For a sample, see her excellent article "Last Call: A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/last-call-3 (Also surprisingly relevant to maintaining OSS packages, IMO.)
I absolutely LOVED her book Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Drowning-Impossible-Idealis...
I thought this would be about the psychology of “getting inside” someone’s head. I think it’s a very interesting phenomenon when someone says something to you and you can’t seem to shake it, and it bothers you for days or weeks. I’m very sensitive to it. I believe it’s a very important window into how the mind works. That’s one reason why it’s interesting. The other is that understanding this phenomenon would be very powerful — to never allow anyone to “get under your skin” would make you a much more powerful and productive person.
I have read that the unibomber, before he started bombing, was subjected to an experiment under the mk-ultra program. The experiment was psycological cross-examination. Ted was taken into a room and asked about certain things, things that were probably very important to him — fundamental beliefs that perhaps he didn’t even realize were fundamental to his psychology. Then, with all of that established, he was cross-examined and inconsistencies in those beliefs were brought to his attention or in some way de-stabilized. It was after this that his descent into insanity began which ultimately resulted in the bombings. This concept of “getting inside your head” is much more important than it is given credit for — completely untapped and unexplored as far as I can tell. I really wish I could understand it. But I can’t really find much when I google around for it. Nobody seems to talk or think about this online. Not in the way I do which is viewing it as an exploit in the human mind.
I'm sorry to post off-topic but... I find this very hard to ignore:
When did Medium gain these huge annoying banners that can't be dismissed at the top and bottom of the page?
> Never miss a story from Conversations with Tyler, when you sign up for Medium. Learn more. Get Updates
I tend to read at larger than 100% font and these banners take up a disproportionate amount of space. At 125% zoom these banners together seem to take up about a third of the total vertical reading space.
If this B.S. has to be there for some reason, why not it put on the side of the page which is otherwise unused whitespace? Sigh. Or why not put it at the end of the article? If people really like Conversations with Tyler, and want to read more, then they've presumably read to the bottom of the page.
> I think this notion that trying to help people, sacrificing yourself to help people was a sickness became very widespread, especially in the ’70s and ’80s under the better-known term codependency. It’s part of our now unconscious culture, the way we look at altruists. When we hear about them, many people think first, “Are they sick?”
I personally wouldn't go that far as calling a person "sick" for being extremely altruistic but it is generally well-known that gifts/free things are never really "free".
For a sociological view on gifts/altruism not being genuinely "free" there's Marcel Mauss's classic "The Gift" [1], while from personal experience I can tell that I used to be taught by both my peasant Eastern-European grand-mothers to never accept free stuff from our neighbors (like going to eat at their place or something similar), the reasoning being that those neighbors would most certainly want something in return at some point in the future.
In a similar vein there's this Seinfeld season 3 episode called "The Pen" [2], where Jerry accepts a "free" pen as a gift from one of his parents' neighbors and, obviously, that turns out not to have been the best idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(book)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pen