Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them

Re:Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Unde... by drasticmeasures on Friday June 29, 2018 @09:52PM (#17429082)

Trying to fully understand a living person is as futile as trying to pin down a river so you can dissect it.

That is, a person is capable of changing like the flow of a river, and while you can analyze who they were in the past, and -- if they're alive -- make predictions about who they will be in the future based on their past, or draw conclusions based on similarities with other people's paths, you can never truly know something that is always capable of change at any time.

But you can know them well enough. Is that frightening, depressing or liberating?

  To better understand someone you have to empathize;
  to better empathize you have to understand them.

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Re:Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Unde... by krapp on Friday June 29, 2018 @10:00PM (#17429105)

Rivers don't tend to change their flow suddenly or unpredictably, though, and I don't believe people's personalities or opinions do either. Change in both tends to be gradual in the short term, even if diverse over the long term, and can be understood by studying the environment in which flow occurs.

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Re:Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Unde... by drasticmeasures on Friday June 29, 2018 @10:03PM (#17429109)

I agree. You can know them well-enough for practical purposes; sometimes they will surprise you.

As an aside, I think the antonym of "lonely" is "understood", and when you empathize with someone, you put yourself in their position and feel understood, and thus less lonely.

  A person can feel lonely in a crowd
  but not alone when their self is understood
  even when alone in a cell 
  made of all (flesh, concrete or abstract)
  that barriers can be built of.

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