Fluency is immediate interaction.

There is no interpretive mediation — no translation in the middle — between intention and action, perception and understanding, or understanding and intention.

Intention flows directly into action; action flows directly into perception of its effect; perception flows directly into understanding; understanding flows directly into intention.

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Algorithm is action mediated by explicit language. Where one must explain (or justify) how one will do a thing before doing it, explain (or justify) how one is doing a thing while doing it, and explain (or justify) how one did a thing after doing it, the mediation of language is necessary.

Algorithmic activity and flow are incompatible.

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Understanding a philosophical work means understanding a new set of concepts and gaining fluency in their use in understanding.

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A philosophical work is understood only in an experience of fluency acquired through the act of reading, which is transferable to practical life beyond books and reading. What is happening is immediately understandable through the philosophical concepts.

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If one is fluent in a language, novel things are said without thinking about the language. The novel sentence flows forth as an expression of the intention.

A great designs supports fluency. Not only in repetitive tasks, but in novel interactions. One intends to do some thing, and the action flows out through the designed thing without a mediating “how do I?”

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In David Appelbaum’s The Stop the awareness of the blind is sightless fluency. No visual image of the disposition of objects intervenes.

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A dancer is not recalling steps, nor imagining the visual effect of the movements of her body. She has the awareness of the blind.

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The most exceptional experience bypasses words and makes language reel. Then language recovers and talks it out of its uniqueness. When asked “Why?” we give an answer.

Great user interfaces operate at a tacit level. The hands work without verbal instruction, to manipulate the objects on the screen.

In this sense, the interface becomes an extension of the body. We do not have to give verbal instructions to the parts of our body to make them do what we want — at least not once we’ve mastered a movement.

When we work to learn a new movement, it is as if the tacit mind transfers control to some other verbal part of the mind that clumsily operates the movement while the tacit mind works to understand in its own kinetic way so it can take over. And when it takes over, the verbal mind must get out of the way. If it remains in control — even a little — its verbalizations will get in the way and trip the tacit mind up. As a teenager I read a dirty trick from The Inner Game of Tennis on how to destroy an opponent’s serve: ask for an explanation on how the serve is done. Instantly the serve stops working, and the opponent falls into a vicious down-spiral of frustration and attempts to analyze and fix the broken serve.

So when software gets in the way of our hands and requires a shift of attention from the work to the operation of the software, it is a profound and frustrating shift of consciousness that makes any work that requires concentration and flow fall apart.

The more a person’s work requires flow, the more frustrating it is to have the flow broken by verbal interruption. Worst of all is when a piece of software has been mastered, the tools becomes an extension of the body and the mind, and flow has become easy — and then the software is changed in a way that requires retraining of the tacit mind. Suddenly, an impediment  breaks the continuity of thought and motion and effect, and the flow is no longer accessible. Then, not only is there a difficulty — there is an irrecoverable loss of a mode of activity, a violation of hard-won mastery.

Sometimes the change is worth it. It is an investment. The retrained tacit mind works even better than before. But this is not always the case. Sometimes what motivates the change is a personal aesthetic preference of a designer or product manager. Sometimes the change is made to accommodate more kinds of tasks and users. Sometimes the change is made to make room for more features, added for the sake of demonstrating innovation, or having a bigger feature list to whip out to impress customers and humiliate the competition.

In all these cases, someone is thinking about the software as something that is looked at, noticed, thought about and evaluated. Great software, however, disappears behind the actions it supports, as a great sentence disappears behind its content.

With sentences and software a compulsion to stand out, to make an impression, to be thought of as great creates annoying mediocrity.

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Great software disappears behind the actions it supports, as a great sentence disappears behind its content.

The goal is flow, and flow requires tacit mastery of the tools one uses. Tacit mastery is fluency.

We usually use the word fluency for mastery of language. And what this means is we are no longer verbally operating the foreign language with our verbal mind. The tacit mind has stepped in and works with the new language directly.

So, really, it is not a tacit mind or a verbal mind. It is always the tacit mind — the tacit mind extending itself through fluent mastery of tools. And one of the most powerful and flexible tools is language. With the tool of language the mind can extend itself to all kinds of other tools, by asking itself questions, making tactical plans, and executing on those tactical plans.

Some people seem only to master this mode of activity. It is probably a great investment and a winning strategy — learn the one tool and use it for everything. But working exclusively through language does limit what can be done beyond the limits of language.

And what are beyond the limits of language? As-yet-inarticulate possibilities. To work through language — to only think or do what one already knows how to say does not entirely preclude innovation, but it does hobble it considerably.

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In reading difficult books, especially philosophy books, a mind is learning fluency in new language tools. Sentences, paragraphs, chapters — the whole book — the whole corpus, even — must be read and reread from different angles until the words hang together and make a whole fluid meaning. The tools are learned and then they are used, but there is not always a nice verbal link between the before language and the after. It would be like showing how to use a hammer by operating a screw-driver.

Most of us choose to read books that make use of pre-existing fluency for effortless consumption, or to build upon the old mastered language and extend or refine what already was. Philosophy, however, breaks your serve.

But often, as with software, we have to ask why. Why would you break my existing tacit understanding? Is it a good investment? Will you help me think better? Or are you building your list of publications to impress colleagues and intimidate rivals? Are you moved by the work, or the need to compete?

Great philosophy disappears behind the thoughts it conceives.

I like fill-in-the-blank formulas. This is the formula for a design problem: “We need __[person]__ to __[action]__ instead of __[alternative]__.” 

When the acquisition of a new concept suddenly brings profoundly surprising possibilities into view, it is important to remember that one can legitimately move from ignorant opposition to informed opposition. It is all too easy to confuse the impact and aftershocks of understanding with obligation to agree. 

Any competent engineer will tell you that good engineering depends on understanding materials. If you misunderstand your materials the system will fail.

Materials must be understood with highly nuanced specificity. Two metals that look and feel the same to an untrained eye and hand might behave drastically differently when subjected to friction, heat or strain.

Design has a similar respect for materials. Design, however, also includes categories of “material” that are not physical — ones that engineers typically factor out, namely subjectivities.

Where an engineer sees a car as a system, a designer is trained to see the car plus the driver as the system — a system with both physical and psychological components. Same with a retail space: a system of objects, surfaces, light, sound, merchandise, customers, sales personnel. Or a hammer — a system that includes an arm, a hand, a nail, a board and a metal form. And with the insight of Design Thinking — (the realization that all systems that include and depend on people are actually best approached by methods used to solve design problems) — things that aren’t normally thought of as “design” are viewed through a design lens — like organizational structures, or business processes, or political policies.

How do you recognize a design problem? If a system being developed will succeed only if people cooperate or participate or behave in some particular way, your problem is a design problem. Approaching such problems as a design problems, using people-centered design methods, will increase your odds of success.

But doing the usual, and treating design problems as if they were engineering problems by failing to factor people in at all, or making uninformed generalizations of “how users are” (or “how women are” or “how female general managers are”, etc.) will get you exactly the kinds of results as you’ll get if you specify “metal” for your engine block. You might get high-carbon steel. But you are just as likely to get tin.

Of course, you can reinforce a tin engine block with a different metal and maybe get it to function, but you’ll never get the level of quality as you would if you considered the material from the start.

Likewise, trying to add design after something has been fundamentally developed for nobody in particular will lead to a mediocre solution is unlikely to be embraced by anyone with much enthusiasm.

Or to put in another way: engineering your way through a design problem is bad engineering.

Know your materials!

Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating irritant reality with lustrous likeness. 

To be recalled vividly as a person is the objective immortality of fame.

To be forgotten as a person but to be seen through like a lens or ghost — to become as invisible as vision itself — is the subjective immortality of  incarnate intuition.

The living immortality is extrapersonal.

In my view, the problem with Rorty is that he fails to pay sufficient attention to practices outside of language that serve to strengthen or weaken a person’s — or a whole linguistic community’s — conception of truth. Clearly language is very important, but even the most persuasive and cohesive description that fails to describe what eventually happens or already happened when it uses its internal logic to speculate on past, present or future will lose persuasive force. Without this kind of activity, science would never have progressed beyond scholasticism.

Rorty may not be metaphysically logocentric, but he is pragmatically logocentric. Only some of our truth-instauration practices are linguistic.

I want to rename my tacit triad “the blind impress” after a Philip Larkin poem quoted by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

“Continuing To Live”

Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

– Philip Larkin

Sadly, this was an insight: Love sometimes requires change, sometimes requires resisting change, sometimes requires urging change. Love sometimes requires willingness to give, sometimes requires willingness to receive, sometimes requires standing back. There is never a general rule, or a handy procedure. It is about you in relation to a specificity that is not you, but that involves you, and the way must be felt, thought, lived and done. It is responsive, responsible, responding response.

I tend to look at love from a single angle at a time, but this fails to do justice to love’s requirements. Love does not require ones heart or soul or mind or strength: and, and, and, and.

Soul balk is the condition where you tell yourself to do something and your self simply refuses to do it.

Soul balk is not exhaustion. Exhaustion is where you’ve used yourself up. Soul balk is a self’s refusal to be used for something it cannot recognize as its proper purpose.

Soul balk might be a lack of self-discipline. It might. But it also might be a lack of internalization of other-discipline — other-discipline that is paying insufficient attention to what the self needs to connect with its own resources and live a self-sustaining life.

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Soul balk is not a state where the self knows its purpose, and sees a mismatch between this purpose and what is required of it. There is no “yes” against which a “no” is visible, and the absence of a positive is felt as a painful dullness that undermines pursuit of anything except moving away from what occupies it, loads it down and dulls it further.

It might be best to see soul balk as a sort of negative faith that conserves and preserves one’s soul for when its purpose is finally encountered.

My “boring advice” gets more boring with every iteration.

When we are thinking very deeply, what is most important? Unbroken concentration. No interruptions. Quiet.

Tools that help people think must never forget these requirements. Recede into the background. Do exactly what is needed at the moment, or do nothing. Do not interrupt with questions or irrelevant information.

Work wordlessly, gracefully, tactfully, silently.

Everyone’s got their “Humans are the only animal that….” formula, so why shouldn’t I?

Humans are the self-designing animal.