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This text is not as impenetrable as it first seems and offers some valuable insights on the friction between socially conditioned roleplaying ("packing") vs dee

by hnzix 7y ago

This text is not as impenetrable as it first seems and offers some valuable insights on the friction between socially conditioned roleplaying ("packing") vs deep thinking ("mapping"). My best takeaways were: 1. You're not crazy for being a deep thinker: it drives force multiplication 2. Ceremony is very often bullshit 3. You're going to have to make some quality sacrifices in your code - here's a useful model on how to approach that I also liked the bits about using a step debugger for code reviews, and avoiding nested conditionals. I mostly failed to grasp the camel sex analogy.

mikekchar 7y ago
It's been ages since I read this, but I remember coming away with a very different impression. "Packing" is essentially storing away details in your memory. If you ever see programmers who write the solution to everything down and then are constantly looking up their notes: that's a packer. "Mapping" is essentially deriving from first principles. It frees up a lot of working memory in your head and allows you to explore the issues more freely. I think it's a bit more than that, though. Fluency in a task usually means being able to do it without undue planning. When you are speaking, you don't figure out the grammar of what you are saying. You just open your mouth and it kind of pops out. It's that kind of synthesis that's important. It's the same as play chess at a high level or especially playing go. You might not know exactly why one move is better than the other, but your fluency allows you to judge it correctly. To me, that's "mapping". "Packing" is a good strategy if you don't need to judge the value of your work. This is the answer: right or wrong. You can write it down. You can memorize it. You can produce it at the appropriate time. But you can't derive it without a lot of effort. This writing influenced my thinking a lot, but when I started to get involved with language acquisition, I started to feel that it's a bit limited. I think language/skill acquisition models are actually a better fit. However, this analogy is still useful in certain ways.
- hnzix 7y ago
  I didn't get that at all. The premise of the article is that society, for agrarian/industrial revolution reasons, has conditioned us to be "packers" - reactive cogs. It implores us to learn from the Japanese post WWII practice of Total Quality Management / Kaizen to become imaginative mappers. The article strongly divides people into one of the two camps, with frequent Dilbert references and disparaging remarks towards packers as "holding their toothbrush with chopsticks". It strongly criticizes packing as worthless ceremony for the sake of social ritual. (If you squint hard enough there's also a parable in there about premature API layers and strong typing, but I'll concede that part's subjective).

by hnzix 7y ago

mikekchar 7y ago

It's been ages since I read this, but I remember coming away with a very different impression. "Packing" is essentially storing away details in your memory. If you ever see programmers who write the solution to everything down and then are constantly looking up their notes: that's a packer. "Mapping" is essentially deriving from first principles. It frees up a lot of working memory in your head and allows you to explore the issues more freely. I think it's a bit more than that, though. Fluency in a task usually means being able to do it without undue planning. When you are speaking, you don't figure out the grammar of what you are saying. You just open your mouth and it kind of pops out. It's that kind of synthesis that's important. It's the same as play chess at a high level or especially playing go. You might not know exactly why one move is better than the other, but your fluency allows you to judge it correctly. To me, that's "mapping". "Packing" is a good strategy if you don't need to judge the value of your work. This is the answer: right or wrong. You can write it down. You can memorize it. You can produce it at the appropriate time. But you can't derive it without a lot of effort. This writing influenced my thinking a lot, but when I started to get involved with language acquisition, I started to feel that it's a bit limited. I think language/skill acquisition models are actually a better fit. However, this analogy is still useful in certain ways.

hnzix 7y ago
I didn't get that at all. The premise of the article is that society, for agrarian/industrial revolution reasons, has conditioned us to be "packers" - reactive cogs. It implores us to learn from the Japanese post WWII practice of Total Quality Management / Kaizen to become imaginative mappers. The article strongly divides people into one of the two camps, with frequent Dilbert references and disparaging remarks towards packers as "holding their toothbrush with chopsticks". It strongly criticizes packing as worthless ceremony for the sake of social ritual. (If you squint hard enough there's also a parable in there about premature API layers and strong typing, but I'll concede that part's subjective).