Yup, we all do it. I know when I do it. I feel bad about it because I'm tring to fool myself and that only makes me the fool.
This came out of reading an article in New Scientist (Oct 8th 2011 issue, page 32 if you still use print) about biologist Robert Trivers. Great interview that was right on (for me at least). He was not talking about programming, but you know how it applies. We are debugging a very difficult issue and we try to convince ourselves of what the cause is. Yeah, right. Facts are facts but that does not stop use from deceiving ourselves in so many ways. Convincing ourselves that a bug is really a cool feature. That we really know how the users will use the product. On and on and on it goes.
One of the most interesting points in the interview is even knowing that we are deceiving ourselves, we still go ahead and do it! Robert knows it and still does it! Life hard enough and then we do this to ourselves? Yuck.
The positive side to all of this is because we do know this, we can take action (abet after the fact) to correct ourselves. There is no shame in admitting we just lied to ourselves, tough yes, but come on, we can take it, it's us we are taking about.
See how many times this week you have tried to deceive yourself. Be honest. You don't have to tell anyone but yourself.
One of the most interesting points in the interview is even knowing that we are deceiving ourselves, we still go ahead and do it! Robert knows it and still does it! Life hard enough and then we do this to ourselves? Yuck.
The positive side to all of this is because we do know this, we can take action (abet after the fact) to correct ourselves. There is no shame in admitting we just lied to ourselves, tough yes, but come on, we can take it, it's us we are taking about.
See how many times this week you have tried to deceive yourself. Be honest. You don't have to tell anyone but yourself.
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