 So next up we've got another friend of ours up here that I have the pleasure of introducing was is going to be speaking and She's got a wonderful talk on you are only human. So please welcome her to the tour camp stage. I Am hot now. Okay, so oh Mike's okay All right, my talk is called you are only human and if you're interested in it My particulars are down here at the bottom. I'm at Boston electrical engineer And I will actually get into why I'm giving this talk in the talk so I'm just going to jump into it and Start presenter mode because I've got 58 slides to get through so we're going to go pretty fast Resume and you are clicking next. Okay, so I Don't know about you, but I've heard this completely made up quote before from my friends I got into technology because I'd rather solve concrete problems and find real solutions Then then deal with messy things like other people and feelings I don't know about you, but I told this to myself a lot of times in college that people were hard and technology was easy and that's why I wanted to be an engineer and You know, that's that's part and parcel with the reality of being some of us You know, but I'm going to summarize something stealing from Bunny's talk yesterday In very clear engineering terms the software we run is only as good as the hardware We run it on and we're fundamentally limited by our hardware Our nature is human beings is something that you're probably interested in understanding because you're human And you might have been ignoring it up until this point But if you want to make a solid go of getting through life and social interaction without having a terrible time It's worth paying attention to who you are not just who you think you are So this is where I talk about how we're all Existentially alone because we're individuals living in a collective, but we experience the world in a very singular way We don't natively have any perspective but our own We're the only thing that's not in our environment You know, so we're out there, you know, trying to suss out the world and explore it in real time with this bizarre time-lapse Superposition of life and trying to build, you know, perspective from that and it's really slow It's painful and it's error prone, which is to say we're all walking along in the dark You know, trying to discover what the world looks like by running into the furniture and wondering why it hurts I wish I remembered which author said that it was someone cool like Ursula K. Le Guin or James Tiptree, Jr You know or maybe even Louise McMaster be old But like it was someone who was insightful about the human condition because this is the human condition And and if you're lucky, you might only get to know yourself You're not really gonna ever know the whole world. You're not really gonna ever know anybody else It's pretty fucking existential and even knowing yourself isn't straightforward We've got this entire self-help pop sci-culture for a reason, you know Like I am ENTJ destroyer of worlds like there's an entire like literature section in the bookstore and five sites on BuzzFeed Dedicated to giving you quick fixes and quizzes to tell you who you are and You know this they tell you this because you want to be able to know yourself So that you can do things like figure out what you want get out of your own way Realize your own potential make a million dollars have a bigger penis like whatever it is but like you're focused on improving your element of the human condition and These are things that a lot of people spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out and some some people never figure it out They're always frustrated But just like you can learn the skills and tools of hardware design and then like create this pattern where you make an investment It sucks a lot it hurts to learn But then you can fix something that's broken use that to design and analyze something else use that to build a New thing break that and then like go through this virtual cycle of leveling up Interpersonal skills and trying to understand who you are and the people around you has the exact same governing principles And if you make a little bit of an investment in understanding yourself and understanding others You can open up a whole world of possibilities that you don't know exist because you can marry your perspective To the person next to you and the person next to them and that's what teams are and that's what society is That's what value systems are so Being socially elite unlocks the following in-game features and I don't have notes So I have to read it off of here social interaction will become less perplexing and you'll have lower social anxiety and anxiety in general It will also be a plus 10 to social engineering because it's actually really easy to ask people for things talk to Amanda Palmer it also increases really ephemeral specs like fun and Satisfaction and improves how you feel even though you're not more hardcore You help it helps you accomplish goals with less angst things just feel easier, right? Like there's all of these things about effectiveness and productivity reducing self-criticism Reducing jealousy being a better person eating vegan eating more kale, you know But at the end of the day, you know, it even it even does in fact reduce inflammation and illness because you are made of meat and It helps you leverage all of the people around you to have a better life Doesn't that sound really really hardcore because it's really really hard So why bother being a more fully human when being a robot is your current safe operating default and Because negative you are still a meat popsicle being stressed as an organism in as an organism with Cognition and mind is really the difference between where you have expectations of what you think is going on and reality Whereas you all here are problem solvers if you have an accurate view of what's really going on in your life You're going to problem solve it. You're going to troubleshoot it You're going to change the parameters and you're going to fuck with it to tweak it to make it better But you can't do that if you don't have an accurate perspective So why am I giving this talk? Okay, so this is a social primate 101 You're only going to trust me if I'm actually being genuine so I'm going to flip to the notes that I didn't put in this speaker talk and Yeah, they're right here, so I'm giving this talk because Once upon a time I I fucked up and so this is radical vulnerability story time about seven eight years ago I had a dream job at the v-sinstitute for Harvard v-sinstitute for biologically inspired engineering at Harvard University Where I was an early hire. I was a staff engineer. We didn't have a lab We had a hundred and fifty million dollar budget that got matched and it involved all of the things I cared about after having burned out in semiconductors on consumer goods Which was an operating mission to help people and I was like, oh my god This is my moment. I can like work on things to save babies. I can do projects for the ninjas in the meantime I have a laser cutter. We're gonna build a team. It's gonna be great and I Cared I cared so much about my work and I cared way too much So what happened is I was tasked with building a team I was tasked with hiring out for other skill sets and it went fine until I was like I was like good finding like this guy's better at me than firmware this person's better at mechanical And then it got to the point where I needed to reproduce myself on the team I had to hire another engineer who is mixed signal analog And I really wanted to work with another woman and we found one she really wanted to be on the team So we hired her and and I was I was really confused about how other people work So I assume she was like me and I assumed the things that motivated me motivated her And I assumed that we would like be good friends and I assumed that we would work well together and I was completely completely fucking wrong you know, so I Was ineffective in bringing this person on my team They ended up hating me. I started getting angry I started getting more antisocial and I'm like, what am I doing wrong and That a friend handed me this book called a dealing with people you can't stand because the way I started this process Was I assumed that the woman who joined my team was my work nemesis. I assumed she was lazy I assume she didn't care and I was like, oh, she's terrible. I can't stand her and In in page like and the way this book starts out is it gives you a whole list of the ten archetypes of people You can't stand in the workplace Whether it's the person who's belligerently throwing their weight around the person who's passive aggressive the person who avoids work the yes Man whatever you get through it and you're like, yeah, I know that guy work with him. He's a dick Yeah, I know that person and make me so mad and then in like page 10 they go Okay, so well which archetypes are you being in this relationship because it takes two to fight and you're part of the problem if you hate someone this much that you can't stand them you're being a dick, too and So the rest of this slide because I done fucked up And I made my team DOA and I destroyed this work relationship and admittedly the technology got out You know we deployed it in NICUs, you know the data collection went well by arguably by all means it was a success It was like a Pyrrhic victory it hurt too much to do and I'm like man if I don't fix this interpersonal thing I'm not gonna build cool things because I'm a limited capacity unit, right? So I realized that I had to grow TM and become a better person to do better next time So art and technology actually have a huge intersection already and they have excellent metaphors for understanding the human condition I started off by listening to a couple Smith's albums and realized I wasn't alone I I tried to console myself by validating my feelings about how much the situation sucked because it did and You know, but I'm like, you know what? I've been through I've been through really crappy situations before I got through undergrad at MIT Which is mainly like demoralizing, you know, but it taught me how to build things My manager Consolidate me by telling me most people when confronted with an opportunity for growth because they are screwing up Choose instead not to grow and to move on to a different situation with a new set of people where they play out the same routines Because growing is scary and hard and most people aren't up for doing it You know and and then the next thing I did was I told myself you have to break something in order to extend it And I was clearly broken and I needed to figure myself out so that I could get out of my own way So rather than being really woeful and stubbornly insisting I was right and this woman was wrong and that guy was wrong and this person was wrong I I sucked it up and I wholeheartedly accepted that I was wrong even though it hurt a lot to do that And then I realized I didn't still didn't magically know like accepting that you suck doesn't teach you anything new You're like, man, I'm really bad at shell scripting. It doesn't like wanting it doesn't make you better at it And so since my goal was really ultimately to make cool things with teams to help people Here's what I dove into so what does it mean to be human and Basically, we all have this thing called theory of mind a theory of mind kicks in between like around one to two years old And it's the developmental state for your hardware at which point you realize that everybody else in the world is not an NPC And a figment of your subconscious like there's actually a point where very with the way we run is we're so self-referential That it is a developmental stage to realize other people are human and that you are just a small part of a large space If you go into philosophy it covers a lot of this as well There's this thing called the mind-body problem where Descartes tried to argue that we're a consciousness The body doesn't matter and oh Descartes was silly. That's bullshit, you know we're a whole complete organism and And you've got to treat yourself as an organism and not a crystalline entity or brain in a jar So how do we process the world and in machine learning terms because we're very good learning machines We're basically a conscious process that's constantly waiting our experiences And those experiences are intrinsic and extrinsic. It's extrinsic being other people What's going on with the weather and intrinsic being things like I really wonder if I should have drank a liter of water before I Got on stage because I'm worried I have to pee right So these things there's also things like vulnerability factors Which is extra load on your system extra things you're dealing with and these things form like a shield around yourself identity You know and a lot of the cognitive shortcuts and sort of things associated with your belief system and your personality That you keep with you in your backpack up in front of your face like a HUD, you know as you navigate through life and These weights are approximations we make that also affect how we interact with everyone else because everyone else has their own story and their own training matrix and Everyone forms things like judgments biases Cognitive distortions things that they believe to be true that might be completely different from what you believe to be true Even though you're both operating in a very similar environment Because like I said, we're all alone in this environment and everyone's got a different path. They're walking So another step is the fact that we're social primates, so this is some pretty recent research I really like Sarah Pessi Sarah Perry's summary essay on this Which is linked down here, but it's others in mind social origins of self-consciousness and I've mentioned before that you don't really know who you are right because like you're a single point of reference And you're not in your environment and that's because cognitively Social primates we get to know ourselves through the eyes of the people around us So there's this like interesting recursive process that happens like I know sometimes that I feel really goofy silly and anxious And then Fabienne's like no was your cool and I can tell that she means it So in my viewpoint, I'm like, huh, and then I see myself reflected in Fabienne's viewpoint that she gives me Honestly, no, you're doing fine and I'm like, oh, okay So now I have this mental model of myself in Fabienne and I have this model of Fabienne And I've got the little me inside Fabienne and that's one of you of me that she gives back to me And then I've got another one from Deviant and I've got another one from Redbeard And this is why people say you should choose your friends because if the people around you are reflecting really Distorted or completely wrong or manipulative images of you you're going to believe it because this is how we're wired to form social groups This is how we actually establish the identity of others and ourselves, you know en masse. That's how our consciousness works So loved so we've got this lens of perception, right both internal perception and external perception We've got this bizarre recursive social model and we've got this tendency to be like constantly learning machines So what does that get us? It gets us a lot of kind of messed up bugs. So biases 101 Meat doesn't follow Moore's law We you know fundamentally are running on a very limited amount of hardware and so we take Computational shortcuts. We're very good at measuring, you know looking at patterns So we start with things like perception and experience and then you have something to curtey you repeatedly and then you're like Okay, I'm gonna make an assessment about it like the sky is blue and it's Tuesday So I'm like quick sweet the sky is blue on Tuesday I've got an association now and then you can turn those associations into things like archetypes So that when I walk up to somebody I'm like that person has a utila kilt I bet they also have a leatherman, right and then then you get into things like judgments or That person drives a Tesla. I think I'm going to reserve judgment for now or You know and then and then in addition to meat doesn't follow Moore's law You've got a limited amount of cash So there's a phenomenon called the monkey sphere and I apologize I forgot to link it But there's actually like a limited amount of processing power you have to view other people as people so that you're interacting with them in this sort Of green zone is sort of like I take you as you come and it's like new every time You rapidly jump to archetypes and judgments and then biases logical fallacies cognitive distortions and shortcuts like racism as soon as There are too many people in the room, right? And so that's how you get like, you know massive sweeping statements about dirty hippies or hipsters because they ruin everything right and and this is just how we work Right you can get to know someone who's different from you But this is computationally intensive and this is almost computationally free, which is why we do it Which is why it's hard Which is why actually having to fuck jaren fair and just society is constant vigilance, right absolutely constant vigilance My diaphragm shakes when I have to try to talk quiet, so I'm gonna move the mic back and yell All right, so cognitive bias I'm gonna give an example of this stuff cognitive biases go up to Wikipedia because cognitive biases you Actually can categorize them the way you can categorize things like stack overflows because you can stack overflow people So, you know, they're organized into categories based on things like too much information, right? You just gave me too many words to know not enough meaning so I'm gonna jump to a conclusion The need to act quickly put pressure on somebody like a used car salesman and see what you can get away with You know and the limits of memory give them too many things to remember and eventually They'll just dump core and go into a random state Right, and you know this because you've done it and you usually feel pretty bad when you realize that's happened to you All right, then there's also logical fallacies by the way You can download this poster for free or order thou shalt not commit logical fallacies from your logical fallacies Org these are things like if you've argued on the internet, you know what these mean But they're they're fundamental flaws and reasoning and when you think about it these fallacies are Repeated throughout cultures. They're repeated throughout generations. You can see them in older writings, right? They're repeated constantly. They're part of the human condition They indicate some of our shortcuts that we take cognitively as we participate in society And then we've got cognitive distortions and if you know what these are I hope you're getting help to work on them because they're exaggerated or irrational thoughts that you just fall into and Every single person does this. This is not the purview of mental health every human has cognitive distortions I had a friend where he he was telling me a story about How his parents took him a snowboarding as a kid or scheme and he was giving a friend fashion advice for snowboarding as an adult And she was picking out some garish jacket and he's like you can't you can't buy that You can't wear that moguls don't like bright colors and then he heard himself and he's like oh shit Right because his parents just didn't want him wearing like neon yellow on the slopes But he actually integrated that right and it was real to him as a 35 year old, right? So and we all do things like selective abstraction. We take the wrong lesson out We make things our fault. We over personalize we over generalize and these are actually Distorted cognitive processes. These are shortcuts you've and ruts you've gotten into And in the context of tech because I do want to make this about tech Check out this paper because bias is why qaqc is completely separate from dev and product dev and dev ops Right. This is why engineers aren't allowed to test their own things bias is why the FDA publishes guidance is on user interactions and Structures things about you know adverse event reporting bias is why the FDA has created this really interesting Event reporting system because they realized that pilots won't report when they mess up if there is a penalty So they have a double-blind reporting system so that they can keep track of faults While not you know discouraging people from reporting because bias and all of these cognitive shortcuts literally kill people all the time Especially when you don't mean to this is how humans make mistakes and either inadvertently or inadvertently hurt other people So check out you are not the user the false consequence of false consensus effect It's a really good paper for why this applies to tech. It'll be a good introductory into the topic and then I mentioned things like vulnerability factors like How much water I had to drink these things all predispose you to being To making these cognitive mistakes right like if you have low-grade pain It's that's the same thing as the spoons metaphor you only have so many spoons to get through your day That actually means that you have a finite amount of cognitive resources allocated per waking cycle or less if you sleep terribly because we're made of meat and You go through that executive function, you know throughout the day You can only make so many decisions decision fatigue is real and these things will actively make your error rate go up and You know part of how that works is these things elevate cortisol and adrenaline and those neuro transmitters Reinforce this shortcutting process. It's supposed to be the very fast reaction that keeps you safe from a lion So there's a PTSD talk coming up if you want to know more about the body effects of you know stress Go to that talk. It's also good to check out and the body keeps the score So I'm going to go through a quick example because I don't want to run out of time But I think I'm doing okay on judgment and bias. So check this out legal first is Audi driver who deliberately slammed the brakes and road rage is convicted So let's go through the order of operations of how this works because I don't know about you But I think all Audi drivers are assholes and this confirms that bias. So I'm like ah finally justice So what happens is there's usually an established pattern and you can't necessarily control what takes a certain input stimulus and makes a pattern for you Sometimes it's conscious. Sometimes it's unconscious, right? Sometimes it happened when you were a kid Sometimes it's something you borrow from your friends like hardcore people have to drink Red Bull and stay up till 5 a.m. Every day and then but you establish a pattern and then that repeats and you create a judgment and Then what happens is you react based on that judgment because it's a shortcut for when you're in a stress situation So saying I'm like driving along. I'm super late to work I'm super stressed and Audi driver cuts me off. I spilled my coffee on my lap and I'm like oh Right and then I'm like asshole right but it's about that person But then it happens again the next week and this time like I dump my papers all over Because I was like trying to put something back in my bag and then I'm super flustered when I get into work Now I've reinforced that judgment right like I'm like all these Audi drivers I'm gonna get them and then then I create a self-fulfilling event I start cutting off Audi drivers on the street. I'm like haha. I drive a fast car too. I'm gonna get you or I drive behind a Civic try me bro, right so and That behavior that behavior then leads to reinforcing these you know bad interactions So now I'm engaging in confirmation bias, and it's not just confirmation bias I am creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where I set up these situations where Audi drivers are ticked me and I don't know Why right? I'm like, oh my god, they're all terrible and then you know Basically, I'm perpetuating this terrible vicious cycle while thinking it's completely justified and Then you jump Eax you just keep doing this until you suck. Well, you know So when you think about it people Are interacting with one another at a level that's far removed from your individual self, right? So like Do you think anyone here cried this morning? What did you what did you eat on the way in do you know if anyone else is drinking to be right now? Do you know how other people feel around you? You probably don't right. You're like, oh everyone's probably doing this thing because that's what my model tells me Yeah, you're interacting with the projection you made of them, you know, and maybe they're projecting something to you like man I hope I'm cool enough to be a tour camp. Oh god. I'm so nervous. This is my first time This is not my first time, but like I was nervous the first time I came and you know When I tried to be too cool for school that created a very different experience than when I was honest about being nervous You know because the real us we keep it on the inside We keep it secret keep it safe and You know and that means that we're not really interacting with each other Which means we're creating sort of all of these judgments and assessments based on really shitty data Because it's cognitively convenient to do that You kind of have social rules of things like if I've got enough rules then I will know exactly what I need to do socially Okay, so these people need to do this thing on Tuesday and on Wednesday the bank teller has to smile at me Right, we have social rules that are meant to sort of offload some of this work, you know in common value systems But you know those things are just meant to get people to do stuff together It's not meant to get you to be happy healthy less alone, right? You know, so we've got this catch-22 situation where we can perceive the projection of ourselves through how other people treat us if they're being honest sometimes people are assholes and they lie to you about who you are and We can see other people through this lens of our own lived experience That includes all of these glitchy shortcuts like did I eat breakfast and was someone mean to me on the train? You know and you know through all of these distortions and biases and distorted self-beliefs, right? And and that's like having a two-bit multimeter as your only piece of test equipment that you can use to explore the world But the world is all 16-bit color, right? And if you want your your experience and the things you build in this world to be based in reality You're gonna have to take a lot of measurements You're gonna have to time average them and it's gonna be held a debug, right? Because that's that's we are single points in time moving along together existentialism one-on-one So and that's the end of the introduction. So I'm at 24 minutes 24 minutes and and I forget what I have next but we're gonna discover it together So the rest of this talk is focused on the how and why you might be interested in doing the following With a couple of tips like this is actually a whole whole large discipline like I mentioned of introspection and meditation and going to therapy and doing what people call the work, right? Like this is why people go to Al-Anon. This is why people go to Alcoholics Anonymous. This is why people join groups. This is why people do toastmasters People come to conferences right to try things out with their friends in a safe environment. This is society This is a lifelong problem But maybe, you know, you want to know a little bit now about what it's like to dismantle sort of this Lens of perception into a more accurate heads-up display that allows you to separate out things that are about other people Things that are about them from things that are about you Because then you can start to say, okay, you know what? I think this is because I need to have a smoothie right now in a five-minute break and when I do that I'm actually gonna be able to solve this problem and You want to be able to separate out this is about me from this is about them in part So you can understand the difference between yourself and your projection Right like it took me a long time to realize that the way I got through college was by establishing a persona that I called Was where everyone's like, what's gonna do it? Oh, you need something done? She's got it done for you And I was actually like sitting there on the inside being like, oh my god When are people going to start helping me do things? Oh, I'm really tired, right? You see this with like every harried mother who's constantly, you know Managing the entire family and then she just wants her husband to volunteer to do something or a partner, right? Like the domestic partners doing all of this work They just want the other person to step in and help them with the work and then the other person says well You should have asked me to do it, you know not realizing how much pressure the domestic partner is on, right? and and and you might not realize that you're kind of setting the relationship up to be that way right because of your Projection and your thing is like man. I got it. I got to get everything done. I got to be the perfect parent Right or I've got to be the perfect provider or I've got to be the perfect hacker or I've got to be the most lead, right? And and then you also want to understand the difference between other people's projections and themselves Which isn't to say you should go around psychoanalyzing everybody you meet and being like, hey, I have your number I bet your mom was a very nice lady, right? So but But you do want to you do want to acknowledge that everyone else is sort of projecting because they've got their own thing going On because you might want to get to know them for real because then you'll have a friend, right? And someone you can trust so I'm gonna say a couple of things with conviction that you probably won't agree with and you probably wouldn't say on your own or Maybe you really do believe these things These data beliefs may drive you to react and I'll get into a little bit about that later I'm just gonna pick some at at random like normal people aren't as smart as hackers or Real hackers don't waste their time on self-care because you know, that's not productive time You could be writing code Computers do exactly what you tell them to my code is self-documenting and You know, the work is the only thing that matters and Your hard work will be rewarded if it's good enough because this is a genuine meritocracy and Things like you know what? We're all hackers. We're technologists. We're very rational and Everyone should learn Linux and The person who wrote my code base before me was an idiot There's only one way to do this and I can't believe they did it the stupid way I'm gonna have to rip this up and start over for it to be worth anything Now if you if you agreed with something I'm not gonna be able to demonstrate this point, but if you're like Really or if you're like, oh hell no, right? Then you're experiencing something called cognitive dissonance that drives you to sort of figure out where you stand in relation to this And that cognitive dissonance is a result of your lived experience, right? And again if you've argued with people on the internet and someone is actually saying what they believe and you think they're just trolling But they are being sincere you will have you know appreciation for how different people's viewpoints are even though They're all moving through the same meat space So we're gonna take 30 seconds to mentally rewrite some of the statements just in your own head To remove judgment and reduce it to an actual fact Like I'm gonna pick. Oh, I didn't say this one I'm gonna pick one I've heard where women aren't good enough to do tech and so that one's gonna take a lot of rewriting I'm gonna say Women were some of the earliest technologists back when it wasn't considered socially desirable to do that sort of work but Tech can be hard, but women are people too and we all have the same basic processing capability and There's a lot of bias to deal with to to get to other people understanding that right because when we state these things that we believe to be true a lot of times they're judgments and They're not facts So step one in like Understanding what you've got going on in your heads up display that's sort of distorting your view of the world is Talking to yourself and seeing what sort of things you say and looking at what you write and looking at what you tweet and looking at Why you tweet it and then say holy shit. Okay, hold on. Can I rephrase this in In the form of Fred Rogers, right kindergarten rules kindergarten rules What if I for a day had to go through and talk to people like I was mr. Rogers, right? There's a really cool paper called freddish the special language mr. Rogers used with children Because he actually knew how children hear things literally and he wanted to make sure that no one got left behind And he applied so he basically he had like a model of how children view the world He had a model of their lens of perception and he did a pre transformation For everything he said and did on that show to make sure that it focused what he said In a way that they could get it, right? He wanted to pitch it to them. He didn't care about adults He wanted to make sure that any child hearing what he had to say felt heard and seen and important And that they got the message right so he did a pre translation that's a huge amount of emotional labor and You can do that for yourself to figure out when you're sort of saying crappy things either to yourself like oh my god I'm so stupid. I can't believe I procrastinated. I'm an idiot, right? That's not factual. You're probably quite smart Yes, you did procrastinate, but that's not the whole story so another thing is our states of mind influence how we interpret facts and situations so We're all familiar the literature. I get this from is mind mindfulness literature And they like to call this thinking mind, but I prefer to call it rationalizing mind So that's when you are in an engagement and you're like, I'm being technically correct Which we know is the best form of correctness You know and then you've got emotional mind Which is where someone is super amped up and they are not listening and they need to make their point They need to be heard and like it's all the feels right And the thing to remember about people who are in emotional mind and also you when you're in emotional mind is No one's gonna remember if you were right. They're only gonna remember how you made them feel You know and we spend 90% of our time as human beings bouncing between these two You know we're either being like super like but technically, you know, or we're just like bam reacting fast, right and In either one of these states in both of these states We're not playing with a full deck we rely really heavily on bias and judgments and these states force us You know to pick those really quickly whether it's like a preconceived notion or it's just a knee-jerk reaction those are being driven by rationalizing and emotional reactions and You know in both of these states if you need to handle something complicated You're probably not gonna do an optimal job of it right because you're not playing with a full deck like you're you're already relying on every Shortcut you have it's like the CPU load is super high because someone's you know doing stuff in the background Maybe they installed malware on your computer except it's native because maybe you're a Samsung phone So, you know one of the important things to do is to try to figure out how to find the middle space Which in mindfulness they refer to as wise mind or wisdom where you're pulling information from both But you're not being driven by either these very intellectual or very emotional reactions because then you have options Then you like then it's like you just unlocked a new portion of the map, right? You can go exploring in it and make better decisions Yeah, so here's the here's the chart of the distribution of probability of time you spend here very very small probability You are being wise without trying really hard and a good way to identify Where you're at right now is sort of like look at your thoughts and see what they're like Are you cool? Is everything slow? Are you rational? Are you task-focused? Are you surgical? Do you have a plan it are 15 people gonna march in line for your plan? You might be rationalizing your loot ruled by logic and pragmatics And otherwise if you're an emotional mind, you might just feel super urgent You're like the shit's got to get done now, right? And And It's a very intense experience, you know, and you might have a lot of feelings come up during it And I'm not one I don't want to say that these states are bad, right? And that you should feel bad if you're doing one or the other they both have information and that's the point They both have a lot of information We are social organisms your feelings give you a lot of information like you can have a hunch that tells you Well that person I don't want to be standing next to them because they're just there's something about it You don't understand why but you're like I don't feel safe there or you know what that doesn't look right or hey You know what? There's something wrong with that that that that packet value. I I'll know what it is in a minute. These things are giving you tons of information sort of below the radar And you want to combine that information to have a very sort of accurate reference point for this moment, right? Like I'm surrounded by my friends and this is really awesome And I'm really happy to be here even though I'm nervous, right? That's the reality and You know so when Buddhists talk about letting go of attachment They talk about letting go of all of the things that you sort of assume to be true when you're in one state or the other where you're like No, I'm in the state and I've got to stay in this state like you can invert This to have like sort of a well of activation energy if you're super emotional It's hard to calm down and if you're super rational. It's hard to listen to other people, right? And it takes a lot of energy to say I'm going to try to sit above this and be as fair as I can even though this feels terrible And it's exhausting right like if you're being the good parent as opposed to the parents who's like I quit kids of yours and you know so That's attachment to be one way or another to be like this has to be the way as opposed to saying I can have more perspective So when Buddhists talk about letting go of attachment They don't mean that you shouldn't care and you shouldn't feel and you shouldn't think and you shouldn't have a belief They mean that you should just be aware of where you're coming from and aware of your own state of mind Be able to see and identify where you're at be able to see and identify what things are judgments What things are assumptions what things are facts and then like name them and identify them like Leaves in a stream so that you can let them go and go think about something else and the law is going to come back There's always going to be more stuff flowing past but when you let them go. That's when you can problem solve So this is like the sort of introspective equivalent of going for a walk because you need to figure out how to solve a problem You're giving yourself a break and you're moving past what you're focused on you're saying gonna let go of the focus I'm gonna walk away from the terminal. I'm gonna go to the vending machine. I'm gonna solder some stuff I'm gonna play some video games And then I'm gonna come back because you're trying to let go of the problem so that you can come back to it and solve it right Because if you were to stay in front of your terminal and not get that perspective You would just repeat the same mistake over and over and over and over and over again So the parable of the two Buddhist monks demonstrates this does anyone know this one? Yay, okay, so the parable of the monks arm an older monk and a younger monk are walking down the road And they hear a raucous and screaming so they run out To where they hear it from and there's a woman drowning in the lake and the younger monk is like I don't know what to do and so the older monk jumps into the water grabs the woman pulls her out of the lake She's super sod and he really has to like drag her up onto the beach Then he has to turn her over knock the water out of her lungs Give her CPR and then he sits with her for an hour to make sure that she's okay before he moves on The younger monk doesn't do anything during this time. So then they pick up they get their stuff They keep going down the road And about five hours later the younger monk finally speaks and he says hmm Brother I I have I have some concerns the older monk is oh you tell me tell me about your concerns And the younger one says you touched that woman back there, and you know, we're not supposed to touch women and The first ones think the first one the older one says hmm. I see well I may have touched her body, but you've been the one carrying her with us for the past five hours or We can have the parable of Allison Mallory and the new QC system So So basically Alice and Mallory work on the same team and Alice has just been promoted to team lead And she's like you know what we really need to do better. We need to implement unit test We need to implement code coverage. We're gonna have a QC system. You're gonna QC your stuff It's gonna get QC to tested before it gets deployed to production and this is how we're going to improve productivity I've got it all figured out and she like drops the docs on everybody She gives like one or two trading presentations, and then she's like, okay, everybody go and Mallory, you know Roles into work and keeps on keeps on breaking the production build. She doesn't really know how to run the test She doesn't you know, she just keeps on doing things the old way and Alice gets like really irate and just like keeps Keeps working on the system being like Mallory. You've got to do a better job You know and brings her in for some pretty tense one-on-ones where she's like, why aren't you doing this and Mallory's like? I don't want to talk about it like you know This is really you know This is just difficult and then Mallory starts talking to the water cooler and man this really sucks It's like process isn't really good, you know I don't know what I'm like I want to do it the right way But like you know Alice doesn't know what she's doing and it's like super tense I'm like why did everything change when she got promoted all this really sucks, you know And before long you've got a classic management setup to fail scenario Alice puts Mallory on a performance improvement plan and Mallory quits and You know do we know what happened there? Do you have some ideas? Because we actually don't know at all what happened there But if you have ideas and you have strong opinions and those opinions are already forming that tells you a lot about yourself So we don't know what happened with Alice. Maybe Alice wasn't good at talking to people Maybe her presentations weren't clear. Maybe her process was convoluted. Maybe it made sense to her not nobody else Maybe Mallory didn't care, right? I was just dragging her feet or maybe Mallory cared but couldn't do it We don't know right like is like know what like that the scenario doesn't include all of those sort of internal details Because we don't have those about other people But if you find yourself like making assumptions about someone else's intentions without information Those that data is about you. It's not about them So that's one way to separate out is this me or is it them because if you can get that information on nothing It's about you so Related let's let's practice what noting is like so this is called the four seven eight or relaxing breathing exercise It's a very yoga thing to do and it's basically really simple We're gonna breathe in for four seconds hold it for seven and then breathe out for eight. So breathe in Breathe out now do it again breathe in Hold it now breathe out Keep breathing while I'm talking So I want you to exhale completely through your mouth and for the fun of it do make a whoosh sound So we're gonna take a few seconds to stop and note and so while you're breathing in and Breathing out slowly. I want you to try to observe how you feel Do you have any particular sensation in your body right now? Are you experiencing any particular emotions that you can identify? Keep breathing and try to name those emotions If the emotion comes with a physical sensation try to describe it to yourself Maybe your hands are tingly. Maybe your fingers feel cold or you have tension in your shoulders Keep breathing and see if the emotion has any reaction or action urge that comes with it Do you know what that urge is? Can you name it or is it not particularly specific? As you keep breathing, do you have any idea where that urge might be coming from and? Can you just name that without judging it? And then move on to the next feeling to see that come through Can you describe for yourself the way the air feels right now? and Then note any sounds either inside or outside the dome Breathe in and breathe out And when you feel ready Come back to the room So that's a that's a breathing and noting exercise and the things you know, they're just your thoughts and feelings They're not who you are, you know, that's not Dictating where you're coming from or where are you going today? It's just stuff you're carrying around in your backpack because we're magpies and we pick up shiny and painful feelings And we put them in our backpack and keep them with us for all time Because your objective in being an effective person is trying to get to the zone of awesome where you've got your side Their side and the truth and like I mentioned earlier one of the things that forced me to actually look at myself and Improving myself so I could be less of a dick to the people around me because I was being super perfectionistic and Driving myself really hard and that made me drive other people's really hard And made it not fun to work with me on a team because I was taking everything too seriously because oh my god I wanted to save babies Right, but that's not an effective way to save babies if people are constantly saying like screw you. I don't want to work on your project Is is it takes two to fight and then I ran into a person in the grocery line. I learned awesome things from strangers. I Had one person tell me Don't should all over yourself Like if you're constantly saying yourself, oh, I should be doing this and I should be doing that like stop and maybe say What do I want to be doing because right now I'm just goading myself and making myself feel bad and The person in the grocery line said, you know what? There's always three sides to every story your side there aside in the truth and I'm like, oh my god, this is great Because you really want to get to that like awesome zone of win because that's when you are aligned with the people next to you And you can put your little flashlight so singular perspective together and map out more of the world That's effectiveness. That's leverage And and you know, I don't want you to forget that you're human, right? So This stuff is not easy to do you are constantly running a huge amount of cognitive tasks You're doing 15 million things like you're running biological processes You might have tissue that's damaged in healing. You've got a lot going on in your emotional life You've got a lot going on with work. You there are people you care about and you wonder if you're going to be able to Help them right like there's shit in the news all of these things You know put cognitive load on you. So that's why you see President Obama a former president Obama make Shortcuts like he has or the fly. Let's talk about the fly. Let's keep it nerdy. His suits are all the same So he doesn't have to think about it. He's like optimized. I'm gonna spend that brainpower on you know doing weird mutant shit so you know You uh, so you're like, okay, so you've given me this thing that scares me about myself and how the That suck do I you know get to the real heart of somebody else given that we're having all of these proxy interactions Right, you just told me that you never really know another person. So it's all done by proxy. Oh, what do I do? And you know at best you infer who you are through introspection and try to like Shrink the size of your projection down to yourself And that doesn't mean you have to be yourself with everybody It means you control when you're projecting something versus when you're not Right like if you've got to have the work persona because you work with a bunch of terrible people okay, but maybe you don't want to wear that at home and and You know and then similarly You try to make accurate observations about other people keeping in mind that your lens is distorted So like sometimes that means calling it and saying I Really stubbed my toe. I have a twisted ankle. I am going to do fuck all that is productive with interacting with other people I am going home. I am eating ice cream and I play video games, right? You know so you can you can learn by noting about yourself You can try to observe other people you can practice separating those two things out until you get an accurate picture and This is also probably usually pretty challenging for people in compsai and security based on everybody I know but practicing compassion is really hard But practicing compassion to yourself Practicing compassion to others is being effective if you can't think of anything nice about anybody else Try saying I'm a good person I hold the door open for other people sometimes and I am kind to small animals Because if those things are true it creates a little window Right, and if you don't have that window or you want to know how big your window is Like do you have a bay window? Do you have like floor to ceiling windows? Are you looking out of a periscope? There's this thing called the self-compassion score. It's like 20 questions And it's you know actually research driven and therapy driven, but it gives you questions like When I'm really into to note on you know one to five Things like when I'm really struggling I tend to feel like other people must be having an easier time of it or I'm intolerant and impatient towards those aspects of my personality that I don't like in which case you might be Shooting all over yourself all the time and driving up the system load or You might actually say a five on I try to see my failings as part of the human condition I don't always succeed, but I try Hmm because if you can't hold yourself in compassion You know and go through and actually sort of give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You're only playing with a quarter of a deck And you're gonna have a really hard time giving other people a fair shake like it's not just about Damning who you are and taking care of everybody else You know you've got to put on your own oxygen mask before you put on somebody else's because it is a reciprocal social Relationship and you know everybody needs to be taking care of themselves because just like you can't own other people's stuff No one else can own yours only you can really take care of yourself and then put yourself in a good position to help others or Confound others or smash the competition or whatever it is you want to do like you don't have to be altruistic to be effective But you do have to take care of yourself And you know the self-care of this mining for operational margin Which is you know actually way more valuable than Bitcoin Is you know driven by stuff like it's hard. It's hard, right? It will bring up every insecurity you have like there's a good article here that I like because she actually lists out Why it's hard like you take care of yourself and you feel like they're starving children in Africa Why am I getting a Manny Petty? You know because many pennies aren't self-care, right? Maybe self-care is having breakfast every day Maybe self-care is taking time to see your friends, right? You know, but it's the only thing that'll take you through and there's another article I really like because I you know try to find and identify with other people going through things and there's an MIT admissions blog Entry about meltdown where this young woman is basically saying She was having a really hard time She was thinking about dropping out of school and her friends like oh, I think I see your problem You only stay happy to the extent that it helps you be a better scientist And you only take care of yourself to the extent that it helps you be a better scientist And that's not the right reason to go on living, right? You've got to actually take care of yourself So I'm gonna run through the last slides pretty quickly before I run out of time But here are the tools you use, right? So you've got tools to debug yourself You can note and try to be compassionate and non-judgmental when you think about where you're at where you're coming from and where you want to go and you know Admittedly that process is going to be scary and you can practice naming those feelings or doing mindfulness practice like the exercise I just walked through you can talk to a friend about the situation. So in the work situation, I talked to one of my best friends I tried to outline everything You know really reasonably to her and her feedback to me was you are being an asshole, right? She reflected me back to myself accurately, right? I was honest with her and she's like, here's the truth about you You don't want to see it You're being a dick and you need to go apologize, which I did it didn't work, but I did it You know and if that's too much you can talk to a therapist This is their job, right? If you are working on things like cognitive distortions Then a cognitive behavioral therapist can help you with that, right? If you have distorted thinking from someone who's like just skewed your worldview and you're like How do I get to a different worldview given that this is where I'm at? That's what CBT is If you're working on things like man, I get angry at the drop of a hat or I'm just so anxious all the time I can't even think straight That's usually the purview of dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT Which is usually done in a group setting so that you can kind of role model from all of the people around you Right and like work on it with a group and a care team DBT helps people with borderline personality disorder be functional and effective the founder had borderline personality disorder But you know these things are you know good if you have trauma. They're good if you have PTSD They're good if you don't they're good if you just grew up lonely Or if you just don't know what you want and you need like a little bit of help to figure that out so that you can Go happily tuteline along on your way Like there's nothing wrong with getting help to have someone Reflect you back to yourself when you don't have a mirror in your apartment, right? And tools to debug others are things like you know the same way you set up to solve an engineering problem Be clear when you go in about what you're trying to do just be honest with yourself Am I going into that office to make a make a deal and like get a new person on my team? You know do I have a task or a goal in mind? Am I going into that office because I know that I really want that person to work with me And I may not think that they have the right answer But their relationship is important and I know that someday we're going to do better work together Or am I going in that office because I need to feel self-respect this person. It's pushing me around and goddamn And I'm not going to take it anymore, right? What are your goals if you know those and act in an integrity with them you'll have an easier time whereas like if you say I'm trying to get the task done, but really you just want to pick a fight You're not going to get the task done and a fight's going to go badly Then you know with other people you don't want to put all of your stuff on them, right? If you're asking someone for something project that you're calm, right? Try not to be manipulative I mean, I know that this would be plus 10 to social engineering But usually you are effective in social engineering when you take the work off of somebody else, right? So like spend a little time be confident be calm be willing be open Listen actively like you have to learn about other people by kind of Situationally observing them in different settings, right? If you're not paying attention, you're not learning anything about them Then you need to you know validate the valid like active listening isn't I know what you're going to say And then tuning them out. Maybe they'll surprise you people will surprise you Makes based during the interaction for things to happen Don't script everything in your life because you're convinced it has only one way to go. That's very very rational, right? but it's also very very narrow and Adjust your tactics right like things are going to change people are going to throw you for curves But you're smart you're flexible and you can figure it out, but you have to stay, you know like light on your feet This is why I like when you're doing martial arts you stay centered and calm again wisdom the best of both worlds So that you can just sort of move with what you have to do as opposed to entrenched rigid and predetermined So I saw a pretty cool tweet from a friend that demonstrates this because you should do some low-stake team-building exercises like Try to describe something you want your friend to draw through a wall Or you can play games and we'll see I don't think I have time for this But the MIT mystery hunt had a challenge two years ago where you had to recite password strings to another player It's at ten minutes on the mystery hunt documentary I really recommend you watch it because it's hilarious and it shows you how people interact together and how they build a rapport And a relationship in order to solve this problem with you know both people passing the issue back and forth you know and Again, this is a summary of how much emotional work and emotional labor all of this is yes It is a lot of work This is why managers get paid what they do because they do this work for a team and as you go along one side It's increasingly more like therapy everything from pitching things like mr. Rogers does to you know sorting out and and Fixing miscommunications by figuring out where each person is coming from even though they might not know right? That's management's job But if your team members do some of this thing like role modeling right and setting values and setting clear boundaries and being Consistent then the whole team will work better together Which is to say if you're very clear about where you're coming from and why you'll have an easier time interfacing with other people's API's and You know again, let go of control you've got to be vulnerable to build trust if people don't know who you are They're not going to trust you they're not going to listen to you and you're not going to see the real them Right so don't hold the reins of power tightly if you get the chance to work with people Hold them loosely and give them that open space to trust you and help you in ways you might not expect Because this can make you a much better developer and technologist And it's a lifelong practice And you may not have the skills yet, and you may not know what you want But you've got like how many decades to work on it if you want to this stuff can slow you down But it can't stop you you're all way too smart for that and There are worse things to be than human right it's actually pretty cool because then you get a friend It's dangerous to go along take this Much worse things to be. Thank you very much