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The programmer Bryan Cantrill notes that coders vastly prefer to figure out the cleanest fix for a bug, some solution that will neatly deal with every possible situation the software might face. When they can’t do that—maybe they don’t have the time, or maybe the bug simply defeats them—they’ll reluctantly use an inelegant solution: a sprawling bunch of lines that deal with the four specific fail-conditions, the strange edge cases they’re aware of, and they’ll just cross their fingers and pray there aren’t more edge cases out there lurking. Technically, they’ll have solved their problem. But they’ll hate themselves so much that they’ll often add a comment next to their solution, castigating themselves—and calling their code “gross,” “disgusting,” or “vile.” For programmers, inefficient code is an offense to the soul.
Soylent is, in many ways, a perfect metonym of the software engineers’ obsession for efficiency. It’s what you get when that worldview—speed everything up, remove friction everywhere—becomes second nature, a twitch instinct. Each moment of life becomes a target for Taylorization, a world of nails to be hammered into submission. Everything should move as rapidly as possible: communicating, working, shopping. Indeed, Amazon’s success is predicated on rendering life into a carousel of instant gratification, as the computer engineer and director Ruhi Sarikaya notes: “Friction is any variable that impedes your progress toward a goal, whether it’s purchasing a product or navigating traffic to make your nine a.m. meeting on time. Amazon is obsessively focused on reducing or eliminating friction—think one-click ordering, Amazon Prime, or Amazon Go.”
This fetish for efficiency is what has driven the delirious explosion of “on demand” services. By the mid-2010s, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs started flooding the market with apps designed to optimize nearly every fiddly task of everyday life—offering to do work so you didn’t. There was Washio (a service that dispatched laundry “ninjas” to pick up your dirty clothes), Handy (on-demand apartment neatening), Instacart (to pick up items from the local grocery store), and the endless phalanxes of TaskRabbits (to do basically anything else for you).
Propelled by these epic feats—clever software, endurance, nutty work hours—the PayPal crew developed a proud sense of having won the gold ring in the meritocracy of Silicon Valley. While most other high-tech firms were collapsing in the dot-com bust of the early ’00s, PayPal was soaring. It successfully went public, then was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, making its founders remarkably wealthy. PayPal, the vice president Keith Rabois proclaimed, was a “perfect validation of merit.” As he told the journalist Emily Chang: “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley. . . . We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literal nobodies. People wouldn’t talk to us.”
lol
Some old-school programmers are unsettled by the rise of deep learning. Gathering data, cleaning it up, training models, and experimenting to find what works? This isn’t software engineering as they knew it. This isn’t the mental carpentry they signed up for. “I got into computer science when I was very young, and I loved it because I could disappear in the world of the computer,” Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android phone-operating system who now invests in machine-learning start-ups, told Wired. “It was a clean slate, a blank canvas, and I could create something from scratch. It gave me full control of a world that I played in for many, many years.” The idea that you’re now just tweaking a model, training, and retraining it until it suddenly works, felt—to him—oddly sad.
when the worst person you know makes a good point meme
Indeed, among the reigning kingpins of Silicon Valley there’s a sort of contempt for things that fail to become massive. Smallness seems like weakness. You may recall the story of Jason Ho, the hacker who created a thriving small business by making time-clock code used by companies around the world. It made so much money that he was able to spend much of his twenties with the freedom to travel and invest. If I’d done that, I’d certainly consider it a success myself.
But when I mentioned Ho’s company to the thirtysomething founder of a very large tech firm, he scoffed. To him, it was “lifestyle business”—Silicon Valley–speak for an idea that will never scale into the stratosphere.
That sort of product is fine, sure, he told me, but Google could do the same thing and put him out of business in a second. If you weren’t aiming to be giant, he asked with a shrug, why bother doing it? This sentiment is arguably even more pronounced in other software markets like China, which has a famously competitive, winner-take-all tech market. When in 2015 I toured the offices of the e-commerce firm Meituan in Beijing, the company was only five years old but in a frenzy of expansion, hiring young engineers as rapidly as they could roll off the transom of computer science programs. The CEO Wang Xing and I peered out over the sprawling floor of coders, festooned with hundreds of plants to make the scene feel less sterile. “In China, you either have to become massive or you will get crushed,” Wang told me soberly. (Meituan alone had survived probably a few thousand competitors, as the tech investor Kai-Fu Lee estimated, when I spoke to him.) In the world of high-tech firms, the race to scale is propelled by a carrot (the magical ease of duplicating and running code worldwide) and a stick (the sharklike competition).
sandwiches!!
Aaron Beck developed a form of psychotherapy in the 1960s and 1970s that he originally named “cognitive therapy,” a term that is often used synonymously with “cognitive behavior therapy” (CBT) by much of our field. Beck devised a structured, short-term, present-oriented psychotherapy for depression (Beck, 1964). Since that time, he and others around the world have successfully adapted this therapy to a surprisingly diverse set of populations with a wide range of disorders and problems, in many settings and formats. These adaptations have changed the focus, techniques, and length of treatment, but the theoretical assumptions themselves have remained constant.
In all forms of CBT that are derived from Beck’s model, clinicians base treatment on a cognitive formulation: the maladaptive beliefs, behavioral strategies, and maintaining factors that characterize a specific disorder (Alford & Beck, 1997). You will also base treatment on your conceptualization, or understanding, of individual clients and their specific underlying beliefs and patterns of behavior. One of Abe’s underlying negative beliefs was “I’m a failure,” and he engaged in extensive behavioral avoidance so his (perceived) incompetence, or failure, wouldn’t be apparent. But his avoidance ironically strengthened his belief of failure.
As of right now, start noticing when
- your mood has changed or intensified in a negative direction,
- you are having bodily sensations associated with negative emotion (such as your heart beating fast when you become anxious), and/or
- you are engaging in unhelpful behavior or avoiding engaging in helpful behavior.
Ask yourself what emotion you are experiencing, as well as the cardinal question of cognitive therapy:
“What was just going through my mind?”
This is how you’ll teach yourself to identify your own automatic thoughts. Pay particular attention to automatic thoughts that get in the way of achieving your goals, especially the ones that interfere with reading this book and trying techniques with clients. You may recognize thoughts such as these:
“This is too hard.”
“I may not be able to master this.”
“This doesn’t feel comfortable to me.”
“What if I try it and it doesn’t help my client?”
CBT is based on the cognitive model, which hypothesizes that people’s emotions, behaviors, and physiology are influenced by their perception of events (both external, such as failing a test, and internal, such as distressing physical symptoms).
Situation/event
↓
Automatic thoughts
↓
Reaction (emotional, behavioral, physiological)
It’s not a situation in and of itself that determines what people feel and do but rather how individuals construe a situation (Beck, 1964; Ellis, 1962). Imagine, for example, a situation in which several people are reading a basic text on CBT. They have quite different emotional and behavioral responses to the same situation, based on what is going through their minds as they read.
Principle 12: CBT uses guided discovery and teaches clients to respond to their dysfunctional cognitions. In the context of discussing a problem or goal, you ask clients questions to help them identify their dysfunctional thinking (by asking what was going through their mind), evaluate the validity and utility of their thoughts (using a number of techniques), and devise a plan of action. With Abe, I use gentle Socratic questioning, which helps foster his sense that I am truly interested in collaborative empiricism, that is, helping him determine the accuracy and utility of his ideas through a careful review of the evidence. Note that we refrain from challenging cognitions (by stating or trying to convince clients that their thoughts or beliefs aren’t valid); rather, we help clients through cognitive restructuring, a process of assessing and responding to maladaptive thinking.
Right from the beginning, I obtain a sample of important automatic thoughts. Abe reports that he often thinks, “There’s so much I should be doing but I’m so tired. If I even try [to do things like cleaning up the apartment], I’ll just do a bad job” and “I feel so down. Nothing will make me feel better.” He also reports an image, a mental picture that had flashed through his mind. He saw himself, sometime in the indeterminate future, sitting in the dark, feeling utterly hopeless and helpless.
I also look for factors that maintain Abe’s depression. Avoidance is a major problem. He avoids cleaning up his apartment, doing errands, socializing with friends, looking for a new job, and asking others for help. Therefore, he lacks experiences that could have given him a sense of mastery, pleasure, or connection. His negative thinking leads to his being inactive and passive. His inactivity and passivity reinforce his sense of being helpless and out of control.