Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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I've started describing certain types of traumatic events as 'origin stories' for heroes or villains. Too many doctors have stories of getting into medicine because of a loss. We are trying to play out our childhoods over again hoping that repeating a scene enough times will somehow blot out the one they can't replay. It starts out noble and ends up sounding a lot like illusion of control (which maybe explains why some doctors are so bad at helping people with poorly understood conditions).

Even as a software developer I can see some of that in myself. Almost nobody has a story about someone dying or a loss caused by bad software driving them into the field. I love to make things. I love to feel useful - to the verge of 'mansplaining' according to some. As a kid there were times where I was made to feel like I was just in the way. Clearly that affected me. I've no illusions about that being a coincidence. Any more than I doubt that the uber-successful people didn't have a monologue in their heads at some point that went something like, "One day you'll all be sorry," Jonathan Coulton-style.

It's said nobody gets to be a billionaire without hurting a lot of people. Maybe you do it because you're a sociopath. Maybe you do it because you think it's just balancing out some equation in your head. Or maybe it started out that way and at some point you stopped policing yourself on that because it just made you feel bad about yourself, and you felt bad before you made all of these sacrifices so if you start feeling bad again what was the whole point?

> I've started describing certain types of traumatic events as 'origin stories' for heroes or villains

This reminds me of a certain segment from "This American Life".

Tragedy Minus Time Equals Happily Ever After

Ron Mallett was ten years old when his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. A year later, after picking up a comic book based on H.G. Wells' book The Time Machine, Ron concocted perhaps the world's most complicated plan to try to see his dad again. A half-century later, Dr. Ronald Mallett wrote a book about his plan, called "Time Traveler".

From the blurb on "Time Traveler": This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist, Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/324/my-brilliant-plan

I read the Book “The Highly Sensitive Person”, and besides the heavy implication that Carl Jung almost had sensory processing difficulties mapped out, it delineates people who think they are introverts or extroverts into two dimensions, and asserts there was a point in your childhood where people who were flooded with sensory overload decided to use it as a superpower or withdrew. It also speculated that it likely depended on your attachment pattern with adults (ie your parents).

As to the “think they are extroverts” comment, 5is part is unfortunately a tangent but the notion is that a “true” extrovert gets recharged by people, rather than drained. If you throw parties and then have to hermit up for a week after, you’re a highly intuitive person but you’re not an actual extrovert, and you will be better able to take care of yourself if you recognize this about yourself. And if you’re an introvert because your bad interactions are evidence that you must be, it may actually be that you get flooded, and once flooded the quality of your interactions drops drastically and you come across like a child. In both cases titration helps. Quality over quantity.

My partner is an intuitive introvert who thinks they are an extrovert. Once we both figured the sensory part of the equation, I bought myself stealth ear plugs and that greatly increases how long I can let her do her thing before I have to tap out.

My love of cryptography, data science, and signal processing is a direct consequence of my privacy and trust being violated when I was younger. A consequence of seeing information is power and this belief that the power of correctly predicting future outcomes can be mathematically modelled and surprises are variables that simply weren't accounted for. As I have gotten older, I have a much more nuanced understanding about personal relationships, but a primal drive to "solve" relationships so I don't get hurt is still there.

The barrier for entry in becoming a successful doctor vs becoming a successful software engineer is very different. The amount of struggle you have to go through in order to reach society's evaluation of successful is very different. I would simply argue that traumatic events are much more motivating and this ends up being necessary to stick through the process of becoming successful in a competitive field like medicine. I think the same exists in specific focuses of software development. I imagine some of the most successful cryptography experts were at some point motivated by realizing the value of having and losing privacy.

The most successful people in medicine and software development I know are the complete opposite of sociopathic. Becoming a billionaire is not how I would measure success. Being good at management and staying a c-level execute at these large corporations is a skill in itself. Whenever I come across financial success = sociopath rhetoric, I think about how my perception has changed over time regarding Ellen Pao, the interim CEO of Reddit. "Pao Effect" is named after her.

https://www.zuckerman.com/news/insightzs/inbox-pao-effect

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