A while ago I was in my car, listening to the radio, and the Beatles came on. I’ve never really been into them, but I have respect for them and their influence on music. I started to think about my likes and dislikes in four quadrants as sort of a silly thought experiment:
On the Y axis is my level of respect for something, and on the X is how much I like something.
So during my commute, I put various things into their quadrants:
I have tried to listen to the Beatles, but the songs of theirs that I like (Roll Over Beethoven, Twist and Shout) were covers, and they have such huge variety in their output that I can’t get my arms around it. That said, I respect them a lot, but the majority of their music isn’t for me.
I spent my childhood in the 80s, and was exposed to the wonders of Glam Rock at a young age. Some of it, like Aerosmith, spoke to me, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Van Halen, however, was always an enigma to me. I have never figured out what the appeal was, nor have I been able to get myself to like much or their work. I get that they are good technicians, but there were better, and overall it sounds like a cacophony to me, so they have been relegated to my lower-left quadrant.
At the top you find things like the work of the late Iain M. Banks. Some of the best sci-fi out there, well written and thought-provoking. I’ll revisit him later on in another post, but you should read him if you’re into that thing.
Finally, there is my shameful secret. I not only read highbrow sci-fi, but I’ll read pretty much any pulp universe that grabs my attention. Back in the day, before Disney changed it all, I read every single Star Wars Extended Universe book from Heir to the Empire to the end of the New Jedi Order series. I’m not the first to say it, but those books were neither particularly well written, nor profound. When I got rid of them, I gave them to a colleague who wanted them for his kid, who was really into Star Wars. I felt very bad handing him those two large bags of books, and mourned his child’s emerging literacy. I’ve moved on. Pulp sci-fi has a home in the lower-right of my four quadrants. Now I read Warhammer 40K.
Where am I going with this? Well, I think that it’s very important to constantly examine your lower left quadrant. Whenever I neither like nor respect something, I will eventually go back around and take a harder look. In software engineering, bias is very bad. You need to spend time studying your biases and then scrutinize things that you’ve judged. You won’t always change your opinion, but you will sometimes save yourself from condemning something as wrong and find a useful tool.
For instance, I am not a huge fan of SCRUM, for reasons I’ll delve into later on, but whenever I challenge my opinion of it, I come out with either more understanding of it, or new tools that do what it isn’t supposed to do. I may not like it, but I gain more understanding of it. I have not been able to do that with Van Halen, though, but that might mean that I ought to listen more for what I’m missing.