Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

> It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison

That last part immediately jumped out to me and made me a bit sad. We have adults walking around with the emotional intelligence of toddlers, because nobody ever thought it might be important to impart that in a systematic way. Did we used to when society worked differently? Maybe, maybe not? I don't know and I'm certainly not one to argue that things used to be better in the old days. But I feel like we're failing our children by not emphasizing emotional intelligence more in schools. We've learned so much in recent decades about how to regulate emotion, how to handle emotional crises, suffering and pain. Schema therapy, DBT and ACT have only really become a widespread thing in the past 2 decades. Did any of us know about cognitive behavioral therapy a decade ago? There is so much we could be doing as a society to improve the mental health of so many people, but we just ... don't.

I feel you are inaccurate, in that schools all focus more on emotional intelligence over any single academic subject matter.

Add up all the required group projects, team stuff, etc and there you have it.

They focus more on it, but in a lord-of-the-flies kind of way. You either get the cues, or you don't in which case, tough luck.

It's the same in other fields, e.g. sports/physical ed often works that way, language and maths as well depending on the teacher. But with none of them, the failure to impart that knowledge increases the risk of murder (as seen here, even though that's an extreme case.)

Edit to add: and in cases like Hans Reiser it's doubly sad because he surely was a smart kid. Sending him off into special "emotional intelligence classes" probably wouldn't have affected his intellectual skills in the slightest (or maybe even in a positive way). But while it's an aspect that most schools try to impart through osmosis, they don't detect when they fail, or even when they notice, there's little they can do about it.

You hit the nail on the head. "git gud" as they say in online games, is not teaching, it's just pushing for competitiveness and survival of the fittest.

I don't know how you can look at the current discourse about anything and say that it's working. People are growing up not learning how to handle their emotions and we're seeing the consequences of that every day.

The other comment hits the nail on the head perfectly with referencing lord of the flies.

For people of a certain age, all the education about these things that worked was delivered almost unintentionally, and all the attempts to impart it deliberately were ridiculous.

Your parents read to you, and you developed a love of books? Probably you know pretty well how to imagine another person's emotions in a hypothetical situation. And that different characters could feel very differently about otherwise-similar situations. You can probably name three to five different ways a person might feel about, say, having their work usurped.

On the other hand, a decade or two ago attempts to teach this sort of thing used exercises like dividing people into four quadrants, named things like 'plants' and 'stars' as if the very idea that different people are different was a shocking revelation they needed to spend several weeks introducing.

Perhaps our techniques for teaching this stuff have improved in the past few years? The way it used to be taught was something of a waste of time.

> I don't know how you can look at the current discourse about anything and say that it's working.

I didn't say it's working, I said that they focus on it more than you think.

Group projects made me resentful because I had to do all the work. The justification was something like "tough luck that's how the real world works". No lessons learned there aside from this feeling that I'm going to get screwed by colleagues.

Instead we should teach kids cognitive empathy and explore applied theory of mind. Do it in an intellectual way. Why do people think differently, what motivates people, how does this motivation lead to events and outcomes in society? It's sort of an intersection of psychology and sociology. If people get skillful at this it helps to reduce how judgemental people can be, which is one of the things the author talked about. You could tie it in with teaching kids about CBT. Teach kids to analyze their own thoughts and assumptions about themselves, others, and the world they're in.

I think there are national differences here, schools around the world can be quite different from each other.

The sad truth is that a highly marginalized community of traditionally outcasted people realized this first. And now that community is doing the best job of addressing young childrens' emotions.

Unfortunately that group is indoctrining those children to share in that groups' problems by giving those children the same emotional issues at impressionable ages.

What group would that be?

Not GP but I assume he meant the transgender community (not really the concept of transgender itself, but specifically the contemporary community that tries to reframe the concept of gender identity, such as the idea that gedner is a separate thing from sex, from how it is traditionally thought of).

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