Aneesh Sathe

Yesterday I wrote about good documentation opening doors to options you didn’t realize you had. In the book On Writing Well Zinsser mentions how one of his key tools is the dictionary. That got me curious about the limitations about the dictionaries available to us. This is not just about the dictionary on the bookshelf but the ones that we have in-context access to. The ones on our computer and phones.

In my searches I came across this post by James Somers who references another great writer John McPhee and his article Draft No. 4. McPhee shows us how the dictionary is to be used. The crux is that modern dictionaries have taken all the fun out and left all the crud in. The old way is the proper way to play with words.

J.S ends with instructions on how to install the (apparently perfect) 1913 version of Webster’s dictionary. Unfortunately, his instructions are a little out of date. Which is to be accepted since he’s talking to people 10 years in his future. Luckily for us Corey Ward from speaking to use from just 5 years ago had updated instructions for MacOS that mostly still work.

I’m updating Corey’s instructions below:

1. Get the latest release for Webster’s 1913 from the Github Releases page for WebsterParser. Download the file: websters-1913.dictionary.zip and unzip it. You will see a folder like file with the extension .dictionary.
2. Open the Dictionary app on your computer, and select File > Open Dictionaries Folder from the menu, or navigate manually to ~/Library/Dictionaries.
3. Unzip the file, and move the resulting websters-1913.dictionary file into the dictionaries folder that you opened.
4. Restart the Dictionary app if it is open (important), then open Dictionary>Settings (⌘,). At the bottom of the list of dictionaries you should see Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) in the list. Check the box, and optionally drag it up in the list to the order you’d like.

The dictionary is also available online if you don’t want to install.

The best option is probably the OED . It’s expensive, but you may get access through your library.

Wordnik also cool.

Through J.S. I also discovered this interesting site: Language Log. They get really deep into language. I mean how much can you write about Spinach, apparently a lot.

I’d love to get back to a world where the internet was used in its raw form. If you are reading my posts, please do comment, share your site/blog and your posts. Social media is also good. More from Somers.

Dad was about my age when he said that reading the manual was better than hypothesis driven button pressing. For teenage me, that took too long. Sure, I may have crashed a computer or two but following my gut got me there. Of course my gut isn’t that smart. In the decades preceding, devices had converged on a common pattern language of buttons. Once learned, the standard grammar of action would reliably deliver me to my destination.

In programming I was similarly aided by the shared patterns across MATLAB, Python, R, Java, Julia, and even HTML. In the end however, dad was right. Reading documentation is the way. Besides showing correct usage, manuals create a new understanding of my problems. I am able to play with tech thanks to the people that took the effort and the care to create good documentation. This is not limited to code and AI. During the startup years, great handbooks clarified accounting, fundraising, and regulations, areas foreign to me.

I love good documentation and I write documentation. Writing good documentation is hard. It is an exercise in deep empathy with my user. Reaching into the future to give them all they need is part of creating good technology. Often the future user is me and I like it when past me is nice to now me. If an expert Socratic interlocutor is like weight training, documentation is a kindly spirit ancestor parting the mist.

Maybe it’s something about being this age but now I try to impart good documentation practices to my teams. I also do not discourage pressing buttons to see what happens. Inefficient, but discovery is a fun way to spike interest.

Meanwhile, I’m reading a more basic kind of documentation. Writing English. Having resolved to write more, I’m discovering that words are buttons. Poking them gets me to where I want, but not always. Despite writerly ambitions, the basics are lacking. This became apparent recently when I picked up the book Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte*. It’s two hundred and seventy pages of wonderful sentences dissected to show their mechanics. I was lost by page 5. The book is, temporarily, in my anti-library.

So, I’m going to the basics, Strunk and White, and William Zinsser. I’m hoping that Writing to Learn (finished) and On Writing Well (in progress) provide sufficient context about reasons to write to make the most of S&W, for the how, then somewhere down the road, savor Tufte.

* Those dastardly Tuftes are always making me learn some kind of grammar.

This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone:

The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

1. Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.
2. Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
3. Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
4. Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
5. When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
6. Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral.
7. GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
8. When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
9. Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
10. Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual.
11. Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
12. Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
    1. Survival - laws and tactics oriented
    2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette
    3. Systems level order - algorithms and protocols oriented
    4. Self Knowledge and Meaning - reflecting on existing and consciousness
    5. Meta-systems - theorizes about theories
13. Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises.
14. Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
15. Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.

Last year, while regrouping myself and rebuilding my old curious ways, I had a thought. The common words “spaces” and “places” pass through our minds, fingers, and lips but they deserve a second thought. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the first one to consider this and the wealth of reading material helped me write We Need Homes in the Delta Quadrant. Spaces and places have been an enjoyable lens to look through.

Recently, through Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates, I was introduced to the Socratic concepts of questions and problems. Initially I thought of it as a newish way to look at things, but I’m converging toward the idea that problems are places and questions are spaces. A quick exploration below as to why.

Problems impede your quest and solving them makes them disappear. There are established ways of solving problems—recipes, algorithms, or rituals that nudge the obstacle aside so the original activity may continue unabated. Essentially, problems are tractable.

Places are tractable too as “an ordered worlds of meaning.” Place-making, like problem-solving, begins by drawing a boundary and then treating that encapsulation as a building black, whatever its inner workings. The moment you can stand somewhere and say “here” you have marked out a place; the moment you can name a difficulty and say “do this” you have packaged a problem.

The Socratic question, by contrast, is a quest. It is a hunt whose solution is unknown. Questions do not disappear when solved, instead they are additive and leave you with something, i.e. the solution. A real question insists on orientation before action: you must find north in the wilderness before plotting any march. And yet, along the path to an answer, you inevitably solve problems. Those problems are the markers that help you orient and keep you moving. A previous “solution” to a question can be used as a new place to further explore and prod at the question. In that sense, a question is like the horizon you constantly seek.

Spaces feel exactly like that horizon. Spaces are pure potential to be explored by the places that demarcate the space. Identity, orientation, and even memory of a space are created by and stored in the places that surround it. To explore a space you must create stable places around it

While the new way of thinking about Questions and Problems is great, I still prefer the lens of Spaces and Places. Q&P seem too narrow a set of lenses limited to the human mind. S&P expand that stage and allow us to think of more in that context. What I like even more is that spaces can also be places assuming we allow a boundary to be drawn around the fuzzy nature of a space. As a scientist, this feels a bit more satisfying because it allows you to explore and experiment even when the knowledge isn’t properly tied down by facts.

What does audacity look like?

I did not imagine the problems I was having was due to a lack of temples and worshipping the right gods. Being from India, this should have been obvious. I had figured out long ago that a steady supply of beer, dedication to craft, good means, and romance were the were critical to happiness. Spirituality had not been considered. Hewing a temple out of granite improved focus.

These days Dwarf Fortress gets lumped into the colony management category of games. It is a pioneer in the genre but it is also so much more. It is for good reason that it is one of the few games thought worthy of collecting by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Even there DF changed the way MoMA preserves art. DF one the most complex game ever created, starting from simple experiments, coded by a single person over 20 years, available for free, through all the normal human hardships. To play Dwarf Fortress is to experience audacity.

DF is a complete simulation. From the growth rate of trees and grass, to simulating individual body parts of creature that allows cats to get drunk. The point of Dwarf Fortress is not to win. There is no way to win. As they say, losing is FUN! The gams starts normally enough. You set jobs for seven dwarfs to that helps them create a home in an unkind wilderness. Sometimes unexpected things happen like a giant farting bird attacks or the elves are cross with you because you used wood to make beds, which is fine in a new game. Eventually though something happens that tells you that there are more layers to this. Like my spirituality problems.

There is a lot of well known lore surrounding DF. From the famous story of Boatmurdered, Oilfurnace, Webcomics, to the drunk cats bug. DF in its small ways also reminds us of life’s important truths like, cats adopt the person not the other way around.

Tantrum spirals, goblin sieges, chairs of different qualities and the happiness they impart, dwarf fortress is deep. Like any effort by a single person, it started simple. Zach and Tarn Adams are brothers who created many many games as kids. DF was not even created for any kind of commercial aim. They simply wanted to simulate as many things as they could so that the game had the ability to tell great stories. Bit by bit, Tarn Adams coded DF without any external help, while finishing his PhD, and eventually getting enough in donations that he could dedicate his time to just building the game.

Recently the brothers worked with a publisher to bring their game to Steam. It made them “overnight” millionaires. That night was 20 years long. Along the way they build up a dedicated fan following, some contributed art, and music to the game, others hacked into the software to provide utilities to improve quality of life. Many of them are now part of the team working on DF full time. A few years ago Tarn estimated that the game was about 44% complete. I have a suspicion that the number hasn’t changed much because despite the regular updates, the brothers keep adding new ideas to build on.

You are unlikely to ever play Dwarf Fortress, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing about this bittersweet human story. No Clip has made a four part documentary, you should watch it.

In a time when games were simple, computing power limited, with no funding, and life’s challenges, DF was created. To play Dwarf Fortress is to experience audacity.