I think this is in tension with the idea that green can be conservation of what he was talking about where spirituality is the idea of facing the other. That means that cutting down a redwood cuts away the other and the awe that you would feel in favor of your own power. Green isn’t a Buddhist view of the world, it’s the idea that there is a boundary between you and other and the other is worth regarding
I have to say that this is the first essay in a long time that I read in its entirety. I really like a defense of green, since I remember talking a while ago with friends about how green couldn’t possibly be a real personality type. Surely it was just a way to be black. I think that this was a good point, especially at the end of the appendix where all of our desires come from nature, so in a sense we can’t help but be green. I do think of green as being more about equilibrium in the current state of nature while the uglier parts of nature tend to be ignored. For example, death in a green mindset looks more like peacefully passing away in ones sleep while death in a black mindset looks like very slow decay. I think basically every color can be said to exist in nature, it’s more about ones reaction to that fact that determines the color.
Super good essay, I’m glad you wrote it!
Do you have an example of a HHH dataset available on the internet, or what a few examples of what those look like?
This made me think of Carmack's integral of value over time vs maximal value. Oftentimes, we are LARPing because LARPing is a lot easier and faster than, as you say, debug until you know exactly what went wrong. When a program crashes, you'll get a ton of logging information, but it's often easier to just add retries and move on. If you're working under deadlines, you know that, in some sense, the quicker fix where you're bumping around in the dark will work and might be just as good as the slower fix of truly understanding the reason for a crash.
This is much less helpful for your own personal understanding, but often what you are delivering is a project, not an increase in understanding. When you want to stop LARPing, you have to go very slowly, and you don't really have time to not LARP in most areas of life. This has the bad effect of making my own personal understanding of many subjects much more shallow than I would like, but it lets me deliver projects, which is net better for my company than deeply understanding software internals. In terms of things that I am trying to deeply learn, there are really only a few areas at a time that I can actually take a shot of understanding, and I have to be sure that I actually want to understand those areas.
I found this post helpful for clarifying the concept of LARPing, in the sense of technical subjects.
Hey everyone, air quality is looking pretty bad right now, it gives me a headache to be outside. We could go somewhere else, or hold off until it's a bit colder so there are fewer fires, but I don't want to go to a park today.
Sorry, I realized I'm out of town this Friday, so bumped it by a week
It was great meeting everyone! I only got a few people’s emails, but I could hold more events like these so feel free to reach out at the contact address above if you want me to let you know when I do. Suggestions about how to make the event better would also be nice and very much appreciated
I meant EAST end, not west end
Air quality is looking good for Friday! I'm working on moving the event to 5PM from 6PM. Just FYI the time is changing. That way, people will have more time to hang out
I would add “finish it”. Many projects don’t actually get finished, you skip the last working set etc etc