Or, why baking bread is easy compared to many other activities.
A recent conversation with @Mayobrot@zirk.us made me think about the fear of doing things. I'm thinking that there are activities that are inherently easier to perform than others because of the natural environment. In speaking about them, however, we use categories that do not differentiate between the two and so we transfer our fears from one category to the other.
Here are some examples from my personal life: I think programming and soldering and model planes are difficult activities because small differences have big impacts. On the other hand, cooking or baking, or taking care of plants are comparatively easy activities because small differences often don't have a large impact.
Take the question of how long you should bake bread. In my oven, with my settings, it seems that anything between 30 min and 90 min results in edible bread. The temperature can vary between 160°C and 220°C and if I'm looking into the oven every now and then this results in edible bread. Varying ingredients by ±10% and more results in edible bread.
The same is true for watering plants, potting plants and all that connects to. Plants adapt. Errors don't accumulate but instead they average out. To much or too little water means it's going to be OK on average.
This is not how software works. Its bugs bugs bugs and they never average out to a nice user experience.
When family asks me about bugs in programming, I tell them that the problem is that we need to put everything into the program: gravity, air resistance, the floor… In real life we don't. Walking is easy because if we push of harder we don't yeet ourselves into the sun. We just bounce a little higher and then we're back on the ground. And we don't fall towards the centre of the Earth as in some 3d model glitch in a game. No, the ground is always there. If we speed up, there's friction to slow us down again. So physics stabilizes many things.
Chemistry stabilizes many things, too. If we use up the oxygen in our room, we don't just go go go and then we die because the oxygen concentration goes down slowly. We get less oxygen, we move slower, we have more time to get out.
And biology stabilizes things, too. We call it homeostasis. You exercise, burning up sugar. Sugar goes down, fat gets mobilized, allowing your body to continue. And then there are a hundred feedback loops for everything to keep your body from falling apart. Of course eventually we all do, but still.
I guess what I really was trying to say is that there are some activities like baking bread that seem hard because you think that baking bread is probably related to model air-planes and if you struggle with the tweezers and glue and all that, surely you will struggle with the ingredients of that dish, too. But that is not so. Usually, you can mess up ingredients pretty badly and results are still edible, or even tasty! They might not be repeatable, but who cares if you're not a chef in a restaurant. It's tasty and you eat it. It's great.
#Philosophy