#MeWriting One of my favorite YouTube channels is StudPack. It’s an ongoing story of a father, his son, and his son-in-law building a dream house for his son, and doing interesting side projects along the way.
In recent Christmas holiday videos, they’ve been working to fix big problems in a friend’s home. The friend’s family is facing long-term financial challenges. Basic home maintenance and finishing home improvement projects got derailed at some point.
One big task they took on was fixing a support beam in the kitchen ceiling. To do that, they had to frame two temporary 12-ish foot load-bearing walls on both sides of the beam. These took time. These took dimensional lumber. These took planning. These were an important part of the process of fixing the beam. Here is the episode where they document this work:
Why am I fascinated with this? Because “in the trades”, as the kids say, temporary artifacts are necessary to allow big things to take shape. In building the son’s dream house, they are continually erecting and dismantling scaffolding. If you watch carefully, you’ll find esoteric examples of temporary in everything they do.
We rarely build temporary things with non-physical mind work. It is a labor of discipline bordering on stubbornness to get anyone to throw away a draft or a prototype. We see that approach as inefficient. Don’t get me started about removing unused features and interface clutter!
Into our crowded archive of every thought and attempt at thinking come algorithms that can generate new expressions of thoughts and changes to expressions quickly and inexpensively. We’re not at all inclined to value what they produce as temporary, so it necessarily becomes clutter and slop. We don’t have the discipline to under-value or correctly value, so we naturally over-value.
Put another way: We have these new generative AI tools that can generate content that will move our own thinking a few feet. We insist on maximizing the value of everything the tools generate. Instead of things to consider, temporary support to formulate bigger ideas, scaffolding for accessing out of reach places, we treat them as fully formed solutions. In over-valuing them, we get slop.
And another way: Filling a blank page doesn’t have to be permanent. It should be something we come back and replace. We should dedicate the time and attention to do so.
I would appreciate your reactions and comments on my LinkedIn repost.