
Tarot for Hackers - zephyrfalcon
https://christine.website/blog/tarot-for-hackers-2019-07-24
======
juped
The use of tarot decks for divination dates back only to the 18th century,
well after magic stopped being useful (because all the skilled or talented
magicians rebranded to "scientists" or "naturalists"), so I'm skeptical of its
value as a system of symbols and motifs. (You will find preachers condemning
it much earlier, which is often cited wrongly as evidence of its use for
divination, but they were condemning card games, not divination.) For me, it's
like squeezing blood from a stone, despite the cool illustrations that _look_
like they should form a symbolic system of Rider-Waite (1910!).

If you're serious about your magic, you should probably cast the I Ching for
this sort of thing (imo).

~~~
adrianN
What's the point of being serious about magic? I doubt that the I Ching works
better at predicting the future than other RNGs.

~~~
lou1306
Tarots, the I Ching etc. can guide creativity. Not because they are magic in
any way; it's just that their rulesets act as a framework for thought
processes.

See: The Man in the High Castle (PKD wrote it by using the I Ching) and The
Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Calvino (based on tarot readings).

~~~
C1sc0cat
Brian Eno (Producer on Bowies Heros) actually produced a deck of cards to help
with inspiration.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies)

------
CharlesW
If this intrigues you, Oblique Strategies[1] (online version[2]) might also
interest you.

Although created for artists (musicians in particular), it can help reframe
almost any creative endeavor in interesting ways.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies)

[2]
[http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html](http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html)

~~~
gav
Along similar lines, Pretend Store (purveyors of fine goods such as the Pocket
Developer[1]) have a set of Prompting Cards[2].

[1] [https://pretendstore.co/collections/all/products/pocket-
deve...](https://pretendstore.co/collections/all/products/pocket-developer)

[2] [https://pretendstore.co/products/prompting-
cards](https://pretendstore.co/products/prompting-cards)

------
blamestross
Tarot cards and similar forms of divination can be really useful if you use
them right.

The cards you draw are random and have little significance. A GOOD tarot
reading asks you to reflect on how your life fits to the cards you drew. It
doesn't tell you anything you don't already have in your head. It just
provides a context to present your personal crises and reflections to
yourself. Done well it gives you a chance to reflect and learn about yourself.
It has no power over anything but your own mind.

I consider myself a "Rationalist Chaote" Ritual, Faith and "Magic" have power,
abet a small one. They are useful tools for intentionally modifying your own
behaviors and outlooks. They are not a replacement for therapy or medical
attention when you are having issues but they are a tool you should keep in
your arsenal of self-improvement.

------
ghthor
I've been doing quite a bit of research into the origins of the tarot deck.

From what I've found is heavily based in hebrew mysticism, aka Qabbalah. The
22 major arcana are symbolic representations of the meanings of the 22 letters
of the 22 alphabet[1]. My most recent finding is even more exciting. The 4
suites numbered 2-10 come out to to 4×9=36 cards. 36×2=72. The myth about the
72 3-letter names of God matches here, where each of the numbered suite cards
Carrie's the meaning of a pair of 3-letter names from the set of 72.

[1] I've been researching why the 5 final forms used in the 27 letter alphabet
were not included and I dont really know why. I've made a deck adding new
major arcana cards for to include this discovery.

------
kixiQu
Someone else has already linked to Oblique Strategies, but I wrote a ~response
to Christine's blog post. Mine is about randomness, Tarot, and Oblique
Strategies: [https://lesser.occult.institute/introducing-randomness-
into-...](https://lesser.occult.institute/introducing-randomness-into-chaos-
culture-oblique-strategies-and-tarot)

------
saagarjha
Sounds a bit like rubber-duck debugging: you solve problems by explaining them
outside of your head and hope that can get you to think about them in new
ways.

~~~
Matumio
A great explanation of the rubber-duck method:
[http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174....](http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174.html)

------
chrisbennet
My girlfriend used read them.

One day I said to her: “Maybe they don’t predict the future, maybe they _make_
the future.”

I don’t think she’s touch them since.

------
hcarvalhoalves
That’s a great use of tarot cards. I’ve heard of it being used to help on
therapy and decrease anxiety, but using it to help debugging is an ingenious
one.

I believe it helps anytime you have a difficult challenge and don’t know where
to start, or your previous attempts failed, by introducing some randomness and
instigating lateral thinking.

------
Buge
I don't think drawing a random tarot card will help me write a better
postmortem. If I started doing so my colleagues would probably start to doubt
my judgement. Maybe skimming through all the tarot cards in order to pick
relevant ones might be useful though.

Or how about tarot cards for interviews? After I conduct an interview I read
the tarot cards to figure out how to judge the candidate.

~~~
geofft
> _Or how about tarot cards for interviews? After I conduct an interview I
> read the tarot cards to figure out how to judge the candidate._

I wonder how many tech employers know for sure that their in-person interview
process has a higher accuracy than this one. If you've passed a resume filter
/ internal referral and can demonstrate that you're not simply lying about
being able to code (or whatever the job is) does the rest of the in-person
interview reliably, provably add signal?

That's sort of the implied argument of the article - that we deal with complex
systems so complex that systematic and rational debugging isn't obviously
higher-signal than picking things at random.

------
pickdenis
I'm curious what the significance of the tarot cards is here. Why not just
write the following article: (this also serves as a TL;DR)

When you encounter a problem with your program, consider the following in
order:

\- your Motive

\- Facet (localize the failure)

\- Immediate Past (what changed to cause this problem)

\- the Action (that you need to take)

\- the desired Result

While the message is valuable, I'm not a fan of the obfuscation.

~~~
anigbrowl
The problem many technically inclined people have when it comes to thinking
outside the box is that they begin by defining the box in such great detail.

~~~
xena
Which is exactly why I define the box to begin with :)

------
amerine
I’m grateful for Christine. I had the pleasure of working with them before,
and one of the things I appreciate is their openness around idea sharing.
Talking about tarot or other woo-woo stuff, even philosophically, is hard in
tech circles and posts like this continue to make inroads in dulling the
negativity.

~~~
reificator
> _Talking about tarot or other woo-woo stuff, even philosophically, is hard
> in tech circles and posts like this continue to make inroads in dulling the
> negativity._

I mean, you can talk about reading tarot at home and I'll support your hobby.
No problems there, I'll ask you what you've done with it recently with genuine
interest, and I'm not going to even think about saying you shouldn't do what
you enjoy.

But you talk about using tarot for debugging at work, there's basically no
chance I'll ever take you seriously again. I apologize for my _negativity_ for
not wanting to use tarot cards for debugging or a Ouija board for requirements
gathering.

~~~
vorpalhex
It's just a form of rubber ducking.

Frankly, a Ouija board for requirements gathering might be a lot less
mysterious and esoteric than some of the scrum practices I've seen...

~~~
sillysaurusx
Plus, if it works, who cares?

It's a bit strange to have an objection to a thing based on the idea that it's
impossible.

I once objected to the idea that colors look fundamentally different in
darkness than in light. When put like that, it's kind of silly to imagine that
one could object to it. But my objection was mostly to do with the way it was
presented: Someone told me to stare at a picture and let my brain "buy into
it." I was younger and practically laughed it off. But sure enough, after
actually doing it, the picture looked much more vivid.

One possibility presents itself as to why Tarot debugging might be effective:
Perhaps it gets you to try more things than you otherwise would have.

The post begins:

 _envision the product or service you are trying to understand more about.
Think of the plans that went into it, the users of the service, how this
understanding will help them, and where the missing part of knowledge fits
into the larger whole. Write this all out if it helps, the more detail the
better._

So, user stories. Right?

From further down:

 _draw The Action. This card will help you decide what action you need to
take. This could be restarting a server, fixing a communication pattern (or
lack thereof), or even just doing nothing and waiting a few minutes. Sometimes
it means that you need to stop what you are doing and try to do the read again
later. It’s okay for that to happen, though that should only be a very rare
occurrence._

This sounds pretty similar to ad-hoc debugging techniques I've seen.

I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service
based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you _tried_
restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly?
And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent
chance of being effective.

I kind of want to go the other direction and make a deck of cards for
debugging. You shuffle the deck, draw a few cards, and see if you've tried all
the techniques it mentions. You could even have decks for designing systems,
refactoring code, etc.

It seems like there's a deeper disconnect here: We want to believe so badly
that programming is scientific work. But it's craftsmanship. Are these rituals
really so much stranger than the rituals of Japanese swordsmiths? Why engrave
a sword with such embellishment when it serves no functional purpose?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/File:Wakizashi_horimono.jpg)

~~~
newnewpdro
> I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service
> based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried
> restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that,
> honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has
> a decent chance of being effective.

Yeah, restart the malfunctioning thing and throw away what precious state you
had for meaningful debugging of a potentially hard to reproduce problem.

If I ever encounter someone guiding their engineering or administration tasks
with tarot cards somewhere I have the authority to, they'll be promptly
dismissed.

~~~
geofft
Restarting the server because the tarot deck said to is certainly a way
_better_ reason than the ones I occasionally see in practice - e.g., "because
the uptime was unusually high and that seemed suspicious," well did you
suspect that it was manually configured and nobody was rebooting it for a
reason? That one is an actively bad reason to reboot a server during an
outage, at least the tarot deck isn't making decisions contrary to evidence.

Also, if you read the article closely, it's not advising you to trust the deck
blindly, it's advising you to use it as a way to think about the problem from
a new angle. If you're restarting it blindly based on a tarot deck, you're the
sort of sysadmin who's ready to restart it blindly based on finding a five-
year-old wiki page with a vaguely similar error message on a totally different
platform. Should that be a fireable offense? (Maybe! Or at least maybe the
company should find you a different role that recognizes that making decisions
about production servers is not actually one of your skills.)

