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mediocrity

How Constant Updates Lead to Mediocrity: Apps for Scraps

May 10, 2021

change, mediocrity, programming, society

We live in the time of “now, gimme, I want something new”. Everything seems to lose its value immediately – material or not. Long gone are the days of old programs or computer games where the product remained the same. And that’s great, right? Or… is it? Because when there is no need to change something, when you fix something that isn’t broken, then constant updates only lead to mediocrity.

Just ask yourself, how many times one of your Android apps updated itself and the newer iteration proved to be inferior? Perhaps you ended up with a bloated app that did the same thing, only now it took more space on your phone. If you were more unlucky, the app might have even messed up something in your workflow, which made it harder for you to use it.

As someone who has experienced this from both sides of the equation – as a user as well as programmer – I can confirm two things:

Users often want constant updates just for the sake of updating, without necessarily having any specific plan in mind.
Developers, to please their audience, offer such updates without necessarily having a clear picture of what will occur down the road.

As I said, I’ve been there myself. I’ve even made the mistake myself – thankfully only briefly, however. As I’ve mentioned in my post on why I stopped working on my Android apps, at some point I got enough of mediocrity and stupidity, and thought “fuck it, I’m done”.

But let’s take a closer look, to see how this perceived need for constant updates operates, and why it’s so insidious – both in terms of programming and in how it affects us socially.

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Tortured Artists: Is Suffering Necessary for a Fiction Writer?

April 12, 2021

Society, Writing

art, artist, mediocrity, society, suffering

Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway. Troubled souls, phenomenal artists. The idea of tortured artists is a sort of a trope or stereotype that wants great artists – writers, painters, musicians – to be constantly frustrated or even self-destructing. But is suffering necessary for a fiction writer? Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The truth is, I don’t know. That’s also one reason I’m phrasing the title of this post as a question mark. Based on purely historical precedence, we can draw the following two conclusions regarding tortured artists:

Not all tortured souls become exceptional artists.
Not all exceptional artists are tortured souls.

In other words, I’d say we can’t really reach any safe conclusion regarding tortured artists. What I believe we can do – and it’s the reason this post exists – is attempt to answer the more modest question: Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The lessons from this attempt can be very important indeed, because they can let us see the ingredients of a great fiction writer.

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Binary Dilemmas: What They Are and how to Avoid Them

February 22, 2021

Philosophy, Society

conditioning, dilemma, ignorance, mediocrity, misinformation, philosophy, questions, social media, society

Binary dilemmas are dilemmas that force you to choose either of two options. You could argue the term “binary dilemma” is somewhat redundant, in the sense that a dilemma usually only involves two options.

However, this is not always true; you could be facing a dilemma between wearing a red, a blue, or a white t-shirt. More importantly, I deploy the term “binary dilemma” to emphasize the particular social dynamics involved: Binary dilemmas are insidiously constructed in a way that conditions you to believe these are the only alternatives.

As a humoristic example of a binary dilemma, imagine a woman asking her boyfriend’s opinion on her new dress. If she phrases her question as “does this make me look fat or thin?”, there is no way for the hapless man to offer a pleasing answer.

If the example seems familiar, it’s taken from my post on the only game in town fallacy. However, whereas that post only focused on the fallacy, the focus of this post will be on avoiding binary dilemmas.

Moreover, the concept of a binary dilemma transcends a mere discussion between two people, having far wider consequences. Think of media, social media, social conditioning, misinformation, and ways to control public opinion.

Importantly, whereas in the example with the dress there is likely no intention to deceive, binary dilemmas are nearly always precisely constructed to make it appear as if there were no alternative.

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