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By no means a summary of the article, but I liked these passages in particular: On emotions: > When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” a

By no means a summary of the article, but I liked these passages in particular: On emotions: > When I was a young adult, I'd pride myself on being “logical” and “free of emotional decision making.” Like all good lies we tell to ourselves, there's a kernel of truth to it. But for the most part, at least for me personally, I am a deeply emotional being. > Emotions run deep and can be a really useful well to tap for intrinsic motivation. For example, for some time after ripgrep was released, I began to immediately hate touching the code that was responsible for printing search results. It was convoluted, buggy and difficult to change. While rewriting is a perfectly logical decision to make on purely technical grounds only, I was motivated to do it because I didn't like the way it made me feel. My emotion helped drive me to make things better for myself. On communicating thoughtfully in order to communicate effectively: > ...being thoughtful in one's communication is important to advance your cause. If you're thoughtless, even if you're correct, you risk working against your own ends because the person on the other end might not be able to look past your thoughtlessness. On the fact that even the author can't and doesn't read every line of every dependency they pull in: > ...As someone who uses FOSS and tries hard to be discriminating with the dependencies I use, it is just not possible for me to review every line of code I depend on. Even if I could somehow manage to read it all, I certainly wouldn't be able to understand it all in enough detail to be confident that it was doing what I thought it was doing.

_qwfv 7y ago
This hit me hard too. Heading into college, I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. Turns out I was just an asshole who wasn't self aware enough to understand my own feelings and was making other people around me hurt.
- macintux 7y ago
  This is an argument I could have every day with commenters on HN were I so inclined. Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.
  - BLKNSLVR 7y ago
    Going against your, and parents, commentary, this is a semi-accurate description of how I used to see myself: "I'd rather be right than popular, and I usually am". But I mostly wasn't convincing, whether I was right or wrong. And that's what I'm continually working on. Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place. And to be convincing you need to know your topic from a number of angles, and you need to know the audience you're playing to. But you also need to know whose worthy of convincing, because there are some (plenty) that won't be convinced either way, so don't waste your time on them - know a lost cause so as to avoid committing self-denial-of-service.
    - phreack 7y ago
      To add to your very good insight, I believe that oftentimes it's not even a dichotomy. Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it, because it turns the conversation into emotional clashes by triggering a desire to oppose on the other. But the very bad thing about that philosophy is that it makes one tend to default to thinking that it's others that are inferior and can't handle the facts you see so clearly... so if it turns out you were not right in the end, we've got the worst case scenario -- Now you're not just preventing yourself from learning and improving (which should always be the goal), you've become just like a troll, an asshole who's wrong.
      - cjslep 7y ago
        > Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it I agree. It takes discipline to be right without being righteous.
      - chinesempire 7y ago
        > Being right does not give a right to be condescending Not to disagree, but, quoting the article, I'd like to "underscore the asymmetry" between people that are right and condescending VS people that are wrong, think they are right (or don't care if they are, most of the times) and are condescending just because they can or because that's the way they think you advance your career. They read somewhere that CEOs have a bad temper and imply that bad temper is necessary to become CEO.
- marklgr 7y ago
  Slightly tangential, but that former stance you describe partly is a consequence of the age-old dualism between emotions and reason, to which people quite frequently subscribe despite strong evidence in the last decades from neurosciences that this is just not an adequete model--that's not how our mind work. We are not some sort of judge in their cartesian theater deliberating between the good, rational-mind and the lively but childish emotional-mind.
- chinesempire 7y ago
  > I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. You can. And probably you should. Just accept it is not the _only_ tool. You have a life too, things come at different angles, from everywhere, and impact you and the people you love differently. I've been working hard for the past 25 years to become an emotionless decision maker when it's about my primary job: writing software. I don't keep code around because I'm attached to it, if there's a better way to execute the same thing. I don't reject other people's code just because it's not the way I would write it. I don't research pureness, I know that to be useful and, most importantly, correct, software has to solve a lot of edge cases and inevitably is going to be full of trade offs. I don't only work on new software or features, I don't plan complete rewrites of legacy systems if I can work around the problem, I do maintainance, even of legacy systems, maybe nobody is gonna credit you for doing it, but it's what keeps the World spinning and rationally it's one of the most important tasks. I used to care about "what will people think if I'll solve this with an 'if'?", now I know that it was my emotions blocking me from doing the right thing. I don't take bug reports personally, although there are times I struggle with the usual "haven't read the documentation" or "it doesn't work it's not really helpful as a description of the problem", but I try to let my emotions out of it, I try to stay away from them as much as possible. Emotionless doesn't mean rude or "acting like a killing machine" it means you're detached from emotions and when a problem arise you help to find the solution instead of blaming someone or something. Emotionless is that alert on the plane that tells you to put your oxygen mask first, before helping your children. Because it's the most rational and logic thing to do, the opposite of what a parent would instinctively do out of love. > Turns out I was just an asshole Don't be an asshole is a good start too :) But sometimes is hard when you're young and everyone older around you talks about tricking the system while you just want to fix it (at least that was my struggle with it when I was younger).
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > > I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. > You can. This is narrowly true in theory, noting particularly that it applies only after the problem is defined, because defining a problem is an application of values which ultimately are rooted not in rationality but in emotional preference. In practice, people don't and probably practically cannot fully define problems in advance of approaching them, but feel out the parameters of the problem in the course of addressing it, so attempting an unemotional approach invaluable means accepting an incomplete understanding of the problem.

_qwfv 7y ago

This hit me hard too. Heading into college, I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. Turns out I was just an asshole who wasn't self aware enough to understand my own feelings and was making other people around me hurt.

macintux 7y ago
This is an argument I could have every day with commenters on HN were I so inclined. Being polite, helpful, and correct is vastly more useful to the world than just being correct.
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  Going against your, and parents, commentary, this is a semi-accurate description of how I used to see myself: "I'd rather be right than popular, and I usually am". But I mostly wasn't convincing, whether I was right or wrong. And that's what I'm continually working on. Being convincing is arguably more important than being right in the first place. And to be convincing you need to know your topic from a number of angles, and you need to know the audience you're playing to. But you also need to know whose worthy of convincing, because there are some (plenty) that won't be convinced either way, so don't waste your time on them - know a lost cause so as to avoid committing self-denial-of-service.
  - phreack 7y ago
    To add to your very good insight, I believe that oftentimes it's not even a dichotomy. Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it, because it turns the conversation into emotional clashes by triggering a desire to oppose on the other. But the very bad thing about that philosophy is that it makes one tend to default to thinking that it's others that are inferior and can't handle the facts you see so clearly... so if it turns out you were not right in the end, we've got the worst case scenario -- Now you're not just preventing yourself from learning and improving (which should always be the goal), you've become just like a troll, an asshole who's wrong.
    - cjslep 7y ago
      > Being right does not give a right to be condescending about it I agree. It takes discipline to be right without being righteous.
    - chinesempire 7y ago
      > Being right does not give a right to be condescending Not to disagree, but, quoting the article, I'd like to "underscore the asymmetry" between people that are right and condescending VS people that are wrong, think they are right (or don't care if they are, most of the times) and are condescending just because they can or because that's the way they think you advance your career. They read somewhere that CEOs have a bad temper and imply that bad temper is necessary to become CEO.
marklgr 7y ago
Slightly tangential, but that former stance you describe partly is a consequence of the age-old dualism between emotions and reason, to which people quite frequently subscribe despite strong evidence in the last decades from neurosciences that this is just not an adequete model--that's not how our mind work. We are not some sort of judge in their cartesian theater deliberating between the good, rational-mind and the lively but childish emotional-mind.
chinesempire 7y ago
> I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. You can. And probably you should. Just accept it is not the _only_ tool. You have a life too, things come at different angles, from everywhere, and impact you and the people you love differently. I've been working hard for the past 25 years to become an emotionless decision maker when it's about my primary job: writing software. I don't keep code around because I'm attached to it, if there's a better way to execute the same thing. I don't reject other people's code just because it's not the way I would write it. I don't research pureness, I know that to be useful and, most importantly, correct, software has to solve a lot of edge cases and inevitably is going to be full of trade offs. I don't only work on new software or features, I don't plan complete rewrites of legacy systems if I can work around the problem, I do maintainance, even of legacy systems, maybe nobody is gonna credit you for doing it, but it's what keeps the World spinning and rationally it's one of the most important tasks. I used to care about "what will people think if I'll solve this with an 'if'?", now I know that it was my emotions blocking me from doing the right thing. I don't take bug reports personally, although there are times I struggle with the usual "haven't read the documentation" or "it doesn't work it's not really helpful as a description of the problem", but I try to let my emotions out of it, I try to stay away from them as much as possible. Emotionless doesn't mean rude or "acting like a killing machine" it means you're detached from emotions and when a problem arise you help to find the solution instead of blaming someone or something. Emotionless is that alert on the plane that tells you to put your oxygen mask first, before helping your children. Because it's the most rational and logic thing to do, the opposite of what a parent would instinctively do out of love. > Turns out I was just an asshole Don't be an asshole is a good start too :) But sometimes is hard when you're young and everyone older around you talks about tricking the system while you just want to fix it (at least that was my struggle with it when I was younger).
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > > I was so confident that it was not only possible, but correct to be an emotionless decision maker. That somehow you could navigate the rational path through every problem. > You can. This is narrowly true in theory, noting particularly that it applies only after the problem is defined, because defining a problem is an application of values which ultimately are rooted not in rationality but in emotional preference. In practice, people don't and probably practically cannot fully define problems in advance of approaching them, but feel out the parameters of the problem in the course of addressing it, so attempting an unemotional approach invaluable means accepting an incomplete understanding of the problem.