Explaining something you know well feels easy. You say what the thing is, mention the two details that matter, and the other person nods. Later it turns out they understood almost nothing, and the part that lost them was the step you did not consider worth mentioning.
The name for this comes from economics rather than teaching. In 1989, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber ran experiments in which better-informed participants had to reproduce the judgments of people who knew less than they did. Standard economic models assume this is straightforward: if you know more, you can always imagine knowing less. The participants could not do it, and they lost money by failing. Market competition cut the effect roughly in half, but never removed it.
> "Better-informed agents are unable to ignore private information even when it is in their interest to do so; more information is not always better."
They called it **the curse of knowledge**, and the crucial word is *unable*. This is not arrogance or impatience. Knowledge is not something we can put down for a moment in order to see the problem as a beginner sees it.
A doctoral study by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford in 1990 shows the mechanism almost too neatly. Participants tapped the rhythm of a well-known song on a table while someone listened and tried to name it. The tappers expected about half of the listeners to succeed. In reality, roughly one tune in forty was identified, a rate below even the most pessimistic prediction any tapper made.
The reason is that the tapper does not hear tapping. They hear the whole song: the melody, the words, the arrangement. The listener hears knocking on wood. The tapper cannot subtract the music from their own head, so the listener's failure looks like inattention rather than a completely different experience.
This explains a lot of ordinary frustration. The senior engineer whose documentation assumes the reader already knows why the service exists. The doctor who explains a diagnosis in language that has no meaning outside the profession. The manager who briefs a task by describing the last third of it. In each case the explanation genuinely felt complete to the person giving it, because it was complete against everything they already knew.
The most treacherous part is that the feeling of clarity is produced by our own knowledge, so it cannot tell us whether the explanation works. Which means asking "is that clear?" is close to useless: it tests politeness, not understanding.
What helps is external evidence. Give the instruction to someone unfamiliar and watch where they stop, instead of asking whether they followed it. Say the obvious step out loud, especially the one that feels insulting to mention. Keep notes of what confused you when you were learning, because that record is the only honest access you will ever have to your own earlier ignorance. Lead with a concrete example and let the general rule come second.
Expertise does not automatically make you a better explainer. It quietly removes your ability to tell whether you are one.


[Source: Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber, *The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings*, Journal of Political Economy (1989)](https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/CurseknowledgeEconSet.pdf)  [Elizabeth Newton, *The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions* (1990)](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/illusion-of-depth/1990-newton.pdf)
- C. Camerer, G. Loewenstein, M. Weber

Experts forget what ignorance feels like

&nbsp;

We like the idea that a finished self is waiting somewhere inside us. A talent to be discovered, a calling to be found, a real personality that circumstances have been hiding. Under that assumption, life becomes a search: if we look carefully enough, we will finally learn who we are.

Jean-Paul Sartre argued the opposite. A paper knife exists because someone first had the concept of a paper knife and then produced it. Its purpose came before its existence. For a human being there is no such prior blueprint, so **existence precedes essence**. We exist first, and only afterwards, through what we do, does anything like a self appear.

That reverses the usual order of explanation. I am not generous and therefore help people; I become generous by helping people. There is no hidden essence quietly guaranteeing that I am brave, honest or serious. There is only a record of decisions.

> "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."

This is why Sartre called freedom a burden rather than a gift. If nothing was written in advance, nothing can be blamed in advance either. We are, in his phrase, condemned to be free: forced to choose, without any authority to sign off on the choice. Even refusing to decide is a decision, and it produces the same kind of person that any other decision would.

He gave the strategies we use to escape this a name: bad faith. It is the move of treating ourselves as objects with fixed properties. I am simply not that sort of person. I had no choice. That is just how I am. Each of these sentences quietly converts a decision into a fact of nature, which is exactly what makes it comfortable.

None of this means circumstances are irrelevant. We do not choose our bodies, families, class, historical moment or the consequences that follow from them. Sartre's point is narrower and harder to dismiss: within a situation we did not select, our response is still ours, and that response is the only material we have to work with.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. If there is no essence to discover, self-knowledge stops being an act of introspection and becomes an act of observation. Not what do I feel I am, but what have I actually been doing. Ambitions we never act on describe nothing. Values we abandon whenever they cost something describe nothing either.

It also means the question is never settled. A record of choices can be continued in a different direction tomorrow, which is the optimistic half of the argument and the reason Sartre insisted his philosophy was not a doctrine of despair.

There is no true self hiding behind the choices. The choices are the self, and they are still being made.

**Sources:**

- [Jean-Paul Sartre — *Existentialism Is a Humanism* (lecture delivered in 1945, published in 1946)](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm)
- [Jean-Paul Sartre — *Existentialism and Humanism*, translated by Philip Mairet (PDF)](https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/ExistentialismAndHumanismBySartre1948EngTranslationPhilipMairet/Existentialism%20and%20Humanism%20by%20%20Sartre%201948%20Eng%20Translation%20-%20Philip%20Mairet.pdf)

## Sources

- [Jean-Paul Sartre — *Existentialism Is a Humanism* (complete English text)](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm)
- [Jean-Paul Sartre — *Existentialism and Humanism*, translated by Philip Mairet (PDF)](https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/ExistentialismAndHumanismBySartre1948EngTranslationPhilipMairet/Existentialism%20and%20Humanism%20by%20%20Sartre%201948%20Eng%20Translation%20-%20Philip%20Mairet.pdf)
- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Jean-Paul Sartre](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/)
- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Existentialism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/)
- [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism](https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/)

— Jean-Paul Sartre

You create yourself through your choices

&nbsp;

Most of us treat memory as storage. Something happened, it was recorded, and remembering means retrieving the recording. On that model a vivid, detailed memory is simply a good file, and a person who remembers confidently is a person who was paying attention.

Elizabeth Loftus has spent decades showing that this is not how it works.

> "Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people."

Her classic experiment with John Palmer in 1974 was almost absurdly simple. Participants watched a filmed car accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going. For some, the question used the word *hit*; for others, *smashed*. The single word changed the reported speed. A week later, the participants who had been asked about the cars smashing were more likely to remember broken glass at the scene. There had been no broken glass in the film.

The mechanism is now known as the **misinformation effect**. Details introduced after an event, by a question, a conversation, a news report or a suggestion, can be absorbed into the memory of that event and later recalled as part of the original experience. The person is not lying and cannot feel the seam.

Later work went further. In studies on suggested memories, a share of participants came to remember childhood episodes that their own families confirmed had never taken place, and they supplied details, emotions and context of their own. Suggestion did not merely edit a memory; it produced one.

The uncomfortable finding is not that memory is unreliable, but that we have no internal signal warning us which memories to distrust. Vividness, detail, emotional weight and confidence all feel like evidence of accuracy, and none of them are. This is why Loftus's research reshaped how courts think about eyewitness testimony: a witness can be entirely sincere, thoroughly convinced, and wrong.

It would be a misreading to conclude that memory is worthless. It is good enough for almost everything we ask of it, and reconstruction is part of what makes it useful, since we store meaning rather than raw footage. The problem appears only where precision matters and where the cost of an error is high.

That suggests a few habits. Write things down close to the event, before conversation has had time to reshape them. When something matters, look for independent corroboration rather than a stronger feeling of certainty. Be careful how questions are asked, because a question can plant what it appears to be asking about. And treat your own most rehearsed stories with mild suspicion, since each retelling is another chance to revise the source.

We do not remember events. We remember our last reconstruction of them, and then we build on that.

**Source:**
  
- [Elizabeth Loftus — “How reliable is your memory?”, TEDGlobal (2013)](https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory)
- [Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer — “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory” (1974)](https://labs.la.utexas.edu/gilden/files/2016/04/Loftus_Palmer.pdf)
- [Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell — “The Formation of False Memories” (1995)](https://img3.reoveme.com/m/21e4113311781789.pdf)

— Elizabeth Loftus

Your memory changes every time you use it

A number that describes something well is tempting to manage. If satisfied customers write more reviews, raise the number of reviews. If good developers close more tickets, count closed tickets. The reasoning feels sound, and it fails in a specific, repeatable way.

Charles Goodhart made the observation in 1975, as an aside in a paper about British monetary policy. The relationship between money supply and the wider economy had been stable enough to look like a control lever, and his warning was that using it as a lever would destroy the stability that made it attractive.

> "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

The version most people know today came from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, writing in 1997 about audit culture in British universities: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Donald Campbell had described the same dynamic in education even earlier, noting that achievement tests are informative indicators of school performance right up to the moment they become the goal of teaching.

The reason is that we almost never measure what we care about. We measure a **proxy**. Nobody can measure understanding, so we measure test scores. Nobody can measure engineering value, so we count merged pull requests. The proxy correlates with the goal as long as people are pursuing the goal. Point an incentive at the proxy and you have asked for the correlation to be broken, because the cheapest way to move a proxy is rarely to improve the thing it stood for.

The result is not usually fraud. It is a quiet redistribution of effort. Tickets get split so more of them can be closed. Difficult cases get avoided because they damage a success rate. Response time improves because replies are fast and empty. Everyone is doing what they were asked to do, and the metric is the only part of the system that still looks healthy.

Which does not mean measurement should be abandoned. Working without numbers means trusting impressions, seniority and volume of voice, which is worse. It does mean treating metrics with more suspicion than we usually do.

A few things help. Keep some measures purely for observation and never attach consequences to them, so at least part of your instrumentation stays honest. Pair any quantity measure with a quality or cost measure that moves in the opposite direction when the first one is gamed. Ask, before publishing a target, what the cheapest way to hit it would be, and assume someone will find it. And when a number improves sharply while nothing around it feels different, treat that as a finding rather than a success.

A measure is a description of reality. A target is an instruction. The moment we confuse the two, the number keeps rising and stops telling us anything.

- [Charles Goodhart — “Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience”](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-17295-5_4)
- [Marilyn Strathern — “‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University System”](https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1997-strathern.pdf)
- [Jeffery Rodamar — “There Ought to Be a Law! Campbell versus Goodhart”, *Significance* (2018)](https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01205.x)
- [Jerry Z. Muller — *The Tyranny of Metrics* (2018)](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174952/the-tyranny-of-metrics)

— Charles Goodhart

When a measure becomes a target, it stops being useful

&nbsp;

Confidence is visible. Competence often is not.

A confident person speaks without hesitation, maintains eye contact and gives clear answers. None of these behaviours proves that the answer is correct. Yet our minds easily treat a smooth, coherent performance as evidence of knowledge.

Daniel Kahneman experienced this while working as a psychologist for the Israeli army. His team observed soldiers completing a leadership exercise and confidently predicted which of them would become successful officers. Later, they discovered that their predictions had little value. The surprising part was not simply that they had been wrong. Even after learning this, their confidence in subsequent predictions remained almost unchanged. Kahneman called this **the illusion of validity**.

> “…a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.”

Confidence is usually produced by the coherence of the story in our minds, not by an objective measurement of the evidence. When the available facts fit together neatly, the conclusion feels true—even when the information is incomplete.

Research associated with the [Dunning–Kruger effect](https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sasi/wp-content/uploads/sites/275/2015/11/krugerdunning99.pdf) suggests an additional problem: some of the knowledge needed to perform a task well is also needed to recognise poor performance. A person may therefore make a mistake without possessing the skills required to see it.

Experts can sound less certain because they notice exceptions, missing information and alternative explanations. Their hesitation may reflect deeper understanding rather than weakness.

Confidence still has value. It helps people act, persuade and lead. But it should never be treated as proof of competence. When accuracy matters, look for reasoning, evidence and results. A confident voice is not data.

[Source: Daniel Kahneman, *Thinking, Fast and Slow*](https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/DanielKahnemanThinkingFastAndSlow/Daniel%20Kahneman-Thinking%2C%20Fast%20and%20Slow%20%20.pdf)

— Daniel Kahneman

Why we keep mistaking confidence for competence

&nbsp;

Being reachable looks like cooperation. Someone writes, you answer. A question appears, you solve it. Each response may take only a minute, so the cost seems insignificant.

But the real cost is not the minute spent replying. It is what happens to your attention afterwards.

Researcher Sophie Leroy calls this **attention residue**. When we leave one task and move to another, part of our attention often remains attached to the unfinished work. We may already be looking at a document or writing code, while mentally continuing the previous conversation. Her experiments found that this residue can reduce performance on the next task.

A message does not even have to receive an immediate reply to produce this effect. It can create a question, obligation or decision that remains active in the background. Being permanently reachable therefore changes not only how often we work, but also the quality of the attention we bring to that work.

Cal Newport questions the assumption that easier communication must always be beneficial:

> “When it comes to the world of work, more connectivity and more communication is not necessarily better. In fact, it often makes things worse.”
>

Constant availability also changes how work is perceived. Responding is visible. Concentration is not. Someone answering messages throughout the day appears active and cooperative, while a person thinking quietly may appear absent—even when that uninterrupted thinking produces the most valuable result.

Research into workplace interruptions found something equally surprising: interrupted participants sometimes completed tasks faster, but they compensated by working under greater stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. We can become quicker without becoming better.

The solution is not to eliminate communication. It is to stop treating every communication channel as an emergency channel. Define what is genuinely urgent, establish expected response times and allow periods during which people are deliberately unavailable.

Being reachable helps others access your time. It does not guarantee that enough of your attention will remain to use that time well.

[Sources: Cal Newport on connectivity and communication](https://calnewport.com/the-obvious-value-of-communication-is-perhaps-not-so-obvious/) · [Sophie Leroy on attention residue](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002) · [Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke on interrupted work](https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072)

— Cal Newport

The quiet cost of always being reachable

&nbsp;

Evolution did not promise to make us happy, healthy or capable of understanding reality correctly. It did not promise anything at all.

Natural selection has no plan and no final destination. It preserves traits that helped organisms survive and reproduce in particular environments. A trait does not have to produce happiness or long-term health. It only has to provide an advantage large enough to be passed on.

Richard Dawkins emphasises that evolution is not simply a process of pure chance:

> “Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”
>

Mutations do not appear because an organism needs them. But once differences exist, environmental pressures make some variants more likely to survive and reproduce than others. The result may look designed, although no one planned it.

The unsettling consequence is that something can be natural without being good for us.

Our attraction to sugar and fat developed in environments where calories were difficult to obtain. Anxiety protected ancestors who reacted quickly to uncertain dangers, even if many of those dangers turned out not to be real. Sensitivity to rejection was useful when exclusion from a small group could threaten survival.

These mechanisms did not disappear when our environment changed. Supermarkets now offer unlimited calories to bodies shaped by scarcity. Social media exposes brains adapted to small communities to a continuous stream of comparison, approval and rejection. Stress systems built to respond to temporary physical threats can remain active because of deadlines, bills and notifications.

This conflict is known as **evolutionary mismatch**: a trait that was useful in an earlier environment may become ineffective or harmful in a radically different one.

Evolution can explain why we experience particular desires, fears and biases. It cannot tell us that we should obey them. “Natural” does not mean healthy, moral or desirable.

Nature gave us adaptations—not instructions for a good life.

[Source: Richard Dawkins — *The Blind Watchmaker*](https://www.spaceandmotion.com/evolutionist-richard-dawkins.htm)

— Richard Dawkins

What evolution never promised us

&nbsp;

A belief does not have to be true to make us feel better. It only has to remove uncertainty.

An unsupported explanation can turn frightening randomness into a story, promise justice where none is visible and make suffering appear meaningful. It may also give us membership in a group whose members confirm the same ideas to one another. The comfort is real, even when the explanation producing it is not.

This creates a tempting reversal. Instead of asking whether the evidence supports a belief, we notice how the belief makes us feel and treat that feeling as evidence. An idea seems true because it is reassuring, familiar or shared by people we trust.

Christopher Hitchens expressed the principle in one sharp sentence:

> “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
>

This principle, now commonly called **Hitchens’s razor**, does not prove that every unsupported claim is false. It establishes who carries the burden of proof. If someone claims to know that an invisible power controls events, opponents are not required to disprove every imaginable version of that power. The person making the claim must first provide reasons for accepting it.

Four years before publishing *God Is Not Great*, Hitchens applied the same principle to the alleged miracles attributed to Mother Teresa:

> “Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
>

The uncomfortable part is that evidence does not promise emotional relief. Reality may be indifferent, an injustice may remain unresolved and an important question may have no available answer. “I don’t know” can therefore require more courage than a confident explanation.

Belief becomes dangerous when the comfort it provides protects it from examination. If doubt is treated as betrayal and contradictory evidence as an attack, the idea can no longer be corrected. What initially offered reassurance begins controlling what its believers are permitted to notice.

Comfort can explain why we want something to be true. It cannot tell us whether it is true.

**Sources:**

- [Christopher Hitchens — “Mommie Dearest”, *Slate* (2003)](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-fraudulent-mother-teresa.html)
- [Christopher Hitchens — *God Is Not Great*, Chapter 10: “The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell”](https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/christopher-hitchens-long-live-hitch)

— Christopher Hitchens

Belief without evidence, and why it feels good

&nbsp;

We like to believe that our decisions follow a simple order: first we consider the options, then we choose, and finally we explain why. Sometimes the explanation may be created only after the decision — and still feel like an accurate report of what happened.

A striking experiment demonstrated how easily this can occur. Participants looked at pairs of faces and selected the one they found more attractive. Using a card trick, the researchers occasionally handed them the photograph they had rejected. Many participants failed to notice the switch. More surprisingly, they confidently explained why they had supposedly chosen that person, referring to features such as the eyes, smile or expression.

The researchers called this phenomenon **choice blindness**. The participants were not necessarily lying. Their minds produced a plausible explanation for a choice they had never made.

Daniel Dennett’s account of the narrative self helps explain why this feels so natural. He argued that our sense of being one consistent person is partly constructed from the stories continually produced about who we are and why we act as we do:

> “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us.”
>
> *„Nasze opowieści są tworzone, ale przeważnie to nie my je tworzymy — to one tworzą nas.”*

Memory supplies selected details, present circumstances suggest an interpretation and the mind connects them into a coherent account. Once created, that account can become part of our identity: *I chose this career because… I ended that relationship because… I bought this because…*

The explanation may be correct. It may also be a reconstruction that protects our image of ourselves as rational and consistent people.

This does not mean that reflection is useless. It means that confidence in an explanation is not proof of access to the original cause. Sometimes the most honest answer to “Why did you choose that?” is not a polished story but: “I’m not completely sure.”

**Sources:**

- [Petter Johansson, Lars Hall and Sverker Sikström — “From Change Blindness to Choice Blindness” (full article, PDF)](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/psysoc/51/2/51_2_142/_pdf/-char/en)
- [Daniel C. Dennett — “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”](https://cogprints.org/266/1/selfctr.htm)
- Daniel C. Dennett — *Consciousness Explained*, Chapter 13, p. 418

— Daniel C. Dennett

The stories we tell about our own choices

&nbsp;

Sleep has become another project to optimise. We track deep sleep, compare nightly scores and search for routines that promise more energy and better performance. Rest is treated as valuable mainly because it may help us work harder the next day.

Matthew Walker challenges the premise behind this way of thinking:

> “Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity.”

In *Why We Sleep*, Walker describes sleep as an active biological process supporting memory, learning, emotional regulation, immunity and physical health. Its value does not depend on whether it makes us more productive. We do not need to earn sleep by completing enough tasks, just as we do not need to justify eating or breathing with improved workplace performance.

The attempt to optimise sleep can also produce a surprising result: worse sleep. Researchers have described **orthosomnia**, a perfectionistic pursuit of ideal sleep driven by data from watches and fitness trackers. Some people become so concerned about their sleep scores that the anxiety itself makes sleeping more difficult. A device intended to reduce uncertainty creates a new reason to lie awake.

Sleep is involuntary. We can create favourable conditions for it, but we cannot command ourselves to become unconscious. Research into “sleep effort” suggests that trying too hard to control this process may perpetuate insomnia. The night becomes another test, and every awakening feels like failure.

Regular hours, a dark and cool bedroom, less caffeine and enough time in bed may help. But the objective is not a perfect score or a flawlessly engineered morning. Sometimes the healthiest response is to stop evaluating every night.

Sleep does improve performance. That is one of its benefits, not its reason for existing. Rest deserves protection even when it produces nothing we can measure.

## Sources

- [Matthew Walker — *Why We Sleep*, official book page and excerpt](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-Walker/9781501144318)
- [Matthew Walker — “Sleep is your superpower”, TED Talk and transcript](https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower?view=transcript)

— Matthew Walker

Sleep is not a productivity hack

&nbsp;

Programmers are usually taught to write code that will survive: reusable components, flexible abstractions and systems prepared for every imaginable future requirement. But what if trying to make code immortal is precisely what makes it difficult to maintain?

The author known as **tef**, writing on the blog *Programming is Terrible*, proposes a more useful goal:

> “Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.”

Every new line creates a future obligation. Someone will have to understand it, test it, update it and check what else depends on it. Reusable code may reduce duplication, but premature reuse can connect unrelated parts of a system. Once several features depend on the same abstraction, changing or removing it becomes surprisingly expensive.

This leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: a little duplication can sometimes be safer than an elegant abstraction. Copying a small fragment of code two or three times keeps those implementations independent. Only after their real similarities become visible do we know what should be extracted into a shared function. Abstraction created from evidence is usually more reliable than abstraction created from prediction.

The same principle applies to architecture. Frequently changing business logic should be separated from stable infrastructure. External libraries can be placed behind small interfaces, experimental features can be isolated, and difficult decisions can be confined to individual modules. The objective is not perfect modularity. It is the freedom to change one part without rebuilding everything around it.

The surprising measure of good code is therefore not how impressive it looks or how many hypothetical uses it supports. It is how little resistance it creates when requirements change.

Software rarely fails because programmers cannot add another feature. It becomes painful when nobody can safely remove the old ones.

## Source

- [tef — “Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend”, *Programming is Terrible*](https://programmingisterrible.com/post/139222674273/write-code-that-is-easy-to-delete-not-easy-to)

- [tef — “Write Code That’s Easy to Delete, and Easy to Debug Too”](https://programmingisterrible.com/post/173883533613/code-to-debug)

— tef, *Programming is Terrible*

**Sources:**

— tef

Writing code you can delete

&nbsp;

We often imagine the future as a date: a moment when artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles or advanced medicine finally become part of ordinary life. William Gibson offers a more surprising way of seeing it:

> “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

The sentence is frequently presented as a prediction, but it is really an observation about the present. A technology can be ordinary in one building and look like science fiction only a few kilometres away. One hospital may use algorithms to analyse medical images while another still exchanges documents by fax. One child experiments with an AI tutor while another has no reliable internet connection.

Technology does not spread through empty space. It spreads through people, companies and institutions — and they are not a uniform medium. Money matters, but so do education, infrastructure, regulation, trust and habit. Even when everyone can access the same tool, they may not possess the same knowledge, time or freedom to benefit from it.

This also explains why technological revolutions rarely replace the old world overnight. New systems appear beside ageing ones. A smartphone can provide instant access to the world’s information, yet its owner may still be required to print a form, sign it by hand and deliver it in person. The future and the past do not arrive in sequence. They coexist.

Gibson became famous for imagining cyberspace in *Neuromancer*, but his method was less about predicting inventions than observing signals already visible in the present. The future begins in laboratories, wealthy neighbourhoods, specialist communities and unusual human behaviour before the rest of society gives it a name.

To understand what comes next, we should therefore stop looking only at forecasts. We should look around and ask a different question: **who is already living in the future — and who is still waiting for it?**

## Sources

- [William Gibson on NPR’s *Talk of the Nation* — “The Science in Science Fiction”, 30 November 1999](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220)
- [Quote Investigator — the history and earliest documented versions of Gibson’s quotation](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/)
- [Joshua Rothman — “How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real”, *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real)

— William Gibson

The future arrives unevenly

&nbsp;

We usually imagine reality as a chain of events: A causes B, which then causes C. Causes come first and effects follow. At the quantum level, however, this order may not always be fixed.

Experiments involving the **quantum switch** suggest that two processes can occur in an indefinite causal order. Instead of either A causing B or B causing A, a quantum system can behave as though both possibilities are present simultaneously.

This does not mean that causality disappears from everyday life. Dropped plates still fall, fire still burns, and actions still have consequences. But the familiar sequence of causes and effects may emerge only at the level of ordinary experience rather than describe the deepest structure of reality.

The question becomes especially important in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with gravity. In Einstein’s theory, gravity affects space and time. If matter can exist in a superposition of different states, the structure of spacetime—and therefore the order of events—may also become indefinite.

Physicists are now developing ways of describing reality without assuming a fixed causal order. Such theories remain incomplete, but they challenge one of our most basic intuitions: that the universe must always know which event happened first.

Perhaps cause and effect are not the foundation of reality.

Perhaps they are simply how reality appears to creatures like us.

**Sources:**

Natalie Wolchover, [“Quantum Mischief Rewrites the Laws of Cause and Effect”](https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-20210311/), *Quanta Magazine*, 11 March 2021.

The sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of things

&nbsp;

Egoless programming occurs when a technical peer group uses frequent and often peer reviews to find defects in software under development.

The objective is for everyone to find defects, including the author, not to prove the work product has no defects. People exchange work products to review, with the expectation that as authors, they will produce errors, and as reviewers, they will find errors.

Everyone ends up learning from their own mistakes and other people’s mistakes. That’s why it’s called egoless programming.

> My ego is not tied to my “perfect” or “imperfect” work product. My ego is only tied to my attempts to do the best job I know how, and to learn from my mistakes, not the initial result of my work.

My ego is only tied to my attempts to do the best job and to learn from my mistakes.

&nbsp;

# Homo Sapiens 2.0—or GMO Homo Sapiens?

After four billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species may be about to begin evolving by another.

Advances in genetics, artificial intelligence and data analysis are giving us tools that could one day alter the genetic makeup of future children. These technologies may help eliminate inherited diseases, cure cancers and allow people to live longer and healthier lives.

The same tools, however, could also be used to select or modify characteristics unrelated to disease. Embryo selection and gene editing may eventually influence physical features, intelligence and other human traits.

Metzl does not argue that this genetic revolution should be stopped. He believes that humanity will embrace technologies capable of preventing disease and reducing suffering. But he also warns that genetic enhancement could create deep divisions, encourage new forms of eugenics, reduce genetic diversity and even contribute to conflicts within and between countries.

The genetic era has already begun. The question is not simply whether these technologies will be used, but how they will be used and who will participate in making those decisions.

Because the consequences may alter the evolutionary direction of our entire species, Metzl calls for a global conversation about the future of human genetic enhancement.

A thought of my own: perhaps one day genetic technologies could also help reduce the human tendency towards aggression. Aggression is shaped by many biological, psychological and social factors, so it is unlikely that we will find one gene responsible for it. Yet if we ever learn how to limit its most destructive forms, this could be one of the greatest benefits of genetic research. Human aggression has been one of our species’ most serious problems for at least the last several thousand years.

**Source:**

Jamie Metzl, [“Homo Sapiens 2.0? We Need a Species-Wide Conversation About the Future of Human Genetic Enhancement”](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/01/homo-sapiens-2-0-we-need-a-species-wide-conversation-about-the-future-of-human-genetic-enhancement/), *TechCrunch*, 1 May 2016.

Homo Sapiens 2.0 or actually GMO Homo Sapiens.

&nbsp;

Certainty feels like strength. In science, however, it can become a weakness.

Science does not ask us to defend an idea forever. It asks whether the idea survives observation, criticism and attempts to prove it wrong. A scientific explanation is valuable not because an important person believes it, but because other people can examine the evidence independently.

This makes changing your mind a feature of science, not an admission of defeat. Carl Sagan observed that scientists sometimes respond to a convincing argument by acknowledging that their position was mistaken. It may be uncomfortable, but replacing an inadequate explanation with a better one means that science has worked exactly as intended.

The more surprising lesson is that skepticism alone is not enough. Someone who rejects every unfamiliar idea is not necessarily more rational than someone who believes everything. One refuses possible discoveries; the other cannot distinguish discovery from nonsense. Sagan argued for a balance between openness and rigorous examination:

> “It’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
>

This is harder than choosing a side immediately. Saying “I don’t know yet” provides none of the emotional satisfaction of certainty. It does, however, protect us from turning first impressions, authority or personal preference into facts.

Science remains reliable precisely because it does not claim to be infallible. Its conclusions are provisional: strong enough to use when supported by evidence, but always open to correction. An unanswered question is not an embarrassment that must be concealed with speculation. It is simply a place where investigation can begin.

The scientific habit is therefore not believing nothing. It is giving every claim only as much confidence as the available evidence deserves.

[Source: Carl Sagan — “The Burden of Skepticism”, *Skeptical Inquirer*](https://skepticalinquirer.org/1987/10/the-burden-of-skepticism/)

— Carl Sagan

Science does not need your certainty

&nbsp;

# Is the Coronavirus Hastening the Posthuman Era?

Fereidoun M. Esfandiary was an Iranian-American futurist, writer and lecturer born in Belgium. The son of an Iranian diplomat, he had lived in 17 countries by the age of eleven, represented Iran in basketball at the 1948 Olympic Games and later taught courses on the future at the New School and UCLA. He wrote about the decline of national identities, technological progress and humanity’s eventual victory over ageing and death.

In the 1970s, he began using the name FM-2030 and formally adopted it in 1988. The name expressed his rejection of identities determined by ancestry, nationality or religion, as well as his belief that the years around 2030 would bring radical advances in human longevity. He expected to celebrate his hundredth birthday that year.

He died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, at the age of 69. In accordance with his vision of the future, his body was cryopreserved in the hope that medicine might one day make his revival possible.

FM-2030 became one of the early advocates of transhumanism: the belief that science and technology can help us overcome ageing, disease and perhaps even death. From this perspective, the human body is not the final product of evolution but a temporary version—one that can be repaired, modified and improved.

The coronavirus pandemic may have brought this future closer. COVID-19 has shown us how fragile our bodies are while moving a significant part of our work, education, relationships and services into the digital world. These technologies already existed, but within a few months they became part of everyday life for millions of people.

We have not yet entered the posthuman era. At the end of 2022, the pandemic is still with us, and we continue to become ill, grow old and die. The crisis has shown, however, how quickly we turn to technology when confronted with the limitations of biology.

The boundary between the physical and digital person is becoming less distinct. Our bodies are increasingly observed, measured and supported by technology, while significant parts of our identity and social existence now function independently of physical location.

FM-2030 imagined a future in which human beings would no longer be defined by birthplace, nationality, gender or biological inheritance. The pandemic did not create that world, but it may have moved us one step closer to it.

The posthuman era may not arrive with a spectacular invention or a clear announcement. It may emerge gradually, through thousands of practical decisions made during moments of fear and necessity.

Perhaps the coronavirus did not open the door to that future.

Perhaps it merely pushed us through a door that was already open.

**Sources:**

- [The New York Public Library — F. M. Esfandiary / FM-2030 Papers](https://archives.nypl.org/mss/4846)
- [Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology — Transhumanism](https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/transhumanism)
- [FM-2030 — About](https://www.fm2030.us/about/)

Is the coronavirus hastening the posthuman era?

&nbsp;

Why should I root for an athlete simply because they come from the same country as I do? Is a shared language—or the accident of being born within the same borders—really enough reason to support someone? And does this reflex not lead us back into the darkness of the past, when people were divided into *us* and *them* before anyone bothered to ask who those people actually were?

Imagine that an athlete from my country is competing against someone from abroad. I know neither of them. Yet I am expected to support the first and hope that the second one loses.

Why?

Perhaps, if I knew them personally, I would discover that I had nothing in common with my compatriot. Perhaps we would have nothing to talk about. Our values might differ so profoundly that I would not even want this person in my life.

And perhaps the foreign opponent would turn out to be fascinating. We might become friends. I might admire their intelligence, sensitivity, humour or courage. I might even fall in love with them.

But none of this matters when the flags appear. One athlete is automatically “ours,” the other “theirs.” Biography, personality and values disappear. A coloured piece of fabric decides where our sympathies should go.

Is this really a thoughtful response—or merely an atavistic one?

Supporting “our side” may be one of the simplest tribal impulses we possess. It requires no knowledge of the people involved and no moral or intellectual judgement. We recognise a familiar symbol, hear a familiar language and react. Our tribe is competing, so our tribe must win.

At that moment, are we using the part of the brain we are so proud of—or simply repeating the behaviour of animals defending their group against outsiders?

We often say that the human brain is our greatest asset. It allows us to question instincts, examine assumptions and see individuals where others see only categories. Yet in sport, we frequently switch it off with remarkable enthusiasm. A flag appears on the screen, and millions of supposedly rational adults begin celebrating a stranger whom they might dislike intensely if they ever met.

Modern national identity is also far less ancient than it feels. Nations are often presented as timeless communities, but modern nationalism largely developed during the last two or three centuries. It helped organise societies, but it also became an extraordinarily effective instrument of political mobilisation. If people could be persuaded that millions of strangers were their brothers and sisters, they could also be persuaded to fight, kill and die for them.

“Your country needs you” sounds much more inspiring than “someone in power needs your body.”

Does national sport rehearse the same division in a safer form? Perhaps partly. Flags, anthems, uniforms, heroic language and collective triumph all turn competition between individuals into symbolic conflict between nations. Sport can give tribal emotions a relatively harmless outlet—but it can also strengthen the habit of seeing the world as a permanent contest between *us* and *them*.

Hopefully, sport is much more than preparation for conflict. It can display extraordinary discipline, courage, intelligence, creativity and physical skill. It can connect people across borders and produce moments of genuine admiration for someone whose language we do not understand.

But to experience that, perhaps we need to stop treating every competition as a miniature war.

Why can we not simply watch sport and appreciate the brilliance of both sides? Why must we choose someone to support with an intensity that makes the opponent’s failure almost as satisfying as our favourite’s success?

People often say that watching without taking sides is impossible—that without emotional allegiance, sport loses its meaning.

I do not believe that.

Imagine that you have two children and they are playing against each other. Do you passionately support one and hope that the other fails? Do you scream with joy when one makes a mistake? Or do you watch both of them with interest, enjoy their effort and skill, and feel proud regardless of who wins?

You may naturally sympathise with one at a particular moment. That is human. But you do not need to turn the other into an enemy to care about the contest.

Perhaps we could watch professional athletes in the same way—not as extensions of flags, governments or national myths, but as individual human beings displaying what our species can do.

They are not “ours” or “theirs.” They are people. Some may be generous, thoughtful and admirable. Others may be unpleasant, selfish or simply uninteresting. We usually do not know. Nationality tells us almost nothing about their character and gives us no rational basis for deciding who deserves our sympathy.

So perhaps we should stop pretending that it does.

Let us enjoy the contest as we might enjoy a game between our own children: interested in the struggle, impressed by excellence and moved by effort, but without needing hatred, humiliation or tribal hostility to make the experience meaningful.

Watch the athletes. Admire their skill. Appreciate the drama. Celebrate the beauty of the competition.

And allow the better performance to win—even if it speaks another language.

Why should I support an athlete just because we share a flag?

> I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
>
> Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold: surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

**Source:** Bertrand Russell, *What I Believe* (1925), Chapter I: “Nature and Man”.

**Full text:** [Project Gutenberg — *What I Believe*](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/73782/73782-h/73782-h.htm)

**Scanned original edition:** [Wikisource — *What I Believe* (1925)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What_I_Believe_(Russell)/Chapter_1)

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.

&nbsp;

**Inspired by Chris Case, John Mandrola, and Lennard Zinn**

Exercise is good for the heart. Few statements in health science sound safer than this one. Regular physical activity lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, improves metabolic health, and is associated with a longer life.

Then along comes a book titled *The Haywire Heart: How Too Much Exercise Can Kill You, and What You Can Do to Protect Your Heart*.

Its authors—Chris Case, cardiac electrophysiologist John Mandrola, and endurance athlete Lennard Zinn—argue that years of intense endurance training can damage the heart. They focus particularly on cyclists, runners, triathletes, and cross-country skiers who train hard for decades, often while treating recovery as an optional activity for less ambitious people.

The book describes what is sometimes called the athlete’s heart: the structural and electrical adaptations caused by long-term training. Most of these changes are normal and beneficial. In some athletes, however, repeated strain may contribute to atrial enlargement, inflammation, fibrosis, and electrical instability. The possible consequences include atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, tachycardia, and other rhythm disorders.

The warning is supported by research. A 2021 systematic review found that athletes had a higher likelihood of developing atrial fibrillation than non-athletes, with the strongest association among endurance athletes and athletes participating in mixed sports.

The conclusion appears straightforward: exercise protects the heart—until there is too much of it.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, science rarely stays straightforward for long.

## The view from the other side

A large study published in *JAMA Network Open* examined more than 122,000 people who had undergone exercise treadmill testing. The researchers found that higher cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with lower mortality. The people classified as elite performers had the lowest risk of death, and the researchers found no upper limit beyond which greater fitness became harmful.

Another analysis, based on data from more than 660,000 adults, reached a similar conclusion. Most of the longevity benefit appeared at approximately three to five times the recommended minimum amount of physical activity. Beyond that point, the benefit stopped growing substantially—but even people reporting more than ten times the recommended minimum did not have increased mortality.

So, does extreme exercise damage the heart, or does exceptional fitness help us live longer?

The mildly irritating answer is: both findings may be true.

## The studies are asking different questions

*The Haywire Heart* concentrates on particular cardiac conditions, especially atrial fibrillation. The large population studies concentrate mainly on death from all causes.

These are not interchangeable outcomes.

A group of endurance athletes may develop atrial fibrillation more frequently and still live longer, on average, than an inactive population. Exercise can increase one particular risk while simultaneously reducing the risks of coronary disease, diabetes, obesity, stroke, and several cancers. Biology does not have to choose one side of the debate merely because we would prefer a clean headline.

There is another important distinction. High fitness is not identical to a high volume of training. Fitness is an outcome influenced by exercise, genetics, age, health, and many other factors. Training volume is an exposure. A person can possess exceptional aerobic capacity without continually exhausting the body, while another can accumulate enormous training hours without reaching the same level of fitness.

The groups being compared also matter. Elite athletes are a highly selected population. To become an elite athlete, a person generally needs favourable genetics, excellent health, years of adaptation, and the ability to survive the training required to get there. Studying those who reach the top may tell us less about those whose bodies objected somewhere along the way and quietly left the experiment.

## Alcohol joins the discussion

The book also identifies alcohol as an important irritant to the heart and a potential trigger for atrial fibrillation. Several studies support a dose-dependent association: as alcohol consumption rises, so does the risk of developing the arrhythmia. A randomized trial involving regular drinkers who already had atrial fibrillation found that abstinence reduced recurrences and the overall burden of the condition.

But this subject has produced conflicting findings too. Some observational studies have found little or no increase in atrial fibrillation among light drinkers. Others have suggested a J-shaped relationship, in which moderate drinkers appear to have outcomes as good as—or occasionally better than—abstainers.

That does not prove that a glass of wine is cardiac medicine. People who drink moderately may differ from abstainers in income, diet, social life, previous health, and access to medical care. A group described as “non-drinkers” can also include former drinkers who stopped because they were already ill. Alcohol research contains enough confounding factors to make a glass of red wine look almost innocent. Almost.

The most defensible conclusion is narrower: heavy and frequent alcohol consumption increases the risk of atrial fibrillation, while the effect of very small quantities is more difficult to establish precisely. For a person who already experiences arrhythmia, reducing alcohol is a reasonable experiment—preferably a more controlled one than changing alcohol, sleep, diet, stress, and training simultaneously and then declaring that one of them performed a miracle.

## A disagreement created by perspective

The apparent contradiction surrounding endurance exercise is a useful lesson in reading science.

Before deciding that two studies disagree, we should ask:

* Did they measure illness, symptoms, fitness, or mortality?
* Did they study professional athletes, recreational athletes, patients, or the general population?
* Did they measure present fitness or decades of training?
* Are they reporting relative risk or absolute risk?
* Is the evidence observational, or was an intervention tested?
* Does the result apply to everyone or mainly to a particular group?

A fivefold increase in a rare condition may still represent a small absolute risk. A lower overall risk of death does not mean that every organ benefits equally from every training dose. And an association between two variables does not automatically tell us that one caused the other.

This is not a defect in science. It is what happens when science attempts to describe a complicated organism living in a complicated environment.

## The value of continuing to look

The easiest response is to select the study that confirms what we already wanted to believe. Athletes can quote the research showing that exceptional fitness predicts longevity. People who prefer the sofa can point to *The Haywire Heart* and announce that they are merely protecting themselves from atrial fibrillation.

Neither group has understood very much.

A more useful conclusion is that regular exercise remains one of the most reliable ways to improve health, while decades of extreme endurance training may carry specific risks for some people. Symptoms such as sustained palpitations, chest pain, fainting, unusual breathlessness, or a sudden unexplained decline in performance should not be treated as proof of admirable commitment. Sometimes the body is not asking for greater discipline. Sometimes it is asking us to stop being ridiculous.

The larger lesson extends beyond exercise and alcohol. The same evidence can produce apparently opposing conclusions when researchers examine different populations, outcomes, doses, and periods of time. A headline gives us an answer; careful reading reveals the question that was actually asked.

That is why intellectual curiosity requires more than finding a source. It requires looking for the source that disagrees with it, understanding why it disagrees, and deciding whether the contradiction is genuine or only apparent.

Knowledge rarely ends with the first convincing explanation. More often, that is where it begins.

## Sources

* [Case, C., Mandrola, J., and Zinn, L., *The Haywire Heart: How Too Much Exercise Can Kill You, and What You Can Do to Protect Your Heart*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-haywire-heart-how-too-much-exercise-can-kill-you-and-what-you-can-do-to-protect-your-heart-chris-case/641a9c12321159e4)
* [Newman et al., *Risk of atrial fibrillation in athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34253538/)
* [Mandsager et al., *Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing*](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428)
* [Arem et al., *Leisure Time Physical Activity and Mortality*](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4451435/)
* [Voskoboinik et al., *Alcohol Abstinence in Drinkers with Atrial Fibrillation*](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1817591)
* [Case, Mandrola, and Zinn, excerpt concerning alcohol and other heart irritants](https://www.triathlete.com/training/injury-prevention/what-to-look-for-in-your-own-heart-health/)

How too much exercise can kill you, and what you can do to protect your heart.

&nbsp;

Under high stress, we lose some of our perceptual and cognitive abilities

Thousands of years ago, when a predator approached, the human body did not schedule a meeting to consider its options.

It activated the fight-or-flight response.

The heart began to beat faster. Blood pressure rose. Breathing accelerated. Adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol were released. More glucose became available, blood flow was redirected to the muscles, and the body prepared for immediate physical action. Strength, speed, alertness, and resistance to pain temporarily increased.

This response made perfect sense. When facing a large predator, our ancestors did not need to develop a long-term strategy, challenge their initial assumptions, or generate three innovative solutions. They needed to fight, flee, or become lunch.

The body therefore prioritised the abilities most useful for immediate survival. The cost was a reduction in some of the perceptual and cognitive capacities needed for more complex situations.

Psychologist Matthew J. Sharps explains that under intense stress, attention becomes narrower and increasingly focused on what appears to be the main threat. Peripheral information may be ignored. Working memory becomes less efficient, so it is harder to hold several pieces of information in mind and compare them. Cognitive flexibility declines, making it more difficult to change perspective or abandon an ineffective approach.

Complex reasoning, impulse control, planning, evaluation of alternatives, and conceptual or creative thinking may also deteriorate. Instead of adapting our behaviour to new circumstances, we become more likely to rely on familiar habits and automatic responses.

This shift is sometimes described as the brain entering a “reptilian mode.” Taken literally, that explanation is not accurate. The popular model dividing the brain into a reptilian brain, an emotional mammalian brain, and a rational human brain is now considered outdated. The brain does not contain three separate systems that take turns controlling us.

The metaphor does, however, point towards a real change. As stress intensifies, the prefrontal cortex loses some of its ability to exercise flexible, top-down control. Faster systems involved in detecting threats, initiating defensive reactions, and repeating learned habits gain greater influence over behaviour. We become more reactive, defensive, and rigid—and less capable of reflection, inhibition, and considering alternatives. The brain does not literally become reptilian. It does begin to favour survival responses that are evolutionarily older, faster, and less intellectually sophisticated.

This is not necessarily a flaw. In an immediate physical emergency, careful reflection can be dangerously slow. A firefighter, police officer, soldier, or paramedic may act effectively because the correct response has been practised until it becomes automatic.

The problem begins when the automatic response does not fit the situation.

Modern stress rarely involves a predator emerging from the forest. It is more likely to involve an urgent email, an unrealistic deadline, several conflicting tasks, a difficult conversation, constant interruptions, or a manager who has discovered that everything can be labelled “high priority.”

The body, however, does not always appreciate the distinction. It can respond to social and professional pressure using a system designed for physical survival.

The result is a curious mismatch. The modern problem may require perspective, restraint, careful analysis, creativity, and the ability to combine several incomplete pieces of information. Stress pushes the mind in the opposite direction: towards tunnel vision, rigid thinking, impulsive judgement, and familiar reactions.

Despite this, employers frequently include “the ability to work under pressure” in job advertisements. Read literally, this may suggest that they are not looking for someone who thinks well under pressure at all. Perhaps they are looking for someone who stops thinking ...

An impressive requirement.

A company wants original ideas, sound decisions, attention to detail, strategic thinking, adaptability, and excellent communication. It then creates an environment that narrows attention, weakens working memory, reduces cognitive flexibility, and encourages automatic behaviour. Finally, it asks why nobody is thinking outside the box—while applying enough pressure to make the box the only thing anyone can see.

What exactly do we expect from the human mind?

Do we want it to react quickly or think deeply? Repeat proven behaviours or develop new ideas? Defend itself from danger or remain open to complexity? And if we expect judgement, creativity, learning, and intellectual flexibility, what conditions make those abilities possible?

We often discuss human performance as if the brain were a machine whose output could be increased simply by turning up the pressure.

Well, no. That is not how it works.

## Sources

- [Matthew J. Sharps, *How We Process Under Pressure: Stress and Automatic Behavior*, Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-forensic-view/202201/how-we-process-under-pressure-stress-and-automatic-behavior)
- [Amy F. T. Arnsten, *Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function*, Nature Reviews Neuroscience](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907136/)
- [Steffen et al., *The Brain Is Adaptive Not Triune: How the Brain Responds to Threat, Challenge, and Change*, Frontiers in Psychiatry](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.802606/full)

Under high stress we reduce some perceptual and cognitive capacities of our brain.

&nbsp;

"We live with a bounty of communications technologies at our disposal. Our culture is composed more of mediated experiences than of directly lived ones. Yet we are also more alone and atomized than ever before. Our most advanced technologies are not enhancing our connectivity, but thwarting it. They are replacing and devaluing our humanity, and — in many different ways undermining our respect for one another and ourselves. Sadly, this has been by design."

"There’s a reason for our current predicament: an antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media. It has turned them from forces for human connection and expression into ones of isolation and repression."

"We are embedding some very old and disparaging notions about human beings and their place in the natural order into our future technological infrastructure. Engineers at our leading tech ﬁrms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution."

"When they are not developing interfaces to control us, they are building intelligences to replace us. Any of these technologies could be steered toward extending our human capabilities and collective power. Instead, they are deployed in concert with the demands of a marketplace, political sphere, and power structure that depend on human isolation and predictability in order to operate."

"Social control is based on thwarting social contact and exploiting the resulting disorientation and despair. Human beings evolved by gaining the capacity to forge greater numbers of social connections. The development of our brain, language, text, electronic media, and digital networks were all driven by our need for higher levels of social organization."

"Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. They always have. That’s why new mechanisms for forging bonds and cooperation between people are almost inevitably turned against those ends. Language that could inform is instead used to lie. Money that could promote trade is instead hoarded by the wealthy. Education that could expand workers’ minds is instead used to make them more efﬁcient human resources."

"All along the way, cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors in any of these areas of life. Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate or repress it."

— **Douglas Rushkoff**

We will look at modern society and technologies that are often built against it.

&nbsp;

Living in a contemporary world means that we are being subjected to a constant attack of automated digital manipulation. We think that we can usually predict people’s behaviors, especially if we only know their thoughts and their feelings, but the reality is much more complex. Our actions also have an influence on our thoughts and feelings. If we engage in a behavior, and especially one that we had not expected, our thoughts and feelings in relation to that behavior are likely to change.

Persuasive technology, as it is now called, is a new design philosophy taught and developed at leading world's universities, which means using computers to change what we think and do. This philosophy is now implemented on different places from social networks to smartphones and even fitness trackers. It can be controversial - and it clearly is. So, we can ask questions like "Who will manage this power of digital influence? And to what end?" I think we can safely assume that the goal is to create behavioral changes and habits, usually without our knowledge or consent. Why? The answer seems obvious.

Persuasive technology was pioneered by [BJ Fogg](https://www.bjfogg.com/), the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. BJ Fogg has coined the term "Captology" an acronym for computers as persuasive technologies. Netflix in 2020 released documentary [The Social Dilemma](https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/) revealed the dark side to persuasive technology used by tech giants.

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