Keyboard Philosopher

I am getting really tired of every community-based website creator feeling the need to reimplement basic functions of the web. Why does every site have to have a ‘Message This User’ action? Has everyone forgotten about email? The problem of sending a body of text to another individual on the web was tackled long ago! Let it be!

Under the ‘I’m going to reimplement a perfectly good system’-system I now have to check yet another message box. Oh goodie, in addition to the six mailboxes I already check, I get to check another. And this one I can’t access though the mail client I use to access many of my others. No, I have to log onto some stupid website with a stupid unique interface. And how many sites with this "feature" do I have accounts on? Far too many. Every one a different website, every one a different interface. I’m not going to remember to check them all regularly, and even when I do, I wont remember how they all work. That’s bad for everyone (including your precious community).

So some genius gets an idea: "I’ll email the users when they get a message!" This is even more foolish! Now I get an email telling me that I got an "email" somewhere else. How bloody convenient!

I guarantee you that no matter how snazzy your messaging interface is, it’s not as effective as how I manage my email. My email is set up in a way that is useful to me. Me, the user. I chose the email program I wanted, I chose the spam filtering solution I wanted, I configured procmail(1) to drop emails into appropriate mailboxes in just the way I like. Email is a stable system that puts the control in the hands of the users. People like email.

To trendy-community-site-creators: the world does not revolve around your website. You do not have to provide every service a person could ever want from the internet. We all visit multiple sites (not just yours). Every site does not need to include a profile, a blog, a messaging system, a set of communities, a news system, a photo gallery and a search engine. Do something new. Do it well. And don’t force your inferior replacements of existing web services upon us. We don’t want them.

I’m in a phase where everything I do must have a reason.

That may sound obvious—of course everything should have a reason, right? But there are many little questions in life where we generally feel that the exact solution chosen doesn’t make enough difference to even consider choosing one approach over any of the others. In many cases this may be the proper approach, but in other cases the minor activity is performed thousands of times in a lifespan, and the small losses incurred by a poor approach eventually add up to something meaningful. In any case, realistic gains are not my focus of this writing.

Since we tackle little problems using an ad hoc approach, our solution may differ from day to day, despite the fact that one particular solution may actually be slightly better than any other. I’m slowly eliminating these "nondeterministic" (in the sense that the approach is chosen seemingly randomly), actions from my life.

The problems I am discussing are minuscule: in what order should I perform washing operations in the shower? How should I indent my source code? In what order should I perform the operations involved in making a sandwich? These are things that don’t matter to most people, yet I’ve have had a rigid sandwich-making algorithm since high school.

I don’t spend a lot of time addressing these problems. My justifications don’t have to be perfect—they serve the role of hypothesis more than theory. Once I have a reason (perfect or not) I apply it consistently. Since my approach and reasoning are explicitly defined, if I devise a new (possibly superior) hypothesis, it is (usually) trivial to compare the merits of the alternatives and to choose the better solution.

How should a reason be chosen? Any reason will do. It’s like a rapid-prototyping software development model. Get something workable together as soon as possible, then work up. Furthermore, reasons don’t need to be objective. "Because it makes me happy" is a perfectly sound justification (though not a very well-specified one) if you are justifying a personal action with no external responsibilities.

To apply the principle back on itself: what is the reason for requiring reasons? For me it is a part of my personal aesthetic. I imagine it is rather unlikely that a person could make him or herself care about this issue—it’s either built into you or not. If this isn’t something that strikes your fancy, feel free to instantly disregard it (it probably wont grow on you). Alternately, if you find yourself obsessing about why you do things, give it a shot.

When I helped my mother clean up the kitchen as a kid, she’d tell me where to put dishes in the dishwasher. If I asked why item X went in location Y, she’d tell me, "that’s just how we do it," or, "that’s how I learned to do it." These answers always irritated me. If we don’t know why we are doing something, how do we know that we are doing it right? Or, more precisely put, if we don’t know why we are doing something, how will we know if we can do it better? Some people may not care, but I want to know that I am getting closer to the right solution.

I propose that we enter a new term into our vocabularies: "the personal aesthetic."

Observations on human behavior have lead me to the conclusion that every human being has a built-in aesthetic evaluation system. This system is applied to nearly everything in life, creating non-random personal preferences from this seemingly random base. The components of the personal aesthetic are neither directly under the individual’s control, not completely out of their control, but somewhere in between. I postulate that one can change one’s personal aesthetic with a great personal effort, but that is the only (conscious) means by which it can be affected.

The source of the personal aesthetic is difficult (likely impossible) to pinpoint. Like most human attributes, the source is probably part nature and part nurture. I speculate that our aesthetic preferences are mostly environmental, though they likely contain some innate, genetic preference.

Our personal aesthetics affect our lives in profoundly important ways. They influence how we believe we must act in the world, which things bring us pleasure, how we define justice and how we should treat others, the importance of the quest for knowledge in our lives, etc. The personal aesthetic imparts an irrational element into our minds because we hold deep-rooted tendencies towards arbitrary behaviors.

The personal aesthetic probably affects us more that we would consciously choose (were we given a choice), but perhaps we would be hasty in such a dismissal.

Indeed, it is often the personal aesthetic which gives our lives meaning. These core attributes give us something we innately "know" we should work towards. They are the axioms of life. The feelings for which we need no stimulus.

Albert Einstein spent most of his life searching for a Theory of Everything; a single formula less than an inch in length which could describe all physical phenomena. Why? Because his personal aesthetic drove him towards it. It drove him to search for it. We don’t even know if such a thing exists, but many of us can identify with his obsession.

How is the personal aesthetic different from simply saying that people have preferences? Well, the personal aesthetic can be thought of as the root level of preferences. Preference at the highest level, or alternately as a kind of meta-preference. That is to say that preferences spawn from personal aesthetics. Which definition you use is largely a matter of semantics, separate from the key idea I am presenting.

Should the personal aesthetic be taken seriously? My answer is certainly "yes," yours may differ. I find that embracing the personal aesthetic is a bit like eating the food you like: you can’t change the taste of brussel sprouts simply by telling yourself that have decided you like the item. Seek to identify the commonalities in things you appreciate. Isolate the root causes to know your own personal aesthetics. Some are obvious—others are not.

In short, I am proposing not simply a new term, but also a philosophy of life. I am suggesting that we possess innate, largely immutable dispositions. These dispositions compose, either partially or completely, the set of things which bring fulfillment to our lives. We will seek them, either consciously or unconsciously, and the former approach will likely be more effective. We should characterize and embrace our personal aesthetics.