This made me think of Carmack’s integral of value over time vs maximal value. Oftentimes, we are LARPing because LARPing is a lot easier and faster than, as you say, debug until you know exactly what went wrong. When a program crashes, you’ll get a ton of logging information, but it’s often easier to just add retries and move on. If you’re working under deadlines, you know that, in some sense, the quicker fix where you’re bumping around in the dark will work and might be just as good as the slower fix of truly understanding the reason for a crash.
This is much less helpful for your own personal understanding, but often what you are delivering is a project, not an increase in understanding. When you want to stop LARPing, you have to go very slowly, and you don’t really have time to not LARP in most areas of life. This has the bad effect of making my own personal understanding of many subjects much more shallow than I would like, but it lets me deliver projects, which is net better for my company than deeply understanding software internals. In terms of things that I am trying to deeply learn, there are really only a few areas at a time that I can actually take a shot of understanding, and I have to be sure that I actually want to understand those areas.
I found this post helpful for clarifying the concept of LARPing, in the sense of technical subjects.
This made me think of Carmack’s integral of value over time vs maximal value. Oftentimes, we are LARPing because LARPing is a lot easier and faster than, as you say, debug until you know exactly what went wrong. When a program crashes, you’ll get a ton of logging information, but it’s often easier to just add retries and move on. If you’re working under deadlines, you know that, in some sense, the quicker fix where you’re bumping around in the dark will work and might be just as good as the slower fix of truly understanding the reason for a crash.
This is much less helpful for your own personal understanding, but often what you are delivering is a project, not an increase in understanding. When you want to stop LARPing, you have to go very slowly, and you don’t really have time to not LARP in most areas of life. This has the bad effect of making my own personal understanding of many subjects much more shallow than I would like, but it lets me deliver projects, which is net better for my company than deeply understanding software internals. In terms of things that I am trying to deeply learn, there are really only a few areas at a time that I can actually take a shot of understanding, and I have to be sure that I actually want to understand those areas.
I found this post helpful for clarifying the concept of LARPing, in the sense of technical subjects.