Lessons from a Pessimist: Make Your Pessimism Productive
lucumr.pocoo.org
lucumr.pocoo.org
I gripe _all the time_. It's part of my being. It's just what my family does. I'm Jewish and so I also associate with it culturally. But importantly, it doesn't get us (my family) down. I consider it just observing the world. It's quite stereotypically Jewish to complain and then say "not that I'm complaining." My daughter inherited this lovely (that's sarcasm, another thing that runs in my family) trait from me. My son did not.
I really have to check myself before complaining around other people. And around my wife. Because I recognize that a lot of people, most even, don't want to hear it.
A friend once said about me: "Some people think the glass is half full, others that it's half empty. You just think the water sucks." :-)
As an easily distracted person, if I don't shop ideas for others to adopt, odds are good that they will get forgotten.
So sure, call me a 'complainer'. My better bosses call me a scout or a lookout.
So the dynamic I propose is that an HSP is going to out themselves for any other ways they're neurodivergent. ADHD people getting distracted by every background noise, every smell. Asperger's people hitting their limits and flaming out, and ADHD people hitting their limits and flaming out, (in roughly chronological order).
I suspect we will find the Venn diagram of HSP and adult diagnosis of ADHD/autism is going to be thin compared to child diagnosis (and unfortunately mostly female, because there's still a lot of internalized sexism around well behaved girls). Few have the coping mechanisms to escape notice.
That said, my own personal (and very unscientific) theory is that ADHD and Autism are merely differing manifestations of the same neurological phenomenon. So I could see that somebody who has ADHD might be more sensitive than a neurotypical person.
There's overlap between HSP and alcoholism as well. Needing to get smashed at a party in order to 'relax' is more than just decompressing after a hard workweek. Alcohol dulls the senses.
> ADHD and Autism are merely differing manifestations of the same neurological phenomenon.
I struggle to imagine how you connected those dots (at least without omitting many other dots that we know connect to one condition but not the other)
It's interesting that your culture came up with one of the best words to describe the useless, resigned, ambient complaining that we're all so tempted to engage in when it seems the world wants to kill us with 1000 papercuts: kvetching.
But perhaps there's a big difference between observation and griping (to use your word) - in the outcome. Observation can lead to improvement: I saw something, I called it out, and then I or someone else can fix it. Complaining to me is the non-actionable form of observation - making a lot of noise but either leading to no improvement or actually discouraging yourself and others from taking action around the topic.
Being privately pessimistic has huge benefits, listed in the article and on other comments. Your planning becomes more effective, you're less starry-eyed with what actions you are actually taking. You become a foundation for those around you.
But being publicly pessimistic does not have the same benefits. While it's true you can gain a lot of fame/money by being pessimistic on social media, it's also internally destructive. You stop believing in yourself and those around you. It's the very reason why so many "critics" (I put this in quotations because 99.9% don't have any sort of standards) fail to be able to produce anything noteworthy in the fields they obsess over. They just become this sort of endless monotony of could've would've should've but projected onto others. Everyone knows a bunch of people like this, talented but they spend most of their time being so publicly pessimistic about whatever the subject is. Some workplaces are so toxic because the "decision maker" is nothing but a public pessimist.
It's so important to recognize what you are putting out into the world through your voice/words, and what is really happening when you are being publicly pessimistic. Are you actually criticizing for improvement, or are you creating a rift in a community? Sounds dramatic but this is what happens in a lot of open source communities, public pessimism becomes the norm because it's easier than criticism you are a part of fixing.
That being said, I find that many workplaces are overly optimistic and need some pessimism/realism to ground the processes.
Worse yet, this tactic can very quickly become machiavellian. Good luck undoing that!
One of the things I keep coming back to over the last few days is the increasing value of face to face interactions.
It's been possible, and even easy, to fake pictures for quite a while. Recently we've had to treat videos with the same degree of skepticism we've been looking at pictures with. Now we're having to shift that kind of skepticism to all non face to face interactions.
Like a lot of people here, probably most, I've formed a number of really meaningful long-term friendships with people I've never met, largely mediated over text interactions. I won't be surprised if, over the next decade or two, people end up developing "friendships" with what turn out to be bots.
What kinds of interactions can we let our guard down and fully trust as authentic? Face to face interactions will be there for a long time. Real-time interactions with people we know and trust over a distance will be reliable for a while, although if they're demanding something unusual we'd have to wonder if they're being faked.
The suggestion to make time for meaningful, direct interactions with other people is a really important one.
Oh man are you going to be pissed when you learn about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick
Writing about my plans has helped me give my anxiety/pessimism a productive job: help me spot what makes me doubt/worry so I can probe further. Identifying these items where conviction is low, makes me explore my motivations, look up data to validate my claims and breakdown my plans further.
The worrying becomes a task about finding what needs to be validated/double checked. If I'm assuming X isn't going to work because Y, then I can lookup evidence/data or make more specific questions. What I like about it is that it generates actionables - the worrying for it's own sake eats up my motivation but having a checklist of stuff that I need to look into gives me an outlet.
You should meet my product manager and reconsider.
The fact that I don't expect a very good outcome doesn't mean I shouldn't try, because what the hell else can I do? At worst, I get useful information out of my (likely) failures.
Also, thinking and preparing for the worst doesn't need to be a gloomy thing. It can even be empowering. When I've thought of all the possible crappy outcomes that might happen, I can be confident that whatever happens, I'll survive. I wish more people were like me; I'm confident that lots of disasters in the world could be avoided if people just took their heads out from the sand and embraced all the horrible possibilities that exist.
I've heard this before, but it never worked for me because I can imagine things going pretty bad. I do think there is a lot of undue optimism. An assumption that things will work out. They often don't. Maybe worrying about nuclear war isn't that productive, but we should all be a lot more worried about things like working environment, rising inequality and the cost of living. Ask Japan.
It absolutely is. When things go wrong I have already thought about the triage and backup plans. The situation will still by dynamic, but I won’t be scrambling to begin making plans. I’ll be be refining what I’ve already thought about to match the new reality.
It feels pretty badass to be thrown a curveball and not be phased. I can only do that if I’ve considered what could go wrong and planned for contingencies.
So yeah, I wish more people could find that middle place, but the extreme end can be debilitating for those like me.
Pessimism seems to be pervasive, and can spill into other areas of life. The form of pragmatism described can be learned, self contained, and is not inherently a pessimistic endeavor, even if pessimism is a natural pathway to the skill.
Pessimism was hammered into me from an early age. I, too, saw my pessimism as a pragmatic tool to be used as I solved problems in the world, and I applied it as such. I allowed this application of pessimism to turn into an acceptance that I was just a pessimistic person, but that's ok <because here's how it helps me>. The trouble is that this is also a path that leads to learned helplessness, a state that by definition one is unable to escape without some kind of intervention or new awareness, because to be in this state is to be unaware of the alternatives.
It took quite a few years for me to truly see the dark side, and how my pessimism had actually permeated many other aspects of how I think. And how my success in channeling my pessimism had made me blind to that permeation and the negative impact it had on other parts of my life and daily experience.
I don't think the people around me saw me as a pessimistic person, but the internal states left behind by this default state of mind were quite harmful. I realized that it contributed significantly to unhelpful rumination about other things in life. It contributed greatly to my depression and other forms of stuck-ness. It left me missing out on opportunities that I discarded by default.
Therapy for the traumatic upbringing that birthed the pessimistic defaults was a huge first step, but the book Learned Optimism (has been mentioned in a few threads lately) is must-read if you find yourself anywhere on the pessimism spectrum. It reframed pessimism for me in a way that was very important, and helped me see that my pragmatic use of pessimism - while useful - did not require me to maintain a pessimistic outlook.
Pessimism trained me to think defensively about problems, but is ultimately an artifact that is unnecessary to continue such a practice. I've got a ways to go, but rewiring the pessimistic patterns of thought has made life much better, and I haven't lost my ability to think critically (and when needed, pessimistically) about problems that require this mindset.
It is true however that he was super pessimistic about Python 3 and was one of the leading voices for a long time talking down Python 3.
Python 3s transition was a lesson in how not to do things, but history has shown ultimately Python 3 did not kill Python, it led to Python 3 becoming one of the worlds most successful languages, despite the pessimism and naysayers.
> It is true however that he was super pessimistic about Python 3 and was one of the leading voices for a long time talking down Python 3.
I strongly advocated against underestimating the cost of migration, which is also why I argued for bringing back the `u` prefix for strings to make supporting 2.x and 3.x work at the same time. I also built a tool to modernize Python codebases to support both at once. I think in retrospective I was not wrong about that the transition will take time.
I don't think the migration to 3.x would have been any faster if I would have pretended it's easy :)
There should be a book in the style of the Mythical Man Month about discontinuous tech stack transitions (Python 2 to 3). Or ecosystem splitting issues (Phobos/Tango), or Package Management (C++).
I don't view your engineering mindset as pessimism, I view it as realist. My take is that engineering is 80% failure mitigation, but if we don't do solid failure analysis we will only get lucky 1/5 the time. I think this is why we see so many software projects fail.
Backporting Python3 features to Python2 would have made the transition go faster for everyone. You are on a hike with a bunch of scouts, huge range of gear and physical and emotional ability, you don't bitch at the fast ones to go slower, you don't bitch at the slow ones to go faster, you redistribute the load, and if the fast ones are still fast, you give them enough supplies to start setting up camp ahead of the rest of the group.
After many years Python programming I still have to look up which direction encode and decode point when converting bytes/strings/whatever.
Python 3 still suffers from not having simple, explicit functions for converting such a string_to_ascii or whatever. Python was meant to be about providing explicit obvious one way to do something but encode and decode are a giant fail in this area and I think this is a primary reason why Python 2 to Python 3 was so hard for people.
I am quite pessimistic about this. Still not fixed or even acknowledged as a problem today.
If developers have to keep looking something up over and over then the developer is thick or the programming language has failed usability in that area.
But for new Python 3 code, I do not find it painful at all. The reason for the transition (to distinct byte/string types) was that it was too easy to confuse the two in Python 2.
Is your critique that you don't feel that the distinct types are needed, or that it's too difficult to convert from bytes to string and vice-versa?
I'm not sure how it can be much easier: b"".decode("utf8") and "".encode("utf8") are quite clear to me.
Is it just that decode/encode are hard to remember? You could use str(b"", "utf8") and bytes("", "utf8"). Careful with str(b"", "utf8") though because if you leave out the encoding you'll get back a string, but probably not the string you want.
They look arcane and unclear to me. Which direction is encode and which is decode? What does decode and encode actually mean? There should be some hint in the function name.
Here is a question for you…. for the example you give, what are all the possible permutations of every possible component of each command?
What happens if you prefix encode with b? What if you don’t prefix decode with b? What other possible values can go in the brackets? Can I encode and decode all types of input?
Now the terms encode and decode may be jargon, but they are not terms that Python made up. This is standard terminology for our industry.
I understand you find them arcane and unclear. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. Which is why I suggested the alternative of using bytes("", encoding) and str(b"", encoding) as an option that you might find more clear.
Maybe Python should have named these to_bytes() and to_string() instead. I can't argue against that. I'm only saying that I don't find encode/decode unclear and that they are standard industry terminology.
I'm addressing the point that you made that the commands are obvious, they're not.
I was asking you to identify all the permutations because that is what makes those commands complex and need constant looking up.
It’s also analogous to encryption/decryption, and to compression/decompression. Bytes are the opaque external representation, the on-disk format. Strings are the intelligible in-program format. You decode the former into the latter.
(Caveat: I don’t know any Python, but the topic of character encoding is independent from the programming language.)
What happens if you prefix encode with b?
>>> b'these are bytes'.encode('utf8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'
>>> 'this is a string'.decode('utf8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'
https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encod...
Proper Unicode handling is hard for developers because many prefer not to think about it at all. Do you have an example of a language that has a Unicode conversion API that does work for you?
This is the case with inflation, it changes the game of living "just because", and some people feel the pain and others not so much. Those who can't renegotiate for higher income are just going to be more negative, and that will percolate one way or another up to those who are better off.
Right now in the US we have the spectacle of big banks being bailed out for irresponsible management at the same time food assistance for poor people is being cut back (the expiration of pandemic-related SNAP expansion). Wealthy people are being rightsized while poor people literally starve. Threats to banks are considered a systemic risk, but hunger in the population isn't. I'd like to find an optimist to explain what is good about that to me, unfortunately I don't know any.
I think that's a good lens at which to look at it, because it doesn't matter whether you think a situation is "good" or "bad", what matters is how you deal with it. OP's "pragmatic pessimism" is actually optimism by this definition, and I agree with OP that it's overall a positive trait—Although it does require maintaining some social cognizance, because many people do not particularly like a tendency to proactively identify problems.
This is what I was looking for. I like the idea the author is presenting here, but I was hoping that he would focus more on what to do when you have a pessimistic thought.
That is, using a pessimistic thought as a cue and reacting with thinking about it as an opportunity to improve something or even accepting it as a reality without approving or disapproving and coming up with a pragmatic response.
Having a healthy dose and harmony of pragmatic realism but still a willingness to dive into the unknown to try with an open mind and heart is another thing.
Innovation that's accessible for the many is often only possible from a mindset of possibility exploring and developing capabilities.
It will astonish exactly nobody here, with or without that setup, that they had to drill into a concrete wall to get access to the thing when it eventually broke.
Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst.
Entrepreneurs can be defined as optimists - and yet it needs a pragmatic pessimist to actually build something that works