Yes, people do it here a lot. The Wall Street Journal comments section, for example, is unbearable because it's simply full of negative comments. I don't mind people being critical because sometimes negative people are actually well informed. Unfortunately, there's too much fire and forget without any accountability. Anyway, we just need to figure a way to raise the bar in such a way that real information is passed on rather than unadulterated opinion.
Perhaps it's more a physical thing than a metaphysical or psychological thing. We live in a universe of increasing entropy and by definition, for any expected outcome the possible disorderly states vastly outnumber the orderly ones. So when we contemplate a set of outcomes for a single future event, it is likely that we always end up contemplating more negative ones than positive ones?
Optimism only works in an environment of increasing energy supply and resources. Optimists in the harsh Viking Greenland colonies who tried to increase their cattle herds died of starvation, because the over grazed pasture would fail. There are records of this; it's not speculation.
For 99.99% of human history optimistically going for a venture lead to death. Not obsessively focusing on risks was a reliably horrible idea.
It's really only been since the dawn of the industrial age that optimism has been a viable strategy.
This applies to social ambition as well. Not being hyper attuned to your rank in society for most of history was a good way to get run through with a sword.
"Aside from Dutch, all other languages lean toward the bleak."
This is rather interesting. I wonder if this contributes to their low rate of aggressive dreams and positivity. Furthermore, it would be interesting to study if this might somehow be connected with their very "liberal" policies towards sex and drugs, sources of pleasure.
We are good at processing negative information. That doesn't mean we are a race of 'depressive realists' or that significant positive emotional events are not the defining building blocks of our character.
The part about the criticism of the positivity ratio was particularly interesting because a co-author wrote the brilliant parody of post-modernism published in one of its seminal journals, Social Text (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
A critique by Sokal is prima facie intriguing.
I need to go read the original article but the Wikipedia summary is fascinating (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio) in specific, Fredrickson and Losada appear to have chosen functional parameters that yield good results, not ones based on evidence.
Negativity was interpreted negatively in this article. It shouldn't be. Negativity can be positive.
Cultivating dissatisfaction is key to doing good work. If you can't bring yourself to say "Man, this sucks, I could do better than that" how will you try to do better?
In fact, research shows people who are motivated more by the fear of loss rather than the hope of gain, in other words, defensive pessimists, are better prepared to handle the obstacles that get thrown in their path. Being negative is the strongest motivation for these people.
The irony of it is humans being wired for negativity sounds like bad news for the optimists. But there's a way to model optimists in terms of negativity too. Optimists have what Keats referred to as high negative capability: they are capable of "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
As a practical matter, I think it helps to honor both the negative and the positive. Be negative when you are figuring out what you want to fix that's broken, and be positive about bringing yourself to actually do it.
Let's say I am negative about how the DMV handles my paperwork for whatever I need to dance through with them. I arrive "over prepared", just to be sure.
... and I arrive to find the DMV haplessly in worship of Saint Kafka.
By my negativity [distrusting an organization to do their job and have themselves together enough to tie their own shoes] I made the process better by arriving "over" prepared.
-- "the act of making your thoughts, feelings, etc., known by speech, writing, or some other method"
Notice the word "known" in the middle of this definition. Known by whom? The person expressing the ideas already knows them. Therefore by definition one is making oneself known to a second party, someone other than the speaker.
> ... and internal verbalization is also often considered as a form of expression ...
Not as the word is defined and commonly understood.
Sure you are. When speaking internally people set up a "mirror" of themselves, speaking as if to another person (despite any internal pronoun use like "I").
If someone yells something in the forest, they are speaking to, variously, a personification of nature, the world, a god, themselves (as described above), or perhaps more literally an imagined companion.
Expression is not about the effect but the intent, even if it's subconscious.
-- which doesn't have a widely accepted resolution. The tl;dr: arguing that another hypothetical person is present by reference to the mind, is a non-starter, except among psychologists.
This along with all the other articles about how it's OK to be sad, depressed, burnt out, unable to focus, disinterested and demotivated are complete bullshit. We're living in a society where we no longer have any real battles to fight and our culture is starting to conjure imaginary problems out of thin air and then come up with creative ways to solve them.
"...even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path."
Here, have a strong cup of toughen-the-fuck-up.
PS: The fact that you're finding this at the bottom of the page and greyed out is a case in point on how HN has fallen in love with self pity. (Not an edit)
As a person who was both actually depressed and actually burnt out (separate occasions, yay). Toughening the fuck up was the only thing that actually helped.
As a fictional man with a steel jaw and a nose that was never broken in over 50 fights once said "It's not about how hard you can hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep going forward"
I've watched a perfectly healthy young man of 15 get a diagnosis of depression from a doctor and was given a prescription of Prozac. We tore up the script and told him it was exam stress and he was fine. Still is 8 years later and kicking ass.
Life is tough and many people, possibly most, want to be told that it's not really tough, it's just that you're special which makes it harder for you and this pill and less work/hardship will solve your problem.
It's why the USA is filled with people addicted to and completely anesthetized by various prescription drugs.
Sure, real depression actually exists. But it's rare and I suspect the over-diagnosis we're seeing is more damaging by removing people from active and productive lives than lack of diagnosis.
When last did you hear a doctor tell someone to get regular sleep, eat well, get some exercise and face up the the challenges they're presented?
There is some truth in what you're saying but you're overly dismissive of the very real and not-actually-rare issues of depression, which have physical causes and treatments just like any other human ailment.
Telling someone who actually has depression--that is, a brain chemistry imbalance that causes negative feelings--to toughen up is about as helpful as telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off.
In my anecdotal experience the link between lack of exercise, poor diet, and depression is very strong. Hopefully there is more research into this area, but the main issue with it is that depression and SB is methodologically weak. What counts as "depressed" and "sedentary behavior" are extremely open-ended. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20174982
The thing is, "toughen up" is not taken to mean that, particularly by someone who is depressed. It's taken to mean "stop complaining, there's nothing wrong with you", which can be very damaging for someone in an already unstable mental state.
Wow, I hope your son(?) is able to break away from your frankly horrible advice and live a happy life. Antidepressants help people and literally save lives. Depressed people can be very effective at hiding it, and you might think he's "kicking ass" up to the point where he isn't in your life anymore.
"Just toughen up" is the unsympathetic, counterproductive and, frankly, dangerous advice of the last century. Take your own advice and stop complaining about humanity deciding it's good to care about each other and care about yourself. Or better yet, see a counselor or therapist about your stunted emotional growth.
This kind of attitude is exactly the reason I took so long to tell anyone when I started getting symptoms of depression. Whether or not it's true, there's a very thin line between complaining about over-diagnosis and encouraging a very damaging stigma against people with what is, at the end of the day, a mental illness they can't help.
Secondly, when I did finally get some help, the absolute first thing I was told was to try exactly those things -- improve my sleep, diet and exercise. Your problem is with the attempted treatment you've seen, not really the identification.
>> Here, have a strong cup of toughen-the-fuck-up.
You might have a point generally, but I think you miss some historical context.
A few hundred years ago, depending on location, if you made a "random snide comment" someone(s) might die. This used to be more serious stuff.
These days we have rule of law, but taking care of your reputation and social respect is certainly one of the things you find not only in the Western world but in all cultures, including among baboons. It is partly genetic.
(Consider all the muscles in your face to communicate and your language facilities; we have had lots of evolutionary pressure to be social with people. That is, if you failed in life or not was to a large degree decided by how you functioned with other people.)
The point is, it is normal, now and historically, to feel destroyed and be motivated by social respect and insults.
Or, rephrasing it a little "we put much more energy and resources into what is not working well and can be improved or could be dangerous then into what is already good", which sounds a lot less surprising.
"Wired" is essentially referring to genetics. ~ 8% of our genomic lineage is that of a virus. Negativity is just the manifestation of an innate human pathogenic desire to cause harm. It's just nature working its magic.
First, it makes sense. A teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage makes a barrel of sewage. A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage. This isn't just a snide saying. It applies directly to, say, the safety of drinking water. That obsessive search for what might be wrong has held an evolutionary benefit for millions of years.
There's also a social power in it. We claim that we want to lead via inspiration and charisma, and that carrot-driven approach works at the big-picture level, but most people who succeed in business, day to day, get their way by exaggerating the negative consequences of whatever they don't want. "I want X" is to put yourself out there and risk being called a bike-shedder. "The company is fucked if not-X" makes it sound like you're looking out for the group... unless you do it too often. So much of the tension and negativity in corporate life comes from the accumulations of these phony existential risks (and the bad decisions resulting from people, especially at the top, buying into them).
(This is not to say that one should directly apply the stick, i.e. be a bully. You don't want that. You want to convince people that there is objective harm to the group, out of your control, that will befall it, if not-X is chosen. If you're the one holding the stick, then you'll be seen as an extortionist dickhead, but invocation of external sticks is quite powerful; see: religion.)
Then there's the art of the complain-brag. The best way to diffuse envy of an elevated position is to make it seem like it actually entails a lot of suffering. "I envy you guys on the floor; I just sit in meetings all day." From CEOs to middle managers, people pretend their jobs are unenviable, because it makes the organization more stable that way. But the picture that people end up with is that things are unpleasant from any direction and unlikely to get better. Plenty of people do like their jobs, but they're not allowed to say as much to the plebs. People will tolerate much more inequality if the people above them in the ranks appear not to be enjoying the position.
>> A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage.
To be realistic, it makes a barrel of (maybe a bit cheaper) wine; alcohol kills bacteria.
(As someone that eats lunch at restaurants most of my life, I avoid reading about kitchen hygiene. Laws and sausages, etc.)
Edit: I didn't realize it, but I guess I am a typical example of cynical negativity. That alcoholic drinks are safe to drink is a feature, not a bug. And while not much of an oenophile, I do enjoy a glass of dry Spanish red. Just don't tell me about the sewage spoon.
"Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out-groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes."
40 comments
[ 23.8 ms ] story [ 1438 ms ] threadFor 99.99% of human history optimistically going for a venture lead to death. Not obsessively focusing on risks was a reliably horrible idea.
It's really only been since the dawn of the industrial age that optimism has been a viable strategy.
This applies to social ambition as well. Not being hyper attuned to your rank in society for most of history was a good way to get run through with a sword.
This is rather interesting. I wonder if this contributes to their low rate of aggressive dreams and positivity. Furthermore, it would be interesting to study if this might somehow be connected with their very "liberal" policies towards sex and drugs, sources of pleasure.
The part about the criticism of the positivity ratio was particularly interesting because a co-author wrote the brilliant parody of post-modernism published in one of its seminal journals, Social Text (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
A critique by Sokal is prima facie intriguing.
I need to go read the original article but the Wikipedia summary is fascinating (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio) in specific, Fredrickson and Losada appear to have chosen functional parameters that yield good results, not ones based on evidence.
Cultivating dissatisfaction is key to doing good work. If you can't bring yourself to say "Man, this sucks, I could do better than that" how will you try to do better?
In fact, research shows people who are motivated more by the fear of loss rather than the hope of gain, in other words, defensive pessimists, are better prepared to handle the obstacles that get thrown in their path. Being negative is the strongest motivation for these people.
The irony of it is humans being wired for negativity sounds like bad news for the optimists. But there's a way to model optimists in terms of negativity too. Optimists have what Keats referred to as high negative capability: they are capable of "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
As a practical matter, I think it helps to honor both the negative and the positive. Be negative when you are figuring out what you want to fix that's broken, and be positive about bringing yourself to actually do it.
... and I arrive to find the DMV haplessly in worship of Saint Kafka.
By my negativity [distrusting an organization to do their job and have themselves together enough to tie their own shoes] I made the process better by arriving "over" prepared.
If you shout in the forest and nobody hears you; are you not still expressing your self?
No, because this fails the definition of "expressing yourself". An expression is defined as --
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expression
-- "the act of making your thoughts, feelings, etc., known by speech, writing, or some other method"
Notice the word "known" in the middle of this definition. Known by whom? The person expressing the ideas already knows them. Therefore by definition one is making oneself known to a second party, someone other than the speaker.
> ... and internal verbalization is also often considered as a form of expression ...
Not as the word is defined and commonly understood.
If someone yells something in the forest, they are speaking to, variously, a personification of nature, the world, a god, themselves (as described above), or perhaps more literally an imagined companion.
Expression is not about the effect but the intent, even if it's subconscious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem
-- which doesn't have a widely accepted resolution. The tl;dr: arguing that another hypothetical person is present by reference to the mind, is a non-starter, except among psychologists.
"...even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path."
Here, have a strong cup of toughen-the-fuck-up.
PS: The fact that you're finding this at the bottom of the page and greyed out is a case in point on how HN has fallen in love with self pity. (Not an edit)
As a fictional man with a steel jaw and a nose that was never broken in over 50 fights once said "It's not about how hard you can hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep going forward"
It only takes getting up one more time than they knock you down.
Life is tough and many people, possibly most, want to be told that it's not really tough, it's just that you're special which makes it harder for you and this pill and less work/hardship will solve your problem.
It's why the USA is filled with people addicted to and completely anesthetized by various prescription drugs.
Sure, real depression actually exists. But it's rare and I suspect the over-diagnosis we're seeing is more damaging by removing people from active and productive lives than lack of diagnosis.
When last did you hear a doctor tell someone to get regular sleep, eat well, get some exercise and face up the the challenges they're presented?
Telling someone who actually has depression--that is, a brain chemistry imbalance that causes negative feelings--to toughen up is about as helpful as telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off.
If "toughen up" means eating well and exercising, it may very well be just as effective as SSRIs: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2291072/
In my anecdotal experience the link between lack of exercise, poor diet, and depression is very strong. Hopefully there is more research into this area, but the main issue with it is that depression and SB is methodologically weak. What counts as "depressed" and "sedentary behavior" are extremely open-ended. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20174982
"Just toughen up" is the unsympathetic, counterproductive and, frankly, dangerous advice of the last century. Take your own advice and stop complaining about humanity deciding it's good to care about each other and care about yourself. Or better yet, see a counselor or therapist about your stunted emotional growth.
Secondly, when I did finally get some help, the absolute first thing I was told was to try exactly those things -- improve my sleep, diet and exercise. Your problem is with the attempted treatment you've seen, not really the identification.
You might have a point generally, but I think you miss some historical context.
A few hundred years ago, depending on location, if you made a "random snide comment" someone(s) might die. This used to be more serious stuff.
These days we have rule of law, but taking care of your reputation and social respect is certainly one of the things you find not only in the Western world but in all cultures, including among baboons. It is partly genetic.
(Consider all the muscles in your face to communicate and your language facilities; we have had lots of evolutionary pressure to be social with people. That is, if you failed in life or not was to a large degree decided by how you functioned with other people.)
The point is, it is normal, now and historically, to feel destroyed and be motivated by social respect and insults.
There's also a social power in it. We claim that we want to lead via inspiration and charisma, and that carrot-driven approach works at the big-picture level, but most people who succeed in business, day to day, get their way by exaggerating the negative consequences of whatever they don't want. "I want X" is to put yourself out there and risk being called a bike-shedder. "The company is fucked if not-X" makes it sound like you're looking out for the group... unless you do it too often. So much of the tension and negativity in corporate life comes from the accumulations of these phony existential risks (and the bad decisions resulting from people, especially at the top, buying into them).
(This is not to say that one should directly apply the stick, i.e. be a bully. You don't want that. You want to convince people that there is objective harm to the group, out of your control, that will befall it, if not-X is chosen. If you're the one holding the stick, then you'll be seen as an extortionist dickhead, but invocation of external sticks is quite powerful; see: religion.)
Then there's the art of the complain-brag. The best way to diffuse envy of an elevated position is to make it seem like it actually entails a lot of suffering. "I envy you guys on the floor; I just sit in meetings all day." From CEOs to middle managers, people pretend their jobs are unenviable, because it makes the organization more stable that way. But the picture that people end up with is that things are unpleasant from any direction and unlikely to get better. Plenty of people do like their jobs, but they're not allowed to say as much to the plebs. People will tolerate much more inequality if the people above them in the ranks appear not to be enjoying the position.
>> A teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage.
To be realistic, it makes a barrel of (maybe a bit cheaper) wine; alcohol kills bacteria.
(As someone that eats lunch at restaurants most of my life, I avoid reading about kitchen hygiene. Laws and sausages, etc.)
Edit: I didn't realize it, but I guess I am a typical example of cynical negativity. That alcoholic drinks are safe to drink is a feature, not a bug. And while not much of an oenophile, I do enjoy a glass of dry Spanish red. Just don't tell me about the sewage spoon.
A related study from last year: "Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out-Group Political Preferences" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12016/full
"Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out-groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes."