Too Important To Be Able To Think
Making mistakes about what we care about
Introduction
It is painful to think about important things going wrong. And we struggle to confront painful thoughts. So it is hard think about what is important. Which makes it easy to make bad decisions about what we care about most.
This is the second post of the blog. See Index and FAQ for the others.
Contents
Highlights of Some Past Posts
I want to connect ideas, not just present them. Therefore every post includes brief reminders of some previous ones.
Graduating Down a Rabbit Hole - Why I’m starting this blog.
My feelings about public school were released by my son’s graduation. This lead me to many realizations. Talking about them in this blog helps me process them.
Personal Example - Marriage
I mentioned my bad divorce in Graduating Down a Rabbit Hole. Here is an outline of why it was bad.
My first marriage lasted 25 years. Through most of it, I believed myself to be a good and devoted husband, married to a loving and devoted wife. Questioning any part of this was extremely painful, so I didn’t.
Unfortunately, my ex had fallen out of love with me. She stayed because I was convenient. She took advantage of my willingness to do things for her. I maintained illusions about her to keep from seeing it.
The story was not all one-sided. Despite all I did, I had many faults. I denied that I did. And refused to hear her legitimate complaints about me.
Relationships like that are not rare. I know of several. You may have seen one as well. Here is what happened next.
Financial problems drove us to divorce. During our divorce, my illusions were stripped away. And then I was blindsided by all the ways I should have known better all along. This overwhelmed me with rage at her, and guaranteed a bad divorce.
Luckily, I found someone else. But I still had the same faults. My new wife complained about them as well. To my shame, I realized that there were many ways in which I had been in the wrong.
Mine is not the only divorce that I know of which fits this description.
My valuing already having a good marriage, made it worse.
Personal Example - Fatherhood
It is hard for a father to feel powerless to protect your child. Graduating Down a Rabbit Hole describes why I felt that. Facing the situation would not have give me more power, but it would have given me more options. I would have been able to support my son better. I would have been less stressed. I might have convinced my ex to make a change sooner than I did.
But none of that happened. My irrationality crippled me. And I was left less able to help than I would wish.
Caring about being a good father, made me a worse one.
Good versus Improving
The Millionaire Next Door pointed out,
Have you ever noticed that the people you see exercising are the ones who don’t need to?
Obviously they don’t need to, because they already exercised a lot. But if you’re in the habit of exercising, you don’t stop just because you’re already in good shape.
The same thing applies to becoming good. Becoming good requires improving. But then you don’t stop improving just because you’re good. So people who are good at something are typically also continuing to improve.
Let’s take this theory farther. To improve, you need to know what to improve on. Which means that you’re aware of all of the ways in which you aren’t good. Which gets in the way of feeling good!
Conversely, people who think they’re good, tend to get lazy. “I’m good, why do I need to be better?” Which means that they stop improving. Which means that they wind up worse than those who continued to work. Therefore,
If you think that you’re good, you probably aren’t.
Nice theory. Does it match real life? In my experience, it does.
At different times I’ve been somewhat serious about ping-pong, chess, programming, and several other things. The competent people I found were generally modest. And the confident ones were usually not very good.
After I noticed this, I got in the habit of asking people to self-rate on a scale of 1-10. The sweet spot was around 7 or 8. People who said that could be anywhere from competitive club play, to state champions. But self-proclaimed 9s and 10s were usually only better than their friends.
I’ve been on the other side of that. In high school, I could beat all my friends at chess. I’d never met anyone who was serious about chess. I thought I was a good chess player. Boy was I wrong!
Hidden Verbal Attacks
Graduating Down a Rabbit Hole showed the following hidden verbal attack, “If you loved me, you would help me.” How does the attack remain hidden?
There are three principles to hiding this attack.
The attack should not be at the end, because people remember that. Here, people remember a request to help. They remember the accusation from, “You would help me if you loved me.”
The attack creates an association with something important. Your partner suspecting you don’t love them is pretty important when you’re in love.
Complying should bring a pleasant thought. If you help here, you’ll feel, “You’re reminded that I love you.” This hides the accusation of the reverse.
The fact that these attacks successfully remain hidden show that,
We easily miss evidence of things we don’t want to be true.
Scammy Thought Traps
My next example comes from The Realization That Shattered My Faith.
Young Living essential oils is likely a scam. Scammers have a problem. How to keep believers from believing critics?
They get believers personally invested in the scam. Get believers to say people criticize to deflect their own personal failings. This makes it easy for believers to reject critics.
But it also makes it easy to reject your own downs. Your doubts make you a critic. They’re a sign of your own personal failure. We reject the idea of that failure, and so stay stuck in the scam.
People really get stuck in such mental traps. From which I conclude,
Scammers rely on our not questioning we find important.
Please note, thought traps are not always false. They are just hard to think about. For example the idea of painful death makes it hard for me to think about jumping off a cliff. This is normally a good thing.
But would you find it easier to commit to doing a bungee jump, or 200 miles of random driving? For a lot of us, driving is easier. But the statistics favor the jump!
Code Reviews
My next example is mostly of interest to my fellow programmers.
Computer programmers produce code. This code usually has bugs. We’ve developed many ways of catching these bugs. One of the most effective is a code review. It works like this.
Someone else reads your code.
They criticize it.
You discuss the criticism.
You have to fix the problems.
There is a lot to be said for code reviews. Per dollar spent, it is one of the most effective ways to find and fix bugs. It also is one of the best ways for programmers to improve. And it is also one of the best ways to keep the whole team up to date.
But there is one little problem. Code reviews are very hard on the programmer. We are faced with the faults of our code, and by extension our faults as a programmer. To the extent that we think it is important not to have faults, this is very painful.
How should programmers deal with this? Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming is the advice that the cofounder of the top Q&A site for programmers gives. All of the advice is about how to make what happens feel less important. So that we might be more rational.
The example of code reviews shows that,
Caring about how good we already are,
gets in the way of actually being good.
Tests and Deeper Dives
It is easy to find more examples. Ego is the Enemy has a lot. If you want more, just find group you don’t like. Look at how they engage in groupthink. Then figure out what feels important to them that they aren’t able to think about.
Also note that the feeling of importance matters more than actual importance. How does it really impact your life when your home town sports team wins a game? Probably not much if you live a long ways away. But it feels important to fans, so they can still get irrational about it.
Psychological explanations are easy to come by. Defensive behavior is triggered by things that feel important. See also, Cognitive Dissonance. But my focus is on the experience.
If this is a problem, how do you solve it? One way is to keep things from feeling important. You’ll find advice like that in essays like Keep Your Identity Small and Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming. This is why Buddhists try to avoid attachment. The same idea is in popular books like Don't sweat the small stuff ... and it's all small stuff,
But what about what we still find important? My attachments to my marriage and children caused me problems. I’ll return to what I could have done in future posts.
Now to my examples.
Personal Example - Marriage: I didn’t fool others about how good my marriage was. Realizing that helps me empathize with the bad personal choices that others make.
Personal Example - Fatherhood: Many parents are irrational about their children. I just did that a little differently.
Being Good vs Improving: Your experience may not match mine. Here are some examples showing competent people who avoid ego.
Listen for 30 seconds to tennis legend Pete Sampras. Humility clearly matters to him. Fellow tennis legend Roger Federer is also described as humble.
Watch Magnus Midtbø’s YouTube channel. You’ll meet one modest world class athlete after another.
Good to Great found that the best CEOs are modest.
The most famous mathematical genius alive today is Terrence Tao. Does he sound arrogant?
There are exceptions World class talent sometimes comes with a world class ego. Michael Jordan comes to mind. But he does something interesting. Watch Failure. His pride in being aware of his mistakes helps him improve. I’ll return to that in a future post.
Hidden Verbal Attacks: I really do want people to understand how they work.
Scammy Thought Traps: Scammers live by fooling people. So fooling you. it is are great to study to find out how you can be fooled.
The jumping vs driving comparison is based on driving deaths and bungee jump safety. They are pretty close.
Code Reviews: See Rapid Development for a source on code reviews. This has long been know. But, even today, many avoid code reviews!