on scaffolding

I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make. Daniel Dennett had a great riff on this– he recommended being a connoisseur of one’s mistakes.

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained over years tends to bear much better fruit than an highly-productive process that one cannot sustain for more than a few weeks or months.

The fear of making mistakes is a particularly strong dampener on one’s learning. You can’t learn if you can’t make mistakes. I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make.

And this is why I put “ayy lmao” in my meme about the heart of philosophy. Laughter is the divine thing that transmutes stupid bullshit into something real. It cracks up the edifice of polite fictions and tedious prattle and gets to the heart of things. And fun, I think, always has a spirit of laughter about it, even if you’re doing it quietly with... See more

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained over years tends to bear much better fruit than an highly-productive process that one cannot sustain for more than a few weeks or months.

if there’s some odd way that you particularly enjoy doing things, then you should probably prioritize that over any system that anybody else advises you to do.

Great works are unsettling, disorienting, they confound our expectations. In this definition, it’s almost impossible for a great work to be considered ‘refined’ at the time of its creation, because its elements are alien, they have not yet had time to have been weighed and evaluated.

I think it can be tempting as a novice to assume that everything a master produces must be refined in the high-res, high-production-value sense. I think that would be quite definitively wrong. A master has to be capable of producing quality low-res work, experimentally.

Because we have a limited amount of time and energy, if we want to get good, we have to allocate those resources effectively. And to do that we have to know how not to waste our time polishing turds