2024-07-14 Obsessive Deficient Attention Disorder

What I Did

More tedium, more misery.

However, I can say that I’ve successfully wiped out the most terrifying portion of my project: the Unknown-I-Don’t-Know-What-I’ll-Do-With-This pile.

Most notably, I ran across this particular vast repository of information. Parsing it has been a stress test of my current system, and has yielded me quite a bit of learning.

So, I’ll divulge that learning, even if I run the risk of sounding egotistical. I’ll write it in the good faith that you won’t take it that way.

What I Learned

I have a strange obsession with things that are true. For me, parsing information in a way that can be most cogently understood is one of my personal favorite things to do.

However, at the same time, that’s not how our minds fundamentally work. We process information, but have no clear indication about whether something is “right” or “wrong” beyond how we feel about it. While our feelings may have some degree of accuracy, they need constant recalibration through well-articulated beliefs, which come directly from what we understand.

I’ve never been comfortable with that fact, and have therefore made it my priority to state things that are true, but also resonate with feelings.

This hobby has consumed most of my life, but I now believe I have a “box” around everything there is to articulate.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m actually done with anything, and I technically would never be if I had abided by the standards of over a decade and three months ago when I started into this project.

The trouble with reality is that we have no direct relationship with it. Even if we use extremely intentional and specific language, we simply made an imperfect copy of the information we interpreted. It may be good enough to do things with it, but there’s a tragic philosophical divide between a mind being able to interpret an “automobile” as it really is, versus “automobile” as an interpreted copy. The mind’s copy fades and distorts, while the ideal would be to actually possess the thing itself inside our mind (a bit like computer information, where it won’t break down).

So, the only true value of any information we encode into our minds is through its use, or “utility”.

In other words, I have found peace that I can come to the end of this ceaseless obsession with many aspects of my projects.

At one time, when I started, I had an image of what the end of the project would look like:

  1. Assemble all my essays that describe how to live, how life works, etc.
  2. After each essay was done, I’d be able to make quick edits if any new information arose for that essay.
  3. Eventually, I’d be done with the essays, and the rest would be a little bit of maintenance once in a while until the essays were effectively complete-as-they-could-be.

This entire approach was a hubristic perfectionist theory, grounded in ignorance. A few well-worded questions to Past Me would have shut it down:

  1. What do you plan to do when you’re just about anywhere and run across a good idea? Is it socially appropriate to edit it on your phone right there in the middle of a conversation?
  2. Will you have time to edit something on your phone?
  3. What will you do if one of the many seasons of life incapacitates you for a few months, but your email inbox piles up?
  4. Can anything truly be “done”? As an example, would you truly be able to capture all the domains of specific survival situations that could exist?
  5. Have you considered the incremental labor requirements imposed for every single essay added to the collection of what you’ve done? Will you be able to do all of it?
  6. What’s your scaling plan? You have a high standard of writing, so you can’t outsource it. How would anyone be able to help you?
  7. You obviously hate advertising, and most people won’t care enough about this to pay you, so do you plan to constantly do this for the rest of your life?
  8. When will you reach a “stopping” point? Will you ever find happiness in this project?

I was operating under a duty-bound burden of obsession. I may not even have listened to Time Traveler Me if he had come by. I probably would have wondered if my beard would look that cool, then would speculate on the technology involved for bending time enough to travel in it.

So, this is my new, trouble-resistant model, which will (hopefully) work better once I’ve paid down my technical debt:

  1. Assemble all my essays that describe how to live, how life works, etc. (which are mostly finished and mostly need editing).
  2. Keep a parallel file system corresponding to those essays.
  3. When anything comes up, save a note/link/whatever to the parallel system.
  4. When the parallel file system reaches critical mass (i.e., >10 articles/notes or larger-scale content like a book), drop everything and update that one essay or essay group.
  5. Drop the content if it’s too severe for what I’d use (like a big book of stuff I already wrote on) or tedious (like deep concepts beyond what I’d ever care to do with for the rest of my life).

All of this is essentially a decompressing from a prior obsession. I desired to parse the truth, and I can happily say I’ve done that for the most part. Now, I have to figure out what to do after I did that.

And, truth be told, I didn’t expect I’d succeed at these projects, so it’s a bit of an existentially confusing problem.

    What I’m Doing Now

    WHAT I MUST DO:

    • Working in an insurance office right now.
    • Figuring out life with a beautiful woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix, which currently involves shopping for an RV.
    • Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

    MY HOBBY:

    Marching through my Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

    • It consists of 12,697 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
    • As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
    • The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

    The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

    1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
    2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
    3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

    Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

    ref#location0 re-sorta contentb guidesc commentaryd tools
    000miscellaneous sidequests6
    001someone else’s commonplacing132
    031miscellaneous piles71
    050my portfolio site edits8
    100AdequateLife edits193
    200Gained InSite edits353
    300TheoLogos edits1069
    400NotaGenius edits349
    430+530Math84523216
    460+610Entrepreneurship summarized, in general210386123
    460+610What it takes to plant a church or start a ministry106
    460+610Specific entrepreneurship for the tech industry20185947
    470+620Management summarized, in general240518925
    470+620Specific management necessary for running a church1242325
    470+620Specific management for the tech industry379873
    50-40019 small pages49
    500-600Trendless Tech edits399
    502Gleaned Axioms61
    510Assembly Code752
    514CPU11253610
    520Anecdotal Language Comparisons96200181140
    522Programming Basics3243193
    523Programming Features2222
    524Software Design959264150
    525Software Redesign5212756
    526Version Control4422951
    527Software Maintenance226
    528IDE3181730
    529Technical Documentation4971115111
    529Programming Habits1619604
    529Game Development50164210488
    529Graphics129144029152
    529AI3011983
    529Machine Learning986071134394
    529Making Programming Languages1232
    529Compilers21716
    542Algorithms34813933
    542Data Structures5171150
    543Databases3741525572
    544Data Visualizations (unmade)2913720
    551Operating Systems9015161941
    552Booting3355
    555CLI/Consoles24461752
    556Unix & Linux659017554
    556Apple (unmade)252114
    556Windows vs. Unix5364
    561Networks191618314
    562Protocols181628112
    563Web Development10375350260
    564Browsers140123554239
    564Social Networks (ummade)2562072268
    565Blockchain17264638
    565P2P/Torrent922591314
    566Distributed Systems4214467248
    567Virtualization15545054
    568Cloud Systems27353053
    572Screen51915
    573Speakers/Microphone2111589
    581Hacking15320
    581OSINT (unmade)156224274
    582TL;DR Cybersecurity33973
    583App/Host/Data Security4216454686
    584Malware25411
    585Social Engineering1117217
    586PenTesting35357612158
    587Authentication6183363
    588Encryption10362246
    589Cybersecurity Compliance17151213
    605Job-Seeking: Technical Interviewing42676
    700EntertainingSpace edits36

    The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

    1. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (001-049->050-700): 201 left.
    2. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d): 1,142 left.
    3. Rebuild my toolbox to conform to all the existing essays.
    4. Update the old content I’ve already written (050-700).
    5. Finish out a few easy pages (50-400).
    6. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
    7. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (460+610).
    8. Finish the Management pages (470+620).
    9. Finish the Math pages (430+530).
    10. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (500-605).