http://www.phparch.com \ May 2019 \ 23Community Corner
Philosophy and Burnout, Part One
Margaret Staples
Why care about philosophy? In a word, burnout.
Misology is the hatred of reasoning, revulsion or distrust of argument, debate, or the Socratic
method, and it’s one of the flavors of burnout.
It’s when the joy of exploring
knowledge, gaining skills, and solving
problems have vanished. When we no
longer wish to discuss the intricacies of
our craft with our fellow practitioners,
and instead long to forget it.
Immanuel Kant says that this “usually
springs from an emptiness of a scien-
tific attainment, or those whose diligent
pursuit of science provides no satisfac-
tion.”
That’s burnout. A state of profound
dissatisfaction that permeates every-
thing in a person’s life, preventing
them from recharging their internal
resources, until they exist in a perma-
nent state of exhaustion. It’s miserable
and it’s a big reason why people leave
the tech industry.
There are three main ways your
personal philosophy can fend off
burnout that we’re going to focus on
in this series: Finding peace with the
limits of our knowledge, identifying
and avoiding logical fallacies (brain
traps), and figuring out which guiding
principles we want to use to frame our
perspective when perceiving our situa-
tions and making decisions.
In this article, we’ll focus on the
first of these hurdles: coming to terms
with the limits of our knowledge; our
horizon of understanding.
Horizons of Understanding
Consciousness is an endless series
of guess and check, a skill you’ve been
building your entire life. The first step
in tackling a guess and check obstacle
is determining what’s inside or outside
of your problem space, and horizons of
understanding are the inverse boundary.
It describes what’s inside or outside of
your potential answer space.
Just like we can’t solve a problem
without clearly defining that problem,
without an understanding of the limits
of our personal answer space we can
end up struggling indefinitely without
ever turning up a satisfying solution.
There are two pieces to this puzzle:
things we could know but don’t yet, and
things we can’t know. When we don’t
have a useful map of which is which
we risk getting stuck, wasting resources,
and burning out each time we’re faced
with a problem we haven’t solved before.What We Don’t Know Yet
When we are born, our horizon of
understanding is: What are words,
even?
We have a massive chaos stream of
input pouring through our senses. In
that torrent of omgwth, our only avail-
able actions are:- To pay attention to something in
that chaos, or - to intend to do something with our
meat robot.
If you’ve ever hung out with an infant,
you can watch them striving to hit level
one with their Attention and Intention
skills, and it’s kind of great. They’re
trying to pay attention, and they’re
trying to do things, and at first, they’re
just super bad at it. But that’s the whole
game to them, so they keep working at
it, and they get better.
Their newly forming attention skills
allow them to start pattern matching,
starting with familiar faces. Their
experiments with intention allow
them to affect the data they’re getting,
with small manipulations at first like
grasping an object. As they do this
work, the torrent of data streaming
in becomes less bewildering and they
become more confident.
Every time we find ourselves expe-
riencing something genuinely new, it’s
kind of like this.
For example: tackling a new language
or learning a new framework. It’s a
whole lot of new, and that can be bewil-
dering. When we try to do stuff, the
results are very rarely what we intended,
and the documentation and examples
we’re leaning on might assume a level
of familiarity we are still struggling to
attain.
Over time we start to recognize
patterns.
We learn where the new framework
keeps our familiar tools like routing or
controllers or models. We see the new
language that we’re learning has this
package manager; we learn how to end
a line, and we memorize the available
loops.
Maybe arrays or objects are handled
differently than we’re used to; perhaps
the terminology or structure is unfa-
miliar, but we connect the new and
unfamiliar with things in our existing
picture of the universe and it stops
being bewildering.
Our confidence in the new terrain
grows as we map it.What We Can’t Know
Having a grasp on what we don’t or
can’t know is super useful. It lets us
focus on the answers that are possible
for us to find and lets us know when
to seek out answers from someone or
somewhere else.