You are not alone
4,637 karma · joined May 29, 2019
Our self awareness - in theory - allows us to change our habits, or at least temper them.
So my experience of this is that my default animal instinct is to automatically judge people in a negatively biased way (which I think may come from our evolutionary instinct to try to predict danger - or if not, perhaps something encoded in me specifically at an early age) but I have tried to adopt the conscious habit of overriding this initial instinct with “mediating thoughts” like “what do I really know about this person?” and “how would I behave if I were in their position”.
I also try to simply remember my discovered self-knowledge that my instinctive emotional response - pre-thought - is to be distrustful or overly negative. Just keeping that in mind helps automatically attack the judgemental thoughts as they come up. I guess it helps me recognise the pattern and not trust those thoughts.
I’m quite convinced that I’ve done this for long enough now that my “habit” of automatically judging people has lessened over time.
The instinct is still there, but better cognitive habits have been overlaid on top.
That said, I still feel I’m about 5-10% along in terms of progress compared to where I’d want to be! (And in reality there is no “end” to this work).
My outward behaviour towards others is generally “good” - I think - but I find myself often frustrated at the instinctive negativity in my head which I have to proactively counter - each and every time.
And because I’m human, I sometimes (ok… often) forget to.
I take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. It is incredible how confidently they talk about certain topics where it’s clear even to an uneducated listener that they only have a surface level understanding.
Their flip-flopping on AI - from it being the best thing ever to being completely overhyped and underperforming - and then back again - has been amusing.
I enjoy their insights on slightly less hyperbolic topics like SaaS business models and other more mundane things. There can be some genuine nuggets of wisdom there.
Jason sometimes pushes back on the political stuff and attempts to be a voice of reason (relatively speaking - though I’m revealing my bias there) and that can sometimes prompt some actual interesting debate. I probably wouldn’t be able to bear listening at all without him on it.
Mainly though I think it can be good to listen to people you don’t agree with every so often.
As a Brit looking in from the outside, it’s hard for me to understand how choices have been made in this election, but if I were to attempt a charitable take, did Trump win because he tunes in to some sort of low level anger/resentment/frustration felt by a chunk of the population?
Whereas the Democrats, more polished perhaps as they are, have failed to make that connection sufficiently?
And that connection - or whatever it is that the population picks up on from Trump, outweighs the “obvious flaws” that his detractors may point towards?
Ie they don’t vote for him because of his hyperbole and “questionable” behaviour, they vote for him in spite of that - for other reasons.
I can see the Democrats didn’t help matters by pushing Biden to run when he clearly shouldn’t have, though perhaps it was the lesser of two evils at the time (from their point of view) given his proven record of being able to actually beat Trump.
Happy to be corrected if this is a bad or naive analysis!!
“Research shows that adults with ADHD are 5 times more likely to attempt suicide. 1 in 4 women with ADHD have made attempts on their life, while men are more likely to end their life. Accidental death is also common.”
http://www.berkshirehealthcare.nhs.uk/media/109514702/suicid...
It was about an A4 page of text and spent most of it being empathetic to “how frustrating” my issue must be and how they were really keen to help. But it was extremely patronising, barely addressed my problem, and it felt like a really long winded and super polite way of saying “fuck you” to a paying customer.
At least that’s how I took it.
I’m sure LLM’s can be used really effectively in customer service but not by just blindly copy/pasting whatever it spews out.
Whenever I’m conscious enough of it I do try to thank people - trying to remember how hard it must be on the other end!
After being diagnosed with something in the DSM - I experienced this myself, and have been very aware of the Heisenbergian side effects of labelling and observing something like this in a specific concrete way.
Common wisdom with some psychological diagnoses is that the symptoms often seem to get worse after diagnosis because you start to notice the problems more. But I think there is an "identity" element to this too as you elude to.
I think this is somewhat inevitable, but the question is, even though you may be subconsciously influenced by the diagnosis itself - is it still better to have such a diagnosis and to be able to work with that information - versus not?
From my own experience, I'm not quite sure - but I'd probably lean towards having the diagnosis still being the better option.
As pet theories go - this seems like a pretty good one!
Very interesting.
> Which is why, so often, the structure of a cult is one NPD leader and a coterie of BPD followers.
I've definitely observed this in a business setting and can think of some well-known (tech company) examples too.
This sort of thing is frustrating from a company that seems to launch a new product every week.
The Zero Trust portal is such a terrible experience to use and has felt very badly “bolted on” to the rest of the Cloudflare portal from the beginning and has only continued to diverge from there.
Cloudflare’s usability took a huge dive for me when tunnels moved out of the main UI.
The integration between critical security products is poor too (eg Access and Tunnels) leading to confusion and uncertainty - which is exactly what you don’t need when it comes to security.
I used to happily accept the MITM downsides for the benefits that CF brings but I’m getting quite close to writing my own simple managed reverse proxy system based on Nginx and just focusing on a few core features that I need.
The same actions committed by two different presidents could vary hugely in their motive - one might be legitimately concerned about voter fraud and the other trying to interfere maliciously with election results.
Admittedly the bar would be high to prove malicious intent (eg. acting out of self interest rather than in the interests of the office/country) but that still seems better than just saying that a given action, regardless of motive, is covered by immunity.
AI/ML is already becoming rapidly commoditised and the level you’re talking about is very infrastructure/platform orientated whereas all the real action (and potentially higher value stuff) is going to be happening an abstraction level or two above that.
It’s kind of like when electricity was invented. Do you want to become an engineer working on building the electricity grid (rapidly commoditised) or do you want to be the inventor/builder working on new things powered by this fancy new electricity?
The analogy isn’t perfect but I always think it’s worth carefully thinking about what level of abstraction you want to work at. Working in the infrastructure layer is definitely fun and rewarding. I would happily do that kind of work too. I love Devops. But like a lot of infrastructure level stuff it may not be where the “action” really is eventually.
But it depends what your motivations are too. “Do what you enjoy” is always a good way to set a general direction I think.
Just my two cents. I’m just an internet moron. I could be wrong.
Ingenious!
For someone using neither of these tools yet, Keyboard Maestro is probably the nicer one to start with to give you a taste for how useful some of those automations can be!
Both are pretty powerful.
Very good advice! (And the rest of your comment too)
Pretty egregious behaviour.