Unfamiliarity breeds content
Daniel Kahneman, finding out additional information, and amateur coding skills
Daniel Kahneman (or at least my understanding of his ideas1) got it right.
That is to say when we are faced with a question that we find difficult to answer, we try to resolve them indirectly, not directly. In short, we do not answer the question at all.
That insight — such as it is — struck me as I was putting this website together.
I needed to upload a photo so I headed to Bear Blog's markdown cheatsheet, which gave tips on how to go about it, among other vital shortcuts.
So I followed the instructions to the letter and — guess what? — I couldn't do it right.2
As a result, I ended up uploading the photo on a separate free photo hosting website (recommended by BearBlog), copying the embed code, and pasting it on the page where I wanted the photo to appear.
It worked.
But then again, as I thought about it, I realized that it was an indirect solution, not a direct one. After all, I had failed, given my substandard coding skills, to understand and render the instructions on the cheatsheet correctly.
Next example: As I was encoding the books that I read in 2019 on this blog, I discovered — again through the cheatsheet — that you needed to type two spaces or type a backslash at the end of a sentence to create a paragraph.
Which is exactly what I did with my 2019 book list.
But it was superfluous.
Adding a backslash to mark the end of the line and to create a new paragraph on a string of code that was already designed to work as a list of items would result in having a backslash at the end of the line on the front page or on the page itself.
In short, I needed to pay more attention to the instructions on the cheatsheet as simple website management is a precise and exacting field.
But I did play and experiment with stuff before I found out.
And that, my friends, is the lesson I learned today; how unfamiliarity breeds content, that is to say, additional information.