Re:God's Lonely Programmer
by agumonkey on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @03:31AM
(#8661543)
I was about to ask this on reddit, Tourette is very awkward, borderline difficult, to witness (had a few classmates suffering it) because it's really tense and chaotic, but at the same time the randomness of it make it easily dismissible on the emotional side because it's not necessarily coherent. On the other side, comments that Terry can throw are so logical, they do pop randomly, disrupting his trail of thoughts, but it's far from bursts of slang and F-word, it means something. I can't wrap my head around that.
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Imagine the same random bubbling up of thought, but instead of appearing as a compulsion, it appears as a really clever idea that will change the world (e.g. a higher-level goal that will generate its own sub-goals that you then seek to achieve, etc.) Thinking about, and planning on how to execute, the idea suddenly produces a dopamine response (a feeling of passionate motivation), in the same way that e.g. planning how to get to a casino when you're addicted to gambling produces a dopamine response.
At some point, the artificial pin of the idea as "really clever" and "world-changing" goes away—but you might not even notice, if you're way down in the subgoal stack trying to solve a small part of (what you see as) the problem.
You have to actually pop back up and re-evaluate whether you still have confidence that the thing you think is a good idea, still is, before you notice that the idea was never that good in the first place and what were you even thinking.