technical debt, meditation, and minds:
[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/technical-debt-meditation-and-minds/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
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Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
Technical debt can be compared to monetary debt.[3] If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) technical debt is required to move projects forward. On the other hand, some experts claim that the "technical debt" metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)
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People have really been liking this metaphor, so I thought it would be good to explicitly call it out in a post. It’s not even really a metaphor; it’s just what’s happening.
When a mind is really surprised, or things are happening too fast, or something is just too hard, or a mind enacts ingrained bad habits, in all these cases a mind takes on technical debt in order to keep dealing with the world in real time. The more technical debt a mind has, the harder it is for that mind to solve problems moving forward, so technical debt begets more technical debt.
Technical debt is hard to pay off. Sleep hacks away it and normal problem solving hacks away at it too. For the most part, though, most people are steadily accumulating technical debt their entire lives. That’s why you can’t teach an old dog new tricks or whatever, and I’m suspicious that e.g. the first-language learning window is anything special at all. I think that window closes because of normal processes that are always at work. (And second and nth languages get literally laid down in different places in the mind/brain.) That’s more elegant than supposing there’s like a special language learning window.
One way to look at meditation is that correct meditation pays off technical debt faster than it accumulates until it’s all paid off. As far as I can tell, this is very related to why some traditions call the enlightened mind the natural state. All those invariant structures get shipped around or homomorphically transformed until everything is in the right place–all the gradients and attractive basins that are pushing or pulling all the time, all the things that a mind would want to do if it could only figure out how, that all gets to happen. As far as I can tell, minds are really only trying to do one thing all the time, somethingsomething elegance collapse in terms of a predictive world model or something.
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
One can get all sorts of positive effects, for months or even years, but eventually things grind to a halt, the practitioner tangles themselves into a corner or piles just too much stuff onto too much stuff.
In particular there’s a right way and a wrong way to use the maps or descriptions of valued states.
If you’re like trying to directly see things as empty or you’re "trying on" spiritual perspectives or construals, or trying to get particular isolated things to stick, whether you succeed or not, you’re probably taking on technical debt.
You can actually get some number of really real attainments, not fake versions, at the expense of increasing technical debt. But if you want all the attainments, or you want to make it all the way, you have to do it in a direction of decreasing technical debt.
Are you increasing technical debt or paying it off in your practice? How can you tell?
[See the meta protocol.]