I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind.
Who says lessons from physics can’t be applied to making software? (I know, nobody is actually dying on that hill.)
A Weakness of Being Data-Driven
Being data-driven is the most scientific way of building products? Hold that thought:
The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.
If you can only imagine that which you can observe, understand, and measure, you’re limiting yourself.
If you can only believe that which you can observe, then you’ll only ever understand that which you can see.
Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find use — or confirmation — in scientific inquiry.
Beware the Prejudice of the Self-Evident
The things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.
The earth is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. These were mistakes determined by our perspective.
There are undoubtedly more things that seem self-evident now, but as we progress in experience and knowledge we will realize that what seems self-evident is merely a prejudice of our perspective given our time and place in the world.
There’s always room to be wrong.
Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same thing.
Asking the Wrong Questions
When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound; it’s because the problem is false.
Incredibly relevant to building software. If you can’t explain a problem (and your intended solution), it’s probably not a problem.
Objectivity Is Overrated
When we do science, we want to describe the world in the most objective way possible. We try to eliminate distortions and optical illusions deriving from our point of view. Science aspires to objectivity, to a shared point of view about which it is possible to be in agreement.
This is admirable, but we need to be wary about what we lose by ignoring the point of view from which we do the observing. In its anxious pursuit of objectivity, science must not forget that our experience of the world comes from within. Every glance that we cast toward the world is made from a particular perspective.
I love this idea. Constantly striving for complete and total objectivity is like trying to erase yourself from existence.
As Einstein showed, point of view is everything in a measurement. Your frame of reference is important because it’s yours, however subjective, and you cannot escape it.
What we call “objectivity” may merely be the interplay between different subjective perspectives. As Matisse said, “I don’t paint things. I paint the relationship between things.”
To end, here’s Rovelli on words being relative to a point of view:
It is what philosophers call "indexicality": the characteristic of certain words that have a different meaning every time they are used, a meaning determined by where, how, when, and by whom they are being spoken. Words such as "here," "now," "I," "this," "tonight" all assume a different meaning depending on who utters them and the circumstances in which they are uttered. "My name is Carlo Rovelli" is true if I say it, but untrue if someone else not also called Carlo Rovelli uses the same phrase. "Now it is September 12, 2016" is a phrase that's true at the moment that I am writing this but will be false just a few hours later. These indexical phrases make explicit reference to the fact that a point of view exists, that a point of view is an ingredient in every description of the observable world that we make.
If we give a description of the world that ignores point of view, that is solely "from the outside" — of space, of time, of a subject — we may be able to say many things but we lose certain crucial aspects of the world. Because the world that we have been given is the world seen from within it, not from without.
Many things that we see in the world can be understood only if we take into account the role played by point of view. They remain unintelligible if we fail to do so. In every experience, we are situated within the world: within a mind, a brain, a position in space, a moment in time. Our being situated in the world is essential to understanding our experience of time. We must not, in short, confuse the temporal structures that belong to the world as "seen from the outside" with the aspects of the world that we observe and which depend on our being part of it, on our being situated within it.