Optimism
github.com
github.com
I saw this talk in person at Nordic Ruby, and it was one of the best talks I've seen (and I've seen a bunch). Strangely enough, I don't really think back and think much about "optimism" when I think of the talk, though, even though the talk is about optimists.
My takeaway was the type of tooling and thought processes that are advantageous when approaching problems and conflict. In many talks — mine included — people will say something along the lines of "be nice to your teammates and leave good feedback", for example, but that's really vague. Reg's talk helped me understand what that type of feedback might be, how it can be explicitly phrased, and how I can give concrete feedback without being antagonistic. I think it makes for a more effective argument, especially when building product, but also it just makes for friendlier humans.
Yeah, this does lead to "optimistic people", hence the title, but I just thought it was weird to see discussion here about the merits of positive people versus negative people. I think the talk's a much bigger dialogue about interacting with humans and, possibly more importantly, yourself.
Anyway, I really liked the talk, and as much as this Markdown is great at getting the point across, this is one of the talks I'd suggest actually watching. \m/
Actionable and specific mean that the person on the receiving end has a set of concrete actions to take to implement.
For example, "get better at programming" isn't specific, and "get a PhD in Computer Science" probably isn't actionable, but "work on improving your ability to write readable code by working through the exercises in this book" is something that can be worked with (especially if you can spend some time to mentor that person!)
Kindness matters a lot, though, and it is different from niceness.
When giving feedback, some people say that they are brutally honest, but often the emphasis is on the first word, rather than the second. Things like "The module you wrote is crap because your code sucks and is hard to maintain." doesn't help in any way, shape or form.
On the other hand, others that focus on being nice often heap on the praise, while excluding or downplaying the criticism. "You worked really hard on that module, and maybe should should spend a more little time refactoring and cleaning things up" is too nice.
Kindness means sharing the good and the bad, but without being aggressive or accusatory: "Thanks for the hard work on that module. It does exactly what it needs to, but I'm really struggling to understand what's going on in there, as there are some really big methods and classes. Breaking those apart into smaller separate objects and functions would help a lot."
As someone who prefers giving and receiving terse feedback... I would suggest that there's nothing wrong with brutal honesty for type of people who appreciate receiving it.
If I write code and forget to test some specific cases, I would much rather get a code review of "Missing tests for negative numbers, empty string, null" than a longwinded and "nice" version. I don't need to hear compliments on what's right... just what can be improved. Some people really value bluntness and see directness as more friendly because it's honest.
I have met more than a few people that said they preferred "brutal honesty", but would still react very defensively to straightforward, terse feedback.
Being terse without seeming to be on the attack is very difficult, and it is human nature to defend ourselves -- and stop listening! -- if we perceive that we are being attacked.
I used to say the same thing, but now I think I was wrong. I didn't want to hear compliments on what's right. But I did need it. Focusing on negatives helped me reduce error rates. But ignoring the positives limited my ability to grow.
What got me to slowly switch was learning about appreciative inquiry. It's a practice of focusing strongly on the good aspects of something and seeking to amplify them. I looked into it because a team I was working with had these brutally negative retrospectives. They were in a rut of flagellating themselves every week about all their failures. They were a great team, but weren't performing well because they became gradually more stressed and discouraged. And after I saw that in them, I eventually saw it in myself, too.
I'm now 6 or 7 years into consciously switching approaches and I'd never go back. Just today I was pairing with a younger programmer, and we even took some time to appreciate their anxiety. That fear of failing was causing them a lot of problems, but instead of asking them not to worry, I asked them to channel their anxiety into areas where it was useful, like writing good tests.
That said, I'm with you on not wanting "nice" versions of things, which I see as a social performance, and not actual kindness.
This is key. I wonder though, what's a good way to signal that to friends and coworkers? I personally declare Crocker's rules[0], but I rarely have the opportunity to communicate that to people I'm talking to.
[0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker's_rules
"By declaring commitment to Crocker's rules, one authorizes other debaters to optimize their messages for information, even when this entails that emotional feelings will be disregarded. This means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind, so that if you're offended, it's your own fault. The underlying assumption is that rudeness is sometimes necessary for effective conveyance of information, if only to signal a lack of patience or tolerance: after all, knowing whether the speaker is becoming angry or despondent is useful rational evidence. Two people using Crocker's Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting.
Thus, one who has committed to these rules largely gives up the right to complain about emotional provocation, "flaming", "trolling", "abuse" (hopelessly subjective terms) and other alleged violations of etiquette. They give these rights up in the interest of effective debate."
A simple example: say you already communicated with the guy in the past. If you add a reference to this previous communication, the reader will remember you better and adjust the frame.
There's so many things passing through language, many are very volatile but still important. We're not computers. Human language have very little in common with computer languages.
That said, this assumes that all communication is between two individuals, and doesn't provide signaling to other members of the group. For instance, if both you and I adopt crocker's rules, but Bob and Susan do not, a new member of our group may assume incorrectly that this type of communication is appropriate for Bob and Susan, or create an environment where the new/less powerful member may be less willing to speak up because of the perceived tone of communication.
It also seems to be position of relative power: one adopting Crocker's rules assumes to be in a position where certain types of speech do no harm to them.
> I would much rather get a code review of "Missing tests for negative numbers, empty string, null" than a longwinded and "nice" version
I agree that niceness isn't always necessary. Fortunately, that's not what the talk is about. For me, the examples you gave actually fulfills all the criteria for optimistic criticism:
- It's impersonal: the focus is on what the code is missing, not your ability as a coder.
- It's specific: there are hyper-specific criticism.
- It's temporary: the tests are merely "missing" and that's a condition that can be quickly changed.
I have been practicing detaching critical feedback from the person and instead attaching it onto the situation or context for quite a while now. In any form, I think that point is crucial.
Could you give an example of what you're imagining a longwinded nice version would be like? Because this seems mostly fine, just a bit clipped.
All I'd really expect to improve it is something like: "This is mostly fine. It just needs tests for negative numbers, empty strings and null." Adding just a few words validates their work, and more practically, it also clarifies that the criticisms are exhaustive.
> As someone who prefers giving and receiving terse feedback... I would suggest that there's nothing wrong with brutal honesty for type of people who appreciate receiving it.
It seems to me that you cited the fragment of donw's comment about "brutally honest", but ineffective feedback ("The module you wrote is crap because your code sucks and is hard to maintain.") and then started arguing that some people like receiving terse feedback.
But won't you agree that the example of "brutally honest" feedback wasn't in any way terse and that "brutally honest" doesn't necessarily mean terse?
I find the second part of the "kind" feedback much more terse: "Breaking those big methods and classes into smaller separate objects and functions would help a lot".
Edit: Found it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjntzo-mYc
To be more optimistic assess good stuff as personal, general, and permanent and negative as impersonal, specific and temporal.
Make notes everyday about your assessments and correct them.
There is research backing this thesis.
Is there a way for a layman to assess the quality of this research. I've read many assertions of research on HN on topics similar to this. eg: Meditation is supposed to help with depression(among other things) but seems like most research is extremely poor quality [1]?.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19123875
Most clinical trials on meditation practices are generally characterized by poor methodological quality with significant threats to validity in every major quality domain assessed. Despite a statistically significant improvement in the methodological quality over time, it is imperative that future trials on meditation be rigorous in design, execution, analysis, and the reporting of results.
There's literally too much to cite :-)
Googling for surveys, this was the top result: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/ (Conclusion: "In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies.")
And as much as I want to resist linking to Wikipedia, it really is a great place to find a bunch of reference material, as well as discover all the search terms you might need to know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
(I am sorta-kinda a CBT skeptic, at least personally. But I know a lot of people for whom they claim it's been life-changing, and this is what they recommend.)
It seems too hard for a layman to make heads or tails of it. Let alone make recommendations to others, which seems irresponsible and dangerous to say the least.
https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/705/is-c...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/13/things-that-sometimes-w...
http://slatestarcodex.com/tag/psychiatry/
I only read a couple of these and that was a while ago, but one interesting (and completely unproven) idea was that CBT's effect size could progressively vanish because so many of the useful ideas are being incorporated into folk psychology.
---
There's a longer post that I'd like to write about this topic in general (CBT, mindfulness, thoughtful self-help à la the OP) that I'd like to write, but that's going to take more thought. So I'm just going to throw some notes down.
The conclusion I've reached is that you can take that same analytical lens you use to tackle technical topics, turn it inward, and get actual benefit for relatively little time invested.
Recently I read Your Brain at Work. There were some flaws (eg, it really pushed ego depletion, which has failed to replicate), but one idea that stuck with me is that mindfulness isn't just hippie "being present" stuff. The meditative exercises can feel like that, but there's also a very analytical reflective aspect. One benefit of meditation is that it makes you more conscious of your own thought processes, which allows you to notice and stop unwanted mental processes as they arise.
Some other recent essays made the point that the most important benefit of the quantified-self movement is reflection, and you should make your choices about what and how to track based on that.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/24/the-holy-grail-of-self-...
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/21/a-framework-of-experime... (the section Concrete Reflexivity is the most relevant)
I've been working on some habits inspired by http://lesswrong.com/lw/fux/my_workflow/. What I found most valuable was incorporating periodic, deliberate reflection into a daily routine with a (digital, searchable, cross-referenceable) paper trail.
I realized that TODO lists weren't just useful for remembering to do things but also useful for clearing out mental static. So instead of just keeping lists for work/school, I also kept a list of more frivolous things (project ideas to flesh out, looking up peoples' opinions on some book, etc.) and would offload any distracting thoughts that came to mind during work hours to it.
I'd heard somewhere that speaking to someone in the morning helps you wake up faster, so I begin practicing Duolingo in bed on important mornings, and kept track of how long it took me to get to work each day (+how much sleep I'd gotten, etc.).
I'd been reading about Jonathan Haidt's theory of moral value and how a lot of human political instincts could be framed as extensions of the basic disgust instinct, so I decided to try deliberately linking distraction with uncleanliness in my mind. I don't think that was particularly helpful or harmful. But in the process I noticed that uncleanliness for me corresponds to a feeling of skin-tingling, like I hadn't showered for a day or two, and I did start having that same feeling when I was getting off-task during the day.
I'm not sure any of this has made me significantly more productive, but the sense of mental control has made me calmer.
Try something and see -- that (experiment) is even more in the original scientific spirit than relying solely on citations.
It's doubly so for things in soft-sciences, where you don't even have the rigor of hard-sciences, and things can be widely cited and praised but be nothing but the ideological fashion (or academic fashion) of the decade, to be scorned a few years later.
I.e.
praise: personal, general, and permanent
criticism: impersonal, specific and temporal
> in order to help people realize that they can do better
vs
> in order to help people feel happy (via optimism)
It is not on your side or against you. It's just something that has happened. How you react is what can be positive or negative.
Realistically, sometimes one must realise that one is the problem, not others or circumstances.
A: Yes, I wrote an essay about my experience after reading Seligman's work on optimism seven years ago, and it was discussed on HN.
Is it better, in your view, to be optimistic, or to be consistent in your evaluation?
Should we strive to be more "optimistic" or to be more "accurate" in our personal evaluations?
Personally, I think that if you're balanced and reasonably happy, there are better things to work on than trying to become "optimistically asymmetric."
But if you fit his "pessimism" model, working on becoming more optimistic may be vital to your health.
Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sounds exactly like how narcissists think.
Just look at Trump. He claims personal responsibility for his successes, but his failures are always one-time events that were other people's fault.
Where should one draw the line?
> Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long-term pattern of abnormal
> behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an
> excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings.
I think you can be optimistic without having an exaggerated feeling of self-importance, and certainly it has nothing to do with a need for admiration or lacking understanding for the feelings of others.
So... I think the answer as to where to draw the line is, "If you are aware enough to worry about the line, you don't need the line."
Engage in self reflection and be honest with yourself, something I doubt Trump does.
Sure it can. Happiness is orthogonal to ethicality or mental health. The line is not a line but rather a homeostatic balance subject to your own priorities and your culture's definition of those concepts.
However the flip side of this is that it essentially trains people to disclaim any personal responsibility for bad events, and this has been mentioned in investigations into atrocities committed by the US military. Unfortunately the only citations I can find with a quick Google search are from pretty shady or biased sources, but I do remember seeing some more reliable-looking ones in the past.
It's also a common claim that CEOs tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies, and it's not hard to see how this might apply there. I read Seligman's book several years ago (and like Reginald, I recommend that almost everyone reads it - it's fascinating) but when I took the test I only came out as mostly optimistic. On 4 of the 6 axes I was considered optimistic, but the other two could be colloquially translated as "when I do bad things I think it's my fault". Now according to Seligman, if I didn't think like that I'd be way better off, but I think I'm ok with maintaining the psychological equivalent of a moral compass there.
Seligman did some work with optimism and the forces, but the Learned Helplessness stuff was taken by two people unconnected with Seligman (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who turned it into a manual for torturing people.
Seligman's name was dragged through the mud for this, but he didn't do the work on torture, and his research was into identifying the causes of Learned Helplessness precisely so people could avoid it. He openly discusses helping the forces apply his research to aiding captured soldiers resist torture:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessn...
There is a lot of he-said/he-said at work, but there is no evidence that he worked with the CIA or anybody else on implementing torture.
Of course, you may be discussing something else entirely!
A: I use an OS X presentation application called DeckSet. DeckSet uses markdown files as its persistence model. That is very convenient for a number of reasons, including the fact that I can manage my presentations with git/github, something that is inconvenient with apps that use a proprietary binary format.
The presentation is available in a more conventional rendering here: https://speakerdeck.com/raganwald/optimism
We can obviously get around it with something like
Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("img")).forEach(img => img.parentNode.removeChild(img));
A: I don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say that he is a data-driven man, and some simple A/B testing revealed that people were more likely to read a book purporting to be about "Optimism," than something they'd never heard of.
It must have been about 10 years ago that I spent a full night reading your ruby essays. It must have been the most engaging writing on programming I've seen.
Also -- this is great and I really enjoyed it. As I have all stuff of yours that I've read. In particular anything related to trampolines and javascript.
A: That you can measure optimism;
B: And that it correlates with performance;
C: That cognitive therapy can increase optimism;
D: That the increased optimism correlates with increased performance.
He published his studies, but I have not reviewed them, I am just repeating the claims from his book.
Thanks.
First, there was a dramatic immediate improvement. I feel like some of that was the material, and some the "Hawthorne Effect:" Anything that forces you to inspect yourself has a short-term beneficial effect. For example, if you tell someone to count their calories, they usually eat better for a month or two simply because counting the calories forces awareness.
Second, I have slipped from time to time, and in each case, I was able to come back to health with some form of CBT.
Third, I find myself using this reasoning technique on an almost daily basis, especially on the Internet where it is easy to encounter negative people. If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll find me saying (somewhat flippantly) "That is your baggage, and I'm not going to carry it for you."
There is a touch of snark in that remark, but at it's root, I believe it is Seligman's theory again: I'm asserting that something negative is impersonal, and by refusing to carry it, I'm making it temporary.
I'd like to help someone who I feel is overly pessimistic, but they are very skeptic of self-help books and therapies, did you feel that way? Do you have any tips to help overcome that?
So... You adopt CBT, maybe you do more of it right away, but you're adopting something that will become part of your life.
One reaction I had is that in my training to teach K-12, we were taught that our positive feedback should also be impersonal, specific, and temporal. This was to avoid falling into the trap of fixed mindset, even if it's more dangerous on the negative side.
And I think I personally appreciate praise that fits into that scheme. It makes me feel like the other person actually noticed and thought about the craft of what I've done, not just the outcome. The other side can feel a bit like flattery, which I distrust.
Not that I think the benefits of the other type of praise are unfounded. Just another point of view. Perhaps there's no shortcut to putting in the effort to learn the mix of styles that works for individual people and situations.
There are a number of ways to reconcile the two approaches. For example, one can note that much of what Dweck describes is a kind of Impostor Syndrome, where people start out with a negative impression of themselves, and have a fixed mindset about their lack of skill.
If someone has a belief that they are a terrible programmer, telling them they are a good programmer doesn't help. They simply dispute it, a well-understood phenomenon. For them, you must provide evidence to shake their permanent belief about their own shortcomings, and being specific is the way to do it.
But what if they are not already mired in self-doubt? That is another matter entirely.
Now here is something I try to apply. Note the difference between a skill related to production, and a "meta-skill," something that enables or powers other skills. One person I know told me that they are terrible at X and Y and Z in their profession, but that they have "grit," the ability to grind it out and get results relentlessly.
Note that they have a positive, permanent, and general belief about a skill, "grit," that isn't a direct producer of results, but enables results.
Another person told me that they reject general praise outright, because they know that they make a lot of mistakes in programming. So they want very specific feedback about what they did well, not general praise. You can guess what came next: They told me that they were not instinctively good, but that they could learn from feedback.
Aha! Another fixed belief about a meta-skill, learning.
And in fact, what Dweck advocates is learning to adopt a fixed mindset about the growth mindset! Another meta-skill. So perhaps, what works is encouraging fixed beliefs about skills that empower or enable the directly productive skills.
But I don't know. Unlike Seligman and Dweck, I am not testing and measuring.
The thing I worry about, however, is that this further entrenches the idea that there is anything that is permanent! If someone tells me I am good/bad at something, I think "well, I am good/bad at this particular thing in this particular way right now." General, permanent praise can ring hollow for me because it doesn't seem like something which can even "actually" be true, but at least I'm symmetric about this with criticism. (I also can't discount the fact that I heard so much general praise growing up that my brain tends to automatically ignores it as being likely ungrounded.)
I suspect adopting the growth mindset has an underlying mindset of impermanence, since if things aren't guaranteed to remain fixed, changing for the better is always a possibility.
Here's an anecdote I find interesting about people and how they view themselves: I was teaching an introductory calculus course, which tends to be full of freshmen, people generally known to be exploring their identities. After a quiz early on in the semester, a student came up to me, pointing to the score, with disbelief "how could this be? I am a good student!" There was a strong cognitive dissonance, and they were blinded because, I suspect, they didn't want to believe they might have been someone else this whole time. Exams don't know whether or not you are a "good student." (The student was bright and creative, and I think went on to do architecture instead.) (This was my first semester as a graduate student. I tried to handle the situation as well as I could given my role, ability, and right to interfere, but I'm no psychologist.)
Sometimes thinking about believing something just because it is emotionally beneficial reminds me of the following exchange from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (by everyone's favorite pessimist):
Slartibartfast: I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. (laughs)
Anyway, to steal your signoff: But I don't know. Unlike you I haven't read Seligman and Dweck, and unlike them I am not testing and measuring.
My concern with the attitude of "oh this is a temporary problem" is that it could lead to apathy. A kind of "waiting for godot" situation.
Or I've also seen "I don't have a good job because affirmative action keeps me down / I don't have a good job because employers are biased against me", which is also a permanent.
Probably the best combo for self improvement is personal/specific/temporary, which would be "I don't have a good job because I haven't studied enough for interviews", which suggests a solution.
It also sounds to me like a pessimistic attitude can be very useful, especially if it guards a person against taking unnecessary risks and trying to overreach beyond his or her capabilities.
Isn't it desirable to have a healthy mixture of both attitudes rather than just one?
Seems like you are describing a part of it.
I understand the association with up and optimism, but in this document, I think that it could be distracting the reader from the content you are presenting.
Thank you for writing this, though!
I imagine the inspiration for them choosing a caret is that carets are used to signal footnotes in some markdown flavours.
What good things? I mean, not only can I not remember a good thing happening, but I have even forgotten how it is supposed to look like. For example, a good time? a good night of sleep? I kept the memory of these during a few years even though they were not happening any more, but for some time I have forgotten how they feel.
So the prerequisites for this method are not always present.
However, Being "optimistic" does not preclude change. The optimistic view is that each such event is driven by the prospective customer's choice (impersonal), is a stand-alone event (temporary), and is only a lost sale (specific).
The optimist is free to explore some options. For one thing, maybe they are selling to the wrong customers? Or perhaps their sales techniques don't fit those customers?
Since the optimist believes these are one-time events, the optimist believes it could go differently tomorrow. That doesn't mean it will magically go differently tomorrow! The optimist believes that they can make some changes and get different results tomorrow.
The pessimist believes that since they are permanently at fault, change is futile. The optimist believes that change is possible.
Now what about the idea that something is generally wrong with the optimist? For example, perhaps they don't listen in general, and this is why they are not selling. Well, "Stop being rude" is difficult to act on. "Listen more..." What does that mean exactly?
The optimist can drill down into specifics. What, specifically is going wrong? Ah, customers don't believe the product suits their needs. We can fix this, do more needs analysis in the qualifying portion of the sales process, and then write proposals in a "where-we-are-today, where=we-want-to-be, gap, how-the-product-forms-a-bridge" format.
So they fix listening in sales. And then they notice a problem in their personal relationships, and they fix listening there too. Lather, rinse, repeat. And perhaps they graduate to fixing a self-absorbption problem.
General problems need an accumulation of specific fixes to conquer, and learned optimism can help.
When you feel vulnerable, every little thing is about to crush your soul, so you take everything personally, it will result in permanent damage because you're so vulnerable and the world of full of danger aka very general and accurate assertion.
This is an accurate worldview from the perspective of a child with parents who don't do a good job of building the kid up into a competent adult (everyone I know)
So the solution is to grow into a self-sufficient adult.
Most adults I know are incompetent at most things in life, the ones who are depressed/unhappy are either more sensitive/aware, or have just been dealt a harsher hand in life.
The solution is always the same, and it'll take years, decades even.
But a few small victories toward self-sufficiency will hopefully propel you to believe in your faculties a bit more - we're very capable little creatures :)
As to the point of the presentation, it's an interesting view of things. Making a note of my explanations explanations is something I should do. Introspective exercises like this can sometimes lead to surprising discoveries.
To have done all he has with 'a frontal lobe tied behind his back' makes it even more impressive.
Although I can't say that I agree with all, I can surely identify with the attempt to systematize our way of though, and the division of personal/impersonal, general/speficif and permanent/impermanent is interesting.
On a (not so quite) side note, one thing that comes to mind when reading this is that meditation can be used as an efficient way of controlling your thoughts, to the point where you can learn to avoid the pitfalls that the author mentions (ex: taking criticism to heart, pessimisn, etc).
It's not controversial to say that our moods can affect our interpretations and decisions, but it is (to me anyway) to make a blanket statement that moods always do effect interpretations and decisions. I find it extremely controversial to suggest that the answer to this "mood bias" is to willfully delude yourself by forcing yourself to think "optimistically". The author suggests that mood is a binary decision between optimism and pessimism. In life, very few decisions are binary, despite human propensity to view things as black and white. I would suggest that there is a middle ground between optimism and pessimism (call it "realism"). As a poker player for several decades, I can tell you that you are forced to discard optimism and pessimism (at least at the poker table) and adopt "realism" if you want to be successful. You can't let your moods affect your judgement. In regards to the author's statement, when someone smiles at you, you have to dispassionately calculate what that smile means given the context and other "knowns" you have to evaluate the situation. If you allow your mood to effect how you judge that smile will ensure your long-term failure as a poker player.
I'd argue that, with some effort, the same mindset can be extended to every day life, neither optimistic or pessimistic. Calculating outcomes and probabilities based on what you know, see, and hear without "mood bias" because you expect good or bad things to happen. I would agree that if you are going to make deluded, biased assessments based on your mood that you are better off doing so with a smile then a frown, but you are best off if you reject self-delusion all together.
However, it's worth pointing out that poker is a zero sum game if you choose winning as the measure of success. But many situations are not zero sum. There's the possibility that optimism could increase the pot for everyone. Furthermore, enjoying the process can be a reward in itself. If you enjoy playing poker losing does not necessarily equate to failure.
All the worst initiatives that have crashed and burned around me in my career, smoldering craters, were built and planned by people who thought they were generally competent and that things would generally be fine, we can bet big on this one. All their past failures, ruins crumbled under the pressure of unmanaged complexity or debris scattered by some unforeseen risk, were minor specifics, won't happen this time.
The author naturally struggles with pessimism, so his presentation and experiences are framed around forcibly developing more optimistic thought patterns. For the people you describe, perhaps the inverse should be applied (the same article from that perspective would be an interesting read!).
I would say that it's probably generally better for you (and those around you) to err on the side of optimism.
He comes very close to explicitly stating that mild optimistic self-delusion is good, because it will make you happier.
He acknowledges depressive realism, that is, the finding that depressed people make more accurate judgments in certain situations, but doesn't really address it.
He's used his research to teach optimism to soldiers so that they are more effective. But perhaps it is appropriate for soldiers in the middle of a war to not feel super optimistic?
>If the premise is that the effects upon your past success are equally likely to be general or specific regardless of their sign
I don't know if that's a true premise. It's an empirical question. There's no fundamental reason why the universe should be even-handed.
I read a good portion of Learned Optimism a while back. I think it's a dangerous book to read for certain types of depressive personalities. Ironically, there's a reading of the book that reinforces pessimism.
I have not read Seligman's work, but I can see at least one way in which the asymmetry in response to positive vs. negative can be justified.
If someone is doing something positive, you want them to keep doing it--so you want it to be permanent. And you want them to internalize whatever it is that makes them do that thing, make it part of themselves--so you want it to be personal. And you want them to expand whatever that positive factor is to other domains--so you want it to be general.
If someone is doing something negative, you want them to stop doing it--so you want it to be temporary. And you want them to not make it part of themselves--so you want it to be impersonal. And you want them to keep it confined and not let it affect other domains--so you want it to be specific.
In other words, the "optimistic bias" is an asymmetric strategy to achieve an asymmetric goal--maintain positives, but change negatives.
The main exercise we used was to write down my thoughts, feelings, physiology and actions in response to a situation. Then we did it again for a more positive imagining of how the same situation could have played out. It's useful to see how each aspect effects the others and identifying how things could be changed helps a lot when the same situation arises again.
For sure it wouldn't be helpful to be wildly over optimistic, it must be very stressful to intentionally delude yourself. But the error bars on most of these judgements are so wide I don't see anything wrong with erring on the optimistic side.
Of course another skill is learning to avoid unhelpful judgements altogether. But that's a different topic and I won't pretend I have much insight there.
It's pretty easy to try to bias yourself toward happiness, but still have a daemon in the background making sure you're not diverging from reality too much. If you're very concerned about being biased, then you can probably trust yourself to be reasonable when being biased in this way.
For many of us, we're more inclined to be irrationally biased against ourselves than in favor of ourselves. The conscious, monitored, and controlled bias the OP describes can counteract our natural pessimistic inclinations.
I wish I had the motivation to give a self-help lecture at a Rails conference. I'm sure no one would come though, and if anyone did come, they would probably hate me for talking about such self-important windbag topics like depression, motivation, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Signed,
The Perennial Pessimist
Elsewhere in this discussion, you will find a link to a video of the presentation, and I trust that if you go looking for evidence that I am a self-important windbag, you will have no difficulty gathering evidence that is consistent with your preconceived beliefs.
I'm sorry to hear that you think that if you gave a self-help presentation at a Rails conference, that nobody would come, and that if they did, they would hate you. This was not my experience at all, and I hope you learn to distrust these instincts and develop a more accurate ability to predict when such a thing would be well-received and when it would not.
One of the things that helped in my case, is that I wrote many of these ideas up in an essay seven years ago, and it went to #1 on Hacker News that day. From time to time since then, people have rediscovered the essay and it has bene positively received. Other essays I have written about Learned Helplessness and my difficulty learning to play Go have also been well-received.
To boot, this particular Ruby conference is actually not very Ruby at all, and the organizers go out of their way to invite speakers who will give non-technical talks.
So... I had inside information.
In my case, I was dropping my line where the fish were biting.
But the road has uphills and downhills: the cognitive boosters and roadblocks.
The optimist only sees the downhills.
The pessimist only sees the uphills.
The realist sees both, and makes a guess on whether this journey is worthwhile. Is the cake worth the effort?
The optimist, while appealing, will soon be met with unexpected uphills. He will be distraught, and maybe even give up.
Shoot for the realist, not the optimist.
The cynic figures the cake is a lie.
A modern and experimentally grounded system of "emotional styles" is provided by neuro-scientist Richard J. Davidson, in his book "The emotional life of your brain".
A bit more nuanced than the "Big Five", he maps emotional traits along six axes: resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context and attention.
Optimism would be "outlook" here, which is interesting because it's a different thing than resilience. Being optimistic isn't the opposite of being pessimistic, it's two different skills.
There are neurological explanations for each of the traits and there are exercises given to move your mind along each axis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111009140201.h...
http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html
Also the 30-min talk was recorded as a video.
TL;DR, references to Pandora's recommendation algorithm:
Describe GOOD things broadly, permanently, and personally. Describe BAD things specifically, temporally, and impersonally.
Now let's think about Pandora. Specifically, Pandora's recommendation that you thumbs up (upvote) a few things, and thumbs down (downvote) many more things. Why?
Let's think about Pandora's recommendation algorithm, or, recommendation algorithms in general (pandora's is good because you can give input every ~5 minutes, as opposed to Netflix, where it's ~1hr). Note: Not an expert! I just read stuff on the internet a lot.
Pandora takes your upvote, and it promotes an entire region of music-space. Pandora takes you downvote, and it demotes a very narrow region of music-space. In other words, it broadly interacts with GOOD things, and specifically interacts with BAD things. Pandora isn't passing judgement on you, but it is a personal thing (or, really, per-channel), and you can un-vote anything; so it at first glance it doesn't apply on the other axis but I wouldn't put it past them if my upvotes carried across channels (so they're more personal, while the downvotes stay "impersonal" to each channel), and it might be better if downvotes decayed in some way over time.
In any event, you can imagine what this looks like in state-space: You start with a broadly defined region, and you start taking holes out of it.
A straight-text extract would be a far more useful presentation online. Following an @idlewords-type presentation, with images to the side of the main text would also help.
I have modest interest in reading this, but not so much that I'm willing to put up with entirely self-inflicted idiosyncracies to do so.
Having it in markdown enables some useful things like git/github.
I'm on a platform (Android) which doesn't have a Markdown translator readily available. Not even via Termux.
You're publishing, for the public. If you want to provide editorial sources, that's one matter. If you want to make consumption easy for your readers, that's another.
You've failed at it. And repeatedly defended that failure rather than remedied it.
Part of the reason I'm making a bit of a stink about presentation is that 1) this is a technical site, technique is what we discuss, and 2) I'm aware of the tools and capabilities for doing this.
If you've got a system with the tools on it (my tablet, as noted, isn't one), then it is completely trivial to output a usable and useful format.
I do this fairly routinely myself, and on third party sources. E.g., a 1793 document, running 72 pages formatted, which apparently doesn't have a high-quality contemporary formatted version available: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/lhw2eq4qmnnwxijlcrfyba
On my desktop system, where it's supported (again, tablet, not), I've written 1800+ CSS stylesheets (most pretty similar and fairly simple), to fix annoyances with sites.
It's not that I can't fix this, if arsed enough to do something about it.
It's that deliberately fucking up presentations is hugely disrespectful to readers. It's why I try to take pains in what I write and style to not fuck shit up. Which is sometimes difficult (client systems are a complete and total shitstorm). But not falling over the low-hanging fruit such as providing mark-ed up rather than rendered text for readers helps a tad.
(And yes, I've ranted at blog editors, magazines, The New York Times, and Hacker News about various foul-ups.)
There's a greater irony, perhaps, in that my own psychological state is giving me a literal headache looking at Ravenwald's presentation here, given its topic. I really don't have the damned spoons for it.
Just sayin'.
A friend video’d the presentation, which I published on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjntzo-mYc
I published it again in another format on SpeakerDeck: https://speakerdeck.com/raganwald/optimism
The SpeakerDeck page includes a link to download it as a PDF.
And yet, someone discovered the source and decided to share that on HN. So be it. Any criticism you have to share with me is impersonal (I didn’t tell anyone to read the source), temporary, and obviously specific to this odd scenario.
FWIW, I’m chuffed, not chastised. It’s amazing to me that he source can be viewed with a web browser and is readable enough to be criticized. More apps should work this way.
So, I am not “defending” the format. I’m explaining it.
---
p.s. To be precise, this is the source I published:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raganwald/presentations/ma...
The link submitted to HN above is GitHub’s attempt to preview the source as best it knows how.
I also see it in discussion of the idea of "fundamental attribution error" (when I analyze my own behavior, I attribute mistakes to external factors; when I analyze others' behavior, I attribute mistakes to internal factors).
I've no idea where this was at, geographically/physically, so maybe it's a local custom or style or something?
It seems to me that is just correlation and not causation. It seems that the cause is the time we spend in action, not thinking about us. When we act, we are more likely to succeed. When we think about ourselves, we are more likely to be depressed.
In my experience, the root of these two things is too much thinking about ourselves.
Quote: Don't think about what is a good man, be a good man. It's alright to think about that but it doesn't seems to be a good idea. Taking periods twice every week seems to be a good idea[1].
[1] Turning Pro (https://sivers.org/book/TurningPro)
But even healthy minds will be pessimistic or optimistic from day to day. The author suggests the explanations we think of dictate our mood, which is true, but also our mood already dictates those thoughts. Our explanations tend to be negative when we're feeling negative. You're just sad already.
The question is this: Is your explanation an objective description of truth, or is it an honest expression of your mood? And it's almost always both. Most explicit negative or positive explanations are also implicit expressions of your mood. Our inner dialog is always emotional, so when we reason with ourselves, we're already reasoning with our emotions, except, they have already happened.
And here is how it works. Intellectual people are capable of coming up with an infinite number of reasons. Give it enough thought and you'll find yourself cataloging reason after reason. The sleight of hand happens when we choose the reason to go with. If you let your gut choose, you'll go with the one that most closely aligns with how you feel, because it will physically feel right. It just clicks. So we reason because of our mood, and further towards that mood. And if you have a working brain, you are an intellectual person.
And here is the common misconception. A reason does not have to be subjective or false to be emotional. All your reasons can be true. The problem is with your selection. Think misuse of statistics [1]. All your data can be true, but can be made to say whatever you want. Conclusions can be written first, then made true. If we can do it with statistics, we can certainly do it with our perception. And this article along with Dr. Martin Seligman methods basically covers the various ways in which we do just that.
So whenever possible just make your mood explicit. Monitor your mood, and take hints from the implicit emotions in whatever thoughts that are about something else. If they're in any way negative or positive, then that's already a clue, because if you think about it, nature isn't inherently either. And if you're down, act on it, don't reason with it. Just hit mute, and physically do things that make you happy (I splurge on a hard root beer or a premium cup of coffee). If your body and mind are healthy, this will work every time. If nothing you do makes you happy, don't feel guilty, just go see a doctor.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
(right when I try to block HN to concentrate on work, I find articles like these, and am heavily rewarded again for my procrastination :)
Tell me about it. I've had suicidal thoughts pop up in my mind, unbidden, for over a decade now. From time to time, at LEAST once a week, I'll just start visualizing putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger. Or jumping in front of the train. Or bashing my head in with a rock. All quite vivid.
And I can't just turn it off. I don't tell a lot of people about it because it frightens them. They've never experienced it before, so they don't understand that having the thoughts doesn't mean that I want to kill myself or will attempt to do so. So mostly on my own, I've been working for years to reshape my internal landscape and to revise the story that I'm telling myself. It's slow going. I've practically become a functional psychologist through thousands of hours of highly motivated research. And I'm in therapy, too, which is a new development. I realized I had reached a plateau where my own solitary efforts had stalled. I wasn't going anywhere.
But over the years I've seen improvements. We can't control our moment to moment thoughts, but we can, over time, change the patterns. We can change the story we tell ourselves. But it takes time. There are no shortcuts. Patience and hope, those are key.
The plural of anecdotes is non-experimental data, but data nonetheless.
I guess that's how religions are born.
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Optimist, said Professor Jove. Hitler was the most unabashed doe-eyed optimist of the last hundred years. That’s why he was the biggest monster. Have you ever heard of anything as outrageously hopeful as the Final Solution? Not just that there could be a solution — to anything, mind you, while we have yet to cure the common cold — but a final one, no less! Full of hope, the Führer was. A dreamer! A romantic, even, yes? If I just kill this one, gas that one, everything will be okay. I tell you this with absolute certainty: every morning, Adolf Hitler woke up, made himself a cup of coffee, and asked himself how to make the world a better place. We all know his answer, but the answer isn’t nearly as important as the question. The only thing more naively hopeful than the Final Solution is the ludicrous dictum to which it gave birth: Never Again. How many times since Never Again has it happened again? Three? Four? That we know of, mind you. Mao? Optimist. Stalin? Optimist. Pol Pot? Optimist. Here’s a good rule for life, Kugel, no matter where you happen to live or when you happen to be born: when someone rises up and promises that things are going to be better, run. Hide. Pessimists don’t build gas chambers.
It does not speak to people's expectations for how things will happen in the future.
In technical contexts, practitioners often use words in ways that do not match the common parlance.
Real optimism is waking up and saying "I have hope that this world can be a better place, all I have to do is do my part to be a better person, and be encouraging and inspiring to others that today can be a better day than yesterday."
Speaking of rhetoric, is it any wonder why journalism, media, and politics are all pure rhetoric, with no real substance? About 2500 years ago, there was a large group of people who said rhetoric was the path of the future, and a small group that said "the truth" is the real key to a better future. They had a great debate, and the smaller group lost. For losing, the leader of the smaller group had to drink poisoned hemlock.
What does optimism or pessimism have to do with genocide? The truth is you can view it both ways.
On one hand you can see the perpetrators as optimists working towards their idealised society. On the other hand you can look at the desire to kill stemming from a pessimistic attitude towards those they are killing, viewing them as subhuman or beyond redemption. Jews weren't targeted in the Third Reich because of a drive towards ethnic purity, they were targeted by painting them as subversive. From an outside perspective, it was only by embracing pessimism about Jews that allowed that society to go along with the genocide.