2004:15:07
978 - Checking Habits
I'm on hold with my read of Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind." Mostly this is because I still can't decide how I feel about what I think is one of the more important claims made, which is
We can either have the habit of automatically looking before we cross the street, or the habit of carefully remembering to look. Of the two I prefer the automatic,...
Skipping the bifurcation issue, and parsing "habit" as including a type or amount of automatism, then question becomes "automatically look" or "automatically remember to look."
This may seem like a strange distinction. But here's a practical
application. This blog entry starts life on my private computer behind a
firewall; when I am happy with it I deploy it on the world-visible host of
my domains. The system of files and directories on the two machines varies
in important ways. If I want to do something like include a picture of a close,
personal friend, say, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre
I need to point to it, but
where that file lives relative to this entry isn't the same on the home
machine as it is on the live server. So when moving the file from the one
to the other, from the home machine to the live server, I have to in some
way account for the difference in where the requested file lives.
I have two ways to do this accounting. First is to "automatically look" each and every time I move a file from one machine to the other. This is accomplished with a little piece of code in the file that does the looking for me. The other method is to "automatically remember to look", which is accomplished by my actually opening up the file and looking, only making a habit of it such that I don't move on to any next task until it's done.
What are the relative advantages? Practially, the first method is a tremendous time-saver...so long as it works. But when it fails will it do so in a manner that makes for quick diagnosis and repair? Will failure do tremendous harm to this or some other file? Is the time saved a net gain over the time spent on creating the automation in the first place and the eventual debugging and cleanup after failure? Or have we just shunted the time expenditure on a buy-now-pay-later plan with the small down payment of the time taken to write the automating code?
On the other hand, what of the habit of manually looking, where the automation comes from my volitional acts. Not as fast. Not even as certain. But it's a pay as you go plan, easily diagnosed, and very flexible.
Thinking back to Bateson's example of crossing the street, what if you've come to your automatic looking in Britain, but then visit America? Are you going to check in the wrong direction and step in front of a bus? Would a habit of remembering have left room for deeper evaluation of the situation?
Of course it really is a false bifurcation Bateson has offered (one I think I can now dismiss and so continue with my reading.) But it is an interesting one. I prefer to keep my flexibility and responsiveness to deeper issues of setting and context...to not run the risk of looking for traffic from the wrong direction when I travel. But for trivial things like a blog entry I'm satisfied to make the looking automatic (as indeed it is in the case of the graphic included above :)
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