I've been thinking that in order to write well, the author has to empathize with their audience. The effect is that the reader is able to empathize with the author.
Math, programming, and writing are verbal skills, but good communication requires empathy, an emotional skill. I realized this was true after I realized I needed to consciously work on empathy because it is so crucial.
I think my code has improved quite a lot since I've been thinking empathically about current and future colleagues. If you keep in mind that this code will be read by other people, and if you really want them not to have a terrible time decyphering it, you start being more careful with naming, structure and syntax.
So yes, social empathy is important to craft great code.
You can never truly know your audience, you can only know yourself. Good writing involves getting in touch with yourself on a fundamentally human level that others can relate to. Good writing is about exploration and discovery. Writers that pander to an audience tend to be hacks, and the best they can hope for is to become shallow commercial successes.
I had never thought about programming (or, for what comes next, application development) as a verbal skill.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense, especially as it pertains to UI/UX. About empathy -- you need to relate to your users, understand, be aware and sensitive of their needs and their thought process as they use your application.
Thanks for the interesting view. Not sure I read it too literally, but it gave me something to think about.
I can't prove it, but I really don't think that programming helps one to become more empathic. In my case, after a long programming session, I need about an hour to snap out of my analytical state of mind, and get my social/verbal skills back to their original level.
I've had the same - I have that quite a lot but have also have the reverse where immediately after a non-technical presentation being presented with a trivial technical problem that mind would not engage with.
Code is also a UI, for your coworker or future self who has to read and understand it. You also need to empathize with your future self and work to prevent confusion.
The article mentions planaria, a type of flatworm that can regenerate from a small piece of tissue. Many experiments with these animals involve cutting them up various ways.[0]
I agree that animal testing is integral to modern medicine, but I also agree with the parent that unnecessarily inflicting pain on even lower animals reflects badly on humanity. How many of these experiments are actually necessary? Do research institutions make the researcher convince them that the suffering is really necessary for medicine, rather than merely to satisfy some curiosity?
"The company plans to leave much of that interpretation up to its volunteer army of intranet moderators, who have day jobs at Google but in their spare time oversee discussion groups..."
It sounds like these employees are not also paid for their extra time spent on moderating.
As someone who is still in school and struggles with emotion/time management/procrastination, I was particularly hit by "focus on goals that are after which you wish to achieve." People around me have pointed this out to me, but it was only until recently did I realize how serious it was.
I think that my impulsive nature and addiction to novelty fuel this problem. Even browsing Hacker News is a manifestation of this. HN always has some cool idea that I could be studying or hacking on when I have free time. But I spend too much time thinking about possibilities than getting done what's right in front of me, because I'm addicted to novelty. I especially neglect school work, which isn't boring at all and rather fascinating and useful, and instead try to find weird things to explore. My huge queue on Pocket is one of many testaments to this. The result is poor, and I feel miserable and disappointed in myself.
Of course, as the video touches upon, modern technology (social media, apps, even internet pornography) exploits humans' desire for novelty (though as previously explained, I think I'm far more vulnerable than average). The video helped me see the connection between my habit and this tendency.
The point is that you'll always have to ensure a chunk of time for your "main" activity and give it sustained efforts. Reading broadly and exploring a range of topics is always good and beneficial, but you need to limit your time on them. If you just spend your whole day reading various disparate newsletters and articles instead of focusing on one book, one particular area that you dive deep into, your career prospect, etc., it wouldn't work.
> “She was acting as a rental daughter, but at the same time she was telling me how she felt as a real daughter,” he said. “And yet, if it was a real father-daughter relationship, maybe she wouldn’t have spoken this honestly.” ... Yūichi Ishii, the founder of Family Romance, told me that he and his “cast” actively strategize in order to engineer outcomes like Nishida’s, in which the rental family makes itself redundant in the client’s life.
> I thought about my missed shrink appointment, and about a psychology professor I met, Kenji Kameguchi, who has been trying for the past thirty years to popularize family therapy in conflict-averse, stoical Japan, where psychotherapy is still stigmatized. He said that he thought rental relatives were, in an unschooled way, fulfilling some of the functions of group-therapy techniques such as psychodrama, in which patients act out and improvise one another’s past situations or mental processes.
From this reading, it seems to me that Japan's fake relatives are the equivalent of counselors and psychiatrists in other countries.
If truth be told, the ersatz family, in some form or another, has been an important function in society since time immemorial. We're just not always honest with ourselves about it, and it's much easier to see it and comment about it from the distance of another culture.
I am reminded of the sad story from this Dar Williams song, where young partiers and the stock photos from picture frames serve this function for a Peter Pan syndrome man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oai7HUqncAA