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Optimism

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Re: Optimism

#61

Post by PSeitz »

drewrv wrote: post #58
smallnamespace wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sounds exactly like how narcissists think. Just look at Trump. He claims personal responsibility for his successes, but his failures are always one-time events that were other people's fault. Where should one draw the line?

> Where should one draw the line? Engage in self reflection and be honest with yourself, something I doubt Trump does.

According to the research he must be pretty happy.

Re: Optimism

#62

Post by PSeitz »

TLDR;

To be more optimistic assess good stuff as personal, general, and permanent and negative as impersonal, specific and temporal.

Make notes everyday about your assessments and correct them.

There is research backing this thesis.

Re: Optimism

#63

Post by sotojuan »

gommm wrote: post #6

Let me give an optimistic feedback because Reginald's work is well worth it. Reg's essay and his combinator book have had a huge influence on my career and my way of thinking as a programmer. I really recommend everyone here to take a look at the combinator book at http://combinators.info As to the point of the presentation, it's an interesting view of things. Making a note of my explanations explanations is somethin…

No exaggeration: I want to be like raganwald.

Re: Optimism

#64

Post by numlocked »

braythwayt wrote: post #9

Author here. Ask Me Anything.

Maybe the most important conjecture in the whole thing is the one that isn't backed up; that optimists are in fact more likely to be successful (in any sense of the term). Is there factual basis to that claim? A healthy sense of dread and paranoia can be useful (if not fun). Obviously demotivating depression isn't helping anyone, but I don't understand why, prima facie, optimists ought to be "better at stuff" than pessimists.

Also -- this is great and I really enjoyed it. As I have all stuff of yours that I've read. In particular anything related to trampolines and javascript.

Re: Optimism

#66

Post by mrec »

braythwayt wrote: post #31
braythwayt wrote: post #9

Author here. Ask Me Anything.

Q: Why the heavy-ass .md? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299756 ) A: I use an OS X presentation application called DeckSet. DeckSet uses markdown files as its persistence model. That is very convenient for a number of reasons, including the fact that I can manage my presentations with git/github, something that is inconvenient with apps that use a proprietary binary format. The presentation is available in…

Is there a text-only version? The pictures aren't really adding anything and IMO break the reader's flow of thought.

We can obviously get around it with something like

  Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("img")).forEach(img => img.parentNode.removeChild(img));
in the console, but seriously. Medium has a lot to answer for.

Re: Optimism

#67

Post by samscully »

lotyrin wrote: post #4

Certainly, an unbiased symmetrical appraisal should be the goal? If the premise is that the effects upon your past success are equally likely to be general or specific regardless of their sign, and any asymmetry between your appraisal of the specificity between positive and negative effects indicates bias, isn't either bias problematic? All the worst initiatives that have crashed and burned around me in my career, sm…

I have not read the book so I can't comment on that but I have done a good deal of cognitive behavioural therapy. Mostly I was taught to consider the optimistic explanation and assess how realistic my negative thoughts were.

The main exercise we used was to write down my thoughts, feelings, physiology and actions in response to a situation. Then we did it again for a more positive imagining of how the same situation could have played out. It's useful to see how each aspect effects the others and identifying how things could be changed helps a lot when the same situation arises again.

For sure it wouldn't be helpful to be wildly over optimistic, it must be very stressful to intentionally delude yourself. But the error bars on most of these judgements are so wide I don't see anything wrong with erring on the optimistic side.

Of course another skill is learning to avoid unhelpful judgements altogether. But that's a different topic and I won't pretend I have much insight there.

Re: Optimism

#69

Post by iaci »

> Are optimists more likely to come up with specific explanations for things in their life? Or more likely to come up with general explanations?

It seems to me that is just correlation and not causation. It seems that the cause is the time we spend in action, not thinking about us. When we act, we are more likely to succeed. When we think about ourselves, we are more likely to be depressed.

In my experience, the root of these two things is too much thinking about ourselves.

Quote: Don't think about what is a good man, be a good man. It's alright to think about that but it doesn't seems to be a good idea. Taking periods twice every week seems to be a good idea[1].

[1] Turning Pro (https://sivers.org/book/TurningPro)

Re: Optimism

#70

Post by mherdeg »

This kind of dichotomous analysis of the world -- you explain things in X way, or in opposite-of-X way -- seems to pop up a lot in social psychology.

I also see it in discussion of the idea of "fundamental attribution error" (when I analyze my own behavior, I attribute mistakes to external factors; when I analyze others' behavior, I attribute mistakes to internal factors).

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