Debugging Yourself

09 Apr 2022 - 03 Jul 2024

So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap? My mind, my limited mind. The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

Idea for a self-help book using CS concepts. Surely someone has done this, like the Rationalists should be all over this. But no, amazingly, there is no book with this title! That's weird, I would have guessed it would be a whole small genre by now.

I almost feel obligated to write it just to cash in on this discovery! Unfortunately I cannot imagine myself as a guru figure of any kind, I just don't have that in me. That's maybe my bug!

Still being familiar with some basic computational concepts and being able to apply them to life situations is a bit of a minor superpower. Some that come to mind

Hm ok, here's a case where the computational version is a very direct metaphor from human interaction, so what does it mean to apply that metaphor backwards? It means that human interaction begins with a process of protocol negotiation, as the parties involved figure out the nature of the conversation, its rules.

OK, there are too many to list, because all of these formalisms have a ground in something human. Mostly.

Meditation as sort of a basic meta-skill. Learning to observe your own processes is an obvious necessary first step towards fixing them.

Note: the importance of debugging in learning was a major theme in Seymour Papert Mindstorms: what did Papert argue and what does it mean for learning and education? | by Amy J. Ko | Bits and Behavior | Medium

Additionally, Papert was critical of educational institutions resistance to the inevitable need for children to refine their theories of ideas over time. Papert believed that if it is true that people learn by essentially “debugging” their beliefs, school should be a place in which debugging is viewed as *essential, encouraged, *and *supported. *Yet, because of the obsession with teaching the knowledge academics view as most correct, students get the idea that there is “right” knowledge and “wrong” knowledge, rather than just useful personal knowledge that is to be improved. Just as the teachers’ lie about relevance erodes learning, Papert viewed education’s resistance to supporting the iterative construction of knowledge as invalidating the natural process by which children learn.

The basic message that comes from ideas about debugging is that we learn from our mistakes; that the intricate process of making things work or learning new skills has to do with hypothesizing, testing, revising, and so on. Children are encouraged to collect, classify, and celebrate their bugs. Sometimes bugs, serendipitously, are adopted as features worth perpetuating, sometimes procedures must be constructed to deal with the phenomena caused by their appearance, and sometimes the bugs and their side effect need to be removed. In this pursuit, children become creative researchers studying behavior, making up theories, trying out ideas, etc.

Software (traditional) has a particular well-defined function, and is composed of parts each of which also has a well-defined subfunctions. Selves are not like this at all. A person has goals and purposes, but they are fleeting and insubstantial and it is probably not the case that each goal has its own machinery (as in SOM).

If your personal bug is something like "lack of ability to sustain long-term goals" (I confess to that one), its not clear how debugging techniques can help.