Let's a Database! (Software systems for fun)

Pseudoscientific bullshit warning: This piece is an extended analogy based on an at best impressionistic view of a small quantity of research that honestly I barely skimmed.

Where are we?

So I missed a week or two here. There’s a few reasons for that, all of them perfectly good and sensible, but let’s talk about one of the big reasons for missing, which is aversion. Some times a task, activity, entity, artifact just becomes an allergen to attention. It’s different for different people (and some of those differences are diagnostic of ADHD so maybe get that checked), but it often looks something like this:

• You look at the task and immediately think of something more important to do. Perhaps this happens so quickly that you have no recollection of ever having thought about the task, and later wonder why you didn’t remember to think about the task at all.
• Looking at the task fills you with unaccountable rage. The more you look at it the worse your mental equilibrium gets. You lash out at someone around you, for no discernible reason.
• The task looks more and more insurmountable; any thoughts of how to solve it seem laughably inadequate. It becomes a dark hole of despair; look away, look away!
• You keep forgetting that the task exists. When you see it on a task board or a schedule you make a vague commitment to do it but by ten minutes later you have no recollection. Perhaps your mind has anticipated the effects earlier in this list and leapt in front of the bullet to protect you.
• The task is in some sense objectively awful (e.g. for me, here, now, “writing atomicity integration tests sucks so much!") and its awfulness makes it awkward to fit into your available time, mental resources, or attention. Every time it doesn’t fit, the task seems slightly larger; over time it comes to seem endless.

I cannot tell you how to fix these problems. I believe that we all have them all at times, and each must find our own ways to address them unique to the topology of each particular mind.

But I do have thoughts.

A Theory of Injury

Think of an athlete making an acute angle turn – a hairpin change of direction, perhaps to evade an opponent’s cover or to receive a passed ball without revealing its direction.

Every last kilogram-meter-per-second of forward momentum must be thrust away, deaccessioned to air or earth. In doing so every single corresponding joule of energy must be stored for a moment, then in the next moment retrieved. The ankle and knee unlock and tighten; the hip rotates and sinks; the immense cords of the thigh pick just the right tension to time their spring extension and compression to the rhythm of the action.

As this symphony of flexions, rotations, and tensions proceeds, lateral stabilizing muscles tighten far beyond comfortable limits to fix each joint to a single dimension of rotation – muscles that play no role in the momenta and energies flowing back and forth, but which hold the actions of bones to the correct plane of motion.

And if any part of this stabilization goes wrong, a hip slips too far and a knee rotates out and an ankle supinates and that same path of momentum and energy flow becomes a river of injury instead as the full weight of the body twists each joint in turn out of plan and wrecks it. To avoid a cascade of disaster, each joint either locks or goes slack depending on evolution’s best estimate of its vulnerability. Collapsing to the ground in pain is the best outcome, and the body delivers.

Considerable research into sports injuries show that despite the impossible advances of medicine, their rate has not declined: Sporting, for whatever reason (illegible to me, I’m afraid – I don’t get sports) will simply consume every advance of capacity as an advance in the frontier of performance. Like any optimizer, its hunger is insatiable until a countervailing goal stabilizes it.

That same research, as I understand it, tells us that the best predictor of avoiding sports injury is the practice of multiple sports; athletes who specialized on one sport too early in their careers will suffer a higher rate of injury for the rest of their lives. And this should not surprise us: The muscles that prevent injury – those stabilizers around the joints that keep them pointed the right way – are after all not the ones that go higher, faster, stronger toward the apex of sporting apotheosis.

What this has to do with us

Of course the body’s muscles are absolute wimps compared to the regret machine in our heads. Constituting 2% of your body mass (assuming that you, the reader are human; if you are a machine the point here is a bit more subtle but you can probably work it out as an analogy for gradient collapse), the brain burns ten times its share of calories, clocking north of 20% of your metabolic load.

And not that healthy stored-fat metabolism either – the brain takes direct access to the glucose taps and counts on the rest of your body to keep up. Using a brain is comically unhealthy for anything much thinkier than an anole.

Under these circumstances it would be madly odd if our mental health were not similarly vulnerable as our physical health, and if those of us whose work will consume every available cognit¹ in a mad festival of optimization did not suffer the equivalent of sporting injuries, and if our mental constitutions did not rely on cognitive stabilizers just like that poor overtorqued knee joint, acting at right angles to the axis of thought, to keep us sane.

Equally, we experience freezing and collapse of our mental joints as we overload them to minimize lasting damage.

And so I hypothesize that it is equally likely that we must exercise our minds on other sports – find other directions and diversions to train up those right-angle muscles that don’t do the heavy lifting of cognition. I do believe that meditating in the morning and working the crossword in the afternoon is injury-preventive training, that my coworker knitting during a meeting is in fact stretching and hydrating, and that the junior engineer building a wall of coke cans is actually…

…no actually, I can’t continue that analogy that far, he’s just self-harming.

I also believe that task aversion is an injury prevention response by the brain, a sign that my mind knows that I have not sufficiently warmed up for this exercise and I should probably pick a different load to carry today.

This is why I am skeptical of purely attitudinal solutions to aversion. It’s baked into the condition of the world. Our minds are finite things with beginnings and endings, subject as the Suttas say to birth and defilement. To have the knowledge of failure is to feel the desire to turn away from harm. The power of positive thinking isn’t really in that same league, metaphysically.

Rather, when we feel task aversion we must train those right-angle muscles.

(I also believe that this is what my intellectual nemesis/obsession Dijkstra was actually noticing when he saw that the best programmers were fond of puns in their native languages: Survivorship bias.)

This is especially a concern when mentoring

If you’re mentoring someone and they’re having task aversion, it’s pretty noticeable but hard to act on.

In my experience, don’t push on it, and definitely don’t tell someone to get better at time management or better document their estimates or whatever. It’s much better to reassign the task to someone else and assign a very different task instead. Prescribing vacation days might also be sensible but we can’t actually write “touch grass” in a github ticket.

Telling someone to do a round of estimating and tasking out future tasks can be a good way to get them unstuck on their current task. It’s also virtuous in its own right.

A note about moral injury

There is one other sort of injury that I would be remiss not to mention. The military – who know a thing or two about injury both as keen observers and actual enthusiasts – characterize a concept of “moral injury”. That’s both “moral” in the sense of ethics and “morale” in the sense of will to succeed, but the two concepts are understood as rhyming in their discourse.

Moral injury is the cluster of symptoms that follow from witnessing, allowing, or engaging in wrongful acts. Those symptoms are wide and varied, from depression and obsession to aggression and thrill-seeking to nihilism² and self-harm. Task aversion fits naturally in this category.

So if you’re experiencing task aversion you should definitely check in with yourself ethically. Are you unmotivated because the task is bad, or the task seems similar to tasks that were bad in the past, or the task reminds you of something? If this is the case, no other way of addressing it is going to help, and you need to go for a walk and clarify how you think about what you are doing.

Moral injury is also part of the mental immune system that makes us allergic to both dangerous and harmless-but-sus intentions. It simply cannot be ignored, and requires real attention and respect. Don’t keep working the injured limb! Rest it for a while! Heat and stretch!

We too often forget that the ethical context of our work makes itself present in everything we do; there is no means-ends distinction in the world.

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Today’s commit

There is no commit this week because I’m temporarily stuck. Oh well. Instead I’m going to experiment with RSS synchronization to the fediverse.