“Susan reminds me of her uncle. She has the vigour, the drive, the mental capacity of Richard Abernethie. It may be my fancy that she lacks some of the kindliness and the warmth of my old friend.”

“Women are never kind,” remarked Poirot, “Though they can sometimes be tender. She loves her husband?”

“Devotedly, I should say. But really, Poirot, I can’t believe – I won’t believe for one moment that Susan could have – ”

“That is natural, mon ami. As for me, I am not so sentimental about beautiful young ladies,” said Poirot.

Your A.I. background shines through quite brightly in your thinking. Sometimes I ‘m not sure if you’re producing literary criticism or identifying components in a model for an A.I. simulation of an ideal mind! An intersection of the two?

“My take on the Poirot quote is that just because people can empathise with your feelings, and interact in a way that shows that understanding, it’s a stretch to actually move to the strategic domain where they adjust their own purposes to accommodate yours..”

Hmm…I don’t think I have a problem understanding what’s being got at here – I’m just amazed that out of the two genders, it’s the females who get blamed for this sort of psychology, IMHO. Yes, there are many instances where this fits the bill (we’re not all Mother Teresas) but from my experience men usually don’t even get to first base (empathy), let alone second (empathy driven action). Over all, one of those charming quotes one often loves to hear coming out of the mouths of Wildesque authors, precisely because they’re untrue (oh, how we love wit – we’d forgive a wit anything – even murder!)

That’s probably some kind of genius there, but I’m not sure if it can be removed from context. I think the Poirot quote about women is similar; the context of the novel will define “tender” and “kind” sufficiently to allow you to get the concept, which is part of the beauty of a mystery novel; it is about a way of explaining the world, despite the constant loss of information (people keep getting bumped off, or clues disappear).

My take on the Poirot quote is that just because people can empathise with your feelings, and interact in a way that shows that understanding, it’s a stretch to actually move to the strategic domain where they adjust their own purposes to accommodate yours.

The power of Poirot and Houses’ narrative approach is that it is in harmony with that of the world’s creator, they have an over-arching insight that allows them to put ideas together correctly, over and above others, because they don’t choose options the author doesn’t, or rather that the options they automatically blank off very rarely lead to important omissions. And also because In that respect they are very close to Homes, the difference being that Homes’ methods deal more with objects in space rather than working with the internal stories of people. This is why Poirot engineers a confession out of the person, because he makes them “obviously guilty” to themselves and those in the room, it is a human-subjective proof, which is then made legally obvious by their confession.

Onto the other quote, perhaps the purpose of the complex psychology (or systems theory or whatever) is to rearrange the complex situations so that you can make simple moral judgements; bundling up the morality of the situation into a way of acting you can say yes or no to.

Oddly enough, I don’t consider it very provocative, and I do in fact find it to be true in my (obviously anecdotal) experience. Obviously, to test it, you’d have to translate the rather literary words “tender” and “kind” into definitions psychologists could agree on, and design some sort of test.

But the overall thesis does not depend on which of such right-brained beliefs you do/do not subscribe to. The point is, you need an arsenal of beliefs like this to navigate by, otherwise life just gets too complicated.

Christie herself had a whole lot MORE provocative beliefs. In one part of her biography, she says to the interviewer, “Men are so much cleverer than women, don’t you think?” It is at once a serious and left-handed compliment — it becomes clear later that she does believe it to be true, but that she believes it to be a masculine advantage that is not worth much.

Justin: in my case, the simplification of morality was a natural consequence of the unpleasant realization, “crap, everyday I am growing older, fatter and more like those sermonizing blowhards I used to dislike 10 years ago.”

Venkat

I know this sentence is just a throw-away one in the context of the entire essay, but it threw me off so much, I just had to ask: Do you really “find [it] to be true,” and on the basis of what kind of observations? It’s rather a provocative viewpoint to hold personally, I would think.

“This again, is an element of his thinking style that I find useful in the real world: keep your psychology complex, but your morality simple. Otherwise you’ll never get anything done.”

Particularly liked this bit. Suspect it may be where I’ve been going wrong…