Monomorphic

My last post, on the topic of resisting the circumstances in life, ended with a question. What choices should I make to resist maximally, given that choices make me stronger, i.e. choices have long term side effects on me?

So I would like to, probabilistically, maximise my set of skills in order to best be able to achieve some kind of ambition I have set for myself. Cutting off my hand will probably not help me, but learning arabic might. Being in a car crash is unlikely to be helpful, but being a marathon runner could conceivably be useful. Both involve pain, but one causes irreversible damage, the other causes an increase of strength if done properly. What is the ideal form of schooling for children (If we take the unlikely view that the purpose of schools is teaching things)? That which increases their ability the fastest, which is to say, the most difficult knowledge, the fastest speed of teaching that they can possibly cope with. The maximum trajectory that they can sustain without losing the grip or their interest in the subject.

Should I do the same in life, then? Probably, but it gets tricky, because life experiences that promise to teach me a lot are often unfamiliar, or dangerous, or otherwise involve pain. As we have seen, it is not the case that pain equals learning, but pain can be strongly correlated with learning. To be more precise: if I become crippled in a car crash, or by cutting off my hand, it is because I received stimuli from directions and with intensities that I could not withstand. Provoke me at a slowly building rate, and I will learn to deal with the provocations and perhaps bite back. Provoke me really hard and really fast from the start, and I will die. And then there are provocation vectors to which individuals cannot adapt in a single generation, for instance, drowning. Species might adapt to this kind of threat over several generations. Is not life precisely that which adapts to changing circumstances, potentials and provocations, in particular potential threats or benefits? But intelligent animals, like humans, are a special form of life. We can select what experiences to undergo, and thus what training to receive. This is how we can consciously adapt in advance when we expect a difficult situation. (Young animals play in order to train themselves for adult behaviour, but this kind of training has been conditioned by evolution over many generations. Are there any animals that train selectively to face threats that they have identified during the same generation, like humans do?)

Friedrich Nietzsche famously said that “what does not kill me, makes me stronger.” While true in some ways, this statement appears to be a generalisation masking a more complex truth. For instance, cutting off one’s hand does not kill one, but hardly makes one stronger, unless one specifically desired greatly improved dexterity of the other hand, even at a very high cost.

It is a fact that we cannot predict all the circumstances that we will find ourselves in throughout our lives. So we cannot predict what skills or strengths we will need either. Any one who has some kind of ambition in life has no way of establishing completely beyond doubt that their ambition will come true. They can only work towards reducing uncertainty.

At this point a number of different attitudes emerge. One could take the view that “Life is nothing but suffering. We must learn to cope with it.” Subsequently one could teach that suffering is a thing in the mind, and that training the mind to absorb suffering without feeling pain or becoming upset is our best hope. Either that, or reduce the ambitions so as to be frustrated less often. The goal of this ambition reduction is zero ambition, zero desires and zero expectations. With this mindset, you can never be let down. Nullified resistance, maximum fluidity.

Another view: life presents us with challenges, some of which we may overcome, some of which it is pointless to even try overcoming. A “pragmatist” view that tries to establish a middle ground. Some suffering is worth resisting, some is too much. People taking this view have some degree of resistance, but also a breaking point at which they would accept that “life is hard” and bend according to the circumstances of fate. Maybe they would also be opportunist and take their chances for easy gains when they can, to get revenge on life.

And finally, let’s look at the other extreme view. Nietzsche also said, perhaps slightly less famously, that “only to the extent that man has resisted, has he lived.” If I take this view, that I should resist adverse circumstances maximally and have my way in life, I must handle the problem mentioned at the beginning of this post — I cannot predict the circumstances that will befall me. No matter how strong I am, it is likely that there will be some set of circumstances that might destroy my aims completely, and me in the process. But let’s say that I take the view that some outcomes are less likely than others. I buy into some form of probability, for instance I think that five dice are less likely to all have the number four facing up than they are to not end up in this configuration. What choices should I make to maximise my ability to resist, given that some choices actually do make me stronger?

In his first amendment to Human, All Too Human (1886), entitled Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, Friedrich Nietzsche states that

300. HOW FAR EVEN IN THE GOOD THE HALF MAY BE MORE THAN THE WHOLE. — In all things that are constructed to last and demand the service of many hands, much that is less good must be made the rule, although the organiser knows what is better and harder very well.He will calculate that there will never be a lack of persons  who can correspond to the rule, and he knows that the middling good is the rule. — The youth seldom sees this point, and as an innovator thinks how marvelously he is in the right and how strange is the blindness of others. (Helen Zimmern transl.)

Friedrich Nietzsche did not describe software making – I can only assume that he was describing authors and ideologists – but this seems to capture the difficulties of software development only too well. And it seems to give a recipe for how to overcome the communication difficulties (abandon exotic, over-refined solutions and focus on an easily understood middle ground, so that everybody can get together and comprehend the architecture). This was originally published in 1886.

With that, merry christmas!