[randallsquared]

I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent

[jiqiren]

Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.

[OrsonSmelles]

He can be wrong in both directions! Lived experience is a uniquely rich and direct source of knowledge, and on average it's wise to take people seriously when they're speaking from it, but it's also very possible for an individual to have an absolutely horseshit interpretation of their own experience! Maybe it's distorted by trauma or self-serving biases, maybe they're just not very good at thinking, but there will always be someone out there to make you regret putting experience on too high of a pedestal, and sometimes the off-putting book-smart perspective is the more valuable one.

[forgotusername6]

It's about not understanding someone because you haven't been in their shoes. Even if they don't understand themselves, it doesn't make the way they feel about their own past somehow invalid.

[trescenzi]

He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.

[larsfaye]

Uh, he's saying it because the kid is overly confident and acting as if he knows Williams' life because he saw a painting and drew a bunch of conclusions, so he was providing a life lesson to realize that experience provides a level of understanding that book knowledge will never be able to capture. And then he even re-affirms this to Will and emphasizes that he can't possibly know what makes him tick because he read Oliver Twist. Your tangent seems entirely unrelated, IMO.

[klodolph]

I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.

[munificent]

> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.

That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".

Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.

In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.

[klodolph]

> That's the entire point.

Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense.

People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. They don’t take off their mask because you make a big speech and confront them about it. The perspective that this speech has—it is telling me that a forceful, paternalistic approach can fix people. If somebody needs to talk but won’t, you can break down the walls. I disagree with that.

I remember feeling like the world worked this way. I remember feeling that maybe I could be broken down and fixed by the right person. Back when I was the age Matt Damon was when he wrote this movie, maybe I would have agreed with it.

But what have I seen since then? I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people. That the person giving the speech rarely understands their target well enough to know which buttons to push. That trained psychologists know better than to try and take their patients down a peg.

[scotty79]

> Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense. > People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. > [...] > I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people.

In recent years I grew to hate narratives. They give the readers the illusion of attaining some deeper understanding of actual reality (of human psychology in this case). While what the actually do is just pushing readers further away from the truth in the direction of a particular deviation in perception of reality that the writer had.

Given narrative is most attractive for the people who have similar errors in the perception of reality that the author had and reading pushes them further away. Confirming their biases. Regardless of what the reality actually is.

[johnfn]

You completely nailed it.

[thinking_cactus]

If you over-commit to uncertainty that's another error. Like there's a dying screaming child and you go "I don't know, I'm not sure of anything, what is life about anyways? Does anything really matter?". Well, I for sure would know that child is probably suffering and is probably worth saving. If we can't be certain of anything, the answer is not don't do anything, but do things taking into consideration uncertainty, and the different degrees of it. I am damn sure I don't want my teeth pulled out without anesthesia right now. I am not so sure which policy on international trade is the best.

It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.