Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

By no means a summary of the article, but I liked these passages in particular:

On emotions:

> When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” and “free of emotional decision making.” Like all good lies we tell to ourselves, there's a kernel of truth to it. But for the most part, at least for me personally, I am a deeply emotional being.

> Emotions run deep and can be a really useful well to tap for intrinsic motivation. For example, for some time after ripgrep was released, I began to immediately hate touching the code that was responsible for printing search results. It was convoluted, buggy and difficult to change. While rewriting is a perfectly logical decision to make on purely technical grounds only, I was motivated to do it because I didn't like the way it made me feel. My emotion helped drive me to make things better for myself.

On communicating thoughtfully in order to communicate effectively:

> ...being thoughtful in one's communication is important to advance your cause. If you're thoughtless, even if you're correct, you risk working against your own ends because the person on the other end might not be able to look past your thoughtlessness.

On the fact that even the author can't and doesn't read every line of every dependency they pull in:

> ...As someone who uses FOSS and tries hard to be discriminating with the dependencies I use, it is just not possible for me to review every line of code I depend on. Even if I could somehow manage to read it all, I certainly wouldn't be able to understand it all in enough detail to be confident that it was doing what I thought it was doing.

This hit me hard too. Heading into college, I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem.

Turns out I was just an asshole who wasn't self aware enough to understand my own feelings and was making other people around me hurt.

This is an argument I could have every day with commenters on HN were I so inclined. Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.

Going against your, and parents, commentary, this is a semi-accurate description of how I used to see myself:

"I'd rather be right than popular, and I usually am".

But I mostly wasn't convincing, whether I was right or wrong. And that's what I'm continually working on. Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place. And to be convincing you need to know your topic from a number of angles, and you need to know the audience you're playing to. But you also need to know whose worthy of convincing, because there are some (plenty) that won't be convinced either way, so don't waste your time on them - know a lost cause so as to avoid committing self-denial-of-service.

To add to your very good insight, I believe that oftentimes it's not even a dichotomy. Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it, because it turns the conversation into emotional clashes by triggering a desire to oppose on the other.

But the very bad thing about that philosophy is that it makes one tend to default to thinking that it's others that are inferior and can't handle the facts you see so clearly... so if it turns out you were not right in the end, we've got the worst case scenario -- Now you're not just preventing yourself from learning and improving (which should always be the goal), you've become just like a troll, an asshole who's wrong.

> Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it

I agree. It takes discipline to be right without being righteous.

> Being right does not give a right to be condescending

Not to disagree, but, quoting the article, I'd like to "underscore the asymmetry" between people that are right and condescending VS people that are wrong, think they are right (or don't care if they are, most of the times) and are condescending just because they can or because that's the way they think you advance your career.

They read somewhere that CEOs have a bad temper and imply that bad temper is necessary to become CEO.

> Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place.

Only from selfish point of view. If you are wrong and convince people to be wrong too, you just very likely made world less good place.

It is important to be right and double check yourself especially if you are able to be convincing.

Rightness comes in degrees. It can definitely be better to be _almost right_ but convincing than _completely right_ but unconvincing. In fact, all you need is to be _more right_ than people would be if you didn't convince them.

> Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.

This is only true when being "correct" doesn't really matter very much (certainly true on the Internet). One of the hard earned pieces of wisdom from age is that the situations in which there IS a "correct" AND it matters are far fewer than you think. Most decisions are a wash so it's fine to concede.

In addition, "polite" is in the eye of the beholder. I can oppose something politely and people will still scream about how unreasonable I am being.

The problem is that "correct" sometimes matters a LOT and has opposition for non-"correct" reasons. Those same people that you deferred to so many times in the past now get very angry when you suddenly put a stick in the ground and go "No. This is correct and it matters and I'm not moving on it." In addition you will find that there is an entire class of social manipulators who just like to "play poker" and will go absolutely apoplectic when you will not budge a decision without new factual evidence.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”--George Bernard Shaw

As a general rule this is completely fine. However, sometimes being impolite and correct is desperately needed. As long as you are being impolite with great calm and forbearance.

My personal view is that being polite is what a decent person does until the other party starts abusing it.

In short, be polite and understanding by default but don't be a pushover.

Perhaps, but in most cases, people vastly overestimate how common that "sometimes" is, how desperately the "needed" is, and how great their own "forbearance" is. They bring this argument up as part of denying their own contribution to a conflict. It's so easy to deceive oneself about this that a better strategy is not to go there. Self-honesty about what one is actually feeling will mostly eliminate it anyhow.

I almost get the feeling that a lot of HN commenters actually pride themselves on writing terse comments devoid of emotion and sensitivity to the receiver/reader. Too often, I write such comments myself, as well. It seems to be part of a larger effectiveness trend, down to even keeping vocabulary as minimal as possible, and avoiding literature because it's too descriptive, a waste of time.

Is it tied to HN or hacker/startup culture, SV mentality? To pride oneself on being an effective robot? No care in the world except building the next great thing, damned be everything else? Maybe it's about the types of people attracted to computers? I hear the same kind of response daily at work, I mean, generally, we're not known to be the most socially intelligent group.

Thanks for your work BurntSushi, Andrew, ripgrep is great.

Perceptions about other people from their online comments are so susceptible to projection that it's important to practice suspending judgment. Tiny packets of text give us so little information about each other that they leave a lot of empty space for interpretation. We fill in those degrees of freedom from our imagination, based on our own prior experiences, which were in place long before that other person showed up.

Sometimes we fill the picture in favorably, but if there's anything in a comment that rubs us the wrong way—anything activating—then the picture we create is not a nice one. Since a forum like HN gets millions of posts a year, there are inevitably plenty of hooks to snag us in this way. If you stop and think about what that means experientially, it's sort of shocking: it means that we are surrounded by our own demons. Since everyone else is having the same experience, a forum like this is a community of people who feel surrounded by their own demons, not realizing that we are mostly creating them for ourselves. This is why disagreements degenerate so quickly, even though each party is sure that they're the one in good faith. It's also why you'll regularly see generalizations about how awful the community is, posted by users who participate in it every day. It's surprising that it can function at all.

By "demons" I just mean a composite of our own past painful experiences, which is the store we draw on when connecting the dots about someone else in a defensive way. This phenomenon isn't only online; it happens everywhere that people don't know each other well. But online, we know each other so little that there are more dots to connect.

> If you stop and think about what that means experientially, it's pretty shocking: it means that we are surrounded by our own demons. Since everyone else is having the same experience, a forum like this is a community of people who all feel surrounded by their own demons, not realizing that they are mostly creating them for ourselves.

I've been thinking about this all day since I read it. Thanks for this. It's a profound insight for me.

This along with BurntSushi's insight about emotional code smell makes this one of the best hn post ever for me.

Slightly tangential, but that former stance you describe partly is a consequence of the age-old dualism between emotions and reason, to which people quite frequently subscribe despite strong evidence in the last decades from neurosciences that this is just not an adequete model--that's not how our mind work. We are not some sort of judge in their cartesian theater deliberating between the good, rational-mind and the lively but childish emotional-mind.

> I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem.

You can.

And probably you should.

Just accept it is not the _only_ tool.

You have a life too, things come at different angles, from everywhere, and impact you and the people you love differently.

I've been working hard for the past 25 years to become an emotionless decision maker when it's about my primary job: writing software.

I don't keep code around because I'm attached to it, if there's a better way to execute the same thing.

I don't reject other people's code just because it's not the way I would write it.

I don't research pureness, I know that to be useful and, most importantly, correct, software has to solve a lot of edge cases and inevitably is going to be full of trade offs.

I don't only work on new software or features, I don't plan complete rewrites of legacy systems if I can work around the problem, I do maintainance, even of legacy systems, maybe nobody is gonna credit you for doing it, but it's what keeps the World spinning and rationally it's one of the most important tasks.

I used to care about "what will people think if I'll solve this with an 'if'?", now I know that it was my emotions blocking me from doing the right thing.

I don't take bug reports personally, although there are times I struggle with the usual "haven't read the documentation" or "it doesn't work it's not really helpful as a description of the problem", but I try to let my emotions out of it, I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

Emotionless doesn't mean rude or "acting like a killing machine" it means you're detached from emotions and when a problem arise you help to find the solution instead of blaming someone or something.

Emotionless is that alert on the plane that tells you to put your oxygen mask first, before helping your children. Because it's the most rational and logic thing to do, the opposite of what a parent would instinctively do out of love.

> Turns out I was just an asshole

Don't be an asshole is a good start too :)

But sometimes is hard when you're young and everyone older around you talks about tricking the system while you just want to fix it (at least that was my struggle with it when I was younger).

> > I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem.

> You can.

This is narrowly true in theory, noting particularly that it applies only after the problem is defined, because defining a problem is an application of values which ultimately are rooted not in rationality but in emotional preference.

In practice, people don't and probably practically cannot fully define problems in advance of approaching them, but feel out the parameters of the problem in the course of addressing it, so attempting an unemotional approach invaluable means accepting an incomplete understanding of the problem.

> This is narrowly true in theory

There is no switch that make it true just by flipping it.

That's why I said I've been trying for the past 25 years, it's a process.

On the other hand empathy doesn't work much better in practice.

People (we) are largely irrational.

> attempting an unemotional approach invaluable means accepting an incomplete understanding of the problem.

Of course!

All you do by ignoring your emotions is that you become unaware of them. They don't go away. Psychology and neuroscience have again and again found how irrational and emotional we are even when we think we are rational.

> All you do by ignoring your emotions is that you become unaware of them

That's a bit silly to say.

It doesn't work like that, it's like saying that if you ignore your arm it stops working.

And nobody ever said you should ignore emotions, but that you are perfectly capable of behaving differently in different situations.

You're not always emotionally charged, you are not always made of steel, you can control what happens to you much more than you imagine.

> Psychology and neuroscience have again and again found how irrational and emotional

Irrational and hormonal, as in "driven by hormones", the layman term is emotional, but it isn't entirely correct.

Emotional is about emotions (nobody consider rage or sadness or loneliness or "I wanna be left alone" emotions, they are considered bad things, something to be removed), but being autistic is not being emotional, for example.

There are a lot of behaviours not caused by emotions, which, BTW, are located in our brain, our logic processing unit, not in our hearts. They are in its backend, the irrational brain, and they are perfectly rational: they are a tool humans used to survive and take life-saving decisions in the span of milliseconds.

They are the same thing as a fire alarm, they signal a change of state, possibly for the worse.

I'll go further and say that we all are at the mercy of our selfish genes, as R. Dawkins proved.

Ignore your arm and you won't learn how to use it. It won't go away. You'll just have an arm the is super uncoordinated and weak.

Ignore your emotions and you'll become emotionally immature and a person people won't like to interact with, because your emotions will come up when inappropriate.

The importance of learning to feel and label your emotions is one of the most basic findings in psychology.

I recommend reading about Non-Violent-Communication. It sounds like it is something completely different, but it is a practice for learning to labeling you emotions in different situations, and then being able to react more appropriately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT8KGgDo6TY

> Ignore your arm and you won't learn how to use it.

Sorry but no, it doesn't.

If you fall you stretch your arms forward, to protect your head, it's an automatism, your body works the way it is supposed to work even when you ignore it

Most of what it does it's independent from your will

It just works

The heart doesn't stop beating if you don't think about it

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