MNTS #29
[Week 48/ Year 2023] Bridge of Asses, Dictionaries, JMurph, Perell, Dr. DiBello, Nog
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.
Reading
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers - While the subject of the piece is coding, I believe anyone who identifies as a craftsman will find this piece highly relatable.
I could understand why people poured their lives into craft: there is nothing quite like watching someone enjoy a thing you’ve made.
I also loved this bit below about the pons asinorum, aka '“bridge of asses”. When learning any new domain, I suspect there is always a, possibly several, “bridge of asses” along the learning journey. I’m super interested in this as a concept for learning more generally. Knowing where the bridge of asses resides on the learning curve for any/all undertakings would be such a useful psychological tool. Knowing when and where you are going to need to buckle down or what to prioritize leading up to the bridge would be a powerful perspective to accelerate learning and increase success rates.
Like many tutorials, it was easy at first and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum, or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid’s Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn’t would remain dabblers
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary by James Somers - I liked the above article so much that I had to see what else Somers had penned. His personal site/blog is a gold mine. My kind of guy. This particular essay I love because it reminded me of a David Foster Wallace essay that I hated at first but then changed my mind about after continuing to think about it for.. well I’m still thinking about it. It’s confoundingly brilliant. We have ourselves a fellow SNOOT in Somers.
I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. In fact they’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language.
There is No Winning the Culture War by Justin Murphy
Let them have the utterly corrupted and technologically obsolesced institutions! Let them have everything in the city of man, from the universities down to the last halloween candy bowl!
They will end up with nothing at all, for a race to the bottom can only end in Hell—though at any time, every person is completely welcome to rejoin the straight and narrow, where there will always be bearers of civilization.
Friday Finds (The Last Edition) by David Perell - As shrill as I find Perell, I will miss his newsletter, but his links archive is an excellent resource to sub for the weekly email. I also fully understand this sentiment. I currently have 18 in-progress drafts in my backlog. 😵💫
Listening
DiBello studies expertise in business. Pretty cool gig.
Dr Lia DiBello is the CEO, President, and Director of Research of WTRI (Workplace Technology Research Inc), and Senior Scientist at Applied Cognitive Sciences Labs Inc. She is a cognitive scientist as well as a businessperson. In the late 2000s Dr DiBello discovered in an NSF-funded study that all great businesspeople share a common mental model of business, and that mental model can be used for all sorts of interesting things, including the assessment of business expertise, which she did — she was the principal inventor of something called the FutureView Profiler
Random
Fun size nog.
Until next week.
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew