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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and that "communicating" was often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.

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Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill.

Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed.

We emit meaning the way a star emits photons.

Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around.

But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.

I really like the way you said we emit meaning.

It is kind of funny, that we seek meaning and/or purpose in everything - our lives, our actions, our thoughts - but there is a nice change in perspective in considering it as something that we produce rather than find.

Humans are evolved creatures that are very resilient across environments.

Any species that has this trait must not get stuck in local maximums, at an extreme that's why the koala is just not a resilient species, over confidence.

We are an anti-niche species, to avoid this we must have a certain percentage of our population that has doubt, existential crisis that shakes us out of a well worn path.

This always amazes me. If you deeply, emotionally _know_ that life has meaning, there will be some existential nights where you you will think "but maybe life doesn't have meaning", and if you _know_ life is meaningless you will sometime find yourself thinking "maybe there is meaning", our brains try to keep us from getting stuck.

Humility in the face of the unknown. As a species, just amazing stuff.

The cycle of confidence and doubt is absolutely amazing, it's kept us from getting stuck.

Keeps us from having "target fixation" and lawn darting into the ground.

Some individuals have these values tuned at extreme ends, the full distribution is represented by humanity.

The most overconfident and the most anxiety ridden, this is all in our spectrum, and it turns out better or worse for each individual.

The great thing is that we can share ideas and examine our priors.

I used to believe that "nothing" was a real thing, but it's only an abstraction, nothing has never been observed it's only "real" in our imaginations. There's no such thing as nothing as far as anyone has observed or proven.

Same thing with meaninglessness, nothing is meaningless, there are just bits of meaning maximally un-complex and decohered. You can use photon emissions from stars for RNG, humans have made even RNG have rich meaning and high practical utility.

Yeah, a typical advice trope is "Find things with meaning and do those" which isn't very useful once you understand we create meaning internally. Meaning is an individualized perception not an extrinsic property.

This gets tricky because our perceptions can be influenced by societal expectations of which things should be meaningful - as if it's an objective property. It's easy to think of activities to which many people would respond "Oh, that must be soooo meaningful" and yet it's entirely possible you may not personally experience a sense of meaning from doing them - yet feel like you're supposed to. It's important to realize there's nothing wrong with that (or with you). You may not experience the 'expected meaning' meaning while doing some "charitably noble activity" widely thought to be meaningful, yet discover something else few would associate with "meaningful" does evoke meaning for you.

> Yeah, a typical advice trope is "Find things with meaning and do those" which isn't very useful once you understand we create meaning internally. Meaning is an individualized perception not an extrinsic property.

Why does intrinsic meaning make this advice not useful? I have always understood this sort of advice to mean “do things that are meaningful to you”.

Sometimes, whats meaningful to an individual becomes cloudy (maybe not everyone gets this, but some do). Or they feel like they are interpreting it wrong or something because it isn't mapping to the cultural expectations and what we "should" find meaningful.

The obvious problem quadrant is if you work on something that has huge meaning to you personally, but no or negative use to most people. Meaning can have both intrinsic and extrinsic components.

Inevitably you have to compromise on what is the most meaningful thing to achieve some reasonably happy balance. How much compromise, how you internalize it to yourself, etc. you have to figure out.

This conversation is reminding me of one of the most formative books in my development: Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning". It explores this idea, that the strive to find meaning is the central defining force for humanity, set against the backdrop of brutal destruction of the holocaust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

This type of thinking should've died with the contemporaries of Darwin who didn't believe in evolution. We live on a planet full of complex, intelligent life, we're far from the only ones giving things meaning. Animals have social structures and emotions that are as sophisticated as our own, it's only ego to think that we're unique in giving life meaning.

The statement was qualified, if you have objective evidence for species propagating long term complex meaning that we have observed as the written word or other externalized means please demonstrate. I do not understand why a person would say that demonstratably dolphins have done more meaning generation than people?

The universe is full of possibilities, I'm trying to establish an empirical/observable floor not the ceiling.

Other species are also intelligent and create meaning, but I don't know of any proposed metric where their impact is remotely close to ours, though it's not 0 and beyond that they are part of our causal chain as well.

I personally wouldn't mind if we kept giving dogs and dolphins and other animals tools for long term complex communication but some people think we shouldn't interfere in that kind of way in the development of other species. I'd be interested in hearing if you hold an intentional development/don't interfere position.

It's ok and true to say people are empirically special and unique in actual observed reality. If there is a dolphin universe where they are the dominant species and have libraries and journals and satellites than that's fine, but we haven't observed that to be the case.

Again, there is a world of possibilities and everyone should explore that, but I am talking about the one universe we have observed and our empirical observations within it. I like to delineate between extrapolative and speculative ceilings and empirical floors.

For those who are interested in the above comments, I find that David Brin's Uplift series does a great job exploring these themes, for e.g., what can happen when dolphins or monkeys are given sentence and full use of advanced technology.

I love the image of humans emitting meaning like stars emit photons. It's poetic, but also kind of literal.

Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process, and in the creativity needed to design an elegant solution. In fact the more boring part is often the coding itself.

This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still.

The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary.

Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.

"Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject.

(So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)

That reminds me of a phrase that I read some years ago:

"A typical Google engineer could describe their job as ‘taking protocol buffers and turning them into other protocol buffers’."

If you take a software engineering textbook, you’ll see there’s nothing about code other than a chapter about methodology. It’s mostly about decomposing problems and stating criteria for a good solution. Which by itself is a lot of writing and talking.

> Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing.

The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging.

WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS.

I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.

I'd blame Social Media. It did more to kill small websites than anything else. Possibly starting with MySpace in 2004.

WYSIWYG never really went away even after Dreamweaver and FrontPage lost popularity. My ISP had a web-based editor in the early 2000s, lots and lots of free hosting providers also had them (HN tends to only remember only GeoCities, but there were hundreds of those providers).

Also: Weebly, Wix and Squarespace are quite old, mid-2000s.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, standing up a public-facing web page (even a single static HTML one) is more complex than saving a word doc. Especially if it gets a lot of traffic, has any kind of user-input, or it comes under attack. So far, out of the attempts to bring web publishing to the masses, the only successful ones so far have been the "hosted" ones where you have to pay someone else to do the hard, non-creative work for you, and are for the most part dependent on them.

The dream of laymen, needing nothing else but an Internet connection, pushing a button on a locally-running application and "poof" a web page appears and is accessible to the world, remains out of reach.

It used to be no more complex than saving a Word document. You used to get a small storage space from your ISP with FTP credentials to upload files. Security was not an issue and neither was traffic. User input was a more advanced matter, but when you've reached the level to having concern for any of these, either your ISP would help you or you'd contract a professional web host. Today it's an immense task for amateurs to just get off the ground.

I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made with no clue of where it would lead". Which then is usually followed with "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being half-jokingly: "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."

Good strategy!

One of mine is to ask myself "what is my attention on?". You'd be surprised at how often the answer is, "a bunch of thoughts".

> often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.

How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.

Do you do the same with emotions? E.g., a) What is this emotion, b) no, that's the undue amount of stress from this particular encounter, c) larger, basic emotion that is the reason you're ruminating about a total stranger taking 20 seconds at the counter to decide on a coffee order after waiting 10 minutes in line... :)

No, I treat emotions as yet to be vocalized or identified observations. Emotions are like unsaid statements, hanging in a pregnant pause. If I find myself caught up in emotion, that is a likely scenario where bias can enter my self conversation, and being aware of the danger of self conversation bias, I turn my suspicious self against myself and re-center logically. Wash away that emotion with analysis and awareness.

I find trying to hide and wash away emotions tends to be a dangerous strategy long term. I get that sometimes emotions are unproductive for the task at hand, but the longer you keep washing them away with "logic", the stronger they keep returning at inopportune times. The long term strategy that works for me is to acknowledge them, actually listen to them, but also recognize I have the ability to act despite them. Easier said than done of course.

My use of "wash away" is more like "transform from unstated feeling to stated feeling with new analysis minimizing bias, for future decisions". It's not a suppression, it's a making stated what was unstated before. It's an attempt at self honesty.

Ah fair enough, that wasn't completely transparent to me.

"Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.

I don't understand how does this help if, yes, communicating, is what we are doing most of the time.

It's a framing mechanism, where when one identifies with "writing code" and gains a sense of purpose doing that, and then automation starts "writing code", does that trigger a loss of a sense of purpose? By framing one's innate skill as communicating it should not matter what medium one operates, they are still using non-casual and specific communications to do their job, even when code generation, or ad copy generation, or a talking spokesperson video is the result.

Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.

Framing it all as "communicating" is oddly clarifying. It explains why misalignment causes so much friction

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