Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive
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I tried (like a good nerd) to reverse engineer all our emotions in my book "The Psychopath Code." Loneliness fell into my group of "Tribal Emotions" (thus evolved to help us form extended families), and here is how I defined it:
"Loneliness - the emotion of being disconnected. You feel physical pain in your intestines and chest when you see others enjoying themselves. You sleep lightly and wake often. Your immune system starts to slow and you start to get sick. Your metabolism slows down, yet you eat more often than usual. Your circulation slows, and you feel cold."
About the rule breakers and psychopaths - I think most people actually switch to reward/punishment reasoning for rule following when empathy and social feedback is lacking. For example, if you know that no one will get hurt (eg running a red light with no cars around) the reasoning switches primarily to risk/reward (are there cameras or cops?) and habits (mental shortcuts and pathways that have been reinforced).
Most of our decisions are made out of habits trained on common situations, and only when the underlying assumptions are violated do we start re-evaluating the stories and heuristics we tell ourselves for our actions.
Regarding rules, I suspect we apply different sets of rules in different situations. Running a red light breaks "would the cops catch me?" yet does not break "would my friends be angry with me?"
I've not looked into habits much. They are obviously powerful shortcuts that save on cognitive workload.
Is it some sort of a hyperbole or I really have to hate people and be physically sick to qualify as a lonely person according to psychiatrists?
You rise a valid point though, while often being objectively lonely and "disconnected" I seldom felt discomfort about it. That would explain good health marks.
These physical sensations follow the emotion (of loneliness) itself--an affective experience preceding, and triggering, the physical after-effects--which PieterH did not speak much about. I wonder why.
[1] See https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bakbc/e...
I don't feel loneliness in my gut; I feel it in my head.
I'm lonely, but sleep a solid 8 hours (except if bothered by other factors such as mismanagement of heat etc which will wake me up). I don't get sick, eat a normal amount and don't feel colder than usual.
Leibnitz's Argument goes like so:
>1. God [Evolution] has the idea of infinitely many universes.
>2. Only one of these universes can actually exist.
>3. God[Evolution]'s choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, God[Evolution] has reason to choose one thing or another.
>4. God[Evolution] is good.
>5. Therefore, the universe that God[Evolution] chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.[1]
FYI, Voltaire made a nice parody of this ideology in his book Candide.
For example I've used a lot of psychology (based on EP, not Freud) in constructing communities that build open source software.
And we are using this thing called the "Internet" that lets total strangers converse, at no cost. And largely built on free and open source. Amazing, huh?
If you believe that science does "nothing to aid in our understanding," and yet you are quick to profit from the fruits of the rational world that science built, that would make you rather a hypocrite.
Very interesting. If it is not a secret, can you share a list of guidelines or tips?
The psychology of collaboration is (in my model, which is of course wrong, just accurate enough to be more useful than ignorance) based on emotions that we've evolved to work together. Most of what I tested and documented over the last decade came from study of failure (most projects fail and you can learn a lot by looking into why), and experience of how to make communities that could survive the kinds of conflict we see. Actually getting a full model for the emotions took a lot longer, finished that a year or so ago.
You can see the results in e.g. the C4 process, our RFC for working together in the ZeroMQ community: http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/
My articles are on http://hintjens.com, starting in 2010 or so.
In professions which are considered more rational and intellectual like programming, there is a danger of discounting the effect of emotions. Emotions are always there under the surface guiding and controlling things.
The more rational the person thinks they are the more they will rationalize their decisions. So when someone proposes using say Protobufs as a serialization mechanism, instead of Thrift, for example, might be doing it because the person who likes Thrift in the group offended them somehow. But that will never come up in the official reason, there will be some benchmark or list of point why Protobufs might be better.
Or maybe they had a fight with their family and they come to work and start shutting down a project and shuffling developers around to feel empowered, and there will always be a seemingly rational reason for it.
Thanks againg for writing that book and sharing your experience. There is just not enough of that, especially focused on open source projects. Some projects naturally converge and discover some of those principles from the toolbox, but having them written down from someone with experience is priceless.
I believe the correct name for that personality attribute might be 'mature'.
Especially, "how do you feel about what person X is doing?"
It's not a gender thing or even a nerd thing, really. It's the same with musicians, for instance (I used to jam a lot), they can be really reticent about saying what they actually feel about other people.
Basically our fear of being rejected by the group, and shame at having feelings that no-one else is expressing make us unable to speak up. Since few people can debug their own emotional stacks, the fear and shame dominate, and stop the (e.g.) anger at an asshat messing up the project from coming forwards.
So actually asking people the specific question can change a lot. Mostly, I'll start with "are you enjoying this (the way things are going)?" knowing they'll admit "no" and then we can work it out from there.
If you have studied EP or even human nature at all, then you realize quite rapidly that the blank slate proponents (who claim we're born with nothing in our minds, waiting for culture to define us) are delusional in some profound way.
It is clear, and Pinker makes this argument well in his book The Blank Slate, that we're the product of biology (EP) tuned and shaped by our environment.
To claim that this, decades of careful documented research and reproducible results, is magical thinking and not science is... hallucinatory.
Right, the same careful research that helps me characterize personality disorders in my day job. You really should stop doing hobbyist research, because The Psychopath Code proves how badly it can end.
Edit: ah, checked your comment history, you've been trolling for a while HN. Enjoy yourself, it's a weird hobby but hey. Some people like to cook and make music, and other people... they troll.
Some of us are skeptical on EP's results more than EP itself. I believe that is undeniable that some (or most) behavior is imprinted within our genes, animal domestication being a pretty solid proof.
That doesn't invalidate the fact that most of the time, when I read some study on the field feels more like conjectures made fit in the researcher's beliefs; some flawed logic where the consequent is used to prove the antecedent, and some dubious experiment most of the time made in other species (biological studies on other species don't translate pretty well on humans, and yet, we try the same with a less measurable parameter?) It's even worse if you happen to read some generalist media approach to EP, where EP is used to push down the editor's narrative.
In short, some of us are careful on EP not because it's not a promising field, but because these days is being used to prove everything and it's opposite.
Cri de coeur or simple typo? Inquiring minds want to know!
Nothing against the article, but how is this #11 on the frontpage? Did HN make ranking easier recently?
this part was not that necessary