In today's blog post, I'm just going to ramble loosely around the theme of "abstractions and reality". Gotta keep up momentum writing stuff, even if some pieces are much better than others...
Getting humans into outer space
Today SpaceX didn't get to launch a manned spacecraft into orbit because the weather conditions didn't permit it. Conditions for safe/successful flight were not met, so this launch was held off.
Stuff like the weather will always be with us; water, wind, sunlight etc.—sometimes, from our cities with climate control we can largely abstract these things away and turn our attention to other education, entertainment, and everything in between.
However, when faced with a very physically challenging task, like getting humans into space—well we must answer reality again. We can control the weather in our living spaces to a large degree, but we can't climate control the entire observable universe.
Policy, Software, Law...
Much of the order imposed on the world is through human "layers of abstraction". If you learn a lot about how some policy works, some software application works, or some law works, you learn about a particular human-created configuration for things, which is different from learning about the weather or biology.
Placed on a desert island and forced to survive with only a hatchet or something... what help does knowledge of California law, Photoshop, or your health insurance policy provide you? Insofar as these things help; you recognize useful categories in the world and train skills in reckoning with reality, they are useful. Beyond that, they are locally valuable (only) in the sense that they can help you in a particular time and place because people have decided to place value on them, but this scope of worth does not extend to the metaphorical desert island.
The computer programer without a computer may have some skills to systematize operations and get things up and running efficiently. But this person's specialized skills in keyboarding, hardware this-and-that esoteric knowledge, idiosyncratic know-how about such-and-such programing language or library—these things are taken away.
However, skills in something abstract/fuzzy like "critical thinking" or "problem solving" need concrete applications to be trained. This is an (obvious?) reason why it isn't stupid to acquire a lot of specialized knowledge, because it is in succeeding in some domain (even human-created) that we train a more general fitness.
California continues opening up
The Season of COVID-19 has brought in a new "local scope" of altered social norms. Health care workers got a boost in prestige. "Conspiracy thinking" got extra-demonized as media companies (including primarily Internet-based ones) chose dug into their ideological/geopolitical trenches. Some relatively introverted people have been having a really great time while some tortured extroverts have turned to committing misdemeanors to keep themselves from punching holes in walls.
Through all of this, I see the "reality" (or biology) of the whole COVID-19 situation is still far from clear/resolved.
Among other reasons, this is why I have focused in this blog on what I'm thinking, pscyhologizing, and speculating rather than trying to tell you all the facts about what is going on. I still think we don't know much; though, I think that many of the ideas I've been writing about here have been useful to me navigating these difficult times.