[arconis987]

Is it just me, or is the language in the essay strangely hard to parse?

> But insofar as it is the passing on of second-hand knowledge about being, it is itself a form of imposture that reproduces and impersonates without meaning or sense and therefore enacts imposture in the act of naming itself as well as in the manner that it imitates an act of passing on knowledge of an existing disease or syndrome.

The essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language.

Maybe the author is trying to give the reader impostor syndrome?

[dusted]

Yeah, at first I thought "ah, it's a bit on the lyrical side" but a few paragraphs down I just dropped out, it's too close to unreadable for comfort. I recognize this kind of long-winded, superfluous style from my own way of writing, it becomes too much like some conversational monologue that devolves into incomprehensibility, not out of a want for sounding smart but rather the lack of the talent that is brevity. English is not my first language, and I suspect that plays a part too, it may be the same for the author of that article.

Now, on imposter syndrome, I've often thought of myself as having this, but, the comfort that thought gives me makes me wonder if I'm not just seeking validation and trying to put myself up there with those brilliant people who supposedly had it too..

[Jensson]

> Now, on imposter syndrome, I've often thought of myself as having this, but, the comfort that thought gives me makes me wonder if I'm not just seeking validation and trying to put myself up there with those brilliant people who supposedly had it too..

Sanity check: have you done something you got praised for and later thought you weren't worth that praise? That is the core of impostor syndrome, if you haven't experienced it then you don't have impostor syndrome. When a brilliant person has impostor syndrome its because others thinks the brilliant person is brilliant, but the brilliant person doesn't see himself as brilliant. But if you fail the first step meaning others don't see you as brilliant, then you can't have impostor syndrome since the syndrome means you don't think you deserve the praise you are getting.

[dusted]

It might be that the person doing the praising is not brilliant either.

Praise is such an ingrained part of our culture, I feel like my generation has been praised throughout our lives for every little, entirely normal thing we do. It takes so very little. It feels hollow and fake, social norm that is followed.

I cannot construe praise to be anything beyond "affirmative, the task was done and there was nothing so wrong with it that it needs mention".

I don't like to receive "high praise" it feels patronizing at the very least.

[asxd]

In software at least, just landing a nice paying job seems to cause impostor syndrome, especially if it's one of your first. I guess getting a job offer is a sort of praise though, which fits your point.

[dusted]

I agree, especially because there are people out there doing hard work all day who earn a fraction.

We sit in nice offices, sipping coffee and play with computers..

[Jensson]

If you feel you don't deserve your job then that is impostor syndrome, yeah.

[_carbyau_]

That's an issue with many self judgements.

Do I really have [XYZ]? Or am I simply trying to rationalise something to myself?

[robocat]

Or perhaps it is imposter imposter syndrome? A deep flex? Maybe just a plain imposter with no syndrome? You could give yourself an anxiety disorder worrying about it too much. </tongue-in-cheek>

[dusted]

I didn't mean it as a flex, more a general observation that we're biased towards narratives that comforts us. So maybe when I'm feeling useless, I take comfort in the idea that super bright people also feel useless once in a while, and so, that puts me in a category with super bright people, we have this in common, so maybe I'm also super bright! ;)

Except, of course I am not, and of course I'm not explicitly thinking that way, but I do think that my brain unconsciously makes that connection on some level, irrational as it may be.

It's such an alluring thought, that maybe I'm not incompetent, maybe I'm just having this "syndrome" that so many other bright people have too... A lot easier to accept than the truth.

[robocat]

The article is dense, needlessly complexified, and impenetrable (requiring specific arts to read it), making the article useless.

This whole thread is brilliant - I really admire the one or two people that tried to summarise/translate sections. That said, I find something weird about people that write about imposter syndrome.

Something similar to imposter syndrome is normal for anyone who is highly skilled:

* To be highly skilled you are continuously improving you skills, by fixing the flaws in your work and fixing your own flaws, from the large to the small.

* To successfully fix flaws, you need to be able to recognise the flaws, in finer and finer detail, as you become more and more skilled. The irony is that while external parties can genuinely admire your work, you yourself can only see more and more that is wrong with your work.

* If you can’t see flaws, you don’t fix the flaws, and you don’t progress.

There is a gorgeous section of one interview with Jim Keller (a legendary/genius chip designer) where he talks about how he knew how deeply flawed his work is. He is really inspiring because he he is so insightful about his thought processes, and there is no entangled bullshit like the article we are commenting on. I also love this quote of his: "Imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self-conception, and 98% of that is wrong.". Quote is at @1:23:00 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

[wisty]

It's being clever for the sake of being clever. They're saying imposter syndrome is itself a bit of an imposter, because it's often more a meme than a serious disease (whatever that means, it's not in DSM I think, maybe it's a symptom of some kind of anxiety).

[WhitneyLand]

It’s not just you it’s pompous bs.

[labrador]

I tried to translate it. I'm sure I didn't get it right because it is hard to parse:

As psychiatrists we see a lot of people coming in saying "Man, I feel like an imposter. I just don't measure up." Most of the time we'll convince them everyone feels that way and they should chillax. It ain't no big thing. A lot of famous people talk about it, almost like they're bragging or something.

If that doesn't work we tell them it's just a meaningless label people throw around for something else that is going on. It's modern "disease" of the times. You hear others throw the words around and pretty soon you're wearing that jacket.

Now the old white dudes had some thoughts on this but they're outdated. They can't help us because they weren't hip to the needs of women and people of color.

You might think most people would go away at this point with less anxiety, but here we get to the real subject we want to speak on, which is privileged people who grew up being told they were special and then finding out everyone in their circle was told the same thing. We can't all be special, lets face it. It's quite a let down for some. It's doubly hard if they haven't separated from their parents yet but no longer get their parents daily affirmations of their specialness because they don't live with them anymore.

Those privileged people usually want to go away feeling good about identifying the problem and vowing to learn a little humility, but this is where we get them. We tell them that they are special, but the capitalist system wants to keep them down and consistently on the treadmill for the capitalist masters. We tell them they've been turned into a robot. Then we close the deal and tell them that we are their only hope and it might involve a lot of work with our specialists at considerable cost.

[asxd]

Appreciate you writing up a more terse version. Tangentially, I fed the article into GPT-3, then led with the prompt:

> Q: Was the above article written by a bot? Explain your reasoning.

It's response was:

> A: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not the above article was written by a bot, but there are several clues that suggest it may be the case. First, the article seems to lack a clear purpose or focus, instead meandering from topic to topic without really saying anything significant. Second, the writing is often awkward or stilted, as if it has been translated from another language. Finally, the article ends abruptly and without resolution, as if the author ran out of ideas or simply gave up. Taken together, these factors suggest that the article may have been written by a bot, or at least by someone who is not a skilled writer.

I thought this was a pretty humorous take.

[labrador]

I don't think it was written by a bot, just in a post-modern style. I think the article has a point, which I take to mean some at the higher levels of achievement are especially susceptible to imposter syndrome can become dependent on the analyst, and since those at higher levels of achievement usually have money, they can spend a lot chasing answers (It reminds me a little of plastic surgery addiction)

[asxd]

I don't think it was written by a bot either. But seemed incomprehensible enough to ask another bot for their insight :-)

In seriousness, I appreciate your analogy above. That brings the article into a more interesting light.

[Animats]

Yup.

A pair of clinical psychologists practicing in Manhattan and Brooklyn NY could probably say something useful about this. But they didn't.

Thought for today: Is impostor syndrome driving the use of excessively complex tech stacks on problems that don't really need them? If it's not complicated, do they really need to pay you $250K a year?

[bryanrasmussen]

>A lot of famous people talk about it, almost like they're bragging or something.

yeah if you're famous and super successful in your field and you talk about having imposter syndrome it does feel a bit of a humblebrag.

[Jensson]

Impostor syndrome is when you don't feel you deserve the praise people give you, so the more praise you get the easier it is to feel impostor syndrome. So it isn't strange at all that successful people who gets a lot of praise feel a lot of impostor syndrome.

What is strange however are all the people who thinks they have impostor syndrome even though nobody thinks they have done anything great at all. They don't see themselves as impostors, they just see themselves as nobodies and feel bad about that.

[Animats]

> Is it just me, or is the language in the essay strangely hard to parse?

It's not you. The author appears to have been influenced by deconstructionist philosophy. Read some Derrida to get a feel for this. That style is snarky with a layer of pseudo-intellectualism on top. This was a big thing at liberal arts schools in the 1990s. About one sentence in five will say something concrete. The rest discusses tangents consistent with the author's ideology. There's just enough meat in this sort of writing to prevent it from being dismissed as totally bogus. But the fat content is excessive.

Text:

By virtue of every imaginable variety of insufficient parenting and relentless contingencies of Oedipal failure, the victim suffered insufficient separation and individuation and was rendered susceptible to feelings of being a fake. The imposter was said to have an undeveloped ego that fluctuated wildly between grandiosity and insufficiency, and to be susceptible to what Freud called “the family romance,” a secret belief that one’s all-too-abject parents could not really be one’s parents. Surely, the imposter thinks, the real parents will arrive to reveal the truth of a more noble bearing. Today’s imposter is not subject to the Oedipal treadmill. Experts assigned by universities and companies to mitigate imposter syndrome emphasize a rigorous self-sufficiency that tends to render the old fashioned attempts at a family-based etiology irrelevant. In another inversion, the neurotic imposter of old was the exception to the normal vicissitudes that would render one rooted in a convincing-enough sense of self. Today’s victim of imposter syndrome is the exception insofar as they belong to an elite and privileged class, but in other respects the imposter is the norm, the expected result of a naturalized economy where parents aspire to produce admirably competitive subjects whose imposter diagnosis testifies to the success of their efforts in raising admirable offspring.

Simplified version:

Impostor syndrome used to be mostly about with comparing yourself with your parents. (Classical theme of Freudian psychoanalysis.) Now it's more about being in a group of high-achievers and not feeling up to their level.

As someone wrote above, "the essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language."

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/451/

[djmips]

Nice optimization!

[asxd]

Not just you. I thought it might have some interesting to say, but I had to stop a ways through it due to the confusing wording.

[Silica6149]

Reading blogs online, sometimes I don't know if it's the writer's superfluous style that makes it hard for me to understand, or if it was just written with AI.

[nopenopenopeno]

E-flux is a very well established art and cultural theory publication. Still, I agree with you. However, as someone who came from that world into computer science, I find the simplistic salesman-like superficiality that is common on many Hacker News tech posts even more off-putting than the wordy mumbo jumbo in E-flux. I think the question is who they’re trying to impress. If you can sort that out, it will be easier to parse and filter.

[labrador]

> the question is who they’re trying to impress

As with any community, each other. Not only does the jargon signify belonging, it obscures the real message from the unvitiated.