She Is So "Ood" (Rude)

I had often wondered about the cause of touchiness. What causes us to be so sensitive and explode in anger or feel hurt?
And I say that touchiness is one of the worst traits to have.

I had zoomed in on the feelings being damaged and / or on thoughts / rationality being damaged as the possible causes of this touchiness.

A damage to the thought is when, say, someone accuses you of dishonesty. If you are a very honest person, this is enough to get some of us into a rage. Unfortunately, we value external opinion so much that even an external untrue assertion can upset us.

In other people, a damage to our feelings is enough to get us all riled up. This damage may be because someone addressed us in the singular instead of in the plural. (This singular and plural form of addressing exists in many languages but not in English.) A damage to your feelings could also happen when someone uses abusive language at you or hits you or uses a loud intimidating tone. In all these cases, there is nothing done to or said about your character. In each of these cases, the issue is not one of whether what someone said was true or not, rather whether what was said  or done was socially appropriate.

Essentially, the injury we feel is of two kinds. One, when what is alleged is untrue. Second, when what is alleged or said is hurting but where there is no question of falsehood of what was said.

When people tell you, that you were very harsh - the thing often forgotten is: whether what you said was untrue. Or just harsh but true. Our emotions step in and zoom into the how something was said, rather than allowing our rational thought to check whether the said thing was true.
Note that something very negative printed about you is not libel if the printed thing is true. The emotions in us would hate to accept this.

Hence it's interesting to ask ourselves: are we upset more by harshness and the tone used? Or more by unfair allegations? What does each of these trigger in us?

It's one thing to be a nun and be called a whore. It's quite another thing to be a whore and be called one. Each of these may cause anguish in us and for very different reasons.

As DK said, the experiencing self is different from the remembering self (Read about DK and his book here: https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahnemann.html.

The remembering self, apparently, remembers the end and not a summary of all the events. Hence a social adept strategy is to always end an interaction well no matter how bad the earlier moments or years were. A socially inept strategy, on the other hand, is to end poorly.

Being humans we tend to place an inordinate emphasis on the end. An event that triggers a touchy response in us is enough to ingratiate itself in our remembering self, any positive memories from the experiencing self is locked out or squeezed small.

I guess the reverse is also true. You can change eons of poor experiencing self with a lovely finale. All is well that ends well.

Why is touchiness bad?
Because it erases any positive experiences and replaces them with the unpleasant remembering self. As I said in the beginning of this post, touchiness is awful.

Imagine if
100 - 5 = -4
And
-100 + 5 =4

The 5 standing metaphorically for the last social interaction. A negative sign indicates a negative interaction or negative memory. The 100 stands for the experiencing self. The remembering self is the sum value and equals almost the value of the last interaction while largely disregarding the experiencing self.

We then understand the importance we implicitly assign to the sign in our "mental maths". 

We probably love dogs because they seem to place so little emphasis on "last minute remembering self".  The experiencing self in them seems to be so overpowering.
Read: https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2018/07/inna-chethaarai-oruthal.html. 

Essentially being touchy seems to very unfair in that it doesn't reward the experiencing self at all, focusing, instead, all the attention on the negative remembering self. Is it possible for us touchy people to consciously force ourselves to focus on the memories of the experiencing self?

Additional reading
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-nobel-prize-winner-daniel-kahneman-gave-up-on-happiness-1.6528513: Quote - "Moreover, we usually choose the next vacation not as an experience but as a future memory. If prior to the decision about our next vacation we assume that at the end all the photos will be erased, and we’ll be given a drug that will also erase our memory, it’s quite possible that we’ll choose a different vacation from the one that we actually choose.”

Delivery By Drones

Much has been said about men being unable to handle or accept his wife's successful career.

While this is likely true of men, I wonder how women would react to surrogate motherhood of a variety where child birth that doesn't need women - Perhaps men give birth or maybe the good old drone (Amazon's version of stork) delivers babies home.

How would this affect women? Would they pained? Would they love it that they don't have to go through 40 weeks of pain? 

How would women feel about the question of men feeling defensive about a wife with a successful career when "surrogate motherhood" becomes popular?

Is a successful wife an issue only with men? Would wives be comfortable with absence of their pregnancy? Or worse, with "fertile fathers"?

In a lighter vein, men could claim that their midlife paunch is a result only of hormonal changes and childbirth. Imagine having to hear that.

Forcefulness

Forcefulness comes out of confidence about one's plan of action (POA). Whether the POA is justified, moral are not relevant. Forcefulness can be driven by a narcissistic nature or by competence. A strong feeling of need may not have anything to do with competence. 

When I tell someone to DO IT, it could be because:

1. I need (it to be done)
2. I know (it has to be done)

I think the need takes precedence over knowledge when we become forceful. Meaning, it's when we definitely don't have a need that it's knowledge that makes us forceful.

When We Hear But Don't Listen

I have a subscribed to a newspaper. I had problems reading it on their app on Android.

Here is the issue raised with them.

Hi, 

I have a yearly subscription. I think the last payment was made in July 2018.

I have 2 android devices. In the first one (Motorola), the subscription details are shown correctly in the app and i have no issue reading the articles. In the 2nd device (Panasonic) the subscription is shown as inactive and I am unable to read the articles. The message shown is that I have to subscribe.

I wonder why I have an issue in the Panasonic phone (Android 7).

Can you help me pls?

Thanks in advance.

Their reply:

Thank you for contacting! I see you are trying to link your Google account with your subscription. To access content with your Google account please be sure you completed the full registration for the link up. Here are instructions to help guide you.

Once you have subscribed through Google Play, you will be prompted to create a profile which will allow you unlimited access to the website, in addition to the app you purchased through. If you do not link your in-app purchased subscription you will not receive full access to the website and mobile website.

If you missed this step when you purchased, please follow the directions below:

Open the app you purchased your subscription from 

Go to Settings

Select Log In or Create Account. Follow the instructions to create a profile 

If you are having trouble linking your Google Play purchased subscription to your sign in credentials, please let us know.

Thanks!

Unbelievable. I thought a bot had responded to the issue. The response above was a mail from the customer care.

Path To God And Morality

When what you want is much more than what your drive or talent can provide, then:

1. You turn to God, Vaastu etc. This is usually packaged as a quest towards spirituality, inner peace, helping the needy etc. One needs to recognize it for what it is. Look towards the person's generosity. Such people are often not generous. They may occasionally pay Paul. But they are likely to have robbed many Peter's en route.
2. You become feminine (give what you can and ask for what you need). Incidentally this belief is also shared by communism. The insidious nature of this can be observed when someone does a lot to address your needs and all they get is a thanks (eg., recall the Thank You note written by Helen Hunt to Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets). Then you realize that you were primarily looking at getting your needs met and what you could do in return was (SASC and) say Thanks. They have been paid in full for services rendered. Is this such a bad thing? You gave them back what you could, which happened to be a heartfelt thanks. Imagine driving to a Volvo dealership and asking them to give you a car because you need one and all you have to pay for it is your good heart which can say an earnest Thanks. When all (that's a hyperbole) your payments are in intangible things and all (hyperbole once again) your receipts are tangible things, ain't that nice. This idea has been explained more eloquently in Atlas Shrugged.
3. Steal, murder and do other immoral / illegal things.

The above points are a continuous spectrum. A person having one of the above characteristics may or may not have the rest of the characteristics.
Only the 3rd point is illegal. The 1st and 2nd points aren't. 
The 1st point gives an indication of your nature, that of your unmet needs, couched in socially correct language. 
The 2nd is very subtle and uses social interaction for one's benefit at the cost of another's. The 3rd of course takes what belongs to someone else by force and is immediately recognized as unlawful. The 2nd is never seen as unlawful.

Robert And Mary - IPE

Imagine if you knew what affected each person. For example, some people react nastily to accusation of lying, some people to accusation of embezzlement, some to being uncaring. 

Some people don't mind much what you say if it's in private, some don't care where you said it and who heard it. What you accuse them of is all that matters, no matter who heard the accusation.

Some people are rational and understand only logic. Some understand only pain. Some people focus only on results achieved. Some focus primarily on lead indicators such as effort or intentions. Some are extremely offended by the tone of your voice, some are more offended by a smile that doesn't reach your eyes.

Some people need empathy to be shown to them than something tangible. Others need tangible generosity and can't stand empathetic (SASC) routine.

If you understood all this about your audience, you could decide the best way to communicate and deal with them. If you wanted to demolish a building or to design a better brake for a vehicle, you would decide on the approach based on the characteristics of the said building or the vehicle and the environment around the building, vehicle.

The same is true when dealing with people. It is engineering once again. How you ought to deal with Robert is different from how you deal with Mary. Dealing with people without understanding the specific characteristics of Robert or Mary is poor IPE (Inter Personal Engineering). 

What's the big deal about this idea? Every man worth his salt knows it and practices it. Right?

Really? Is that so?

No. There are some people who have never heard of this idea, many more who are aware of it but do not have the skills or preference to practice it. For such people, this IPE comes as something of a shock. These people express their thoughts and do things without considering the differences between Robert and Mary. 

Additional reading
https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2018/09/christene-blasey-ford-and-brett.html

Swimming InSensitivity

A friend sent me this link: https://www.storypick.com/single-mom-bullies-swimming-teacher/

I thought the exchange was rather funny because it's so obvious that the lady talking to the coach is awfully insensitive.

It's more interesting when it's not so obvious - for example when the lady (or man or child) isn't so expressive as the one in the link but the thoughts, not expressed as eloquently, are just as repulsive.

Continuing on, I thought insensitivity could be of 2 kinds.
Let's say a person is supposed to do some work for us everyday and that person doesn't turn up on Sunday and we ask why he didn't work on Sunday. There are two options here:

1. When we are paying the person by the hour,  we are insensitive and a J (as in MBTI). Note, we will pay him for the hour(s) on Sunday. There is some innocence in our question, an Innocence and insensitivity that arises from our J.
2. When we are paying by the month (so many $ per month for a quantum of work everyday), that's just pure insensitivity. The work on Sunday does not pay the guy anything extra. Here there is no innocence at play, we just want a good deal for ourselves at someone else's expense.

Now the lady talking to the swimming coach in the link above: which kind was she?

Quiet

This is mostly a set of quotes (without permission) from a nice book by Susan Cain.

The author seems to have equated E to ESxP and I to INyJ. The author's E seems to have the characteristics of a Venus, her "I" that of Saturn. The x sends likely to be F and y to be T.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can%27t_Stop_Talking

Righteous behavior [it is believed] is not so much the good we do behind closed doors when no one is there to praise us; it is what we “put out into the world.”

Most of Berns’s volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them. 

Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. Kagan’s work helped link certain infant temperaments with adolescent personality styles. 

Kagan hypothesized that infants born with an especially excitable amygdala would wiggle and howl when shown unfamiliar objects—and grow up to be children who were more likely to feel vigilant when meeting new people. And this is just what he found. In other words, the four-month-olds who thrashed their arms like punk rockers. did so not because they were extroverts in the making, but because their little bodies reacted strongly—they were “high-reactive”—to new sights, sounds, and smells. The quiet infants were silent not because they were future introverts—just the opposite—but because they had nervous systems that were unmoved by novelty.
The more reactive a child’s amygdala, the higher his heart rate is likely to be, the more widely dilated his eyes, the tighter his vocal cords, the more cortisol (a stress hormone) in his saliva—the more jangled he’s likely to feel when he confronts something new and stimulating. As high-reactive infants grow up, they continue to confront the unknown in many different contexts, from visiting an amusement park for the first time to meeting new classmates on the first day of kindergarten. We tend to notice most a child’s reaction to unfamiliar people - how does he behave on the first day of school? Does she seem uncertain at birthday parties full of kids she doesn’t know? But what we’re really observing is a child’s sensitivity to novelty in general, not just to people.    High- and low-reactivity are probably not the only biological routes to introversion and extroversion. There are plenty of introverts who do not have the sensitivity of a classic high-reactive, and a small percentage of high-reactives grow up to be extroverts. Still, Kagan’s decades-long series of discoveries mark a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of these personality styles—including the value judgments we make.

If a high-reactive toddler breaks another child’s toy by mistake, studies show, she often experiences a more intense mix of guilt and sorrow than a lower-reactive child would. All kids notice their environments and feel emotions, of course, but high-reactive kids seem to see and feel things more. If you ask a high-reactive seven-year-old how a group of kids should share a coveted toy, writes the science journalist Winifred Gallagher, he’ll tend to come up with sophisticated strategies like “Alphabetize their last names, and let the person closest to A go first.”
There was an easy answer to the nature-nurture question after all—we are born with prepackaged temperaments that powerfully shape our adult personalities.
On the other hand, there is also a wide range of possible outcomes for each temperament. Low-reactive, extroverted children, if raised by attentive families in safe environments, can grow up to be energetic achievers with big personalities—the Richard Bransons and Oprahs of this world. But give those same children negligent caregivers or a bad neighborhood, say some psychologists, and they can turn into bullies, juvenile delinquents, or criminals. Lykken has controversially called psychopaths and heroes “twigs on the same genetic branch.”
Incidentally I said that CEO's and criminals are similar.
It may be that some disadvantaged kids who get into trouble suffer not solely from poverty or neglect, say those who hold this view, but also from the tragedy of a bold and exuberant temperament deprived of healthy outlets.
But even orchid children can withstand some adversity, Belsky says. Take divorce. In general, it will disrupt orchid kids more than others: “If the parents squabble a lot, and put their kid in the middle, then watch out—this is the kid who will succumb.”

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. - —MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
These seem like contradictory principles, but they are not. Free will can take us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz’s research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

Sometimes speakers need to talk about subjects that don’t interest them much, especially at work. I believe this is harder for introverts, who have trouble projecting artificial enthusiasm.

But Eleanor wasn’t the light, witty type he’d been expected to marry. Just the opposite: she was slow to laugh, bored by small talk, serious-minded, shy. Her mother, a fine-boned, vivacious aristocrat, had nicknamed her “Granny” because of her demeanor.

Some children, it turns out, feel a lot more guilty about their (supposed) transgression than others. They look away, hug themselves, stammer out confessions, hide their faces. And it’s the kids we might call the most sensitive, the most high-reactive, the ones who are likely to be introverts who feel the guiltiest.

High-reactive introverts sweat more; low-reactive extroverts sweat less. Their skin is literally “thicker,” more impervious to stimuli, cooler to the touch. In fact, according to some of the scientists I spoke to, this is where our notion of being socially “cool” comes from; the lower-reactive you are, the cooler your skin, the cooler you are. (Incidentally, sociopaths lie at the extreme end of this coolness barometer, with extremely low levels of arousal, skin conductance, and anxiety.)
We know from Kagan’s work that a relaxed torso is a hallmark of low reactivity; and alcohol removes our inhibitions and lowers our arousal levels. When you go to a football game and someone offers you a beer, says the personality psychologist Brian Little, “they’re really saying hi, have a glass of extroversion.”
Elaine Aron has an idea about this. She believes that high sensitivity was not itself selected for, but rather the careful, reflective style that tends to accompany it.

It’s not that there’s no small talk, observes Strickland, the leader of the gathering. It’s that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end. In most settings, people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they’re comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reverse. They “enjoy small talk only after they’ve gone deep,” says Strickland. “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”

We all have old brains, of course. But just as the amygdala of a high-reactive person is more sensitive than average to novelty, so do extroverts seem to be more susceptible than introverts to the reward-seeking cravings of the old brain. In fact, some scientists are starting to explore the idea that reward-sensitivity is not only an interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash. They’ve been found to have greater economic, political, and hedonistic ambitions than introverts; even their sociability is a function of reward-sensitivity, according to this view—extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying.

What underlies all this reward-seeking? The key seems to be positive emotion. Extroverts tend to experience more pleasure and excitement than introverts do.
Dopamine is the “reward chemical” released in response to anticipated pleasures. The more responsive your brain is to dopamine, or the higher the level of dopamine you have available to release, some scientists believe, the more likely you are to go after rewards like sex, chocolate, money, and status.
Still other research has shown that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a key component of the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system, is larger in extroverts than in introverts.
This blindness to danger may explain why extroverts are more likely than introverts to be killed while driving, be hospitalized as a result of accident or injury, smoke, have risky sex, participate in high-risk sports, have affairs, and remarry. It also helps explain why extroverts are more prone than introverts to overconfidence—defined as greater confidence unmatched by greater ability.

Kellogg School of Management Professor Camelia Kuhnen has found that the variation of a dopamine-regulating gene (DRD4) associated with a particularly thrill-seeking version of extroversion is a strong predictor of financial risk-taking. By contrast, people with a variant of a serotonin-regulating gene linked to introversion and sensitivity take 28 percent less financial risk than others. They have also been found to outperform their peers when playing gambling games calling for sophisticated decision-making. (When faced with a low probability of winning, people with this gene variant tend to be risk-averse; when they have a high probability of winning, they become relatively risk-seeking.) Another study, of sixty-four traders at an investment bank, found that the highest-performing traders tended to be emotionally stable introverts.

Kuhnen and Brian Knutson have found that men who are shown erotic pictures just before they gamble take more risks than those shown neutral images like desks and chairs. This is because anticipating rewards—any rewards, whether or not related to the subject at hand—excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly.

“Psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.” But in flow, “a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working.”