Think of Pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Think of Pavlov

boz.com

106 pointskiyanwang48 comments

> After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.

Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.

Maybe the author learned a lot from you !

People don’t remember what you say

anywhere near as clearly as how you make them feel.

Slight tangent but I've had my own Pavlovian moment when I taught a loud neighbor how to keep the volume down [0]. It all started when our RF tv remote interfered. He probably thought there was a ghost that turned off the tv whenever his volume went above 15.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/teaching-my-neighbor-to-keep-the-vo...

Truly a sitcom worthy story.

Some people need the opposite advice: Sometimes an interaction is just a one off event. No need to teach a lesson.

And on the flip side, sometimes there's no need to learn a lesson! One of my pet peeves is when people draw huge conclusions about people/things based on way too few interactions (small sample size). Sometimes someone is just having a bad day. But if it happens again and again and again, _then_ you should draw conclusions.

Agreed. Naturally, we don't always know which event is a one off ( it used to be easier prior to proliferation of internet and then cell phones ). This likely explains some of the overcorrection I see in this area as a result. I am constantly on guard in public and if someone pulls a cell to record me, I am immediately defensive.

I guess what I am saying is that it is harder to assume it is not the type of event where we don't have to 'condition' people.

Pavlov experminted and confirmed about the shortcuts taken by animal instincts via correlations, avoiding the hardwork of reasoning every time. This optimization is natural for all life forms including humans. And that's how evolution happens.

But, you don't need to game it by being specifically aware of what's going on. When you fabricate your responses in order to give false correlations to people around you, it causes distrust and alienation, purely because of your inconsistent responses over time. So the optimal option is just being what you are.

If you are aware of what you are and find that it needs improvement, a good technique is to fabricate the responses as those of the person you want to become. Fake-it-until-you-become-it is imperfect but an improvement on I'm-an-asshole-so-they-should-adapt-to-it. After all, if you want to change, that's who you are too.

Banal and superficial mechanistic take on human behavior. Which is exactly what I would expect from Meta’s CTO

I don't like the comparison at all. Behaviorism has been long discredited in favour of more complex representations of our cognitive process [1].

Please don't treat people around you like experiments.

[1] https://personal.utdallas.edu/~tres/spatial/tolman.pdf

That Behaviorism rejected complex internal states (or "cognitive representations") was and is a bit of a strawman. The point is that the internal states must be defined such that they can be grounded in observable behavior.

> Please don't treat people around you like experiments.

Isn't it fitting that the guy who wrote the blog is the CTO of Meta/Facebook, who are quasi experimenting for-profit on people for over 20 years.

Nothing quasi about it, the entirety of the facebook universe is a giant Skinner box

This is the official publication where Facebook researchers and academic collaborators reported the findings of their 2012 News Feed experiment that manipulated emotional content and measured effects on users’ posting behavior.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

Judging from the comments Boz and the rest of the careless people he works with did a great job at training a good part of us to really dislike them and the company they work for

It’s a funny way of describing things but it seems like sensible advice. Probably lots of people don’t need this lesson explained to them this way, but it probably does click for some people, and getting them to see the bigger picture of what they’re communicating seems good for them and the people they interact with.

> Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (born January 7, 1982)[1] is an American business executive and U.S. Army Reserve officer who has been chief technology officer at Meta since January 2022.

Yeah, my advice would be to take whatever this guy says and…do the opposite.

So your advice is to treat all interactions with colleagues as one-off transactions and to make sure you try hard to always ‘win’ – demonstrate that they are stupid for not knowing something, try to get them to commit to doing more than their ‘fair share’ of joint work, etc?

No my advice is to treat people like human beings and not science experiments. Which is something that Meta does, and he advocates for in this blog post.

The author misunderstands basic human behavior here. And there are enough literal-minded people on HN that everyone ought to just avoid this advice entirely.

Just one example-- some narcissists will take the author's strategy personally, and they will fuck with him relentlessly for their own amusement. Worse, it won't be clear to onlookers who is the victim and who is the aggressor. It will appear as one low-empathy individual trying to "train" others while another, intransigent individual actively resists the training. There's even a good chance onlookers will see the narcissist as the good guy, successfully fighting back against the author's snobbery and condescension. If you can't think of a citation for this pattern then you don't currently live in the U.S.

And that's ignoring the fact that inconsistencies in other people's reactions over time often don't have anything to do with the author's behavior. Someone who comes away from interactions "feeling small" may in fact be consumed with their own crippling anxiety. Interpreting that as a failure of the author's Pavlovian strategy is a recipe for codependency that helps no one. The whole metaphor is a fool's errand.

Adding to this: socially awkward people shouldn't feel pressured to mute themselves.

> Everything being a repeat game and people on the sideline taking notes

This isn't an excuse to play small. The universe rewards courage.

Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)

Eloquent and insightful article. I can confirm the method works.

I kind of wish it had more examples. But I agree well written and thoughtful.

I've read most of the posts from that blog and shortness is boz's style without hesitations. Try looking for your examples in the another articles, the topic of each article typically overlaps with few other topics.

What happened to just being honest, communicating respectfully, and doing the right thing?

That disappeared for the author the moment he worked for Meta, which hides the truth, encourages flaming and negativity via their algorithms, and facilitated genocides.

I've often wondered if the inauthentic calculativeness of modern (and particularly Western) culture had its source in Dale Carnegie's book.

I've absolutely measured people in this way time and time again. From the POV of owning delivery, you very quickly learn, from the little details, who you should put on your go-to list.

I reviewed the mini-blog post and initially thought: "Okay, this doesn't seem unreasonable". Then I clicked over to the "About" section, only to find out the author is the CTO of Meta (and proudly at Facebook for two decades).

Then took a closer look at the latest post, "Love what you do." Really? If "loving what you do" means contributing to Facebook/Meta’s legacy of facilitating genocides, exploiting users, running unethical social experiments, and overall polarizing societies to the brink of destruction just for profit - then your "life advice" is just hollow, superficial nonsense. Screw you, "Boz" - we don’t need that kind of hypocrisy at HN.

I had the same thought, how can you continue working for Meta if the leader happily undermines democracy for profit and enjoys schmoozing with the current administration who have no scruples of dismantling our democratic institutions and world order.

I get not everyone can leave a company if their life depends on it and they have to support a family, especially in this market.

But this guy is probably a millionaire already. He's got the luxury of working for more world positive companies or projects.

But him choosing to continue to work for Zuck sends a clear signal what his values are.

It's all just self embellishment and rationalisation with these guys for the horrible stuff they did. Even if they think its genuine, this Philip K Dick quote fits exactly "Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools".

What an impoverished way of looking at relationship. I’m not surprised Boz wrote this one—someone with a reputation of being high friction and being hard to work with.

I couldn’t imagine thinking of relationships so transactionally, like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them. There is very little room in this tersely communicated philosophy for intimacy and vulnerability, and in fact, the “hard feedback” he mentions can only be delivered successfully within the context of a trustful relationship.

It can be an exhausting way to view relationships, but I think it’s true. I’d argue there also is plenty of room for intimacy and vulnerability when it’s genuine. I think people appreciate these traits when they are genuine and appropriate, and prefer it to a fake aura of confidence

Red vs blue pill

This is the rule - with the notable exceptions being the people that that society lionizes as “good” or “empathetic” or “kind.” For example MLK, Fred Rogers, Steve Irwin, Bob Ross etc…. these are people whose avatars demonstrate relational capabilities that transcend transactional.

In day to interactions with people in modern industrial society, 99% of the interaction is transactional by default. However if you look around you’ll notice that again the plurality of relationships are transactional at their root.

This is in contrast to transcendental relationships, like the achievable ideal relationship between parent and child, between siblings or romantic partners.

This is especially true for people who got into a position of power via “climbing the ladder”

The ladder in this case is made up of other people that you step on in order to get to the next rung in the ladder.

Transactionalism is ultimately the foundational basis for capitalism and our existing social order globally, and unfortunately also the root of all evil.

> like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them

This is more of a statement about the other person, especially if true, than the person trying to estimate the score, who is just trying to model their world as accurately as possible.

If you don't like it, the only thing you can do is try to be more complicated than a single score yourself. If it is in fact a good model of most human, then there is nothing you can do to change it, and being angry at the person who made you aware of the model doesn't help either.

Yes, viewing relationships transactionally is not good for either participant. But I think you have taken a rather distorted view of the article - and there’s a more charitable way to view this than a brutal utility optimization:

> someone comes with a question and leaves feeling small, they’ll stop asking. If they bring you a hard problem and you meet it with curiosity, you’ll get more of those. If you always solve things for people, they’ll outsource their judgment. If you always critique, they’ll start hiding the work.

I take this as a reminder that my off-hand remarks to people can really make a difference. I don’t think that is “impoverished” at all.

It’s always important to remember what your position is when making off hand remarks.

An off the cuff comment to a friend or a colleague where you are both equal in stature/responsibility - probably fairly harmless. But important to also remember that you often don’t know what someone else is going through.

An off the cuff comment when you are the CEO or CTO to someone junior - potentially catastrophic for them.

"This doesn’t mean everything should be ... [this] ... or ... [that]."

This is a typical LLM sentence typically as first sentence of the conclusion. Just sayin.

That name rings a bell.

Not a good one: CTO of Meta / 20 years at Facebook.

Gee thanks for the downvotes FB employees/shareholders. I assume Boz must have proudly forwarded having hit HN first page with his pseudo insights.

Good job, Andrew! Nice article!

Excellent short read! This also applies to yourself. The way you talk to yourself matters and is a repeatable game.

The Third Patriarch of Zen wrote: The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

It’s a fun game to notice all the little preferences we introduce in our self talk and be intentional in our responses.

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