You describe yourself as someone who drills into people until you reach a core. I've had experiences with other people where I felt like they were drilling into me to find a core, and though I'm not sure if what I mean by the phrase is what you mean by the phrase, I found such drilling to be horribly frustrating because the driller was seeking a particular type of core but completely missing all the small and subtle things that are genuinely* important.
Your comment about helping out depressed friends reminds me of the same thing--it makes me think of other people who may or may not be like you, but who also seem to want to use a hammer on personal problems that require more finesse. The frustrating thing about it is that these people are so focused on FINAL SOLUTION that they reject all small and subtle intermediary partial steps towards a solution, and consequently never get anywhere at all.
So, if you are like the people I'm thinking about, don't be--you should be clever enough to understand the value of partial steps, or subtle networks. If you aren't like the people I'm thinking about, then I do not have anything to yell at you about.
*Sometimes it seems like people take a body of evidence, extract a rule from it, and then reapply the rule in a slightly different situation--they find things easier to understand in this way, but they end up applying things inaccurately. A relevant example of this is when a person analyzes her own personality, finds that "philosophy" is very crucial to her core, then drills for that sort of core in other people. She would, however, be more accurate in her comprehension of others if she did not extract the rule "philosophy is important to a human's core" from her available body of evidence and then try to apply it to a relatively unconnected body of evidence.
Like, there's a distance between what is true and what was represented in the writing, and a distance between what was represented and what was interpreted (but the interpretation was a totally valid one given the text), but I think your reaction was dead on given that interpretation of that representation. Commendably so.
I'm not offended. The reply was helpful and informative and I wanted to acknowledge that while leaving open the question of whether or not I'm like the people who you are referring to (because I'm really not sure).
Have you ever read Dangerous Liaisons?
You describe yourself as someone who drills into people until you reach a core. I've had experiences with other people where I felt like they were drilling into me to find a core, and though I'm not sure if what I mean by the phrase is what you mean by the phrase, I found such drilling to be horribly frustrating because the driller was seeking a particular type of core but completely missing all the small and subtle things that are genuinely* important.
Your comment about helping out depressed friends reminds me of the same thing--it makes me think of other people who may or may not be like you, but who also seem to want to use a hammer on personal problems that require more finesse. The frustrating thing about it is that these people are so focused on FINAL SOLUTION that they reject all small and subtle intermediary partial steps towards a solution, and consequently never get anywhere at all.
So, if you are like the people I'm thinking about, don't be--you should be clever enough to understand the value of partial steps, or subtle networks. If you aren't like the people I'm thinking about, then I do not have anything to yell at you about.
*Sometimes it seems like people take a body of evidence, extract a rule from it, and then reapply the rule in a slightly different situation--they find things easier to understand in this way, but they end up applying things inaccurately. A relevant example of this is when a person analyzes her own personality, finds that "philosophy" is very crucial to her core, then drills for that sort of core in other people. She would, however, be more accurate in her comprehension of others if she did not extract the rule "philosophy is important to a human's core" from her available body of evidence and then try to apply it to a relatively unconnected body of evidence.
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I'm not offended. The reply was helpful and informative and I wanted to acknowledge that while leaving open the question of whether or not I'm like the people who you are referring to (because I'm really not sure).
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