One thing I’ve learned at this point is that almost l no kid or adult is actually irrational.
If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life (because if you did, you’d be like them).
And you can’t actually ask someone to explain their own behavior because everyone only lives one life and they rarely know in what way their shoes are different from someone else’s.
This goes along with my own observation that when someone you just met says "I'm a really fucked up person," you should believe them no matter how attractive they are.
Heh. Yeah, avoid it. One girl who said that to me killed herself by hanging a couple years later with an electrical cord in the backyard of a rehab facility. And the girl after her who said something similar is in rehab now. Ain't no joke. I think when people say that jokingly, they know something I don't. I appreciated the honesty I thought they were giving me, but I was too young to realize how seriously they meant it. I don't even know if they thought they were being serious. But they knew.
I'm a dude who thinks about intentionally walking into propellers or windmills to take my face off, and turn into a fine red mist. So it's not totally weird I'd date women with suicidal tendencies. But yeah, if you say that kind of shit out loud, it's usually coming from somewhere true. I'm a pretty fucked up person. I'm trying with all my strength not to be one, to the people who matter to me and the people who count on me. But recognizing the dark ones so they don't fuck with you is essential to survival.
> you can’t actually ask someone to explain their own behavior
Yeah I think that's best done with a therapist who will take time to guide someone through their past. Asking a kid why they acted out, or an adult why they did something crazy, is almost rhetorical. They're not going to know the answer without a deep dive into how they grew up.
OTOH it's a little shocking if you actually ask people and get them to think about it. Like, my friend's 8 year old kid was always hitting his 6 year old sister, so [my friend, the mom] would hit him and punish him when he did it. I said did you ever ask him what he thought his sister felt when he did that to her? So next time he hit his sister, my friend sat him down and said "What do you think that felt like to her, being hit by her older brother?" And didn't let it go, she demanded an answer. The boy was dead silent for about a minute and then buckled and apologized, and apparently hasn't hit his sister since then. The mom thanked me when I saw her and says she never would have thought of that approach. Far be it from my childless ass to give parenting advice. She's a very, very smart woman. But I think we too often think of self-reflection as some kind of adult thing we can't do on our own, or need deep therapy for, when sometimes someone just holding up a mirror to you can do it in an instant.
Some psychologists suggest that kids fight because they subconsciously know it gets their parents' attention. So when a parent breaks up fights it can unintentionally reinforce that behavior.
>If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life (because if you did, you’d be like them).
I disagree with this. As an example, a video came out the other day of a Chicago Transit Authority employee getting into an altercation with some guy. "Some guy" pushed him to the ground and walked away. The employee very slowly (he was quite obese) rose to his feet, pulled a gun, walked after the guy, and then shot 14 times hitting him 3 times. In short, he murdered the guy on video in the middle of a crowded station. There's no way that's not irrational behavior.
You can be 100% rational but 100% wrong. A computer is 100% rational but whether the output is right or wrong depends entirely on its input.
I make this distinction because if you want to change someone's mind or behavior, assuming that they are irrational is a non-starter. You won't make any progress. Once you get past that, you realize that they are actually being rational and that there are deeper obstacles that need attention.
I think the parent commenter is suggesting that employee may have experienced some past trauma before that event. None of that excuses the behavior, nor does it excuse them from the consequences. Also, I would not call it "rational". I think that comment is just saying the hate could come from some past incident, and that it can be helpful for society to know the roots of violent behavior.
> I disagree with this. As an example, a video came out the other day of a Chicago Transit Authority employee getting into an altercation with some guy. "Some guy" pushed him to the ground and walked away. The employee very slowly (he was quite obese) rose to his feet, pulled a gun, walked after the guy, and then shot 14 times hitting him 3 times. In short, he murdered the guy on video in the middle of a crowded station. There's no way that's not irrational behavior.
"If someone seems irrational, it's because you don't understand the person"
"Thats not true, because I didn't understand why somebody did something, so he must be irrational."
IDK if you know what circular reasoning is, but you're suffering from it.
The video in your example doesn't fully explain the situation. You don't know these people, you don't know what happened before, you don't know if they know each other, you don't know what the other guy said/etc.
I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad daylight.
> There's no way that's not irrational behavior.
There's a book called 'Thinking fast & slow' that talks about questions like these. "Is someone's behavior rational?", is a very hard question to answer for your brain, unanswerable even. Still your brain quickly comes up with an answer: 'it's irrational', disregarding the fact that this by itself might arguably be irrational, how does the brain do this? What is this answer based on exactly?
To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'.
So basically your brain is transplanting your own experience, your own set of learned behavior, yourself, into the situation that you saw in the video, and then decides: "Well, I wouldn't do that, so conclusion: this guy is crazy". But ofcourse out of all the possible upbringings, experiences, lifes you could have, you only have 1. So you will never truly know how it is to be someone else.
The only way to know if the shooter in your video was rational or not, is to ask why he did it.
>"If someone seems irrational, it's because you don't understand the person" "Thats not true, because I didn't understand why somebody did something, so he must be irrational."
Who said I didn't understand why the guy shot him? I certainly didn't.
>To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'.
Uh, no that's not what I did.
>I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad dayligh
I’m probably a rare person because I can and do understand other people and myself to the level they aren’t foreign to me.
What I’ve noticed is all humans seem to operate on the same frameworks. It’s just filtered through their nature and experiences. Mental illness is just another filter.
Maybe it’s because my bipolar brain has a lot of hard, untreated mileage in it. I’ve experienced so many emotional and mental states that there is little I find difficult to relate to.
If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life (because if you did, you’d be like them).
And you can’t actually ask someone to explain their own behavior because everyone only lives one life and they rarely know in what way their shoes are different from someone else’s.