Social cognition, actor-observer asymmetry and other social phenomenon in action

Whoever is reading this, I'm going to start with two apologies. First is that the name of this topic may sound too technical. Sorry about that. Second is that as always I'm going to be abstract, to abstract as usually in order to protect me and the guilty. This is a public blog you know :P .
So without further delays, let's get to the point. It's may be an old cliché, but in order to understand yourself you must observe and listen to others and in order to understand others you must observe and listen to yourself. But not only listen, but to analyze. On one hand this is very powerful tool in understanding and persuading self and others, on the other hand this is very challenging task, since behavior of a person and interactions between people takes much less time than analysis. There are solutions for that of course. First of all not every single interaction are equally valuable. Sometimes it takes little to see the pattern. Another good thing is that we do not have to start from the scratch. There are some researches regarding these topics.
But knowledge is not enough. Another important thing is... Well I would call this "ego suppression". There are no my interests outside of me. No one must do anything for me unless it's they interest. The first question I should answer here is "what are their agenda?". Were I need as little assumptions as possible, as little bias as possible. That is hard, but not nearly as hard as second question: "what am I trying to do?". This is not as simple question as it may look like. People has lots of hidden agendas, so secret that they doesn't know about it even themselves. There are lots of insecurities, defenses we are not aware of. This, I believe is one of the main sources of misunderstandings between people.
The bottom line here is that the key of understanding and persuading others is as unbiased as possible self observation.

30% of planing, 5% of coding, 65% of debugging

I believe this should work for programming. I think so, o course it depends on an application, but unless it's very trivial application planing is one of the biggest part of a job and at least you've done planing and coding damn well debugging will use the majority of project's time. Well the maintenance is going to tame the most of the time spent with an application, but anyways, this is not about software, but about life. Planning and "debugging" are important in both. And thinking about software applications I've seen an interesting [well interesting to me] similarity. Sure you need planing to avoid stall, but also plan doesn't often come together so, I've tried to find out why. The problem is that when you developer software application instead of trying to predict all the work it should do during it's "life", you try to create algorithms for more general situations, reactions to events, data inputs and so on, or some programmers even creates neural networks, of genetic algorithms. So program is a sort of plan for computer. So my idea is that when you are planing, creation of algorithms for situations, that is going to happen rather than situations itself is much better approach. Now, the biggest problem is how to put these ideas into practice...

Reset addict

I must confess. I am a "reset addict". I'm pushing that button both metaphorically and literally. And sometimes this wish to start everything again is ridiculous. I remember on project for one of university assignments. I've started two months before deadline, did lots of work, used every trick i knew including putting all schedule as sticky notes on a big peace of glass. Last night I've changed practically everything and remade this project completely. Another examples are almost every project I've tried to complete on web and basically every project with programming except programming assignments in university, therefore I hope to break that "reseting streak" and try to finally launch my personal site. So be ready for it in 2012 first quarter. That all for now.

Apolgies

Another important topic for me right here and right now is apologies. Everybody does that sometimes right? Sometimes, we don't, sometime we feel that somebody else is obliged to apologise us. Sometimes apologies are childish way to avoid punishment, cheap way not to feel guilty or even worse You just don't feel any guilt and apologise only from pure politeness or as I've written before to avid punishment. In other words apologies is not sincere.
Sometimes apologies are sincere. One person feels sincere regret, he apologise and the one who accepts apology really forgives. This is in my humble opinion the best interaction people who done something wrong to one another. Now of course the insincere apologies is not the only problem. Another problem is the wish for vengeance. When someone did something wrong to You, You just want to torture the person every way imaginable to make him really pay and if he feel regret, he tries to sincerely apologise sometime he tries to torture himself in order to make this apology accepted and sometimes, You are taking advantage of his sincere regrets and try to torture him even more. People has got used to this, and therefore those who doesn't want to be abused this way tries not to apologise, tries to act as if they doesn't care, because they doesn't want to be tortured, even if they torture themselves deep inside.
So even if turning another cheek in general may be not a good idea, but sometimes understanding of each other, understanding that everybody does mistakes, instead of blaming and judging, everybody wold be better of and would make relationships much better amongst all of us.

Honesty and "what if"

It's better bitter true than sweet lies I used to say, and its so true. But he problem is that honesty starts with being honest to myself. And in lots of cases I fail to be honest with myself, because it's do hard. The longer I live the more I have to hide from myself and It's most often counterproductive. One of the reasons is that honesty means admitting that I have some socially unacceptable thoughts, feelings or ideas and socially unacceptable means not only unacceptable to others, but unacceptable to me as well. Why it's counterproductive? Well anger is something that makes people to give effort to restore social justice. An when somebody is unjust, I should get angry, but I don't instead I analyze if my anger is adequate, what is the use of it and so on if it is useful I get angry if not, I don't. Now what is the problem here? The problem is that I can't evaluate situation correctly and usually I'm better of acting on an instinct. Or am I. In case of anger, I should be able to tell when and most importantly how to get angry, this is a skill, certain knowledge in social psychology are invaluable here, but experience are even more important.
Of course merely anger management are least of my problems of honesty with self. Another is fear to honest, fear, because I don't know is something terrible is going to happen next.

Idea

Three days back I've red a book about strategical persuasion and it reminded me that in order to persuade somebody you must have an idea, that you want to see them in your way, because nobody will buy your idea unless you have clearly formed it and/or grasped it, reminds me Cobs from Inception words "An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks". That explains lots of misunderstandings in my life including my failures to persuade myself. So now once again I'm trying to understand myself, and that's hard task, because the smarter you are the more you are capable in understanding things, such as yourself, but the smarter you are the more complex you are therefore more difficult to be understood.

Don't make me think (continued)

I've written, that making people question their beliefs, establish new opinions is something that makes think and thinking fatigues most of people, bushes them out of comfort zone.

Now I've found out that in reality it's more complex, because social factors comes into play. If somebody isn't motivated to understand, they will not and it really doesn't matter what. For instance Ray Comfort can't understand evolution, big bang theory, abiogenesis and NephilimFree can't understand that earth is spinning around earth and so on. On the other hand same people can understand how earth was created before sun, while knowing (well, not always) that earth is spinning around sun, how sun can be created before sun even knowing that sun is the source of daylight and so on. So it's not just about mere simplicity of explanation or simplicity of very phenomenon that is explained, but rather authority of the one who explain, social influence, credibility of speaker, etc.

That's not really reassuring, but as Richard Feynman said, "if you don't like this go elsewhere, to the other reality perhaps, that is more simple, more psychologically pleasing".