Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

- 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.

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