Sometimes, I am reminded not to be quick to judge because I usually don’t know the whole story, and life is hard, and the world is complicated. Every once in a while I even manage to put this to practice. My most recent reminder came from seeing I’m the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband on the front page of Hacker News (discussion link) about how a short video clip went viral about a couple and ran away with a deeply unfair and untrue interpretation. I am very glad that the woman in the video decided to publish this: it is an very real and well-written reminder to remain open, defer judgement.
Before getting back into the social commentary, I want to say that I have also found this to be critical in my professional life: a lot of code that looks bad or stupid sometimes isn’t, but I’m missing something: there was a constraint I’m ignorant of, or it turns out I don’t understand the problem nearly as well as I thought I did. I don’t know though if I’m any more successful applying the “remain open, defer judgement” advice there than about people though.
Returning to the original article, I want to highlight a couple of comments from the Hacker News thread.
‘snovymgodym’ wrote:
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it’s very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person’s life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
… which indeed is another aspect of the problem, beyond the “be kind, defer judgement”.
‘pfortuny’ referenced the “father-mother-child-donkey conundrum” which ‘alexjplant’ then looked up and quoted:
C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: “Remember the miller’s donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, ‘Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.’ So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, ‘What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.’ Then both father and son rode, and people then said, ‘Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.’ So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, ‘Here are two asses carrying another ass.’ Then all three walked and people said, ‘What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.’ So let’s go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say.”
They added:
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we’ve charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
Finally, ‘didgetmaster’ pointed out:
Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).
We humans sure as hell love our narratives, and we also tend to not be bothered by its relationship to reality, or lack thereof.