agnosthesia – n. the state of now knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person – noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed..
There are a lot of times I’m not sure how I really feel about something. Whether it’s something in the state of the world (politics, government, culture), or it’s a technical item. There are many cases where I’m just not sure. I have to stop and think outside myself, and often think about how I would react if things were structured one way vs. another.
In the tech world, I’ve often been a little uncomfortable with EULAs and software licensing, but I also don’t quite know if I would abandon most copyright/IP/patent/ etc. I’m not sure if I think the world (or my life/career) would be better or worse.
Sometimes it’s smaller, like the way someone else tries to teach me a topic or present an idea, or perhaps the way that an event is organized. I don’t pretend that I know better, and try to remember that I might go about the item/task/etc. differently, but I don’t know if I would. It’s easy to react, and much harder to make decisions and act without the benefit of hindsight.
I do use agnothesia, trying to step outside of my own emotions and feelings and look at what a situation or idea changes in me, as if I’m studying myself. I don’t often come to any resolution or learn anything, but it helps me to remember I’m just one person, part of a larger community and society, and life can be hard when you don’t have all the answers.
Or as I feel, many at all.
From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Voice of the DBA 
love this post. what you are describing is _self-actualization_ and congrats to you. so many tech folks aren’t reflective like this. I think like this…if the world says something is WRONG…I start to think about why it might be RIGHT. NOLOCK is my favorite example. there are actually some use cases where it might make sense. But whoa…never say THAT on a blog post. 20 years ago it was “index fragmentation”….everyone insisted on defragging their indexes, sometimes weekly or even daily. but if you need to constantly defrag, isn’t there a bigger design problem? maybe you shouldn’t be defragging? that logic was unheard of back then. Now it’s much more accepted. acceptable opinion only changes when a few folks start thinking differently.
totally agree on your IP thoughts too. I’ve come to the conclusion that IP/copyright doesn’t make sense. But yep, whole-cloth abandonment of IP rights means that careers and biz models would need to change. It’s scary b/c NO ONE really knows what the biz model would be under an IP-free society. But we’ve been moving that direction for 25 years with FOSS and it’s definitely made our tech industry better, but it’s really hard for companies that created the FOSS and _the momentum_ to monetize it (think Elastic, cloudera). but the more they fiddle with the OSS licensing to maintain their biz model, the more the industry leaves them behind. It’s a shame.
a lot of what you describe is also roughly _human empathy_ … something that is sorely lacking in the world.
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Thanks, and glad you like this.
I do think people can talk nolock or other features, if you have a rational reason or explanation. With IP, I don’t know what to do. I think IP rights need to be there, but getting to a new place is hard. I wish we’d take IP/patent/trademark back down to 14+14.
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