The Pseudo-Extrovert Blues

I learned a new word for myself recently.  No, not the embarrassing one they used to call me in college.  No, not the one my wife calls me when I leave dishes in the sink - a new one.  "Pseudo-extrovert."

What is a Pseudo-Extrovert?

A pseudo-extrovert is easy to define - an introvert masquerading as an extrovert.  The Extrovert-Introvert continuum has at one end individuals who feel more energized by loud noise and multiple interactions with others, while at the other end you find people who recharge with quiet and solitude.  In practice, it means that while introverts can enjoy a loud party or group project at work, it will leave them drained.  It also means that extroverts will feel drained after spending a few hours working alone on a pet project.

There is a lot more to it than that, but that's a more accurate representation than characterizing introverts as shy nerds who lack social graces.  Some of us are really cool.  Seriously.  Want to see my vintage collection of "Magic, The Gathering" cards?

Denial and the shallow life

So what's so bad about being a pseudo-extrovert?  I went through a divorce almost 10 years ago, and I decided to change things up in my life.  I wanted to get ahead at work, meet more girls, and get people to think I was cool.  I did get those things in some measure by following a "fake it until you make it" policy of acting more confident, interested and gregarious than I really was.  It came at a cost, though.

Extroverts, real extroverts, feel energized by interacting with new people.  Many of them also get a strong feeling of connection with the people around them precisely because they spend more time and energy on a larger number of relationships.  That sounded great, but it just doesn't work that way for me.

Pseudo-extroverts not only miss out on their close connections, we also lose much of  the rich inner life of abstract ideas and deep thinking that is our real source of power and sustenance.  Feeling emotionally exhausted means that you don't want to do much of anything at the end of the day, even the things that used to be your main source of stimulation and enjoyment.

The upshot of this is stress, heart attacks, and probably an early death.  Think I'm exaggerating?  I had heart surgery less than 6 months ago.  Even with "normal" cholesterol levels and regular exercise, my coronary arteries were getting blocked.  I also felt stressed-out most of the time, but I didn't know what to do about it.

I only have so much energy for social interaction.  Spending that energy being the life of the party and the social connector at work meant that I had less energy for the people who matter most to me.  I've felt less connected to my family and close friends because I don't have enough "me" left to give to them.  Even worse, when they wanted my time and attention I would feel like they were making unreasonable demands of me.  You can't hide feelings like that from the people who are closest to you, and the strain on your relationships just adds more stress.

Why?  Cultural values.

So why do we put ourselves through this?  I think the reasons above are pretty clear, but there is a deeper reason.  In the US and much of Western Europe, our culture venerates being social.  Leaders are seen as people who get others "fired up".  People who prefer to avoid conflict and are less outspoken are often seen as lacking in social graces, meek, or just disengaged.

Above I said that I felt stressed-out, but didn't know what to do about it.  That's because I believed that I shouldn't feel that way.  We're bombarded with cultural messages that say we should feel happier and more connected if we're more gregarious.  We're told in many subtle (and some not-so-subtle) ways that if we don't want to spend time with other people, we must be depressed or antisocial.  In other words, being an introvert is seen as being flawed and in need of "fixing".  The answer is to be more of an extrovert!

Bullshit.

I recently read several books on the subject (I read a lot when I'm not pretending to be a social dynamo), and one really crystallized these concepts for me.  I recommend "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" as my favorite read on the subject.  Feel free to hit me up for other recommendations, though.  Like I said, I've been reading a lot lately.

What to do about it?  Opt out - most of the time.

I want to shout this out!  I'll... wait, I'm an introvert.  I'll type it at the top of my voice - I'm not going to take part in your extrovert culture no more, man!

Actually, I think that I'll only do that some of the time.  Why waste what I have gained?  I can speak to large groups, interact well with new people, and do a lot of other little things that didn't come easily to me a decade ago.  The key for me isn't to stop doing these things.  It's simply to not accept them as my default behaviors.

This solution is self-acceptance.  If you're in the same boat as me, I'd suggest being true to your nature most of the time, and make a conscious choice to bring out your extrovert persona once in a while. Meet-ups are a good example (I'm a co-organizer of the Detroit Java User's Group) - go ahead and attend an event or two, just space them out more and plan for some alone-time afterward to digest the experience.

Extroverts aren't wrong to have a more boisterous way of engaging in their lives.  It's another way to do things, and worth trying on for size from time to time.  It's just not a better way if it doesn't suit your personality.


Have you had a similar experience?  Please chime in with a comment!  (Introverts love electronic communications - we get to connect with other people without feeling drained by it.)

Flu Vaccine or not?

I've been getting a vaccine shot for the past few years, and I wanted to revisit the topic to see if it was a good idea to keep doing it or not.  What I learned is that good information is really hard to come by.  I also learned that getting vaccinated is very unlikely to help you, but may help society as a whole.

To get to the heart of the matter, I tried to answer these questions:

• How likely am I to get the flu in any given year?
• How likely is it to kill me if I do get it?
• How much less likely am I to get the flu if I get vaccinated?
• How likely am I to suffer serious side effects from the vaccine?

If you don't want to read the rest, the cliff-notes answers are: 1) Around 1 in 400 2) Very unlikely 3) About 50% 4) No friggin' clue, but there is some chance.

I say "I" above, but I really mean "me, my wife, or my kids".  

Definitive answers on this are pretty hard to find.  For instance, the CDC's page on effectiveness of the vaccine really set off my bullshit detector.  It describes the details of how statistics are compiled, confidence intervals, etc, etc, and then gives you one number with no citations for it.  Worse, it's a relative-risk number, which I consider to be questionable without seeing the absolute risk numbers along side.  

Why absolute risk?  Well if the risk of contracting a given disease is vanishingly small, a vaccination doesn't make sense at all because there is always some risk of side-effects.  For instance, someone may develop a vaccine reduces your risk of fatal Floogle's Syndrome (I made that disease up) by 80%.  If the overall incidence of Floogle's Syndrome is 1 person in every 100, it's worth risking quite a few side effects to avoid it.  If the incidence is 1/200,000,000 (that is, 30 people in the entire world), it isn't worth taking any precautions - your chance of getting it is too small to bother with.

Some statistics

Using the CDC's numbers for last year's flu season, it's 1.5% across the entire flu season.  But, that's for "ILI", or "influenza-like-illnesses".  I found this study which showed that only 17% of children who saw their doctor for "the flu" actually had a variant of the influenza virus.  If that applies across the whole population, it means that your chance last year, here in Michigan, was 0.17 * 0.015 = .25%.  This same study showed that if the children were vaccinated, the vaccine was effective in 58% of cases.

If I did the math right (check it yourself - I might not have, and I made a few assumptions above), that means getting your kids (or yourself) vaccinated is likely to help avoid the flu 0.15% of the time in a given year. To put it into perspective, if you live over 600 years and get vaccinated every year, you can avoid one case of the flu.  If you live to be 100, there is a 1 in 6 chance that getting vaccinated every year for your whole like will help at all.

If you think my numbers are optimistic, double them.  That's still a 1 in 3 chance that the vaccine will help you over a lifetime. 

But what if the flu is likely to kill you?  

I'd consider a 1 in 6 chance of avoiding premature death worth it.  We know that influenza isn't certain death, though.  I can't tell how uncertain it is because every site I looked at (like this one from the CDC again) lumped influenza and pneumonia together.  That said, the same sites tell us that pneumonia accounts for 98% of the deaths in that number.  

Pretty much all of the sites I looked said that "flu and pneumonia are the 8th leading cause of death", and used that as an argument for flu vaccination.  Since flu itself accounts for around 2% of that, flu is more like the 50th leading cause of death, not the 8th.  That's way below most cancers you could name, and about on par with epilepsy.  Thats a serious condition, but how much time do you spend worrying about it if you haven't been diagnosed with it?

But what about side-effects from the vaccine?

This is where things get really murky.  I can't quote a single study that gives solid numbers, though there is a lot of anecdotal support.  In other words, side-effects - including some serious ones, do happen.  I just don't have any reliable way to tell how frequently they occur compared to the beneficial effects of the vaccine.

Fear-mongering

The CDC and other health organizations seem to always use fear as a way to motivate people to get vaccinated. They talk about risks, then use statistics to obscure what the actual risks are.

That doesn't mean they're assholes.  I think that they're sincere, professional people who really want to help.  I also think that many people who work in epidemiology want to justify their grant money to continue their research and build an infrastructure so when they develop a truly effective vaccine, it will make a difference.  

I don't agree with the way they do it, though.  It smacks of an elitist view that most people are too dumb to make the right choice if you give them all of the information.  There might be some truth in that (though I'd say "don't take the time to think it through" rather than "too dumb"), but so what?  Lying with statistics is still lying.

Conclusion

So, the flu is unlikely to kill you, you have maybe a 1 in 400 chance of being exposed to it in any given year, and the vaccine will prevent it only about half of the time if you are.  Side effects happen, but they seem to be unlikely.  Is it worth it to get vaccinated?

Probably not.  

Most of the relatively small number of deaths occur in the 65-and-over age group.  That may make it a bit more sensible for you if you're over 65 or you live with someone who is.  If you live in a warmer climate, the chances are slightly higher.  Overall I don't buy it, though.  As a means of improving reducing your risk of illness, you're better off taking a couple of long walks than spending your time getting vaccinated.

Getting vaccinated against the flu is an altruistic act.  By getting a vaccine, you help reduce the total number of cases that a doctor has to handle.  You reduce the chance of giving someone else the flu.  If another pandemic like the 1918 outbreak occurs, you're supporting the infrastructure to quickly distribute a vaccine that actually will save a lot of lives, including yours.

Maybe.

I think I'll pass on getting the vaccine this year, though.

Keeping a Personal Knowledge Store With Evernote

Having a personal information store is like offloading a lot of the "remembering" part of your mind to external storage.  I don't know about you, but I suck at remembering things.   What do I have to do at work today?  Damned if I know - better check Evernote.  What did my wife want me to pick up at the home improvement store?  Check Evernote.

One of my main uses of Evernote is as a very simple-yet-flexible GTD system.  It is based on the TSW system.  Using tags and shortcuts, I keep track of the things I want to get done, and review the list daily.  The daily review takes 5-10 minutes, and looks like this snapshot:

If anyone is interested, I can write a more detailed post about how I manage tasks, but for now...

Creating a personal knowledge store takes this idea to a different level. Instead of just making information searchable and accessible, you use selected pieces of information to build a deeper understanding of things you care about, and you can thereby enhance your creativity.  If you can get several unrelated (or barely-related) concepts together in your mind at the same time, you're almost guaranteed to have some novel ideas.  If you have even a modest skill in dropping the truly dumb ideas, you'll be left with some useful new-to-you concepts.

To help with this, I've been using an app called EverShaker that allows me to randomly view notes in a set of notebooks and/or tags that I choose.

You can get the same effect with some scripts, or even by just clicking randomly through a set of notes returned with a saved search.

The whole process goes something like this...

As you can see, I pull information from a wide variety of sources, and I'm particularly fond of putting highlights and notes into electronic books.  Pretty much all popular e-readers let you export the highlights/notes en masse into an email or web page, which lets you put them into Evernote.  Between all of them, I have almost 500 notes.

Here is an example of making new connections, made by skimming my notes as I write this post:

• The site Gamestorming has a huge number of useful creative and organizational techniques, one of which is using a storyboard. 
• Daniel H. Pink's book, "A Whole New Mind" focuses on using a more "right-brained" approach to work and other aspects of life.  One of Pink's ideas is to create designs that connect with emotions.
• Stephen Denning's "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling" describes using a narrative as a compelling way to engage people's interest.

What about using...
...a storyboard format in a presentation
...to tell a story about a person's joy or anguish about a problem we have
...when I'm selling my management on a solution to the problem?

What about using...
...a hand-drawn storyboard
...showing a child's happiness when making good (or sadness when making bad) choices
...to help my kids understand the importance of doing household chores, or avoiding strangers, or any of the myriad other things that I want them to understand to prepare them for adulthood?  

There is nothing earth-shaking about these ideas, but I probably wouldn't have thought of them if I didn't keep a curated set of ideas around.  My goal is to keep doing this daily until it becomes a habit, then see where it leads me.

What's Next?

I spend quite a bit of my time expanding my trove of esoteric knowledge (some would say "useless knowledge").  I thought I'd create a blog where I could share some of it with like-minded deviants.

In my Independent in Detroit blog I write regular posts on software development topics, but I wanted a place to post about all of the other things that fascinate me.  I'm interested in:

• Health and medicine, particularly as they relate to life extension.
• Personal productivity.
• Personal knowledge management.
• A potential upcoming technological singularity.
• Other things that I haven't considered yet.

I read a lot.  I mean really a lot, and on a diverse range of subjects.  You can expect to see reviews of books and blogs I've read in here.  You can also expect to see a few well-researched posts, and a lot of my opinions and blue-sky ideas.