&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

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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

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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

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.

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

Is the coronavirus hastening the posthuman era?

Why should I root for some athlete whom comes from the same nation as me?

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

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

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

"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.

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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