This is a great quote. I'm probably going to be using that example in a lot of debates :-)

Thank you!

The "bad and better" mental model works well in many scenarios. Particularly where people tend to become hyperbolic and think in only absolutes.

Rosling used to work in Mozambique, the poorest country in the world at that time. In his first year there he was the only doctor for a population of 300,000 (!) people. He writes further: in my second year, a second doctor joined me. We covered a population that in Sweden would have been served by 100 doctors, and every morning on my way to work I said to myself, "Today I must do the work of 50 doctors."

To overextend the metaphor, I try to see all the little systems of the world as incubator babies. Some of them are worsening, we may lose some, some are near perfect health... We can celebrate the improvements while simultaneously mourning the losses.

Sometimes you'll hear that a person is "complicated". Our emotional world can be layers of many tones, textures, timbres. I think that when we invite the emotional correlate of abstract visual art, it gives us an intellectual advantage. In terms of being able to mentally simulate multiple contrasting perspectives in parallel, it almost guarantees we'll land closer toward truthiness. The basic emotions are like representational art. Easier to digest, easier to understand, easier to handle... Cotton candy for your guts.

Suffice to say, we're richly rewarded when we couple intellectual understanding with emotional resonance.

What are your thoughts on engaging in social media (say this comment thread), it is so easy to forget there is (probably!) a living and breathing person on the other end. I made friends in gaming who have different worldviews and sometimes debates came up (say covid and vaccins) and the debates really changed attitudes and understanding. It has been such a difference than many debates here or on worse on reddit, or anywhere else.

It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.)

I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance.

I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude.

All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what!

The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since.

No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.

> I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here.

I, for example, simply did not have any interesting thoughts to share most of the time and didn't bother commenting when I did have some. But you just changed my attitude towards that. Thanks! I even created an account here :)

I am probably going back to lukering to be honest. I post in good faith, although sometimes I make stupid jokes and probably deserve the responses. But, it sucks when you put time into a comment and it gets trashed to hell with no responses telling you why.

HN is the hardest forum. People smell bullshit a mile away, everyone is super smart and informed, humor is suspect. I've never taken breaks from Reddit due to dejection. I've taken dozens of breaks from HN due to dejection... It does really hurt to get downvoted in a community of people you admire lol

If you think the convos are worth it, fuck it! Let the downvotes flow. Make it a game. But if it is causing you any sort of distress, there's other places online people will eagerly welcome you to.

Thanks man. I dont do social media at all. I signed up here not too long ago. I have lurked here for a long time and learnt so much, decided it was time to take part.

I have thought about not giving a shit and "letting the downvotes flow", but then I would become the kind of poster I would not want to read either. and that Dang chap has lot more to deal with, than me getting butthurt.

Cheers though, I do appreciate it.

Awesome!!

Thanks for those insights, you raise some good points and food for thought.

Having had a premature baby, please don't: progress is rarely "linear". I agree that does not make the example inapplicable, it just makes it insensitive.

There are so many better examples to choose from that don't strike a personal nerve (at least, personal to this extent) with any of the audience. Or if your audience hasn't had this experience, it's a moot example that they can't really relate to.

There's two things to unpack here.

First, the major one. Yes, it is an insensitive example so a better one should be one.

Secondly, regarding your comment regarding progress, human progress is also not linear. It's not even constantly and universally pointing in the right direction (there are frequent regressions, some bigger than others), let alone advancing at a constant speed.

I said as much: it's not inapplicable, just insensitive.

TL;DR: I am letting you know how this example made me feel. Take it any way you want.

It's so much easier for me to process any realist take on something that may have concerned my own health or my parents' health (we've all had serious health conditions), but shouts of the crowd "hey, we are empathizing" when it comes to premature babies makes me gulp (and my kid is doing great: what about those whose isn't?). Why don't we use kids with serious, life threatening conditions as examples too? Because those examples are too emotionally taxing.

It exactly feels like coming from someone who has not had a premature baby (or had a low risk one, as >80% of them are: babies coming out at 36 or even 33 weeks of gestation have a very low risk of any developmental issues and have high chances of survival, yet are still called "premature" — their parents are unlikely to have heard phrases like "it's so-and-so, you probably understand what this means" or "may become blind in a matter of days/hours", even though they've experienced a lot of psychological stress too).

If the goal is to trigger an emotional response, I think this is the wrong one. If the goal is to trigger a rational response, then anybody with a first-hand experience is going to have a hard time.

I am simply calling it out as I see it: find a better example, please.

Hi,

With all due respect, and not taking anything away from your painful experience, I don't think a "better example" needs to be found. Why? The incubator analogy works precisely because it is so relatable—even to those who do not have kids. We should not rob people of such powerful analogies.

People shouldn't feel like they have to carefully walk on eggshells to use such analogies, all in the fear of offending someone. I hope you don't parse me wrong.

Well said. My response was going to be a lot less measured than this, and I would be an asshole for saying the first thing that popped into my head, so I am glad you got there before me. To re-phrase what I was going to say in a more senensitive way, to the OP, to me this reads like (and really no offence), you would prefer for other people to miss out on good knowledge due to the small chance that someone may feel a little bit bad for a short time. Its a bit like a "think of the children" argument, but there aint no children here, well accept for me maybe.

I am sorry you had to go through that though. Also the threads above this comment are some of the best I have read on here in the last month or 2, and there has been some seriously good content (to me at least), in that time.

What I am saying is that it is not relatable. It's obvious from some other comments in the thread (there is someone saying things like "we'll lose some" — I am not saying they are not right, just that they are not relating to it). Sure, some people will empathize, but most won't. I know I wouldn't before going through the experience.

To be honest, I don't even understand what's the need for an analogy here? Is it not clear to everyone that something can be both "bad" and becoming less bad ("better" or simply improving) at the same time? Does the analogy really help communicate that?

I mean, when I get a regular cold, when my nose starts being heavily congested (instead of leaking), I know I am bad, but improving. When you just get a job out of college, your financial situation might be "bad" (large student debt), but you've finally started paying it off ("bad and better"). Or your house is flooded ("bad"), but you've just arranged for the insurance to send someone to fix it up ("bad and better"). It's really trivial to come up with examples. None of these has any potential to trigger an emotional response the way (non-empathically, to me) talking of premature babies does.

It was used as a superfluous tool to attempt to trigger those "think of the children" emotions in people that the next commenter mentions (though they attempt to attribute that to me: I was actually saying "think of the parents" ;-)).

To me, an unnecessary analogy that does not consider how it will be perceived is anything but "powerful", but I also think it's fine for us to agree to disagree.

> People shouldn't feel like they have to carefully walk on eggshells to use such analogies

I totally agree. I don't see how that relates to me sharing how this particular analogy has made me feel: when we get to all the overly-politically-correct talk, it's usually people jumping to protect someone else who they think might be offended — here, I am sharing my own lived experience. That's a data point, and anyone can decide on their own whether that will influence their choice of analogy or not.

Is it really not valuable sharing these "data points" (all the replies I've gotten are surely making me second guess myself)? How do people learn about how people feel if they are not willing to listen to them? Do you change anything when you learn how you made people feel?

I don't want belabor the point here. But yes, we have to agree to disagree. There's nothing wrong with you sharing your difficult experience, of course. What I'm saying is that how the analogy will be "perceived" is irrelevant; that's the eggshells part I was referring to. What counts here is the effectiveness of it. You're essentially saying "regardless of how useful it is, we should ban this analogy because it might offend someone". If you go down that route, you would've been robbed of many of the greatest books and insights.

The incubator analogy is perfectly "relatable" (i.e. understandable) to many of us. Though, of course, not in the finest resolution that someone who has experienced the unfortunate situation. But all the same, it can be appreciated without losing the critical insights. Evolution has "programmed" us to understand these kind of analogies.

Rosling was a doctor, and an extremely sensible man. There's a reason he picked that analogy; he knew what he was doing.

> [...] I don't even understand what's the need for an analogy here?

Yes, an analogy is required—that's how our minds make sense of many things in life. I strongly suggest to read the book "Metaphors We Live By"[1]. A classic from 40 years ago that shows how deep analogies and metaphors run in our bones. And no, a student debt or a leaky nose doesn't cut it; a powerful analogy like what Rosling used strikes a better chord with the topic at hand ("the state of the world").

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo363799...

To be blunt, your feelings are your problem. There is nothing wrong with that analogy. All yohr comment does is discourage people from trying to relate anything to common life experiences because someone might've had a bad one.

Analogies are a tool used to describe a situation by relating to something more familiar: are premature babies really something all of you "dissenting" voices have experienced? Analogies can trigger all sorts of responses (intellectual and emotional).

Whether you care about the responses of your audience is your choice. I am not disagreeing that my feelings are my own (though they are not a "problem" for me), but I am sharing them for the benefit of those who might care. If you don't, that's "your problem".

Being personally triggered by some random example doesn't entitle you to expect the world to avoid any references to it in other contexts. Simple as that. People use all sorts of examples for all sorts of discussions, any one of them could offend any random person for any number of personal reasons. The onus is on the offended party to understand that strangers don't owe them a damn thing when they're not even talking to them personally.

I ain't expecting anything. I think I've explained quite clearly that it strikes me as an insensitive example (from the way it affected me personally) where one could easily find others which are not. I would hope that people appreciate that, even if they won't honour it (I could even say "even if they disagree with it", but you can't really disagree with feelings).

Whether someone cares for that or not is, just the same, in their court.

This entire discussion seems to have turned into whether I should be even expressing what someone saying made me feel. If that's truly useless, I am totally socially inept (I am probably not far off), so that's a useful learning too.

This reminds me of something one of my history professors said. He's never really disappointed in life because he sets his expectations extremely low. If something exceeds those expectations, he's happy. If they don't, well, he didn't expect much of it to begin with so nothing really changes. He said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but it still sticks with me over a decade later.

I like the incubator example. It is easy to jump to (extreme) conclusions, and not see what's really there.

Reminds me of https://www.logicalfallacies.org/

Sir, I really liked this one. Gonna read the book for certain.

Interesting term, so simple yet effective.