As if our brains magically emerged from a billion years of evolution with complex mechanisms that did not help us survive... :)
I tried (like a good nerd) to reverse engineer all our emotions in my book "The Psychopath Code." Loneliness fell into my group of "Tribal Emotions" (thus evolved to help us form extended families), and here is how I defined it:
"Loneliness - the emotion of being disconnected. You feel physical pain in your intestines and chest when you see others enjoying themselves. You sleep lightly and wake often. Your immune system starts to slow and you start to get sick. Your metabolism slows down, yet you eat more often than usual. Your circulation slows, and you feel cold."
Indeed, a very interesting read! Can you list references or is this all original research?
About the rule breakers and psychopaths - I think most people actually switch to reward/punishment reasoning for rule following when empathy and social feedback is lacking. For example, if you know that no one will get hurt (eg running a red light with no cars around) the reasoning switches primarily to risk/reward (are there cameras or cops?) and habits (mental shortcuts and pathways that have been reinforced).
Most of our decisions are made out of habits trained on common situations, and only when the underlying assumptions are violated do we start re-evaluating the stories and heuristics we tell ourselves for our actions.
I'm sorry to say it's mostly original research, though I did do a lot of research into the studies people have done on the various emotions and particularly their physical manifestations. I did not keep references because I was lazy and generally don't do that (this is not academic work and I absolutely want to keep it readable for non-academics).
Regarding rules, I suspect we apply different sets of rules in different situations. Running a red light breaks "would the cops catch me?" yet does not break "would my friends be angry with me?"
I've not looked into habits much. They are obviously powerful shortcuts that save on cognitive workload.
I have spent a good part of my morning reading some of your material. Particularly some of your blog articles on hintjens.com. I am very glad I was able to find your content. It is thought provoking to say the least. I hope I will be able to find more content from you in the future. Good luck and thank you.
>Loneliness - the emotion of being disconnected. You feel physical pain in your intestines and chest when you see others enjoying themselves. You sleep lightly and wake often. Your immune system starts to slow and you start to get sick. Your metabolism slows down, yet you eat more often than usual. Your circulation slows, and you feel cold.
Is it some sort of a hyperbole or I really have to hate people and be physically sick to qualify as a lonely person according to psychiatrists?
That's that, but I'd imagine that "feeling physical pain seeing others enjoying themselves" is something far more serious than just loneliness, maybe I misunderstand the term.
You rise a valid point though, while often being objectively lonely and "disconnected" I seldom felt discomfort about it. That would explain good health marks.
I took his "feel physical pain in your intestines and chest" to mean, in part, that "sinking feeling in the gut" which is due mainly to the stimulation of the Vagus Nerve[1].
These physical sensations follow the emotion (of loneliness) itself--an affective experience preceding, and triggering, the physical after-effects--which PieterH did not speak much about. I wonder why.
It is hyperbole, average people can cope with being disconnected from society.
Some people who are lonely and develop these symptoms are better explained as reaction from DPD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_personality_disorder
In evolutionary terms, a lone hunter/traveler that becomes a shriveling ball of tears when completely alone doesn't pass the survival threshold: people are not evolved to die from being alone.
Besides in the modern world, you're not "really alone" unless you live off-grid in some remote wilderness with no internet/phone/radio. Disconnecting from society is far harder than what people think of it(not using mobile devices 24/7 on your person is not "disconnection")
Agreed, the secondary characteristics feel somewhat circumstantial to me.
I'm lonely, but sleep a solid 8 hours (except if bothered by other factors such as mismanagement of heat etc which will wake me up). I don't get sick, eat a normal amount and don't feel colder than usual.
That text does not mention hate, and the physical pain I'm referring to is mostly low level discomfort. It can still drive some people to extreme behaviour.
Evolutionary Psychology is like Leibnitizian Optimisim [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds] where God is replaced by evolution. It does nothing to aid in our understanding except to reassure us that everything that is is as it should be. It's essentially an ideology of apathy.
Leibnitz's Argument goes like so:
>1. God [Evolution] has the idea of infinitely many universes.
>2. Only one of these universes can actually exist.
>3. God[Evolution]'s choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, God[Evolution] has reason to choose one thing or another.
>4. God[Evolution] is good.
>5. Therefore, the universe that God[Evolution] chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.[1]
FYI, Voltaire made a nice parody of this ideology in his book Candide.
It might be an ideology of apathy if, once finding a plausible evolutionary cause for psychological phenomenon, you cease the investigation. Which you shouldn't. Shutting down a line of inquiry with criticism like this does nothing to aid our understanding either - consider the idea on its merits, as (if you will..) a pure function of its premises.
There is a profound difference between magical thinking and science. Once you build scientific frameworks (such as EP is part of), you can move much faster in interesting and useful directions that may seem unrelated and yet all connect together.
For example I've used a lot of psychology (based on EP, not Freud) in constructing communities that build open source software.
And we are using this thing called the "Internet" that lets total strangers converse, at no cost. And largely built on free and open source. Amazing, huh?
If you believe that science does "nothing to aid in our understanding," and yet you are quick to profit from the fruits of the rational world that science built, that would make you rather a hypocrite.
The psychology of collaboration is (in my model, which is of course wrong, just accurate enough to be more useful than ignorance) based on emotions that we've evolved to work together. Most of what I tested and documented over the last decade came from study of failure (most projects fail and you can learn a lot by looking into why), and experience of how to make communities that could survive the kinds of conflict we see. Actually getting a full model for the emotions took a lot longer, finished that a year or so ago.
You can see the results in e.g. the C4 process, our RFC for working together in the ZeroMQ community: http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/
Thanks writing and sharing those. Very good insights there. Also sorry, didn't recognize your name at first as Pieter Hintjens (I wouldn't have asked as already had the link to the book in my bookmarks). I periodically refer to "The Toolbox" when discussing development practices at work.
In professions which are considered more rational and intellectual like programming, there is a danger of discounting the effect of emotions. Emotions are always there under the surface guiding and controlling things.
The more rational the person thinks they are the more they will rationalize their decisions. So when someone proposes using say Protobufs as a serialization mechanism, instead of Thrift, for example, might be doing it because the person who likes Thrift in the group offended them somehow. But that will never come up in the official reason, there will be some benchmark or list of point why Protobufs might be better.
Or maybe they had a fight with their family and they come to work and start shutting down a project and shuffling developers around to feel empowered, and there will always be a seemingly rational reason for it.
Thanks againg for writing that book and sharing your experience. There is just not enough of that, especially focused on open source projects. Some projects naturally converge and discover some of those principles from the toolbox, but having them written down from someone with experience is priceless.
Yes, we tend to discount emotions, our own and others'. It is amazing in retrospect given how important these are in driving us. What I learned with groups was to explicitly ask people, "how do you feel?" and then to insist until I get answers that match what people are showing, rather than saying or claiming.
Especially, "how do you feel about what person X is doing?"
It's not a gender thing or even a nerd thing, really. It's the same with musicians, for instance (I used to jam a lot), they can be really reticent about saying what they actually feel about other people.
Basically our fear of being rejected by the group, and shame at having feelings that no-one else is expressing make us unable to speak up. Since few people can debug their own emotional stacks, the fear and shame dominate, and stop the (e.g.) anger at an asshat messing up the project from coming forwards.
So actually asking people the specific question can change a lot. Mostly, I'll start with "are you enjoying this (the way things are going)?" knowing they'll admit "no" and then we can work it out from there.
This is a good observation. I've seen this happen in work situations multiple times, and I've felt those feelings as well. Which is why one of my life goals is to learn the skill of objective judgement without being influenced by emotions unrelated to the technical merits of a decision.
I believe the correct name for that personality attribute might be 'mature'.
narrator is implying that in fact no EP is part of magical thinking, not science. A view that any quick googling will back up as being not terribly controversial actually.
Many people dislike EP intensely (and have attacked its developers, such as Steven Pinker) because they are passionate (I'd say fanatical) believers that culture is what defines us, not biology. So yes, you can find a lot of hate for EP. That doesn't mean much.
If you have studied EP or even human nature at all, then you realize quite rapidly that the blank slate proponents (who claim we're born with nothing in our minds, waiting for culture to define us) are delusional in some profound way.
It is clear, and Pinker makes this argument well in his book The Blank Slate, that we're the product of biology (EP) tuned and shaped by our environment.
To claim that this, decades of careful documented research and reproducible results, is magical thinking and not science is... hallucinatory.
Not all evo-psych critics are blank slate fans. Some of us just like our science to be based on repeatable experiments. The truth in evo-psych, that humans are animals that evolved in various environments, sometimes has only a tenuous connection to the claims of evo-psych. (e.g. that any particular aspect of modern life has some sort of link to some particular aspect of life on the savanna -- how could we possibly know that?)
Well, that's not entirely true (while I do admit the nurture bunch are loud).
Some of us are skeptical on EP's results more than EP itself. I believe that is undeniable that some (or most) behavior is imprinted within our genes, animal domestication being a pretty solid proof.
That doesn't invalidate the fact that most of the time, when I read some study on the field feels more like conjectures made fit in the researcher's beliefs; some flawed logic where the consequent is used to prove the antecedent, and some dubious experiment most of the time made in other species (biological studies on other species don't translate pretty well on humans, and yet, we try the same with a less measurable parameter?)
It's even worse if you happen to read some generalist media approach to EP, where EP is used to push down the editor's narrative.
In short, some of us are careful on EP not because it's not a promising field, but because these days is being used to prove everything and it's opposite.
I think everything you want from EP is available in social psychology textbooks like "The Social Animal" by Pratkanis. Unlike EP practitioners the authors actually start out with falsifiable hypothesis and then conduct actual experiments to derive their theories. A lot of people take the results of actual social psychological research and rediscover it with a non-falsifiable EP justification. That's not science, that's just taking scientific observations and reinterpreting them as the will of God or "Evolution" in this case.
> decades of careful documented research and reproducible results, is magical thinking and not science is... hallucinatory.
Right, the same careful research that helps me characterize personality disorders in my day job. You really should stop doing hobbyist research, because The Psychopath Code proves how badly it can end.
It would be really useful to have an actual concrete argument of how and why, rather than vague "your amateurish book proves how bad your book is" statements.
Edit: ah, checked your comment history, you've been trolling for a while HN. Enjoy yourself, it's a weird hobby but hey. Some people like to cook and make music, and other people... they troll.
Ranking is relative, so on less busy days (such as today's holiday in the US and Canada) stories with fewer points can be ranked higher than usual. You can always email questions like this to hn@ycombinator.com to avoid cluttering the discussion threads.
I tried (like a good nerd) to reverse engineer all our emotions in my book "The Psychopath Code." Loneliness fell into my group of "Tribal Emotions" (thus evolved to help us form extended families), and here is how I defined it:
"Loneliness - the emotion of being disconnected. You feel physical pain in your intestines and chest when you see others enjoying themselves. You sleep lightly and wake often. Your immune system starts to slow and you start to get sick. Your metabolism slows down, yet you eat more often than usual. Your circulation slows, and you feel cold."
http://content.psychopathcode.com/chapter6.html