That reminds me of the concept of the "mythos" in Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance. My understanding of it was that the mythos is
the unspoken rules and understanding of reality that emerge within a
society. There is peer pressure to act according to that view of
reality even when it doesn't make sense and those who do not are
considered insane.

It also reminds me of stories from Collapse by Jared Diamond (a great
book, btw). For example, the Norse society in Greenland collapsed
because they stuck to Northern European cultural norms even when
living in the arctic, and as a result starved to death while living
next to the Inuit who's lifestyle was adapted to life in that
environment. We can be thankful that enterprise IT isn't that harsh!

--Nat.

On 2/2/06, Michael Feathers <mfeathers@...> wrote:
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> Keith Braithwaite wrote:
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> >
> >But there's still good stuff out there and pretty much universally
> >it's made be people who actually understand what they are doing and
> >have a high level of skill as well as being talented and inventive.
> >And still they can combine and create in was that remain surprising
> >(and would horrify a Modernist of 90 years ago).
> >
> >So, is there a route to being po-mo that dosn't involve understanding
> >pointers first but still leaves you competent?
> >
> >
> I think there is. The thing that I take away from the
> Modernism/Post-modernism dichotomy is the issue of "grand narratives."
> I've always been troubled by the fact that people don't do what they say
> or say what they do.. the fact that software development is a messy
> process and there are people who wish that it was clean. In fact, for
> some developers, messiness could be staring them in the face and they
> simply don't recognize it. Ask them about their history as developers
> and they come up with example after example of experiences discordant
> with their current beliefs or view of the way that software should be
> developed, yet they themselves may not even notice the discord. I'm
> very interested in this process: how we trick ourselves with the stories
> we tell ourselves.
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> Things I've read about pomo leave me with the impression that (in most
> of its guises) it is largely a rebellion against a teleological view of
> rationality (I'm not sure if I'm using 'teleological' correctly here).
> So, people feel the rules are confining, so they make up their own rules
> and it's a big party, but if you try to map it all back to what people
> really know, everyone gets nervous. I guess it makes sense as a
> reaction to most of what happened in the early to middle 20th century.
>
> For me, the struggle is to get people to see what they really do and
> where their stories are stifling.. but people have preconceived ideas
> about the way things should be. You can show them another way of
> looking at things, and a third, but it's hard for many people to handle
> that many and often they are lost in the wilderness when their original
> way was found lacking
>
> (done rambling)
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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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