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February 8, 2010 17:15
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Thinkers and Doers | |
There's really no such thing as being a "thinker" | |
who can't get things done and being a "doer" who | |
doesn't think much. | |
Each of us has a fixed quantity of energy we can | |
use any given day. Thinking and doing are both | |
activities that consume the energy. | |
If you think too much, then you simply don't have | |
resource left (either time or energy) to do it. | |
If the aim is to get as much done as possible, | |
then the way to do it seems to stop thinking. You | |
use up all your energy doing. Logical enough. | |
But then, if all (or most) of you do is doing, the | |
biggest danger is to be doing the wrong thing all | |
the time. | |
So some thinking IS needed. The question, for a | |
pragmatist, is how little of it can you get a way | |
with it? | |
I suspect that to succeed in different domains of | |
problems, different upfront thinkings are | |
required. | |
If you want to meet a girl, overthinking is | |
counter productive, because not only does thinking | |
not help (you can't predict anything), it starts | |
to make you anxious. Thoughts about how to handle | |
it best degenerates into thoughts of failure. | |
Whether you should leap straight into it (a | |
goal-oriented series of action), perhaps depends | |
on the predictability of the playing field. | |
For unpredictable domains, you have to think | |
"fast", rather than think "much". By definition, | |
the fast paced, unpredictable nature of it (say, a | |
business), demands you to react to the | |
circumstances RIGHT NOW. If you fail to react fast | |
enough, you are reacting to a situation that no | |
longer exists. | |
When do we have the luxury to think as much as we | |
want, or even the NEED to do so? | |
I think the converse to unpredictablity isn't | |
"predictability". There's simply no such thing as | |
"predictability". Unpredictability is a symptom | |
that your thinking of the world is outdated, or | |
outpaced by the speed of change (there's rarely | |
velocity, that is to say, a direction of change). | |
The domain of problems where you can and should | |
think as much as you can are those that depends | |
entirely on your imagination, and your internal | |
model of the world (which doesn't necessarily have | |
anything to do with the Real World). | |
Some examples are like programming language, | |
novels, composition, painting, axiomatic | |
mathematical system, literary theory, | |
philosophy... | |
These ostensibly attempts to "represent" the | |
world. But what they really represent is the | |
internal perspective of one person. As a novelist, | |
you can be writing about "real people", what what | |
you are writing really is how you think real | |
people are like. | |
So the domains where you can think are those that | |
are "private". The quality you look for is | |
internal coherence. The system fits | |
together. Within the world described by a novel, | |
the characters behave in believable ways. | |
And of course, an internal representation run the | |
gamut of being completely insane to something that | |
seems real. | |
In the case of a programming language, it is also | |
the distillation of the language inventor's | |
representation of the world. It's interesting in | |
that a language is both a medium for thoughts to | |
manipulate your internal representation, and a | |
tool to manipulate the actual world. | |
And of course, different people have different | |
senses of the world, and they find different ways | |
of thinking more "natural", and different ways of | |
doing things more "convenient". | |
But despite a programming language being something | |
that interacts with the external world, it is | |
largely an internal activity (for the | |
programmer). So internal coherence of the language | |
has far greater weight then whether it's useful or | |
not, meaning, whether standing in the frame of | |
that language, you can successfully be doing | |
thinsg, and navigate the world. | |
Arguably there are languages with strong internal | |
coherence we call beautiful, but are not terribly | |
useful if we place greater weight on getting | |
things done. Getting things done is a reaction to | |
the world, and the world cares nothing about your | |
sense of elegance and consistency. | |
So you have Haskell. Very elegant, very consistent. | |
Is it useful? | |
And you have C. Dangerous. Ugly. Unfriendly. | |
Is it useful? | |
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