caryoscelus:~#

And now, with some audience filtering applied, we can dig into mattress without further ado.

The full title actually reads as following:

What is hard, different kind of laziness, goodness of abstractions, usefulness of truth and other questions that you should have been asking

Since this article is a lazy article, i’ll start with short overview of the topics.

Writing english is hard (translation: it’s hard to express abstract thoughts in natural languages). Discussing “hard” is hard (just another concrete example for expressiveness or funness purposes). Life is hard (i’ll probably run out of paper before i can describe what that one means).

What is more lazy: writing a program that does boring homework for you, or doing boring homework yourself? Eh, homework was supposed to be an example, but i can’t really stop touching education topic just yet: is homework that cannot be checked whether it was really made by a student and not a program (that might have been written by them or someone else) have a purpose?

Of course, i’m not going to answer (or even elaborate on) that question here, because i’m lazy and writing english is hard. If you want, you can consider it your homework, but pay attention to the fact that it (or its part) may be a red herring.

Abstractions, generalization, induction — so many words that generally need elaboration in order to be understood correctly (did i mention that communicating meaning is hard?). Maybe we should replace them with precisely defined logographic characters?

Well, the problem is that even precise terms are not enough. We’d also like precise and succinct grammar.

Higher order naivety and cynicism

Another thing to consider: socialization is known to turn naive children into cynical teens. However, while most adults are more cynical than children, many are less cynical than teens. Sometimes that’s called wisdom (..that comes with age and experience), but that term is really really really fuzzy. I can understand how it became popular, but that doesn’t excuse its usage.

So, instead of using fallacious terms, why not reuse ones (maybe also fallacious) we’re using anyway and add modifiers to them?

??? -> naivety -> cynicism -> 2nd order naivety -> …

Damn, this pattern shows up so often that i don’t even! But, perhaps some elaboration is due.

So, as you may guess, this can turn into an endless sinusoid-like graph of naivety-vs-cynicism. But it’s a bit of oversimplification. And i’m not even talking about simplification of curve per se; that is obvious. Rather, i mean that using just one numeric value is an absurd oversimplification, worthy of behaviourist award.

As a matter of fact, even my simplified model isn’t that simple. There is a certain qualitative difference between levels of naivety or cynicism. One of my favourite examples is “naive cynicism”. Which is of course still a fuzzy umbrella term. But it’s a fun way to describe certain kind of people, who believe that literally everyone is a cynic and expect everyone to act accordingly and always try to find rational “cynical” explanation. They also tend to think they’re justified to act in a way they do, because everyone does so.

I’ll leave it up to you to consider possibility of cynical naivety, but it should probably be obvious that there’s such a thing as intentional naivety.

Next, next, NEXT.

Abstractions

Yay, abstractions! Who doesn’t love themselves a good bite of godly abstraction?

But as the title mentions, abstractions can be good or bad. See previous section: abstracting away the difference between naivety and cynicism into one variable might simplify the model, but it makes it mostly useless: it abstracts away essential details. It’s a bad abstraction.

Another example is famous “prisoner dilemma”. Mathematical model of it (i.e. decision/outcome matrix) is just “pure numbers”. Nothing wrong with that. Just stating the obvious. But the name is fucking misleading. Taking this as a model of real-world prisoner dilemma leads to thoughtful head scratching and long debates on the nature of rationality and decision-making. Well, that’s also due to naive cynicism, i must add.

Regardless, the real prisoner dilemma can be easily fed into decision-making matrix, without any head-scratching and oh!-natural-selection-isn’t-just-about-force revelations. I’ve already touched upon this in an unpublished post: skeptics can easily fall into the trap of explaining simple things with complex constructs years or centuries after the same thing was already explained and explored.

It’s all about fear/trust issues, really. Scientist and philosophic paranoics don’t trust their minds and thus have to invent mechanical rules. It’s akin to running virtual machine without optimizations, so naturally it makes thought processes extremely slow. But they’ve got proofs!

Truth

I think you might’ve noticed that i’ve been talking about truth usefulness just a bit back already. But “what is TRUTH?” anyhow. I could just invoke Kant and be done with it, but then i could as well ignore the question altogether.

The problem is that the question arises from the same paranoidal school of thought. “Socrates is mortal”, yeah, fucking right. The funny thing is that just like with naivety and cynicism in general, naive paranoidal philosophers tend to turn into cynical paranoidal philosophers and vice verse.

Turned away by inability to define truth, they are ready to proclaim “there’s no truth”. Bored and pained by “lack of truth”, they turn to one deity or another and become devoted to the new shinjitsu.

Yeah, apparently Hegel had some interesting ideas. Too bad they were turned into such an ugly mess. Kinda ironic that people who admit being more stupid take up the task to explain more smart ones, isn’t it?

But hopefully no truth lost between us. I tried to defend this article with a few powerful おまじない. If it is all in moot, so be it.

Lazy

Shall we get to the king of virtues, then? J-u-s-t t-o-o l-a-z-y t-o d-o t-h-a-t. Or so you should’ve answered.

One thing about laziness is that it should be an informed one. Misinformed or uninformed laziness tend to be ugly and boring.

Lazy to learn how to automate your routine? Be ready to be pained by routine.

Lazy to learn variables and procedures? Be ready to be pained by rewriting your code.

Lazy to learn functional programming? Be ready to be pained by copy-pasting and learning “patterns”.

Etc, etc.

But if you’re lazy to do the routine, rewrite and copy-paste your code, you’re likely to end up doing more useful things and possibly become a better person in the process.

The problem, yet again, is about information and criteria. If one is told to learn everything, how to distinguish between what to learn and what to not learn? Axiom of choice, 呵呵.

This makes me think about Emacs vs Vim vs IDE vs YACE. It takes time to learn Vim or Emacs to use them efficiently. It takes even more time to learn to use IDE efficiently. Yet many prefer to learn useless IDEs. Still others stick with some YACE and don’t bother switching.

Sometimes i wonder if text editors are useful concept et al.

So yeah, i probably should’ve touched on other substances as well, but this is a lazy article after all. Learn yourself a haskell, a category theory, some introspection, philosophy and clairvoyance and you can evaluate the rest.