 scale in the mentoring track is my pleasure to introduce you today to Yask, who will be talking to you about how you don't really know anything. And I was told that it was previously known as you are all idiots. So he's going to do his own introduction, but let's give him a warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to start with this disclaimer. If you don't like some of the things I say, I'm sorry, I'm just telling you how the world works. And if you have a problem with that, you've got to complain to whoever you think made it, be that Zeus, Poseidon, Thor, Ram, Yahweh, or the Judeo on the mountain. Or be content that evolution definitely did the best it could. Don't shoot the messenger all in all. Now I'm going to start with some images that you're probably familiar with. By the way, the part where I left myself, I just skipped. My name is your sports lead. I work as community manager for own cloud. And I hope I won't insult you all too much. Back to the image. So I don't know how many of you have seen this. So you know that A and B are exactly the same shades of color, even though it must certainly doesn't look like that. Then again, these lines are horizontal and they don't look like it. And this is not a GIF. It's a JPEG file. If you look closely, you can see the JPEG artifact. So we call these visual illusions. And really, that's a misnomer. Because there's nothing illusionary about them. They're just images. Just stuff that you look at all day. And it's not the image that has anything funky going on about it. It's our brain that is screwing up. It's this gray matter here that's making a mess out of what you're looking at. Not the image is fine. There's no lying there. It's not a mirror trick or anything like that. So I think this should worry you. Because I'm going to get to a couple of things you might not want to know. But then again, you must have read the description of the talk. So I hope you know. So this is a picture of our brain. And by the way, if you're a neurosurgeon, you're going to hate me because I'm simplifying here quite criminally much. But I hope you all get a point. So the green part, both the light green and the dark green, that's the part that does this messing up of the images you look at. It's a visual cortex. It's been either evolved over millions of years or carefully designed by one deity or another. It's quite a complicated piece of machinery. But then again, it's designed to do what it does. Look at stuff. You get input from your eyes and it gets processed in multiple stages. It's really quite interesting if you're interested in this kind of stuff. A lot of this has been emulated in computers. It does like edge detection with algorithms. You can quite easily, you know, emulate that. I mean, in theory, if you would lose a part of that brain, we could probably actually replace it with a computer. I mean, you know, there's a lot of connection issues. But the processing we can do pretty well. So it's reason we want to understand how it works. But it makes mistakes. Now, you have to realize you've been looking at stuff your entire life. I mean, you do it about 16 hours a day. You've been doing that since you were born. And you have a brain that's specifically designed to look at stuff all the time. Now, I'm going to talk about what you do with the front part of your brain. It's roughly equally big. It's a frontal lobe there. And it's where, among many other things, you know, logical thinking is supposed to be. Unlike the part on the back, it wasn't exactly designed to do that. Not at all. You have to learn it. You might remember math classes. That's fun, right? It takes years to learn how to read and write and all this stuff. And you don't do this a lot. Actually, researchers in this area, depends on who you ask. But if you would ask them, how many times a day do you really, seriously, consciously, deliberately make a decision? They will say either once or twice a day, once or twice a week, depends on who you talk to. Some believe it's even less. Some say you never really consciously make a decision. It's your subconscious that does it all the time. So this might be a surprise for many of you. You think you make decisions all the time. Let me tell you about a little experiment they did, which I find fascinating. And it's been replicated thousands of times. Well, probably more than dozens of times. So it works like this. You put a person in a room, you put a button in front of them, and you tell them, look, you can press the button whenever you want. You can do it in five minutes, you go out in ten minutes, you can do it in an hour. Your only task is to decide autonomously when to press the button. There are no screens in the room, there's no subconscious machinery trying to make you do anything, nothing. You do get one of these funny hats on with all the wires because they're checking what's happening in your brain, but that's it. Now, before you do something, your brain kind of prepares for that. So the red part, that's the primary motor cortex, it kind of prepares the movement. It's quite interesting how that works too, by the way, when you think of a movement, roughly the same activity takes place and when you actually execute the movement. But that's a different thing. This is like an activity that happens before you move. Now, with these devices, you can measure this activity happening approximately 600, 400 to 600 milliseconds before the movement takes place. So if you're looking at a brainwave, you can, about half a second before someone does something, you can say, oh, he's going to click on the button. Now, what they've done is they started to interrupt people in their time. So the moment they saw the activity, they said, oh, stop, stop. Did you already decide to click? You know what the answer was? No, but they can reliably predict that you will click, but you don't know it yet. So what does that tell you? Well, your consciousness clearly didn't decide to click yet. Your brain already was going to click. So you didn't make the decision consciously. This was quite interesting to discover, as you can imagine. And since then, a lot of research has been done in these areas, and that's where you get to the point where some researchers believe you don't make conscious decisions at all and consciousness is just watching what's going on and makes you think you're in charge. Big conversation. The point of all of it is that we've been doing pretty amazing stuff. I admit. But at the same time, this is not primarily what we do and what our brains do. On one hand, we all think we're very smart, and these guys, they were quite brilliant in their own ways. Yes, but at the same time, they were very flawed. I mean, take Mr. Newton on the bottom right here. He himself believed that his research into alchemy had far greater relevance than the stuff he did related to the apple and gravity. I mean, right now you think what? But yes, seriously, he thought that alchemy was the thing. He tried to find the philosopher's stone, turn stuff into gold. He tried to find the elixir of life. Seriously, he did. So you might argue there might have been something a little off here with this very intelligent man. So was this just a lack of knowledge? I mean, how is this possible that people that smart spend so much of their time on stuff? Well, we generally accept that silly. I mean, the guy on the bottom left, I'm pretty sure really did believe Zeus did live on Olympus, right? It's fascinating sometimes. So let's talk about math for a second. I'll make my point, don't worry. So throwing dice, gambling, is pretty old. This stone was found in Egypt, and not recent, but it was found recently, but it's old. The Egyptians were using this. So if I ask all of you, how big is the chance to throw a six or a die with 20 sides like this? How big is that chance? Anyone? One and 20. Exactly, Minto. So let's say I throw again. How big is my chance on a six? One and 20. So we know that, right? And we also know that if you throw twice, the chance to get a six two times in a row is one out of 20 times one out of 20. So, well, let's say we're all very smart as humans. I'm not talking about any of you in particular, just in general. We must have figured that out quite a while ago. Did the Egyptians know it? Who thinks that the Babylonians discovered this? Hence. Egyptians, then. Who thinks the Greeks discovered this? Come on, 300 before Christ, they were smart guys. One hand, two hands, three, four. All right, all right, all right. The Romans, somewhere 300 after Christ. Let's go a little later then. How about the great Muslim philosophers in the year 1200? No? Yeah, you're right. It took until 1565 until the Italian, no less, figured it out. And he only, well, he didn't publish it ever, as a matter of fact. It was only published after his death. And he didn't even know this multiplication rule. The only thing he knew was there was something with multiplying the chances, but he didn't really get the how or what. So we've only known this for 400 years, which for something as common as gambling, can you imagine if you would have gone back in time with the knowledge you have today of this one thing, you could have won the entire ancient world by just playing dice, because I loved playing dice, because you understood chance. It's not like they didn't think about it. They did. So just to get an idea how long this took for us to get a clue. Now, but now we know, right? Now we've learned that, you know, if you throw dice twice, you know, the second throw is not related to the first, or not. Why the heck does this still exist? That makes no sense. If we were even half rational, now with our big heads, this would not exist. In the middle of a desert, nonetheless. So why? Well, for the same reason that you can't count the black dots. And the same reason that this still is not a gift. Your brain is just not very good at this stuff. You think you are, but we have countless limitations. We are just not that terribly clever. So, well, I mean, if psychologists do anything, one of the major things I guess they should be doing is, of course, studying this, right? What's wrong in our head? Now, they call it cognitive biases. And they are fundamental consistent biases. So mistakes we make consistently, reliably. You can absolutely count on people making certain mistakes again and again and again, because it's wired, hardwired in our brain. It'll come back again and again. I mean, Wikipedia actually notes that it's often studied in psychology and behavioral economies. Yeah, no shit. Right? That's what I should be doing. So, let's talk about statistics a bit. Because I was just talking about dice. I mean, how does our brain deal with math and statistics? Think. How did you learn that 9 times 9 is 81? You know that all, right? Do you calculate that when I ask 9 times 9? You remember it, right? Your brain is not that good at calculations. Your memory is pretty pay-ish. I mean, lots of issues with that one. We'll get to that. But memory is used a lot by your brain to determine chances. Now, there are issues with that. Let's say you have a key ring and there are two keys on it that look very similar. We all know, statistically speaking, that the chance that you grabbed the wrong key is 50%. But we also all know that in reality, you grabbed the wrong key about 70%, 80%, right? That's how it works, right? So why do we think this? Well, this is because if your brain asks itself, gosh, how often do I grab the wrong key? It doesn't calculate it. It looks in your memory. Now, it happens to be the case that the way memory stores stuff is influenced by a lot of things, including emotions. And we tend to get a little more emotional when something goes wrong than when it goes right. So that's what you remember. That's why you think it goes wrong. And this is also why people are afraid of flying. Because every time a plane crashes, it's in the news. We won't forget. So when you have to decide whether to drive or fly, you ask yourself, gosh, is flying dangerous? Your brain says, well, I can think of a couple of cases when it went wrong. Yes, it's dangerous. Let's not fly. And this is pretty hard to get over, even if you recently know that it's not dangerous. Lots of people still need bloody therapy to get over their fear of flying. So this isn't just a thing that influences how much you think something happens. But it goes a lot deeper. It's really a belief in your brain that flying is dangerous because it makes this mistake. It really makes you afraid. It's not a superficial little fact, but it's more of a belief. It goes really deep because it's the way your brain works. And your brain tends to rely on these heuristics, these biases, and make these mistakes again and again and again. I mean, we know this one. I mean, I'll give you a couple of seconds to read it. We know that correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but there's another ex-carsity strip where he plots out the incidence of cancer and the use of cell phones. The conclusion inevitably will have to be that cancer causes cell phones. It's pretty interesting because that's what the numbers say. When I studied psychology, in my first statistics class, they gave a really beautiful example of how people can misunderstand statistics. It's not directly about causation. Did you know that there's a relationship, a correlation between cancer and handbags? Everybody was like, what? Yeah, yeah. If you have a handbag, you're more likely to get cancer. And this is true. You can look it up. This is a difficult fact. Why is that? Well, it's called a spurious correlation. It's caused by something else. Yeah, there happens to be correlation between something else and handbags and that something else and cancer. That's being female. If you're a woman, you're more likely to get cancer than a man. You're also more likely to have a handbag. There comes a relationship between handbags and cancer. But we are bestowed by this. We automatically think that this comes with that that has to be a causal relationship. No, there isn't. And the fact that you walk over a certain path and the tiger attacks you is not that path that makes it or the holy tree that made the tiger go away after that. That might have helped that you climbed in it. So we make a lot of mistakes. And this goes in many different directions. Another thing I really like, I'm going to give you a scenario. You're going to tell me what you do. Let's say you're going to buy a television, an expensive one, $5,000. So, well, you picked your TV and you're about to check out, pay for it. And somebody behind you in the line says, hey, dude, across the street, they're selling the same TV for $4,995. Are you going to cross the street for that? How many of you would cross the street? Two. Yeah, I guess so. All right, different scenario. You suddenly are in need of a pen. So you walk into a store and they sell a pen, but it's crazy expensive. It's going to be $5. Somebody behind you in line says, hey, you crossed the street, sell the same pen for only one. Who's going to cross the street? Uh-huh. I know. Does it make any kind of sense, certainly speaking? No, it does not. Don't we know that? This is us. We're not logical. We're not rational. Heck no. There's a massive list of these things. Illusion of superiority. More than half of us think they're smarter than average. We all know that's not the case. They've done a study and they ask from people a bunch of trivial questions. You know, who's the current president of the United States and stuff like that. Who's the rights chancellor of Germany during World War II? Most people know that stuff. And then at the end, they say, look, after each question, if you were really, really, really sure that you're right, like 100%, no doubt about it, you would bet your house on it, then, you know, check this box. What percentage of those questions that people get wrong? 20. Good luck. That would cost you a house, right? We are a little overconfident. This is not only in the direction of confidence, by the way. It can only also go the other way. If people do a difficult task and you ask them to estimate whether they do compared to the average, they will actually go the other way around and they will think, gosh, this was so hard. I must have performed worse than average. You might probably know this other thing. If you studied for something and you learned something that was really complicated from then on, you will believe it's simple. Anyone can do it, because I can. Again, we are not good at estimating stuff. So this is a list of biases from Wikipedia. As you see it's long. There are some really fun ones. The well-traveled road effect. If you travel a certain route from home to work, the more often you've traveled the route, the shorter you'll think it is. There you go. Many more. One of the fun ones actually brings us back to an earlier image. Not this one though, the ones that are so weird. And it's the naive realism effect. I'm going to quote it completely. It is the belief that we see reality as it really is, objectively and without bias. That effects are plain for all to see. That rational people will agree with us and that those who don't agree with us are either uninformed, lazy, irrational or biased. Because of course we aren't biased. And again, there are countless more. And the thing is, these have an effect on us and our behavior in our society in general. And there's the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unskilled people overestimate their ability in something while skilled people underestimate their ability. This means that if you're in a room with experts and people who don't know shit about something, the experts will think, gosh, I'm not entirely sure about this, I'll shut up. But the people who don't know what they're talking about don't have that problem. We must have had this experience at birthday parties, right? So a lot of these effects can be played and they are being played. And there's the endowment effect. People require more pay to give something up than they would pay to acquire it. So you can give something to people and then offer them money or offer them something to give it back but they don't want to do that. They will want to keep it more than that they would have paid for it in the first place. It's a nice trick, right? You can use it if you want to sell stuff. There's also the decoy effect and supermarkets love this. A choice between A and B is going to be influenced by an entirely unrelated object C. For example, if C is similar but not better than either A or B, that's a funny thing, right? So if you have two bottles of wine in the store that you can buy and there's a $30 bottle and a $40 bottle, a lot of people will go for the $30 bottle. So then you introduce a $60 bottle because then they're all going to buy the $40 bottle. This really works. That's why you always have an extra expensive item in the store. They don't sell it. They don't want to sell it. They just want you to buy a more expensive product that's just below it. It's called the decoy effect. And there's a lot of stuff like this. There's the mere exposure effect. The more you've seen something, the more you'll like it. It's as simple as that. Again, there's a massive list. I have a whole bunch more of these and you know I'm going to save you guys from it. The thing is, some of these, I mean look, the wine bottle thing, okay, they try to get you to buy more. It's not cool, but hey, we all don't believe any of these nonsense anyway, so we all think we're rational. We're not influenced by the bottle, so you don't have a problem, right? This one is a little more scary. So we think that our opinions influence our behavior. They do, less than you think, but they do. And we also think that our opinions are based on what we know about the world. Experiences we had, things we read, newspapers, et cetera. In reality, your opinion is pretty much entirely predictable by simply asking for the opinion of your friends and family. Sorry to say it and in some cases it's not the family, but it's really your social circle that defines your opinion about stuff. And I'm talking about stuff like who should be the president of the next United States. If you would have had very different friends, you would have liked the guy on the other side of the aisle, and I know a lot of you will go like, no way, but really, seriously, believe me, as much as you would have crossed the street for the three bucks and not for the five. Believe me. So let me ask you a question. It's 2016. How do you get the opinion of your friends these days? How does it come to you? How do you know what, you know, your friend thinks about political stuff? Through them, right? So if they will change their algorithms a little bit, because that timeline, I mean, who knows how they construct it, right? That's magic. It's not purely based on time, right? It's not based on anything simple. It's a complicated thing, what they think you will find interesting. So they can change it a little bit, just a little bit. Now, just make stuff about a certain presidential candidate that's positive, a little more likely to be higher up, negative stuff a little down, and do the other for the other candidate. They can change the elections. And no one will ever know, and you will never be able to prove it unless you really catch the people who wrote the code which you can't because, you know, the MCA and 50 other laws and rules and reasons, right? This is the scary stuff, because you see, you might have heard of these experiments, our colleagues did, with subliminal messages, you know, you're sitting in a movie theater and, you know, they flash a bottle of Coca-Cola, so you'll buy more Cola. Does it work? Yes, it does. It's true, this stuff works. The reason they're not using it that much is because it's not so strong. Yes, it influences you, but you really aren't going to buy Coca-Cola because of that. Your brain kind of classifies this information and it will immediately discard it if, like, information from a higher value comes in. You know what information of the highest value is? What your friends think. Any other information will be discarded because of what your friends think about something. And again, that's how you get that. I'm not even talking about the information access that could rectify the whole problem because that's these days controlled by a search engine. Now, all of this that I've been talking about has been assuming that you're sane, healthy, well-educated and not drunk or stoned or anything else. If you go out in the desert for a couple of weeks too fast and, you know, think about beautiful things, you'll go hallucinate and come up with even more interesting conclusions. It's not difficult to hallucinate. You can just dance for a few hours or, as I said, go into the desert and fast. And of course, there are lots of interesting mushrooms. I, as Dutch person, should know and do. So I hope I've convinced you that there is a bit of an issue here. Now, we are not as rational as we think, and that's bad. It can be abused, it is being abused. Now, honestly, I don't think Facebook is doing this stuff right now, by the way. I mean, they're a very big company. They have so much money that if you would want to buy them in the sense of make them do this by money, you would have to come with a lot more money than even US presidential campaigns are wasting on advertising. So I'm not terribly worried that it's happening now. But we are working really, really hard at building a surveillance state, as you might have noticed. Now, we're spending hundreds of millions on storing all our information and building an infrastructure, both legal and technical, to do this stuff on a scale that's insane. I mean, China is actually doing some really interesting stuff. They're trying to gamify politics and trying to incentivize people. Via their friends, fascinatingly, they've been watching this talk, except that I haven't given it before. They're trying to basically give people a score based on their behavior. Do they do sports, healthy stuff, but also what political opinions they have and how often they talk about politics. In China, the rule is dumped. So it's a simple one. And then this score can have effects on your life, right? I mean, whether you can buy a house with a certain mortgage or not. But your score affects that of your friends. So they will put pressure on you to behave. That's very clever. And I do think if we're not careful, stuff like this is going to come here, too. But back to us. So a lot of these biases, they've been studied because, of course, people think, okay, how can we deal with this? Can we compensate for these? Now, I've got good news and bad news. For some of them, yes. We can compensate for them if you're aware of them and have the mental energy to deal with it. So especially things like preconceptions like racism and sexism, you can compensate for quite well. But you need to be aware of it in the moment. You need to have the mental energy. So if you're tired, you're going to be more racist and you're going to be more sexist because you don't have the mental capacity. It takes energy. When you're afraid or tired, you will again be, you know, well, less nice than you should have been. But we can do something. There's just training to be done, but it's limited. Now, the thing is, you're all highly educated, I'm guessing. Most of you are pretty smart. You get paid for using your brains all day. So you think these biases, for me, they're less bad than for other people, right? Well, it's actually the other way around. The thing is, our brains are smarter. So they're better at stuff, in general. And one of the things that many of these biases rely on is your brain lying to you, as I mentioned at the beginning. Well, when you're smarter, your brain happens to be better at lying to you. Seriously. You will notice that people who believe in alien abduction, still, after everybody walking around with a cellphone that can make pretty good pictures, those people are usually well educated, and they're not stupid. And that's a thing, because if they were stupid, they would have been convinced by the facts by now. It sounds silly, but this is really the case. The higher educated, the smarter people are, the better they are at finding cognitive strategies to make themselves believe stuff that is just nonsense. So you can't solve all of this, and we probably have it worse than a lot of other people, actually. I can't really help you solve it. But I can help you with a couple of social skills that will at least make a couple of things a little better. Now, I have to say, Ex-Cassidy Rocks, I've taken for this part of the talk, I've taken a bunch of his pictures. You should really look it up. If you have questions, you can now ask them at any time or now, before I'm going to go into this or during. But I'm going to try and talk a little bit about social interaction. So I'm not going to get too many much into the biases, because the problem with them is you can't really do much about them. What you can do is try and be nice to other people. You'll be surprised how much that helps with a lot of these. So, I'll talk about communication AFK, as they call it. Now, I'm going to talk about three points. I'm going to talk about opening and having conversations, giving and receiving feedback, and working with other people. So let's talk about having conversations. Now, a lot of you are probably aware that in real life, the communication is not abstracted from the hardware layer. So it matters what you look like, whether you dress and whether you have a nice hat or not. I like the one over there, by the way. So the protocol is not abstracted away, so you have to care about this stuff, right? And the problem is communication itself. I mean, there's no proper RFC process. It's not standardized. It's totally under-documented, and there's a lot of redundant elements. Now, usually, when you have a conversation with people, it goes a little bit like this. Hi, how are you? Fine, thank you. Which, by the way, is redundant. It doesn't have to be true. You just say it. And then you go back, and you say, I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Do it the other response again with, I'm fine, thank you. Now, here it gets interesting. The local differences are massive. The conversation I just described, which is utterly normal for the vast majority of you, irritates Germans beyond belief. And this is true. They think it is dishonest to ask people how they are when you're not interested in it. Doesn't that make sense in a German way? It does, right? This is true. So my wife, she's from Brazil, and she moved to Germany about five years ago. And the difference was amazing to her. The thing is, when you get a new job in Germany, it's totally different from Brazil. In Brazil, on the first day, somebody would show you around the office, and then you would basically shake hands with every new colleague, and as soon as the guy or girl who shows you around is gone, they will probably come to your desk at one point or another, talk to you, have socials chat, how many kids do you have, where do you live, and how's the weather, and everything else. In the evening, you all go out to a pub somewhere, get drunk together, get to know each other a little better, and you'll probably have a bunch of new Facebook friends at the end of the evening. That's how it works in Brazil. In Germany, it's slightly different. You come in the office, somebody points you to where is what, they'll put you behind the desk, nobody will talk to you the rest of the day. Nor the next day, nor the rest of the week. And the first time you get a first Facebook friend, it's probably after half a year at minimum. Now the thing is, they're both being polite, just in their own way. So in Brazil, people think it's polite to come and introduce you and tell you that they're all there for you and they want to help you, et cetera, and you're part of the family. They think it's polite to let people figure out their own way, don't bother them too much, don't flop them with all the social nonsense, just let them find out their ways and then, of course, whenever they have questions, they can come. They're both being polite, they're both being nice. How do you deal with this? Well, first of all, be extra nice yourself, because that never really goes wrong, although it does sometimes upset the Germans. I'm not joking about that. If I go in a supermarket here, I'm checking out and people say, hi, how are you? I mean, it's a live in Berlin. I'm Dutch, but I live in Berlin and I love it. But it's still weird that people say, hi, how are you? And I'm, oh, shit, I have to answer. Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, thank you, how are you? This is still weird for me, but in Germany, people will genuinely find this insulting. I'm not joking. It's none of your business. You are asking someone you don't know how they are? You force people to talk to a stranger about how they are. This is seriously considered a violation of privacy. You're laughing, but this is serious. People in Germany, they don't like Americans. This is one of the reasons. They think it's all this stuff that's weird people. So don't assume bad intentions. People are usually being polite in their own way. My wife really thought they all hated her at work. She thought, oh, my God, what have I done wrong? Nobody came and talked to me. I mean, she's now been working at different companies, and she's used to it now, but that really took some time and effort. This is not easy. She's not terribly communicative herself, so this was quite tough on her in the beginning. So it's different. I always tell Europeans be extra, extra, extra nice because then you'll still be a dick. I think, you know, in my experience, Americans are usually very friendly. I mean, you might still, I'm sure, have your own opinions of the people from there or there or there, but believe me, compared to Europe, you're doing just fine. But for you, I can definitely recommend a slightly thicker skin because you do get upset rather easily and try to be a little more direct, especially to the Northern Europeans because they don't want to get subtle hints. They really won't. And also, you won't be able to insult them that easily and don't compliment too much. Really, it's... Like, I had my job interview with my boss at SUSE for SUSE Community Manager about seven years ago, and in this first conversation, he started to say, guys, for the beautiful resume, and, you know, and he went on and on. And at some point I said, okay, can I please interrupt? This is making me feel really uncomfortable. I mean, more than two compliments in one phone call? Please don't. It doesn't work for me. I'm Dutch. I come from an island where they basically look at the world this way. You're doing your job really well. That's the very minimum, so don't expect any compliments for that. If you go above and beyond it, we'll consider. So I had trouble with taking compliments. I still do, by the way. Starting with applause, I still find weird. It's a little too much. So these differences are bad. I'm not even talking about Asia, right? Japan, China, I mean, these gaps. I mean, we're talking here, U.S., Europe, right? I mean, well, first of all, let's be honest, a lot of you are European, genetically speaking, but there's a massive gap there. So keep that in mind. Now, this was starting up, and the key you need to understand is when you say, hi, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you very much. This is essentially a handshake protocol and there's no data transfer. I mean, for you again, this is all familiar, but for Europeans, when I say it that way, everybody goes like, ah! Ah! Now I get it. This is just a handshake protocol. No data transfer. It's a key. But after the handshake protocol, that's where data transfer starts. Now, often in social setting, you start with small talk. This is not a programming language. It's the other one. Now, a good way of looking at small talk is that it is about decreasing your page rank. Now, I know a lot of you are probably not a big fan of SEO, but on a personal level, you need to do a little bit of that, too. It's not about the content, but it's about your reputation. So keep the conversation light. It could be fun to talk about the kid who puked at a birthday party or something, but don't talk about family member who died. That's too heavy, really. And when you talk about the weather, just stay away from too many telemetry details. Just keep it generic. You know, like, it was good or bad. The amount of participation is not really terribly relevant, as in most people don't care. Now, I want to help you a little bit with some issues, and I'll give you a second to read this one, because I think it's rather common for people. Again, ex-cacity understands us, I think. What you need to understand is that this is very normal. Pretty much everybody has it. As a matter of fact, there is a bias here. It's called a spotlight effect. We think everybody else gives a shit about us. In reality, they don't. Now, some people have this more than others. I mean, I personally, when I walk past a group of people, oh, my God, I really think that they're looking at me always. I hate that. I feel so... Oh, shit, am I walking right? People have it a lot. Some people don't have it. But the fact that you always think that they're judging you, almost everybody has it. And in reality, believe me, people are way too busy with themselves. They don't judge so much. They don't have time for that. They're both thinking this. That's a thing. I mean, there's this fancy term that goes around a bit. It's called the imposter syndrome. I don't think it's officially a syndrome, but I think it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of people have this kind of anxiety. And I think you should look at it a little bit different. Now, it means, as long as you're uncertain, it means you're still open to learning. You want to get better. If you wouldn't, you'd be psychopath. See, that's a good thing. And if you don't have it, maybe you should be worried. Now, there are multiple causes for this. As I said, it's a bias. It's something that's built into our brains. And again, it completely helps you with that one. But being aware of it helps. And one thing you need to realize is part of it is that we only see the outside in the finished work. If you see a programmer who wrote something and you see the code and you think, oh, my God, this is fucking brilliant. I can never do this. You don't know how much time I spend on it. You don't know how many other people they asked, how many times they were up late at night looking on the Internet, trying to find out the right snippet of code to do something, you only see the finished work. But when you do it yourself, you're painfully aware of all the steps that are needed to get there. That's why you tend to underestimate yourself in this regard, compared to other people. It's the same in having a conversation. You think it goes easy for other people? Well, ask them if you look as uncomfortable as you feel. You probably don't. Which means they might feel just as uncomfortable as you do. You're just thinking that they don't, just like what they're thinking about you. This is something a lot more of us have in common, than you think. When you have this thing called a networking session, I know a lot of geeks really go like, oh, no, no, a networking session. No, thanks. That's horrible. You're basically there to be judged. Well, if you look at it that way, you'll definitely never have a fun time. You'll never understand why there are people who for some crazy reason actually don't mind being at a networking session. But the key here is that you need to find something that genuinely interests you about the other person you're talking about. This is a very plain and simple tip. If you're in a networking session, you don't find the other person interesting, walk away. Seriously, try to find someone you find genuinely interesting, and ask after the stuff that they do that you do find interesting, and you'll be just fine. If you're listening, and you're asking the right questions, and you don't need to think about all this stuff, because you have found something you find genuinely interesting. If you start to worry like this, clearly the other person is interesting enough, you should move on. This is a very simple key. I know in reality, of course, it's a lot harder to actually do, but try to keep that in mind. If you have one of these things where you need to be social to people, you can't ask them whether they've recently upgraded their kernel that makes life a lot harder, because then you don't have anything to talk about. There are other things in life you can talk about. Personally, for example, I find it interesting to figure out what people do. In the sense of, you're a neurosurgeon, but what do you do? You're not cutting in people's brains all the time. What do these people really do? They spend a lot of time behind the desk doing paperwork, I guess. When you have a conversation with a patient and then you try to figure out what happened to them, and then you try to find out based on their behavior what's wrong with their brain. How does it work? This is fascinating stuff. Believe me, almost everybody, when you really dig into what they do, it's quite interesting. A lot of them will be like, I work, but if you really start to dig, most people are interesting. They don't think they are, so they won't talk about it too much, although there are people who think they're way too interesting. That's a whole different story. When you dig a bit, most people are interesting, especially the ones who don't really want to talk about themselves in my experience, who do actually interesting stuff that just don't really get it. They think it's interesting, but they don't think anybody else would notice that it's interesting. Now we work, a lot of us at least. This is starting a conversation, even in the most horrible situation where it's called networking session. I want to talk a little bit about this thing of getting feedback. I mean, this is another thing that you will encounter at work and that most people hate. You don't have to be a geek to hate having to give feedback to colleagues or having to get it. On the other hand, feedback is core to learning. You can't really learn if you don't get feedback on your performance, so you need it, you need it, and other people need it. So it is useful to be able to give feedback in the right way. I mean, we've all heard the term constructive feedback. I'll try to make it a little more concrete. Because there are three elements to basically giving feedback in a way that can actually use it. This is the key. It's about giving feedback that's useful. Now, first of all, it needs to be timely. Second of all, there's a question of where you do it and there's a question of what things to give feedback on. So the first one is about time and place. And this one is actually simple. Do it quick. Do it private. Because if you wait too long, the thing is you might have noticed that somebody did something really stupid, but they probably wouldn't have done it if they thought it was stupid, so they will have forgotten it a lot sooner than you did. So if you come complain about it a week later, they barely remember and they most certainly won't be happy with getting feedback on something they barely remember, because it makes it pretty hard to do something with it. So if you see something do something that you think they shouldn't and they should be aware of, first of all, realize you would do them a courtesy to tell them that. If you do it properly, they won't be angry at you. Really, most people take it quite well if you do it in the right way. It's really important to do it in time. If you wait to the next day, that's usually already way too late. Wait to the next break. Catch them at the toilet or something. Private place, not other people around. And that's really important. The second key is the markup of it. So how do you do it? Now, we all know that if you start by, that was stupid, you won't earn a lot of cookies. Now, the key is to really describe what the other person did without using any judging words. You don't have to say, you know, you did something stupid. You just describe what they did and then you shouldn't try to describe and judge that nor try to tell them what they should have done. The only thing you should do is tell them what effect it had on you. So make it personal. Now, obviously, when we're talking about code, that's a bit tough. I do get that. When we're talking about personal stuff, it's a lot easier, right? If someone was very loud in a meeting, you'd just say it made me feel very uncomfortable or try to be as concrete as possible. You scared the shit out of me. It could work. But try to make it about you because the fact is that it's then about you and how you took it and from their perspective doing something about it is doing you a favor. And people are often a lot more willing to do you a favor than to fix something that you're whining about. Right? So it's a much more friendly way. Now, when it's about code, again, don't say your pet sucks. Try to be concrete. If you do X, then Y happens and Z breaks. That's the kind of stuff people can deal with. Also, don't try to immediately give them a solution. Let them just first soak it in. Don't start with a solution. Always be specific. That's the key. And never say always or never. Why? The reason is it needs to be reasonable and real otherwise people can't really deal with it. Now, the third important thing in feedback is that you have to seek balance. Don't overdo it. So effectively you need to allow error codes. Introduce the fact that you're going to get feedback. And then the trick is to sandwich it. So, sandwiching means that you give a positive thing. I mean, you must have heard this, perhaps, at one meeting or another. You give a positive thing. You give the negative thing. And you answer the positive thing. It makes it feel a bit you know, artificial perhaps. But it really does work. As long as you're concrete in all three, so complement needs to be as concrete as a piece of criticism. You're awesome. Yes, it's nice to hear. But if the other person can't really tell you why, it doesn't mean half as much as when they can. You know what I mean? Same with applause, by the way. It's way too generic. So, and then you need to give people time for feedback. As I said, you need to let it soak. If they need to complain, if they need to say, well, I see it different, just let them vent. You need to give people time to process it. And, you know, also don't expect too much, by the way. You should not give feedback on things that they can't fix. I mean, if you give feedback and say, look, you know, you drove too hard that something people can fix. Or you drove so hard that it scared the shit out of me by the way. First of all, you had a beautiful car and then you drove too hard because it scared the shit out of me. But I really like your eyes. Might be a little too specific, but you catch my drift. This is okay. But not if you'll never drive with them again. Because, I mean, they can't fix it, at least not for you, maybe for someone else. So try not to give feedback on things that just frustrates people. You basically say, hey, you failed. And by the way, there's nothing you can do about it. That's not nice. Try to be nice, as I said earlier. That's much better than that. More karma. The other thing is you have to realize this is a pretty interesting thing that you see in a lot of self-help books. You know, how long it takes to break habit. Does anyone know the magic number? I've heard four weeks, but hey, a month, approximately. But this is self-help book knowledge, not psychology knowledge, as in, I don't think anybody really did the test. In my personal experience, it's roughly right. But if you think about this, that means you can change about 12 things that you don't like about yourself at best per year. I don't know about you, but I can make a list that's quite a bit longer than 12 things that I'd like to change about myself. The fact that you try to change three or four of them at a time probably explains why you don't change any of them. Yeah? So if you're giving feedback, you expect someone else to immediately stop talking so loud in the meeting the next day, and from then on forever, well, you might be expecting a little too much. So don't give them feedback on 12 things that are wrong in the last hour. Don't expect them to change right away and be gentle in their minders. Give them time and tell them that you give them time. I get you want to immediately stop talking loud because you always do it, and I get it. It takes time to change that. Try to help people and give them room for it. And also for yourself. Don't be angry at yourself if you still haven't done X, Y, Z. Because these things take time. Really, these ingrained behaviors can take a long time to fix. 90 days might just be right. Although I really hope I will at the same time because, my God, that's for a year. How am I on time, by the way? We're almost there, right? I have a few more things on negotiation. I'm going to talk about the orange for a couple of minutes. Now, yeah. You can read this later. I'm going to tell you all a story. It's about negotiation, and I'm going to do that as last slide. I will skip the other parts on it. So, when I started it again, we got this really cool story in negotiation theory. So, if you're trying to fix a problem that you have with someone else, trying to find the common ground, you need to keep this story in mind. So, there's Alice, Eve, and an orange. I'm talking about the fruit, not the color. Sorry for that one. So, Alice and Eve, they both wanted an orange. Now, how are we going to deal with this? Well, they can fight it out. One of them will have the orange and a little bit of blood, and the other one will have a lot more blood, crying in the corner, and no orange. That's one negotiation tactic. A lot of people love it. It's not particularly effective, but it works. It's a compromise. So, you cut the orange in half. Both have half an orange. In many cases, it means both are unhappy, but at least, you know, you're compromised and you avoided all the blood. Now, the goal of negotiation that you need to keep in mind is to find a really better solution. And believe me, that doesn't exist. You know, if Alice and Eve would have talked to each other, and they just have tried to figure out why the heck they both wanted an orange, they would have discovered that one of them wants to have a glass of orange juice, and the other one wants to make an orange pie. If you're a little bit at home in the kitchen, you will know that for an orange pie, you need to peel. For orange juice, you just need the inside. So, they would have talked to each other. They could have both had everything they wanted. So, the next time you need to negotiate something with someone, try not to think about the blood and the cutting stuff in half. The Bible has another one more beautiful story, right, on the cutting in half. This is not the optimal way, and this is not the optimal outcome. Most negotiations have an outcome that might not always get to 100% for both parties, but definitely more than 50%. And there are even situations where you can get more than 100% for both of the people, if you just figure out what you want. Again, the key here is to just be nice and be aware of the fact that you're all idiots. I'll keep it at that. Thank you very much.