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…people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future

There are aspects of my life where I’m optimistic but probably less so than most people. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a self-decribed pragmatist: I see wonder and beauty all around but I also see problems coming a mile away.

In my work as a software architect I consistently encounter a propensity for optimism from folks who dream things—as opposed to those who build things. The dreamers are “The Business” and they are “bully”. To varying degrees, anything short of “can do” is nay-saying.

Strangely, it’s the dreamers who tend to label the do-ers (as pessimistic) but not the other way ’round. In professional life it’s taboo for someone to tell an optimist that they just don’t know enough to understand the real risks involved in X, Y or Z.

Those conversations do happen rarely and don’t often result in much change. Why?

One answer could come from applying evolutionary psychology to the SDLC. It’s a topic I’m interested in considering further.

As a start, I’ve looked at The brains rose-colored glasses : Nature Neuroscience.

The best way to think about the problem from The Business’s expectation is:

optimists’ brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted

The foundation of Agile Methods—XP—took this into consideration. XP focused on measuring “velocity” and included rules that used past velocity to govern / temper the optimism of a future iteration.

More details can be found here: optimism

Frontline’s “The Wounded Platoon” is documentary that follows members of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st battalion, 506th infantry…the regiment known as the “Band of Brothers”. It exposes some of the repercussions of modern warfare on the psychological health of our troops.

One of the biggest impacts is PTSD.

PTSD was a term that emerged from the wars in Viet Nam. Some have said that it’s a new term that’s the same as the old adage that “War is hell”.

However, something else is going on:

Since 2002, the number of Fort Carson soldiers diagnosed each year with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has risen from 26 to 1,120, a rise of over 4,000 percent.

In recent decades, medical science has greatly increased our knowledge of PTSD. One might naively think that a deeper understanding would result in more humane treatment of soldiers who can’t cope. That is true in some circumstances. However, our deeper understanding has also led our military to adapt policies and approaches for dealing with combat troops exposed to inhuman situations:

Before the Iraq War, American soldiers in combat zones were not allowed to take psychiatric medications…

But by the time of “The Surge”, more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. These drugs enable the Army to keep soldiers with post-traumatic stress on the battlefield.

One soldier, Kenny Eastridge, came home with PTSD and got into some really bad trouble. He was convicted for participating in a crime spree that included drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, running over and stabbing a nursing student and finally the execution-style murder of two fellow soldiers.

From his jail cell, soldier Kenny Eastridge recalls his own experiences from that his time in The Surge:

I was having, like, a total mental breakdown. Every day, we were getting in battles and never having a break, it seemed like. It was just crazy. I just got to where I couldn’t take it. I tried to go to mental health, and they put me on all kinds of meds, too, and I was still going out on missions.

Like, they had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff. They tried different medications at different doses and nothing would work.

How is this different from human medical experimentation?