Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done (2012) [pdf]

"Stop using luck as an excuse for your failures and other people's failures."

This doesn't really sound they have the objective world setup well, and would trivially slide down to judging unlucky people. I'm convinced that the just-world hypothesis is one of the most evil cognitive biases a culture can have (in terms of how much suffering is created, see some developments in Christian religion), so I'm not sure this is a risk worth taking.

In my life I found the most true view (as far as I can find it) to be the most useful. Knowing that luck is an important factor fairly significant rotates what you do, why you do it, what you consider important, what you think about others, etc. I think if we do develop cognitive adaptations, we should nonetheless root them in what is true. I.e., if we go for the pragmatic adaptation, why? For a lot of people, the idea that luck is important is brand new information they should sit and chew on for a while.

> you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.

So this is not quite true, and it's somewhat related to the point above. A lot of luck based events are random to the person they happen to, in the sense that they were chosen for it randomly, but have a non-random source, or arise from a non-random pattern. Someone might get sick, which is random, but how the system deals with it is not random and makes the difference in how debilitating that event can be (in other words, society has ways of modifying the effect of randomness on the system). A person might be randomly targeted, but the source of the targeting is not random (i.e., the target of a robbery may be random, but there's nothing random about the robber and their choice to rob).

The problem with the randomness concept is that it's not symmetric. If you focus on the individual only you miss the cross-effects. What we say, when we say that luck is important, is that a given person cannot conquer the world, cannot override its rules, and many of its rules are unfair. What we are not saying is that we should sit down and do nothing, in fact, we're saying the opposite: the world is broken and requires fixing, and the world should be fixed before the individual is fixed. And it is the awareness of its unfairness that is needed here. What is there to fix if a given person is fully responsible for their lives? We just blame the person and move on, as humanity has done for thousands of years.

This sort of approach (separate things into true reality and pragmatic/relevant reality) requires a lot of justification before it should be adopted.

This one will get complicated since it's effectively a discussion on free will. :) I will say that trying to examine why people do what one could call stupid or terrible choices is an interesting exercise.

Consider, for instance, the act of smoking in a smoking-dominated country. I have grown up in such a country and I did not pick up smoking because I considered it bad. But I am also a significant outlier for other reasons (let's say I didn't have a lot of friends growing up). From a 3rd party perspective, especially one originated in a country that doesn't smoke a lot, picking up smoking seems like a very terrible idea, and it seems very straightforward to judge those people.

But consider it from the dynamics of the country: what does it mean to be a smoker, what does it mean to be a non-smoker, in such a country? Are there consequences to each? Why do most people end up smoking? What would they have to give up to not do it? Is a decision of an outlier like myself relevant/useful? What is the breaking point after which a culture switches from an activity being mainstream vs not?

If we say smoking is a terrible choice, we'd be forced to conclude that people in countries that smoke a lot must be worse people in some sense than people in countries that do not smoke a lot. A similar conclusion was once made by Milgram. But I think by now we realize that these conclusions are definitely not the right ones, so we need some other explanation.

> For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/.

This, for example, doesn't sound like a choice from the perspective of the walker or worker, because they don't have the information. So on that level it looks to me to still be random. It's like choosing a career when you don't know anything about the market or what makes a good career - it's basically random from your perspective, even if there are deterministic paths all around. After all, most physical luck (i.e., accidentally tripping) is also deterministic internally, but it's luck to us because we can't tell.

It is not random for the whoever manages the Australian mining industry, because they have the information. One way to reduce randomness is having more information, which can be extended to educating people more.

Being a jerk can work sometimes.

Take the fictional character Gavin Belson from the show Silicon Valley as an example: He's not what we would call a Leader but he has this egocentric selfish view of himself. He shares no emphatic towards people around him, which means that he can virtually do anything without caring too much. You might say he is an asshole (he is) but he will carry his vision on no matter what.

Is this guy healthy? He represents someone that no one likes. Every single employee hates hims, his ideas are terrible, he will run over people without blinking, etc.

In sports look at Cristiano Ronaldo, you can find early interviews when he was younger and didn't had any awards. If you asking who is the best football player in the world he would instantly reply: Me Some years later he actually become one of the best all time football players. You might say he has an unhealthy amount of self confidence which can be seen as arrogance. From a young age he carried this belief system/mindset that brought it several awards and broke record after record. He is completely obsessed with training that at age 33, his body has a metabolic age of 23! About 6 years ago I saw an article saying that, according to his physical therapist, he would play at a world class until age 36 and, so far, it is happening.

We can question if Ronaldo has a healthy dose of self belief. He gets things done on the pitch and we might ask at what cost? He could work a LOT less and be a decent player with millions on his bank account. No need to push his limits every single.

The same happens with developers: If you believe in open source you'll be willing to use and write open source tools despite the fact that there are closed source solutions. We could argue that this is not healthy because you're wasting your time when you could get things done in a much shorter amount of time.

Same with CEO: They all believe their product is the best and sometimes (I work with several) they seems nuts and as a developer I've to be their therapist sometimes so that their product doesn't looses touch with reality and becomes something wild that no one understands.

In the examples above it's very subjective to quantify/measure what an healthy dose of self belief looks like. You could say that they are all nuts and you would have a point:

Gavin Belson believes he is the next Steve Jobs. Ronaldo believes he is the best no matter what. Open source developers believe that closed source code is evil. CEOs believe they're the next Steve Jobs or some cliche like changing the world for better

If we kill the Ego/"Cognitive Distortions"/"Mental Disorders", there is nothing extraordinary about these people.

Having a belief, regardless of being true of false, will have the effect of you acting upon it.

Can you make 10 million dollars? Answer 1: No Answer 2: yes

If you answer No, I'm 99.9% sure you won't because you won't even try. If your answer is Yes, you'll try and you might succeeded at it. You won't might suffering along the journey to make it.

I find it very hard to classify what is a mental disorder or a personality trait. It can go both ways: wonderful or terrible.

It's a very subjective topic, to classify this as a "Cognitive Distortions" (in a negative way) is like saying that creative people and leaders should be placed in a mental institution or something like that. Some traits like kindness, empathy, helping the poor, etc. are nice things that we should nourish in our society but they might get in the way of creating value/getting things done. The idea might be scary but a psychopath doesn't gets dragged/delayed like "normal"/empathetic people. They try to get what they want without caring about the cost.

The way I try to overcome it is by thinking that there are things that I don't control. I could create an app in XYZ stack and in the months some packages are broken and unmaintained.

Just realise that if it's hard for you, it's also hard for others. If you fight for it, eventually things will work. I had many failures in the past due to arrogance, not playing along, over confidence, etc. In the end, you've to analyse the situation, learn from it and just keep going forward.

The more you fail, the better you'll become at handling it. You were born on this plant knowing nothing and you failed a lot of times, more than you can count, until you become you. Each day you're a little bit better than yesterday.