perfessor multigeek's Journal: journal dynamics

So, here's the JE I had all ready to post:

Yep. It's true. Again bellus quies nailed it. This is what smart people do instead of daytime televison. I've just consumed half a day reading the FK's significance thread, the Fiver-Rah "girly-rant" thread, and a dozen others. It's not quite oblivion but it's as close as *I* intend to get (these days more then a few drinks usually just gives me a strong desire to immediately stop drinking). I'm not even sure why I'm planning to post this.
I am, in fact, a slashdot addict.
Can we create a support group? I guess not. Within a month it would have a site with a FAQ, be running on slashcode, and folks would be debating about what the XML tags for the archived threads should be.
The worst part is that I'm not certain I've wasted the day. With all the useful links I've come across, I've gotten some handy leads on several things that I had pending. Demm you all I say! This ambiguity is driving me nuts.
Of course I know how to deal with stress these days. I'll spend a few minutes at slashdot. Hm. Guess not.
Rustin


Pithy, silly, mildly stress relieving, and fundamentally dishonest.
Know what? I know perfectly well why I'm spending so much time here. It's really odd, but in truth, I'm doing a better job here of hacking my brain and my life then I have by doing anything else in years.
Well, add up the circumstances.

First of all, the topics. These are certainly broad-ranging but have a general and building theme of figuring stuff out. And over time they have not only gotten more oriented towards underlying causes, but more willing and capable about taking on taboo subject matter, just like slashdot in general (I personally found the /. discussion of bathroom behavior a significantly promising case of turning the "hacking" problem solving paradigm towards the rest of our lives).

Secondly, the culture. In other words, along with the topics, the sci/tech culture mores of openness, fact-seeking, honesty, and accuracy valued over "winning" are at long last spreading beyond topics like OS and video card choice. The underlying credo that problems, pretty much all problems, are solvable is also rare and precious to me.
[WARNING, FLAMEBAIT AHEAD] (BTW, to me the most astounding thing about this is the prevalence of religious Christians in these discussions. I developed a deep aversion to religious Christians, and to a lesser extent Jews, when working in managerial level IT as I saw a disturbingly predictable correlation between the strength of somebody's belief in a Semitic religion and their likelihood of choosing argument from authority ("X magazine says so") as a trump over argument from data or experience ("X application makes a lot of direct calls to memory so we should avoid it on the older machines, where we tend to dump the flaky RAM"). This has contrasted utterly with the /. journal community, where I have found a group that is majority religious Christian and consistantly taking approaches like "that's not what I've heard but if you've got a counter-example then let me know because maybe my source is wrong".) [END FLAMEBAIT]

Thirdly, the intelligence of the people posting. To some extent this is, more specifically, a matter of a higher standard of rigor. Frankly, I've spent the past decade in groups like IT staffers (in New York, where almost nobody codes, they just run installers, do diagnostics on gear they ordered from Ingram, and follow procedures), business school types, lawyers, and journalists (each of whom are trained to jump to conclusions, and reduce things down to one or two factor causes), and so on. For me to be surrounded by others who agree that actually understanding a problem is utterly different from having an account at a good repair shop is intoxicating.

Fourth, the accelerating level of openness that is currently in an exhilarating game of chicken with the still crucial sense of anonymity. This one is tricky, and by its nature, metastable at best. People are continuing to think of their behavior here as a sort of cruise ship romance, fun and maybe even profound, but detached from "real life". So folk are revealing ever more about themselves in a way that, despite protestation to the contrary, is evidently in some cases based on an illusion and, to some extent, reality of anonymity. But the more we fill that vacuum with data and the more time we spend here and the more we talk about our lives, link to our projects, and so on, the less vacuum is left. We are visiting a place that seduces with its isolation and then spending our time here, broadening the roads, lighting visible fires, and inviting our friends to join us.

Fifth, the text-only format. This is important, both for the freedom from distractions and the induced editing delay that lets me clear my thoughts and prevents reflex answers. This exists in symbiosis with the ease and reliability of the posting mechanism to create speed bumps where they are salutory and effortless transit where appropriate.

Add a few other variables and being here is more and more like getting ever larger scraps of the source code of my own brain after years of dealing with nothing but a balky GUI.
I have become like one of those middle-aged secretaries who used to be so vastly competent in WordPerfect DOS. In other words, handed an arbitrary, even counter-logical, complex system with too many layers to allow normal effective use, I've doggedly worked my way through finding how, if you put the format tag on the sixth line and the Olivetti fonts were installed, then the tabs will reset every second page.
Instead, here, I'm hitting stuff like the question about superpowers. And fiding that the process of answering them, combined with the drive to have that answer be honest is requiring considerable self-review and analysis. I'm having to climb into the backup tapes here and rereading the contents of the old directories is revelatory.
When asked in the framework of the above-mentioned states, simple questions are hitting me like koans.
Why did B.Q.'s question about painting send me into a panicky sense of vulnerability? Especially since I'ld *just posted* a JE about stuff here hitting sensitive spots?
Normally I'ld smoothly deflect that sort of question. Hell, I used to do stuff for the freakin' NSA! While, I might add, attending a college of leftist rich kids who took great pride in asking everybody about everything until they had reached deeper then the Marianas Trench. Think about that one folks. When you're working on fiber optics taps and a very bright, openly anti-government pacifist physics major asks why you're reading up on the optics of surfaces, what do you say? Blithely misleading responses on sensitive topics are something I crank out like others crank out baseball stats.
Maybe it's just timing. Maybe I'm just tired of living on autopilot.
But I don't think that that's it. Sure, it's a big part, but not all. After all, think of the Vital Stats thread. I think that there is a broader movement of people here who have decided to take this community seriously and to choose both to trust (seemingly insane in an online forum) that disclosure is viable. I suspect, though I haven't seen any detailed posts yet that say so, that others are *deciding* to cause these discusion to be of consequence. Even if it means migrating to a place like Fort Knox's site to do it.
Rustin