>There's a large middle ground between saccharine niceness and vicious back-stabbing.

Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be inclined to overcompensate with niceness.

>I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

I find the opposite. In science, in order to assess your evidence, you often have adopt a somewhat dispassionate stance, and make judgements unclouded by emotion. An inability to process emotion, then, can be a tactical advantage, because it doesn't incur the overhead of compartmentalization (which taxes my brain). And to go to the extreme, I have had had more than one friend who were extremely impaired in their ability to process human emotions (I think the in thing is to label this 'asperger's') who were extremely good at reasoning, as evidenced by the fact that they were brilliant mathematicians, and I don't mean number crunchers - full on propositional logic and proof-crafters.

> Perhaps you misread me. I'm claiming that saccharine niceness goes WITH vicious back-stabbing. Because people who are vicious back-stabbers are going to be inclined to overcompensate with niceness.

I don't think we really disagree. I think that if conflict is avoided through saccharine niceness, eventually it will come out as vicious back-stabbing, and vice versa as you've noted. So the two apparent opposites actually go hand-in-hand, they feed each other. But when I say a middle ground I mean something like firm politeness. I don't believe that brutality paired with honesty is a middle ground; it's just an aggressive solution instead of a passive aggressive one.

I think when I say bad at reasoning, I really mean anything that at least partially involves a judgment call. A lot of the scientific process is deciding which experiments to do. Yes, an inability to process emotions is generally going to mean you're suited for working with logic, and as such might excel at proofs, programming, theoretical physics, stuff like that.

But the problem I've noticed is that people's careers often get derailed because of emotional issues: it could be because they're passive, they can't handle anger, they get stepped on or taken advantage of, they have grandiose dreams about their research, they become unwilling to admit they were wrong, etc.

Hmmm, maybe a better way to say it is that the firm politeness pairing is a middle ground between the saccharine niceness / vicious back-stabbing pairing and the brutal honesty pairing.

> I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

This is an interesting explanation. Do you think that people bad at understanding their emotions are less aware or mindful of their unconscious biases?

Yeah, more or less. I think that whatever is unconscious (read: lost, forgotten, dissociated, unfelt, or unthought) ends up getting expressed anyway, in yourself or in your relationships. Seeing this expression clearly in the world requires working with your emotions. If you cannot do that, then it's very difficult for any of your strongly held "rational" views to change, because doing so would require dealing with some pretty heavy emotions.

The upshot is that it gets really tiresome to argue in situations where you've realized this is what's happening. In my experience, most of the time that you see hardcore polarization on an issue, where all appeals to reason seem to fall on deaf ears, it's actually due to some kind of emotional blockage like this. At this point, practicing empathy and asserting firm but flexible boundaries is often the only way out.

So, pay attention to your emotions, they're trying to tell you something.

I agree wholeheartedly that unconscious desires find ways to express themselves, but it's novel for me to correlate those who are disconnected from their emotions (i.e. push them into their unconscious) with those who are more likely to fall victim to cognitive biases, dissonance, etc. It makes a ton of sense; for example, it takes all of my mindfulness to stop myself during a discussion/argument and ask myself honestly whether I'm open to hearing someone's argument or if I'm just feigning openness while trying to get a point across that I've tied my ego to. Oh, the inertia of preconceived thoughts and biases.

This is very useful to know, so thanks for the light-bulb moment. It'll be easier to step away from discussions when I can recognize that someone will live and die with their agenda because A) they lack the mindfulness to divorce their emotions from their stance, B) their identity and ego is built upon this stance, and C) no one will let you come by and sweep away their identity/ego without a fight, especially when their emotions, repressed or not, are swarming.

I guess it's easier to trust the judgment someone who's aware of their emotions than someone who's got a glaring blind spot.

Cool, glad my perspective was helpful. Sometimes stepping away from an argument, while it gets you away from being locked into either attachment to the argument or aversion to the argument, can turn into the third poison of disinterest in the argument. Detached engagement is the antidote here. If it's somebody I care about that I'm close to, or if it's myself, often I will ask about and validate associated feelings with the hope but not the expectation that it loosens whatever strongly held stance a little bit. People are a lot less rigid in their thinking when they know that they've been heard both intellectually and emotionally. Most of the time this approach won't actually change anything, but once in a while you'll get to witness a miracle.

Yet another good point re: disinterest in an argument being a potential third poison. I can see how detached engagement at least gives you an opportunity to have your voice be heard without the angst of fully-attached engagement. I think I have a tendency to walk away from arguments with unreasonable people, which seems like a good thing at first but is probably suboptimal from a professional standpoint. Thanks again, friend.