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My reasoning is often conjured ex post facto as well, with my brain tricking me into thinking I had good reasons to do something before I actually thought of th
by MattHeard 8y ago
My reasoning is often conjured ex post facto as well, with my brain tricking me into thinking I had good reasons to do something before I actually thought of the reasons.
Our brains use reason to justify what we already did more than it uses it to choose what we will do.
- scarejunba 8y agoIn The Righteous Mind, in a small section, Jonathan Haidt talks about this with the analogy that reason is a mahout riding the elephant of emotion. After reading that book and some others, I wondered if I could train my feelings so I’d respond instinctually and instantly to things in the ‘right’ way. Often when we see code, we have a feeling of ‘dirty’ or ‘clean’. An internal reaction that pushes us in some direction. It’s worth questioning why we think that about some things, but I think we eventually develop a sense of what is a good pattern and what isn’t and we actually use the emotional reasoning of our brain to guide us effectively in writing code. Perhaps we wouldn’t even be effective programmers if we had to actually think through full reason each time. Less applicable when reviewing code, of course.
- beat 8y agoYou're on the right path, I think. It's the same thing I do with my "I may be wrong, I'm often wrong" anti-affirmation. I'm training my mind - and training the minds of people I work with - to recognize my fallibility in advance, so it's not such a shock when I actually am wrong. Because yeah, I'm often wrong. And for my own purposes, recognizing the possibility that I might be wrong in advance, and being comfortable with it, heads off a lot of wasted effort from defending my wrongness.
- beat 8y agoEveryone does it. You're just aware of it. Most people think it's because they're smart, not because they're dumb.