Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

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"Similarly, as a child, people yelling at me that I was a lazy bum just didn't help. My primary reaction was resentment, not shame. Though I had shame, too. Its just not so easy to motivate oneself when feeling like a shameful failure."

This varies with personality and situation - I know exactly what you mean because I was shouted at for being fat and lazy as a child and it never did any good, but I can also think of many situations in my own life where the opposite was true and people yelling at me for failing provided the impetus to do better...

I think the risk of not doing anything is worse though. If poor behaviour is tolerated, and not given some kind of negative feedback then it can become accepted. I suspect this is part of the obesity problem - if living as a fat person were really horrible less people would be inclined to do it and, at the risk of sounding cruel, if medical help were refused for obesity related problems then the genetic element would take care of itself...

I'm fat - and if I die because my heart clogs up with all the byproducts of that fatness then it is my own /stupid/ fault.

> This varies with personality and situation - I know exactly what you mean because I was shouted at for being fat and lazy as a child and it never did any good, but I can also think of many situations in my own life where the opposite was true and people yelling at me for failing provided the impetus to do better...

Yep, absolutely. Maybe it's that I listened to too much punk rock as a kid, but I have this odd personality trait where if someone criticizes me for something that I consider illegitimate, I get this instant, visceral "fuck you" response, and their critique does me no good.

In other cases, I take too much to heart.

Human emotions are silly, fragile things.

Yep, absolutely. Maybe it's that I listened to too much punk rock as a kid, but I have this odd personality trait where if someone criticizes me for something that I consider illegitimate, I get this instant, visceral "fuck you" response, and their critique does me no good.

Punishment is the trickiest of all behavioral modification techniques. It is very likely to backfire, which makes perfect sense. If punishment was very effective on a given individual, he/she would be a perfect slave. Being a perfect slave isn't so great from the perspective of the slave, though it is good for the master. Since human biology doesn't make it easy for a large population of slaves to be related to a master, it makes perfect sense that we'd evolve defenses against punishment. (By contrast, ants and honeybees are all children of their queen, so their arrangement makes perfect evolutionary sense.)

One psych teacher of mine pointed out the behavior of Wile E. Coyote as plausible -- often punishment of a complex organism can result in the subject trying again and again in different ways, despite punishment, particularly if there is a possible reward to be gained.

' Maybe it's that I listened to too much punk rock as a kid, but I have this odd personality trait where if someone criticizes me for something that I consider illegitimate, I get this instant, visceral "fuck you" response, and their critique does me no good.'

Oh, been there, done that. :)

I used to despise the people who would give me grief for smoking. They were wasting their time, and it was none of their fucking business.

Later, after I quit smoking, it occurred to me that those admonitions helped. Much as I hated to accept that, the regular jibes kept alive the idea of quitting.

I hate being told what to do, especially if it's coupled with the idea that what I'm currently doing is both wrong and stupid, but that's just pride.

I didn't quit smoking because people told me to, but having people constantly tell me to quit did help keep the idea percolating in the back of my head, a contribution to my finally coming to terms with what needed to be done and mustering the reserve to just do it.

There's the risk that some people will spite themselves just to show the world how independent they are, and the more you tell them what that must do, the less likely they are to do it. But provoking people into reconsidering their actions, even if it annoys them, may help in the long run.

I've reluctantly come to a similar conclusion. I moved to California from the UK in 2001 thinking that the anti-smoking laws in bars, etc were oppressive 'nanny-state' measures. I was finally able to give up smoking though, and it really helped that it was socially unacceptable to light up a cigarette in most situations. It also helped that I left behind my smoking friends and hung out with people who didn't smoke, so it wasn't just the laws, but it made me reconsider my previous position on paternalistic regulations.

When I was quitting smoking I noticed that there were many places I could not smoke, and that when there I did no have quite the same impulse to smoke as when I was, say, home.

Basically, so long as I knew I had the option to smoke I was way more inclined to want to do so, and found it harder to resist. This was sort of encouraging, because it suggested that a lot of the urge was psychological, which seemed better than a relentless chemistry-driven compulsion I might never beat.

That's not to deny the physical addiction part, but to note that appreciating that it's not all physical addiction makes it seem less impossible to beat.

(I also noticed that the urge to smoke in the morning was greater after I had that first one. I then started throwing any remaining cigs down the toilet before going to sleep. That took will power. :) Sure, I would buy smokes on the way to work, or at lunch time, but it helped me cut down. I must say, addiction sucks.)

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