Comment on Escaping Your Past

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:26:05 GMT

See, the thing is that you don't just say "I've got some ways of tweaking how my brain works. They aren't very good, and I don't really have any understanding of what I'm doing, but I find this interesting." (Which would be the equivalent of "I've got a text-substitution tool, and maybe there might be some way of using it to fix this undocumented 30-year-old ball of mud whose code I can't read".)

Which is not all that surprising, given that you're trying to make a living from helping people fix their brains, and you wouldn't get many clients by saying "I don't really have any more idea what I'm doing than some newbie wannabe hacker trying to wrangle the source code for Windows with no tools more powerful than sed". But I really don't think you should both claim that you understand brains and know how to fix them and you have "miracle" techniques and so on and so forth, and protest as soon as that's questioned "oh, but really it's like trying to work on an insanely complicated pile of legacy software with only crappy tools".

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