Family D: Purpose and Limits

Nine isms of machinery, and no answer yet to the obvious question.

Define the terms, hold the method, convert the decisions, get it out of your head, push what matters, minimize what a person has to supply. Every one of those is an instruction about how, and a person could follow all nine, completely, for a career, and have built something enormously efficient that nobody asked for and that serves no purpose anybody stated. I have seen that built. On a bad week I have helped.

So this family is two isms, and between them they are supposed to say what the machinery is for and where it stops.

The purpose ism is the one I care most about and can defend least. It says that converting decisions into formulas frees the mind for ambitious thought, and the first half of that is a well-supported fact about how attention works while the second half is a statement about what a life should be spent on. Those are different kinds of claim and my original sentence ran them together with a dash. Separating them is most of what that chapter does, and what survives is smaller and more honest: the release is real, the destination is not automatic, and an unallocated release goes to whoever is best at collecting it, who is not you.

The boundary ism is the one that keeps the whole creed from being a totalizing claim. It says some things should be left alone. That is the right instinct and it arrives in a form that cannot defend itself, because the sentence as I wrote it is equally available to somebody doing careful work and somebody avoiding it, and no reading of the words tells them apart. Fixing that required going to the evidence, and the evidence turned out to be brutal about how often people who invoke this rule are right.

Two things before the family starts.

These two isms point in opposite directions and that is not an accident. One says keep converting, because every conversion buys back something scarce. The other says stop converting, because some things are worse converted. Between them they define an interval rather than a direction, and everything in this book that reads like a general instruction is actually a claim about where in that interval a particular decision sits.

And this family is where the creed stops being about work. The first nine isms would be at home in any operations manual. These two are about what the operations are for, which is not an operational question, and they are the reason this book is a personal creed rather than a methodology. I am not certain about them in the way I am certain about defining a variable, and the chapters say so, and I would rather hand a reader an uncertain answer to the right question than a confident answer to a smaller one.

There is a reason these two come last rather than first, and it is not that they matter least. A creed that opened with what the work is for would be a creed nobody could argue with, because purpose stated in advance of method is unfalsifiable and comfortable and does no work. Putting it here means the reader has already seen the machinery, has watched most of it get narrowed by somebody who believes in it, and can weigh what it is for against what it has been shown to cost. That order is deliberate, and it is the one place in this book where the sequence of the argument is part of the argument.