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Back to the Future Tense
Feb. 9th, 2023 11:54 amI woke up this morning with a little bit of a realization. The book I’m in the middle of is basically exactly as advertised. Anxiety is good for you because it gets you to worry. And the detail on that is, if you worry and make plans based on information, then you will prepare for the future and have a (cringe) good outcome. If you _don’t_ do this, your outcome will be less good. Basically, either sign up for a life of anxiety and worry _intentionally_ or it’s your own damn fault when bad shit happens to you.
I want to make some observations about this as a perspective. But first! Condemnation! Bad words! Attack on character! I believe last night I said criminally unenlightened and _I stand by that assessment_.
Now that we have that out of the way, some calmer, hopefully more insightful and useful observations.
…
What you cannot see here are the many paragraphs I typed and deleted.
Saved By Works is cruel, morally bankrupt and makes you the meat of so very many kinds of horrifying predators, and co-opts you into helping predators by maintaining a grooming process.
Please don’t believe this crap.
I may resume liveblogging.
OK in the creativity chapter. “People who felt moderately more anxious (also angry or joyful) came up with more ideas, and ones that were more innovative. [Don’t believe any of this — if you go read how they measured innovativeness, you will be appalled. I didn’t check. It’s always appalling.] One reason anxiety in particular increased creativity was that it prompted people to stick with brainstorming and problem solving longer. They persisted.”
*blink*
Sure. That’s true. But why would you think that was a _good_ thing?
Next: “The other week” panic attack at 3:17 a.m., worrying about a relationship with a close colleague. So she gets up, and decides she has to “start a conversation with my colleague, and it needed to be honest. Just making that decision cleared away the fog of the night’s worries. And it reminded me that I had a good bit of control over the situation — and could make it better by doing more than just tossing and turning in bed at night.”
*blink*
“When our response to anxiety is to become creative [honestly how is deciding to have an honest conversation with a colleague creative?] — when we paint, plant a beautiful garden, start a difficult conversation, or take an old piece of cauliflower in the fridge and turn it into a pretty decent meal — we can see that positive choices, not dread and fear, are the gifts of anxiety.”
You know, or you could make those choices _without_ the anxiety. Does she not know?
Next up, perfectionism. Her title for this section strikes fear in my heart:
“Never Mind Perfectionism, Here’s Excellencism”
She did not invent the term. I looked. Patrick Gadeau basically applies an additional constraint to frenetic goal-orientation / ladder climbing: attainability. Still high, but at least attainable. This is a good constraint! I am in favor of attainability in goals. I have had this argument with people, and am mildly startled to learn that in 2018, you could produce a research paper advocating for it and people would be like, innovative!
Inventing a word counts, I guess?
Her summary of excellencism is a little different. “It involves setting high standards but not beating ourselves up when we don’t meet them.” Oh look, more demands for perfect performance, this time in behavior when failing. Lovely.
“An excellencist is open to new experiences, takes unique approaches to problem solving, and is okay with getting it wrong — as long as they can learn from their mistakes to strive toward exceptional achievement. (New para) Excellencists often show higher levels of anxiety compared to nonperfectionistic people [ya think?!?] — along with greater conscientiousness, higher intrinsic motivation, enhanced ability to make progress on goals, and more feelings of positive well-being. What they don’t show is more debilitating anxiety.”
Apparently, the most anxiety without the debilitating parts?
The next few paragraphs are absolutely headspinningly awful. Roughly: if you work longer, you’ll do better work, up to a point. But quality matters too. And overtraining is real. All that is … in the same universe as maybe grasping the point? Then!
“Or continuing to tweeze your eyebrows in pursuit of that perfectly shaped arch until your brow has all but disappeared — and you have to draw it in with a pencil, as your grandmother did.”
“We can break down any task into zones of increasing, diminishing, and decreasing returns.”
No. You. Cannot.
I checked the reference on that, which is to a meta-analysis that purports to support SLODR, but of course, it’s from 2017, and people are still publishing about SLODR and while I neither know nor care how this debate will end, it’s basically about something that I think is either not real or not useful. In any event, bringing IQ saturation at high vs. low levels into a discussion of task breakdown is throwing a bunch of obscurity at a statement it has absolutely nothing to do with so let’s just note the academic dishonesty and move on.
Where were we? “Imagine that two people — one a perfectionist and one an excellencist — are writing a short story. In which zone will each land? Both have to figure out how much time they need to spend: too little, and the plot will be muddled, the writing disorganized and the grammar atrocious; just enough, and they’ll be in the zone of increasing returns — the quality of the story will proportionally improve with each hour of effort. It’s when they’re close to being finished that the differences between perfectionists and excellencists really stand out. Perfectionists are much more likely to enter the zone of diminishing returns, in which each hour of labor yields smaller and smaller improvements in organization, clarity and creativity.”
I’m stopping reading the book at this point; it’s going to be a DNF, and I will produce a review labeled with DNF. I had some issues with the hypothetical bear encounter, because I’ve had a bear encounter, and it didn’t in any way support her argument. I also know other people who’ve had bear encounters and read a lot about bear encounters. Basically, either nothing you do has any impact, or you had to bring bear spray along.
But even ignoring the bear thing — look people make up stories in their heads about encounters with predatory animals all the time and get them wildly wrong and whatever it’s a thing — this paragraph is absolutely unforgivable. What writer, never mind fiction writer, ever experienced “proportionally improve with each hour of effort”. The only time anyone can ever figure out they are in a zone of diminishing returns is by scrubbing at something to destruction. And perfectionists don’t finish writing even short stories. They rarely get out more than a sentence or two, and that’s assuming they even sat down to try. They probably had to go lie down to recover from the panic attack.
I want to make some observations about this as a perspective. But first! Condemnation! Bad words! Attack on character! I believe last night I said criminally unenlightened and _I stand by that assessment_.
Now that we have that out of the way, some calmer, hopefully more insightful and useful observations.
…
What you cannot see here are the many paragraphs I typed and deleted.
Saved By Works is cruel, morally bankrupt and makes you the meat of so very many kinds of horrifying predators, and co-opts you into helping predators by maintaining a grooming process.
Please don’t believe this crap.
I may resume liveblogging.
OK in the creativity chapter. “People who felt moderately more anxious (also angry or joyful) came up with more ideas, and ones that were more innovative. [Don’t believe any of this — if you go read how they measured innovativeness, you will be appalled. I didn’t check. It’s always appalling.] One reason anxiety in particular increased creativity was that it prompted people to stick with brainstorming and problem solving longer. They persisted.”
*blink*
Sure. That’s true. But why would you think that was a _good_ thing?
Next: “The other week” panic attack at 3:17 a.m., worrying about a relationship with a close colleague. So she gets up, and decides she has to “start a conversation with my colleague, and it needed to be honest. Just making that decision cleared away the fog of the night’s worries. And it reminded me that I had a good bit of control over the situation — and could make it better by doing more than just tossing and turning in bed at night.”
*blink*
“When our response to anxiety is to become creative [honestly how is deciding to have an honest conversation with a colleague creative?] — when we paint, plant a beautiful garden, start a difficult conversation, or take an old piece of cauliflower in the fridge and turn it into a pretty decent meal — we can see that positive choices, not dread and fear, are the gifts of anxiety.”
You know, or you could make those choices _without_ the anxiety. Does she not know?
Next up, perfectionism. Her title for this section strikes fear in my heart:
“Never Mind Perfectionism, Here’s Excellencism”
She did not invent the term. I looked. Patrick Gadeau basically applies an additional constraint to frenetic goal-orientation / ladder climbing: attainability. Still high, but at least attainable. This is a good constraint! I am in favor of attainability in goals. I have had this argument with people, and am mildly startled to learn that in 2018, you could produce a research paper advocating for it and people would be like, innovative!
Inventing a word counts, I guess?
Her summary of excellencism is a little different. “It involves setting high standards but not beating ourselves up when we don’t meet them.” Oh look, more demands for perfect performance, this time in behavior when failing. Lovely.
“An excellencist is open to new experiences, takes unique approaches to problem solving, and is okay with getting it wrong — as long as they can learn from their mistakes to strive toward exceptional achievement. (New para) Excellencists often show higher levels of anxiety compared to nonperfectionistic people [ya think?!?] — along with greater conscientiousness, higher intrinsic motivation, enhanced ability to make progress on goals, and more feelings of positive well-being. What they don’t show is more debilitating anxiety.”
Apparently, the most anxiety without the debilitating parts?
The next few paragraphs are absolutely headspinningly awful. Roughly: if you work longer, you’ll do better work, up to a point. But quality matters too. And overtraining is real. All that is … in the same universe as maybe grasping the point? Then!
“Or continuing to tweeze your eyebrows in pursuit of that perfectly shaped arch until your brow has all but disappeared — and you have to draw it in with a pencil, as your grandmother did.”
“We can break down any task into zones of increasing, diminishing, and decreasing returns.”
No. You. Cannot.
I checked the reference on that, which is to a meta-analysis that purports to support SLODR, but of course, it’s from 2017, and people are still publishing about SLODR and while I neither know nor care how this debate will end, it’s basically about something that I think is either not real or not useful. In any event, bringing IQ saturation at high vs. low levels into a discussion of task breakdown is throwing a bunch of obscurity at a statement it has absolutely nothing to do with so let’s just note the academic dishonesty and move on.
Where were we? “Imagine that two people — one a perfectionist and one an excellencist — are writing a short story. In which zone will each land? Both have to figure out how much time they need to spend: too little, and the plot will be muddled, the writing disorganized and the grammar atrocious; just enough, and they’ll be in the zone of increasing returns — the quality of the story will proportionally improve with each hour of effort. It’s when they’re close to being finished that the differences between perfectionists and excellencists really stand out. Perfectionists are much more likely to enter the zone of diminishing returns, in which each hour of labor yields smaller and smaller improvements in organization, clarity and creativity.”
I’m stopping reading the book at this point; it’s going to be a DNF, and I will produce a review labeled with DNF. I had some issues with the hypothetical bear encounter, because I’ve had a bear encounter, and it didn’t in any way support her argument. I also know other people who’ve had bear encounters and read a lot about bear encounters. Basically, either nothing you do has any impact, or you had to bring bear spray along.
But even ignoring the bear thing — look people make up stories in their heads about encounters with predatory animals all the time and get them wildly wrong and whatever it’s a thing — this paragraph is absolutely unforgivable. What writer, never mind fiction writer, ever experienced “proportionally improve with each hour of effort”. The only time anyone can ever figure out they are in a zone of diminishing returns is by scrubbing at something to destruction. And perfectionists don’t finish writing even short stories. They rarely get out more than a sentence or two, and that’s assuming they even sat down to try. They probably had to go lie down to recover from the panic attack.