Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done (2012) [pdf]
pdfs.semanticscholar.org
pdfs.semanticscholar.org
Ego does, sometimes, gets in the way of getting things done but without it we wouldn't care to launch anything new/groundbreaking. Without our Ego as creator, we would have no soul in my opinion.
Anyone who freelances, creates something alone, goes solo as a startup founder etc. needs these "cognitive distortions"/"mental disorders", I see them as necessary beliefs. The opposite would be someone who just blends into and becomes yet another functional toothed wheel without any manifestation of desires. A good portion of our society is like these, some people don't want more and are happy/contented.
We need these self beliefs/"lies" to wake up on the next day and keep moving forward. I guess this is a form of inner power/motivation without relying on our environment and/or friends. As a solo freelancer, I do "suffer" from some of these because at the end of day: this is what drives me forward.
It was a theory on the cognitive bias of depression/anxiety, applied to the locus/worldview of someone, wherein a person interprets with a smaller outlook on the future i.e. the opposite of "looking at the bigger picture".
I've found many anecdotal parallels in people I know, but am absolutely teething to find this article.
If you happen to recall the outlets you read this at, I would be interested in learning more. Hopefully the article would have links to papers as well... perhaps including fMRI scans? Truly fascinating stuff.
Think of time spans as "percentage of life lived so far", and a lot of that particular time stretching suddenly makes sense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/The_Cogn...
I wish I had seen that thread! I've been looking for an article I'm pretty sure I found on HN. It was an idea of the development of consciousness from the basis of developing models for action planning. It starts with purely reactive, non-planned actions as the low rung. Then development of models of physical self and environment, allowing planned actions. Then adding social modeling, eventually yielding a model of self that allows for self reflection and consciousness.
Or, at least, that's what I think I remember. Can't find the article for the life of me...
I have "launch fear": I delay by another week every week, because I found one or more bugs the day before, which to me is unacceptable. Also it would crush my ego if people said I hadn't noticed or bothered to fix it, because it would mean I don't care about my users.
When I am launching, I want users to have the best experience possible. MVP is minimal, not bug ridden. When I find a bug, it hurts, and it is almost depressing - as in, leading to paralysis.
Just do it.
I didn't quite realize that this was a thing.
I share the same tendency and it may have as much to do with something else: the 'epoch' moment which implies change, i.e. a 'decision' or outcome which could be bad.
'Development' is a grind, but at least you're alive. After launch it may go well, but you could get wiped out - I think people may fear this.
Also, launch brings so much chaos, unclarity ... in 'development' you're in charge of what's going on. After launch, your users and investors definitely own your time.
It is hard to explain but you've nailed it. In development, you are alive and can fix things. I do not want things to go wrong for my users.
By myself, I have a lot of leeway. There are many things I can tolerate, and I often strive for "good enough"
But I can't do that with future users involved, even if they don't exist yet. Because they will trust me to deliver a good product, and I want to be worthy of their trust.
When launching, the dreams / expectations that fueled the development will get "reality-checked". The initial dream comes from the heart, so when the launch fails, people fear that their core identity is being attacked. You could call that the negative side (from a personal pov) of external validation.
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." - Reid HoffmanWe only get one chance at a first impression and it’s very important that we get it right. If we do, then that user is delighted and will mostly likely recommend it to someone else.
That’s why I really like “minimal delightful product” rather than “minimal viable product”.
But “minimal delightful product needs to solve the users job”. This means even if it’s slightly buggy but you manage to solve a painful problem, the user still is delighted with a smile.
So many products I see that are the work of long months of building but don’t solve the users problem.
The process I find works best is a strong canary program. “You don’t spend more than a week without iterating by showing something to a customer and collecting/observing feedback”
The first version is ugly and only meant for a few users, as more holes are fixed, it’s exposed to more and more users until you hit the gold pot and find new users are actually “getting delighted”. That’s when you’d go full GA on a feature with a limited scope that “gets the users job done in a way that delights them”
Just add to that: The best experience possible right now.
If your imperfect product is compared to your non-existent product, which will your potential users want?
The way I try to overcome it is by thinking that there are things that I don't control. I could create an app in XYZ stack and in the months some packages are broken and unmaintained.
Just realise that if it's hard for you, it's also hard for others. If you fight for it, eventually things will work. I had many failures in the past due to arrogance, not playing along, over confidence, etc. In the end, you've to analyse the situation, learn from it and just keep going forward.
The more you fail, the better you'll become at handling it. You were born on this plant knowing nothing and you failed a lot of times, more than you can count, until you become you. Each day you're a little bit better than yesterday.
I don't think those two things are dichotomous. (Is this dichotomous thinking being displayed right there?) One can very well be motivated by what they're doing but still understand and accept that they're fundamentally not very different from any other human being, and that they can look at the evidence, listen to others' ideas, and admit their mistakes, without jeopardizing their pursuit.
Sure, if somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. However if one goes as far as really "distorting" the reality/self perception, or look down upon others, I don't think it can end well at all. I would hypothesize that some founders succeeded despite being jerks, but most jerks are not successful founders, and most successful founders aren't jerks.
Being a jerk can work sometimes.
Take the fictional character Gavin Belson from the show Silicon Valley as an example: He's not what we would call a Leader but he has this egocentric selfish view of himself. He shares no emphatic towards people around him, which means that he can virtually do anything without caring too much. You might say he is an asshole (he is) but he will carry his vision on no matter what.
Is this guy healthy? He represents someone that no one likes. Every single employee hates hims, his ideas are terrible, he will run over people without blinking, etc.
In sports look at Cristiano Ronaldo, you can find early interviews when he was younger and didn't had any awards. If you asking who is the best football player in the world he would instantly reply: Me Some years later he actually become one of the best all time football players. You might say he has an unhealthy amount of self confidence which can be seen as arrogance. From a young age he carried this belief system/mindset that brought it several awards and broke record after record. He is completely obsessed with training that at age 33, his body has a metabolic age of 23! About 6 years ago I saw an article saying that, according to his physical therapist, he would play at a world class until age 36 and, so far, it is happening.
We can question if Ronaldo has a healthy dose of self belief. He gets things done on the pitch and we might ask at what cost? He could work a LOT less and be a decent player with millions on his bank account. No need to push his limits every single.
The same happens with developers: If you believe in open source you'll be willing to use and write open source tools despite the fact that there are closed source solutions. We could argue that this is not healthy because you're wasting your time when you could get things done in a much shorter amount of time.
Same with CEO: They all believe their product is the best and sometimes (I work with several) they seems nuts and as a developer I've to be their therapist sometimes so that their product doesn't looses touch with reality and becomes something wild that no one understands.
In the examples above it's very subjective to quantify/measure what an healthy dose of self belief looks like. You could say that they are all nuts and you would have a point:
Gavin Belson believes he is the next Steve Jobs. Ronaldo believes he is the best no matter what. Open source developers believe that closed source code is evil. CEOs believe they're the next Steve Jobs or some cliche like changing the world for better
If we kill the Ego/"Cognitive Distortions"/"Mental Disorders", there is nothing extraordinary about these people.
Having a belief, regardless of being true of false, will have the effect of you acting upon it.
Can you make 10 million dollars? Answer 1: No Answer 2: yes
If you answer No, I'm 99.9% sure you won't because you won't even try. If your answer is Yes, you'll try and you might succeeded at it. You won't might suffering along the journey to make it.
I find it very hard to classify what is a mental disorder or a personality trait. It can go both ways: wonderful or terrible.
It's a very subjective topic, to classify this as a "Cognitive Distortions" (in a negative way) is like saying that creative people and leaders should be placed in a mental institution or something like that. Some traits like kindness, empathy, helping the poor, etc. are nice things that we should nourish in our society but they might get in the way of creating value/getting things done. The idea might be scary but a psychopath doesn't gets dragged/delayed like "normal"/empathetic people. They try to get what they want without caring about the cost.
Several of them feel like variations of the same theme: I know I'm right, so I can disregard evidence|opinion|counter-argument because .. an axiom of the system is I know I'm right.
If I had a sixth, it would be the tendency to latch onto a mantra. "think different" doesn't really mean very much, but boy, successful people who get stuff done like to say it.
(I'm not a person who gets stuff done btw. the mantra my get-stuff-done colleagues say which feels apposite is: "do the shit work first" which kind of makes sense: they don't procrastinate about things they'd rather not do)
Another one: seventh might be they believe implicitly they are the smartest person in the room
True. But reading you say it now makes it sound less like GTD and more like they do the right (different) things. Things that yield results; which makes the lead up look important. Kinda the tasks are a symptom more than a means, if that makes sense.
IBM had just "think" and I really liked that. The trouble is, it leads to endless ratiocination.
U.S. Army: "An Army of One"
U.S. Marine Corps: "For Our Nation, For Us All"
"Think better. Do best."
Too often, for reasons too many to list here, we humans tend to pounce without stepping outside our confirmation bias and asking:
- Is this the right thing to do?
- And the best way to do it?
We too easily presume the status quo to be our friend, when it's often the enemy.
Fwiw, I think the 5 Whys are a great tool. More critical thinking than traditional GTD. But what good is GTD if the T's are wrong?
I put this together, for fun:
As a person with contrarian tendencies who has occasionally been accused of "implicitly believing" I'm the smartest guy in the room, I think it's important to recognize there's a difference between trusting your own reasoning and thinking you're smarter than everybody else. You can mostly avoid the latter by learning strategies that help you estimate the confidence level you should have in your beliefs. A couple of "am I wrong?" mnemonics I've learned to apply include:
- What kind of evidence are my ideas based on? Is it observation, hearsay, case studies, or something more substantial?
- How many silly/unrealistic counterexamples can I think of? Often these will contain hints of a more complicated, realistic objection.
- (if you have time to use the Web) Are there any professional researchers whose conclusion resembles my argument? What can I learn from/about them?
- Am I at risk of wishful thinking, availability/selection bias, or defending a position I previously implicitly committed to? If so, try to apply the same reasoning to a similar situation where the fallacy won't apply.
But I think you missed that the leaders in this space, get so few contradictory signals that apart from hired geniuses, and they can always fall back on "I have higher social smarts" -these aside, I think they get positive confirmation bias.
I often believe I'm the smartest person in the room right up until I open my mouth...
What then?!
There was also a serious side to my question though, that we all have flaws in our reasoning, even in the reasoning we use to question our reasoning. Using heuristics to judge, just never turns out right all the time.
I think that advice is wrong, because:
1) there are many different skills you can improve and you are probably not the most skilled one in the team in all of them
2) even if you are the most skilled, it doesn't mean you can't learn from less skilled people
3) 'smartest' is a strange criterion, because if there is one thing you can't learn, it's becoming more intelligent
However, if you truly believe there isn't much you can learn in your current work any more, possibly because of the skill levels of your teammates, switching to a different job is probably a good idea.
Well, you don't create something new if you don't think different in some way. The "different" part is really generic, but that's the point, it people could say something specific here, it wouldn't be different.
And it might be because they are, in fact, the smartest sort of people, that they get the most done.
We are of course, only sampling smart people who get stuff done. Smart people who do not get things done tend to be astoundingly good at being unproductive.
This if taken to the extreme is just narcissism and can wreck havoc. My father very frequently just gets possessed with insisting how only his interpretation or memory of the events is correct and ignores all sorts of even the most basic evidence, to the extent of absolutely distorting the reality. Not hard to imagine what sort of chaos and pain it has created in the family. Maybe sometimes this helps in running a business but if one takes it to personal interactions it can be simply ruining.
Also I do believe that the best leaders aren't the ones who insist on being a jerk but are instead those who can objectively evaluate evidence, genuinely listen to others and immediately acknowledge their own folly when their previous beliefs are wrong. Such traits can only be a plus, while distortive stubbornness is only negative and is a trait found in many depressed people as well.
> (I'm not a person who gets stuff done btw. the mantra my get-stuff-done colleagues say which feels apposite is: "do the shit work first" which kind of makes sense: they don't procrastinate about things they'd rather not do)
Sound advice.
> Another one: seventh might be they believe implicitly they are the smartest person in the room
How is this very different from the "personal exceptionalism" thing? Aren't they exactly the same? (The only difference might be that the original author insisted upon "macro-exceptionalism" but I doubt people can easily draw such a line in their self perception).
Depression is correlated with realistic perception of realist. Non-Depression (optimism, productivity) is correlated with mild delusion.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201206...
The grandiosity associated with mania is a superset of this. (As mentioned elsewhere, the reverse is not necessarily the case.)
- Dichotomous Thinking
Pretty much exactly as described in the slides.
- Overgeneralization
Albeit without the "Correct" part, as often as not, nevertheless leading to some very interesting discoveries.
- Blank Canvas thinking
To an extreme degree, rebuilding ones personality and self image at least once a year.
- Schumpteranism
See previous point. This was mostly internal destruction and rebuilding, but often manifested itself in staying awake for days rearranging furniture, breaking down or building in walls etc.
Source: runs in the family.
Now, it's possible for someone's actions to suggest that they have some subconscious motivations that are in conflict with what they say makes them happy. And it's also possible for them to grow in ways that overcome these cognitive distortions, such that chasing an ambition over all else is no longer fulfilling for them. But even if that happens, in the moments before growth they still were not losing out on anything, because their psyche at the time didn't care about what they missed out on.
Saying happiness is a kind of mental state doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to be right about whether you're in it. People are constantly in denial about whether they're jealous, depressed, angry, etc. Happiness is the same thing. We all undergo some mix of positive and negative experiences in our life. We come to a conclusion about whether those add up to happiness, and that conclusion is colored by many things, like the idea that we're fulfilling some important purpose, or "crushing it" or whatever else.
As for your point about "who can tell you you're not happy", that's missing the point. It's true that someone else who is not privy to your stream of consciousness probably isn't in a position to tell you whether you're happy. But that in no way implies that your own judgment is infallible. Nothing about the world guarantees that every truth is knowable by someone, at least not easily. It may be that you're blind to your own mental state.
However, we have very good evidence in aggregate that many people chase success at the expense of happiness. They often later describe a feeling that they were deceiving themselves.
The presence of a trait doesn’t imply that it’s in any way an active ingredient, even a very little active. Post hoc analysis is bullshit.
Still not sure I agree in this case (you can think luck is real bit still behave optimally) but it could be a helpful way to think in other scenarios.
Once you get into any specific situation and you need a higher resolution view of things then you can look at the situation as it should be looked rather than defaulting to the low resolution view that luck doesn't matter.
We can all put our big boy pants on, accept that luck is a part of reality, and act in the best possible way with this fact in consideration.
This is where we disagree. A cognitive distortion automatically filters the world for you. Your body does it without you being consciously aware of it. You want these distortions to be helpful, otherwise your body will automatically filter the world in an unhelpful manner to you.
For instance, in the face of this PDF, the person I first replied to said something like "the people who get stuff done got there because they're lucky". This worldview is poor because it doesn't help you get more stuff done in any way, it's just a blame game (in this case the thing that's getting blamed is luck). And it's something you'll do automatically if you're always considering luck in how you see the world.
The point is to get rid of this mechanism in your brain/body that jumps to luck (or any other harmful concept) and to substitute it with something more helpful.
There are times that changing the original strategy/task/behavior is not the optimal thing to do, but your "no luck" world view does not allow for that possibility.
Believing luck is not real pretty much immediately activates the just world hypothesis, which is responsible for some rather awful things happening to people. It's the kind of shallowly selfish, short-term belief set we do not want to have.
It's not just about a given person and how productive they singularly happen to be, why are we focusing on that so much?
This doesn't follow, and the article adnzzzzZ linked explains how it doesn't follow. In particular, if you divide the concept of truth up into "objective truth" and "pragmatic truth" as the article suggests, you can believe the just-world hypothesis is false on an objective level while still believing that you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.
"Stop using luck as an excuse for your failures and other people's failures."
This doesn't really sound they have the objective world setup well, and would trivially slide down to judging unlucky people. I'm convinced that the just-world hypothesis is one of the most evil cognitive biases a culture can have (in terms of how much suffering is created, see some developments in Christian religion), so I'm not sure this is a risk worth taking.
In my life I found the most true view (as far as I can find it) to be the most useful. Knowing that luck is an important factor fairly significant rotates what you do, why you do it, what you consider important, what you think about others, etc. I think if we do develop cognitive adaptations, we should nonetheless root them in what is true. I.e., if we go for the pragmatic adaptation, why? For a lot of people, the idea that luck is important is brand new information they should sit and chew on for a while.
> you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.
So this is not quite true, and it's somewhat related to the point above. A lot of luck based events are random to the person they happen to, in the sense that they were chosen for it randomly, but have a non-random source, or arise from a non-random pattern. Someone might get sick, which is random, but how the system deals with it is not random and makes the difference in how debilitating that event can be (in other words, society has ways of modifying the effect of randomness on the system). A person might be randomly targeted, but the source of the targeting is not random (i.e., the target of a robbery may be random, but there's nothing random about the robber and their choice to rob).
The problem with the randomness concept is that it's not symmetric. If you focus on the individual only you miss the cross-effects. What we say, when we say that luck is important, is that a given person cannot conquer the world, cannot override its rules, and many of its rules are unfair. What we are not saying is that we should sit down and do nothing, in fact, we're saying the opposite: the world is broken and requires fixing, and the world should be fixed before the individual is fixed. And it is the awareness of its unfairness that is needed here. What is there to fix if a given person is fully responsible for their lives? We just blame the person and move on, as humanity has done for thousands of years.
This sort of approach (separate things into true reality and pragmatic/relevant reality) requires a lot of justification before it should be adopted.
This is just fundamentally wrong. The correct level of analysis to fix the world is the individual. If individuals aren't responsible for their actions and doing their best in life then the world will never be fixed. By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.
> By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.
Frankly, it's the least of my concerns if I am giving someone excuses or not or if someone is trying their best. My concern is whether the world makes sense, is reasonably fair, and if people in it are happy. People trying, or not trying, their best, is only relevant if it is somehow interfering with that goal. At the end of the day I don't think people doing their best is all that relevant because it's not an objective measure and by definition varies between people. This smells of a religious kind of "sacredness", of people trying to create value out of nothing through "virtuous" action and living. This is the kind of thing people turned to when the world was so bad that improving it was impossible, so they turned inwards, so that even in the darkest circumstances they could feel good about themselves. Are you familiar with such philosophy? Is that what you're doing here? Do you think this is a good time and place for that?
If someone's best is a broken bridge, and someone's mediocre is a working bridge, guess which bridge I want? The world doesn't care about my "best" or your "best" and never did and never will. The bridge only works if it is built correctly, it doesn't care if someone did their "best".
We should not be focused on what is our personal best, because that's irrelevant and self-focused and leads to a shallow kind of selfishness. It undermines what can be built by human hands through collective effort. It gives credit when none is due (to work with no results). It makes us focus inward and generates concern with esteem and status. We shouldn't be worried about that, we're not animals. We should focus on what works, what's a good idea, what brings results.
Fuck that. Luck is real. And I won't give up. It's called taking a leap of faith. You don't have to lie to yourself in order to take risks.
Your solution is harmful. If people stop believing in luck, then everyone who fails just didn't try hard enough.
>Your solution is harmful. If people stop believing in luck, then everyone who fails just didn't try hard enough.
This is only harmful if you aren't willing or prepared to take responsibility for your actions.
I think it's useful to take a similar approach when considering luck. Good things (big contracts, investors) are the equivalent of "hazard", and good market positioning, professional networking, persistence etc. then increase the "risk" of them paying off. It's not about "being lucky", it's about increasing the likelihood of positive outcomes to a level where your overall success becomes likely.
Once you decide that everything is intrinsic, any instance bad luck is enough to declare people "untouchable".
- Being born into a good family.
- Winning the lottery.
Luck: Something you cannot affect yourself. If luck is your only game, prepare to be disappointed. Also: 70 percent of lottery winners, end up broke just a few years later.
Question: Is having good luck actually bad luck? Or does it trigger bad behaviours that rich people don't have? ... I think this well and truly debunks any notion that luck's got anything to do with it.
In fact I think the opposite. I think luck's got nothing to to with it, and that the only way you will keep your wealth, is to learn how to 1. increase it fast, and 2. how to hold on to it.
As a matter of fact, most people live from hand to mouth. They aren't even able to hold on to the little wealth they create. And thus so many of them think they're slaves, when they are in fact free to do as they like.
Thing is, most people are terribly afraid of the freedom, and – as the example with the lottery winners prove – most can't handle large sums of money anyway.
If you want an example of a guy who really learned about money before he got rich, look up Elon Musk. One of the reasons he dared to risk everything, was because he learned to live on much less than normal people would ever accept. He knows his bare minimum.
Do you?
With that security securely at the bottom, he could risk the venture that starting a new company from scratch is. In any case, luck's got nothing to do with it.
And people aren’t ‘terribly afraid of freedom’, what does that even mean?
Just because most technologists don't doesn't mean it's actually such an unknown.
That's simply wrong.
If "with adequate business research, those can be avoided" is true, it can only be true as a syllogism where 'adequate' is defined to mean the research necessary not to fail, and any company which fails hasn't done 'adequate' research.
Hard to take musk as a good example. Plenty of people lived on less making the biggest bets they could, and have nothing to show for it. Just consider if he had been born in another country or timeframe.
This is not to claim rich people don't deserve their riches. In large, that is a statement many of us fine meaningless. Rather, spare us the nonsensical justifications that require near deification of people that have acquired lots of money. Respect does not have to equal devotion.
There is tremendous survivorship bias in this analysis.
While these traits were found in a substantial portion of people who "Get Stuff Done", how about the people who exhibit these traits, but don't "Get Stuff Done"? We have no idea how large that population is.
Assuming the author's research is perfect, and every successful person who "Gets Stuff Done" exhibits these trait. The author, at best, has shown these traits are necessary, but not sufficient. Since many people potentially have these traits and don't "Get Stuff Done", there must be further special sauce which differentiates them.
This hardly proves much since the group of people who buy lottery tickets is self-selecting. A person who understands probability will not be buying a lottery ticket. Most people buying them are not in the best situation.
There's a lot more going on in the world than people who work hard vs people who buy lottery tickets.
This often quoted line is a complete media distortion of what really happens. It is wrong. I highly recommend being skeptical of the misinformation spread by news and looking into the primary sources yourself.
Here’s the Florida study that this line is referring to:
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf
Here’s the actual results of the study:
Results show that although recipients of $50,000 to $150,000 are 50 percent less likely to file for bankruptcy in the two years after winning relative to small winners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years afterward.
First, this study wasn’t people winning millions and blowing it, it’s people winning modest amounts under 200K. Second, they’re not going bankrupt at higher rates than other people, they’re filing less often in the short term, and at the same rates in the long term. In other words, the lottery winnings of $10K - $200K didn’t help their longer term life prospects.
Is that some sort of surprise? Anyone would spend $200K in 5 years.
The winnings did not create higher rates of bankruptcy, and I don’t know right now where the 70% number came from. The number of people who filed for bankruptcy was 5.5%.
“DENVER — Over the past couple of years several news organizations have attributed a statistic to the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) stating that 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large financial windfall. This statistic is not backed by research from NEFE, nor can it be confirmed by the organization. Frequent reporting—without validation from NEFE—has allowed this “stat” to survive online in perpetuity.“
https://www.nefe.org/Press-Room/News/Research-Statistic-on-F...
There are a great many things beyond our control. But we will never stop trying to figure out that one thing we can do by choice that makes some kind of difference -- the more difference, the better.
Except there's a lot more going on here and a lot more at stake. Beliefs about the world, specifically beliefs about, long story short, why bad things happen to good people, can dramatically affect policy decisions and what a given culture considers acceptable. Someone feeling good about themselves is absolutely not a good enough reason to mangle reality. And that seems to be all that this whole mess is about. You want to believe you are in control of your life so you bury everyone else with you when that's absolutely not what we need right now to actually understand why things happen.
Rejection of the influence of randomness means we do not examine or account for said randomness. It means we think safety nets are worthless. It means we vote against free healthcare. It means we leave people to fend for themselves because we convince ourselves that it logically makes sense. If people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
For a large slew of events that can randomly hit a person, there is often a very non-random source. But we are so focused on an individual-based rhetoric that we cannot admit that sometimes people affect others and that is a much bigger lever to pull than trying to convince every individual person to be some sort of a superhero who has no problems.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were aiming at with the lottery ticket example, given that it's pretty much nobody's choice even if they believe in luck.
I worked hard at solving my problems and eventually got myself off the street.
There are lots of people who seem to apply that same general mentality to life. We know that diet and lifestyle are huge factors in health outcomes, but many people don't really take that seriously. The connection between eating right and better health isn't immediate and obvious enough.
I write about issues like homelessness and I generally look at both pieces of the equation -- what the individual can do for themselves in spite of society not being helpful enough and what society needs to do differently.
I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
Pocketputer.com should get you to both Street Life Solutions (About page) and San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (Links page).
My Patreon link is in my profile as well.
There's more room here than learned helplessness, in fact, I think that doesn't derive from the "luck is important" mindset at all. See my post here since I'd just be repeating the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535786
1. I wasn't talking about you in specific.
2. It's a relatively brief forum comment. It's not reasonable to assume it needs to cover all possible use cases as if it were, say, a scholarly paper.
3. It's entirely possible to engage someone in discussion and say "Ah, well, that sounds like a dichotomy that I don't fit." or something like that without being attacking or dismissive of the basic point the person was trying to make.
4. I don't like talking to people who come across as hell bent on shooting down everything I say rather than trying to understand my point. So I think I'm probably done replying to you in this thread.
I am just going to note that you're doing a very similar thing with statements like these:
> I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
So you may not be getting the results you're expecting because you're generating strawmen in your posts to which naturally the other poster is going to be inclined to reply in the somewhat less understanding manner.
It's not always easy to keep these discussions fully level and polite, and I absolutely fail in that all the time, but, like, pot, kettle.
nodnodnod
> Rejection of the influence of randomness means [...] people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
Well, it is complicated and gets very subtle. For every person who is struck by catastrophe through sheer bad luck, there is at least one who is struck by catastrophe after a series of terrible personal choices.
Deciding which is which is not an easy choice. For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/. Because they deal with the risk all the time, they see it as a choice to made.
Not mangling reality cuts two ways. Just because a choice isn't obvious doesn't mean that decisions don't play a role. In addition we can't attribute success solely to luck. Success strikes randomly in a small pool of people who have the capacity to be successful. That pool is small, and the people in it shouldn't be made responsible for the vagaries of the universe at large.
This one will get complicated since it's effectively a discussion on free will. :) I will say that trying to examine why people do what one could call stupid or terrible choices is an interesting exercise.
Consider, for instance, the act of smoking in a smoking-dominated country. I have grown up in such a country and I did not pick up smoking because I considered it bad. But I am also a significant outlier for other reasons (let's say I didn't have a lot of friends growing up). From a 3rd party perspective, especially one originated in a country that doesn't smoke a lot, picking up smoking seems like a very terrible idea, and it seems very straightforward to judge those people.
But consider it from the dynamics of the country: what does it mean to be a smoker, what does it mean to be a non-smoker, in such a country? Are there consequences to each? Why do most people end up smoking? What would they have to give up to not do it? Is a decision of an outlier like myself relevant/useful? What is the breaking point after which a culture switches from an activity being mainstream vs not?
If we say smoking is a terrible choice, we'd be forced to conclude that people in countries that smoke a lot must be worse people in some sense than people in countries that do not smoke a lot. A similar conclusion was once made by Milgram. But I think by now we realize that these conclusions are definitely not the right ones, so we need some other explanation.
> For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/.
This, for example, doesn't sound like a choice from the perspective of the walker or worker, because they don't have the information. So on that level it looks to me to still be random. It's like choosing a career when you don't know anything about the market or what makes a good career - it's basically random from your perspective, even if there are deterministic paths all around. After all, most physical luck (i.e., accidentally tripping) is also deterministic internally, but it's luck to us because we can't tell.
It is not random for the whoever manages the Australian mining industry, because they have the information. One way to reduce randomness is having more information, which can be extended to educating people more.
If these unlucky people you describe win the power ball they'll just lose it because they failed to become millionaires (discipline/money management) before they got the millions.
I would hypothesize that some founders succeeded despite being jerks, but most jerks are not successful founders, and most successful founders aren't jerks.
In any case, if somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. However if one goes as far as really to "distort" the reality/self perception, I don't think it can end well at all and might well wreck havoc and can even be classic signs of depression. Objectively evaluating evidence, understanding that human beings are not fundamentally different, genuinely listening to others and immediately acknowledging own folly can only be a plus in all sorts of scenarios.
Furthermore there is the question does it count as a distortion if they are self-aware that these are all heuristics and adjusting accordingly?
Defining 'sanity' without reference to reality itself is ironically downright insane. Like Pythagorians reacting so negatively to discovering irrational numbers undeniably exist.
That criticism is not even present in the slides. It just says "heartlessness, alienation." You may believe those risks to be justified, but getting defensive about as if these are not real risks is denying the real world data, which coincidentally is another criticism mentioned.
> Defining 'sanity' without reference to reality itself is ironically downright insane.
The word 'sanity' is not mentioned in any of these slides. You are getting defensive over non-existent accusations and in the process are managing to almost understand what 'distortion' means in this context but then somehow get it completely wrong.
All of these five things are thought processes. They can be right some of the time. They can be right most of the time. What defines them as a "distortion" is whether they are the default mode of interpretation of the world all of the time, regardless of what the reality of the situation is. The word is not chosen as a derision - see also déformation professionnelle[0].
A more appropriate framing of the anorexia comparison would be "always feeling that one is fat, regardless of actual weight." Focusing only on the moment in which someone is actually underweight but still feeling fat is both getting it and missing the point at the same time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9formation_professionnel...
>it may have costs but is not doing so any better? Thinking
>that preserving the status quo at the cost of advancement is
>in itself a distortion arguably.
This creative destruction obviously only has to happen when something cannot be changed. Then there's the question: why can't it be changed? In stiff organizations this is well-known to be there virtually anywhere but of course in startups as well.
My far-fetched theory is that teamwork is still something very rarely found. So individual people always have their own space, be it a project, microservice or some module. It's their baby, they've designed it, deployed it, maintained it etc. If someone else needs to join the project, this person always needs to ask the creator for permission of everything until the creator's rules are followed 100%. Maybe I'm alone with this observation but this has happened to me far too often. I wish these projects would rather emerge of joint thought processes and also be evolved like that. Then there would be no need of people having to go through walls, exposing border-line anti-social behaviour...
You could probably test this by looking at different work environments outside of Silicon Valley or even the US.
Also, a few years ago I read a NYT opinion article citing research into what teams perform best. It wasn't all that dependent on IQ, but on those where where, everyone contributes more equally, people were better at reading each other's emotional state, and which had more women[0][1]. It should be noted that women are better on average at reading emotional states, and that being better at reading each other's emotional state may play a big part in having everyone contribute equally.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-t...
Actually I recently had a discussion about the exact topic. At my current work we have something like team work, the last time before I had that was years ago in university where we could hand in together exercises in a group. That was one woman, two men in the group. That was awesome, we truly developed the understand and the solution together.
Another point though is that individuals (me for instance) have to learn to work in teams (again). Having worked for years as 1-man-army, I had a hardy time working effectively with other people.
If somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. So I don't think they can all be called distortions but I don't believe all of them are sane either.
hm...
Arrogance is telling the people around you how they are idiots instead of producing a superior product or convention.
Think about it in terms of your performance (output) instead of your opinions (what you say).
For the person working on that new thing this is deeply frustrating. The early hostility is super depressing. You just have to power through it, because you have the personal vision to know that new thing solves a problem in a certain way.
Having gone through this more than once I have formed high personal exceptionalism. Due to my technical experience I now have a pretty good idea of what ideas are super great and what ideas are really bad, though from time to time I am still (rarely) surprised at just how wrong I am.
The consequence of this is that I am really bad at marketing and self-promotion. I would rather just work on my idea without telling anybody. Because I have a small following of users to my big github project I know people will end up using my code anyways. The biggest limitation in this approach is that you are effectively removing yourself from external feedback.
High self-esteem means respecting yourself. It means that if someone else can do it, you thin you can do it too.
Exceptionalism is a mild delusion that says that risks and constraints don't apply to you. It means that if no one else can do it, that doesn't mean you can't.
Arrogance is about how you treat others, not how you treat yourself.
If you told Bill Gates "You can't do X" and he had already done it many times over, well, why should he waste time arguing with you?
You can also be arrogant on top of that. But you don't have to be arrogant to believe your track record justifies an assessment that the limits that normally apply won't apply to you, or won't necessarily apply, thus it merits trying anyway.
Such people tend to find their limits by smacking into them at 100 miles an hour and it is usually not pretty. They do this because they just can't trust the judgement of other people who have told them countless times "You can't do X." only to be proven definitely wrong.
But generally: reality is grey; actions are not.
If you see reality as it really is, it is harder to make decisions, and to commit to them.
A quality of leadership is the ability to make decisions quickly. If they are the right decisions, so much the better... (LN)
A quality of leadership is refinement, which allows for decisions that e.g. unite people of varying backgrounds through a higher-resolution process which, while still dichotomous in some ways, is much smarter about it. In using elegant models one's reaction time is shortened while also bringing to bear a great deal of leverage.
.. and half the time i can't tell whether i'm kicking serious ass (rewarded) or causing people trouble (fired)!
I sense that there are some insights and good observations here, unfortunately for me this is all wrapped in a lot of psychological jargon that i can't penetrate.
* Personal exceptionalism
* Dichotomous thinking
* Correct overgeneralization
* Blank canvas thinking
* Schumpeterianism (creative destruction)
i don't endorse the guy and didn't vote for him, but, um, this reminds me of Trump.
i mean, how can we assess any person who actually succeeded at a goal that thousands of others wanted but failed to achieve?
i don't know. how did this guy avoid losing? it's just so weird. i'm still seeking good theories for his unexpected success...
Hilary had 65.8 million which was almost exactly what Obama got in 2012, 65.9. To say that Trump did nothing is the same narative that Bernie supports started blaming Hilary supporters for losing. It's always the people that vote at fault and not the people who didn't vote.
The first two I can see but certainly not the last three.
So many people that 'get stuff done' in the 'work' sense are those who have good focus, set priorities, and focus on outcomes. They often don't even stand out.
Moreover, the 'I am special' is still arrogant, in a way.
Many of these people can have softer, beta type personalities, but the actions, decisions and and outcomes are still those of an arrogant person.
I know loud, boorish and apparently 'arrogant' people who are at the end of the day pushovers in the sense that they are actually nice guys, soft on negotiation because they want a 'fair deal', loyal to people to a fault etc., they just have a brusque, apparently cynical outward demeanor.
I think this is a very interesting psychological framework with the wrong wording in the title ... or rather, a much better definition of what they mean by 'get stuff done'.