PROGRAMMING LESSONS

I sometimes wonder how working on engineering problems (electronics 
or software, mainly, all self-taught) changes my decision-making in 
the real world. After all maybe I spend as much, even more, time in 
that world than outside of it. I even dream in that world, human 
emotion mixed up with engineering principles in a fantasy of 
sensibility that recurs in my sleep.

The lessons of debugging are some that strike me as particularly 
uncertain in their relationship to real-world problems. Debugging 
is really facing the falsity of a reality that you've built for 
yourself. This is particulary the case with software, where the 
nature of the machine I described in my post 
"2019-10-22The_Perfection_Machine.txt" discounts the influence of 
uncertainty factors. You write out your own little universe as 
instructions to a computer tasked with creating that mini universe. 
It is a world designed within your own comprehension, yet it often 
defies your comprehension when you first set it in motion, defying 
your false reality.

Simple re-analysis of the match between the reality in your mind 
and that in code often picks up the most basic bugs. But the real 
debugging is where the flaw is in the logic itself. The problem of 
squaring unexpected observed results with the perceived reality 
within your program. You can isolate the point of divergence by 
identifying the conditions that produce it, or breaking it up into 
smaller, simpler, universes. However this can ignore larger 
interactions within the whole universe of the computer, and thereby 
only recreate in practice a false certainty within your mind about 
the nature of the whole system.

In such cases I often fall back on a little saying of mine:

"If you can't do what you want to do, do what you don't want to do."

Basically try to actively break the system - sabotaging either its 
design or its inputs. There's only one way that you can understand 
it working, but there are infinately many ways that you can 
understand it failing. So if you can't understand why it doesn't 
work how you expect it to, try to make it fail in a way you don't 
expect it to, and try to understand that. Usually that points out 
some unintended interrelationship completely foreign to the reality 
that you thought you'd created.

This saying (if that term applies to something you mainly say to 
yourself) has been slowly creeping into other fields of my life. If 
I'm trying to fix something and it won't go back together like I 
understand it should, I try pulling it apart some more. If I can't 
get to something by walking towards it, I walk away from it and try 
to find another route along the way. Often this is quite obvious, 
although sometimes less so at the extremes and it does demand that 
you accept the possibility of never acheiving what you want to 
achieve before emotionally resigning to that fact.

But it's also something that can only be taken so far. It's a 
destructive dicipline which can be very harmful if applied where 
wealth or safely are at risk. If my father's reaction is anything 
to go by, it's not a confidence-inspiring thing to say out loud 
either. But at the same time false perceptions of our personal 
reality are what can be most harmful to us, and perhaps those of up 
who practice an abundance of caution against breaking the 
real-world systems that we don't understand are those who are most 
easily enslaved by the fansasies they develop themselves or adopt 
from others.

I'm really most curious about how to apply it to personal 
relationships. I'm not someone who pushes people beyond what I 
perceive to be their personal barriers. But I'm always wrong about 
other people anyway, and social people naturally confront others in 
more probing ways than I would normally feel comfortable. I usually 
feel like that's a game I don't want to play. Indeed I don't like 
being probed beyond my own comfort levels by those people, but the 
negative consequences of that in terms of knowing people, and most 
particularly knowing women, are quite evident.

To think in over-analytical terms (I was going to go into that 
consequence of "programming lessons" too, but Sunday's running out 
quick and I want to finish building a workbench for my shipping 
container darkroom), it's mainly a question of how much to risk my 
emotional stability in exchange for satisfying my sexual 
frustrations.

 - The Free Thinker

PS: I wonder whether people would rather read this, or me talking 
about building the workbench? I'd rather read this, but lots of 
people post about things like building a workbench. Also in real 
life I'd instead choose to talk to someone about building a 
workbench, and I can't think of anyone I'd talk about this topic 
with because in fact it is too probing for my sensibilities. But 
I'll quite possibly never talk to anyone about the workbench 
either. Hmm...