Documenting My Brain

Book Notes: The Power of Onlyness

2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Power of Onlyness

Status: reading
Started: 2021-02-09

Chapters 1 & 2

When she was younger, the author Nilofer Merchant was attending college and expected to start university a year later when her family arranged for her a husband. An arranged marriage, as it is still common in certain cultures. Afraid that her new husband would forbid her from continuing her education, she left home. Based on that, she says she learned that choices define us and reveal who we are and what matters to each one. In university, she felt she finally found a group to provide a sense of solidarity and shared purpose, people who encourage her to invest in her education.

Finding “your people” sometimes means having to walk away from places you don’t fit in rather than trying to squeeze yourself into a too-tight space with the aim to belong. It isn’t until people make that choice that they are able to find others who share something meaningful with them.

Having attended a community college, she felt for a long time that this was a negative experience for her as opposed to others who attended only prestigious institutions. Later on, after using her experience that came from having attended a community college to contribute to discussions on education reform, she started realizing how her personal experience not only shaped her and contribute for her to be successful and achieve what she wanted to, but such experience provided her with an uniques perspective to contribute with something that others who didn’t live something similar could not, no matter what prestigious institutions they attended. Other later experiences shaped her and provided unique learnings, including being fired from her then dream job in what she called “my biggest professional failure and an epic personal failure”.

Meanwhile, her husband (by choice!) decided to do something new. Tired of corporate life, he wanted to do something good for the world. Encouraged by the author, he forgot his initial idea of giving up everything and then started working on his vision by doing something small: he set up a blog where he wrote about things he cared about, such as economical and social development for developing countries and areas. Despite his non-existent readership, doing so allowed him to explore and refine his ideas by expressing them. A person discovered his blog and invited him to join a newly created and also scarce in membership wiki dedicated to the subject. The members of this group didn’t have expertise or credentials in the subject, but they all shared a deep interest, you could even say a passion. This small wiki project has become Appropedia Foundation, a collaborative effort to provide information on projects that people can do to tackle problems like obtaining clean water or preventing malaria. Despite its small scale and the fact that all its founders have worked on it on the side, it has grown to impact millions of people from all over the world.

These personal experiences have made the author start thinking about her idea of “onlyness”. Companies scale by betting on sameness and avoiding reliance on individuals at all costs: each person is and must be a replaceable cog in the corporate machine, and scale and efficiency are achieved by doing the same things exactly in the same way in larger and larger amounts of time/quantities. Her experiences made her realize that there are groups, projects, maybe even some companies that rely on the opposite: the collective power of multiple people, each one bringing what only they can do or what only they do best. In the case of Appropedia, thousands of volunteers dedicated their time to contribute: create new content, translate content, moderate discussions, spread the word so that those who could benefit from their content could access it. All of that without much coordination, monetary compensation, or even requiring a large amount of time from people. This was in 2006, only five years after Wikipedia started. Although such modus operandi might seem trivial and normal nowadays, it is interesting to see it for what it is, and what it is is a very powerful idea. Being so used to such a collective collaboration environment on the internet, we might not appreciate or understand its power enough and what an incredible idea it is when compared to how things worked only a few time ago.

The Internet has allowed regular people to make an impact, or “making a dent” as the author puts it. Previously, making an impact would require one to join a powerful organization: a government, a large corporation, the military, the church. People would have to attain power. To do that, they would need to invest in expensive (and ofter useless) credentials. They would need to play politics and invest in “networking” that would give them power and credibility but didn’t directly contribute to their vision and project. All of that created a waste of time, energy, and other resources. Also, people would need to fit in with their organization’s culture. Bad luck for those naturally unable to fit in, such as minorities or anyone who tended to be labeled as outsiders. Having to do all of that to be able to make an impact naturally caused less innovative ideas to come up. What the internet allowed is for people to bypass the organizations and hierarchies that were previously necessary. By being able to easily find like-minded people with shared interests, the creation power has shifted from hierarchy and organizations to individuals and networks.

When value creation is institutional and hierarchical, the vast majority of people are treated as cogs, dispensable and replaceable. But when value creation is networked, the distinct ideas, judgments, and decision making of individual players—you and I—matter more as the fundamental building blocks of value creation. This seems the ultimate game changer: While organizations and hierarchies continue to serve many useful purposes, we no longer need them to attain big goals.

As part of this book the authors present the story of multiple people who made a dent and explains their story under her idea of “onlyness”. Chapter 2 presents two stories: Kimberly Bryant and Zach Wahls.

Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code (BGC). It all started when she brought her twelve-year-old daughter to a coding camp. Seeing the lack of diversity in her class, and hearing her daughter complains about her teacher’s lack of attention to girls, she decided to do something. This situation reminded her of her own stories. Growing up in a rough neighborhood, no one thought she would join Vanderbilt University and graduate in engineering. While in university she overcame a terrible start, having finished the first year with a 1.3 GPA. She felt alone. After finding friends in the black student community and getting involved in student activism, she overcame her initial difficulties to graduate with a B. She also participated in student movements that forced her university to adopt a new policy regarding South Africa apartheid through the university endowment fund investment strategies. When Kim graduated, she joined the corporate world where she faced racism. A manager was happy about hiring her since he managed to do a double strike: hiring a woman AND a people of color. Having highlighted her gender and her color, and not her ideas, potential, or capabilities, made her feel the effect of being the “only one”.

In 1977 Rosabeth Moss Kanter has researched tokenism, which is the practice of symbolic efforts like minority-focused hiring with the goal of achieving good PR and overall achieve the appearance of having a diverse and supportive environment without actually promoting changes and having a really diverse environment. Her study showed that when someone is a member of a group who represents less than 15 percent of the total, this person experiences certain effects:

They feel watched and monitored, and suffer extreme performance pressure.
They feel isolated from the group and they are less able to form meaningful social bonds with the colleagues.
They are pressured to assimilate into the group.

Kanter described this tokenism as difference being allowed in, but in such a small amount as to never affect the power structures.1 People who are “firsts,” “onlys,” or “the exception to the rule” feel this effect. And what it means is that they are more likely to adapt to the context rather than dent it to reflect their own ideas.

{All of these effects makes people feel less confident and unwilling to express their ideas. Worst yet, no matter how good they are able to express their ideas, other people won’t value them the same as if the idea was given by a “credible” member of the group. That creates situations where the same idea proposed by a whither member of the group, or a male member of the group, of a member of the group who conforms with the majority ethnical group; is valued and the same idea proposed by a member of the group who is not part of the “majority” might go ignored. Ill intentioned people even go as far as to purposefully ignore the minority ideas, and then steal their ideas, presenting them as their own later; or they can find a way to get credit for work that was done by someone who is a minority. As individuals, how can we assert ourselves in these situations and prevent it from happening to others as well?}

Going back to Kim. Her personal story affected her in a very individual way and gave her a distinct power that included a passion, or one could say a sense of indignation. In response to her daughter’s situation, she started by forming a small study group and invited five of her daughter’s friends. She prepared a curriculum, lessons, and exercises. Later she started to invite other people and networked with other moms interested in the idea. The group has grown to form chapters in several cities around the world, and Kim’s goal is to teach one million girls to code until 2040. Kim’s work is essential for a new generation of black women who will face a new world: millions of jobs will become obsolete, and the best jobs are (and will be) related to engineering and technology. Overcoming the racism and sexism that drive black women away from those challenging, fascinating, and high-paying jobs is essential to contribute to promote equality. From a small study group, she formed a large organization that has been recognized by the likes of Oprah and Barack Obama. It all started with a passion, a vision that mattered to Kim, and a willingness to dedicate a few hours of her time. That’s how it started, but it grew through the power of networking with other like-minded people.

The author says that Kim’s story demonstrates three things:

Defining or redefining your history and experience is important. Define it if it hasn’t yet, or redefine it if it has been defined already by someone else. When the author valued her until then shameful attendance in a less prestigious community college, this gave her the knowledge, ability, and perspective to contribute to state-level debates on educational reform. Your history is also, and in a large part, the history of your decisions. Each decision you take shape yourself.
Context matters. Where you grow up affects you. Where you live affects you. Be it your neighborhood, your state, your country, your culture. All of that has an effect on you.
It is important to value yourself, even or especially those faulty or shameful parts. See the beauty in brokenness. Hold what makes other laughs. Don’t hide the things that make you unique, but don’t let others define you by that, and don’t accommodate yourself to their expectations and preconceptions.

The meaning you assign to what happens to you and to the decisions you take is the most important thing, not those things by themselves.

John W. Gardner, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, said, “Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or a prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. [But], you are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.”

Starting new ideas as side-projects is good. The author claims most of the examples she studied started as side-projects with low investment and commitment in terms of time. Doing so allows people to invest in bold ideas without having to justify whether they are truly good or worth the investment (financial, time, emotional). Also, even things that grow over time to become big projects and ideas usually seen at the time they were created like small, simple, or even frivolous endeavors.

In 1997 Tom Peters wrote an article called The Brand Called You. He starts by reinforcing the importance of branding: a tiny shoe shop can build an incredible brand to the point of rivaling a big name like Nike for a specific niche; a person uses some sort of branding indicator (a mix of trust, quality semblance, values) to decide which sites to read or which email to answer; a worker creates a brand for himself in terms of his skills, role, and contributions in his workplace. In a world of so many possibilities and information (remember, it is 1997…) branding is the factor that dictates where people spend their attention and their money. He urges people to forget about their titles and ask themselves what is the unique value they create in their jobs, what makes one stand out? He then advocates way for one to promote their branding: start a side-project, either at work or outside it; do some freelancing work to extend your network; start teaching something at work or a local college; start writing to a local and small newspaper (1997..); show up in conferences and conventions and give a presentation. Invest in “word-of-mouth marketing” (1997’s organic growth). He then says that all of that provides a different and new type of power: influence power, as opposed to hierarchical conventional power. This power is based on influence, recognition, perceptions, and network, as opposed to credentials and titles. He talks about the “project world”: work started being organized around projects, as opposed to ongoing tasks and roles. Projects have deliverables and measurable impact. This presents a perfect opportunity to grow yourself and your “brand”. If you are not working on a project, organize your tasks in a way to create a project for yourself. He then talks about loyalty: loyalty to a company has been replaced by loyalty to colleagues, your team, your project, your customers, and yourself. The future, he says, is not vertical anymore. Instead of a ladder, there is a checkerboard.

Peter’s ideas and vision are valuable and they were ahead of his time. In a way he described what is nowadays called the “knowledge economy” or “ideas economy”. They make a lot of sense still today. The author, however, regrets his excessive focus on branding, marketing, and the corporate world. In fact, a critical person might say they even sound a bit shallow: a guide to corporate slavery success teaching you how to advance the corporate checkerboard now that the corporate ladders have been removed. That would be “conflating the wrapping with the gift”: learning how to gain credibility, build networks, and build a brand (which are all part of the packaging) without much care for the actual ideas and projects you are building (the gift). The author says that that’s not Peter’s key ideas. He provides a pathway and ideas to leverage yourself, and that can be used in a valuable way as opposed to creating branding for the sake of itself.

And it’s probably worth noticing that “onlyness,” the word, does not represent more of you; […] Instead, it is a word that braids together how people create value in this modern economy: First, you stand in that spot in the world that only you stand in, then you meaningfully connect with others so that you (and, more to the point, your ideas) finally have a new pathway in.

Community is central to onlyness, for it enables you to progress from being the “only one” to enlisting the strength and scale of a group. Research from sociology, psychology, and anthropology has consistently shown that when individuals are in the position of being the “only one” in a group with a different norm, they will be pressured to conform to it. Nonconformists are typically dismissed and made to feel “other.”* In those circumstances, “others” can be set up to compete with, to judge, or even to betray one another in order to win one of the limited number of seats at the table.* In many respects, conformity or competition is not a choice but simply a matter of survival. To crack the code of acceptance and belonging—the most fundamental of human psychological needs—you’ll naturally suppress the qualities that set you apart.

Chapter 2 also brings the story of Zach Wahls. He succeded in making the Boy Scouts of America to change their policies and stop discrimanating against gay members. Until then, they adopted a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. Zach managed to convince important donors to stop donating to the organization while they did not change their policy, gained widespread adoption through open letters and manifests signed by hundred of thousands of people, and his actions inspired more people to take similar actions and put pressure on the Scouts organization.

Without belonging, the odds are good that you will give up your own ideas. As a result, your fresh perspective and novel ideas are either deferred, in the best of cases, or extinguished, in the worst. That dynamic changes when you find people who share a common cause.

As mentioned previously, social media and the internet gave immense power to regular people. People now have an unprecedented ability to find others who share common interests and ideas. This has been described by Andrew Solomon as people’s “horizontal identity”, as opposed to their traditional “vertical identity” based on heritage/family/language/culture.

Book notes: A Promised Land by Barack Obama

2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Promised Land

Status: Read
Started: 2021-01-02
Finished: 2021-02-02
Duration: 34 hours

A Promised Land is Barack Obama’s autobiography. He tells his story starting from his youth and college days, following through his yearly political activities until the end of his first term as the president of The United States.

I enjoyed his candidness on many topics: he talks about his early problems with his wife, many of them caused by his political ambitions. He talks about his contradictions, like earning a Peace Nobel and authorizing an increase in military operations at the same time, or being elected while promising a new way of doing politics and having to resort to the old politically and legally accepted “quid pro quo” deals to pass his legislation.

I found it interesting when he explains the organizational values and culture that he promoted through his campaigns and his presidency. He explains that he adopted an approach of giving people lots of responsibility, trusting them to do their work, and making them accountable for the results. This was a new way of organizing a political campaign since usually the rank and file folks would follow strict protocols and take decisions based on hierarchy channels. In the White House, he would constantly go out of his way to ask input from advisors, including asking questions to the staff of his leaders (eg. cabinet secretaries). As he put it, those are the people who actually do the work. That’s a very interesting insight, and it aligns with recent trends in organizational cultures of high-growth companies: valuing the people who do the real work and possess technical knowledge, as opposed to valuing only leadership, and fostering an almost startup-like organizational culture of empowerment, trust, and making people accountable for their results.

Obama gives an introduction to the American bigotry and extreme polarization that has grown and festered in the United States since his election. Starting with the populism of Sarah Palin, who found a way to inflame the until-then apathetic republicans voters; and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party movement as a strong grassroots republican political movement. Republicans started to relentlessly boycott his agenda in Congress after finding out that doing so would inflame their newly enthusiastic voters. During his presidency saw the rise in the abuse of the filibuster mechanism, which allows any party to essentially block the Senate agenda unless a majority of 60/100 is achieved. Combined with a polarized and radicalized opposition, this made it very difficult to govern onde the Democrats lost their 60% majority.

At some point, a certain Donald Trump started gaining prominence in the political news after promoting birtherism conspiracies. Obama mentions a personal lack of awareness at some moments about some of Trump’s and Republican’s movements and the popular reaction to them due to the fact that he watched very little television, mostly basketball games, a clear contrast to his successor famous binge-watching of TV news coverage.

Famous Obama’s roast of Donal Trump in the 2011 correspondents’ dinner

There are also very interesting takes on external politics. He gives some insightful descriptions of world leaders: the affecting and emotional president of France Sarkozy; the no-nonsense and analytical Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel; the old and oblivious President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak, the even-then already famously corrupt Lula da Silva. When traveling abroad Obama famously hosted town hall meetings and invited students, youth leaders, minority representatives, and other local people to ask questions and tell their stories. He tells his experience dealing with international issues like the Arab spring and the European economical crisis in the aftermath of the American crisis of 2008. He tells about a very interesting episode: after a lot of tries, he manages to get together the leaders of Egypt (Mubarak), Israel (Netanyahu), Palestine (Abbas), and Jordan (Abdullah) for a visit to the White House. They all have a great time together, with lots of small talk and respectful conversations, and there are promises about actions to achieve a peace treaty. Obama soon realizes what is going on: each of them is playing a part. They have all been around the previous US presidents who decided they would bring peace to that cursed part of the world. They all knew what to do: play along, talk nice, make the US president happy and maybe win some concessions in terms of trade deals or economical aid. After the show was over, each of them would go back to their country and to their old lives. War was not only the status quo for them, but it was politically good for each of them. There is nothing better to manipulate a population and increase your political power than war and an enemy, so none of them had any real interest in achieving peace.

In the months to come, I’d think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn’t revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all.

After years of antagonizing the Muslim world, the United States’ position changed with the Obama administration. In his famous 2009 speech in Cairo, Obama signals a change in the US attitude and famously greeted the audience with the traditional Muslim greeting “Assalamu alaikum”.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. Obama is certainly a very inspirational leader. His values of hard-work, ambitiousness, and kindness are an inspiration to anyone. He has certainly tried to steers America’s direction back to their traditional values that have made them the greatest and most powerful country in the modern world and at some point the most admired nation in the world. As he says in the book’s preface

more than anyone, this book is for those young people — an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

Book notes: Learned Optimism

2020-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Learned Optimism

Status: reading
Started: 2020-12-10
Book notes

Book notes

This is my summary and notes for the book “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life” written by the American psychologist Martin Seligman.

By default, you can consider that the ideas under the section “Notes” are either the author’s own ideas or my interpretation of them. When writing my own thoughts and ideas, or when I am expanding on the author’s ideas, I enclose them in braces “{this is my own thought on the subject}”.

See goodreads reviews or buy the book.

Seligman is a Penn State Ph. D in Psychology. He is one of the main proponents of “positive psychology”, which is psychology studies focused on “positive” topics instead of “negative” ones (eg. research focused on quality of life instead of illness; or why people succeed instead of why people fail). It is psychology focused on researching how to promote positive outcomes instead of merely avoiding or reverting negative ones. It can be considered a reaction against psychology focused mainly on mental illness and deviant behavior. In fact, he has written the book “Character Strengths and Virtues” as a counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Learned Optimism covers the author’s ideas on the concepts of helplessness, pessimism and optimism, based on extensive scientific research made by him and other people.

Notes (Chapters 1 to 3)

Pessimism and optimism are two ways of looking at life. Pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and to be low achievers. The author sees pessimism and optimism as learnable skills or changeable habits as opposed to being inherent traits.

Helplessness is when our actions have no noticeable effects. A newborn can’t decide to do anything. At some point, he learns to cry, and that’s all he is able to do that has any impact on his life (eg. when he cries his parents might show up to check on him). In life, we go from being totally helpless as babies to having increasing control over our lives as we grow. As adults, we can take infinite decisions that all have some impact on our lives and our future. In our last years, the degree in which we control our lives starts to decrease, possibly climbing back to levels similar to when we were newborns as our physical and cognitive capabilities decline.

If someone went to you at work and suddenly accused you of stealing, how would you react? The natural reaction would be to deny, argue, and discuss, possibly furiously. If you were to be fired for stealing something when you did not do it, you would probably get mad at the injustice and possibly do what you can to repair the damage or undo it. You might even seek revenge. You can reach out to superior people, you can sue the company and the people who treated you badly. Instead, people who think themselves helpless and are overly pessimistic might watch things roll out passively, waiting for others to decide their fate. They might even accept it, remembering that times from their past when they cheated in an exam or did anything immoral, and see the present situation as just a delayed punishment for their past sins.

Psychology research used to be based on considering people as pure products of their environments. Little thought was given to how people’s own actions and thoughts could affect their minds and personal outcomes. Freud believed that everything was the fault of your mom and dad, and that you secretly want to fuck or/and kill each of them. Skinner and his behaviorism psychology believed that behavior was molded mainly by external reinforcement. Ethologists used genetic influences to explain behavior. Others viewed human actions as a pure product of biological drives and needs.

Theories in psychology started to change from focusing on the environmental effects on people’s lives to start focusing on the effects of individual actions (thoughts, behaviors, preferences, decisions). {This was part of a bigger change in society: changes in the labour market and the development of new technologies increased the amount of choices people could make, and the effects of their choices on their lives became apparent. Such societal change coincided with changes in the rate of depression. Several studies have demonstrated that people suffer from depression at alarmingly higher rates when compared to people from decades ago. The age of the self is the age of innovation, new technologies, control, personal freedom, but also the age of depression, suicide, the glorification of appearances, and the reward of confidence over real competence. For a majority of people nowadays appearing to be right is better and preferred than being right.}

{Society has changed in the past decades. Before people had god, community, homeland and patriotism, family; in other words, communal values. Society has shifted to value individualism over community. Our lives changed from communal activities to individual activities. Not all of that has completely gone away, but some of them will shortly and overall their importance has decreased greatly.}

Depression has traditionally been explained by two main theories: psychoanalytic and biomedical. The psychoanalytic view is based on Freud’s ideas and claims that depression is anger against ourselves and based on mistakes, blame, and guilt over our past actions. The biomedical model explains depression as a consequence of chemical imbalances in the brain. As such, it seeks to treat depression with medication or treatments such as shock therapy. Although there is enough evidence to suggest that medical imbalances can cause depression, and many medications have good effects on treating depression, it doesn’t explain the whole issue. There are different degrees of depression, and traditional treatments such as medication cannot treat cases of mild depression, even though their effects can be as devastating in the long-term as the severe cases of depression.

There is also a promotion in helplessness when people must rely on medication to have a “normal” life, and getting their hands on these medications can only be made legally through the goodwill of some people. The author argues that other than a minority of cases, depression is usually not caused by chemical imbalances that can only be reasonably treated through medication. It is actually some kind of “severe low mood” that arises from the way we view and explain things that happen in our lives and how we react to them. According to him, pessimist beliefs are one of the core root causes of depression.

Theory of personal control, or Learned helplessness theory

Learned helplessness is learning to develop a quitting response. This theory has been developed by the author and other researchers through many studies. The studies demonstrated that dogs can develop a sense of helplessness, in other words, they understood when their actions were futile. That sense of helplessness transferred to different contexts.

One of the studies separated dogs into two groups. Both of them were subjected to physical pain through electrical shocks. For one of them, the pain was random and there was no way for the dogs to make it stop. The other group was also subjected to physical pain, but there was a way to stop the shocks through a physical mechanism that the dogs were able to learn. After that, the two groups were put in another place and also given shocks there. This time, to stop the pain all they had to do was to jump a simple barrier and go to the place where the shocks were not applied. The dogs from the second group quickly learned how to jump the barrier and avoid the pain. The dogs from the first group did not even try to stop the pain, having learned in another context that their actions wouldn’t affect their outcome, even though that was not the case anymore.

“With regard to learned helplessness, Steve and I believed the dogs were just lying there because they had learned that nothing they did mattered—and they therefore expected that no actions of theirs would matter in the future. Once they formed this expectation, they would no longer engage in action.”

The experiment was repeated with some variations, and similar experiments were performed in humans as well, all pointing to the existence of “learned helplessness” in both animals and humans.

The results from the author’s research challenged the traditional ideas in psychology at the time that was controlled by the behaviorists. This new group that challenged the behaviorists are called cognitivists. It took time and many experiments to counter their objections and become an accepted idea. Behaviorists put up a fight and engaged in what is commonly known as “adding epicycles”. This phrase came from the act of astronomers who defended that the sun traveled around the Earth to “add epicycles”, or small circles within a greater circle, in order to explain and defend their idea against increasingly observations and facts pointing to the Earth traveling around the Sun.

“The phrase “adding epicycles” came to be applied to scientists in any field who, having trouble defending a tottering thesis, desperately postulate unlikely subtheses in hopes of buttressing it.”

{Helplessness is such a terrible feeling that the CIA developed their own “learned helplessness” program in which detainees were subjected to persistent torture to make detainees develop a sense of helplessness and start giving information.}

Explanatory style

Explanatory style is a way to assess how people explain to themselves and to the world why events happen. If you won the lottery, or if you are promoted, or if your crush rejects you, how do you tend to explain those events? Of course, each case is different and will have a different explanation, but there are some underlying patterns and motivations that can be detected and categorized. These explanatory styles can be used to assess how optimist or pessimist a person is, and also how likely she is to suffer from depression or helplessness.

There are three dimensions for a person’s explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. Each dimension has an optimistic and a pessimistic style.

Permanence

Permanence is about how people view the persistence of events. The words always and never are related to a permanent style, while words like sometimes and lately and other qualifiers are related to a temporary style. A person with a permanent style tends to view event consequences as long-lasting and permanent, and they explain them this way. For instance, saying “I missed this appointment because I was occupied doing something else” indicates a temporary explanation style, while saying “I missed this appointment because I am bad at remembering my schedule” indicates a permanent explanation style. Saying “I forgot to submit my homework last week because I was busy watching Netflix” indicates a temporary style while saying “I forgot to submit my homework last week because I am always busy watching Netflix” or “I always forget to submit my homework because I watch too much Netflix” indicates a permanent style.

Failure makes everyone at least momentarily helpless. It’s like a punch in the stomach. It hurts, but the hurt goes away—for some people almost instantly. … For others, the hurt lasts; it seethes, it roils, it congeals into a grudge. … They remain helpless for days or perhaps months, even after only small setbacks. After major defeats they may never come back.

The pessimist permanent style means that the person believes bad events have permanent causes (I was bad at X situation because I am always bad at Y), while the optimist permanent style means that the person believes that good events have permanent causes (I did well at X because I am good at Y). So, you can have a tendency to explain bad events in either permanent or temporary ways, and a separated tendency to explain good events in either permanent or temporary ways.

People who believe good events have permanent causes try even harder after they succeed. People who see temporary reasons for good events may give up even when they succeed, believing success was a fluke.

Explaining bad events using permanent style (pessimist signal)

“She never talks to me”
“I never set time to study”
“I never do things I plan to do”
“You always ignore me”

Explaining bad events using temporary style (optimist signal)

“She haven’t been talking to me lately”
“I haven’t set up time to study in the past month”
“Lately, I haven’t done things I have decided to do”
“You ignore me when you are not in a good mood”

Explaining good events using permanent style (optimist signal)

“I was luycky that day”
“I studied hard”
“The other teams played bad”

Explaining good events using temporary style (pessimist signal)

“I am lucky”
“I am intelligent”
“My rival is no good”

Pervasiveness: Specific vs. Universal

Permanence is about time. Pervasiveness is about space.

How does one event in your life affect other events? If something good happens in one area of your life, does it permeates to other areas? For instance, if you study hard and do incredibly well in an exam, does this give you confidence and energy to pursue other things, maybe asking someone special out or taking a new hobby? At the same time, how do bad events affect your overall life? If something bad happens in some area of your life, does it affect the others? If you are fired from your job and start feeling unaccomplished and incompetent, do you also start doubting whether you are a good parent to your child or a good lover to your partner, even though the setback at work did not affect and is not related to those other areas?

People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.

Explaining bad events using universal style (pessimist signal):

“All bosses are terrible”
“I am ugly”
“University is useless”

Explaining bad events using specific style (optimist signal):

“My current boss is terrible”
“This person thinks I am ugly”
“My University is useless”

Explaining good events using specific style (pessimist signal):

“I am good at math”
“I did a good work at this project”

Explaining good events using universal style (optimistic signal):

“I am good at things I do”
“The projects I work succeed”

Personalization: Internal vs. External

Do you blame things on yourself or on external factors? Do you blame bad things on external factors, and attribute good things to yourself? Or the other way around? When we blame ourselves we internalize them, when we blame external factors we externalize them.

People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who blame themselves do. Low self-esteem usually comes from an internal style for bad events.

Explaining bad events using internal style (low self-steem signal):

“I am dumb”
“I haven’t study hard”
“I am not talented at X”

Explaining bad events using external style (high self-steem signal):

“You are dumb”
“I did not receive educational opportunities”
“I am not lucky at X”

Explaining good events using internal style (high self-steem signal):

“I played well or I worked well”
“I studied and worked hard to achieve things”

Explaining good events using external style (low self-steem signal):

“The team played well or The team worked well”
“My parents provided me with good opportunities”

Hope

Hope has largely been the province of preachers, of politicians, and of hucksters. The concept of explanatory style brings hope into the laboratory, where scientists can dissect it in order to understand how it works.

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style: pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.

People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations.

{It seems this is the famous half full/half empty glass thinking.}

Explanatory style test

{It seems Seligman has developed many kinds of psychological tests and I couldn’t pinpoint exactly which one is part of the book.}

My results for this test are:

6/8 on “Permanent bad” score, indicating that I am “quite pessimistic” in the pessimistic permanence dimension
4/8 in “Permanent good” score, indicating that I am “average” in the optimistic permanence dimension
4/8 in “Pervasiveness bad” score, indicating that I am “average” in the pessimistic pervasiveness dimension
2/8 in “Pervasiveness good” score, indicating that I am “very pessimistic” in the optimistic pervasiveness dimension
7/8 in “Personalization bad” score, indicating that I have “very low self-esteem”
4/8 in “Personalization good” score, indicating that I am “average” in terms of optimistic personalization

These scores can be used to calculate aggregate scores:

9/16 in Hope, indicating that I am “moderately hopeless”
10/24 in Good score, indicating “great pessimism”
-6 when calculating (Good minus Bad score), indicating that I am “very pessimistic”

{We all have the tendency to rationalize and support whatever results come up from these types of tests. Who wants to waste 20 minutes of their lives doing some test like this and then say “what a stupid test, it got all wrong” when you can just formulate evidence and arguments to support whatever result comes up, as long as the result pleases you somehow? That considered, I found that this was an interesting result. I do have a tendency of isolating good events to their own areas, which is indicated by the “pervasiveness good” low score. I also have a high tendency to personalize bad events, indicated by the low “personalization bad” score.}

Some notes about explanatory styles

{This test indicates that certain behaviors are good in some situations and allegedly bad in other situations. According to the test, it is good to take responsibility for your own actions when good events happen, but the best thing to do when bad events happen would be to blame them on someone else. This is an interesting insight because it is not about what is moral or the correct thing to do, just what kind of explanatory style brings positive or negative individual psychological outcomes. The author touches on this point. For instance, he advocates for people to have an internal style for bad events because that’s the right thing to do and that’s more valuable in the long run, even at the potential cost of some higher psychological suffering or the need to compensate for it in other dimensions to not let this affect their whole lives.}

Chapter 4

There are three types of depression:

normal depression: mild depression, which is common in everyone’s lives.
unipolar depression: depression without manic episodes.
bipolar depression: clinical depression with mania.

Depression causes four types of negative changes:

thought: pessimism regarding the future, low self-esteem, hopelessness
mood: sadness, discouragement, despair, crying episodes, anxiety, irritability, numbness
behavior: passivity, indecisiveness, suicidal thoughts and actions. hard to start activities, and gives up on them easily
- suicide behavior can be separated into two main motives: 1) stop the pain 2) manipulate others (eg. seek revenge and inflict pain in others or seek to be loved/get attention)
physical responses: decreased appetite and libido; insomnia. morning insomnia is common, when the person wakes up way too early and can’t get back to sleep, making them start the day exhausted.

There has been research about the prevalence of depression in US population:

ECA (epidemiological catchment area) showed a large difference in the lifetime prevalence of depression (ie. percentage of people who have suffered from depression at least one in their life) among generations. It is expected that older people might display a higher prevalence, they just have more years in their life. However, newer generations present a much higher prevalence of depression
A followup study confirmed these findings. It also showed that women suffer from depression twice as much as man; and that the average age for the first episode of depression is much lower for younger generations.

{Not only older people should have a higher depression prevalence because they have more time to have suffered in life, but today’s living standards are much higher than the previous generations. TODO find newer statistics, maybe try to find or combine some data showing depression prevalence by generation up to the current year. What are some interesting trends on this? (eg. has gender difference changed over time? do people who migrate suffer more or less from depression? what about economical conditions? what about childhood predictability? are there differences between people with larger or smaller families? what about heavy users of social media? what countries suffer more or less from depression? are there professions with higher/lower depression prevalence?)}

The prevailing medical opinion is that both unipolar and bipolar depression are illness, while normal depression is just a case of bad mood. The author argues that bipolar depression is a illness and caused mainly by chemichal imbalances treated with lithium, but that there are not much difference between normal depression and unipolar depression, except for major cases of unipolar depression. Bipolar depression is inherited, but unipolar is hardly so.

There are no major biological changes that can explain the dramatic increase in depression occurrence for just single generations. The author experiments with rats, dogs, and people, has modeled depression using the helpless model. After demonstrating the effects of helplessness, he has proceeded to demonstrate that the subjects suffering from helplessness suffered from depression by checking their depression symptoms.

The nine symptoms of depression according to DSM-III-R:

Depressed mood
Loss of interest in usual activities
Loss of appetite
Insomnia
Psychomotor retardation (slow thought or movement)
Loss of energy
Feelings of worthlessness and guilt
Diminished ability to think and poor concentration
Suicidal thought or action

{The author has demonstrated that his helplessness experiments indeed serve as a good model for depression, but haven’t yet explained whether and why people would feel more helpless today when compared to 100 years ago. He is arguing that helplessness is a cause for depression and that helplessness has become more common recently, causing a surge in depression. Much like a new virus or a mass poisoning could cause a surge in a specific disease. If that’s the case, what is causing an increase in helplessness? Which specific cultural or economical changes might have been causing that? How does that compare across cultures and countries?}

Chapter 5

Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck developed the first forms of Cognitive behavioral therapy. Before their work, the accepted idea in the field was that depression was a very complex disease, either caused by chemical imbalances (Biomedical school) or by deep unresolved psychological problems associated with guilt and shame (Freud school).

Ellis’s first works were in the field of sexuality, where he promoted sexual liberation in the context of psychology. Later he started studying depression. Based on his clinical practice, he identified that a depressed person has a pattern of pessimism and low self-esteem. He questioned whether that negative thinking pattern was not a symptom of depression, but the disease itself. He even questioned whether the then accepted-wisdom of depression as a complex disease that can only be treated through complicated and extensive medical interventions and medical monitoring was causing people to essentially feel helpless regarding their own ability to deal with their problems and worsening their depression.

Another psychologist at the time, Joseph Wolpe, started challenging the accepted notions regarding phobias. The accepted theories regarding phobia were pretty much the same as the ones for depression, Wolpe challenged that notion and developed what eventually became the “graduated exposure therapy” treatment, or desensitization. Essentially, Wolpe argued that the irrational fear was the disease itself, and not a symptom of a larger and obscure disease called phobia. By using techniques learned from Ivan Pavlov’s work, Wolpe developed treatments first with animals and then with humans that cured phobias in a couple of months. Contrary to the then accepted beliefs, once the specific fear was cured, people hardly relapsed and did not develop another similar irrational fear due to untreated psychological or biological causes; indicating that the fear itself was the disease.

The book author, Martin Seligman, partnered with Beck at the end of the 60s to study depression together. Their work gave a start to the first techniques associated with cognitive therapy. The goal of cognitive therapy is to identify bad thinking patterns and convert them into good patterns, such as converting a pessimist explanatory style into an optimistic one.

We all experiment failures in life. Failure produces helplessness. After facing a similar failure, some people go through a brief period of feeling helpless, and others go through weeks or months feeling helpless. As demonstrated by studies, helplessness causes eight of the nine symptoms of depression. How long you feel helpless affects how long you feel depressed. Clinical depression requires five of those nine symptoms, and that they occur through at least two weeks. If you feel helpless for more than two weeks, you have clinical depression.

People who have a pessimistic explanatory style (personal, permanent, and pervasive explanations for bad events) feel helpless longer, causing depression.

This is the central prediction from my theory: People who have a pessimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will probably become depressed, whereas people who have an optimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will tend to resist depression. If this is so, then pessimism is a risk factor for depression in just the same sense as smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer or being a hostile, hard-driving man is a risk factor for heart attack.

That idea has been tested for many years, to test against reversed causality (depression causing pessimism) or correlation (since there is an intersection between pessimism ideas and the depression symptoms used for diagnosis, there could be just a correlation between pessimist people and depressed people). One study followed students from the start of classes until the end. After being asked what failure in class would look like to them and assessing their explanatory style. People who failed according to their own definition and had a pessimist explanatory style got depressed at a rate of 70%, as compared to around 30% of people who failed but did not have a pessimist explanatory style, and 30% of all pessimists no matter if they failed or not. The combination of failure (helpless) and pessimism produce much higher rates of depression. Another experiment was conducted in prison, demonstrating that the pessimist detainees suffered more from depression on leaving prison than those who were not pessimists. Another one followed 400 third-grader students through years that demonstrated the same pattern: the pessimist students were much likely to develop depression or to suffer from it for an extensive period of time than the non-pessimist students.

These and other experiments demonstrated that by assessing the explanatory style of a group of people, it was possible to predict those who would suffer from depression based on that. Still, they did not prove that pessimism caused depression. They indicated that the reversal causality didn’t hold, since these studies identified pessimist people before they suffered from depression. But pessimism could be just a signal: those people could have another characteristic (either psychological or biological) that caused them to react badly and become depressive upon failure, and after realizing that they became pessimists. In other words, there could be a correlation between the two, but not a causal relationship. This has been researched by experimenting with cognitive therapy to change depressed pessimists’ explanatory style. People who changed their explanatory style did not stay depressed and had few relapses. Meanwhile, people who received only medical treatment did not stay depressed as well, but they relapsed frequently once medication stopped. Those who did not receive medical treatment and did not undergo therapy to change their explanatory style stayed depressed. If there was no causal relationship between the explanatory style and depression, changing the explanatory style wouldn’t cause people to stop being depressed. There are other causes for depression as well, such as genetic influences, failures and bad events occurrence, hormones and other biological influences; but pessimism has been demonstrated to be one of the major causes.

If you walk around disposed to believe of any problem that “it’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I try,” you are set up for depression. But just because you may be disposed to think this way doesn’t necessarily mean you frequently utter such thoughts to yourself. Some people do, some don’t. People who mull over bad events are called ruminators.

There are optimist and pessimist ruminators, and there are optimist and pessimist people who do not ruminate. Non-ruminators are usually action-oriented: instead of think about how bad things are, they think about what they are going to do. Rumination creates a feedback-loop: once the person feels helpless upon facing some bad event, they explain the event in a pessimistic way (the explanation arrives at the conclusion that the cause is permanent, pervasive, and personal), and that makes the person consciously expect to stay helpless. Rumination reinforces this cycle.

Research showed that women have a depression rate twice as high as men. The author argues that rumination is the root of that situation. The three main theories explaining men vs women depression occurrence are:

sex and gender roles and expectations cause women to be more depressed since they are taught to value social relationships as opposed to achievements, causing them to have lower self-esteem. Also, women have to assume more roles (eg. be the main caretaker, organize the household, and also work), which makes them more susceptible to experience failures.
women experience more helplessness due to cultural differences in appreciation and recognition. boys receive more attention from parents on childhood, and as adults men are more valued and their contributions are more recognized than women.

These two theories are more or less debunked or have demonstrated to not impact enough to properly explain the 2-1 rate difference. The third theory is that rumination is the cause of the difference. The concept of rumination and its role in this gender difference was developed by psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.

women ruminate more than men, especially in face of failures. the author says that in face of failure, men tend to act (eg. if fired they either go get drunk to forget about it or they instantly start looking for a new job) while women tend to think (eg. if fired, they tend to take time to analyze and understand what happened before making decisions and acting). this behavior difference has been demonstrated by research. although men and women experiment the same rate of mild depression, those who ruminate tend to have their mil depression escalate into something bigger. {the author doesn’t argue that women think and act differently due to any natural biological differences, he only states that they act that way, without speculating about the causes. it is possible that on average women do act differently than men in terms of rumination, and that difference might be explained by sexism in education and culture. if that’s the case, should we expect this 2-1 rate to become closer as societies progress in terms of gender equality?} {this whole concept of rumination indicates that the best way to handle distress or failures is to not analyze or bury yourself into it, at least in the aftermath of the problem. that’s a good excuse to drink away the pain. what is the optimum amount of time after a failure that you can focus on the problem and analyze what went wrong without increasing your odds of getting depressed? how do you balance the need for self-reflection in face of problems and the need for distracting yourself to not wallow yourself in misery?}

Until recently, traits were used to explain human actions: people were lazy, mean, criminal, noble, generous, and that’s why they did what they did. Being personality traits, they were hardly changed. A bad person committed crimes because they were bad. A dumb person didn’t study or changed their career because they were dumb. These explanations for failure changed through time and started focusing on the environment: someone committed a crime because they were raised in poverty and unstable homes; someone was dumb because they didn’t have accessed to education or suffered from lead water poisoning. This change of interpretation is related to the development of Behaviorism, and it is also behind the recent new-age trend of self-help movements {did I hear quantum coaching?}. Despite the hijack by those self-help movements, the authors argue that they are correct, at least superficially:

A culture believing in self-improvement will support health clubs, Alcoholics Anonymous, and psychotherapy. A culture believing that bad action stems from bad character and is permanent won’t even try.

Cognitive therapy uses five tactics to treat depression:

Identify automatic thoughts that came up to your mind at bad times. A mother might frequently tell herself “I am a bad mother” each time she acts in a way that she doesn’t want to her child (eg. when she screams them), or a person might think “I am useless or I am weird” when they have an anxiety crisis. These automatic thoughts are a result of the person’s explanatory style.
Consciously argue against these automatic thoughts. After identifying them, find contrary evidence and remember about them in moments of crisis.
Through cognitive restructuring, aka reattribution, come up with different explanations that you can use instead of the automatic explanations you used to use. This alternative explanation should use a better explanatory style (eg. less pervasive, permanent, and personal). Instead of thinking “I am a terrible mother”, the mother might learn to explain her failures in terms of (“I good with the kids after their school, but I am not by best when dealing with the kids in the morning”)
Start distracting yourself from depressive thoughts and avoid rumination. You can adopt strategies like go watch a movie, play some game, or whatever it takes to cool down before your start analyzing the situation. Sometimes you don’t even need to analyze the situation. Something bad happens, all you can and should do is to accept it and move on.
Recognize values and assumptions that contribute to depression and change them. (eg. “I can’t live without love” to “Love is precious but rate”; “Things need to be perfect otherwise I have failed” to “The important thing is to do my best”)

Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Explanatory style and optimism at work

The author has conducted research on Metropolitan Life, then one of the largest insurance companies in the United States. Until then the company used an aptitude test called Career Profile to decide who to hire for life insurance salesman positions. The company suffered from high turnover, as it is common in the area. More than 50% of people quit before the first year, causing high loses in training and reduced expansion capacity tot he company due to the lack of people. The author’s interest relied on the opposite idea from his previous work: instead of focusing on identifying people who were more likely to suffer depression, he was looking to identify those who were most likely to succeed. Having an already stablished process through a standized test was great to provide control groups.

Being a salesperson is not an easy job. People must be able to handle constant rejection. Each 10 calls to prospects might achieve one followup. Some of these followups will end up buying the product. Suffering from constant setbacks and defeats, it was reasonable to suspect that optimist people would fare better than pessimist people, and the former would be less likely to abandon the job.

The author formulated a test called Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) to determine a person explanatory style. He then did several experiments. One of them assesed a group of high-productive sales agents and another group of low-productive sales agents. The agents of the most optimistic half of the spectrum sold 37% more than the industry aveerage, while the 10% more optimistic sold 88% more than the most 10% pessimistic. Future experiments indicated similar results. The final experiment consisted in having an alternative hiring process as opposed to using the traditional Career Profile questionaire. In this experiment, people who ranked high in the ASQ test but failed the Career Profile were hired. Collectively, this group of people who wouldn’t have been hired using the existing process due to their lower soce in the Career Profile end up having excellent productivity. The company has changed their hiring policy based on these experiments and started using the explanatory style questionnaire as part of their hiring process, allowing people who score higher in the ASQ to be hired even if they fail the Career Profile test.

Empirical versus theory-based tests

Empiral and theory-based tests are the two main types of tests used to predict potential for success.

Empirical tests use empirical evidence to predict future outcome: given a group of successful people, or a group of people who did not achieve success, come up with as many questions as possible, get their answers, and use the common answers as basis for predicting outcome for other people.

Theory-based tests like IQ tests or SAT are baed on a theory, and try to assess people according to that theory. For instance, the theory behind SAT is that academical success is heavily influenced by a certain types of skills, namely mathematical-analytic skills and verbal skills. The ASW questionaire created by the authors to assess job application suitability for a insurance sales position is also a theory-based test: it is based on the theory that optimistic people will have a higher degree of success at that position than pessimistic people, and that these traits or skills can be assesed through their explanatory styles.

Is there a role for pessimism in life?

Is there a role for pessimism in life? Is there a role for pessimism in the workplace? Did pessimism represent any advantage in any kind of situation?

The evidence exist to suggest that pessimism and depression lead people to see reality more accurately when compared to non-depressed and optimist people.

A experiment conducted by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson asked people to judge how much control they had over a light switch. A group interacted with a perfectly functioning light switch, while other interacted with a light switch that did not work and the light behavior was controlled by the researchers. When judging their control over the light switch and the light behavior depressed people were accurate: they correctly identified when the light switch worked and the light went on or off based on their actions, and they also identified when they had no control over the light because it went on or off no mater what they did. Nondepressed people, however, highly overestimated their degree of control in the helpless situation. The researchers did additional experiments adding monetary incentives, and again nondepressed people were unreliable: when the experiment was rigged so that they would lose money, they would say they had less control than they actually had, and when the experiment was rigged to benefit them, they would say they had more control than they actually had (eg. someone claiming credit and responsibility for the good things that happened to them while putting blame on others/bad luck when bad things happened).

Another experiment put people in a situation where they had to present something to other people. Once again, depressed people were more able to realibly assess how good they performed while nondepressed people overestimated how good they were.

One more experiment put people in a lab, making them take a test and ensuring that they would be correct and wrong a certain number of times. For instance, each participant in the test got 20 questions correct and 20 questions wrong, and they were told their results. Later, when asked to recall their results, depressed people correctly remembered how many questions they got wrong and right, while nondepressed people distorted the past and claimed they got more questions right than they actually did. THat goes against the traditional wisdom that depressive people distort the past and see it in dark shadow, suggesting that they merely see the past as it is while nondepressive people distort their past to focus on the good parts.

Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically. This means that, on average, optimistic people will distort reality and pessimists, as Ambrose Bierce defined them, will “see the world aright.” The pessimist seems to be at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indifferent universe.

This difference when assesing reality casts a light on the role of pessimism in modern society. The author claim that positions like CPAs, financial roles, safety-related positions, not only benefit but rely on the reality accuracy of pessimists so that their roles can be performed correctly. As such, mild pessimism are able to leverage their “pessimistic accuracy” while avoiding the constant heavy depression and sense of helplessness that heavily pessimist people suffer.

The downside of pessimism, as already discused, are:

it promotes depression
it produces lack of initiative and promotes inertia, specially when faced with challenges
bad mood (low self-steem, anxiety, sadness, worry)
high rate of desistance. they give up before they can achieve success, and as such teach themselves that success is unatainable
worst health condition
tendency to enter a loop: they expect bad things to happen and when they do they feel worse. setbacks become disasters, disasters become catastrophes

Human’s circadian cycle and basic rest–activity cycle ensures that eveyone experiments some degree of depression daily, and hormone cycles cause the same variation on a monthly basis for women. People tend to be mildly depressed at four in the morning and afternoon, and feel most energized in late morning and early evening. There is a cycle of optimism and pessimism that is common through the days, and both have a purpose. During highs, great plans are conceived, reality is distorted in order to make them seem achievable, new ideas florish. During lows, we are pulled back to reality, we have a better assessment of risks, we might distinguish shiny ideas from what really matters.

Depression and explanatory styles for kids

The CASQ is the attributional style questionnaire focused on children. The authors has conducted experiments to research the causes and effects of explanatory style in children. Some of the results from these experiments are:

up to puberty, girls are more optimistic than boys (as opposed to their twice higher depression rate later in life)
despite gender, children perform very high in terms of optimism until puberty
children have a lopsided explanatory style: bad events are temporary events with limited effects, they go away quickly and they are caused by someone else/bad luck/nature. Meanwhile, good event have lasting effects and duration, they help and contribute in all areas of their lives, and their cause is the child’s own actions, or at least that’s how they explain them to themselves.
there is high rate of depression among children, comparable to adults. but their depression don’t progress to hopeless and severe cases, and children suicide is rare {although children suicide has been rising it is still a very low anual rate}

The author argues that children have a natural immunity against hopelessness intended to make them more willing to survive until puberty, when they are then able to start doing their biological duty of growing their species. {has anything similar ever been researched in animals??}. This is similar to how prepubescent children tend to have good health conditions.

Where the explanatory style comes from for children?

There are three main theories regarding the origin of a child’s explanatory style:

Mother influence: the theory is that children absorb their main caretaker (usually the mother) explanatory style. This is done either thought direct explanations (the famous question children ask “why?”) or by observing their mother behavior either talking to them, when talking to herself, and when talking to other adults. Both son and daughthers have a similar explanatory style to their mother, and the father’s explanatory style have low influence on them. The lack of influence of the father’s style helps to rule out a strong genetic influence.
Adult criticism: adult figures that have influence and authority over children affect their explanatory style through criticism, such as teachers, parents, and caretakers. Children absorb the criticism received from these adults and use them to explain the world to themselves. The author says that due to behavior difference between boys and girls, boy tend to receive criticism in classroom based on temporary and specific causes. They fail a test because they were not paying attention or were scremming and running around. Meanwhile, girls tend to receive permanent and pervasive criticism: teachers say they are not good in the subject, or they are lazy. This has been demonstrated in experiments: when facing an unsolvable test in an experiment, boys use explanations like “I was not paying attention” or “I did not care about this test”, while girls use explanations like “I am not good at this type of test” or “I am not intelligent enough”.
Life crisis: Life crisis and their effects influence how children develop their explanatory style. Going through major crisis like economic crises and recovering from that contributes for an optimistic style. Meanwhile, people from families who went through these crisis and never recovered financially tend to have a pessimist style. Other examples of life crisis with similar effects include abuse and loses (death of a close one). People who has lost their mother early in life also present a higher rate of pessimist explanatory style.

CAVE: Content analysis of verbatim explanations

This is a technique developed to assess one’s explanatory style without using the “official” questionnaires. Instead, one’s public discourses or verbatim interviews can be assesed and rated as they were questionnaire answers. {TODO: what about training a machine learning model to assess that?}

Assesing depression in children

There is a test specilized for assesing depression in kids called “Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Child (CES-DC) test”. Depressed children has terrible performance in school. Research has showed that pessimism is a predictor for depression in young kinds. Also, depressed kids who were pessimist tended to stay depressed while depressed kids who were optimists tend to get better.

Divorce

Other than the explanatory style, bad life events are also predictors or causes for depression in children, including: someone close from the family dies, someone close goes away (eg. a brother leaving home to live in another place), a pet dies, the child moves to a new city/school, parents have constant fights, and parent’s divorce.

Divorce has profound implications on children: they are much more depressed even after a long time after the divorce, and on average they suffer from depression symptoms like sadness, bad mood, physical pain and health issues, lower self-esteem.

Weirdly enough, research has also demonstrated that somehow children of divorce suffers from more bad events in life. Some of them are understandable since they might be related to the cause of the divorce, or they might be consequences of divorce: parents are more likely to be hospitalized, the kid is more likely to fail school, disruptive changes like new strange people moving into the house, parents losing their jobs or having constant fights even after the divorce. Some other events were also more likely for divorce kids although there is no clear explanation as to why:

we were astonished by the last category of bad events that children of divorce suffer more of. We still don’t know what to make of these remarkable facts, but we think you should know about them:

The children of divorce see a sibling hospitalized three and a half times more often than children of intact families do.

The child’s own chance of being hospitalized is three and a half times greater.

The chance that a friend of the child will die is twice as great.

The chance that a grandparent will die is also twice as great. Some of these events may be causes or consequences of divorce. But, in addition, families that divorce seem to be cursed by more kinds of misfortune that seem to have nothing to do with the divorce itself, either as cause or as consequence. We cannot imagine how the death of a good friend of the child’s or a grandparent dying could be a consequence of divorce or how it could be a contributing cause. Yet the statistics are there.

{What other weird and seemingly unrelated statistics exist? In a way this made me remember about this website Spurious correlations which presents ridiculous correlations like how suicides by hanging correlates linearly with US spending on science, or things like that. In this case, however, it is not two unrelated variables that happen to share a similar function representation in a graph, but an actual statistics demonstrating that group A (divorce kids) are more likely to X,Y,Z then group B (non-divorce kids), and although this can still be only a correlation, it is a very peculiar one. The author even hints, partly joking partly serious, that these families might just be cursed, so the reason they were more likely to have a friend dying is not caused by their parents having divorced, but the fact they were cursed somehow is what caused both their parent divorce and their friends death. Can this data be taken seriously? Has this been replicated in other independent studies?

Can the increase in depression rate be explained at least partly by the increase in divorce rates? TODO: plot divorce rates and depression ratesm maybe by country/age/religion/socioeconomic status}

Parents fighting is nearly as bad as divorce for children outcomes. The author talks about the importance of avoiding fights for the wellbeing of children. He also talks about having productive fights: it is important to be polite and refrain from violence, and having clear resolutions. Research has demonstrated that children are less disturbed by fights when they have a clear resolution.

Girls and boys depression rates

Although adult women suffer twice more depression than man, young boys have higher depression rate and pessimism explanatory style than women. Their difference are in two symptoms: boys are more likely to display behavioral disturbance and anhedonia (defcit in motivation, anticipatory pleasure, consummatory pleasury, and reinforcement learning). This difference remains until puberty.

{TODO: How depression rate in children compare across variables (culture, socioeconomic status) and how it compares to adult rates?}

Abort Git Commit from Vim

2017-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

To abort a git commit from Vim or other terminal-based editor just make the editor exit with an error code.

Exit vim with error code:

:cq

Configure Airbnb Style Guide and Eslint

2017-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Airbnb Javascript Style Guide is the style guide for Javascript and NodeJS used by Airbnb and many other projects.

Configuration

Install the dependencies and add them to package.json as development dependency:

$ npm install -D eslint
$ npm install -D eslint-config-airbnb-base
$ npm install -D eslint-plugin-import

Add the npm lint script to package.json:

"scripts": {
    "lint": "eslint ."
  }

Create a .eslintrc file in the root of the project:

{
  "extends": "airbnb-base",
  "env": {
    "node": true
  }
}

The config file above extends from the airbnb-base base configuration file. Rules customizations can be added to this file.
Instead of creating the .eslintrc file, these configurations can also be added to the file package.json inside the property eslintConfig.

Create a .eslintignore file in the root of the project:

node_modules/**
.git/**

It is also a good idea to include the path for front-end libraries and vendors in the .eslintignore file.

Finally, run the lint:

$ npm run lint

Delete Local and Remote Git Branch

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These commands can be used to remote a branch both from the local repository and from the remote repository.

$ git push origin --delete <branch_name>
$ git branch -d <branch_name>

The flag -d will probably have to be replaced by -D if the branch has not been merged.

Find and Kill Process by Port

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It is possible to find the process running on some port and then kill it:

sudo netstat -lpn |grep :'3000'
kill -9 <process-number>

Hacking Existing Atom Package

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$ apm develop <package-name>
$ atom -d

apm develop will clone the repository on ~/github/<package_name> or in the directory defined by the variable $ATOM_REPOS_HOME. It will also install dependencies and create a link from ~/.atom/dev/packages/<package_name> to the repository directory.

atom -d opens atom in development mode with the cloned package installed. Since $ apm develop creates a link to the cloned repository opening Atom in development mode will automatically load the package. Note that the cloned package won’t be loaded outside development mode.

If working on a PR go to the repository directory and update origin to point to your fork:

git remote set-url origin <https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git>
git remote add upstream <original-repo.git>
git fetch upstream

How NPM Manages Dependencies

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NPM installs package-specific modules inside the directory ./node_modules. Global packages installed using the -g flag are installed available inside the node directory (usually inside /usr/local).

Each project has its own version of each dependency. So, if you have ten projects using the same version of Express each of them will keep its own copy of Express (and all its dependencies). This is the best way to ensure a sane dependency management and allow freedom to make upgrades/downgrades of versions.

Comparing to the Python environment, the way NPM deals with packages is similar as using pip and virtualenv together.

Install .deb Package File

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To install a .deb file use: $ dpkg -i <.deb-file>

It may be a good idea to use $ apt-get install -f after installing a file using this method, since this method may not install the dependencies that the package needs. This option will look for packages with broken dependencies and fix them.

Documenting My Brain

Book Notes: The Power of Onlyness

The Power of Onlyness

Chapters 1 & 2

Book notes: A Promised Land by Barack Obama

A Promised Land

Book notes: Learned Optimism

Learned Optimism

Book notes

Notes (Chapters 1 to 3)

Theory of personal control, or Learned helplessness theory

Explanatory style

Permanence

Pervasiveness: Specific vs. Universal

Personalization: Internal vs. External

Hope

Explanatory style test

Some notes about explanatory styles

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapters 6, 7 & 8

Explanatory style and optimism at work

Empirical versus theory-based tests

Is there a role for pessimism in life?

Depression and explanatory styles for kids

Where the explanatory style comes from for children?

CAVE: Content analysis of verbatim explanations

Assesing depression in children

Divorce

Girls and boys depression rates

Related Wikipedia Links

Abort Git Commit from Vim

Configure Airbnb Style Guide and Eslint

Configuration

Delete Local and Remote Git Branch

Find and Kill Process by Port

Hacking Existing Atom Package

How NPM Manages Dependencies

Install .deb Package File