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This has been known among psychologist for awhile now. In fact someone who is too honest, someone who see's the truth of the world is more likely to be clinical

This has been known among psychologist for awhile now. In fact someone who is too honest, someone who see's the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves This podcast from radiolab really changed my perspective on the concept. Pretty much if you're not depressed, most likely some aspect of you is delusional. I would say people on HN are especially prone to lying to themselves. They lie to themselves about how intelligent they are. Programming is tied to intelligence and people need to think they're smart in order to maintain pride. Religion is easy to laugh off as irrational for HNers because religion isn't a big part of their lives. Intelligence and programming is a big part of their lives and that's where all the lies live, in something you take pride in. Additionally people on HN think they're more rational then normal... they think they don't fall into the trap of lying to themselves. I hate to tell you this, but that's just another lie you all tell yourselves.

99_00 3y ago
You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things. I say that we aren't. And given that, you are better off believing the lie that helps you or makes you feel good instead of the one that hurts you, assuming both have the same predictive power.
- jimkleiber 3y ago
  I tell people "I don't know if your intentions are good or bad and I may never know. If I believe they're bad, I feel bad. If I believe they're good, I feel good. So I choose to believe they're good." So I appreciate your perspective as I think it aligns with mine.
- corethree 3y ago
  > You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things. I believe that for situations where a single human has enough information and ability to ascertain the truth, most humans deliberately will not make a beeline for the truth. They sort of veer off to the side towards a half truth that better suits their situation. None of this is a conscious choice though. Self deception is completely orthogonal to our ability to ascertain the actual truth. As I said even if we were magically gifted this ability, most choose not to use that ability. Of course this quality lives on a gradient, some people are really good at self deception, others are really bad at it.
  - fellowniusmonk 3y ago
    Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level. I mean who cares if some guy running a convenience store or writing an email client thinks the world is flat? Maybe we just need a small aberrant percentage of the population so there will always be a few people "shorting" the status quo for cash and occasionally preventing extinction.
    - corethree 3y ago
      >Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level. It's not just this. It seems as though lying to oneself is so pervasive that it is likely a biological advantage. Meaning not only is obsession with the truth not advantageous but it's actually disadvantageous while the opposite self deception is actually normal and highly beneficial such that this trait has been naturally selected to persist.
    - 99_00 3y ago
      We don't have the mental bandwidth or responsiveness to perceive reality. Our brains use shortcuts to observe and think. These lead to errors. We didn't need to be perfect to get to this point. Just good enough to beat the environment and the other meat sacks. Predictiveness of a mental model is the the closest we can get to understanding reality.
JauntyHatAngle 3y ago
To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all. The trick (which is very hard) is to recognise when one of your own arguments is one of convenience, emotion, illogical etc. And not be biased towards logical fallacies against others. But this does not mean that your average person on hacker news doesn't tend towards better educated and more rational discussion than large amounts of the public. It also means hacker news tends towards specific blindspots, sure.
- corethree 3y ago
  > To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all. True. But the problem here is that this "skill" you think you have. It might be just a lie you tell yourself. You wouldn't know. That's the nature of lying to ourselves. Humans are all highly irrational creatures. Yet individually when we think of ourselves.... all of us unequivocally think of ourselves and most of our actions as rational. This includes you.
kykeonaut 3y ago
I feel that a sign of being a good programmer is recognizing you are not a good programmer. Then again, this is not me, but Socrates speaking.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Socrates understood that he understood more than most, similarly a good programmer will understand that he is a better programmer than most. The "I think I'm bad therefore I'm good" mantra is just coping. The important part is understand that you can't be perfect, Socrates understood that there were many things he didn't understand, a good programmer will understand that there are many ways he could improve, but doesn't mean that they think they are bad.
- corethree 3y ago
  Bro, this sounds like rationalizing. You realize you're not a good programmer and you try to rationalize that realization with this quote. Quotes like these are huge indicators of self deception. I mean it may be true, but usually the only person who cares for these quotes are the ones who have a strong desire to believe that it applies to them.
  - oysterpingu 3y ago
    Well, I wouldnt say if you think you're a bad programmer that makes you a good one. However, I would rephrase it as "If you're honest with yourself and the mistakes you make, you are able to solve them. If you're not humble, then it is very difficult to be a good programmer (or anything really), because you would think you never make mistakes. And as a result you would never fix them"
fellowniusmonk 3y ago
I am a high functioning depressive, or possibly not depressed at all, I think I am uniquely qualified to speak to the psychology of non-self deception while still being a "high performance" individual, especially compared to my co-hort of "defective children". I was born with heart defects, so during my formative years I was on restricted activities and was constantly confronted with the futility of life, the imminence of death, my memories start at 3, in the days leading up to my first surgery.. for my second procedure at 5 I was scared of not waking back up, by 10 I would wake up from anesthesia disappointed I didn't die on the table, I was happiest in the oblivion and real life had so much struggle. I knew no peers and almost no adults who understood what it was like, much less people willing to talk about it in any serious way. Thought stopping platitudes were the best I could get from most adults, more scared of even talking about death than I was of the thing itself. I pursued religion and even went to seminary, but all the God/Religious concepts we know about really are just disappointing, unhelpful, pastiche or frankly evil at core (Jainism being a strange exception in my mind, even though the common cultural expression of Jainism shares many of the same issues I have with Hinduism). There was a time window in my past when I decided to generally "overshare" my internal thoughts and I stopped after a close friend ended up flippantly saying "well of course, you're obsessed with death.", that's not really the energy I want to put out there. I think people fight very hard to ignore death, that's why existential moments find them in bed at night or when they are alone and quiet with their thoughts. I've been waiting to die for as long as I can remember, my relationship with death is radically inverted so my existential thoughts are as well. If you really soak in this futility, if this sense of "Everything is meaningless and transient" is inculcated in you early enough... unbidden existential thoughts transforms from... "Nothing matters", to "What if everything matters?", I don't know, I don't know enough about reality to "know for sure" that nothing matters. I'm just trying to discover as much stuff as I can and promote environments and attitudes that keep civilization stable enough for us to continue our species level rocket pace of discovery and inquiry. If I was born anywhere else or any earlier I wouldn't exist. I'm just curious to see what happens, what's ultimately true, if we ever figure it out, if we figure it out in my lifetime, if entities and causality are what we think they are now... and I'm going to kick around as long as I can to find out what happens. I think truly embracing intellectual humility is key to happiness and pursuit of life in a world that is -- as experienced -- unjust, random and capricious.
chrismorgan 3y ago
> Religion is easy to laugh off as irrational for HNers because religion isn't a big part of their lives. You’re generalising. On the occasional threads directly dealing with religious topics, you will easily see that there are plenty here who are very religious. As for me, my religion is the most important thing in my life.
- corethree 3y ago
  True. Nothing wrong with generalizing though. If I told you that jumping off a cliff would result in you dying when really you only had a 99% chance of dying I would also still be generalizing over that 1% chance of survival. I would say for HN you're in the minority.
jimkleiber 3y ago
I wonder if the "someone who sees the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed" is related to seeing a truth and not expressing it. Lately I've really been starting to wonder if depression is the opposite of expression. Or in other words, instead of pushing feelings/thoughts out (ex-press), we push them down (de-press). I can say from my experience when I feel very confident that I see what's happening and I don't say it, I can feel depressed. Or if I do say what I see and people around me deny what I see, then I can stop expressing and start depressing and feel that depression even more as I close off from others and from myself.
- corethree 3y ago
  No it's not specifically about what you're talking about. People are literally being delusional here. There's a ton science behind this phenomenon. You can listen to that podcast it's quite interesting. Basically they can do quantitative experiments where they have groups of people rate others about how attractive they are 1-10 and through this gather an average rating about someones attractiveness. Then they have those people who were rated, rate themselves. Of course they also measure for happiness too. Turns out the less happy you are, the more accurately you rated yourself in turns of attractiveness. What I described is just one experiment out of many trying to measure this phenomenon of self deception. It is completely consistent in most experiments. Almost every single one results in a positive correlation between happiness and self-deception.
  - jimkleiber 3y ago
    Ah, I'll check out the podcast as it seems counterintuitive to me and therefore I might learn something, thanks!
  - jimkleiber 3y ago
    I listened to the podcast. In those experiments they described, I feel pretty confident that they're not so much measuring self-deception, but more like self-belief, or faith in oneself. First, they defined self-deception as "you have two contradictory beliefs, and you hold them at the same time, and you allow one of them into consciousness that you have a motivation for allowing one of them into consciousness." I don't know if that's so much self-deception, maybe more just trying to resolve an internal conflict and not having certainty over which one is objectively true, because for so many things I believe it's really hard to hold certainty over them being objectively true. For example, if I believe I'm good at programming and believe I'm bad at programming, which one is objectively true? I could be better at programming than my dad and worse at programming than my friend who is an Apple engineer. I think they were mostly measuring whether, in uncertainty about one's (or other's) goodness (intentions, abilities, etc.), did they believe they were good or bad? For example, in the embarrassing questions survey, if people answered yes to they thought about wanting to rape someone, I imagine they probably don't think they have good intentions. And then if someone doesn't think they have good intentions, I imagine they probably feel worse than someone who believes they do have good intentions. Eight years ago I created a class called Emotional Self-Defense. An ex had sent me an email that said, "Every time I was about to leave, you did something nice so I wouldn't go." And I immediately felt angry, "This girl thinks I manipulated her." Then a few minutes later I felt sad, "Was I manipulating her? I thought I was in love." The next day, after getting a scalp massage, I relaxed on the chair and thought, "I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't go, I was doing them to savor the moment. I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't leave, I was doing them because I thought she'd enjoy receiving them and I'd enjoy giving them." Then I thought, "If I can't trust my own good intentions, who the hell will?" So I tell people I choose to believe I have good intentions and that others have good intentions because I feel better when I do. Do I know for certain that they or I do? No, and I don't know if I ever will. The other experiment was about cheating and how a woman can simultaneously think a man is cheating and not cheating. In the podcast, the assumption was, to everyone else, the man was obviously cheating and yet the woman lied to herself because she believed he wasn't. But the opposite can also be true, where, to everyone else, the man is obviously not cheating and yet the woman believes that he is. This has happened to me, where the woman was convinced I was having sex with someone else when that wasn't the case at all. Lastly, the swimming example seemed to talk more about whether people believed in themselves, as much of the statements seemed like positive affirmations. "We believe we're invincible. Because if we go int here with any other thought there's no chance of us accomplishing our goal." And "It's like I have the ability to catch this person. It's going to happen." So for me, I don't think it's so much about self-deception and more about self-belief (and other-belief), as I'd argue that people who believe in themselves and others are happier and more successful. Lastly, they say "that depressed people lie less." But then go on to say, "They see all the pain in the world. How horrible people are with each other and they tell you everything about themselves. What their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right. Maybe it's the way we help people that help them be wrong." I see a lot of pain in the world but don't think that people are horrible, I think most of us react out of our own pain and want others to join us in the pain. Almost a yearning to not be alone. And therefore I choose to believe that pain and sadness are OK, as they help me feel even closer to other people and to myself. "And the problem is they're right." By what objective measure are people terrible? I appreciate you continuing with me on this and reinforcing that I listen to the podcast because for many years now I've talked about being honest with oneself and emotional honesty and such, and I think I want to focus more on loving oneself and others. In such conflicts, choosing to believe in our good intentions, our good abilities, our overall goodness instead of choosing to believe in the opposite. So thank you for helping me see this more clearly today.

99_00 3y ago

You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things. I say that we aren't. And given that, you are better off believing the lie that helps you or makes you feel good instead of the one that hurts you, assuming both have the same predictive power.

jimkleiber 3y ago
I tell people "I don't know if your intentions are good or bad and I may never know. If I believe they're bad, I feel bad. If I believe they're good, I feel good. So I choose to believe they're good." So I appreciate your perspective as I think it aligns with mine.
corethree 3y ago
> You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things. I believe that for situations where a single human has enough information and ability to ascertain the truth, most humans deliberately will not make a beeline for the truth. They sort of veer off to the side towards a half truth that better suits their situation. None of this is a conscious choice though. Self deception is completely orthogonal to our ability to ascertain the actual truth. As I said even if we were magically gifted this ability, most choose not to use that ability. Of course this quality lives on a gradient, some people are really good at self deception, others are really bad at it.
- fellowniusmonk 3y ago
  Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level. I mean who cares if some guy running a convenience store or writing an email client thinks the world is flat? Maybe we just need a small aberrant percentage of the population so there will always be a few people "shorting" the status quo for cash and occasionally preventing extinction.
  - corethree 3y ago
    >Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level. It's not just this. It seems as though lying to oneself is so pervasive that it is likely a biological advantage. Meaning not only is obsession with the truth not advantageous but it's actually disadvantageous while the opposite self deception is actually normal and highly beneficial such that this trait has been naturally selected to persist.
  - 99_00 3y ago
    We don't have the mental bandwidth or responsiveness to perceive reality. Our brains use shortcuts to observe and think. These lead to errors. We didn't need to be perfect to get to this point. Just good enough to beat the environment and the other meat sacks. Predictiveness of a mental model is the the closest we can get to understanding reality.

JauntyHatAngle 3y ago

To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all. The trick (which is very hard) is to recognise when one of your own arguments is one of convenience, emotion, illogical etc. And not be biased towards logical fallacies against others. But this does not mean that your average person on hacker news doesn't tend towards better educated and more rational discussion than large amounts of the public. It also means hacker news tends towards specific blindspots, sure.

corethree 3y ago
> To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all. True. But the problem here is that this "skill" you think you have. It might be just a lie you tell yourself. You wouldn't know. That's the nature of lying to ourselves. Humans are all highly irrational creatures. Yet individually when we think of ourselves.... all of us unequivocally think of ourselves and most of our actions as rational. This includes you.

kykeonaut 3y ago

I feel that a sign of being a good programmer is recognizing you are not a good programmer. Then again, this is not me, but Socrates speaking.

Jensson 3y ago
Socrates understood that he understood more than most, similarly a good programmer will understand that he is a better programmer than most. The "I think I'm bad therefore I'm good" mantra is just coping. The important part is understand that you can't be perfect, Socrates understood that there were many things he didn't understand, a good programmer will understand that there are many ways he could improve, but doesn't mean that they think they are bad.
corethree 3y ago
Bro, this sounds like rationalizing. You realize you're not a good programmer and you try to rationalize that realization with this quote. Quotes like these are huge indicators of self deception. I mean it may be true, but usually the only person who cares for these quotes are the ones who have a strong desire to believe that it applies to them.
- oysterpingu 3y ago
  Well, I wouldnt say if you think you're a bad programmer that makes you a good one. However, I would rephrase it as "If you're honest with yourself and the mistakes you make, you are able to solve them. If you're not humble, then it is very difficult to be a good programmer (or anything really), because you would think you never make mistakes. And as a result you would never fix them"

fellowniusmonk 3y ago

I am a high functioning depressive, or possibly not depressed at all, I think I am uniquely qualified to speak to the psychology of non-self deception while still being a "high performance" individual, especially compared to my co-hort of "defective children". I was born with heart defects, so during my formative years I was on restricted activities and was constantly confronted with the futility of life, the imminence of death, my memories start at 3, in the days leading up to my first surgery.. for my second procedure at 5 I was scared of not waking back up, by 10 I would wake up from anesthesia disappointed I didn't die on the table, I was happiest in the oblivion and real life had so much struggle. I knew no peers and almost no adults who understood what it was like, much less people willing to talk about it in any serious way. Thought stopping platitudes were the best I could get from most adults, more scared of even talking about death than I was of the thing itself. I pursued religion and even went to seminary, but all the God/Religious concepts we know about really are just disappointing, unhelpful, pastiche or frankly evil at core (Jainism being a strange exception in my mind, even though the common cultural expression of Jainism shares many of the same issues I have with Hinduism). There was a time window in my past when I decided to generally "overshare" my internal thoughts and I stopped after a close friend ended up flippantly saying "well of course, you're obsessed with death.", that's not really the energy I want to put out there. I think people fight very hard to ignore death, that's why existential moments find them in bed at night or when they are alone and quiet with their thoughts. I've been waiting to die for as long as I can remember, my relationship with death is radically inverted so my existential thoughts are as well. If you really soak in this futility, if this sense of "Everything is meaningless and transient" is inculcated in you early enough... unbidden existential thoughts transforms from... "Nothing matters", to "What if everything matters?", I don't know, I don't know enough about reality to "know for sure" that nothing matters. I'm just trying to discover as much stuff as I can and promote environments and attitudes that keep civilization stable enough for us to continue our species level rocket pace of discovery and inquiry. If I was born anywhere else or any earlier I wouldn't exist. I'm just curious to see what happens, what's ultimately true, if we ever figure it out, if we figure it out in my lifetime, if entities and causality are what we think they are now... and I'm going to kick around as long as I can to find out what happens. I think truly embracing intellectual humility is key to happiness and pursuit of life in a world that is -- as experienced -- unjust, random and capricious.

chrismorgan 3y ago

> Religion is easy to laugh off as irrational for HNers because religion isn't a big part of their lives. You’re generalising. On the occasional threads directly dealing with religious topics, you will easily see that there are plenty here who are very religious. As for me, my religion is the most important thing in my life.

corethree 3y ago
True. Nothing wrong with generalizing though. If I told you that jumping off a cliff would result in you dying when really you only had a 99% chance of dying I would also still be generalizing over that 1% chance of survival. I would say for HN you're in the minority.

jimkleiber 3y ago

I wonder if the "someone who sees the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed" is related to seeing a truth and not expressing it. Lately I've really been starting to wonder if depression is the opposite of expression. Or in other words, instead of pushing feelings/thoughts out (ex-press), we push them down (de-press). I can say from my experience when I feel very confident that I see what's happening and I don't say it, I can feel depressed. Or if I do say what I see and people around me deny what I see, then I can stop expressing and start depressing and feel that depression even more as I close off from others and from myself.

corethree 3y ago
No it's not specifically about what you're talking about. People are literally being delusional here. There's a ton science behind this phenomenon. You can listen to that podcast it's quite interesting. Basically they can do quantitative experiments where they have groups of people rate others about how attractive they are 1-10 and through this gather an average rating about someones attractiveness. Then they have those people who were rated, rate themselves. Of course they also measure for happiness too. Turns out the less happy you are, the more accurately you rated yourself in turns of attractiveness. What I described is just one experiment out of many trying to measure this phenomenon of self deception. It is completely consistent in most experiments. Almost every single one results in a positive correlation between happiness and self-deception.
- jimkleiber 3y ago
  Ah, I'll check out the podcast as it seems counterintuitive to me and therefore I might learn something, thanks!
- jimkleiber 3y ago
  I listened to the podcast. In those experiments they described, I feel pretty confident that they're not so much measuring self-deception, but more like self-belief, or faith in oneself. First, they defined self-deception as "you have two contradictory beliefs, and you hold them at the same time, and you allow one of them into consciousness that you have a motivation for allowing one of them into consciousness." I don't know if that's so much self-deception, maybe more just trying to resolve an internal conflict and not having certainty over which one is objectively true, because for so many things I believe it's really hard to hold certainty over them being objectively true. For example, if I believe I'm good at programming and believe I'm bad at programming, which one is objectively true? I could be better at programming than my dad and worse at programming than my friend who is an Apple engineer. I think they were mostly measuring whether, in uncertainty about one's (or other's) goodness (intentions, abilities, etc.), did they believe they were good or bad? For example, in the embarrassing questions survey, if people answered yes to they thought about wanting to rape someone, I imagine they probably don't think they have good intentions. And then if someone doesn't think they have good intentions, I imagine they probably feel worse than someone who believes they do have good intentions. Eight years ago I created a class called Emotional Self-Defense. An ex had sent me an email that said, "Every time I was about to leave, you did something nice so I wouldn't go." And I immediately felt angry, "This girl thinks I manipulated her." Then a few minutes later I felt sad, "Was I manipulating her? I thought I was in love." The next day, after getting a scalp massage, I relaxed on the chair and thought, "I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't go, I was doing them to savor the moment. I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't leave, I was doing them because I thought she'd enjoy receiving them and I'd enjoy giving them." Then I thought, "If I can't trust my own good intentions, who the hell will?" So I tell people I choose to believe I have good intentions and that others have good intentions because I feel better when I do. Do I know for certain that they or I do? No, and I don't know if I ever will. The other experiment was about cheating and how a woman can simultaneously think a man is cheating and not cheating. In the podcast, the assumption was, to everyone else, the man was obviously cheating and yet the woman lied to herself because she believed he wasn't. But the opposite can also be true, where, to everyone else, the man is obviously not cheating and yet the woman believes that he is. This has happened to me, where the woman was convinced I was having sex with someone else when that wasn't the case at all. Lastly, the swimming example seemed to talk more about whether people believed in themselves, as much of the statements seemed like positive affirmations. "We believe we're invincible. Because if we go int here with any other thought there's no chance of us accomplishing our goal." And "It's like I have the ability to catch this person. It's going to happen." So for me, I don't think it's so much about self-deception and more about self-belief (and other-belief), as I'd argue that people who believe in themselves and others are happier and more successful. Lastly, they say "that depressed people lie less." But then go on to say, "They see all the pain in the world. How horrible people are with each other and they tell you everything about themselves. What their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right. Maybe it's the way we help people that help them be wrong." I see a lot of pain in the world but don't think that people are horrible, I think most of us react out of our own pain and want others to join us in the pain. Almost a yearning to not be alone. And therefore I choose to believe that pain and sadness are OK, as they help me feel even closer to other people and to myself. "And the problem is they're right." By what objective measure are people terrible? I appreciate you continuing with me on this and reinforcing that I listen to the podcast because for many years now I've talked about being honest with oneself and emotional honesty and such, and I think I want to focus more on loving oneself and others. In such conflicts, choosing to believe in our good intentions, our good abilities, our overall goodness instead of choosing to believe in the opposite. So thank you for helping me see this more clearly today.