This person did not watch Good Will Hunting. I'm not a fan of the film, I just know for a fact several characters do this at several times. That is, y'know, the plot.

I haven't read further enough to discern whether this is AI slop, but it doesn't look promising.

Most people just don't want to hear, don't want to know. And people know it, so people don't say what they think.

I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".

And NO ONE digs into this for more details? When I was younger this frustrated me, but as I got older I realized this was a reflection of normal human psychology. People avoid interesting topics all the time. "Why did you cheat on your husband?" "How come you're depressed all the time?" "What do you do when no one is watching?" "Do you like your job?" etc ... all of these questions have pretty direct answers, but it seems like people will do almost anything to avoid speaking about uncomfortable topics directly.

It's still not something I fully understand, but it's something I've at least made some peace with. It's human nature, for better or (usually) for worse.

It's only when push comes to shove, or when you get a bitter reality lesson, that you can understand them, or that you can accept and benefit from being told such advice.

> “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

Nobody said that because that was his whole problem, that he _couldn't_ go there. That was his entire character!

Maybe I'm missing something but that's literally what everyone in the movie is telling Will. HIs best friend, his mentor, his girlfriend, his therapist. They all literally say this in some form during the movie. His character growth is believing it himself.

I think it's even simpler: very few people actually have communication skills. Being able to formulate thoughts and communicate clearly is itself a difficult skill, and in the era of generating instantaneous ChatGPT articles and online-first social lives, no one is developing said skill - nor do they realize they're terrible at it. Or at least, they don't want admit it.

Part of the reason movie logic seems illogical ("just say this and the problem is solved!") yet realistic is because we are looking externally at someone else's problems, and not our own. There was a good HN comment yesterday making this exact point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945216

The good news is: if you manage to develop communication skills, you'll be a step ahead of everyone else, especially as people become more reliant on AI chatbots to formulate their thoughts.

Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!

So while Hollywood writers may have just needed a mechanism to make the plot interesting, that pattern can become reality as well.

It's a bit like people talking reading ChatGPT crap, will start talking and writing like ChatGPT.

Might sound simple in theory, reality might get messy.

> It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages.

This is why it's not the "cheapest" way to build drama -- as the author quickly admits, it's how most people actually are. We watch drama precisely because it teaches us how we can improve. We see a character who needs to grow, and either they don't and is a cautionary tale (and shows us what might happen to us if we don't), or they do (and shows us how we might improve our own lives if we learn the same lesson).

Nothing about this post is wrong, exactly, but the problem of "walking around in a haze of denial" isn't something that you're going to fix with a blog post. This is a huge part of therapy -- talking about the issues you're facing, so your therapist can start to put together the patterns of what you're in denial about, and surface them to you so you can actually address them. But the whole point is, you generally can't do this yourself, because you're not seeing the patterns to begin with. You're so used to them, they're invisible. You can't do it by yourself, almost by definition. How can you fix the things your brain is hiding from you it just not seeing to begin with?

So this post is on the right track, but the idea of trying to distill it down into three "tips" is about as simplistic as "Step 2: Draw the rest of the f***ing owl". They're not wrong, but learning to apply them properly can take years of work.

If you grew up with an emotionally erratic parent or caregiver, who might suddenly explode with anger at unpredictable times, that’s probably why you’re unwilling to bluntly address what should be simple issues. You were conditioned early on to think that anything that could possibly be conceived as critical would be met with anger and possibly violence. So you avoid exposing yourself to that risk.

What you have to learn, and what this post is indirectly trying to tell you, is that’s not normal, and most people won’t react like that.

Once I learned this, it changed how I live. Similar to the article, I’m much more likely to say out loud the thing that people are only thinking. It removes so many potential problems that create prisoners dilemma type payout stuctures that it rarely seems useful not to make things explicit.

That's the core of most of real world issues be it at work or relationships of any type. I can also personally attest most of issues of any type in my megacorp are caused by bad communication. How many times you see a barely functional marriage where unspoken things hang around and one party is afraid to tell them to the other side, and subtle hints are ignored. How many folks from older generations had a good talk about their true sexual preferences for example. Some nationalities have issues speaking frankly, ie British circle around issues with too much politeness. Good luck getting any Indian (in India) telling you "no" or "I don't know" (spent so much time wandering in wrong directions in good ol' times before smart phones).

Remove this issue and psychologists lose 95% of their work. Perfectly clear communication is an exception in this world.

I'd say movies gradually found this topic since many people will find themselves in those movies and identify with struggles of protagonists. Then logically frequent ending resolving many if not all issues allows people to have a little dream of resolving stuff they struggle with (subconsciously or consciously) in their lives.

To say it differently, define the smart contract that details the expected behavior! Everything else is then supposed to be mechanical. If one doesn't want to abide by the contract, one doesn't then get the associated payments or privileges!