If the only thing stopping me from doing horrible things was that I haven't yet imagined doing them, then I and everyone around me should be terrified of me. Fortunately, my self-control seems to be a little stronger than that. Though it is not helpful for everyone to be told by implication that they have permanently terrible self-control (or any similar implication). [1] Fortunately I seem pretty good at dealing with such implications, although I am less confident about other people.
(Some articles have repeatedly appeared on HN, to the effect that when gifted kids are taught that "gifted" is an unchangeable property of a person and has nothing to do with gaining skill by repeatedly playing with something, they tend to stop putting a serious effort into doing anything new and challenging--for fear they'll screw up and have to accept they're not "gifted"--and so they tend to stop or severely restrict their mental growth, becoming rather less "gifted". Now imagine how this applies to self-control.)
I just did picture murdering my family over dinner with a fork. I decided the idea holds no attraction to me, and is pretty stupid. I am not worried about deciding to do it in the foreseeable future. Feel free to explain how this situation is not ok.
(Nor do I think the idea will repeatedly come back to me in the future and I'll panic and try to think about anything but it, and only end up thinking more about it, until I lose sight of anything else and just do it because I don't know what else to try. --I have the impression, from some books I've read, that that's one way some initially sane people end up doing crazy things. In this scenario, the panic is obviously an exacerbating factor, and it stems from the belief that "I'm thinking about something horrible [or have been thinking about it for what seems a long time]" => "There's something wrong with me and I won't be able to stop".
My solution is contempt for that belief, and for other people who believe it. Like, possibly, you. (This should be combined with some sort of escape valve--if you conclude that everyone else sucks, you need some way to deal with that, and if you don't have such a way, then you may start panicking if you come close to thinking that everyone else sucks. I just assume that, no matter how high a percentage of other people appear to suck, there are people like me, and eventually we'll get together and make a good society). Meanwhile I have contempt for the horrible idea, because it is not special amongst the many other horrible ideas--let's imagine them!--and if I were vulnerable to doing them, then I'd probably have done one of them already, which I haven't. And in the unlikely event that I do keep thinking of it a lot, my working hypothesis will be that it's just self-caused by anxiety foisted on me by taking seriously, on some level, the words of people like you. ...I have read of a case where someone said that he did keep having murderous thoughts, and that this coincided with the development of a tumor in his brain; I guess it might be possible that the latter could cause the former somehow, though now that I know of this, I would still not panic, or if I did it'd be about cancer, not about the murderous thoughts. A brain tumor with such specialized effects seems very unlikely in any case.)
Anyway. This little exercise, picturing your scenario, reinforced my confidence in my sanity and my ability to decide not to do other horrible things. I'd say the experience was positive for me. So, why? There you have one answer: an exercise to prove one's sanity. (Again, I do not respect someone who would do horrible things and just doesn't because he hasn't thought of them yet. I would hope such a person would learn and grow stronger than that.)
And there are use cases for putting detailed, horrible, evil things into media productions--not breaking reader's immersion, teaching people about their vulnerabilities so they can protect themselves, and sheer enjoyment for other reasons I'm not sure of. I wrote up a couple of examples, but they made the comment too long, so here's just one, which I write about because it's fun:
----
In this clip from the anime series Death Note, the main character Light Yagami, who (unbeknownst to anyone else) is the evil killer Kira, confronts Naomi Misora, a former CIA agent and the fiancee of an FBI agent whom Kira recently killed. She has some very compromising information about Kira that she intends to bring to the police; Light wants to kill her to prevent this, and he needs to learn her real name to kill her.
Light lies to her, learns some personal details about her, compliments her, learns more details, learns that she trusts him (for the wrong reasons); exploits her trust and what she's told him to make her a (completely fake) offer he knows she'll really want; pretends to back off from it to avoid suspicion (while continuing to compliment her and extend the offer); and adds a comment ("But you're young and beautiful... don't risk your life for this") that sounds like more backpedaling, but which he knows will actually bring out her fierce loyalty to her fiance's memory and induce her to say yes. She accepts, and tells him her real name; he writes it in his Death Note (pretending it's a normal notebook) and kills her, making her jump in a river so it looks like suicide.
I consider this pure evil--in particular, noticing her admirable qualities of trust and loyalty and determination, and making them work against her; and conducting the whole conversation with a straight face until he kills her. I also find it kind of beautiful. Meanwhile, I would be repulsed at the thought of me or someone else actually doing this sort of thing (I'll classify it as "observing and manipulating someone through conversation to get them to give you what you need, then seriously harming them") to someone I knew.
What is the value of my seeing things like this? Well, I don't expect to understand fundamental reasons why I like things, but I can make up guesses, and an obvious one here is: Knowing an archetype of pure evil, I can be better prepared to deal in real life with examples of impure evil that approach the archetype to varying degrees. (Also the pattern-matching part of my brain will be more likely to notice if I start doing things that approach evil. Also, it might help me understand other people's reactions if I unintentionally do things that look like evil. Though, for the record, looking like evil is not evil, and using force to stop or punish someone who merely looks like evil is unjustified.)
----
I'm glad Falkvinge is addressing this issue. It had to be done, sooner or later. And he makes a powerful case--especially section 2, I dunno about section 1. (I'm impressed... I know of the "humanitarian with the guillotine" pattern, where a naive, doesn't-examine-the-secondary-consequences-before-acting, but generally goodhearted politician makes a well-intentioned law that ends up hurting people more than it helps. I'm familiar with the mental tool of imagining that a law was made maliciously, to figure out what the bad consequences might be. But I keep being faced with the conclusion that it's more than a mental exercise: that all pieces of legislation were in fact originally put forth by people with anti-social intentions.)
[1] John Holt explains, with several examples, how some groups of people (but not others!) have come to think that children are reckless and uncoordinated and dangerous to themselves and others, and how their resulting treatment of children causes children to exhibit exactly those traits, in ways they do not when they are not so treated. http://pastebin.com/LkBd4VhN
This is the most provocative comment I've read on my post. Reading it, I find myself thinking I will never be good because I have some sort of emotional disability that gives me shaking hands compared to some other people that are imbued with the magic gift of curiosity and fearlessness.
Logically, I consider the possibility that such things can be learned or cultivated, and that perhaps I can one day be fearless and curious. But emotionally, there is something pessimistic inside me that believes I will always be this way.
I'm envious of people who are good at being bad. It's a skill that lets you choose how to develop yourself.
I've noticed that it's really difficult for me to be bad at something, by which I mean that of my brain hasn't decided that it really needs to keep doing something, I gravitate towards things that I'm already decent at even if I don't really feel like I enjoy it.
Doing even things that I might initially enjoy quickly becomes extremely stressful if I can't observe myself making progress. Forcing things works for a while, but is not sustainable.
Sometimes there's also this weird disconnect between what I want to work on and the things my unconscious brain wants to work on, and that does get stressful as well.
I'm glad the author is talking about this problem, but I think there's a slight misidentification of the cause.
I don't think it's that we're supposed to be bad at things, it's that we're expected to already be good at things. This still applies (irrationally) even when:
1. There is no mechanism provided for becoming good at the things we're expected to be good at.
2. Most people aren't good at the things we're expected to be good at.
The underlying thing here, is that ignorance, a temporary condition, is conflated with stupidity, a permanent condition.
Carol Dweck puts this another way: she describes a "fixed" mindset, where people believe that mistakes are examples of their inherent value, and therefore fear taking risks, and try to hide their mistakes. This is contrasted with a "growth" mindset, in which mistakes are seen as a necessary part of growth and risks are seen as learning opportunities.
Also related is Brene Brown's theory of vulnerability as being a necessary part of forming relationships.
I will say, I'm not entirely convinced by all the details of either Carol Dweck's mindset theory or Brene Brown's vulnerability theory, but the generalities seem to be evident in my own life.
EDIT: I'll also add that this conflation is particularly damaging to people and communities where intelligence is highly valued, and people base much of their self-worth in being knowledgeable. My personal experience is that growing up I based a lot of my self-worth in "being smart" so anyone disagreeing with me or pointing out something I didn't know felt like an attack on the very thing that made me feel worthwhile. Building real self-esteem made it possible for me to start seeing that when I don't know something that doesn't decrease my value as a person. This has allowed me to admit I don't know things more often, and actually fill in some of those gaps with real knowledge. I'm still a growing person, and I'm still not good at this, but the progress I have made has improved my life immensely.
I'm curious - could you reframe "following your gifts" as an opportunity instead of an obligation?
I also feel that same drive where I get restless when I feel my talents are being wasted. I think a lot of people do. But when my talents are actually being used, I don't feel miserable or unhappy, but rather content. I think this may be because I don't think in terms of "Am I accomplishing everything I set out to do? Have I made enough of a mark on the world?", but rather in terms of "Am I doing the right things? Am I following the path that will maximize my contributions to the world, given the information I have available?" (Okay, admittedly I've fallen into thinking like the former on occasion, and I tend to become miserably neurotic when I do. But I've worked pretty hard to try and view things in the latter light.)
The former puts the locus of control on the outside world, where you feel responsible for the effects of your actions, even if those effects are outside your control. The latter puts the locus of control on yourself, about your choices. In theory (and in my experience), success follows as a consequence of doing the right things, not as a cause.
And then when I find that something is preventing me from doing the right thing, I ask what it is. Very often, it's myself, and I have some internal fear I need to face and get over. Sometimes, it's someone else, in which case it's time to cut that person or organization out of my life.
I'd argue it's OK even if your expertise does not catch up. The world goes by without you or I being perfect. It's one thing to strive to be better, but what good does it do if you are paralyzed because you question yourself at every turn?
I have a similar problem. It bothers me a bit that I'm not amazing at any single thing, but not nearly as much as it bothers me that there are things I can't do well. I have this strange belief that I should be at least competent at every skill there is. (I blame my dad for this, by the way. He is good at everything. :-) )
I never said to stop working at it. I’m merely pointing out that the knowledge that one is a personally unsolveably flawed human being doesn’t have to cause uneasiness.
Yes. This has been a problem for me for most of my adult life. I coasted through grade school, college. Most things came easily, naturally.
It all came crashing down for me, though, when I got my first semester law school grades back. For the first time in my life I did poorly, when I expected to do just as well as I had done before. It is not an exaggeration to say my entire sense of self erupted beneath me. I became depressed, anxious. I withdrew completely. I ended up dropping out of school. I am still recovering.
This sort of problem doesn't get much sympathy until it's too late. I hope gifted kids get more support these days.
I found some hope in the work of Carol Dweck and her book, "Mindset." All my life I had been told how smart and talented I was. I adopted this "fixed" mindset about myself, and when it was contested, I broke. Adopting a "growth" mindset is a much more sustainable, workable model. I highly recommend looking into Dweck's work for anyone who might be struggling in this vein.
I think the more apt phrase is "I lack the discipline".
I do think there is a level of fooling myself when do choose badly, thinking "It'll be fine, no big deal", when down deep I know it will cause a problem.
Mentally healthy people make bad choices all the time, knowing they will pay for it later, but wanting to enjoy "the now".
There are clearly differences between people who embrace the fact that they aren't perfect and thus are open to learning, and those who feel shame at not succeeding at something they consider themselves competent at.
Clearly its in the same genus as problems with addiction or habituated behavior but its a more easily overlooked.
To an extent, why not? When I was child, it was expected of me. I failed in that, but I realise that I'm the only person to blame for it and it means I wasn't intelligent enough.
If it will take me 50x tries to do something and someone else of that same background will do it in 25x, that means I was doing something utterly wrong.
There's another side to this line of reasoning. Sometimes, things feel tough because you are simply on the wrong track: Studying and working on the wrong things, have your ambitions set too high, working the wrong way (hard, not smart) or just push yourself too hard. If this happens to correctly describe the difficulties you have, the right answer is to ease off a bit - not just buckle down and push harder.
Which of these situations you're in at any given time is a difficult question which can't be worked out from three sentences written on a web forum. I would hazard a guess that given the "curse of the gifted", the former is more common in kids just out of High School. But I have often seen the latter as well, including on Hacker News. Both these situations can turn into mental health issues if you don't take them seriously.
I know that some facets of my thinking are exceptional, but I am not always aware of what I am good at until I do it. This often leads to people being surprised by my abilities after they have written me off already. Its a novelty, but I'd rather be consistent.
I am very successful in my career, but I failed my way through school and struggled with addiction when I was younger. It's not easy to live with ADHD. I have a lot of anger, people frustrate me so much. They are too slow and don't take enough risks.
I disagree with the author. Handicaps are real, very real, they are not mere excuses to protect our sense of self-worth. If anything, what the handicapped/troubled person desires is to lift and be free his burden - and not to use it to fail repeatedly.
Apart from that, yes subconscious fear of failing, of being not good enough, can paralyze you and demolish your productivity. You spend time searching for that perfect design, then you stumble upon someone's else work, feel inferior/get jealous - go back to the drawing board, and your project gets never completed, not even halfway done. You can never be perfect enough.
So, striving for perfection is not a good ally, striving for providing solutions is.
But please keep real problems/issues out of that, you don't have the right to insult troubled people and call them under performers, and diminish their burdens to "excuses for failure".
The over-thinking story is just one of many rationalizations. "I can't do well because I am too smart, see?"
People get frustrated when they are bad at something. The options are to get better or not. It is tempting to rationalize not practicing as being caused by something out of your control.
This reminds me very much of the Carol Dweck's theory on the Fixed and Growth Mindset[1].
I too, was raised on a Fixed Mindset; "You're not good at math/physics/chemistry? That's ok, I'm sure you have other skills.". This caused me some level of discomfort in trying new things (which are necessary for any sort of growth) because at some point I could just reach 'the end of the road' and the limit of 'talent'. This has often caused me to avoid new and challenging things altogether.
Since a year or so I've been trying to adapt the Growth Mindset by interrupting my thought process when I feel this discomfort and (often literally) say to myself that it is not the outcome that matters, but the chance to improve your skills and extend your abilities. Failure is not about you and it should just be a trigger to try harder; the road does not end. I still fall in the same traps I used to, but I've said Yes to more (challenging) things this year than any other year and I haven't 'failed' nearly as much as I thought I would, nor did the failures have the impact I feared them to have. Growth really is a marvelous (and endless) thing.
If the only thing stopping me from doing horrible things was that I haven't yet imagined doing them, then I and everyone around me should be terrified of me. Fortunately, my self-control seems to be a little stronger than that. Though it is not helpful for everyone to be told by implication that they have permanently terrible self-control (or any similar implication). [1] Fortunately I seem pretty good at dealing with such implications, although I am less confident about other people.
(Some articles have repeatedly appeared on HN, to the effect that when gifted kids are taught that "gifted" is an unchangeable property of a person and has nothing to do with gaining skill by repeatedly playing with something, they tend to stop putting a serious effort into doing anything new and challenging--for fear they'll screw up and have to accept they're not "gifted"--and so they tend to stop or severely restrict their mental growth, becoming rather less "gifted". Now imagine how this applies to self-control.)
I just did picture murdering my family over dinner with a fork. I decided the idea holds no attraction to me, and is pretty stupid. I am not worried about deciding to do it in the foreseeable future. Feel free to explain how this situation is not ok.
(Nor do I think the idea will repeatedly come back to me in the future and I'll panic and try to think about anything but it, and only end up thinking more about it, until I lose sight of anything else and just do it because I don't know what else to try. --I have the impression, from some books I've read, that that's one way some initially sane people end up doing crazy things. In this scenario, the panic is obviously an exacerbating factor, and it stems from the belief that "I'm thinking about something horrible [or have been thinking about it for what seems a long time]" => "There's something wrong with me and I won't be able to stop".
My solution is contempt for that belief, and for other people who believe it. Like, possibly, you. (This should be combined with some sort of escape valve--if you conclude that everyone else sucks, you need some way to deal with that, and if you don't have such a way, then you may start panicking if you come close to thinking that everyone else sucks. I just assume that, no matter how high a percentage of other people appear to suck, there are people like me, and eventually we'll get together and make a good society). Meanwhile I have contempt for the horrible idea, because it is not special amongst the many other horrible ideas--let's imagine them!--and if I were vulnerable to doing them, then I'd probably have done one of them already, which I haven't. And in the unlikely event that I do keep thinking of it a lot, my working hypothesis will be that it's just self-caused by anxiety foisted on me by taking seriously, on some level, the words of people like you. ...I have read of a case where someone said that he did keep having murderous thoughts, and that this coincided with the development of a tumor in his brain; I guess it might be possible that the latter could cause the former somehow, though now that I know of this, I would still not panic, or if I did it'd be about cancer, not about the murderous thoughts. A brain tumor with such specialized effects seems very unlikely in any case.)
Anyway. This little exercise, picturing your scenario, reinforced my confidence in my sanity and my ability to decide not to do other horrible things. I'd say the experience was positive for me. So, why? There you have one answer: an exercise to prove one's sanity. (Again, I do not respect someone who would do horrible things and just doesn't because he hasn't thought of them yet. I would hope such a person would learn and grow stronger than that.)
And there are use cases for putting detailed, horrible, evil things into media productions--not breaking reader's immersion, teaching people about their vulnerabilities so they can protect themselves, and sheer enjoyment for other reasons I'm not sure of. I wrote up a couple of examples, but they made the comment too long, so here's just one, which I write about because it's fun:
----
In this clip from the anime series Death Note, the main character Light Yagami, who (unbeknownst to anyone else) is the evil killer Kira, confronts Naomi Misora, a former CIA agent and the fiancee of an FBI agent whom Kira recently killed. She has some very compromising information about Kira that she intends to bring to the police; Light wants to kill her to prevent this, and he needs to learn her real name to kill her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ISK8Z0gN4&t=8s
Light lies to her, learns some personal details about her, compliments her, learns more details, learns that she trusts him (for the wrong reasons); exploits her trust and what she's told him to make her a (completely fake) offer he knows she'll really want; pretends to back off from it to avoid suspicion (while continuing to compliment her and extend the offer); and adds a comment ("But you're young and beautiful... don't risk your life for this") that sounds like more backpedaling, but which he knows will actually bring out her fierce loyalty to her fiance's memory and induce her to say yes. She accepts, and tells him her real name; he writes it in his Death Note (pretending it's a normal notebook) and kills her, making her jump in a river so it looks like suicide.
I consider this pure evil--in particular, noticing her admirable qualities of trust and loyalty and determination, and making them work against her; and conducting the whole conversation with a straight face until he kills her. I also find it kind of beautiful. Meanwhile, I would be repulsed at the thought of me or someone else actually doing this sort of thing (I'll classify it as "observing and manipulating someone through conversation to get them to give you what you need, then seriously harming them") to someone I knew.
What is the value of my seeing things like this? Well, I don't expect to understand fundamental reasons why I like things, but I can make up guesses, and an obvious one here is: Knowing an archetype of pure evil, I can be better prepared to deal in real life with examples of impure evil that approach the archetype to varying degrees. (Also the pattern-matching part of my brain will be more likely to notice if I start doing things that approach evil. Also, it might help me understand other people's reactions if I unintentionally do things that look like evil. Though, for the record, looking like evil is not evil, and using force to stop or punish someone who merely looks like evil is unjustified.)
----
I'm glad Falkvinge is addressing this issue. It had to be done, sooner or later. And he makes a powerful case--especially section 2, I dunno about section 1. (I'm impressed... I know of the "humanitarian with the guillotine" pattern, where a naive, doesn't-examine-the-secondary-consequences-before-acting, but generally goodhearted politician makes a well-intentioned law that ends up hurting people more than it helps. I'm familiar with the mental tool of imagining that a law was made maliciously, to figure out what the bad consequences might be. But I keep being faced with the conclusion that it's more than a mental exercise: that all pieces of legislation were in fact originally put forth by people with anti-social intentions.)
[1] John Holt explains, with several examples, how some groups of people (but not others!) have come to think that children are reckless and uncoordinated and dangerous to themselves and others, and how their resulting treatment of children causes children to exhibit exactly those traits, in ways they do not when they are not so treated. http://pastebin.com/LkBd4VhN
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