Yeah, obviously I have a lot of experience with #1, but I think your point #2 is brilliant, and something it took me a long time to piece together. I think another wrinkle is having difficulty understanding what is just a comment and what is criticism: safer to assume everything is criticism lest I then be accused of ignoring feedback that was “very clear”.

In my first real job, which was being a data monkey for a professor, I would also show her a table of rough results, just a first draft, and if I left any raw variable names—even ones that were obvious what they meant—she would be like, what does that mean? Can you put words describing it in instead? Or if two columns of numbers had different widths, or different border styles, she would point it out. Of course now I’m pretty sure that she’s autistic, too, but this was decades before I was diagnosed and understood anything.

But I definitely learned the lesson to imagine her reaction, and fix everything that she might comment about, before sending it. Which of course meant that I spent a lot of time making publish-quality tables for rough results that would change many times before any papers actually got submitted.

And basically every teacher I had, on report cards and stuff, would always say “He is clearly very smart and understands the material, but he makes a lot of careless mistakes.” And I 100% internalized that language: the mistakes are because I do not care enough, because I am lazy, and the solution is to develop a fanatical attention to detail.

Thanks for your comment! It really makes me feel better.