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The Mundane, the Mystical, and the Meta (defmacro.org)
39 points by coffeemug on Nov 26, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Interesting perspective and I mostly agree with the kernel of your article.

A few small gripes. All three words start with the letter M perhaps to make them easy to recall, but I feel like other words that are more familiar wrt the subject matter (from existing literature), could serve the same purpose better.

The kernel of your article and the preceding “Craftsman, Executive” seems to dwell on learning to make the right decisions for the context at hand, which we can just generalize to decision-making.

Herbert Simon, one of the best thinkers on decision-making, came up with a model that was improved upon by George Huber, that is neatly captured by this graphic:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Asefeh_Asemi/publicatio...

The diagram helps highlight the differences & similarities between the two modes.

Using the diagram to better understand your article, I would characterize

  - meta: intelligence

  - mystical: design

  - mundane: monitoring


“Capitalist discourse” in Lacan’s theory of discourses reminds me a bit of this; it is essentially the realization of “new” constraints, ex nihilo, that can be reorganized and resolved.

The methods in the article are almost like further subcategories for the internal alchemy at play when creating something new.




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