Personal Reflections on Guilt and Knowledge: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Discovering a Coding Error

Irrationality, Intrusive and Unwanted Thoughts, Cognitive Distortions, and Trying to Love all of Myself

Dall-E generated image from prompt: "A watercolor of a man, overwhelmed with guilt and dread. His face is a mix of confusion, fear, and remorse, surrounded by a belief he had been in an accident which had never even happened and the viewer feels sympathy seeing it."

This is a very long substack and you may want to skip it. It is one level about an event in my career when I learned my dissertation had a coding error. It is on another level me wondering if my struggles with intrusive guilt thoughts was both an irrational habit that I can’t easily see, except that this event helped me, and that maybe the reason why I …