
You Can't Fix People - blackhole
http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2013/08/you-cant-fix-people.html
======
StandardFuture
Hmmm. The hypocrisy is blatant. He apparently hates the way "people" are. Yet,
at the same time he hates other people who also hate the way people are i.e.
sexists and racists?!?!?

I apologize for the following but: Are you fucking kidding me?!?

Does he truly believe that he is alone in dealing with people? Do we not all
deal with people? Is this not a core component of life and of _cough_ growing
up _cough_?!?!?

Have not many individuals over the ages dealt with their differences in
various ways? Some dealings being better than others?

>I can never escape these problems, because they are people.

Why are "people" the problem? Why do you overgeneralize so easily? Yet, you
ask so hypocritically:

>How do you get people to stop making terrible assumptions about other people?

This article should not be upvoted. If you are "tired" of dealing with people,
as the author, I can almost guarantee that you have not spent enough time
searching. Don't end your search to find good people with premature
conclusions that sadly this author has jumped too.

~~~
plam
I share your disagreement with the piece. Not everyone needs or wants to be
"fixed". It took me years to realise that the best I can do for others is not
to listen for a solution to "help" them, but listen just to listen.

------
angersock
I think that one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with people (at
least for myself, as I'm loathe to extend my experiences to others) is that
they fail several key things:

People are not:

* linear time-invariant

* rational

* abstractable

By the first, I mean two things. People do not react proportionally to a
change in input--raising your voice slightly or disagreeing somewhat harder
may suddenly get you punched in the nose instead of just yelled back at
somewhat more, or being even nicer to somebody may not return any change
whatsoever. Moreover, the same input applied at a later time may completely
change the reaction of a person--a harmless text message repeated at a later
date could set a person off.

By the second, I mean that people simply do not follow a logical chain in most
situation. Given a set of rules and inputs, you'd think that a person (and
even their mental state) would behave predictably; this is obviously false if
you've ever done business or sold to consumers or dated.

By the third (possibly the largest), I mean that people can't be reasoned
about at a high level. You simply _can 't_ ignore or approximate all of the
little minutiae that make up that person's background, and if you try you'll
find that everything falls to pieces. "Every girl likes compliments" fails,
"every customer wants the cheapest goods" fails, every abstraction falls over
in contact with the enemy.

EDIT:

People seem to be reacting negatively to the opening statements of the
article. When I read it, I interpreted it as the author trying to express the
idea that even massively difficult technical problems are still amendable to
standard problem-solving techniques, in implicit contrast to "people problems"
which the author finds elusive.

A correct reading, I suggest, would be that the opening is more an attempt at
example than braggadocio.

~~~
StandardFuture
An oversimplification of the human individual into nothing more than an
analytic system seems very dystopian to me.

The responsibility of getting to know an INDIVIDUAL for who THEY are is a
beautiful and expensive journey. Which is why we can only afford it in a
minimalist sense i.e. MAYBE one person to fall in love with, MAYBE a family to
love, and MAYBE a handful of friends to truly love as well.

However, if what the author seeks (hidden in an array of emotions) is the key
to Utopia then that is a different issue. I am honestly not sure if the
authors intentions were honestly stated. I am not sure if the author is truly
frustrated with people or himself. I do know that taking this article point
blank, word for word, as an objectively true and necessary outlook on life is
very dangerous.

~~~
angersock
I'm generally of the opinion that the more people you love, the more people
you can love--it's a skill like any other.

I think it's a shame that more people don't try to get to know others better;
everyone has a life and a history, and it's quite fascinating to hear the
stories of how another has come to intersect your path in life.

The trend that distresses me most, though, is that we've forsaken modeling
people (which is bad) to instead simply bowing to statistics to do our
reasoning for us (which is worse). Treating people as knowable agents using a
flawed model is still more respectful of the human condition than saying
"Well, they _tend_ to do this given _that_ , so, um, yeah."

People are not robots, but they also sure as hell aren't dice.

------
georgebonnr
What's a problem solver to do? To put it crudely, stop being so judgemental.
And stop viewing people as problems. Stop defining persons' entire identities
by one (admittedly awful) behavior or attitude they exhibit. People are more
complex than that. And you're not just a "problem solver." You're many other
things... Some good, some bad. Some probably as bad as being a sexist or a
racist, depending on how you look at things. Life is not math. In all
seriousness the best suggestion I have is to try to maintain an attitude of
extreme charity towards all people, and to constantly re-focus on the things
that you and they hold in common as human beings with needs, wants,
intentions, and desires.

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RyanZAG
You can't fix people, but you can fix a person. It's the same as saying you
can't create a usable UI that allows any possible data to be entered, but you
definitely can create a usable UI for some specific data. So the reason you've
come to the conclusion that fixing people is impossible is because you're
trying to fix everyone at once, and each person needs their own solution.

Even better, some people don't even need fixing. Devote your time to just a
few people and the problem disappears.

~~~
angersock
_" you can fix a person."_

Sadly false. All you can do is send messages and hope that their internal
state matches what they show you, and that what they show you is what you
want.

------
rdegges
Oh man, I really enjoyed reading this because I've felt the exact same way
most of my life (as a matter of fact, I still do feel this way quite often).

Dealing with people is incredibly hard because everyone has biases,
experiences, and lives of their own -- and regardless of how much you try to
put yourself into someone else's shoes -- to understand why this person is the
way they are -- there is simply no way to ever truly understand how someone
feels and acts.

People can be hateful, ignorant, and mean to one another -- but at the same
time, people can also be kinda, loving, and compassionate.

I've found that the best way to get around the constant anxiety that goes
along with wanting to help and _fix_ everyone I come across is to try my best
to be accepting of people the way they are.

Nowadays when I meet new people, I try to have no expectations: instead of
building up a mental image of this person in my head, and assigning them an
identity (this person is nice, or this person is smart, or whatever) -- I
instead try to be fully _present_ in the moment and let things happen as they
will.

Not only does this help me deal with social anxiety a lot, but also helps me
relax and feel more comfortable about myself, knowing that I'm constantly
trying to live in the moment, accept reality (and people) as they are, and
live my life the way I choose regardless of outside influences.

It's incredibly hard to do this, but all the effort pays off (at least it does
for me).

Thank you for sharing your story.

------
solistice
Well, we don't have a framework for fixing a person, no state where a person
is considered whole.

Imagine you're fixing a car. There's a (relatively) clear spec on when it's
considered fixed, and you strive to get there. You can get there by following
instructions, or you can get there by experimentation.

Without knowledge of what is considered fixed, you're making shots in the
dark. A lot of people are, and you have a chaotic system.

Comming up with a framework for what a person should strive to be is
technically a job for philosophy, but that's not working, is it? We seem to be
naturally change averse, and a lot of philosophical works boil down to
rationalizing what you are doing is right. Kant reads like the bible of
irresponsibility (What is the "Kathegorischer Imperativ" exept absolving
responsibility to a higher mandate?), and Nietsche reads like he's trying to
give you a free pass for everything provided you're the Supermensch (and who
doesn't class themselves that way?).

No, creating frameworks is a dangerous game, and I've stopped trusting anyone
to do a proper job at it. All religions I know of failed at it to various
degrees (look at that track record for gods sake! They're still being used to
justify murder). Most philosophers had their ideas tried out (as far as that
was viable), and those approaches again didn't work out perfectly.

And here we're sitting, no idea how to do things, but hellbent on doing
something. It's amazing we figured out science, which is why we can figure out
those problems easily. But philosophy? We don't seem to have progressed there.

So yeah, fixing people is about as futile (right now) as physics has been
before the scientific method.

------
afhof
From a completely selfish standpoint, shouldn't you try fixing yourself first
rather than "fixing" other people?

~~~
solistice
What if you aren't broken?

~~~
MaysonL
If you think you aren't broken, you're _very_ broken.

------
kor023
Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqV-
egZOS1E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqV-egZOS1E)

Just as a counter point..

------
mynameishere
The cascading narcissism is ridiculous, but then the paranoia shows itself...

 _They will do everything in their power to destroy all my efforts at building
a better world_

...and it just becomes kind of pathetic.

~~~
angersock
Thank you for an excellent illustration of the sort of negativity that the
author is attempting to point out.

~~~
dylangs1030
To be fair, the first three paragraphs didn't have anything to do with the
author's point. They just kept talking about all the wonderful thigs he's
capable of doing even if he's not qualified for them.

I would have rather had a more fleshed out point about people and a sentence
about how the author is a problem solver than so much about what he can do and
then some stuff about other people.

~~~
angersock
The purpose of the opening is to illustrate that technical problems are
tractable and that even without the necessary first-hand experience the
general methods of problem solving remain fruitful.

I didn't take it as the author bragging--rather, the author was attempting tho
show that even these supposedly impossible and ungainly issues can fall to
properly-applied methodologies; in short, that technical problems are never
hopeless regardless of how outgunned you might think you are at the start.

------
gulfie
1) In this case fixing seems to be behavior(or thought) modification. 2) We
fix people all the time. 3) Industries are built on it. 3) Fixing people is
what pays for the internet of today.

$557 Billion USD, of fixes just this year alone.

[http://nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/global-ad-spend-
grows...](http://nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/global-ad-spend-
grows-3.2-percent-in-2012.html)

We fix people all the time.

------
quasque
Not that I agree with the connotations of "fix" as used in this piece - but
why do you want to fix people in the first place? It's not your
responsibility.

If certain people bother you, then the best you can do is try to change your
own outlook and circumstances to deal better with the negativity you feel
towards their behaviour.

Or to put it another way, the only person you're responsible for fixing is
yourself.

------
level09
This brings back to my mind the popular blog post by Aaron swartz: Fix the
machine, not the person :
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi)

I personally think only few people can be fixed, those who are very
intelligent and who know how to get over human nature and their cognitive
biases.

------
ckevinc
Appears to be down.

Google's cache of the article:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ti31eUM...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ti31eUMHA00J:blackhole12.blogspot.com/2013/08/you-
cant-fix-people.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

------
dylangs1030
You could have done without the first three paragraphs.

Other than that...I'm not sure what else to comment. Of course you can't fix
people. If we could, we'd live in a utopia where everyone was happy and
operated efficiently.

------
ChrisAntaki
You can talk with people.

~~~
asjordan
Yeah, and that's literally the _least_ you can do. You can't 'fix' people, but
you can certainly do a HELL of a lot more than complain about or simply reject
people as un-'fix'-able. Seriously... air quotes aren't enough: don't say fix
people. You don't fix people, you interact and engage with them. Or as
ChrisAntaki says: you talk with them.

------
gulfie
The comments were better than the article.

------
ramgp
What happen with article is now down?

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st8ic
"people r dum", writes self-righteous neckbeard.

~~~
angersock
Come now, at least give credit for writing style. The author put good effort
into writing their piece, whether or not you agree with the conclusions.

