You can't expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge. Emotion pushes out reason. That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability. The path of least resistance is to walk away from that sort of fight. Men generally prefer the path of least resistance. The exception is when men irrationally debate with other men. That's a type of sport. No one expects opinions to be changed as a result.
Friday, April 1, 2011
QoTD: Monkeybrains edition
Scott Adams (HT: Isegoria):
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
"That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability."
Every so often I learn I'm not actually human.
Either that or cogitating and emoting simultaneously is a skill that can be learned by anyone.
Or...you're more like my 5-years-ago self, and you either don't hit the big emotion on topics, or you don't see the brainclosing that happens on the important topics.
I tend to assume that anytime I see everyone else doing it but don't see me doing it...it's a blindness on my part.
I have a method for detecting brainsclog. It fired off twice today, in fact.
I wait an hour or two. I'm still feeling stuff about it but I can reason in straight lines again.
The emotion per se is not the cause. Rather, it is something I awkwardly describe as an obsession with validating the emotion.
That, for example, if I'm angry at my landlady, it must be because she wronged me. Not because, for example, she did something that makes me angry regardless of whether it should anger me or not.
Oh! Three times. Hello, brainsclog.
I just realized how I managed this supposedly superhuman feat.
Everything makes me emotional enough to interfere with reason. I would be utterly incapable of following any kind of rational line of inquiry without this method.
Necessity is the mother of invention. (Oddly, invention has more than one mother, I guess.)
So, normally I would wait an hour or two and end up posting a different comment. As we're apparently both online right now, I will forgo the process.
Post a Comment