Day 27: Mistakes

If one has the strength to look at things unceasingly, so to speak without blinking, one sees a great deal; but if one falters only once and shuts one’s eyes, everything instantly slips away into darkness.

(From a passage deleted in (Kafka 1995))

Life is incredibly fragile and any semblance of stability or security unimaginably tenuous. Perhaps the full extent of our vulnerability can be imagined, but I doubt that a human mind occupied with the full weight of this reality has any capacity left for any other activity.

Six months ago, I stood up from my couch after working for several hours on my laptop, I experienced an intense head rush and passed out for a split second. In that moment of mental vacancy I fell on my face and put my upper teeth through my bottom lip. The place my face impacted the floor was only inches from corners that could have rendered me blind, mentally impaired, or dead. Thenceforth, I stand up cautiously. The quality and length of our duration is extremely uncertain.

Today I spent nearly an hour implementing and documenting applicative functor modules for Zip-wise operations on list and arrays for alg_structs. When I ran my property based tests that check for adherence to the laws, they failed. A moments reflection revealed that lists of unequal size cause complications on this manifestation of the structure. A quick read on Haskell’s implementation of their ZipList typeclass showed that they solve the problem by defining return a as an infinite list of as. This is impossible with OCaml’s eager evaluation (but is easily done for lazy lists, for which I should consider adding implementations).

Every little risk and mistake adds up: Less sleep tonight means worse decision making tomorrow, which could lead to worse dietary decisions that will increase chances of health problems later (but not too much later). Every hour I burn on misguided work due to postponed testing and too little design time is one less hour I have to rest, plan, and prepare for the challenges to come.

We can make many mistakes and be fortunate enough to wind up OK, but simple errors can easily lead, directly or indirectly, to deadly outcomes. There’s no way of knowing whether our mistakes are minor or deadly prior to the unfolding of consequences. The only rational response I know of is to strive for the utmost feasible caution, as allowed by practical requirements for timely action and the important challenge of not becoming a nervous wreck.

Over the years, I’ve made many mental notes recording particular mistakes and steps I could have taken to avoid them or reduce the negative outcomes that followed. However, mental notes are as unstable and ephemeral as the substance their recorded on. I’ve decided to start keeping a list of such lessons and heuristics. This will let me review, update, re-evaluate, and expand upon these notes-to-self. That rework and review should help me internalize the lessons. Perhaps they might also be useful to others prone to similar sorts of errors.

You can find this nascent list under the theme of Heuristics.