The Missing Missing Reasons

I thought the thesis about how different people privilege emotion over facts, how emotion is reality for some people, was very interesting:

> The difference isn't a matter of style, it's a split between two ways of perceiving the world. In one worldview, emotion is king. Details exist to support emotion. If a member gives one set of details to describe how angry she is about a past event, and a few days later gives a contradictory set of details to describe how sad she is about the same event, both versions are legitimate because both emotions are legitimate.

> [...] Emotion creates reality.

> In the second worldview, reality creates emotion. Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster's emotions are justified. Small details can change the entire tenor of a forum's response; members see a distinction between "She said I'm worthless" and "She said something that made me feel worthless." Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn't be acted on.

Asking if reality creates emotion or vice versa is like asking if the front of the horse pulls the back or if the back of the horse pushes the front.

Please don't post this sort of high-indignation, low-information post, especially when the topic is inflammatory. It breaks many of the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and degrades discussion.

If your post is rooted in personal experience that you would be willing to share, of course that would be a completely different thing. But simply venting the energy of it like this does nothing to foster understanding.

For the person yes. But others may prefer to build their understanding emphasizing one or the other. (And that might feed back to the first person's presentation and incentives, in turn affecting their person.)

Does We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse deserve a mention here?

Well... You're not wrong, anyway. These forums are filled with dysfunctional people who have caused a lot of pain and suffering to their children. They're not good people, by any metric.

But I disagree that it's an uninteresting topic. The adult children of these parents are often struggling in their own lives with problems that directly tie back to their dysfunctional parenting.

For those adult children, it's critical to the healing process to come to an understanding that their parents behavior was not OK or normal.

If this isn't interesting to you, personally, that's OK... But then wouldn't it make more sense to just sit out of the discussion, and find another topic to comment on? By dismissing it, you run the risk of coming off as insensitive or disrespectful to the people who do benefit from participating in this kind of discussion.