In many places it seems to have become the norm to celebrate overwork, sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Ordinarily if you reveal that you are unhappy, unproductive and causing yourself mental and physical harm, people will be concerned and try to intervene. However, the expected response to this kind of suffering is usually praise. You haven't had a full night's sleep in months? Wow, you are so dedicated! I wish I could sacrifice that much.
I've heard a lot of reasons for this phenomenon. Obviously there's a certain degree of bravado, no different to the initiation rituals found in many other cultures; you show your strength by willingly enduring harsh conditions. There's a kind of cargo-cult signaling: productive people are busy; busy people must be productive; more busy = more productive, and so on. But there's another good reason that I haven't seen mentioned: deliberate self-sabotage.
You see it often enough when people present something. They'll talk it down before showing it to you as a kind of hedge against your opinion. Oh, it's not done yet. The code's a mess. I threw it together in an hour so don't expect much. You sabotage it before someone else can judge it, which gives you safety in lowered expectations. A crappy app can still be a pretty good for a half-finished prototype. Better still, there's a certain degree of clever misdirection; if your work isn't representative of what you could do under better circumstances, then any criticism isn't really criticism of you or your abilities.
But that kind of sabotage has to be done one situation at a time, and only applies to certain things. What if you could sabotage everything you do? Say, if you could be overworked, overtired and just doing the best you can under the circumstances? That would mean everything you do is not reflective of what you're really capable of. And if you make a dumb mistake and screw something up, you can offer a wistful "oh, oops, I must have done that because I'm so tired and busy".
With that said, I think there is some real benefit in having a kind of creative liability shield at times. Much as corporate limited liability encourages innovation and risk-taking, limiting how much the things you make reflect on your qualities as a person can be a powerful tool for creativity (with similar caveats about ethics and responsibility). I've heard it described as the freedom to fail, but I'd extend that to "the freedom to fail without being a failure". And, despite its negative qualities, sleep deprivation does let you fail without being a failure.
I believe that if we had better options for creative liability shields, it would reduce the appeal of self-sabotage. Maybe that wouldn't be enough to stop the culture of glorified overwork on its own, but it'd be a good start.
I had a fun conversation today about the various little semi-scripted social interactions you have to perform, how nobody really teaches you the rules, and how easy they are to get wrong. For me, at least, young adulthood was a series of wacky hijinks caused by a lack of this kind of knowledge. Go up to the counter to order at a café, get told to sit down and wait for table service. Sit down at a café, wait for half an hour before I realise nobody's coming. Never ever ever jump the queue, except for sometimes when you're just giving back a form or something. Or at a bar where it's complete anarchy.
Anyway, it would be kind of fun to put together a life manual, with little how-to bits on the most mundane and obvious everyday stuff. How do you catch a bus? How do you eat at a restaurant? How do you buy food at a supermarket? Attend a football game? Deal with salespeople? Order drinks in a pub? All these things are simple enough, but involve a bunch of little steps that make you look a bit silly if you don't know them.
Fortunately for me, I was blessed with passable social skills, a single culture to learn, and a lack of anxiety about looking dumb. But if you're not so lucky I can imagine those situations being pretty intimidating. And regardless it seems like a pretty inefficient way to learn. It'd be a great help to have a manual that could tell you things like whether you pay when you order takeaway or pay when you pick it up.
There were a number of reasons mathematics was my most difficult subject, not least among them a peculiar habit common to maths lecturers. They would speak with a kind of soporific slowness when introducing a topic, then blitz through the workup on the board so quickly you couldn't follow it at all. It would have been hilarious if it wasn't so disorienting. It's like they had been told at some point, "you need to slow down so that the students have time to understand", and the lecturers had dutifully slowed down everything – except the actual mathematics.
It took me a while before I realised the problem: they didn't actually understand what was difficult! I mean, these were serious researchers teaching first-year mathematics, roughly the equivalent of Tolkien teaching people how to use adjectives. Whatever difficulty there was had long ago been internalised, leaving only a kind of faint confusion. What, exactly, are you finding difficult here? It's "big red house", not "red big house". Yes, of course there's a rule. You can look it up or whatever, but you shouldn't need to. Can we move on to the interesting stuff and stop worrying about which way around the adjectives go?
As you might imagine, this shows up in many more places than mathematics lectures. It's important not to forget that programming is just typing with more rules, but I see a lot of people try to teach programming without spending enough time on syntax or other simple mechanics we take for granted. I've made the same mistake myself. Inside each of us, it seems, is a tiny frustrated mathematician who just wants to skip to the good part. But, if we want to convey our ideas clearly, we have to give time to the obvious.
A friend I met up with a little while ago told me he was trying to form a habit of writing some code every day. It seemed like a pretty good idea and, since I'd already had some success with the habit of writing words every day, I figured I'd give it a try. Much like writing, code has the nice quality that it can be big or small; a commit can be a simple bug fix or some documentation, all the way up to a whole new feature or new project. However, I ended up entirely doing little crappy fixes and then gave up entirely.
A while back I learned about the motte-and-bailey doctrine, a delightful construction where you put forth a big, indefensible proposition ("consciousness is caused by quantum effects") and, when you are challenged on it, retreat into a small, defensible one ("quantum effects appear in the brain"). Once the challenge has gone away, you can return to making the more bombastic claim again. The name is from a medieval defensive structure that worked much the same way.
It strikes me that goal-setting could be a less ethically dubious way to use that technique. A grandiose goal is much more motivating than a modest one. Unfortunately, modest goals are achievable and grandiose ones are often not. Can we have our cake and eat it too? Perhaps, if we create motte and bailey goals. Think about a big motte-goal ("add a new feature to one of my projects every day"), but only actually commit to a much smaller bailey-goal ("write any code at all").
This seems to me the major difference between how I think about writing on my website vs how I thought about the code-every-day challenge. I have a motte-goal of sharing ideas or things I've made, and a bailey-goal of just write something. The ambition of the ideal keeps me motivated to do it, and the modest actual commitment makes it feasible. Code every day, on the other hand, is pretty uninspiring by itself.
I think I'll try again soon with a more ambitious motte and see how that goes.
For some reason injustice has always bothered me more than I would expect. Looked at as utilitarian style goodness-vs-badness, there are a lot of bad things that aren't necessarily unjust, and there are a lot of unjust things that have fairly mild consequences. Ordinarily I'm happy enough with utilitarianism as a basis for ethics, but there's just something that bothers me in particular about something that's not just wrong, but unfair.
A bit of reflection reminds me of a very similar feeling I get when I'm working on or learning about a system that is designed badly. The concepts don't work, the primitives are badly chosen, or the thing is just plain ugly. I get frustrated by that because I'm looking at the gap between what that system is and what it could be, and it feels like a dissonant chord sounds. The closer-but-not-quite it is, the more frustating it is.
I think in essence my feelings about justice are a specialised form of that same system aesthetic. Bad things happen all the time, but only a small number of bad things make you realise that a societal system that gave rise to them is severely broken. I've come to think of justice as nothing more complex than good system design: a just system is how a well-designed system feels from the inside.