"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #19: Hamming Questions for Potted Plants

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January 19th, Training Regime Day 19: Hamming Questions for Potted Plants. Here the exercise is to imagine yourself as a potted plant; to vegetate with pot! (I haven't done that for almost fifty years.) 

  Oh-kay, it's a reasonable metaphor -- maybe really an analogy? Anyway, it's a pattern which you can try to fit your selves within, and I take it that it's really, underneath, an exercise in boggling: to look at your life, your stories, your selves, with fresh eyes. Think through each aspect of being a plant, and consider what it's a metaphor for in your own actual life. More concretely, make a diagram of circles and arrows, or spiders and legs and threads, connecting the crucial factors in the plant's existence -- and then relabel them as crucial factors in your own. Can do. In the icy little park where I sat this morning on an insulated folding pad and had my cappuccino and croissant, I found myself looking at some plants in giant pots, waiting for spring.... but before that I thought about the way Xu's notes think of fruit. If you want a potted plant to produce fruit, you need to worry about how much sunlight it gets because 6CO2 + 6H20 => C6H12O6 needs light to drive it... and if you're thinking about potted plants that produce fruit, then you're talking about strawberries, avocados, (strawberries are not berries but avocados are) and maybe a few others.... think about companion plants that help strawberries grow, like bush beans, and similar issues. Growth and productivity are all about setting up the environment. Maybe. Here I plant myself, I can do no other. But I guess I'd rather think about flowers, specifically the hybrid tea rose called Rosa 'Dolly Parton':

Sun: Full sun

Water: Medium

Maintenance: Medium

Flower: Showy, Fragrant

Attracts: Butterflies

Other: Thorns

 

It's fun to muddle metaphors, isn't it? And it's Dolly Parton's birthday.