Dunning you, Kruger me.

One of my favorite articles on the ‘net is Daniel Stenbergs “I could rewrite CURL”. In that article he shares a series of snippets of people stating that they could, if they really wanted to, rewrite one of the most used pieces of software in the entire developer sphere, with 28 years of legacy, in N-days. Easily.

It humerously points at a very human tendency of overestimating ones understanding of a problem solely because one has tangential experience that feels transferrable, despite having little to no direct insight into the problem one is proclaiming to be the solution of. At the risk of Cunninghamming myself, this is my understanding of Dunning-Kruger (in part).

I suspect one cause of this naive confidence to be insufficient empathy; it’s easier to assume a lack of competence in others than it is to try to imagine whatever absurd complexity that arises from diligently maintaining a project in the face of hundreds of thousands of users for what approximates three decades.

Here’s how I suspect reality works in the heads of people who make such confident claims out loud:

“That’s just thermodynamics”, they say after explaining that caloric balance is the solution to be obesity epidemic and that there’s no need for intervention. “The best thing is that it’s free!”

We’ve all heard these. Here’s some favorites:

• Have you tried stopping after your second drink?
• Why don't you just not think about it?
• Just smile more and it'll feel better!

In reality, the root cause of the opioid epidemic is perhaps slightly more complex than “don’t they understand that it’s bad for them”.

Part I

Not believing in the
struggle of others

For anyone suffering a mental disorder, this one hits home.

There’s a subset of people who are very confident that the magnitude of struggle other people face are but a figment of their imagination. There’s probably no category where this occurs more often than that of mental disorders. Because a lot of us have experienced periods of downregulated [good brain], it’s easy to make the assumption that people who fail to come out of their own pits of despair fail precisely because they simply aren’t trying hard enough.

Meanwhile, the few that come out sober on the other side of AA do not do so solely by their own doing. They often have had the support of mentors and friends actively helping them for years, if not decades. When you talk to a recovered alcoholic you sometimes hear the sentiment that they are still fighting the impulse to start drinking again, despite having been sober for years. This, whilst knowing that if they were to start drinking again, the risk of them loosing everything they’ve fought for is high. Relapses still happen.

Categorizing alcoholism as a disease or disorder because those who suffer from it cannot help themselves is just as logical as making the same type of distinction for other types of illnesses. For some reason this makes some people very angry.

“Have you tried telling your pancreas to produce som insulin?" is a ridiculous statement.

“Have you tried not suffering from clinical depression?" is perhaps equally ridiculous.

Part II

Still not believing

One tab that is always open in my browser is that of the Orange Site. I love it. There’s always good articles, discussions and arguments from which a lot can be picked up. There’s also a number of people who frequent the site who exhibit this type of assumptive, quasi-confrontational approach to discussion.

In Swedish, there’s a relatively new word called “snälltolka”. There’s no equivalent English word, but it roughly means to interpret a statement as genuine and not assume bad intentions just because it didn’t land good on your ears. On the Orange site, this can often be an uphill battle.

- I eat 4 oranges everyday, I love them.
- I highly doubt that you've had exactly 4 oranges for every day of your entire
  life, and it's quite strange that you would ascribe romantic feelings to a fruit.

As the saying goes, [subject] must be great at parties.

Without empathy, or just the proclivity to cut others half a finger nails worth of slack, all statements perceived to be antithetical to ones own opinion become a breeding ground for life-and-death battles. I’ve learned not to post a lot on the internet in general because the cost is often higher than the reward. It’s in part why the last time I wrote a post on this page was three years ago.

Instinctively it’s tempting to respond to comments whose nature is that of almost deliberately misunderstanding your position in order to justify battle, but the best option is often to save your responses to those who don’t come running with swords in their hands.

Luckily, these comments are often few and far between. Often critique is justified, and sometimes the person commenting is abrasive because they genuinely misunderstood what you wrote.

If you do decide to respond, try to empathize with their position and steelman them; don’t return fire with fire. If the comment is downright rude, it’s (often) best to just ignore it completely.

Part III

"Everyone just wants quck fixes"

Amphetamines, gastric bypasses, steroids, plastic surgery, people are just undisciplined!

People with ADHD just need to organize better. People with obesity just need to have a healthy relationship with food for the next 40 or so years.

Lance Armstrong didn’t win all those races because he was on drugs, he won those races because he trained at volumes that makes other professional athletes die of rhabdo. This includes other bikers who consumed as much if not more drugs than he did. Heck, it’s not like sustained drug abuse isn’t one of the cornerstones of most professional athletes in nearly every sport. Steroids increase your ability to recover from stress, which means that it’s now on you to up the level of stress even more to gain benefit. Most of us don’t have the mental fortitude to sustain hours upon hours worth of training sessions a day, every day, for years on end.

People with that kind of work ethic and pain tolerance didn’t get it solely from reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations that one time. Likewise, people who stay in bed for months with crippling depression aren’t doing so because they’re insufficiently stoic, no matter how many Ryan Holiday books they read[0].

Sometimes you need a kick in the behind to get going. Sometimes you need to experience negative outcomes to sufficiently motivate you to action. Sometimes you need external help in a form that other people scoff at. In the end, if the net outcome is a positive one, who cares? Worse is Better is better as Better™ means nothing if it never comes to fruition.

Part IV

This applies to all of us

Why aren’t we all in great shape, constantly surrounded by awesome people, perfect families, living in the best of places, loads of cash, have great careers and have released at least four books?

No one has infinite energy, agency, finances, time, what have you, to pursue all the things they want. Sometimes you have to choose to focus on one thing at the expense of many other things. Perhaps the goal you set for yourself is so high that it has to come at the expense of a shortened lifespan, less friends, no time to raise a family etc. We don’t know. Perhaps you don’t know either. Should we reach out and ask if we’re worried? Absolutely. Should we judge you and tell you what to do despite not knowing why you’re doing it? Maybe? Probably not?

Some of us have turned our lives around precisely because someone in our vincinity grabbed us by our ear and told us to get our shit together. Some of us did read a quote once and turned life around right then and there. These things happen, but I doubt their reliability compared to being surrounded by empathetic people recognizing you and your problems, with no pretentions that they know better and must immediately let you know about it, yet would still offer a helping hand if asked for one.

Part V

What should we do?

If there’s a point I’ve been trying to make, it’s that everyone is different. Our problems are different, and the solutions to those problems are different. Even if the problem we share seem quite similar.

There is never a quick easy fix for anything worth complaining over. Rewriting it in Rust won’t save us when the problem is rent seeking behaviour from external forces that prevent good engineering from occurring in the first place. Yes we could have prevented this incident by writing more tests, but we didn’t because we couldn’t. Perhaps we need do to rewrite it in Rust. I don’t know.

But if there was something that we could do regardless of problem, it’d probably be to snälltolka first, and scrutinize after. Your acerbic, paragrafryttande[1] coworker might be crumbling on the inside and taking it out on people in his vincinity. Or, he lives only to torment you specifically. If we begin by assuming the latter, then everyone we meet is a bullshit artist that screws others to compensate for their own insufficiencies. If everyone you meet is like that, perhaps it’s not them, but your insecurities projected onto others.

Be nice. We don’t know what others are going through. Golden rule and all.

Fredrik Holmqvist