Concerning the Dark Souls of US presidencies

It has been said that the current president is the Dark Souls of US presidencies. Which, to be sure, has a certain ring to it, but it lacks the virtue of truth. Let's explore the issue for a spell.

Dark Souls is a series of games built around the notion of gradual player progression. The games might seem hard at first, but if you stick with it you learn how to overcome that difficulty and become good at what the games ask you to do. The difficulty is not mechanical - the challenges do not require superhuman reflexes or superior skills to overcome - but rather psychological. By failing, again and again, the player gradually learns what needs to be learnt. The reward for this application of patience is the opportunity to excel whenever new situations arise that require the very thing just learnt. It is the player leveling up, rather than the player character.

Meanwhile, in the background of all this character development, a world and its long tragic backstory is ever so subtly unfolding. It is not a simple backstory, where this happened after that, but a series of subtle implications of social relations and emotional states of mind. Complex social processes led to cascading catastrophic outcomes which in turn sparked other social processes which -

It is a deep and complex backstory, and for the sake of brevity, it will all be ignored. Suffice to say that much of it is left unsaid, and that the player will have to piece it together from archeological fragments, old legends and features of geography.

From this description alone, you might see what I'm getting at. Gradual self-improvement through patience, slowly unfolding understanding of past events through contextual knowledge, and the characterization of subtle states of mind - neither of these things are applicable to the current president, even with excessive use of shoehorns or cherrypickers.

There probably is a past president that would live up the title of the Dark Souls of US presidencies. But that is a topic for another cycle.

My computer broke down, can you learn it?

With the recent update to Windows being in the news (not in small part thanks to a computer-eating virus which eats non-updated versions), I've been thinking about how knowledge is situated. Which might seem like a strange connection to make, until you are confronted with this question:

"My computer broke down, can you fix it?"

This is a very common situation to find oneself in, especially if one has acquired a reputation for being able to fix computers. (Even if it only came about from helping someone change the background image that one time.) The knowledge required to navigate this situation is not, however, primarily related to computers. Mostly, it comes down to knowing the asker, their general level of computer literacy and the problems they've asked you to fix in the past. It is a very particular skill set, and over time you develop it through use and abuse.

The aforementioned recent update seems to have crashlanded a fair number of systems, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. This made me think about whether I could fix my system if it went down as well, and after poking around for a bit (and making an extra backup of all the things for good measure), I figured that I probably could, given time.

If someone were to ask me to fix the very same problem on their system, I probably couldn't. Not because of my admittedly limited skill in these matters, but because of the different situations in which the problem is situated. If it's just me and my broken computer, then I can take my time, tinker with it, fiddle with the knobs and overall do things that are not directly goal-oriented but which nevertheless gets to the point eventually. It'd be a learning experience, albeit a terrifying one.

If it's not just me, then a whole host of other constraints and situationally specific conditions apply. For one thing, the asker might not have the patience with me learning on the job; they might want the situation dealt with and gone, and me taking my time is the opposite of that. There's also the added element of risk - tinkering is never 100% safe, and accidentally making the problem worse is equally the opposite of the solution. Being risk-averse is good, but it is also slow (yes, even slower), which overall is not conducive to getting things done in a brisk manner.

The point here is not that computers are fragile (though they are), but that knowing something rarely is a yes/no proposition. Mostentimes, we know something sufficiently well that if we were to try it out on our own we'd probably turn out all right, more or less. More often than not, the things we know stem from some first attempt that went in an orthogonal direction from well, but which nevertheless sparked the learning process that led us to where we are. We tinker, we fiddle, and eventually we figure things out.

Though, to be sure, having someone around who you can ask about these things as you go along learning speeds things up immensely.

Do be kind to their patient hearts.