This reminds me of ‘The Medium is the Message’ and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Quine’s ontological commitments. Namely, that leaky abstractions don’t just leak sideways across your different abstractions, but also up and down across levels of abstraction. Thus your epistemology leaks into your ontology and vice versa, which leak into which goals you can think about etc.
One takeaway from thinking this way was that I radically increased the priority on figuring out which skills are worth putting serious time into. Which were more ‘upstream’ of more good things. Two answers I came up with were expert judgment, since I can’t do the vast majority of things on my own I need to know who to listen to, and introspection in order to not be mistaken about what I actually want.
This reminds me of ‘The Medium is the Message’ and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Quine’s ontological commitments. Namely, that leaky abstractions don’t just leak sideways across your different abstractions, but also up and down across levels of abstraction. Thus your epistemology leaks into your ontology and vice versa, which leak into which goals you can think about etc.
One takeaway from thinking this way was that I radically increased the priority on figuring out which skills are worth putting serious time into. Which were more ‘upstream’ of more good things. Two answers I came up with were expert judgment, since I can’t do the vast majority of things on my own I need to know who to listen to, and introspection in order to not be mistaken about what I actually want.