[es7]

Science and technology and other nerdy pursuits can be really valuable, and certainly don’t require you to be judgmental of others.

The problem, as I’ve seen it is that people who are bad at some of the other ‘games’ that make a meaningful life lean too heavily on science and technology as a coping mechanism. That coping mechanism could be many things: nerdy pursuits, alcohol, video games, etc.

Whatever your pursuit, if you’re being judgmental of most other people, then you’re probably missing something big and should take some time to reflect on what that is for you.

[routerl]

> Whatever your pursuit, if you’re being judgmental of most other people, then you’re probably missing something big

Sure, but this may very well be intentional and good; an entire community can become pathological, and it then makes sense (and is good) for principled people to trust their judgement, even if it makes them an outcast.

Liberal-minded people often had this reaction to the mid-century rise of fascism, to the point of turning that into art. I'm specifically thinking of Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionescu, but there are many other examples.

[hans1729]

>it then makes sense (and is good) for principled people to trust their judgement, even if it makes them an outcast.

I don't get this. Being judgemental always seemed immature to me. Being curious and trying to understand why individuals or groups do seemingly irrational things: yes. Being judgemental (or "principled" (is this synonymous?)): no. To me, that was always a sign of someone who hasn't made sense of themselves yet. At what point have you made so much sense of anything that you can make a defining principle out of it? That just robs one of agency, reminding of religion and stubbornness.

I get that being fixated on some idiom is helpful in avoiding mental drift and maintaining focus, but that seems like the end of the road in terms of advantages. At the same time, that fixation limits your ability to go beyond the things you felt you understood years ago, whenever the principle was cemented into your cortex.

Is it a desire for deeper stability? For ground truth? Because if I look at what people actually are, no matter how intelligent they may be in some domain, what I see is not able to come up with general idioms. Not even close, actually. What I see is brains trying to make sense out of noise with extreme simplifications, rather fitting the data to their model than the other way around. I never got the advantage of saying "well now MY model fits this pattern, PERIOD!".

[flir]

I don't need to eat the whole apple to know it's rotten. Using your judgement saves a lot of time. Your way (an infinite loop of "trying to understand" with no actual conclusion) just leaves you open to being repeatedly bitten by the same dog.

[Bancakes]

Most people are not deep or interesting, and are easy to plot on a database. If silicon valley companies know being a consumer - for instance - is a wretched lifestyle, then so can the average person.

I don't need cutesy ways to understand it, I resent it. Having to send your kids to school with fancy clothes and shiny toys - what a setback in society.

At some point you need to have a set of axioms to ground yourself so that you do not shift from your optimal lifestyle. At some point, you should only be interested in people better than you.

[es7]

> Most people are not deep or interesting, and are easy to plot on a database

This strikes me as only very superficially true. In my own experience as a human, I've found that every person I meet is unique and interesting in meaningful ways. I didn't use the term "deep" because it seems ill-defined in this context. If one of the main ways you think about "most people" is "not deep", then it seems to me that you're letting arrogance blind you to reality.

What I mean by that is that there's an infinite number of ways for depth to emerge in our complex reality. Thinking deeply with the most linear and rational parts of our brains on a specific category of topics is just one of those many ways. Many times, the illusion of shallowness emerges when the "others" understand something intuitively that the judgmental person only knows how to think about logically.

Fancy clothes and toys are a status symbol. Within interpersonal hierarchies, status is incredibly important and many parents believe that it is important for their child to grow up with a sufficiently high feeling of status within their peer groups. That helps the child learn interpersonal interactions in a certain way, and it helps them develop their self-esteem and self-image in certain ways and it also reflects back on the parents. You might choose to dismiss status and social hierarchy and social development as irrelevant to the life you want to live, but it doesn't make the topic any less complex or interesting for the people who do value those things.

Reading to the end of your comment again, I'm hoping you're just a troll, because a worldview that groups people into categories like "better than you" and "worse than you" without context is a dangerous worldview. I hope for your own sake that you take the time to revisit that opinion.

[Bancakes]

Status used to be defined by achievements - it had weight back then. Consumerism is a modern phenomenon and to me seems to enable people to compensate for a lack of character and skill with abundance of inanimate objects. Suzy wears an artsy dress - can she draw one? Billy sports an expensive calculator - can he plot with it well?

I say people are not deep because often they cease growing, and instead develop sentimentality and culture around something which is mass-produced and soulless. Then human connections shift from direct and interpersonal to being routed over a net of purchased goods.

I don't like it either but humans are normally distributed over different metrics, and it makes sense to look above and climb up, instead of accepting yourself. People change, don't be yourself.

[watwut]

The issue here is, that good sounding high minded principle you describe in first paragraph fairly often amounts to enabling. It also puts great emphasis to understanding aggressor and literally none to understanding victim ... which turns into victim blaming and petty scrutiny of victim fairly often.

And I don't even have super big issues in mind. It happens in fairly normal abusive/low level corruption situations the most.

[dorgo]

So what? Blame the aggressor and stop thinking? It feels like another fallacy.

[somenameforme]

Might you be conflating the notion of a scientific principle with that of an ethical, moral, or otherwise 'social' principle. Should we treat animals humanely? I expect you think the answer is so obvious that this sounds like a rhetorical question.

Why? And I'm sure you and I could both give plenty of reasons, but ultimately it's just an opinion. Someone observing a cat torturing another animal solely for its own entertainment (with no intention of even eating it), might well argue why we then in turn feel so obligated to treat them so well - especially were roles reversed in terms of size, there's no doubt the cat would treat us as just another toy for its passing amusement. And such behavior is far from limited to our feline friends.

And this is what a principle is. It's an "ought" that isn't necessarily based on anything concrete. Do you value security or freedom more? There's no right or wrong answer there, it comes down to what your own personal values and principles. But the reason we hold the principles and values we do is because we believe them to be right. And so in this case, I see no reason to imagine we are not judging other people (even if we might like to imagine its not the case).

And yes, when principles come into contradiction with no room for a middle ground, conflict will eventually emerge. It's the story of humanity's past, present, and undoubtedly future - as much as we might want to not want it to be so.

[dorgo]

Have you ever looked at this as competing ideas fighting for domenance in the environment of human minds? We are not the protagonists in this. We are the resources these ideas are using in their endeavors.

[routerl]

> Being judgemental always seemed immature to me

This might just be a matter of vocabulary. I come from a tradition where "judgment" means pretty much the same thing as "inference", and it's not possible that inferential reasoning is "immature", so we probably disagree about definitions.

> At what point have you made so much sense of anything that you can make a defining principle out of it?

Well, there are certain fairly uncontroversial things. For example, I think that an argument's conclusions should follow, according to the rules of inference, from that argument's premises. This is just applying deduction to everyday life, as a principle. Of course, as with many real-life applications of general principles, it comes with caveats; in the case of deduction, for example, it calls for an understanding that most things in life don't lend themselves to formal, deductive arguments.

Nevertheless, the point here is that I haven't made "so much sense of anything", but have borrowed the best (as far as I can tell) tools my culture has provided me with, in order to make sense of things. At this general level of description, it should be recognizable that I'm talking about things like math, science, and many others.

> Is it a desire for deeper stability?

Sure, that's part of it. This is why medicine exists, for instance. The human desire to normalize the wild oscillations of nature is why we make clothing, build shelters, grow crops, etc etc.

> I never got the advantage of saying "well now MY model fits this pattern, PERIOD!".

When confronted with human goals, some models succeed, and some don't. A theory of infection that doesn't lead to vaccines will, probably, succumb to the brutal fact that "this pattern of thinking isn't useful".

[golergka]

Have you experienced a moment when most of your nation supports an unjust invasion, and many openly and proudly dream of genocide?

[waqf]

I think it's very useful in such a case to investigate, as scientifically and dispassionately as possible, exactly how such a moment came to be. And I think that would involve "getting into the heads" of the supporters of the cause. Do you not think so?

[golergka]

That's true, but that shouldn't stop you from being able to pass judgement.

Just in case you're wondering, that is NOT a hypothetical example for me.

[watwut]

Well, if you see that to be in dichotomy with being principled or judging, then it is less noble then you seem to imply.

[waqf]

If by "being principled or judging" you mean labelling people as evil and dismissing them then I don't accept that that's axiomatically noble.

If by "being principled or judging" you mean having any ethical values at all, then I don't see that it is inconsistent with striving to understand others' minds; I was asking because it appeared that the poster I was responding to thought so.

[dorgo]

I think that to pass judgement bears responsibility. So if you want to judge your neighbours go above and beyond reasonable effort.

I'm not religious, but I like what Christians say: do not judge if you don't want to be judged.

[temp8964]

However, in high school, many of other kids are in fact playing stupid games. Boys hang out do stupid things, or compete who’s the bigger bully. Girls play social games with bullies.

[pm90]

Im guilty of being rather judgmental of others who performed worse than me in academics. I don’t really want to go into the reasons but, yes its very unhealthy to think that way. People have their reasons for why they choose to focus on some things and not others. Perhaps the most important goal of a good society is to be able to assign people to things they’re most suited for.

[sleepdreamy]

At least you are able to see your behavior.

I was judged harshly for not going to college immediately out of HS. I went 6-7 years later and graduated debt free. Meanwhile some of my peers will be paying their loans well into their late 50s. Not knowing what you want to do for the rest of your life at 18 shouldn't be shunned when you acknowledge that fact.

I'll never forget going into WaWa after a day at the office(Dressed up) and seeing the girl from my English AP class who would mock me when I presented infront of class. Super uppity and always negatively judging the quality of others work. I was very nice to her when I could've easily been cruel.

I hope she learned a lesson on judging others, but probably not.

[hans1729]

>People have their reasons for why they choose to focus on some things and not others.

You're saying that like those "reasons" are properties of the personality of their beholders. They are not, it's coping mechanisms all the way down.

>Perhaps the most important goal of a good society is to be able to assign people to things they’re most suited for.

Perhaps we should stop putting things as wild as brains into boxes labelled "suited for X, suited for Y". Perhaps the most important goal of a good individual is to be able to leave others alone, so they can flourish instead of trying to fit the arbitrary concepts that random other participants made up for them to fit into.

[dasz]

I've found that there's a kind of person who excels at academic pursuits but isn't so great elsewhere. Especially outside academia.

I was judged harshly at school. Fast forward years later and I'm that guy who hired someone who got better scores than me. Annoyingly I later also had to fire them because they couldn't deliver. Those scores didn't help them succeed. Too much theory.

They had not played the associated game of project management. Too much focus on getting good caused excessive success in their local minima instead of the bigger picture.

I realised this lesson quite frequently in many ways and our hiring is now more around the competency game. Can they do it? So now the bar is set differently and there's multiple games you need to play and succeed in. Better have hobbies outside IT as well.

We've gotten suspicious of people who overplay in the tech sandpit. Its suboptimal in our view.

Hiring adult humans who can succeed with adult supervision seems like a better overall situation.

[Bancakes]

It seems like such an outdated world view that "person X is born to do Y. His ancestry is such." Everyone can put efforts to adapt and learn new concepts and skills and isn't that the point of university? I'm confident out of 100 somali pirates, one of them is the most apt to learn python.