Integrity requires a context of use

Andy’s repeated distillation of the need for a context of use¹ strikes a chord with a refrain that has surfaced between Kyle and I that we’re calling the traveller unmoored, but might generalise to any mind adrift.

Avvai, Kyle, myself, and no doubt many others can relate experiences of people who seem effectively addicted to travel, trapped in a limbo of not knowing what they really want to do. Ironically, this is probably the same existential trauma that arises from chasing money: a persistent, unacknowledged awareness that it lacks meaning.

Many of us are drawn to travel by the intense crucible of personal experimentation and growth that it can be, but there has to be a substantive application of that growth, a context in which to test whether these experimental ideas are actually growth, integral growth, or merely the sensation of movement as substitute for growth.

Andy, talking about systems design, but I think subbing self for system yields something insightful for evaluating integrity,

My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places.

— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024