Tarot for Hackers
christine.website
christine.website
If you're serious about your magic, you should probably cast the I Ching for this sort of thing (imo).
See: The Man in the High Castle (PKD wrote it by using the I Ching) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Calvino (based on tarot readings).
Although created for artists (musicians in particular), it can help reframe almost any creative endeavor in interesting ways.
[1] https://pretendstore.co/collections/all/products/pocket-deve...
The cards you draw are random and have little significance. A GOOD tarot reading asks you to reflect on how your life fits to the cards you drew. It doesn't tell you anything you don't already have in your head. It just provides a context to present your personal crises and reflections to yourself. Done well it gives you a chance to reflect and learn about yourself. It has no power over anything but your own mind.
I consider myself a "Rationalist Chaote" Ritual, Faith and "Magic" have power, abet a small one. They are useful tools for intentionally modifying your own behaviors and outlooks. They are not a replacement for therapy or medical attention when you are having issues but they are a tool you should keep in your arsenal of self-improvement.
From what I've found is heavily based in hebrew mysticism, aka Qabbalah. The 22 major arcana are symbolic representations of the meanings of the 22 letters of the 22 alphabet[1]. My most recent finding is even more exciting. The 4 suites numbered 2-10 come out to to 4×9=36 cards. 36×2=72. The myth about the 72 3-letter names of God matches here, where each of the numbered suite cards Carrie's the meaning of a pair of 3-letter names from the set of 72.
[1] I've been researching why the 5 final forms used in the 27 letter alphabet were not included and I dont really know why. I've made a deck adding new major arcana cards for to include this discovery.
One day I said to her: “Maybe they don’t predict the future, maybe they make the future.”
I don’t think she’s touch them since.
I believe it helps anytime you have a difficult challenge and don’t know where to start, or your previous attempts failed, by introducing some randomness and instigating lateral thinking.
Or how about tarot cards for interviews? After I conduct an interview I read the tarot cards to figure out how to judge the candidate.
I wonder how many tech employers know for sure that their in-person interview process has a higher accuracy than this one. If you've passed a resume filter / internal referral and can demonstrate that you're not simply lying about being able to code (or whatever the job is) does the rest of the in-person interview reliably, provably add signal?
That's sort of the implied argument of the article - that we deal with complex systems so complex that systematic and rational debugging isn't obviously higher-signal than picking things at random.
When you encounter a problem with your program, consider the following in order:
- your Motive
- Facet (localize the failure)
- Immediate Past (what changed to cause this problem)
- the Action (that you need to take)
- the desired Result
While the message is valuable, I'm not a fan of the obfuscation.
I mean, you can talk about reading tarot at home and I'll support your hobby. No problems there, I'll ask you what you've done with it recently with genuine interest, and I'm not going to even think about saying you shouldn't do what you enjoy.
But you talk about using tarot for debugging at work, there's basically no chance I'll ever take you seriously again. I apologize for my negativity for not wanting to use tarot cards for debugging or a Ouija board for requirements gathering.
Frankly, a Ouija board for requirements gathering might be a lot less mysterious and esoteric than some of the scrum practices I've seen...
It's a bit strange to have an objection to a thing based on the idea that it's impossible.
I once objected to the idea that colors look fundamentally different in darkness than in light. When put like that, it's kind of silly to imagine that one could object to it. But my objection was mostly to do with the way it was presented: Someone told me to stare at a picture and let my brain "buy into it." I was younger and practically laughed it off. But sure enough, after actually doing it, the picture looked much more vivid.
One possibility presents itself as to why Tarot debugging might be effective: Perhaps it gets you to try more things than you otherwise would have.
The post begins:
envision the product or service you are trying to understand more about. Think of the plans that went into it, the users of the service, how this understanding will help them, and where the missing part of knowledge fits into the larger whole. Write this all out if it helps, the more detail the better.
So, user stories. Right?
From further down:
draw The Action. This card will help you decide what action you need to take. This could be restarting a server, fixing a communication pattern (or lack thereof), or even just doing nothing and waiting a few minutes. Sometimes it means that you need to stop what you are doing and try to do the read again later. It’s okay for that to happen, though that should only be a very rare occurrence.
This sounds pretty similar to ad-hoc debugging techniques I've seen.
I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent chance of being effective.
I kind of want to go the other direction and make a deck of cards for debugging. You shuffle the deck, draw a few cards, and see if you've tried all the techniques it mentions. You could even have decks for designing systems, refactoring code, etc.
It seems like there's a deeper disconnect here: We want to believe so badly that programming is scientific work. But it's craftsmanship. Are these rituals really so much stranger than the rituals of Japanese swordsmiths? Why engrave a sword with such embellishment when it serves no functional purpose? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/...
Yeah, restart the malfunctioning thing and throw away what precious state you had for meaningful debugging of a potentially hard to reproduce problem.
If I ever encounter someone guiding their engineering or administration tasks with tarot cards somewhere I have the authority to, they'll be promptly dismissed.
No one was recommending throwing away state that might help you debug a problem. But I think that there are people who will dislike the idea of controlled randomness regardless of any merits, counterexamples, or evidence in support of its effectiveness.
Doctors hated the idea that washing their hands would save lives, because it implied they had been doing their jobs wrong their entire lives.
Also, if you read the article closely, it's not advising you to trust the deck blindly, it's advising you to use it as a way to think about the problem from a new angle. If you're restarting it blindly based on a tarot deck, you're the sort of sysadmin who's ready to restart it blindly based on finding a five-year-old wiki page with a vaguely similar error message on a totally different platform. Should that be a fireable offense? (Maybe! Or at least maybe the company should find you a different role that recognizes that making decisions about production servers is not actually one of your skills.)
Exactly. I don't really have many beliefs, but one of them is something like "if it works (for some definition of "works"), do more of it".
Programming is basically a ritual where we create runes that empower lightning we tricked into thinking (with sand) in order to think about the things we want it to.
But if my workplace started handing out magical "productivity-increasing" placebo pills and some people defended the practice by saying to stop being so negative and be more open-minded, I would leave. Part of our jobs in tech is to minimize the bullshit to its absolute smallest possible surface area, not embrace it and pretend, with the power of imagination, that it's a good thing.
Buying into the bullshit and tying your abilities to something as flimsy as a placebo pill is not a great idea.
To be honest, I miss working with you.
I've been working on a few more "woo-woo" things for a number of years that I've been unsure how to properly approach in a work setting (but do actually use it as an advantage in a work setting). Been working on a book for it for years. DM me on Twitter (@theprincessxena) if you want a link.
It's actually really hard to be open enough to talk about this kind of stuff in a work setting. It's easy to let fear of being labeled the "weird one" stop you, even when nothing else prevents you. However, when you do get known as the "weird one", you can get away with saying basically anything without people questioning it too much (EG: "it's Christine, she's weird, I don't have to care about $THING").