in those people's minds.

Isn’t the explanation incomplete? It explains why someone couldn’t come, but it doesn’t explain why Kim in particular couldn’t come. Therefore, Kim must contend both with the outcome (that she couldn’t come), and with the fact that the selection process was hidden from her. The concealment creates the bias towards negativity imo, in the absence of other information.

The is another example that is missing context. Both statements can be true. Bob might have done a good enough job for the boss, but not for Bob. Maybe Bob needs to realize he doesn't need to strive for perfection. And if the boss is happy, then great. On the other hand maybe Bob could have done better. And thus getting a larger bonus or something

I think I might fall prey to this but I'm not sure.

In this situation, if I were Kim, I'd try to objectively evaluate my relationship with the ticker holder, and adjust accordingly.

When I have an objective measure, I think it is a cognitive distortion to view it in any way other than the facts: the ticket holder decided not to include me in the group that was going.

In this case, my adjustment would be based on my expectations from my relationship: if I'm very close to the ticker holder, and they know I would have wanted to go, it informs me that the relationship isn't reciprocated, and I need to adjust my expectations.

If I don't really know the ticket holder, or I know them well and know that they don't think I'd want to go, then my expectations from the relationship are met, and no adjustment is required.

So, is this a cognitive distortion? Am I assuming the worst possible interpretation of events? I think so. I'm 46, and the reason I do this is because my life has taught me that more harm results from assuming best intent when the evidence is clearly contradictory.

But there is the possibility they don't get hit by a bullet. No harm done. Do they still have the right to become angry of a mere possibility that didn't pan out? At that point it's pure conceptualization.

2nd, this seems very much to be predicated on Cartesian dualism, that the mind is independent of the body. Would someone growing up in a society where they were subjected to daily derogatory statements in regards to some group to which they belong, would their physical wellbeing be divorced from their mental wellbeing?

If the subjective is to be discounted, then there is little in the realm of human reality that will remain. Everything that a human perceives is part of their imagination. Our consciousness does not touch the real (so far as we may know); it constructs sensory data models that are by definition subjective.

Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener? The language game is not merely the pitcher and the passive receiver. Even silence is an interpretable phenomena. There no way out of the dance of meaning.

> But there is the possibility they don't get hit by a bullet. No harm done. Do they still have the right to become angry of a mere possibility that didn't pan out?

Firing bullets into the air and driving drunk are both crimes and there's zero dispute about it, so does this one really need discussion?

These extreme examples aren't even relevant to what the paper is discussing. If someone goes around using well-known racial slurs but then later tries to claim good intentions, it won't pass scrutiny. Claiming good intentions isn't a free pass, but it's not what the paper is claiming anyway.

> Why should the speaker be granted carte blanche any more than the listener?

No one is saying the speaker should be granted carte blanche. I don't know where this strawman argument came from, but it's not what the paper is about.

This paper isn't about a free pass to say anything and avoid scrutiny. It's about listeners denying the speaker's intent and substituting their own worst-case interpretations and rejecting the possibility of any other explanation.

The very phrase 'denying the speaker's internet' posits and assumes such a thing which is beyond the speaker's pure self-conception.

I would say the problem here is that, in a vacuum, what establishes the speaker's intent as any more authoritative than the assumptions of the listener? The right to choose what it is you meant and to choose what it is you interpret are equally weighted here. Any additional weight that is to be applied must be applied within the context of a specific interpersonal relationship at a particular point in time.

Therefore generalized mappings of the weighting of such interactions cannot likely be established preemptively through a process of pure reason.

The divorce of intent (or lack thereof) in various scenarios exactly points out that there is not some unified notion of the necessity of intent (or lack thereof) being applied in order to come to judgement, but instead the conceptualization of when intent (or lack thereof) should matter is deployed, seemingly, on the very fundamentally subjective basis of 'I know it when I see it' or in terms of society: 'when it has been culturally deemed such'. So the friction here would not seem to be one of the misapplication of a schema, but the friction of running against a social more.

But what gives the right to the most positive one?

A general predisposition to assuming a good nature of your fellow humans?

A notion that seems very culturally hidebound, rather than something that describes a general state of human psychology that policy should dictate that humans should be brought into alignment with.

No, it seems to be a universal truth that humans _generally_ cooperate, else we'd have all killed ourselves off (or been forsaken to eternal tribal squabbling, never able to coordinate enough to build a "real" society).

Yes, humans cooperate. But it's not a universal truth. Indifference is the default state of man's relation to man and it is man's prerogative to decide who should receive his consideration. With this in mind, it's better to say humans are contractual. They can cooperate when the incentives (or disincentives) align towards doing so. They can also ignore or attack each other when such incentives are ineffective or insufficient.

If someone gave you a perfectly reasonable and logically consistent explanation, what makes it right to automatically assume they're lying and substitute the worst possible alternate explanation?

The point isn't that you have to trust 100% of what everyone says. The point is that it's a problem if you're trusting 0% of what everyone says and using that as an artificial opening to insert your own, alternative explanation in which you are the victim.

> The cognitive distortion is taking uncertainty and replacing it with the worst possible interpretation.

So being a good computer scientist / engineer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com