Id argue that rather than him exposing the class as a hoax, he exposed that his level of comfort with the course content was quite low. The class is about emotional intelligence, and he essentially admits he is lacking in this (not able to understand why his actions provoke certain responses in people).
I've taken a similar class, and the content can be quite uncomfortable (and sometimes the content strays into bs territory, but I and others find much of the content of value). A common reaction to this uncomfort is to deny the validity of the concept of emotions / EQ, but many people who try to understand these concepts do come out with a better understanding of how to engage emotionally
I know for many logic minded people the concept of emotional intelligence seems like bs, but it is real (sorry for asserting this rather than providing evidence, but that's another topic). My brother is on the spectrum and I'm on the autistic side of normal, and it's my experience that EQ can be learned and that learning it valuable and worthwhile personally and professionally
Are you really so sure? It’s not an easy thing to maintain awareness of the workings of one’s emotions, especially for someone raised in a repressive, collectivist culture that doesn’t value the internal life of the individual, and especially if that individual is on the spectrum, in which case the emotions are “buried” even deeper.
If his emotions are buried so deep, that there no way to see real world consequences of them, than maybe it is better to say, that there are no emotions?
I think, that mottos in Western culture are just pathetic ones. Western culture knows nothing about how to raise steady emotions in people. I was born in USSR, and I saw how it should be done. But there is one consequence: with experience comes tolerance to external attempts to raise my emotions by some lovely motto. Now it is really hard to. "All people deserve to live healthy lives" -- what is it? I was grown on ideas of Worldwide Communist Revolution and bringing freedom from damned capitalists to all people? I read books, I watched films, discussed this in a classes, I learnt world history in terms of societies struggling to make one more step toward communism. And after that I hear motto for preschool kids. The topic for boring school essay about role of Communism in bringing healthy life to everyone. I had eaten tons of this shit before I came to a school. I have eaten even more in school. Why I should have any emotions now?
Really, I can hardly believe that any adult can be touched by such a motto. I'm unable to understand it, even when I try to imagine how it could be, if I was not born under ideologic pressure.
The Black Swan can be a good motto, because it is a symbol of some non-trivial idea, because it reminds me something that I can forget to think through one more time. It reminds me about ideas which I want to think through again and again. But "healty lives for everyone" is something like communism, it will not be like that in the overseeable future. It is just one more ideologic lie, which is must be spoken due to some social protocol. Pointless tradition.
I've never heard a good case that emotions exist. I'm a believer that we have both a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that are activated reflexively by the same types of stimulation that activate them in other animals; and as humans who deal with abstractions as physical metaphors, those abstractions stimulate our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems by activating the same ancient reflexes.
As humans are rationalizers, they construct reasons for these nervous activations after the fact. If you inculcate them with simple slogans that become habitual, they will interpret themselves in terms of those slogans. It's a failure of introspection, or rather a rerouting of any rational introspection through a lens of theory-theory[1].
Are you arguing against dualism? What kind of existence could emotions have that is not "rooted" in the material biological world?
Emotions are a useful concept that helps explain and predict human behaviour and makes human interactions more predictable/rational. If a person is sad at t0 i know that his answer to go to a party at t0+1 will be lower than if his emotional state was happy at t0. That you can describe emotions by biological processes is inconsequential. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
I've never heard someone say they've never heard a good case that emotions exist before. Would you mind elaborating? For me, I recognize emotione in myself that fit my understanding of the word "emotions", and that is sufficient for me to believe they exist
Many emotions have physiological "symptoms" and are associated with certain brain regions and pathways. Our understanding of biology does not permit us to define emotions to the level of physiological detail that we have for, say, inflammation, but that doesn't mean emotions don't exist
You might like Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” Emotion is, as you say, essentially a higher order function of the nervous system—-some complex way of amplifying and dampening certain systems in order to adapt to circumstances. We understand emotion less clearly than we understand multilayer perceptrons/neural networks/basic learning and reasoning.
But even dogs seem to have emotions, don’t they? My dog gets excited if I offer him a treat, and sad if I don’t give it to him.
> Really, I can hardly believe that any adult can be touched by such a motto.
I grew up in the east block too and I come upon this quite often. The peak of it is the current political situation in the USA.
I wonder if this is connected with the pressure to be young and healthy for as long as possible or at least looking like it which allows you to participate in "young culture" whith everything that comes along with it (tech, speach, dress, views,...). The side effect is a infantile look at the world and concepts that are supposed to run it on all levels.
I work for an US company in Germany and see realities collide every day.
Nope, I don't mean that brainwashing is ethically good. Its just much more effective in totalitarian state.
If "steady emotions" is not clear, it may be due to my bad English. I used "steady" in the sense "persistent" and "strong". You say "communism" and people respond with strong emotions, mainly positive. I didn't tried to judge it ethically. Let's leave this for another discussion.
I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt, that he knows his own emotions. I simply assume that I know the inner workings of my own mind better than anybody else can. If somebody tells me that they have a magic window into my mind, I assume that they're trying to manipulate or bullshit me.
It's not just repressed Communists. I work with scientists and engineers, and they also roll their eyes at corporate slogans. In turn, the managers know this.
> I simply assume that I know the inner workings of my own mind better than anybody else can.
I think this is a very bad assumption; Eric Schwitzgebel has spent a lot of his career making the case that it is a bad assumption: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
Emotions come from the unconscious. Of course they can be difficult to detect. Nonetheless they can shape our thinking and behavior dramatically. Read Carl Jung, “The Undiscovered Self.”
