The future is becoming more like Brave New World rather than 1984

[Rolig Loon]

19 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

When you say 'logic' in your example, are you always making the connections with your conscious mind, or do you sense something deeper going on in helping you make these connections?  For example, with scripting.  I just watched a series on Netflix (The Queen's Gambit), and it had me wondering what factors influenced their chess strategies. 

That's a really good question. I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit myself. I can relate to the sort of rush that she obviously felt as she worked through a strategy in chess. In part, it's the joy I feel in discovering or creating order in things that don't appear to have any. It's more than that, though.  In chess and in scripting the challenge is to find the best path to a goal. There may be many paths that involve different possible starting and end points, but the challenge is to find the one that gets to the goal fastest and most efficiently. The challenge is more exciting if the situation keeps changing as you search for the path; an opponent makes counter moves or a limitation in the servers makes it possible for the script to get ambiguous results.  A fun game of chess involves remembering how you or others have approached similar tasks in the past and looking for ways to apply them and improve on them in new settings. There are many good solutions, but the best one is always just beyond your reach.

Much of the search is conscious.  There are standard chess moves -- gambits -- that are known to produce good results in special settings.  Scripters collect subroutines and functions that they know will save time and make code more efficient.  A good chunk of scripting and chess, though, is aesthetic.  You don't think about it directly, any more than an artist thinks consciously about which brush stroke and blend of paints on the palette will create beauty.  Beauty comes out of the life experience and emotions of an artist. A scripter or a chess player creates beauty in the same way; not intentionally but by putting herself inside the creation and feeling it evolve. I can understand the way that the chess player in The Queen's Gambit saw an imaginary game unfolding on her bedroom ceiling, almost like being an actress in a video. I have friends who are mathematicians who see the same thing in equations.

[Madelaine McMasters]

On 3/6/2021 at 12:55 PM, Ceka Cianci said:

Once I'm in cruise control, it's like sippin tea on the porch swing..

Some years ago, I hired a painter to paint my kitchen cabinets and woodwork while I worked in my lab. I noticed that he would "check out" as he painted, seeming to no longer be there. His body was in my kitchen, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. I'm quite familiar with the "flow" Rolig describes, and thought the painter might be experiencing it, just as I do when working on almost anything, interesting or not, particularly repetitive work.

At lunch, I asked him where he "went" when he was painting.

"Sometimes I'm gardening, sometimes I'm hiking. Today I'm painting another client's house."

He was actually working out the logistics for his next job while doing mine.

I loved that. He's been my go-to painter for more than 20 years.

[Madelaine McMasters]

On 3/6/2021 at 1:12 PM, Rolig Loon said:

Me too.  If I understand Ceka's example, that guy with the stopwatch would probably be the same way if the company didn't keep changing the machinery every once in a while.  He'd get bored. It sounds like he likes the challenge of getting dropped in from of a new machine, figuring out how it works, and coming up with his own scheme for getting the most out of it.  He's not motivated so much by sitting on the porch swing and sipping tea as he is by figuring out how to get there.

My formative career years (12 of them) were spent working for a small company run by a man who thought the best way to run a business was to just get the hell out of his employees' way, and never hire an MBA. Everyone was free to figure things out and improve them. Those who didn't work that way could still find a comfortable place in the company, so long as they were conscientious, but lots of us worked our butts off because it was fun.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was anathema to us.

Everything is broken to some degree.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

When you say 'logic' in your example, are you always making the connections with your conscious mind, or do you sense something deeper going on in helping you make these connections?  For example, with scripting.  I just watched a series on Netflix (The Queen's Gambit), and it had me wondering what factors influenced their chess strategies. 

That's a really good question. I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit myself. I can relate to the sort of rush that she obviously felt as she worked through a strategy in chess. In part, it's the joy I feel in discovering or creating order in things that don't appear to have any. It's more than that, though.  In chess and in scripting the challenge is to find the best path to a goal. There may be many paths that involve different possible starting and end points, but the challenge is to find the one that gets to the goal fastest and most efficiently. The challenge is more exciting if the situation keeps changing as you search for the path; an opponent makes counter moves or a limitation in the servers makes it possible for the script to get ambiguous results.  A fun game of chess involves remembering how you or others have approached similar tasks in the past and looking for ways to apply them and improve on them in new settings. There are many good solutions, but the best one is always just beyond your reach.

Much of the search is conscious.  There are standard chess moves -- gambits -- that are known to produce good results in special settings.  Scripters collect subroutines and functions that they know will save time and make code more efficient.  A good chunk of scripting and chess, though, is aesthetic.  You don't think about it directly, any more than an artist thinks consciously about which brush stroke and blend of paints on the palette will create beauty.  Beauty comes out of the life experience and emotions of an artist. A scripter or a chess player creates beauty in the same way; not intentionally but by putting herself inside the creation and feeling it evolve. I can understand the way that the chess player in The Queen's Gambit saw an imaginary game unfolding on her bedroom ceiling, almost like being an actress in a video. I have friends who are mathematicians who see the same thing in equations.

Though I did play chess when young, I was drawn away from it by the endlessly more interesting problems of my engineering world. I love complexity, but not so much when it's manufactured for "entertainment". Like you, over my life I've accreted a fair body of knowledge that I use to solve problems at hand, but I'm most intrigued by problems that require tools not already in my box, or to which I might apply some counterintuitive thinking.

Though much of my problem solving is conscious, I was blessed with an innate desire to "do things in odd ways". When a solution seems obvious, I get itchy.

I share your joy in beating back entropy, Rolig. While nihilists point to the ultimate futility of it all, I'm having a blast delaying the inevitable.

[Rolig Loon]

3 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was anathema to us.

Everything is broken to some degree.

Sometimes the fun is in figuring out new ways to break things.  I suspect that's what motivates some hackers. A "perfect" machine or a "perfect" script is a challenge to find weak spots. Personally, I find joy in anticipating the weak spots and strengthening them so that they don't become vulnerabilities, but I can understand the challenge that a safecracker must feel. 

[Wili Clip]

17 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

My formative career years (12 of them) were spent working for a small company run by a man who thought the best way to run a business was to just get the hell out of his employees' way, and never hire an MBA. Everyone was free to figure things out and improve them. Those who didn't work that way could still find a comfortable place in the company, so long as they were conscientious, but lots of us worked our butts off because it was fun.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was anathema to us.

Everything is broken to some degree.

That is exactly the model of running a business that is my fav and it is a good model. Managers can do a lot of damage if they micro-manage employees. The people who are involved with processes of work on a daily basis usually know the best how to improve on it and make it better or reach goals more efficiently or faster. I think so much more in tech industry. Its is very good in within organization to have healthy communication and feedback loops. This turns the organization more towards the learning organization. Manager's task is to set up the process initially and maybe supervise to see that goals are reached and to motivate employees to learn faster. 😁
 

 

Edited March 8, 2021 by Wili Clip