I dont know if they teach the Theory of Bounded Rationality anymore but it helped me when I was younger and got thrown into similar complex no win situations.
The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do?
You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive
2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
A mentor put it this way to me: you can't steer a stationary ship. The ship has to be moving for the rudder to work, and therefore it's better to be heading in the wrong direction (where you can turn around once you figure that out) than to be sitting still, doing nothing.
> I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.
Yup, but what I see so often happening is that people will look at the situation and automatically affix responsibility to whatever side has the most power, they obviously are being derelict in not working hard enough to solve the problem. Any attempt to point out other factors is treated as supporting the abuse by the side with the power. They have "solved" it by finding someone to blame.
Or you just can fight that tendency, fight this “solutionism” worldview, not everything is solvable, things may not turn out all right, but that’s ok, too. I.e. one should embrace the fatalism, the “it is what it is” worldview.
> Now I'm an adult, watching this kind of thing play out on a global scale every single day with the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems.
I must have missed the memo on this situation.
But more seriously, there’s such a thing as constructive criticism, and there’s such a thing as fatalism. And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.
Sure, it's wrong to shoot the messenger. But sometimes the messenger is wrong.
I think that real solutions to complex problems only arise from analysis and thinking carefully. They don't come from application of simple heuristics.
yeah, after explaining the whole psychology and telling story of her mom's schizophrenia, then BAM she hits you with a huge dose of, as you said, fatalism.
there's a very odd similarity between her mothers' delusion about cat 4 hurricanes and her own example of people being "blown out of their apartments by typhoon-strength winds". having disasters like that thrown in your face constantly by every conceivable media source probably doesn't help.
fwiw, other essays: "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", etc.
The application of this psychobabble to current events lacks support. People aren’t getting mad at climate protesters because they think the protesters caused climate change. Likewise, people aren’t getting mad at college protesters because they think the caused the problems in the Middle East. Those are actually examples of value disagreements. I.e. when you prominently put your values on display, you invite reaction from people with different values. That has nothing to do with the “blaming the messenger” problem discussed earlier in the article.
Protesters are not only bringing a message, but almost always proposing a solution. And in both cases you mention they are vigorously pointing out the frying pan while being willfully blind to the fact that they're trying to get us to jump in the fire.
It's possible to have a protest movement over somebody protecting an ox, but most protests are about issues that aren't solved because there is no good solution. If there is an answer why hasn't it been done?
this article started out so strongly too--found it pretty interesting. and then just deteriorated. like, within a few sentences in the later half you already know the leftist stance with little nuance on any of the topics being brushed with broad boring strokes
Indeed. I think that another way to look at it would be that protestors are not simply messengers, they are people who have specific goals which they would like to effect.
The war reporters, scientists, or perhaps the journalists reporting on the protests are the messengers here, and whilst I think they do receive a fair amount of cynicism, usually that's linked to the perceived attempt at influence.
i.e. Okay, you want me to change what I'm doing for you. I don't know you, and my natural tendency is to decline such requests until I determine that you're trustworthy, because otherwise I'd simply be under a constant DoS attack.
At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person. I could imagine even the schizophrenic mother the author mentions describing her motivations in terms of good, kind, and caring intentions, e.g. to protect her family from the various space aliens and demonic possessions and so on.
If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.”
Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
>Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana.
Strangers in Their Own Land is an odd citation here - it doesn't really talk about convincing people so much as understanding their concerns.
It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.
You probably don’t like it any more than I do, but the people who, for example, are fighting every day to remove rights from minority groups do, in large part, believe that they are kind.
Brainwashing is a helluva drug.
They do not view the systematic attack of minority groups as “evil” because they have been brainwashed in to believing that the groups they are attacking are evil, so, to them, their hypocrisy is justified as righteous.
The Author lists many psych studies. Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them.
There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those.
I appreciate he’s up front with his doom. I’d likely be a doomer too if I was in my 20s-30s with a schizophrenic mom and reading psych abstracts.
I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground.
Also reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
> I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground.
While I share some of your sentiment here (truly), I think 90% is way too high a number for the field as a whole, and also believe you're likely discounting "emotional intelligence" and the boots-on-ground work that non-academic psychology specialists are doing for public health and mental health in general. IOW, I am *equally* skeptical of armchair psychology people who are so dismissive about "real" psychology people.
Everybody has an opinion, and peer reviews etc. are how we root out "intuition" from clinically proven phenomena. EMDR is a great example of a recent-ish innovation that is still being tested clinically on its efficacy, but shows some promising signs thus far AFAICT. I'm certainly glad somebody is testing it etc. so that we can incorporate it into folks' care, and would not consider the people doing so "90% charlatans" nor would I find them exclusively in some alleged 10% of "non-charlatans"
I agree I’m probably a loon too. I would say 90% is not the number that aren’t ‘up to something interesting’ but 90% cannot do good statistics? I feel pretty good about that number ;)
Odd to dismiss someone as a doomer using the argument of "all psychologists are hacks anyway". The mind is the most complex part of humanity to study and you simply cast those wanting to try and understand this nearly unsolvable topic a "failed mathematicians" (a relatively easy, objective discipline).
>reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
nothing will make you more fatalist than seeing all the slow progress made and how modern society actively works backwards and dismantles so many of these facilities by the request of the financial elite.
From the article: Social workers started .. asked me if I felt safe in my home. They asked if I was okay.
I lied because I'd been taught a valuable lesson ... When you complain, people judge you.
It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing.
It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake.
Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker.
My longish life repeatedly taught me the above is absolutely true.
It also taught me a corollary:
No one, anywhere, wants to clean up their own house.
Political parties. Gov agencies. NGOs. 501c3. Worldwide religion. Local meeting house. Think tank. Grassroots org.
When someone identifies dysfunction, entropy and corruption - when someone works out a legitimately better way and wants to be part of the solution: They can expect suspicion, accusation and being labeled.
It's often couched at first. It's increasingly open if the 'troublemaker' persists.
Size matters, in my experience. Large orgs can have lots of pragmatic folks who get reality. They try to not overly focus on how they contribute. Which I get.
In Smaller/Local orgs, it's common for members to deny they'd ever discourage improvement - even while they actively marginalize 'troublemakers'. Which I have never understood.
None of this is absolute and unvarying but it's common to the point of being the rule.
> the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems.
Her mother was schizophrenic. OK, we get that. People like to deny problems and sweep them under the rug. We get that, too.
However, generalizing her mother's illness to the "collapse of global industrial civilization" is a bridge too far. People can reasonably differ about that, in general, and specifically about what should be done about it if it IS true.
Would intentional restraint of civilization be a better descriptor? How about neutering by design?
My wife needs long term, in-patient treatment and therapy. After centuries we can finally do it fairly well. And then we put a moat around it that very few can cross.
My wife is not in the small, privileged class that can cross that moat. After a lot of damage, she eventually left us to become homeless. The last I heard she's 2k miles away. Her sister died unexpectedly yesterday. I sent word but it's not likely to reach her.
I don’t think you understood. The mother’s illness was not generalized to the collapse of global civilization. The author’s experience with the former is being generalized to the experience of others as it relates to the “collapse” of global civilization.
Your loved one's decline is something you have superior insight into. "Global decline": no, you probably do not.
The former is something that an outsider can't argue with you about, unless they know the person. The latter: yes, they can. Their facts and opinions might well be better than yours.
Though this article does point out what I think is a real effect in human psychology, it bothers me that the author ends up using the whole narrative to inject her own opinions on world affairs in a context where we should feel guilty for questioning them, as though we're just as bad as her father or the police that wouldn't intervene to mitigate her mother's schizophrenia. That's a really rotten trick.
The article becomes ironic because it's an example of the very thing she is complaining about. All the decent, kind, caring people are vastly outnumbered by people like the writer who apparently tread the exact mainstream line on things like climate change, the Gaza conflict and "Trump is bad" (she writes: "The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us"). One of her covid articles mentions how "we were waiting on the FDA to approve vaccines for children under five". She couldn't be more mainstream if she tried, I couldn't find a meat=bad article but maybe that's still coming. How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
>How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
because as we saw with the 2016 US elections, majorities don't always make for the path forward. Numbers may be bigger, but invested parties put a lot more care, time, and money into pushing their cause.
And a cornered rat bites back. "the mainstream" got too comfortable and the counter culture is biting back hard. his can lead to just as many regresssions are there are progressions in humanity.
Readit News
The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do?
You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive 2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.
Mistakes and failure are awesome and underrated.
I must have missed the memo on this situation.
But more seriously, there’s such a thing as constructive criticism, and there’s such a thing as fatalism. And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.
Ironic for you to say that on a post that specifically talks about trait transfer, of people hardwired to misattribute and shoot the messenger.
I think that real solutions to complex problems only arise from analysis and thinking carefully. They don't come from application of simple heuristics.
I've come across this response a lot. It pops up when someone repeatedly won't take the hint and stop talking about the entirely visible decay.
> And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.
Some types of reputation are like fields of weeds that choke out new, healthy growth. Burning them makes for better soil.
Deleted Comment
there's a very odd similarity between her mothers' delusion about cat 4 hurricanes and her own example of people being "blown out of their apartments by typhoon-strength winds". having disasters like that thrown in your face constantly by every conceivable media source probably doesn't help.
fwiw, other essays: "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", etc.
It's possible to have a protest movement over somebody protecting an ox, but most protests are about issues that aren't solved because there is no good solution. If there is an answer why hasn't it been done?
The war reporters, scientists, or perhaps the journalists reporting on the protests are the messengers here, and whilst I think they do receive a fair amount of cynicism, usually that's linked to the perceived attempt at influence.
i.e. Okay, you want me to change what I'm doing for you. I don't know you, and my natural tendency is to decline such requests until I determine that you're trustworthy, because otherwise I'd simply be under a constant DoS attack.
If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.”
Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land
It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.
FWIW, take my data-point: no.
Brainwashing is a helluva drug.
They do not view the systematic attack of minority groups as “evil” because they have been brainwashed in to believing that the groups they are attacking are evil, so, to them, their hypocrisy is justified as righteous.
There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those.
I appreciate he’s up front with his doom. I’d likely be a doomer too if I was in my 20s-30s with a schizophrenic mom and reading psych abstracts.
I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground.
Also reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
Do tell. Which three?
While I share some of your sentiment here (truly), I think 90% is way too high a number for the field as a whole, and also believe you're likely discounting "emotional intelligence" and the boots-on-ground work that non-academic psychology specialists are doing for public health and mental health in general. IOW, I am *equally* skeptical of armchair psychology people who are so dismissive about "real" psychology people.
Everybody has an opinion, and peer reviews etc. are how we root out "intuition" from clinically proven phenomena. EMDR is a great example of a recent-ish innovation that is still being tested clinically on its efficacy, but shows some promising signs thus far AFAICT. I'm certainly glad somebody is testing it etc. so that we can incorporate it into folks' care, and would not consider the people doing so "90% charlatans" nor would I find them exclusively in some alleged 10% of "non-charlatans"
>reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
nothing will make you more fatalist than seeing all the slow progress made and how modern society actively works backwards and dismantles so many of these facilities by the request of the financial elite.
I lied because I'd been taught a valuable lesson ... When you complain, people judge you.
It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing.
It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake.
Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker.
My longish life repeatedly taught me the above is absolutely true.
It also taught me a corollary:
Political parties. Gov agencies. NGOs. 501c3. Worldwide religion. Local meeting house. Think tank. Grassroots org.When someone identifies dysfunction, entropy and corruption - when someone works out a legitimately better way and wants to be part of the solution: They can expect suspicion, accusation and being labeled.
It's often couched at first. It's increasingly open if the 'troublemaker' persists.
Size matters, in my experience. Large orgs can have lots of pragmatic folks who get reality. They try to not overly focus on how they contribute. Which I get.
In Smaller/Local orgs, it's common for members to deny they'd ever discourage improvement - even while they actively marginalize 'troublemakers'. Which I have never understood.
None of this is absolute and unvarying but it's common to the point of being the rule.
Her mother was schizophrenic. OK, we get that. People like to deny problems and sweep them under the rug. We get that, too.
However, generalizing her mother's illness to the "collapse of global industrial civilization" is a bridge too far. People can reasonably differ about that, in general, and specifically about what should be done about it if it IS true.
Would intentional restraint of civilization be a better descriptor? How about neutering by design?
My wife needs long term, in-patient treatment and therapy. After centuries we can finally do it fairly well. And then we put a moat around it that very few can cross.
My wife is not in the small, privileged class that can cross that moat. After a lot of damage, she eventually left us to become homeless. The last I heard she's 2k miles away. Her sister died unexpectedly yesterday. I sent word but it's not likely to reach her.
Your loved one's decline is something you have superior insight into. "Global decline": no, you probably do not.
The former is something that an outsider can't argue with you about, unless they know the person. The latter: yes, they can. Their facts and opinions might well be better than yours.
because as we saw with the 2016 US elections, majorities don't always make for the path forward. Numbers may be bigger, but invested parties put a lot more care, time, and money into pushing their cause.
And a cornered rat bites back. "the mainstream" got too comfortable and the counter culture is biting back hard. his can lead to just as many regresssions are there are progressions in humanity.