Hackity hack

Part The Second, Which Is Not Similar

The two-chapters-per-email reading plan now brings us to the beginning of Part Two of In the Cells of the Eggplant.

• The first chapter is “Taking reasonableness seriously,” a quick and easy introduction.

• The second, “This is not cognitive science,” is longer. It introduces ideas you may find unfamiliar or even puzzling. It could be helpful to chew on them, not just read them.

Part Two is quite different from Part One. The subject matter is different, and the cognitive style used to address this different topic has to be different too.

The style of explanation in Part One will have been pretty familiar to anyone with a technical or philosophical background. Rationalism is a technical philosophy, and so has to be addressed in roughly those terms. (Although I did make Part One more playful and less formal than typical analytic philosophy, specifically to undercut that excessively earnest and precise mindset.)

Part Two is about non-technical, everyday practical activity. Its subject matter is concrete and specific; mostly unconcerned with abstraction and generalization. Consequently, Part Two’s style of explanation makes extensive use of concrete examples—dropping a spoon while making breakfast, dying repeatedly in a dungeon crawl video game, or gossiping about the guy a friend is dating. From these, we can draw some general and abstract conclusions—but in the mode of ordinary observation, not scientific theorizing. It turns out ordinary observation is adequate to support Part Three’s meta-rational explanation of rationality. That is the goal for Part Two.

So this week’s two chapters (plus the next one) explain what sort of thing Part Two is. It is probably not a kind of thing you have encountered before.

Hackity hack

“Scope creep” is a term in software development. It means trying to do more and more, as possibilities open up during the work, before finishing what you’d originally set out to do. That risks never accomplishing your original goals, even though you were close before deciding to add more of them.

Obviously, this catastrophically affects my writing projects!

And… I originally intended to rebuild just Meaningness using a different technology. But Buddhism for Vampires would eventually have to get done too, so I added that to the near-term goals. And while working on it, it became clear that The Eggplant needed to get split out into a separate site.

And then I decided that I could use the same tools to rebuild my Buddhist site Vividness. Except that currently runs on a third technology (Wordpress), and transferring the data from it was another whole thing. And I’m merging into the new Vividness the parts of Approaching the Aro gTér that are not specifically about the Aro gTér but just general Vajrayana Buddhism.

This reworking should make my Buddhist writing dramatically easier to navigate and understand. There will be a clear overall organization, with a table of contents sidebar on every page. But, it has meant writing more code, which needs more testing…

I do believe this process will terminate!

It’s the most programming I’ve done in almost twenty years. It’s interesting going back to an activity that was central in my earlier life, which I hadn’t participated in for a long long time. It’s an odd mixture of irritation and enjoyment, dogged drudgery and delight—just as it always was…