Frameworks

Summary

Descriptions of a shared archetype I’ve seen emerge from my writing.

A framework emerges when a collection of my past experiences, learnings, and opinions form a pattern that is generalizable to both future experiences and people other than myself.

Frameworks are useful for a lot of related reasons:

1. Frameworks serve as a baseline for my past/current understanding of the world. Having this baseline allows me to spend most of my time investigating novel/interesting/unexpected outcomes from new experiences while quickly and automatically strengthening my understanding of expected outcomes.
2. The act of writing something down in public necessitates a high level of understanding of the topic. Oftentimes I think I’m onto a framework, only to realize that I can’t string together any sort of coherent thought yet. In this way, it identifies the gaps for me and invites me to explore them further.
3. Frameworks create a central point to invite and collect discussion/feedback about wide topics. It’s a way of saying “this is everything I know so far about it. Does this viewpoint generalize to your world, or can you help me poke holes in it?”

My overarching hypothesis is that as I live through more experiences and meet more people, smaller frameworks will slowly merge into larger ones. Eventually, I predict I’ll hold a very small number of key frameworks that are highly generalizable and accurately describe my values on their own. (For example, I expect the Organizing fun events with friends and The Open Computing Facility frameworks to soon become part of a larger framework describing effective community-building and physical space design.)