(2020-05-09) DR MacIver Cleaning Up The Fnords In Your Environment

David R. MacIver: Cleaning up the fnords in your environment. Have you ever used a new program or system and found it to be obnoxiously buggy, but then after a while you didn’t notice the bugs anymore? If so, then congratulations: you have been trained by the computer to avoid some of its problems

Negative responses from our environment install learned beheaviours which cause us to avoid them. It's not that we can't see the fnords, it's that we don't look at them.

The term "ugh field" apparently comes from Less Wrong

I've always had an ugh field around cleaning,

I completed a full 20/10 of cleaning and then did another 10 minutes to finish it off and restore some order.

A friend asked whether being in a slightly tidier space felt different. My initial answer was that I hadn't really done enough to achieve that

later realised this wasn't true, there was one signficant difference: The pile of papers was no longer vaguely scary, because I knew what was in it and that it was all stuff that I either didn't need to deal with or was entirely able to deal with (Open Loop)

The pile of papers was no longer a fnord.


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