I was talking to a friend about the idea of kindness and gracefulness recently. It's been a while since we both agreed on the idea that you really only know how kind someone is when they are under stress, but in that recent conversation I pointed out that sometimes you can observe kindness through small acts that are non-performative.

What is non-performative? To give an example, there's the old saying in dating that you should observe how your date treats the waiter, since it shows how kind your date is when not biased by trying to impress you. However, since this saying has now become universal, the act of how you treat the waiter itself has become performative. That is, your date might treat the waiter nicely to try to impress you.

So now you have to expand what you observe in your date to understand how kind that person actually is. It doesn't necessarily have to be about which person they are kind to though. Kindness can also show through small details, like how patient someone is when an order takes a long time, etc. These acts are usually done without awareness of performance, which makes them better signals of someone's kindness.

Is that all, though?

Thinking back to the people I met in my life, I can point to at least one instance where a friend is quite kind even non-performatively, but her kindness breaks down significantly under stress. When not stressed, she's the type to make all kinds of small gestures one wouldn't think of to make people feel welcome, comfortable, and at home. However, when stressed, she had a tendency to lash out at those immediately surrounding her.

So maybe it is true that kindness is only fully observable under stress after all. It's not a satisfying conclusion, but nevertheless a useful one to keep in mind.

— Categorized under: #kindness, #psychology, #interactions

Thinking about the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, it occurred to me that there's something about current Western society (at least in the U.S.) that can kind of inoculate you to the realities of the world.

I see this difference whenever I visit a 3rd world country and come back to the U.S.. Everything will feel less real for a month or so and then settle back on their old patterns.

This pattern came up again yesterday, when a lot of people in general seem to take Ukraine with less gravity than the situation really calls for. There's a part of me that feels the same way – it's fun to meme something as serious as war. On the other hand, the part of me that has read so many books and seen so many realistic portrayals of war is yelling at me for how serious this actually is.

I sometimes perform thought experiments on this kind of thing – suppose that a foreign country invades the U.S. and hostile troops are literally in my city, would I be able to quickly take reality into account and act quickly? Odds are it would probably take me a while. The length of time it would take me to adjust to that reality is, in a way, how much fog I am in when it comes to thinking about war (and certain realities of the world).

Catch-22, one of those anti-war novels, is pretty much precisely about that realization when the book's protagonist actually come into contact with the realities of war. This quote at the climax of the book feels relevant here:

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

— Categorized under: #psychology

One of the things I note daily is [how interested am I in X], where X can be a variety of subjects.

Recently, a curious pattern emerged on one of them – my interest in Touhou sunk really significantly for a while. The above ticks show 7 day averages computed daily.

What accounts for the fall? The answer for that one ended up being pretty clear – I stopped listening to Touhou music for a while when I got into Ghost Club and Deltarune. It turns out that frequently listening to Touhou music had a self-sustaining effect on my interest in the series, and the spike on the right hand corresponded to when I started listening to Touhou again.

Outside of music, one other activity that seems to have a strong effect on my interest curve seems to be the frequency of community participation related to the interest. For example, art meetups tend to temporarily but strongly boost my interest in art, and Japanese meetup does the same for motivations to study Japanese.

It's important to note that this doesn't seem to always happen though. For example, hearing a lot about hacking doesn't seen to boost my interest in that subject much.

Combined together, I think these observations suggest that environment plays a surprisingly strong role in interest – at least it seems so in at least a few areas for me.

— Categorized Under: #psychology, #hobbies, #data

I was chatting with a friend about the murals in Denver yesterday, apparently the street art in Denver is refreshingly positive – instead of “Fuck Society” and “Tear down the Power”, it's more like “Stay Kind” and “Love this City”.

This reminds me a lot a phase that people go through.

A decent amount of people I know went through an ironic phase of fashion, where they tend to dress dark, edgy, and loud. After that phase, the sense of fashion tones down a bit but you can sometimes tell that it's still present. Out of the people I know who went through that phase and came out the other end, it seems that they tend to be a bit kinder and more thoughtful than usual (though usually also less idealistic about the way that society works).

Thinking and talking to people about this, the common thread about that ironic phase was a sort of discontent with the world, a desire to distance from that world (blended sometimes with a desire to be unique), and an expression of both. This naturally make them feel a bit harder to approach while in that phase, but what does that say about people who went through that phase and dialed it down?

Thinking about it, I can come up with the following possibilities:

1. Workplace dress code
2. No longer discontent
3. Better to be integrated with society to change it
4. No longer feeling the desire to stand out
5. Feeling that the fashion choice doesn't express their personality
6. Not wanting the attention anymore
   

I think that outside of the first one and last one, the reasons are all indirectly connected with why someone who went through the ironic phase might appear kinder and more thoughtful compared against the average population. Of course, there are tons of kind and thoughtful people who bypassed the phase altogether, but I do think that someone who has gone through the phase is on average more able to discuss some important topics, albeit the ones that are darker and more personal in nature.

— Categorized under: #fashion, #psychology, #sociology

In a random walk the other day, I realized that the typical fashionability of bisexuals and the typical social awkwardness of neurodiverse people are actually quite related.

One of the important facets of social skills is to understand how people will react to what you do. We implicitly use this skill to avoid doing awkward or offending things. Neurotypical people have an advantage on this because they can use themselves to simulate how most people will react to the situation. On the other hand, neurodivergent people will struggle because they could only learn this from observing how others react to the situation. This has the further effect of making socializing much more painful to neurodivergent people, further reducing their opportunities to get feedback.

The generally-higher fashion skills of bisexual (and gay) people serves as an illustration of the opposite phenomenon. Because these people are attracted to people of their own sex, they are often immediately able to use their own emotional responses to simulate how attractive they will be to others of their sex. This is something that heterosexuals don't have easy access to. Unless there is a way to tap into increasing their own attraction to their own sex, the best that they can do is to either run simulations from other pictures of attractive people of their sex they have seen, or to have friends who are attracted to their sex give tips for them.
In productivity literature, there are a lot of verbiage on how important having an immediate feedback mechanism is. Thinking about examples like those in my life, the salience of that type of mechanism suddenly becomes amazingly clear.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity, #social, #fashion

Recently I was reading a book called What to Say Next by Sarah Nannery. It was a really insightful account of what life looks like on the spectrum, and one of the interesting perspectives from the book was that contrary to the opinion that people with Autism are less emotionally sensitive, they are actually more emotionally sensitive.

The idea is that people with Autism experience certain emotions so strongly that it often causes problems in everyday functioning. For example, people with Autism have trouble making eye contact, and this is because the amount of information and emotions involved in it is overwhelming for them. Similarly, autistic people tend to spiral into negative emotions easily, because those emotions are felt so strongly.

I think the idea definitely has merit, and it actually made me think about what people mean when they use the work “sensitive”. In everyday context, we generally say that a person is sensitive to something if they pick up on it easily or can easily be bothered by it; but actually, this is a side-effect of a more fundamental type of sensitivity.

As an analogy, we can think of sensitivity as having the volume knob turned up on some aspect of life. A person who is sensitive will usually have a easier time picking up differences between different sounds, but this is only true if the volume isn't overwhelming. If a person is so sensitive that everything is incredibly loud, then instead of being more discerning, that person will actually be less discerning because they spend all their time running away from the noise.

So saying that a person is sensitive to something can paradoxically mean that that person is worse at processing that thing. Thinking about it, in everyday parlance, the better word to use to describe when someone is good at processing a certain type of stimulus is probably “discerning”. To a certain degree it implies sensitivity, but either the sensitivity is not overwhelming, or that person has learned to rein in their strong reactions to information, and has learned to direct that energy productively.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #communications, #thinking, #emotions

One of the things I always liked about myself is that I have an interest in people. Looking at the things that occupy my mind the most – psychology, sociology, music, art, writing, reading, culture – there's no doubt that there's always been a humanist bent to it.

The other day, during a meetup, I was chatting with an artist who specialize in doing portraits. She really liked drawing portraits, and her portraits looked really good, but she mentioned that she was always a bit scared of doing full character drawings. The body was really hard to draw for her, she was less interested in the subject, and she had no confidence that she could get the body proportions right. So we chatted a bit about strategies for tackling that.

This episode stuck in my mind for a while afterwards. When I think about it, it's natural to like drawing specific parts of people (like faces). However, the idea of liking specific aspects of people has never occurred to me before. Looking at my own interest in people, it becomes extremely obvious that I'm interested in specific aspects of people, rather than people in general.

For example, most of my interest in people lies in self-help, aesthetics, culture, and social psychology. On the other hand my interest in learning about the life of a stranger, the idea of how to navigate conversations in a selfless way, and my attentiveness in putting people at ease are pretty deficient. There are weaknesses in many other parts too. In other worlds, despite knowing a decent amount about people, my social intelligence is still pretty low.

I have friends who are quite skilled in these areas, and when I talk to them, it becomes apparent that one of the critical skills here is to deeply understand the headspace of the other people, and understand how various ways of interaction affects the headspace. This is pretty often done using yourself as a kind of simulation. Though this is something I do occasionally, I don't really go as far as I would like with it (I feel that it doesn't naturally go that direction), and to me it feels a bit selfish to be so occupied with other things that I don't think about this, especially now that I've become more aware of this flaw.

In my mind, interactions with people can really be a lot more. Instead of two, three, or many people anxious to fill the silence with small talk, it could be a musical duet, or trio, or symphony where everyone gets to pick what music to play, contribute their own interpretation to the mix, and come out happy after partaking in something that was fun, beautiful, and validating.

Right now I'm still pretty far from contributing to it, but at least I'm becoming more motivated in getting there.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy

I've been thinking a lot more recently about how different my headspaces are when I slept well versus not. Though now I'm much less irritable on low sleep, there are still pretty significant differences. The biggest one is that I feel like I have cyclothymic disorder when I don't get sleep – sometimes I'm very happy, sometimes I'm very sad. Things will suddenly become either extremely interesting to me or completely uninteresting, depending on the headspace I wake up in.

This is a pretty big problem when trying to choose a consistent life direction. If you sometimes find the same thing at times irresistibly compelling and at times utterly boring, you will likely have trouble getting anything that requires consistent effort. In addition, it makes it extremely difficult to visualize what a sort of “ideal life” would look like – it requires stable observations of my happiness under various scenarios in order to extrapolate.

Now, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,001 reasons in the universe to try to sleep well, but I feel like this is will probably be the overwhelming reason that pushes me above and beyond to try to sleep well consistently.

On a related note, I noticed that a lot of my recent writings have a sort of sad tone to them. That's actually not the case – I'm probably as happy as I've ever been right now, it's just that I'm currently in problem-solving mode, and problems have a tendency to be negative-sounding things.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy, #emotions, #irl

One of the interesting things I've noticed from effective friends and coworkers is that they tend to form unusually clear understanding of things they work on.

This is not to stay that most people don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of things they work on, but it seems... different with people who are very effective. Most people (including me) tend to operate on a lot of fuzzy knowledge – where the mental models are often vague because we haven't bothered to truly connect them to something we understand. To me, it seems that very effective people make those connections.

As an example, in my day-to-day work I am often adjacent to a certain technology called COM. However, my understanding of COM is still quite weak, and I think this is the case for the vast majority of junior developers. Most senior developers seem to have a good understanding of COM, however, I don't think that is because they've been around COM longer and incidentally picked up on it – I think they are at the senior level partially because they have a solid understanding of related technologies. And I don't necessarily think that they took much more time and energy to try to understand these technologies, though they easily could have done that too. I think a lot of it comes down to good habits when incorporating new knowledge, such that new knowledge are connected to very close to something that they truly understand.

What does it mean to truly understand something? At least for me, in the areas of concrete knowledge, it means to be able to understand and explain how something works (and ideally why it works this way) down to a fundamental level. Everyone has at least some sort of ground level knowledge, kind of like “2 + 2 = 4”, but how much of their understand of the world are connected to that ground level is dependent on the person.

What trips me up very often is that no fire alarms go off in my head when I get new knowledge that's not grounded. Perhaps this was evolutionarily good – it wouldn't do much for primate humans to obsess over random phenomena when survival itself was challenging. In practice though, I don't really like how I can't explain how a lightbulb works, or that sometimes I read a book thinking that I understood it only to have the knowledge be pretty useless when I try to apply them.

The type of confusion/fog when I don't really understand something, and the type of satisfaction I feel when I really understand something, are feelings that I'm trying to get better at recognizing now. I think there will be a decent amount of upfront trouble to implement something like this, but it's better than the frustration that almost always come from the lack of understanding. Besides, it's just nice to be on solid ground, or know that the bridges you walk on have strong foundations.

Related reading: understanding – nabeelqu

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Categories: #thinking, #psychology

One day over group lunch, my coworker told us an amusing story with his kid. He was barbecuing with his six-year-old son outside, and saw his son reaching towards the crackling flame. The kid was evidently entranced by how pretty the fire looked. My coworker admonished: “don't do that! You'll get hurt by the fire!”, and his son looked at him and nodded knowingly. All the while, his finger was still inching closer to the red-hot flame.

I found this story really memorable because it reminded me of all the times when I knew something to be true, yet went against it anyways. It seems like for me, there's a strong difference between knowing something to be true and really knowing something to be true. It doesn't have to be experiential to feel really true (i.e. I don't have to eat a ghost pepper to know that it would be really bad idea), but there's nevertheless some confidence level that have to build up for something to feel really true.

The sensitivity to distinguish between knowing and really knowing seems important to me. With respect to the current vaccination situation, there are a decent amount of people out there who knows that it's a good thing to do, yet still sways with “oh... I'm not sure, something's weird. Maybe I'll wait.” Knowing that it's a sign of uncertainty that requires additional investigation to resolve seems like a pretty important trait.

On the other hand, I've also been in situations where I laid out a hundred ironclad reasons to do something, yet my emotions still go “down with the system!!”. How to resolve these? I'm not sure if I really know...

Anyways, to finish the story that started all this, my coworker's son got a tiny scorch and pulled away from the fire. I bet he'll know not to touch the fire next time.

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Categorized under: #psychology