Sometimes I've observed a particular kind of scope confusion that trips people up. You put your metadata in your data and then end up thinking total nonsense. A good example is Infinity. Infinity isn't a number, it's a statement about the behaviour of numbers. It's metadata, and you shouldn't treat it like data. My favourite trick when I see these is adverbing them. Ban the word "infinity". Instead, only use "infinitely". A number can't be infinite, but a series of numbers can go infinitely. I think we should apply the same thing to random. There's no such thing as a random number, and we should stop saying it. Instead, a number can be generated randomly.
I've been spending a lot of time in SDR-land lately, which, owing to the popularity of the GPL there, has mostly turned into an exercise in being angry. I don't think it's a bad license per se, but I have serious reservations about interpreting "derived work" to mean anything that links with your code. I was in an ornery mood, so I put together the Goose and Gander License (or GGL), which turns the tables somewhat and gave me a chance to revel in the ridiculousness of viral licensing. I can certainly see the appeal now.
I think it's great that you can turn everything into dollars, but there is sometimes a question of whether you should. One thing that has always seemed strange to me is that fines are essentially a punishment you can trade. Similarly, I've heard that the upper class in China sometimes hire people to go to prison for them, which is more ridiculous but only by degree. The danger is that when we abstract things into dollars they become fungible; interchangeable; without significance. Mostly that's useful, but I think that some things need to be different. Otherwise, what's the point? With software, as with money, it's easy to get so caught up in the abstraction you forget why you invented it in the first place.
Over the course of this week I'm going to be trying an experiment, so all my posts will be one paragraph long. This is partly an exercise in lowering the high water mark, partly to see what I can get done within the constraint, and partly just for experimentation's sake. There is a real temptation to get stuck in one particular groove with something I do consistently, so I think it will be valuable to inject some instability once in a while. Wish me luck!
Through the course of our lives we slowly build up a particular understanding of the world, and a particular set of beliefs that allows us to navigate that world. This is a process that works pretty well, but it seems like sometimes we have a lot of difficulty passing that wisdom on. I've very rarely had the experience of someone else describing a particular system or belief to me and being able to accept it wholesale. This seems strange, because something that's true should be easy to identify and accept once it's pointed out to you.
For sure, some of this is just plain stubbornness or NIH syndrome: why accept someone else's system when you could figure it out for yourself with the minor disadvantage of time, effort, and opportunity cost? However, I don't think that alone is enough to explain why it's often difficult to pass along beliefs. It seems to me that the issue is one of context: that often our beliefs only make sense against the background of particular situational realities or hidden assumptions, and the belief falls apart when removed from that environment.
This leads to a second, perhaps worse form of failure to pass on beliefs: passing on bad beliefs. I think of this as the problem that shows up when telling someone "just ignore what other people think of you" or "just be yourself". That is very easy to say once you have a well-developed understanding of social rules and the limits of acceptable behaviour. If you actually ignore what other people think of you, you may well end up yelling "I'm bored" in meetings or peeing on the street. And it's probably unwise to just be yourself if your self wants to hump a stranger's leg in public. These beliefs only apply in a particular context.
And sometimes I think that context is widely shared enough that you can say things like "just be yourself" and most people will be able to apply that belief in a way that preserves its wider applicability. But I think the bigger that idea is, the less likely that is to be true. Your standard universal life advice beliefs are going to cut across so many different situations that it would be very difficult to construct one that avoids all contextual pitfalls. However, I think there is a, much harder, way to make universally applicable beliefs: eliminate context.
Science, by and large, tries to follow this process. The goal is to construct universal laws: not just true the few times we tried them, but true everywhere. This process turns out to be extremely difficult. The laws of mechanics, for example, went from only true in everyday situations involving friction and gravity, to only true for reasonable-sized bodies at sublight speed, to true at any speed for very large things or very small things, but not both at the same time. And there have been a lot of physicists working on mechanics for quite a long time. Being exhaustive is exhausting.
Perhaps the best we can do with our own beliefs is just to call out their limitations and recognise the assumptions and context they live in. I would love to see a Theory of Everything for everyday life, but it does not appear one is coming any time soon. Maybe if all the scientists can wrap up physics and move on to pop psychology we're in with a shot. In the mean time I'd be in a much better place to trust the current state of the art for life advice if it was a bit more modest in domain.