Is this something you encounter more in discussing research or philosophical problems, as opposed to personal situations?
I see things like this pretty often:
A: I’m really stressed out today. Everything’s going wrong! My boss called me lazy, my car started making this funny smell, every time I try to use my phone this stupid error comes up that says “Invalid Transit Proxy”, and my cat is sick and it crapped all over the floor.
B: Oh, “Invalid Transit Proxy” means you’ve set a custom pipeline server for outbound sessions, and it doesn’t ping. All you need to do is go into Settings and reset it to the factory network configuration, so it can DHCP to your WLAN and ….
A: Dammit, I don’t want to try to fix my phone right now! I have to clean up all this cat mess; the smell is making my eyes water.
B: Dude, don’t bite my head off, I was just trying to help you be less stressed.
Or are you thinking more of situations like this?
C: I read this interesting Wikipedia article this morning, on philosophy of suicide. Camus asks, if God doesn’t exist, why we shouldn’t just commit suicide. I’m not sure I buy his answer though, because …
In the first scenario, B doesn’t know how to deal with A’s overarching problem (being stressed out), and responds to just the one thing B does know about (technical trouble) which doesn’t happen to even be the most immediate stressor (cat mess). If B had offered to clean up the cat mess, A probably would have appreciated it.
In the second scenario, D pattern-matches C’s topic of conversation (philosophy of suicide) onto something they think they know how to respond to (suicidal ideation) and responds on the wrong meta-level. D can get this entirely wrong: C may actually think, “I observe that I am not suicidal, but some people are,” and D misreading C as saying, “I am suicidal.”
Is this something you encounter more in discussing research or philosophical problems, as opposed to personal situations?
I see things like this pretty often:
A: I’m really stressed out today. Everything’s going wrong! My boss called me lazy, my car started making this funny smell, every time I try to use my phone this stupid error comes up that says “Invalid Transit Proxy”, and my cat is sick and it crapped all over the floor.
B: Oh, “Invalid Transit Proxy” means you’ve set a custom pipeline server for outbound sessions, and it doesn’t ping. All you need to do is go into Settings and reset it to the factory network configuration, so it can DHCP to your WLAN and ….
A: Dammit, I don’t want to try to fix my phone right now! I have to clean up all this cat mess; the smell is making my eyes water.
B: Dude, don’t bite my head off, I was just trying to help you be less stressed.
Or are you thinking more of situations like this?
C: I read this interesting Wikipedia article this morning, on philosophy of suicide. Camus asks, if God doesn’t exist, why we shouldn’t just commit suicide. I’m not sure I buy his answer though, because …
D: OMG DON’T KILL YOURSELF! (calls suicide hotline)
In the first scenario, B doesn’t know how to deal with A’s overarching problem (being stressed out), and responds to just the one thing B does know about (technical trouble) which doesn’t happen to even be the most immediate stressor (cat mess). If B had offered to clean up the cat mess, A probably would have appreciated it.
In the second scenario, D pattern-matches C’s topic of conversation (philosophy of suicide) onto something they think they know how to respond to (suicidal ideation) and responds on the wrong meta-level. D can get this entirely wrong: C may actually think, “I observe that I am not suicidal, but some people are,” and D misreading C as saying, “I am suicidal.”