Ivan Bogachev

Religious texts are often full of metaphors and oversimplified for the sake of a good story. It's ok. Literature is an art. But these books include insane amounts of information about human psychology. I'll give you a few examples.

Structural parts of the psyche. The id, ego, and superego that we know from psychoanalysis. Actually, they've been with us for millennia. Socrates used to talk about them. Shoulder angel and shoulder devil. Order and chaos. Preservation and change. Will to live and free will. Two forces. Two wills. Two whispering creatures. And "you", stuck in the middle.

Sensory rooms to help people with psychological problems were invented in the 70s, but you can trace them back at least to the time of witch hunts. Most likely they were with us much longer. I'm just not motivated enough to find the origins.

Art therapy? The idea that warriors can neutralize their destructive mindsets by making art when going home to family is not new. Many old pagan rituals look exactly like combinations of art therapy with gestalt therapy. We don't call them like that, but the working principles are identical.

Modern therapists use the same tricks that men of religion used for centuries. They deny this, of course, to look more serious, which is funny, but it's kind of true. And no, I'm not here to criticize. I'm here to whisper.

The knowledge is there. In the books. Our ancestors collected some data for us. We can use it. We just need to translate everything into the modern language of science. Don't make conflicts between science and religion. Make translations. Poets and scholars look at the same world at the end.

In physics, we've made a lot of progress in the last few centuries. When everybody around us is getting magical skin burns, we borrow a Geiger counter from radiology and check everything. We don't blame the invisible evil anymore. Old stories are like outdated theories now. Good enough for a cave man, but not to get the GPS on your phone working. We have better stories now, with more precision.

But in psychology, we still exist on the level of protoscience. We live in the cave. We need to build a stable basement for the field. In our position, it's not wise to discard data just because the authors don't have a PhD.

Read old books. Listen to folks out there. Test their claims. Combine old approaches with fresh observations. Utilize every bit of knowledge we have. It doesn't guarantee success, but it's better than reinventing everything on your own.

One of the interesting topics for exploration is connections between personality traits and patterns of behavior. Are they even connected? And, if yes, then how?

These sorts of data mappings are useful in practice, but I think we have to be careful. All these traits don't define you. They describe you. There is a difference. We assign the words to different observable qualities, but they don't necessarily explain the internal structure of the organism. I will propose a classification that can be used with my theory, but again, it's all about semantics and language.

The first group of traits comes directly from our 16 patterns of behavior of the class I. When you use the same pattern over a long period of time, people start to associate its parts with you. Creative. Aggressive. Dramatic. These kinds of words describe what you do. They portray your patterns of behavior and should be bound together by the same logic as the basic impulses. We easily apply these words to little kids and our pet animals, since the patterns are universal.

The second group is about your stability and efficiency. Cool-headed. Purposeful. Committed. Emotional. All over the place. These words don't describe any specific patterns, but provide data on your ability to actually finish whatever you do. Get the job done and not waste the resources. These qualities are very important in competitive environments, where the resources are limited. They're often mentioned in traditional martial arts as something crucial for survival and deeply interconnected with a state of a body. There are some correlations to study in their context.

The third group includes the rules-based qualities. Idealistic. Principled. Methodical. Pedantic. In some cases they affect your efficiency, in some cases they don't, but what makes them special is that you need to be intelligent and create a lot of rules in your memory to get these traits associated with you. Cultural environment. Education. Previous experience. More rules you learn, more variety you get here. Usually we treat little kids and animals as intellectually inferior creatures and do not apply these words to them in any form.

The fourth group includes the traits based on your connections with others. They don't describe you in vacuum, but rather add some data on the alignment of your behavior with a group. Selfless. Selfish. Reliable. Unreliable. Cooperative. Uncooperative. These words naturally come in pairs, and they're relative by definition. We're talking about combinations of compatible and incompatible patterns and rules that meet each other for various reasons and do not depend exclusively on your own personality. If you have multiple groups to interact with, then it's very possible that they'll associate the exact opposite traits of this kind with you. And usually we don't apply these words to animals, unless they're seriously involved in our group activities, like hunting dogs.

What do you do? How stable are you? Any special rules? Answers to these questions describe your overall personality. I'm not sure if we should treat the fourth group of words as personality traits, but they can add more details to the description. Context can be important sometimes.

Irrational. I avoided this word for a while. It's way too confusing. With a dream to build a replicant that will mimic human behavior, I'm looking for engineering explanations for everything, but irrational thinking is something odd. What is it? How do you build it? Nobody has any blueprints of it. I started to scroll through examples of irrational thoughts and actions with a hope to find some patterns in this mess on my own...

Constant fear of safety. Perceiving every environment as dangerous. Choices to not do anything and procrastination. Consuming instead of creating. Ignoring. Crying for help when not needed... Wait. No. This looks like the processes on the reactive side of the table. These are patterns of behavior of the prey animals. They don't make any sense for a predator.

Eventually I got some reversed examples, where the predatory behavior was claimed to be irrational from the perspective of the prey. That's an interesting duality of opinions. Almost like we have two opposing kinds of reasoning, and everybody believes that his reasoning is the rational one.

It looks like this whole thing is not about you choosing emotions over brains, but about somebody wanting you to be a predator, while you're not one of them, or vice versa.

This means that the term "irrational" is relative, actually. You're always rational in relation to your own patterns of behavior, but at the same time you can be irrational in relation to the patterns on the other side. In many ways it's like a personal morality. It's not universal by definition.

In mania, depression, catatonia, and schizophrenia, we see combinations of contradicting patterns inside one individual. The behavior goes against itself. These are real conflicts in logic. Most people who are blamed to be irrational do not have anything like that. They're not sick in any way. They just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and are being confronted with some expectations.

Sometimes healthy people may want to switch to other kinds of behavior for some reason. We can help them, but we have to keep in mind that this is not about some minor thoughts. The chemistry of the whole organism will be affected. New behavior will seriously contradict the existing one.

We expect to see the withdrawal symptoms during the switch. The relationships in the groups will be destroyed. You cannot change a side for real and pretend that nothing happened. It's not just dreams. There will be consequences. You have to burn your old life to build a new one. Not every person out there will be ready to pay the price. It will look like an irrational thing to do.

The existence of the basic impulses from my theory should be obvious for every person who ever looked at the real people outside. The four parts of the psyche are more of a game of language, rather than a game of logic. They're there to create the right mindset. To show that there are four functional roles to begin with. However, when we connect everything, it may not be obvious why the processes end where they end. Why don't we reconnect them in a different fashion?

The thing is, the processes start exactly where we placed them, according to their roles, but they end where they have to. It may sound counterintuitive, but they just don't have any options here. It feels like everything should be connected to everything, but every process has its requirements. Their directions are already incorporated in their meanings.

We need the environment to ignore it. We need somebody out there to call for help. We need to find the supplies in order to exhaust them. We need space to create new things in it. We need the world of things to annihilate them in various ways. Every process here requires an environment. We can make compromises in some other things, but not here.

Temptation to violate the rules, as well as justification, bending the rules, requires intelligence. We need to work with rules to do these things. Diagnosing and dread require us to operate with rules and consequences. To understand that the environment gives us things we don't deserve, or stops our actions, we have to work with logical rules as well. Every road leads us to the same intelligence. These processes won't work without it.

The helping environment gives us free energy for new unnecessary actions, while danger suggests us to change our course. Counterbalance, protection, and reconstruction are the ways to go against the naturally happening events. Inaction is a change in some indefinitely working program. Everything here pushed us to other ways of doing things. Again, the processes start differently, but they lead to the same place.

Adaptation and goal-oriented destruction are two sides of the same blade, pointed in opposite directions. Both can hurt us. Inflexibility leads to conflicts. Indifferent environment means that there is something wrong. These impulses trigger the self-preservation mechanism. The rest of them are on the other side of the coin. They are notifications that there is a pause in action. It's time to heal and recover. The destination is the same.

We will need to perform some adjustments eventually, polish the wordings to make everything sound better, and grasp the right meanings. Nobody invented all these words to be used in this sort of system. It's a hard linguistic problem, and even the detailed descriptions in the book are not silver bullets, but I hope this explanation will help others to improve this system or build similar models for different processes. Just throw an apple and look where it lands naturally. It shouldn't have a choice.

Scientific theories tend to be much simpler than IT systems. On the frontiers of science, demons hide themselves in novelty, but not in complexity. We use Occam's razor and appreciate elegant solutions for our problems.

In contrast, programmers rarely create completely new things these days, but the complexity of our systems can be overwhelming. We constantly work on the methods to decrease it. This is one of the main topics for debates in the field.

We use all sorts of design patterns to organize large amounts of code. They help a lot. No need to keep the whole project in your head all the time. But also we have discussions on how to write instructions that would be easy to understand.

If you have millions of lines of code in the project, the last thing you want is to read every one of them several times to get the logic. You don't write code for machines, you write it for people. By writing simple code you help your colleagues to spend their resources on actual development, instead of solving your puzzles with zero business value.

When you increase cognitive complexity with no reason, you create technical debt. It gradually slows down the development process. Increases the costs. It can kill the project eventually. There are rare exceptions where we accept dirty code in some utils to get better performance, but they're write-only things. Once they start to work, you leave them alone and never get back.

Some people used to argue that complex tasks require complex code, or that precision in algorithms makes code dense, or that abstract concepts are hard to understand by their nature, and that you need to grow as a professional to get it. None of this is true.

The moment we started to introduce the tools for static code analysis, to automatically prevent the obfuscated code from entering our projects, we realized that complex systems can be written in simple language. Of course, you need to learn the basics. You need to know the words. But the code can be easy to understand. When you write intricate code, it's likely not because you actually need it, it's because you choose it.

When I look at the language in academic publications, I feel like it's much more complex than it should be. Often, I have to read the same sentence many times to understand it. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the language.

It seems like people use the same arguments to protect this obscure language that programmers used back in the days to protect their bad code. But why?

When we work with data, we don't really think about hardware. In most cases it's absolutely unnecessary. It doesn't matter what kind of materials and processes are present in your computer, as long as it works.

However, if we put a computer into the environment with high radiation, random events start to happen. You could say that one destroyed molecule in the processor will not affect the program. Most likely not. But if we wait long enough, we get to the point where small destructions accumulate and start to affect the system as a whole. It either stops working completely, or some glitches appear in the program, or in the memory, where the program saves data.

From the perspective of a program, this is a natural chaos that may or may not damage the system at any given moment. Of course, we can play with statistics. We can say that technically all these small particles and collisions are completely predetermined, but it doesn't matter. The robot knows that it is destined to go into that room with a melted reactor, but only a chance decides if the program will or will not work as expected.

Even if God doesn't play dice on the level of atoms, the robot still has to play the Devil's game on the level of programs and data.

When we talk about determinism in behavior, we often limit the path by the genes and the environment - education, family, friends, etc. We often say that some person is destined to end up in some place because all these factors are pushing him there.

But all these initial constants and environmental factors exist on the level of software. Our sensors don't see what's going on at the lower levels. Things happen, but we don't save them in our memory for further use in the process of decision-making. Some of these hidden events can provide unpredictable alternative options to consider.

It's funny to observe people talking about fate and destiny when they apply these concepts to individuals who actually choose these random options. They look at your past. They see the causes for everything. They predict your future. But the next day they have to change their tune and say that actually everything leads you to something completely different. And the next day it's something different again. And again, and again, and again.

I think that we should differentiate the physical determinism and the practical unpredictability of behavior. Past events in our memory are not everything. There is some degree of randomness that exists on its own and cannot be measured by the brain itself.

What would you prefer, to stay where you are, correct the errors, and proceed with your life in an orderly fashion, or to embrace the chaos, play a game of chance, and build a different future? The choice is yours.