If I were in her shoes, behaving the way she behaves, I would feel disgust toward myself.
(tl;dr: you should be kind to yourself)
suppose you have some major flaw that you should fix; something you feel kind of vaguely bad about it, but somehow you just haven’t ever managed to fix it. given that you being aware of it hasn’t already just fixed it, it’s probably not trivial to fix. now imagine someone (whose opinion you care a lot about) comes in and berates you for it. they call you an idiot, a fool, the entire circus—the whole works. they argue that you should obviously just do X (you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise).
maybe after thinking about it for a while you’d agree, but in that moment? you’d probably feel quite upset and defensive and annoyed. if you respect this person’s opinion a lot, you might even feel ashamed or afraid. and however hard it usually is to make progress on improving, it is probably even harder in that moment.
being disgusted at people for having a nail in their head is counterproductive to them taking the nail out. being disgusted at yourself for having a nail in your head is counterproductive to you taking the nail out of your own head.
you’d probably feel a lot better if someone sat down with you and first listened to all the things you had tried, and understood your confusion at why you find it so hard to fix something that seems easy to fix, etc. it’s possible to still convey a sense of urgency and importance without meanness.
just as you can treat other people this way, so too can you treat yourself this way; just as this is more effective to get other people to do what you want so too is this a better way to get yourself to do what you want.
I do in fact treat myself that way in cases where the assumptions bind—i.e. cases where I have in fact tried the first basic things and they didn’t work and need debugging. And I do have sympathy for others in those cases.
I do not think that is the typical case in my experience; “you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise” is not actually how it usually works. (Indeed, on occasions when this sort of thing explicitly comes up in conversation, I go out of my way to make sure that they do have plenty of room to correct me if I’ve misunderstood what they’ve done so far! In general, I specifically put a lot of effort into not trampling over people in conversation.) The typical case is that they have some internal narrative about how The Thing isn’t so bad, or it’s not really something which needs fixing at all, or it’s normal, or it’s not really under their control (and therefore not their fault), or fixing The Thing is supererogative, or [...]. And that narrative excuses the fact that they have not, in fact, put in real effort, other than sometimes clearly-performative “trying”.
Consider the example from the post of my teammates on that project. Why didn’t they study any ML? Well, it’s not like the school had any requirement for them to do so. They took the classes they were required to take, and did reasonably well in those classes. They followed the path as it was laid out. What they failed to do was take any responsibility for themselves. The Thing was presumably seen as supererogative. It’s not like they tried to do it and failed; they just never had enough agency over their own lives to figure out what skills they would need and acquire those skills, other than deferring to the school’s requirements.
(tl;dr: you should be kind to yourself)
suppose you have some major flaw that you should fix; something you feel kind of vaguely bad about it, but somehow you just haven’t ever managed to fix it. given that you being aware of it hasn’t already just fixed it, it’s probably not trivial to fix. now imagine someone (whose opinion you care a lot about) comes in and berates you for it. they call you an idiot, a fool, the entire circus—the whole works. they argue that you should obviously just do X (you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise).
maybe after thinking about it for a while you’d agree, but in that moment? you’d probably feel quite upset and defensive and annoyed. if you respect this person’s opinion a lot, you might even feel ashamed or afraid. and however hard it usually is to make progress on improving, it is probably even harder in that moment.
being disgusted at people for having a nail in their head is counterproductive to them taking the nail out. being disgusted at yourself for having a nail in your head is counterproductive to you taking the nail out of your own head.
you’d probably feel a lot better if someone sat down with you and first listened to all the things you had tried, and understood your confusion at why you find it so hard to fix something that seems easy to fix, etc. it’s possible to still convey a sense of urgency and importance without meanness.
just as you can treat other people this way, so too can you treat yourself this way; just as this is more effective to get other people to do what you want so too is this a better way to get yourself to do what you want.
I do in fact treat myself that way in cases where the assumptions bind—i.e. cases where I have in fact tried the first basic things and they didn’t work and need debugging. And I do have sympathy for others in those cases.
I do not think that is the typical case in my experience; “you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise” is not actually how it usually works. (Indeed, on occasions when this sort of thing explicitly comes up in conversation, I go out of my way to make sure that they do have plenty of room to correct me if I’ve misunderstood what they’ve done so far! In general, I specifically put a lot of effort into not trampling over people in conversation.) The typical case is that they have some internal narrative about how The Thing isn’t so bad, or it’s not really something which needs fixing at all, or it’s normal, or it’s not really under their control (and therefore not their fault), or fixing The Thing is supererogative, or [...]. And that narrative excuses the fact that they have not, in fact, put in real effort, other than sometimes clearly-performative “trying”.
Consider the example from the post of my teammates on that project. Why didn’t they study any ML? Well, it’s not like the school had any requirement for them to do so. They took the classes they were required to take, and did reasonably well in those classes. They followed the path as it was laid out. What they failed to do was take any responsibility for themselves. The Thing was presumably seen as supererogative. It’s not like they tried to do it and failed; they just never had enough agency over their own lives to figure out what skills they would need and acquire those skills, other than deferring to the school’s requirements.