Hah, I can't help feeling that this describes me pretty well (not brilliant, maybe, but everything else :)). I should be worried about it, of course, but somehow I'm not--perhaps it's because I have limited ambition. Or maybe it's just the job market right now.
I used to really like Lisp. I still do, even. But now I've gotten caught up in Haskell which--despite being a completely different language to Lisp--is actually more of the same. If I replace Lisp with Haskell in the article, then it fits even more. Eerie, really.
Now that I'm relatively depressed about my future "on a soda fountain or doing yard work" I can go do something useful and enjoy my break.
"Often this kind of student never makes it to the end. He flunks himself by dropping out. He ends on a soda fountain or doing yard work, but all the time reading and studying because a good mind is always hungry.
Now one of the things about Lisp, and I've seen it before, is that Lisp is a real magnet for this kind of mind. Once you understand that, and see that it is this kind of mind that has contributed a lot to the culture of Lisp, you begin to see why Lisp is, like many of its proponents, a brilliant failure. It shares the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the brilliant bipolar mind (BBM).
Why is this? Well, its partly to do with vision. The 'vision thing' as George Bush Snr. once described it, is really one of the strengths of the BBM. He can see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his resources are insufficient."
I can't seem to find where it originates, but there's a frequently mentioned saying to the effect of: the optimally productive person is really smart but not so smart that they see too much of the big picture, because that's paralyzing, unless perhaps you manage to get yourself a job as a McLuhan-style public intellectual, or a novelist. Someone in an HN thread somewhere hypothesized that that might be related to the "Ballmer peak" in productivity after a beer or two, because alcohol sort of dulls the insight a little.
I think there's three groups. There's "smart enough", which is your fairly high-output productive person who gets shit done and may be somewhat dulled to the fact that the world is insane. (I wouldn't call them optimal but they're very handy to have around.) Then there's "too smart for your own good" which is as you and the article describe, seeing all the BS everywhere and feeling paralyzed and recognizing your own limitations (whether for how much BS you can put up with or even sharp intelligence barriers--it's not always too-big-an-increase in difficulty per se that kills a Lisper in college, but a dramatic increase in the amount of required BS to plow through to get anything done or get an acceptable grade). I don't think the monetary future for that kind of person is necessarily bleak, though, at least in the present times. There are so many startups you can join if you're smart enough to do even a little Lisp programming on the side, or you can start your own, you can also "float around" pretty easily and if you're lucky you'll get caught with a winner.
But then there's "John von Neumann" smart. I'd even lump the modest-in-comparison John Carmack in that distribution (not at the top end of course but I think he's earned a spot there), Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy too, along with a bunch of other relatively modern figures like Linus. These mythical people are worth at least 20 of the first group, and maybe 5-10 of the second group on the second group's good days. This third group can make the second group's lives even more depressing, since someone in the second group is smart enough to see and understand what they might have been if they had only slightly better brains.
I wrote a *nix kernel and shell for my OS class in 1997 in three nights. I also failed Intro to Philosophy, and got an A in 3D calc after sleeping thru the final.
I am still struggling with these issues to this day. We should try to figure out how to help ourselves and others like us manage these issues.
It's not 'bipolar disorder', specifically... It's not anything specific in terms of psychological disorders, so far as I have been able to determine. It's what is described in this article, to a tee.
Indee it's not about actual bipolar disorder (a.k.a. maniac-depression) at all. It's just a figure of speech. It's describing more a combination of cronic procrastination, unwillingness to do "boring" things even when it arguably goes against their self-interest (e.g. failing Intro to Philosophy), etc.
(I wish I could make myself clearer but I have no time for that now, as that would be procrastination).
I'm bipolar. The usenet post referenced contains advice that would literally be considered medical malpractice if a doctor uttered it: Try to avoid medication if possible.
If you're truly bipolar, you need medication. This is not my opinion, this is the current obligated medical treatment.
What I have seen from my bipolar friends who go off their meds has often been horrifying. It's incredibly common, unfortunately, largely stemming from beliefs like this post posits: it's just a discipline issue, it's a phase, it's an attitude, etc.
As always, try to avoid medical advice from usenet posts. Your loved ones will thank you.
Yeah I don't quite buy the bipolar argument in this context, so I agree with you that its questionable advice regarding the medication. Thankfully I'm not bipolar, so N/A to me but its good that you pointed it out nonetheless.
Thankfully I had a lecturer who recognized this & talked to me about it. He pointed out 2 things:
1) From a purely practical perspective I needed to suck it up & pass this course regardless of boredom.
2) Model solution driven marking (checkbox style) doesn't reward inspired answers. So the aim is not to answer brilliantly, but rather to answer as the other 120 people in the class would. (Its model solution driven because the professional exam is set up that way, so the lecturer wasn't in a position to stop the insanity)
Not exactly ground breaking insights, but I graduated a couple of weeks ago (barely) and I think that was partly thanks to that talk.
I've found #2 a pretty problematic part of education that I'm still sort of trying to unlearn. Once you realize that's what's going on, the goal becomes not to do things "for real", but instead to reverse-engineer the education system: figure out why the question is being asked, what it's designed to test, and what kind of answer it's designed to elicit, then answer accordingly. This often greatly simplifies the problem space, because using some heuristic meta-reasoning you can really narrow down what's "really" likely being asked and what forms the solution is likely to take (or even what methods the question is likely expecting you to use). But then that's a skill not easily transferable to "the real world" when working on problems that aren't specifically posed to test a particular skill or with a specific answer in mind. Though it's probably a good skill for job interviews.
I actually think #2 is more of a hacker symptom rather than limited to the weird Lisp Programmers. Someone here put it fairly bluntly a while back in the form of a "How to tell if you're a hacker" quick quiz. At the end the answer was something like "If you intuitively tried to 'game' the test, you're probably a hacker. If you don't even know what that means, you're probably not one."
I think it's a useful skill to sharpen and definitely not limited to passing tests. There are diminishing returns to worry about for how much you want to try and game something, but having even a basic intuitive feel for it is pretty useful in "the real world".
Yes, one of the key insights needed to pass modern education in the US is to suck it up and do the drudge work.
On the flip side, that's not a useless thing to learn - about 10-25% or so of my "Professional life" is some form of drudge work. So I did need to learn to suck it up.
Whenever I really felt like "too smart for school", I remembered the manual labor I had done in summers prior and that helped put some steel in my spine.
Brilliantly written piece. Though I never knew about LISP back then (and I can't claim to be as brilliant as the guys he's describing), I do remember very clearly when in my final High School project I did a web application with Java and PHP and the bullshit of XML (back in the time when J2EE was the bee's knees) and unsound engineering almost turned me off programming. Haskell and Python got me back into it, though.
Your link didn't work for me. I assume this is the section you are referring to:
<quote>
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.
Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations.
Along the way, he realised that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem.
If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada.
The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
Question (as someone whose deepest depression was a 'bad day' at work ;)): the article states that
But also it goes with realising that a lot of human activity is really pretty pointless, and when you realise that and internalise it then you become cynical and also a bit sad - because you yourself are caught up in this machine and you have to play along if you want to get on. Teenagers are really good at spotting this kind of phony nonsense. Its also the seed of an illness; a melancholia that can deepen in later life into full blown depression.
I think that purely rational reasoning will easily lead to this conclusion, but emotionally this does not feel true: we all want to avoid suffering and live in happiness. So, the eventual goal becomes making yourself and other people happy.
I seems to me that such reasoning can only get to you if there already is an emotional imbalance (e.g. due to bipolar disorder or stress).
So, isn't it a trigger for illness, rather than a seed?
This article rings quite true with me. The pointlessness of school resulted in me barely attending class at all this quarter; thankfully I did pretty okay this quarter. The kind of thinking we're talking about is neither a symptom nor a cause of depression. Rather, both are wrapped up in the personality of the thinker.
When I'm depressed, my thinking is skewed. I admit it. And here's an important point: if rational reasoning leads you to one conclusion and emotional reasoning suggests something else, then doesn't that mean that your meaning of life depends on how you feel in a given day? My emotions aren't predictable enough for me to accept that.
Sure, emotions are very temporal and frequently changing. But even if I am angry, bored, or excited, I know that I also want to and am capable of being happy. Evenmore, some other emotions are often strongly related to pleasant emotions. E.g. if child gets angry because he/she has to go to bed, it's usually because the child wants to play.
People with depression are not always able to experience happiness. And I cannot explain why, but at the worst, I don't really want to be happy either.
Do you actively not want to be happy, or just not really care about attaining happiness?
This is personally interesting to me. I do not think I am depressed, but I find I do not care much about being happy. I admit the experience is pleasant, but it doesn't bother me that it is rare.
That's a nice variation of Nozick's experience machine [1] :). I wouldn't consider taking such a drug, because it leads attachment to that good mood. Attachment leads to unhappiness: that state may not be maintainable (shortage of drugs, rebirth if you believe in that, etc.) and we can always wish for more or better.
I think that the highest form of happiness is non-attachment, being aware but not under control of pleasant and unpleasant experiences (akin to enlightenment in Buddhism).
I'm a bipolar Lisp programmer, and I relate to this article a lot.
If anyone else relates too and has not been diagnosed, I am here for any questions at all.
Please, please reach out. It's estimated that 1 in 4 untreated bipolar people commit suicide. This is a physiological disease that is no joke, not a "mindset" or attitude.
You get diagnosed, usually without you having any idea it's coming.
For me, I didn't get diagnosed until this year, and I'm 32. It gets worse as you get older.
It took one hospitalization and a treatment center for me to get properly treated.
Bipolar used to be called manic depression, because it is characterized by two main phases:
Depression: Usually more severe than even Major Depressive Disorder in bipolars. High risk of suicide. Suicidal ideation, inability to eat, complete loss of functioning, etc.
Mania or Hypomania: Periods of highly elevated mood. May exhibit grandisoity, visions, hallucinations, increase in spending and sexual activity. Increase in irritability.
There's mixed states too, like a wired depression that is lethal. They're not as common.
The #1 symptom of all mood disorders is sleep disturbance.
Bipolar for 25 years here: mixed states get more common as you become more tolerant to your medication - frighteningly so in fact. The euphoria that comes with highs doesn't happen as before, leaving you wired and irritable but with the energy to do stupid things to yourself and others.
I haven't ever been suicidal but this last year I've allowed myself to think about it because of the complete pointlessness of just about everything I've done (or more commonly, not done because it was pointless). Sigh.
How long did it take you to get tolerant to your medication?
I went through a round of neurochemically-inspired regret for the things undone this year too. It's not true; it's just a figment of our mood-states. I've found it helpful to remind myself constantly that thoughts and feelings are transient; actions are what really count. So no matter what I feel like, I can still function in some capacity.
Besides, you're on HN, you must be doing something right.
I would guess fifteen years to get tolerant. Of course I might just be mistaking medication effects for creeping age when it comes to lack of programming accomplishments.
I used to really like Lisp. I still do, even. But now I've gotten caught up in Haskell which--despite being a completely different language to Lisp--is actually more of the same. If I replace Lisp with Haskell in the article, then it fits even more. Eerie, really.
Now that I'm relatively depressed about my future "on a soda fountain or doing yard work" I can go do something useful and enjoy my break.