Tag: Psychology

Constantly Wrong and Out of Your Depth – Psychology of Programming

“The thing that gets lost, and which I think is important to know, is that programming is never easy,” he says. “You’re never doing the same thing twice, because code is infinitely reproducible, so if you’ve already solved a problem and you encounter it again, you just use your old solution. This means that by definition you’re kind of always on this frontier where you’re out of your depth. And one of the things you have to learn is to accept that feeling—of being constantly wrong and not knowing.”

Which sounds like it could be a Buddhist precept. I’m thunderstruck.

“Well, constantly being wrong and out of your depth is not something people are used to accepting. But programmers have to,” he concludes.

Devil in the Stack: Searching for the Soul of the New Machine
Andrew Smith

Gray Rocking, Definition of

Gray rocking is a technique for disengaging with manipulative or abusive people by becoming as dull, boring, and uninteresting as a gray rock, thereby removing the “supply” or emotional reaction they seek. This involves giving brief, non-committal responses, keeping your tone and expressions neutral, and avoiding sharing personal information that could be used against you. While it can be effective in managing difficult interactions, especially in inescapable situations like co-parenting or workplace relationships, it can also be emotionally exhausting and may lead to feeling disconnected or numb.

Definition from Google AI

The Committee – Addiction and Internal Dialogue

In a new interview with “Rock Of Nations With Dave Kinchen And Shane McEachern”, BUCKCHERRY’s Josh Todd spoke about David Draiman’s recent onstage speech about the “demons” of addiction and depression in which the DISTURBED frontman revealed that, a few months ago, he “almost joined” his late friends Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell and Scott Weiland while battling these demons. Asked if he can relate to Draiman’s mental health challenges, Todd said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Absolutely. I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been clean and sober from drugs and alcohol for 28 years. And although you take away the drugs and alcohol, it’s just a symptom of the problem. The problem is your mind. Between your ears, I’m different than a normal guy walking the street. So because of that — I call it ‘the committee’, and the committee between my ears can be an asset or a liability, for sure. So you have to do a lot of things to manage that and to understand those particular voices in your head that really wanna get you isolated from people and get you to drink and use.

BUCKCHERRY’s JOSH TODD: ‘I’ve Been Clean And Sober From Drugs And Alcohol For 28 Years’

Sad Music, Attraction of

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”

This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it. Maybe we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Maybe there’s an evolutionary advantage in it, or maybe we’re socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Maybe our bodies produce hormones in response to the fragmentary malaise of the music, creating a feeling of consolation.

The Reason People Listen to Sad Songs
It’s not because they make us sad but because they help us feel connected, a new study suggests.
NYTIMES
Oliver Whang

from the comments:

DNALevelC
I’ve always attributed the mood improvement I get when listening to sad songs to some kind of homeopathic response. Like a vaccine, a small dose of sadness immunizes against profound sadness. I find it a powerful effect

Surin S
Melancholy songs are the closest thing to traveling back in time.

David Knight
The whole thing when you are sad is that you feel like you are the only one in the world that feels that way. Hearing sad music shows you that you are not the only one and a good song writer can put a positive spin on the whole thing. The idea that there is someone out there who has empathy for the rotten way you feel is uplifting. I’ve experienced this with multiple genres of music from country, folk, and blues to jazz, classical, baroque and renaissance so it’s not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. Hurtin’ music has no boundaries.

Sarah
Sad songs do two important things: they put to words feelings one might have been unable to verbalize and they remind us that we are not alone in our sorrow.

The Incalculable Value of Peripheral Connections

In Placerville, Calif., David Turoff, 72, a veterinarian, chats with his mail carrier and UPS deliveryman, and sometimes drops in on the mechanic who repairs his truck just to say hello or leave a gift of firewood. “They make me feel good,” Mr. Turoff said of such brief interactions. “I like having connections with people.”

Toby Gould’s day begins with a 7 a.m. visit to Chez Antoine, a bakery and coffee shop in Hyannis, Mass. Mr. Gould, 77, a retired minister, buys a takeout latte and speaks French, haltingly, with the Belgian proprietor, who bestows a slice of ham on Mr. Gould’s Australian shepherd, Layla. If the shop closed, “it would leave a hole in my life,” Mr. Gould said.

They May Be Just Acquaintances. They’re Important to You Anyway.
The people at the dog park, the bank teller, the regular waiter — these casual relationships may be “weak ties,” but they’re also a key to well-being.
Paula Span

From the comments:

Nancy
My friend and I ate pizza together every Friday at a local restaurant. The man behind the counter knew our orders and always chatted a bit with us every week. A couple of Fridays ago, we walked up to the door and it was locked, with a handwritten “Closed” sign. It closed permanently. We were so sad. What happened to our guy? Did he get another job? We miss going there and seeing all the regulars. We had to start all over at a new pizza place

barbara
This article really resonates for me. My husband and I had lived in the same neighborhood for 30 years and when he died, I discovered that I had to break the news to many of his “weak ties.” Some of them had known us as a couple and so naturally asked about his absence, but others were people he had interacted with alone – the dry cleaners, the man who repaired his watches etc. Many knew his name but others did not, and yet every one of them had something to say about him and often a story to tell. They had also observed us as a couple over the years and offered their impressions of our relationship. (You are never invisible in a neighborhood!) Discovering that he had left a small gap in so many people’s lives helped me immeasurably in coping with the huge gap he had left in mine.

Been There Experienced That
While I was having radiation therapy, I struck up a relationship with the bus driver and a passenger. When I came to the end of the treatment, I told them why I had been riding and that this was my last ride. Both cheered me when I got off the bus. It felt very good.

You Can Like What You Actually Like

This love can’t be faked, not inside your own soul. Yet among those who are merely trying to impress, it is of course faked all the time. At my university, we foolishly used to ask applicants for a list of the writers and books that had “influenced” them. This is not an entirely fair question to ask any writer, but for a board of academics to spring it on a bunch of young, inexperienced, aspiring writers was madness. Of course the answers we got were mainly intended to impress. The question became the single most insincere item in the entire application—bypassing the mendaciousness even of professorial letters of recommendation. The lists we got were almost always very grand, academically impeccable, and exactly the same: that year’s higher-than-highbrow list of what every applicant assumed a bunch of professors wanted to see. We should have been ashamed. We were doing people damage by inducing them to lie about their real tastes and their real identities, leading them into a form of self-betrayal that at worst can be a symptom of self-contempt. Dishonesty about what really pleases your imagination is outright dangerous to you as a writer.

The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction
Stephen Koch

Hitler Hears Bad News – Don’t Shoot The Messenger

…as Halder recorded:

When he read a statement compiled from unimpeachable sources which showed that in 1942 Stalin would still be able to muster another one to 1-1/4 million men in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga, and at least half a million more in the eastern Caucasus and the region to its north, and which proved moreover that the Russian output of first line tanks amounted to at least 1200 a month, Hitler flew with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth at the one who was reading this statement, and forbade such idiotic nonsense.

Hitler’s Mistakes: New Insights into What Made Hitler Tick
Ronald Lewin

People will vote for someone they don’t like, they won’t vote for someone they think dislikes them.

“David Axelrod said to me, ‘Remember Anthony, people will vote for somebody they don’t like. They gave Richard Nixon a landslide, nobody liked him, they gave him a landslide. What they don’t like doing is they don’t like voting for people that dislike them.’ ”
“See the difference? So you’re standing at a podium calling people deplorable, they’re like, ‘okay, give my vote to the orange man.'”
Anthony Scaramucci

#Unfit, the Psychology of Donald Trump
An eye-opening and shattering analysis of the behavior, psyche, condition, and stability of Donald J. Trump.

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1470415129?

Three Types of Yes

I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment.

A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge.

A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action.

And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.

Voss, Chris; Raz, Tahl. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Software Development, Frustration Rollercoaster


What are the harshest truths of being a software engineer? from cscareerquestions

Shit-Gnome
Sometimes you’ll encounter problems that seem impossible, and will take much longer than you’d expect to solve. If you let it, it will break your confidence for a while. Then you’ll finally figure it out, and feel amazing. It can be a self-confidence rollercoaster.

WorriedFortune
I struggle with this so much. Sometimes I feel like I know what I’m doing, other times I feel like I have an IQ of 55.

PringlesDuckFace 
It’s like the IDE is stabbing the red squiggle right into my heart.

Drauren
I pendulum between, “I am an absolute god at my job” to ” I am a fucking idiot” on a semi-daily basis.

Semantic Polarities – Ugazio, Parks

“Valeria Ugazio’s book Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the Family: Permitted and Forbidden Stories proved particularly useful. Ugazio considers the construction of identity in terms of a number of “semantic polarities” (fear/courage, good/evil, success/failure, belonging/exclusion) and suggests that in each family of origin one criterion of value will tend to be hierarchically more important than others in the way people talk about and assess each other. As a result, it becomes a matter of urgency for each individual in the group to find a stable and comfortable position in relation to this dominant polarity. Is it, for example, more important in this family to be seen as independent and courageous, or as pure and good, or as a winner? Wherever and for whatever reason an individual is unable to find a stable position—perhaps he or she wishes to be good but simultaneously yearns for transgression, or desires intensely to belong but then feels diminished by inclusion in the peer group—this can lead to the kind of conflicts and oscillations we associate with mental illnesses, or again with the tensions and ambiguities we find in creative art.”

Parks, Tim. Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them 

Frequency Illusion / Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, Example of

Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you’ve just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject — or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you’re not crazy; you are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that’s because you’re noticing it more

KATE KERSHNER, HowStuffWorks

wp-15855379840093695081174932282751.jpg

When I moved I noticed all the other people moving, such as the people who got this UHaul. Now I’m settled in, either people are moving less or I’m just not noticing as much.

The Divided Self – Daudet Quote

“Homo duplex, homo duplex ! ” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is dead, he is dead ! ’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.

“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks! ”

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience
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