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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. Such a stupid and shallow comment speaks only of the person who said it, and nothing of the intended subject.

As a father who tries to raise three healthy children, though, I also marvel that such a shallow comment could have such an adverse affect on someone. I do realize that the man is a savant, thus already four or five standard deviations away, but perhaps our society should reconsider the early childhood learning strategies that produce such insensitivities. Maybe we should return to letting children insult one another and not intervene - thus enabling the children to learn to deal with such comments. It won't completely solve the problem for people like the man here, but it would certainly help.

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I don’t even think that saying stupid and shallow comments speaks to the person who said it. Don’t we all say stupid and shallow things every day? It takes serious effort to filter thoughts in such a calculated way so it’s always the “perfect” thing to say. It might be even neurotic to constantly try this. We are all failed, but I’d like to think just most of us did not really had bad intentions. Maybe just a bad moment. Or some bad insight. :)

  > Don’t we all say stupid and shallow things every day?

Yes, we all do. And I'm not convinced that trying to filter all one's speech because someone might be oversensitive is the correct approach.

> I also marvel that such a shallow comment could have such an adverse affect on someone.

Some of us are wired differently, and some of us are bullied to death. I'm both. Everyone can't create calluses against these kinds of shallow comments by playfighting, esp. if it turns bullying at life-threatening levels, and nobody intervenes, because they let children to be children.

As a result I grew very asymmetrically from get go. I got very ahead in maturity without the defenses I needed to front and process criticism. I left painting because everything I did was shot down (but I have won two awards for my age groups earlier), I had severe dance phobia for 20+ years because somebody mocked how I dance, and I left writing philosophical pieces because my English teacher mocked me.

Yes, I now dance, and write philosophical things (but not publish them), an old friend who was an art student said I can certainly draw, but I feel no enthusiasm now. The only thing I were unable to get me from me was computers, and I now have a Ph.D. (oh, my math teachers called me a failure, dozens of times, hah!).

So, no, we shouldn't raise people with "emotional battery induced numbness", but shall teach them to deal with harassing people by making them understand the mechanics. It's harder, but it doesn't make you collect these comments in an emotional waste basket and dump on an unsuspecting person who unintentionally triggered you on a bad day. Instead, you process and get rid of them, and it makes you genuinely happy without an overfilled emotional trash compactor inside.

> Maybe we should return to letting children insult one another and not intervene - thus enabling the children to learn to deal with such comments.

By not intervening you show to the kid this is an acceptable and normal situation, and fuel frustration and a sentiment of injustice.

Good point. Where do you see a balance?

That reads a bit like: „If you have more fun as a kid, you will never be depressed.“ I‘m certain this is not how it works.

The article dances around the topic (might be cultural differences), but OCD and depression are related[0]. So Kohei Omori might have been in a phase of depression, triggered by an online individual that stated his work is meaningless. That's nothing a childhood can prepare for. It‘s a disease.

[0]: https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/ocd-and-depression/

That is not a good strategy in raising resilient children.

I tend to agree. The world is, on the rough, a dark place. While each person should individually strive to make it better, life will throw at you far worse than a thoughtless insult.

With that said, as a general rule, creators, commenters and bystanders should keep in mind the difference between the time and effort that goes into making something, and the ten seconds that it takes to say something dumb about it. They are not the same.

>It won't completely solve the problem for people like the man here, but it would certainly help

How can you know?

What do you mean "letting children insult one another"? it seems to imply parents / educators have complete control of children's interactions, and this is simply not true.

That said, there should still be intervention; verbal abuse (which is what it's called when adults do it to one another) should not be normalised, and "deal with it" / "grow thick skin" isn't it either. Because they will take that "thick skin" with them in e.g. an adult relationship and use that normalised verbal abuse on their partner, kids, people they work with, people they interact with on the daily, who did not have that same (abusive) upbringing and thus are harmed by the abuse.

TL;DR, kids will be kids, but don't raise them thinking verbal abuse is OK and that it's the victim's fault for not having thicker skin. "enable the children to learn to deal with such comments" sounds like victim blaming to me.

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