I believe that in the long term, personal credibility is bolstered by wins and losses are forgotten. So I'm happy to risk losing face in exchange for once in a while saying something that might be a big win for everyone on certain subjects, like programming.
Depression is different. It probably works the same way where karma is concerned, but the difference is that with programming, I am motivated by getting people to think. If they try some hair-brained programming scheme like "The Williams Style:"
I don't lose sleep over the result: They are adults, they made a choice, they are smart enough to rewrite/refactor, they learned something, their colleagues can stop them, &c.
With Depression, I am motivated by people's outcomes. If I tell them CBT is wonderful but it doesn't work for them, I might have steered them towards a very poor outcome. It may not be so easy to just start all over again. I fear giving bad advice about depression because I believe the consequences are far more serious than writing conjectures and anecdotes about programming.
With programming, I sincerely believe that a beautiful failure is a win unto itself. With depression, a failure may have fatal consequences. This isn't a face or karma issue for me personally. I can't speak to anybody else's eagerness or reticence to speak to programmin or depression.
It may help to reframe the discussion as measures of progress in a direction, not in terms of success and failure. These are all tools to help people manage these overwhelming emotions and keep them as fellow productive humans in society. Neither you nor the strawman-on-the-internet are necessarily wrong, as both of your statements may provide some utility to the depressed person you want to help.
http://raganwald.posterous.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influe...
I believe that in the long term, personal credibility is bolstered by wins and losses are forgotten. So I'm happy to risk losing face in exchange for once in a while saying something that might be a big win for everyone on certain subjects, like programming.
Depression is different. It probably works the same way where karma is concerned, but the difference is that with programming, I am motivated by getting people to think. If they try some hair-brained programming scheme like "The Williams Style:"
https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2011/11/...
I don't lose sleep over the result: They are adults, they made a choice, they are smart enough to rewrite/refactor, they learned something, their colleagues can stop them, &c.
With Depression, I am motivated by people's outcomes. If I tell them CBT is wonderful but it doesn't work for them, I might have steered them towards a very poor outcome. It may not be so easy to just start all over again. I fear giving bad advice about depression because I believe the consequences are far more serious than writing conjectures and anecdotes about programming.
With programming, I sincerely believe that a beautiful failure is a win unto itself. With depression, a failure may have fatal consequences. This isn't a face or karma issue for me personally. I can't speak to anybody else's eagerness or reticence to speak to programmin or depression.