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Optimism

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Re: Optimism

#81

Post by dahart »

ryanobjc wrote: post #77
dominotw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is research backing this thesis. Is there a way for a layman to assess the quality of this research. I've read many assertions of research on HN on topics similar to this. eg: Meditation is supposed to help with depression(among other things) but seems like most research is extremely poor quality [1]?. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19123875 Most clinical trials on meditation practices are generally ch…

There is a ton of research in this area and an entire field of clinical therapy called "cognitive behavioral therapy". There's literally too much to cite :-)

In that case, I'm sure there's a good survey paper and some decent places to start for interested non-experts.

Googling for surveys, this was the top result: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/ (Conclusion: "In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies.")

And as much as I want to resist linking to Wikipedia, it really is a great place to find a bunch of reference material, as well as discover all the search terms you might need to know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

Re: Optimism

#82

Post by braythwayt »

ebbv wrote: post #76
braythwayt wrote: post #9

Author here. Ask Me Anything.

Since it's been 7+ years since you made this change personally, what has been your long term experience? Has the change stuck? Have you had periods of struggle? Thanks.

My experience is:

First, there was a dramatic immediate improvement. I feel like some of that was the material, and some the "Hawthorne Effect:" Anything that forces you to inspect yourself has a short-term beneficial effect. For example, if you tell someone to count their calories, they usually eat better for a month or two simply because counting the calories forces awareness.

Second, I have slipped from time to time, and in each case, I was able to come back to health with some form of CBT.

Third, I find myself using this reasoning technique on an almost daily basis, especially on the Internet where it is easy to encounter negative people. If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll find me saying (somewhat flippantly) "That is your baggage, and I'm not going to carry it for you."

There is a touch of snark in that remark, but at it's root, I believe it is Seligman's theory again: I'm asserting that something negative is impersonal, and by refusing to carry it, I'm making it temporary.

Re: Optimism

#83

Post by ucarion »

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…

It's an open question in philosophy (what isn't?), but isn't happiness our ultimate aim, or at least a very important component of the ultimate aim?

It's pretty easy to try to bias yourself toward happiness, but still have a daemon in the background making sure you're not diverging from reality too much. If you're very concerned about being biased, then you can probably trust yourself to be reasonable when being biased in this way.

For many of us, we're more inclined to be irrationally biased against ourselves than in favor of ourselves. The conscious, monitored, and controlled bias the OP describes can counteract our natural pessimistic inclinations.

Re: Optimism

#85

Post by iamleppert »

Am I the only one who read the paper in a kind of wise-man on high high voice, complete with deep sighs of self-reflecting pauses (perhaps denoted by the '^' characters?). Are those meant to make us think the author is saying something profound and important?

I wish I had the motivation to give a self-help lecture at a Rails conference. I'm sure no one would come though, and if anyone did come, they would probably hate me for talking about such self-important windbag topics like depression, motivation, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Signed,

The Perennial Pessimist

Re: Optimism

#86

Post by coldtea »

dominotw wrote: post #73
PSeitz wrote: post #62

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.

>There is research backing this thesis. Is there a way for a layman to assess the quality of this research. I've read many assertions of research on HN on topics similar to this. eg: Meditation is supposed to help with depression(among other things) but seems like most research is extremely poor quality [1]?. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19123875 Most clinical trials on meditation practices are generally ch…

For some such cases, it's also important for people to judge for themselves.

Try something and see -- that (experiment) is even more in the original scientific spirit than relying solely on citations.

It's doubly so for things in soft-sciences, where you don't even have the rigor of hard-sciences, and things can be widely cited and praised but be nothing but the ideological fashion (or academic fashion) of the decade, to be scorned a few years later.

Re: Optimism

#87

Post by braythwayt »

iamleppert wrote: post #85

Am I the only one who read the paper in a kind of wise-man on high high voice, complete with deep sighs of self-reflecting pauses (perhaps denoted by the '^' characters?). Are those meant to make us think the author is saying something profound and important? I wish I had the motivation to give a self-help lecture at a Rails conference. I'm sure no one would come though, and if anyone did come, they would probably ha…

The "paper" is actually the markdown source for a presentation, the ^ characters are markup indicating that what follows is a speaker's note that does not appear on the slide.

Elsewhere in this discussion, you will find a link to a video of the presentation, and I trust that if you go looking for evidence that I am a self-important windbag, you will have no difficulty gathering evidence that is consistent with your preconceived beliefs.

I'm sorry to hear that you think that if you gave a self-help presentation at a Rails conference, that nobody would come, and that if they did, they would hate you. This was not my experience at all, and I hope you learn to distrust these instincts and develop a more accurate ability to predict when such a thing would be well-received and when it would not.

One of the things that helped in my case, is that I wrote many of these ideas up in an essay seven years ago, and it went to #1 on Hacker News that day. From time to time since then, people have rediscovered the essay and it has bene positively received. Other essays I have written about Learned Helplessness and my difficulty learning to play Go have also been well-received.

To boot, this particular Ruby conference is actually not very Ruby at all, and the organizers go out of their way to invite speakers who will give non-technical talks.

So... I had inside information.

Re: Optimism

#88

Post by mathgenius »

braythwayt wrote: post #9

Author here. Ask Me Anything.

When pessimism works it leads to action. Hopefully effective action.

My concern with the attitude of "oh this is a temporary problem" is that it could lead to apathy. A kind of "waiting for godot" situation.

Re: Optimism

#89

Post by braythwayt »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #80
braythwayt wrote: post #9

Author here. Ask Me Anything.

Thanks for another fantastic, thought-provoking piece of writing! As someone who has also dealt with periods of depression, this resonated with my experience and how I've learned to better manage my emotional state. One reaction I had is that in my training to teach K-12, we were taught that our positive feedback should also be impersonal, specific, and temporal. This was to avoid falling into the trap of fixed minds…

The discussion around Optimism vs Mindset is very interesting and I am constantly trying to use both methodologies in tandem.

There are a number of ways to reconcile the two approaches. For example, one can note that much of what Dweck describes is a kind of Impostor Syndrome, where people start out with a negative impression of themselves, and have a fixed mindset about their lack of skill.

If someone has a belief that they are a terrible programmer, telling them they are a good programmer doesn't help. They simply dispute it, a well-understood phenomenon. For them, you must provide evidence to shake their permanent belief about their own shortcomings, and being specific is the way to do it.

But what if they are not already mired in self-doubt? That is another matter entirely.

Now here is something I try to apply. Note the difference between a skill related to production, and a "meta-skill," something that enables or powers other skills. One person I know told me that they are terrible at X and Y and Z in their profession, but that they have "grit," the ability to grind it out and get results relentlessly.

Note that they have a positive, permanent, and general belief about a skill, "grit," that isn't a direct producer of results, but enables results.

Another person told me that they reject general praise outright, because they know that they make a lot of mistakes in programming. So they want very specific feedback about what they did well, not general praise. You can guess what came next: They told me that they were not instinctively good, but that they could learn from feedback.

Aha! Another fixed belief about a meta-skill, learning.

And in fact, what Dweck advocates is learning to adopt a fixed mindset about the growth mindset! Another meta-skill. So perhaps, what works is encouraging fixed beliefs about skills that empower or enable the directly productive skills.

But I don't know. Unlike Seligman and Dweck, I am not testing and measuring.

Re: Optimism

#90

Post by StanislavPetrov »

> It is not controversial to say that our moods affect the explanations we make up for things that happen in our lives. If we are in a good mood and someone smiles at us, we think they like us. If we are in a bad mood, we wonder if they have read some awkward code we just checked in, and if they are laughing at us.

It's not controversial to say that our moods can affect our interpretations and decisions, but it is (to me anyway) to make a blanket statement that moods always do effect interpretations and decisions. I find it extremely controversial to suggest that the answer to this "mood bias" is to willfully delude yourself by forcing yourself to think "optimistically". The author suggests that mood is a binary decision between optimism and pessimism. In life, very few decisions are binary, despite human propensity to view things as black and white. I would suggest that there is a middle ground between optimism and pessimism (call it "realism"). As a poker player for several decades, I can tell you that you are forced to discard optimism and pessimism (at least at the poker table) and adopt "realism" if you want to be successful. You can't let your moods affect your judgement. In regards to the author's statement, when someone smiles at you, you have to dispassionately calculate what that smile means given the context and other "knowns" you have to evaluate the situation. If you allow your mood to effect how you judge that smile will ensure your long-term failure as a poker player.

I'd argue that, with some effort, the same mindset can be extended to every day life, neither optimistic or pessimistic. Calculating outcomes and probabilities based on what you know, see, and hear without "mood bias" because you expect good or bad things to happen. I would agree that if you are going to make deluded, biased assessments based on your mood that you are better off doing so with a smile then a frown, but you are best off if you reject self-delusion all together.

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