I love programming for a lot of reasons but one of them is just that it’s an entire field that dedicates an incredible amount of energy to discovering more useful abstractions. That’s very in my wheelhouse of compulsions. But…
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…it's persistently unpleasant seeing how many programmers — who are exposed to this very same effect and recognize that elaborated abstractions may be more useful but simpler ones also work remarkably well — fail to port that knowledge outside their field of expertise.
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Like, when you see someone who abstracts a problem (not a computer one) differently from you, their's a trap in immediately assuming it's bad or at least yours is less wrong.
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But that's really hard to do in isolation because often the hard-to-predict costs that we socially pay are for the emergent consequences of interacting abstractions, just like in computer systems.
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TLDR: Your favored abstraction is one abstraction among many that all vary in quality with respect to heterogeneous loss functions. Most of the time you assert that your abstraction is better, you’re making a statement about your loss function, not the abstraction.
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Except we're rarely stating loss functions explicitly, were just inducing them on-demand. And the difference between yours and mine manifests as generalized trust or distrust.
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