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Tag: Psychology

Imposter Syndrome

Internet is a good thing: it allows us to see and experience things that were not possible decades ago. On the other hand, it’s sometimes also overwhelming. When I see capable people doing amazing stuff on the Internet, very often I feel I’m not worth of what people think I am. Occasionally I thought it’s because I’m shy and I’m usually not comfortable fully expressing my thoughts. In other occasions I’m simply not patiently enough to argue otherwise.

But it’s not just me. A lot of people are experiencing the same feeling and I’m starting to realize that I may be suffering from the imposter syndrome. After all, after so many years my personality has changed a lot. I’m no longer shy. I’m much more confident than I was. And I’m also a more capable person so I deserve a better life. It doesn’t feel right to be satisfied with what I’m getting. I’m better than that!

Meeting with people confirms that. There are a lot of people pretending to be expert in something and it seems they are enjoying quite a lot, although I can spot right on that they’re not what they believe they are. They’re not ashamed, why should I feel bad for myself? I’m much better a person than those real imposters, of course I deserve better things!

It’s more than a year since I wrote a blog post last time. A lot has happened during the past year. After years of depressing research career, I’ve published in a good conference and successfully defended my PhD. I’ve started working (again) in the industry. I’ve also found a long term direction that should keep me busy in the next five years. We’ve also got our foothold in Luxembourg, although there remains a lot to complete, it’s a good starting point. I’ll try to blog more often about what’s happening in my life, just to keep track of my thoughts and experiences, so that I can look back to them later and say “boy, I didn’t know I was so naïve a while ago.”

I’ve also updated my blog theme and fixed the HTTPS issue with WordPress and Cloudflare: I only needed to install the CloudFlare Flexible SSL plugin and enable “Automatic HTTPS Rewrites” on Cloudflare. Now the website feels more responsive and neater. That’s a good starting point to (re)start blogging!

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Fear makes one only weaker

Yesterday morning I received a call from one business partner complaining about two german students not satisfied with the internship position at another business partner in Changzhou. So we decided to drive to Changzhou in order to get a subjective grasp over the issue. And the issue was more serious than we have expected: neither of the two interns are satisfied with the placement, and one was in a very bad physical situation. Plus, he had lymphoma — a type of cancer — a few years ago and is still recovering from the treatment.

Strange thing was that he felt quite in Germany, but since he was pale and didn’t feel very well, we took him to the hospital for a check. We we arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t even stand up and we had to use a wheel chair to escort hime to the emergency treatment department, where the doctor checked his heart rate, body temperature, oxygen level, and a comprehensive blood test.

We looked very serious about his situation, but the doctor said everything was OK with him. She smiled and said to us in Chinese, “I believe he has hysteria”. I’ve heard about hysteria before but never really met someone with such symptoms. So I observed him carefully as the doctor give him a saline. One of my colleagues sat next to him and chatted with him. He seems extremely normal to me when he is not discussing about his illness or cancer. They constantly bursted into laughters when they talked about funny experiences, which is a bit weird since patients next to him are really seriously ill.

After confirming with the doctor again and again, we decided to go for dinner before the saline was finished and he seemed much better. We went to a german restaurant and had a really nice dinner. Over the dinner no one mentioned about his illness nor cancer. And he seemed totally fine.

This is really the first time I see how one’s mind may affect his physical state — in such a drastic way. That’s why when one is afraid of bad things, bad things always happen. Because fear of something makes one weaker, so that one does not have enough energy to defend oneself. This is another ‘scarcity’ problem: when you focus too much on something, you’re using too much bandwidth and leaving too little bandwidth for other things. And you’re trapped deeper and deeper until you are completed depleted of bandwidth or energy — that’s when you collapse.

The best way to fight this problem is to lose some focus on the fears. Then you’ll have more bandwidth to cope with other more important stuff. Just step back, ignore the fears for some time, and find out the long-term plans or goals. After all, not all in life are important, at least some are not any important as we’ve thought.

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More beautiful than you’d thought

Two videos today. The first one: Real Beauty Sketches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk).

We all get used to the good parts of ourselves and often get trapped in the parts that we don’t like about ourselves. However, others may not view you the same way as you do. Things you hate may be the favorite of another. In a different eye you are more beautiful than you think you are.

And the second one: Information management as an organization on Yabroad.com (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3IogtSHVR0).

I didn’t know I could make a video relatively smoothly with much confidence. But I made it. It sounds not bad. I’m confident when talking about things I know and familiar of. I’m not afraid of getting my voice heard. On those occasions when I’m reluctant to speak out, it’s not because of I’m afraid I have a horrible voice or my English is not interpretable. But now I know my voice is more than OK and so is my English. I just need a little confidence on the contents when I start to speak. I may do more of these in the future, but probably with a script before rolling the camera. 🙂

 

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判断机制

ifanr上看到一篇文章里面这样一句话,觉得很有意思:

蒙洛迪诺说,人做判断的时候有两种机制:一种是”科学家机制”,先有证据再下结论;一种是”律师机制”,先有了结论再去找证据。

在不同的场合,不同的时机,同一个人也可能会采用不同的判断方式。但我觉得我自己和大多数人更倾向于使用“律师机制”,不信?看我去找找证据……

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The power of thinking without thinking

Blink: the power of thinking without thinking is another book by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers: the story of success I just read a few days ago. He is a good writer: he knows how to explains theories with examples and stories that creates resonance to audience. And he knows how to write bestsellers: books should be easy to follow and not too lengthy. This book Blink is a fine example: it’s a less-than-300-page small book.

Compared with Subliminal, this book does not contain too much diving into how human brains work. Instead, it’s all about plain but intriguing stories. It starts by talking about spotting a bogus statue at first sight; then it discusses about how to predict divorces by analyzing how couples talk to each other; then it comes to why we fall for people’s appearances, how newbie police fails to read people’s minds, etc.

This book brings up a theory called “thin-slicing”: getting the big picture without actually going through the whole picture, but through taking a small part of descriptive samples and inferring the correct result using these samples. Thin-slicing is an ability that only through years of practice can it be possessed. It is a state that spontaneous and correct judgement occurs to you even though your consciousness has yet participated in the process. This ability becomes an integrated part of yourself, just like the instinct to avoid coming cars. It doesn’t necessarily deal with reasoning: your success of getting the correct answer does not guarantee that you know exactly why. If you are forced to give reasons, you may not come up with correct ones and they may hazard your first-sight judgement. To reason means to use your conscious mind; but thin-slicing is from deeper than the consciousness — it comes from the unconsciousness of your brain.

However, thin-slicing may not always give us correct results. We usually trust those who are good looking, while this sometimes leads to unpleasant endings, such as choosing the handsome Warren Harding as the president of the US and who make the worst president in US history; Most white people and including some black people, think under their consciousness that the white is a superior; Many treat women as inferior. These are the unconsciousness that we need to prevent, otherwise we are not able to focus on the aspects that really matters.

In summary, use the unconsciousness, but use it properly. Train the mind, so that the pattern recognition engine in our brains gets recognizing what is important and what is not, so that in a blink of time, we can make the best decision without thinking (using our conscious mind).

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What sets outliers apart

There is a famous quote from Einstein that goes “genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work”, and the book Outliers: the story of success proves it correct. As many knows that Einstein has an IQ of around 150, however, IQ is not the definite factor towards success, but rather, IQ is not important at all once it reaches a threshold — as long as you have an adequate intelligence, it’s other aspects that really matters. Those aspects include hard work, social savvy, upbringing and the culture one comes from.

This book tells a story of a man named Chris Langan with an IQ of 195, but he ended as as a bouncer at a bar for the most of his life. He is smart, so smart that he understands Principia Mathematica at the age of 16. But he never knows how to deal with people. He lost his scholarship because his mother forgot to fill a form for him and after he confronted his dean he concluded that the professors do not care about the students. And so he quitted. By contrast, the father of atomic bombs, Oppenheimer is not as smart, but he processes a great practical knowledge. He knows how to get away with punishment after trying to poison his tutor at  Cambridge. He also persuaded General Groves to let him participate in the Manhattan Project, despite his poisoning record and affiliations with Communists. It’s obvious that both Langan and Oppenheimer are smart, but in a way they could not be more different in aspects other than intelligence.

The author also elaborates how important diligence is. It’s known that for one to become good at something, he/she has to spend at least 10,000 hours on it. Bill Gates had more than 10,000 hours of experience with computers before he dropped out; the Beatles had more than 10,000 hours of practice before they made a real hit; the same with Steve Jobs, Bill Joy (cofounder of Sun Microsystems), Eric Schemidt, etc. As the book puts it, “no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich”.

However, as important as diligence is, it’s equivalently important to have the ability of seizing opportunities. The computer gurus are typically born in mid 1950s (Bill Gates 1955, Paul Allen 1953, Steve Ballmer 1956, Steve Jobs 1955, Eric Schemidt 1955, Bill Joy 1954);If you look at Chinese Internet gurus, same intersting facts: year in which the founder is born: Baidu 1968, Alibaba 1964, Tecent 1971, Netease 1971, Sina 1969, Sohu 1964, why? Because they all had their 10,000 hours of practice when the personal computer revolution began in 1975 (or internet starts to become popular in China in mid 1990s). It did not happen only in computer industry, but also in other industries such as law, manufacturing, and so on.

The culture you are from and the upbringing shape your thinking and behaviours and in the end how successful you are. It takes three generations for Jews to transform from tailors and garment industry workers to doctors and lawyers. Success is not magic; it’s the hard work passed along generations to generations. Asians are better at mathematics because our ancestors have to calculate carefully when growing rice; and asians are more diligent because our ancestors have to put the hours in hard work so as to survive.

Next time when someone asks how could Chinese economy grow so fast, show him how Chinese work.

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The unconsciousness rules our lives

When my girlfriend asks me if I had vegetables for dinner, my usual answer would be “no, but I had fruits”, upon hearing this she always teases me that I cannot differentiate fruits from vegetables. Well, yes and no – of course I can distinguish them in my conscious mind; but in my unconscious mind, I can’t.  That is, although I know that they are different, deep under my consciousness my animal instinct always categorize food as either meat or nonmeat – thus tricking me into treating fruits and vegetables as interchangeable.

Phenomena like this seem trivial but they happen again and again in our daily life, often without being noticed. Psychologists think our brain is a two-tier system that works like two entire railway systems. These two generally operates independently of each other but they are also connected at various points. The more fundamental tier is our unconscious mind, which deals with our basic animal functions like sensing and safely responding to the external world; on top of the unconscious lies the consciousness, which deals with our rational thoughts and set us apart from other animals. In our daily life it is actually the unconscious that processes more information. Scientists estimate that the human sensory system sends to the brain about eleven million bits of information per second, while we can only handle somewhere between 16 and 50 bits per second. The rest go unnoticed and are processed by the unconscious to produce a much simpler abstraction of information so that our conscious mind is not overwhelmed.

As a result of this two-tier brain system, when something happens, the reality we perceive is not really what we have sensed, but rather what the sensory system detects plus what we think happened. Here’s the catch. Our unconscious mind may trick our conscious mind into thinking about what may have never happened. For example, when listeners in one study hears “it was found that the *eel was on the axle”, where the asterisk stands for a cough/noise covering the sound, listeners thinks they hear “wheel”. If “axle” is changed into “table” they hear “meal”; and with “orange” as the last word listeners hear “peal”. So in a way our brain “invents” reality rather than “senses” it.

This also happens to our memory system. Even though sometimes we think we remember things, the memories may not be accurate. There has been an example of a victim remembering the wrong person as the rapist, even though she saw the rapist’s face under good light condition. She committed the mistake the first time when the police asked her to identify the rapist from several potential criminals and she chose the one that best matched the rapist from her memory. And after that she kept reinforcing the idea that the one she had identified was really the criminal. The problem is that the real criminal never appeared in the lineups, thus resulting her to remember what she wants to believe in – the decision she made when forced (by herself) to identify someone as the criminal.

However, our unconsciousness is not all that bad. It helps us to tell if a person is happy or angry without thinking about it. It also helps us to be social. When we communicate, we always give away nonverbal cues, and we are quite good at deciphering these hints. For example, even if we mute the sound and cover the subtitles when watching a movie, we will still be able to get a relatively accurate clue about what is really going on. Moreover, animals are even better at reading our nonverbal cues. That is probably why sometimes we think our pets actually understand our words – in reality they don’t, but they are good (in particular dogs are better than us) at understand our social signals like emotions.

The unconscious also helps us categorizing things, keeps us in faith of groups we belong to and share the group’s compassion in the face of enemies. Furthermore, it keeps us confident about ourselves. In fact we are often overly confident and overestimate ourselves. Our desire of feeling good about ourselves leads us to have unconsciously biased behaviors. For example, researchers found that in the US people with the same surname are more likely to get married. That is, Browns are more likely to marry Browns; and Smiths are more likely to marry Smiths. The researchers explained that even something as seemingly meaningless as our names could make us feel good and form an opinion in favor of ourselves. This may also explain why in Apple many senior managers have Steve as their first names; and in Amazon many Jeffs hold senior positions.

Another study show that 94% of college professors think their work is above average. Obviously at least 44, or almost half of them overestimate themselves. This human character is a blessing rather than a flaw, since evolution designed the human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive. Feeling good helps our ancestors to endure hunger, coldness and diseases. Even today, this still works. Take the placebo effect for example, patients that are given sugar pills but are told the pills are effective to treat their diseases feel significantly better – sugar pills with a different label actually cures or alleviate pains. They do not in any way alleviate pains in the physical level, but rather, it is our unconsciousness that tricks and treats us.

As we evolve along the long history, our animal instincts have been kept or even further developed while our rational thinking progresses. The conscious part is what tells us apart from animals. However, animals can survive with little or without much consciousness; while no animals can survive without unconsciousness, neither can humans. Understanding the unconsciousness means more than just survival, but also means better coordination with the conscious, better understanding of ourselves as humans, and really following our hearts.

The book Subliminal: how your unconscious mind rules your behavior is quite fascinating. It provides an extensive range of psychological experiments to support the idea, and explains theories in a great sense of humor. Below are some excerpts and notes from the book.

When the author tries to prove to his mother that a tortoise is primitive by waving his hands to it and it ignores him, his mother argues: “Your kids ignore you, and you don’t call them primitive creatures.”

Smiths are more likely to marry Smiths: people have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and therefore we have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names.

The Pepsi paradox: Pepsi tastes better than Coke in blind tests; while people still prefer Coke when they have a choice. Wine tastes better with higher price labels. Stockings with a particular scent sells better. Detergent with yellow and blue box is more effective. Many of our basic assumptions about ourselves and the society are false.

The human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information per second, while we can only handle between sixteen and fifty bits per second.

The human mental system is a two-tier system comprised of an unconscious tier and a conscious tier. The unconscious tier is more fundamental. It developed early our evolution, to deal with basic necessities of function and survival, sensing and responding to the external world. Most nonhuman species can survive with little or no conscious thought, but no animal can exist without unconsciousness. Scientists estimate that we are conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive function, the other 95% goes beyond our awareness.

If a animation is shown in front of one eye and a static picture is shown in front of the other, you will only be aware of the animation, even if the static picture is pornographic (but you will probably make a correct guess if you’re forced to). PS. in academia they sometimes take “highly arousing erotic images” from the International Affective Picture System, which contains a range of pictures from sexually explicit material to mutilated bodies to pleasant images of children and wildlife.

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乌合之众

所谓经典,经久不衰之宝典也。这本来自1895年的法国的书,在100多年之后读起来仍然让人觉得津津有味。作者对社会的剖析入木三分,深刻揭示了社会群体的特性。

群体顾名思义,由一群个体组成。而这群个体走到一起形成一个群体之后,其中的每个个体的特性便不再重要,作为群体中的一员,这个个体可能会完全迷失在群体中间。群体抹去每个个体心智的的差距,使他们的行为趋向一致;每个个体不断相互影响和暗示,相互传染极端思想,使这个群体做出任何单个个体都不会做出的出格事情。书中有个很形象的故事:在一个马戏团里,一匹马将粪便拉在了一位坐着观看表演的女士的腿上。而周围的一群绅士却丝毫没有绅士的表现,一齐大笑起来。试想,如果只有一个绅士在场,会发生这样的情况吗?

群体是不使用理性,不用逻辑思考问题的。在群体之中一个个体的智力会泯灭,群体只能接受感性的,形象的思维。作者认为群体中个人智力的泯灭存在着四个阶段:自我意识模糊,独立思考能力下降,判断力和逻辑在暗示与传染的作用下趋同一致,最后残存的智力被测底反噬。历史上很多不可思议的事件中都能找到这种情形:不管平时多么聪明,在群体中却完全迷失了自我。比如高级知识分子失去独立思考的能力,去做一些违背原则的事情(想想我国几十年前发生的事情)。群体只接受简单的概念和形象,不接受正常逻辑。群体迷恋偶像,创造偶像,并沉浸其中不可自拔。

一个群体需要有领袖,这个领袖往往是这个群体里最极端的个体。只有极端的人才能成为领袖,因为极端的个体可以更好的感染群体,而群体的奴性成就一个领袖,个体成为领袖之后又使得群体和领袖变得更为极端。为了释放这些极端的情绪,这个群体便以残暴可怖的手段去处理异见持有者。

文末作者以悲观的情绪分析了人类历史发展的规律:个体走到一起,团结起来抵御外部入侵;摆脱野蛮,发展个体,形成文明;文明强盛,逐渐复杂,止步不前;走向衰落;群体分崩离析;回归原始。“人们在追求理想的过程中,从野蛮状态发展到文明状态,然后,当这个理想失去优点时,便走向衰落和死亡,这就是一个民族的生命循环过程。”

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洗脑术

我同意书中的很多说法,比如“别人的成功是不可以复制的”,事实上没有任何现实是可以复制的。相同的可以是某一方面的经验或者事实背后的逻辑与模式,但是“人不能两次踏过同一条河流”,这个世界上并没有一条放之四海而皆准的成功学定理。联想到最近看到的微博,“凡出口不离乔布斯、巴菲特、比尔盖茨的,大抵过的不如卖煎饼的。”成功的人各有各的个性、能力、方法、机遇和运气,而他们的传记,专访只说出了他们愿意分享出来的一部分信息,这部分信息的真实性也值得商榷。用作者的话说,赢家通过制造理念,用这些他们再熟悉不过的理念对别人进行洗脑,把这些人限制在他们给出的特定框架中,让这些人同意他们的说法,让这些人成为自己想法的布道者和执行者,从而成为大众心中的偶像和赢家。如果这是一场比赛的话,那么这些赢家就是游戏规则的制定者,裁判以及参赛选手。所以赢家之所以赢,也就那么理所当然了。

而这个世界上并不是所有人都有能力去制定游戏规则的,有人明智(教父和洗脑者),有人冷静而善于观察(牧师和布道者),有人热情少思(信徒)。然而每个人都有去争取得到属于自己东西的权利,要想最大化所得,需要自己利用技巧。比如,积极思考,保持自信,做一个优秀且看起来正常的人;与人交往时挖掘出对方的深层次需求,可以威逼,亦可利诱,奖惩结合才会事半功倍;懂得如何转移话题和注意力,说谎与失信并不一定是坏事,不要一味直白,要善于包装坦诚;多听少说,保持神秘,不要过分暴露自己;做一件事情前看看有没有其他人想做,如果没有就要放弃,因为人都是趋利避害的,而你不比别人高明多少;要偏执,要固执,要坚持自己的想法,前提是自己真正相信自己的想法。

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