Technical debt can be compared to monetary debt.[3] If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) technical debt is required to move projects forward. On the other hand, some experts claim that the “technical debt” metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it.
People have really been liking this metaphor, so I thought it would be good to explicitly call it out in a post. It’s not even really a metaphor; it’s just what’s happening.
When a mind is really surprised, or things are happening too fast, or something is just too hard, or a mind enacts ingrained bad habits, in all these cases a mind takes on technical debt in order to keep dealing with the world in real time. The more technical debt a mind has, the harder it is for that mind to solve problems moving forward, so technical debt begets more technical debt.
Technical debt is hard to pay off. Sleep hacks away it and normal problem solving hacks away at it too. For the most part, though, most people are steadily accumulating technical debt their entire lives. That’s why you can’t teach an old dog new tricks or whatever, and I’m suspicious that e.g. the first-language learning window is anything special at all. I think that window closes because of normal processes that are always at work. (And second and nth languages get literally laid down in different places in the mind/brain.) That’s more elegant than supposing there’s like a special language learning window.
One way to look at meditation is that correct meditation pays off technical debt faster than it accumulates until it’s all paid off. As far as I can tell, this is very related to why some traditions call the enlightened mind the natural state. All those invariant structures get shipped around or homomorphically transformed until everything is in the right place–all the gradients and attractive basins that are pushing or pulling all the time, all the things that a mind would want to do if it could only figure out how, that all gets to happen. As far as I can tell, minds are really only trying to do one thing all the time, somethingsomething elegance collapse in terms of a predictive world model or something.
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
One can get all sorts of positive effects, for months or even years, but eventually things grind to a halt, the practitioner tangles themselves into a corner or piles just too much stuff onto too much stuff.
In particular there’s a right way and a wrong way to use the maps or descriptions of valued states.
If you’re like trying to directly see things as empty or you’re “trying on” spiritual perspectives or construals, or trying to get particular isolated things to stick, whether you succeed or not, you’re probably taking on technical debt.
You can actually get some number of really real attainments, not fake versions, at the expense of increasing technical debt. But if you want all the attainments, or you want to make it all the way, you have to do it in a direction of decreasing technical debt.
Are you increasing technical debt or paying it off in your practice? How can you tell?
https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/protocol-analysis/
meditationstuff 
> and I’m suspicious that e.g. the first-language learning window is anything special at all. I think that window closes because of normal processes that are always at work. (And second and nth languages get literally laid down in different places in the mind/brain.)
A testable prediction? Are you at the level of non-technical debt where you could try learning a new language for the first time? (Separately from if that’s a good use of your time).
I predict that someone very far along on the meditative path, who puts in the time to learn a second language or to polish a second language that they learned after early childhood, will end up with that second language “mixed in” with their first language. In other words, the fluently multilingual advanced meditator will have a more similar brain, in the relevant ways, to a “natively multilingual” person, someone who grew up speaking multiple languages, than other later-in-life bilingual or multilingual individuals.
It’s not automatic; you don’t get it for free by taking classes or something. You do have to do a special thing that looks more like meditation than study and practice, in addition to whatever else one normally does to learn a language (drill, immersion, etc.)
Generally speaking, correct meditation “puts things in the right places” in the brain. And generally you learn how to learn better (across hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of hours).
As I’ve gotten a taste for this, I have indeed thought about gaining “fluency all the way down” in a second or third language. It’s a very large time investment, though, some fraction of the total number of real-time hours of language use in one’s entire life thus far, because of how stuff gets laid down in the brain. And so I think the opportunity cost may be prohibitive. But it would be a finite amount of time, a non-insane thing that someone could reasonably do, and it’s on my maybe list.
There are lots of cool things in this space, for social interaction, sports, intellectual abilities, stroke victims, PTSD… Anything that you use a brain for… This stuff is very, very, very cool.
I currently believe that this works almost just as well for an eighty-year-old as a twenty-five-year-old meditator. The eighty-year-old may need a few thousand more hours to get to the bottom, depending on how learning and compression actually work, because they’ve been alive longer, but I imagine it’s pretty practically finite, all things being equal.
I believe that the ways in which some subset of eighty-year-olds (or forty-year-olds or fifty-year-olds or thirty-five-year-olds) are mentally X is often or even usually because of “technical debt” and not some sort of cellular senescence or something. I think the operating characteristics are the same from one acquiring one’s first couple of wired-together neurons until (a little after) medical death. I think that the “technical debt” explanation is more elegant because there are sharp-as-a-tack 80-year-olds walking around, and even a confused 80-year-old is doing astonishingly complex real-time learning with their mind, in every waking moment, that is not really different in kind from a baby’s mind. I claim.
v relevant: https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/12/22/what-is-love-neural-annealing-in-the-presence-of-an-intentional-object/
So, do you think that practicing in the style of Mahamudra/Dzogchen or shikantaza (Shinzen’s “Do Nothing”) pays off technical debt faster or lessens the chance of backing yourself into a corner or something along these lines because there’s no “artificial activity”? Just throwing it out there.
It’s still possible to end up in a corner with Mahamudra / Dzogchen / Shikantaza / Do Nothing because there will still be “navigation” on the basis of implicit models (the models being about what one is supposed to do, how one is supposed to do it, and whether it’s working, as with all practices).
So, in a vacuum, these practices don’t guarantee the right thing is going to happen.
But, that said, one isn’t sort of actively hammering away while doing these, so, if bad things are happening, they’re happening more slowly. And, things aren’t as “loud” so there’s more opportunity to pay attention to subtle things that are going on.
That said, the above practices can still benefit from all sorts of little tweaks, pokes, and experiments, so not all “activity” is bad, just as not all technical debt is bad. Sometimes you want to add in some debt, karma to get something useful/important to happen. Then you pay it off as quickly as possible.
The best practices will be a mixture of non-activity and activity, to sort of use your language.
I think there is a thing where if one is doing more purely non-activity, things can take a verrrrrrry long time, like thirty years, sort of unless that non-activity is “very correctly done.”
There seems to be a pattern where the more successful people doing heavy activity practices like noting will seemingly get very far, and then hit a wall, and then need to back way off. And there’s a question of how much one needs to “undo” in such situations, and how much that adds to the timeline.
So, there’s some optimal interleaving of activity and non-activity.