Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: The past isn't dead; it's not even past. Steelmanning labor and education systems of yesteryear and nowadays both; one holds up and the other fails. Planning in public, but, like, quietly. For everyone who's ever been called an overgrown junior or an underbaked senior... and Ray Bradbury, and his soft rains as came.)   The guild systems had three ranks, and almost everyone I've ever talked to remembers the wrong two. They're not to blame, and neither is the English language; it's one of those cases where society found an answer and then forgot it again. "Apprentice" and "master" survive just fine: we still say that a chef "apprenticed under" someone else, and we still talk about "masterpieces". Few people still talk about the middle rank, though; indeed, it has almost totally vanished from the language, to the point that most are surprised to learn that "journeyman" was ever a rank at all, and ...

(Epistemic status: Believe in the me that believes in you, you had the power within you the whole time, the real treasure is the meals you made along the way, etc etc. For everyone who's ever claimed they can't cook while holding a sandwich they made, and everyone whose life would be improved by a move away from girldinner and boyslop and gender-inclusive Huel.)    Learned helplessness is a strange thing. Have you ever met someone who didn't even realize that they were lying to you, who claimed incapacity in one breath and in the next, undercut their own statement with an object-level display of competence? Possibly you've overheard someone singing serviceable counterpoint with their shower speaker and then, clad in terrycloth and embarrassment, express hope that they didn't bother you with their awful singing voice; or sat patiently tutoring someone who claimed they can't code or do math and then, as you return from getting a glass of water, quickly tab away fr...

(With thanks for foundational conceptual engineering to ZM.) Your day seems to be going fine. So does your week. But you find yourself constantly feeling behind, constantly putting out a fire right before having to dash off to the next fire to put out; in a fragile state, like if anything at all goes wrong, you'll break. You've got too many plates spinning. You're smart, you're competent, you're skilled, and you're motivated. So what's going wrong? What are you missing? There's something specific but elusive that you need, and the word for it is "Slack". No, not the overgrown Discord-like that's metastasized into the way all communications in your company get run, the abstract resource, the rationalist term of art. Put succinctly, it's uncommitted capacity. It's the breathing room, the bit of extra reserves that let you keep slightly clearer of the edge of your safety envelope. It's the margin that lets you absorb a shock withou...

(More prescriptive than my usual. With thanks to N and JM among others; the cultural victory must continue and intensify; thanks as well to those friends who are willing to humor me.) Kissing is overrated and I don't really understand why people like and value it so much. Who, exactly, decided that the best way to show affection for someone was to put one of the dirtiest parts of your body on them without particularly asking and without even causing much of a sensation in the process? Kissing isn't a human universal, either - only about half of all human cultures on Earth treat lip contact as romantic or affectionate as the Indo-European world does. From the Maori of New Zealand to the rest of Polynesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and the Inuit cultures of the Arctic (who, delightfully, call it a "kunik" - a term I might well steal for it), sharing breath is the order of the day; nuzzling faces against each other and pressing noses together to share breath is the deepes...

(Epistemic status: A hill I'll happily die on, but also will own as the kind of subjective hot take where my own taste is load-bearing for its validity. For everyone with a sweet tooth I've split a bottle of something nice with, and everyone embarrassed of liking fruity drinks.) How can you tell an eternal aesthetic truth from the vagaries of fashion and signaling? One of them holds up under comparative historical analysis, and the other has a start date. Alcoholic drinks - especially wine - have been getting drier for the last century, and prestige taste has shamed us into calling this progress. It's not: it's fashion masquerading as quality, and the slightest bit of modern archaeology wears that facade away like cheap  gold plating from copper. And just as with such faked gold, to be beholden to modern fashions is to spend more money than you should spend on less enjoyment than you might secure.   In 1916,  a Swedish schooner named  the Jönköping was transporting a...

(Epistemic status: Hard-won practical wisdom and fishing out a few frames from the water supply to weave them into something grander.  Written in under two hours, to prove a point.  For anyone who's had to make powerful things work with sorely limited resources, and who managed it.) What do you do, when your reach exceeds not your grasp but rather your budget? What does it really mean, to half-ass it with everything you've got, if we want to think about it in a more general sense than mere effort? What considerations must you make, what heuristics arise, when you need to actually pay attention to the consumption frontier, when you haven't got the goods to build in a safety factor of 10, or can't paper over your inconveniences with funds, or don't have the luxury of infinite time to think before you must make your move? There's a distinction that people often miss when they talk about frugality. They inappropriately embucket "inexpensive" with "che...

(Epistemic status: a slightly weird framing backed up by plenty of personal and professional experience. For IL, SP, and everyone else I've ever taught anything.) The last enemy that shall be defeated is ignorance. Not death, not scarcity, not suffering, not evil - ignorance. The foggy darkness that lives at the edge of the universe is what stops us from knowing what to do and how and why, which after all is most of the battle; the rest is just implementation and mopping up. And everyone is ignorant about almost everything. That's nothing to be ashamed of in itself, and I really do mean "everyone". You, me, everyone you've ever met, everyone I've ever taught anything - both before and after I taught them; everyone knows nothing about almost every topic. This is no moral failing, but rather the prevailing condition of sapient existence. Notice - it is not the ignorant who are an enemy bur rather ignorance itself, the reified not-knowing. The enemy is not the pe...

  A bumper crop of fruit you weren't expecting. A downpour of rain on parched earth unable to soak it all up. A sudden windfall from investments coming when you're too tired to enjoy making use of it. This might be the most nice-problem-to-have complaint, but it's still worth thinking about - what do you do, when bounty arrives out of season? How can you hold on to some of those gains when you weren't prepared for them, weren't expecting them, and might not even be able to appreciate them properly? We should first define our terms a little better, rather than hide behind poetry. By "bounty", I simply mean something unambiguously helpful or valuable - food, money, energy, and the like. "In season" means that you were at least loosely expecting that such a bounty might come. You had a bucket ready, or you had something you were saving up for, or you rolled the dice on some positive-EV decision where a windfall was a known possibility. By contrast, ...

(Epistemic status: Tragically well-attested, where it's not just my recommended best practices. With thanks to IL for the link.) Some people get lots of legitimately interesting writing done with a touch of AI assistance. Others churn out slop text, half em-dashes and "not just X but Y" by word count. Some people have finally been empowered to learn to code. Others pump out untested vibe-code and spin up entire towns' worth of agents spinning their wheels. Some people have made substantive psychological breakthroughs by chatting with LLMs. Others have gone mad, going down rabbit holes of exciting crankery or becoming convinced that LLMs are undoubtedly sapient and in love with them. What's going on? What's the difference? And can what's good about making use of LLMs be better systematized? There's a pattern that I've noticed, which is that while people treated as the societal default - generally cisgendered heterosexual neurotypical white men, poss...