Apart from what Richard said, the second paragraph has a very… “handing down nuggets of wisdom from on high”? vibe to me. Like, Val apparently thinks he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions or something? (I interpret “you haven’t touched the true core” as something like “you think you know what’s going on but there’s more to it than that”, but it’s not clear and that’s part of the problem.) And if lsusr wants to learn, here’s a long article he can read. (Firefox reader mode puts it at 57-73 minutes.)
Val acknowledges that the paragraph is probably annoying, and uses words “guess” and “might”, and that makes it less obnoxious to me than it would be otherwise. But still obnoxious. More things that would make it less obnoxious to me:
What makes Val think lsusr hasn’t touched the true core of his heartbreak? This probably partly comes from details that don’t make sense if you don’t know the framework, but it should at least be possible to point at something in what lsusr wrote. Things like “you spend N words on this and 3N words on that, if you were in touch I’d expect roughly equal numbers of words”; or “your writing style when when talking about this is much more concise than your writing style when talking about that, like you’re trying to avoid thinking about it in detail”. If Val can’t point at something like this, I think that’s a bad sign and he should admit that he can’t.
Is there something specific that makes Val recommend this particular framework here? Or is it just his standard recommendation for getting in touch with emotions?
Give lsusr some way to say “no, that seems wrong” that doesn’t involve reading the long article. Like, “another explanation for what I see might be ___, and if you think that’s what’s going on then this probably won’t help you”.
More explicit acknowledgment that what he’s doing here is thinking he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions; that this is the sort of guess that people frequently make while being dead wrong about; some reason why he thought it was worth making anyway.
(I don’t know that I would like the comment if it had those things. But I do think I would find it less bad.)
I wondered that too. I miss the old LW social norm where downvotes were expensive and came with an explanation. Here I’m just left shrugging because I’m not sure what update to make.
(I mean this as a sharing of my experience, not a critique of how LW is designed. I’m sure Oli & Ben et al. put a ton of thought into details like this and landed on the current karma model for good reasons.)
I didn’t vote on it either way, but I read the Forrest article, and if someone made a top-level post promoting the “Drama Triangle” I would very likely give it a strong downvote. It’s yet another universal Procrustean psychological theory, every possible response to which can be shoehorned into the theory itself.
I also found the first paragraph of Valentine’s comment icky. It comes across to me as histrionic emoting, and I would not care to encounter that sort of thing addressed to myself. But it was addressed to lsusr and it is up to him how he takes it.
For what it’s worth, I took Valentine’s first paragraph as high praise. I write narratives with the deliberate intention of eliciting specific emotional responses and that was the exact emotional response I aimed to elicit when I wrote this story.
I’d feel icky too to read such a response to one of your [Richard_Kennaway’s] posts or to one of my drier posts. But I feel the emoting is appropriate in this context.
Why the heck is this at −5, am I missing something here? Tentatively upvoted unless someone tells me why this should be so far down.
[edit: Though I disagree with the downvotes, I now understand them due to the explanations in child comments]
Apart from what Richard said, the second paragraph has a very… “handing down nuggets of wisdom from on high”? vibe to me. Like, Val apparently thinks he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions or something? (I interpret “you haven’t touched the true core” as something like “you think you know what’s going on but there’s more to it than that”, but it’s not clear and that’s part of the problem.) And if lsusr wants to learn, here’s a long article he can read. (Firefox reader mode puts it at 57-73 minutes.)
Val acknowledges that the paragraph is probably annoying, and uses words “guess” and “might”, and that makes it less obnoxious to me than it would be otherwise. But still obnoxious. More things that would make it less obnoxious to me:
What makes Val think lsusr hasn’t touched the true core of his heartbreak? This probably partly comes from details that don’t make sense if you don’t know the framework, but it should at least be possible to point at something in what lsusr wrote. Things like “you spend N words on this and 3N words on that, if you were in touch I’d expect roughly equal numbers of words”; or “your writing style when when talking about this is much more concise than your writing style when talking about that, like you’re trying to avoid thinking about it in detail”. If Val can’t point at something like this, I think that’s a bad sign and he should admit that he can’t.
Is there something specific that makes Val recommend this particular framework here? Or is it just his standard recommendation for getting in touch with emotions?
Give lsusr some way to say “no, that seems wrong” that doesn’t involve reading the long article. Like, “another explanation for what I see might be ___, and if you think that’s what’s going on then this probably won’t help you”.
More explicit acknowledgment that what he’s doing here is thinking he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions; that this is the sort of guess that people frequently make while being dead wrong about; some reason why he thought it was worth making anyway.
(I don’t know that I would like the comment if it had those things. But I do think I would find it less bad.)
I appreciate the thorough explanation, it helped me to understand things here quite a bit.
I wondered that too. I miss the old LW social norm where downvotes were expensive and came with an explanation. Here I’m just left shrugging because I’m not sure what update to make.
(I mean this as a sharing of my experience, not a critique of how LW is designed. I’m sure Oli & Ben et al. put a ton of thought into details like this and landed on the current karma model for good reasons.)
I didn’t vote on it either way, but I read the Forrest article, and if someone made a top-level post promoting the “Drama Triangle” I would very likely give it a strong downvote. It’s yet another universal Procrustean psychological theory, every possible response to which can be shoehorned into the theory itself.
I also found the first paragraph of Valentine’s comment icky. It comes across to me as histrionic emoting, and I would not care to encounter that sort of thing addressed to myself. But it was addressed to lsusr and it is up to him how he takes it.
For what it’s worth, I took Valentine’s first paragraph as high praise. I write narratives with the deliberate intention of eliciting specific emotional responses and that was the exact emotional response I aimed to elicit when I wrote this story.
I’d feel icky too to read such a response to one of your [Richard_Kennaway’s] posts or to one of my drier posts. But I feel the emoting is appropriate in this context.