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
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 didn’t resubmit the paper to a journal was because of irrational guilt over things I might do. And it is on another level nothing more than me noticing that the discovery of the error offered me an opportunity to see how in my own mind the “feeling of knowledge” could exist both because of the sensations of knowledge and then persist even when exogenously those sensations disappeared through the discovery of a typo. It is in other words a weird substack and I am posting it even though it is a long rambling mess. I decided to write it anyway.
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