Aneesh Sathe

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.

I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, landed in dung. This led to the thirty years war and the coining of the word ‘defenestration’. Defenestrating happened to important, visible, people held responsible for mismanagement leading to widespread discontent. While the defenestrated may represent the idea, surely we can’t imagine that it was that specific person who was going around causing the suffering. No, they had minions. Here we explore a bit of their story.

Royalty is meant to be seen. They were either chosen by or were the local gods to lead the people. They were the head of everything and if something were to go wrong it was their responsibility. Royalty also means creating good memes. Whether the Alhambra, Taj Mahal, or Beijing projecting power through architectural memes was the standard.

Administration and bureaucratic structures is the silent clockwork that powers the projection. These guys, are antimemetic. The antimeme is a recent invention and denotes ideas that have high impact but are hard to spread. This is important because when the tax burden gets too high you want the peasants to go for the king not the local tax collector.

The Mughal emperors were the head of the administrative machinery with final say over all important matters. The administration itself was antimemetic in nature. The provincial officials such as the bakhshi, sadr as-sudr, and finance minister reported directly to the central government rather than the subahdar (provincial governor). Matrix organization, I hear you thinking. This complex, multi-layered reporting structure, while designed for central control, also diffused responsibility and made the precise locus of decision-making less transparent to external observers and even to other officials.

In the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor abolished the Central Secretariat to assume personal control. However, the volume of letters got so high that he soon appointed a few grand secretaries. They never held a high rank and always merely “recorded imperial decisions”. If merely were a boxer he would be a heavyweight. Can’t blame that guy with the pen if he’s just doing what the king asks him to.

From the al-Andalus through the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals the the ulama shaped legal systems and molded public morality. Of course the monarchs decrees but the ulama interpreted them and applied them as law into daily life. This interpretive authority, operating subtly within the legal and religious bureaucracy, allowed for continuous adaptation and influence without the visible, attributable acts of formal legislation, making it profoundly antimemetic.

Let me end with the quote from the wonderful, and joyfully mimetic, Yes, Minister:

“Hacker: Humphrey, did you know that 20% of all honours go to civil servants?

Sir Humphrey: A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty, Minister.

Hacker: No, their duty is what they get paid for. The rest of the population has to do something extra to get an honour. Something special. They work for 27 years with mentally handicapped children six nights a week to get an MBE. Your knighthoods simply come up with the rations.

Sir Humphrey: Minister, her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end, they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small reward for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty, and to the nation.

Hacker: “A modest wage”, did you say?

Sir Humphrey: Alas, yes.

Hacker: Humphrey, you get over £30,000 a year! That’s £7,000 more than I get.

Sir Humphrey: Yes, but still relatively the modest wage.

Hacker: Relative to whom?

Sir Humphrey: Well, Elizabeth Taylor, for example.

Hacker: Humphrey, you are not relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.

Sir Humphrey: Indeed, yes. She didn’t get a first at Oxford.

Hacker: And you do not retire into obscurity?! You take a massive index-linked pension and go off to become directors of oil companies and banks.

Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes, but very obscure directors, Minister.

Hacker: You’re in no danger of the sack. In industry if you screw things up, you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot.

Sir Humphrey: Very droll, Minister, now if you’ve approved the list…”

Sources

Much of the reading and sourcing of material for this was done across books from the Contraptions Book Club and some deep research help.

• Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin
• Monkey King: Journey to the West, the abridged Lovell edition
• Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Dougles E. Streusend
• Kingdoms of Faith by Brian A. Catlos
• Zheng He: China And the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433 by Edward L. Dreyer
• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister