Why D is for Delta, Daisies, and Dude
Yeah, what if we’re wrong, right? We’re not great at cost/risk/benefit in the realm of unknowns and complexity.
And yet…
Ambiguity lurks, as Bug Stu loves to say. Ambiguity also irks, they tell me, so I’d better explain the title and the possibly conflicting comic (drawn by Jordan Johnson, here in the Land of Kent). Oh wow, now that I look at that comic again, I see there’s a lot of stuff that could use some explaining. I’ll just wing it here and see how it goes. I’ve written about this at The Pie on Medium somewhere, but this will be a quick version, or at least different.
“D is for Delta” was uttered in a 2019 meeting at MatchBOX Coworking Studio, in the Glew breakout room. It was mockingly dramatic geek-speak for a formula I’d written about change divided by time resulting in…well that was ambiguous actually (and actually, that will come up in Stu’s story later). Also, apparently the Stralfs had figured out what we were working on, so sabotage had already ensued. At that moment, in that meeting, D is for Delta diverged in meaning and also applied to another very change-oriented new endeavor emerging right there in the midst of our meeting on galactic embetterment. It was eerily instantaneous.
D was also for disturbing and disruptive, it turned out. And not the kind of disruptive that the entrepreneurial wave drove into the ground. And it was disheartening. But maybe it was also destiny, like Kurt Vonnegut explained in Slaughterhouse 5. That is, whatever happens was always going to happen. (An interesting impression, but I’ll stay wary of it due to the implications. You might want to as well, because it’s a trap, according to Stu.)
Still, promising work continued on The Pie and in our efforts to improve the galaxy, specifically by turning back the Foes of Flourishing, aka Stralfs, ideally with the lesson that they should stick to their own planet and not try to take over others in our beloved Milky Way community. Things looked so good, so exciting, so potentially satisfying and effective, that the symphony of confirmations evoked a “Duuuuude” from me, because I tend to say things that my students used to say, like, a lot. It feels like a subtle form of fun I guess. So “D is for Dude” was born. The appropriate use is when one’s working on a problem and realizing what might be an especially sweeeet solution.
Daisies are asters, and similarly structured stars and eyes (if you look closely) are a big part of Stu’s story, at least in the more whimsical metaphysics he’s imagined. It’s relevant, but that will come later. Daisies are also simple, lovely, and signify happiness to me. Gee, I really like daisies, come to think of it. And since a lot of this stuff seemed to be headed for happiness, and that was felt while working on and in the project, “D is for daisies” was a natural evolution of what D was…for. That’s how it all happened, but I needed to change the order so the title would “speak” better. Try it the other way, the chronological way. See?
And you know something? This last episode before EPISODE 1 feels a little like the last day before Christmas break at school. I mean, I don’t feel like doing much more today. I really just want to say one more thing about that comic strip and caption up there. The theme is risk in being wrong about big ideas. We humies have been way wrong before. Why we think we’re different now is puzzling to Stu (and to me), especially when there are ways of handling the uncertainty.
It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be changes, but it does mean we probably need to “really understand before we plan,” to paraphrase Allie Space-Owl. And, there are two concepts we seem to generally ignore which are related to the law of diminishing marginal returns (from Economics 101, but if you take the money talk out of Economics, you still have the study of how we do life and how our Want-wells work with everything else, as Stu would call it) and to the fuzzy concept of the Hedonic Treadmill (which people will qualify and/or dismiss as it suits their points, but it’s an important consideration—best understood when tied back to the law of diminishing marginal returns.).
Combine those two and add the fact that our shared complex agency turns it all into probabilities of patterns—not particular cases and guaranteed outcomes, positive or negative. Then combine that with our naturally poor intuitive sense of probabilities. The result can usher in a mental setting where reality becomes the interpretations of cloud shapes, guided by the senseis of Self which became more and more common since the Stralfs landed in 1819, but especially in the 20th century—in the name of science. You know who my sources are. I should probably just leave it there.
Well, there’s one more thing, and maybe it’s as important as all the others. Most complex systems, and the elements within them, in our entropy-laden world, us included, benefit from slack. For some reason, I always remember J.B., a member of the endearing MatchBOX coven, mulling over that element of The Pie, IndSteadavision, The FiDdLers, and other things we’ll explore more here. I hadn’t really recognized its importance until she mentioned it, but yeah. That’s why it’s good not to be too much of a hermit probably. There’s probably a hermitting sweet spot, Goldilocks…hmm. We’ll have to work on that sometime.
Thanks for reading.
Tim