About the Name of the Domain, or “LEARNING IMITATES DRAMA”

Originally posted August 25th of 2021

Comedy, Tragedy, and Epic are the primary forms of drama as defined by Aristotle in his work Poetics. But, what’s this have to do with writing code, (other than my personal background)? Well, the three forms of a drama are also a great analogy for the Three Stages of Learning, or Four (or Five Stages) of Competence.

The Three Stages of Learning are defined as “cognitive”, “associative”, and “autonomous.” You can read more about in this scholarly article if you’re curious. The Four Stages of Competence/Mastery from Alan Chapman being “unconsciously incompetent”, “consciously incompetent”, “consciously competent”, “unconsciously competent”, and as suggested by Jon Bergmann: a fifth stage of “master teacher.”

Aristotle essentially says that: comedies are about “bad things happening to bad people.” Tragedies are stories of “undeserved misfortune”, or “bad things happening to good people”. Epic stories are all about “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

With the three forms of drama, I believe, you have a much more powerful tool for self analysis than wondering what you are or aren’t doing consciously. If you’re unconscious of being incompetent, it seems like a difficult “chicken or egg” kind of problem to get to the point of realizing/recognizing that you’re incompetent (and in what way).

The reason why the analogy of Comedy, Tragedy, Epic works better for reflection is this: if you’re attempting something, have no idea of what you’re doing, and not getting the result you want… then looking at the situation from the perspective of: “I’m getting a bad result because I AM bad (at this)” is a much easier conclusion to reach than “I’m a beginner, this is normal, and this will pass…” … pass when? being the unspoken question. If you have fears that an unkind expert on Stack Overflow might look at what you’ve done and write a reply more mocking than helpful, that “THEY’RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU!!” … then you know you’ve got much work to do.

In terms of “Comedy” it’s also worth mentioning that negative emotions are powerful ones, not necessarily more powerful than strong positives like “love”, but definitely more powerful than something neutral and flavorless like: “this is is normal for beginners”. It almost goes without saying that trying to fight the tide of negativity and reframe it as “normal” isn’t the easiest thing to do, for despite “normal” being truth, it will feel like a lie; the statistical average of “normal” doesn’t loom as large in the mind as the exceptional outliers.

However, rolling with the negativity and performing some mental judo as in “This is a comedy” makes it easier for you to interrupt the pattern. Viewing failure and incompetence as some flavor of comic absurdity allows you to step outside of yourself. And sometimes, stepping outside yourself is all you need to move to the next level: tragedy.

If you’ve put much work into something… you’ve studied hard, you have a sense of what needs to be accomplished and how… and yet, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t figure it out. You can’t get it to work…. NOW, you’re in the realm of tragedy. Tragedy is when you’re good (or good enough), but no matter what you do you will be the recipient of undeserved misfortune. Undeserved because you aren’t slacking off, taking things for granted, or so “new” that you don’t even know where to begin.

Think of Oedipus, Antigone, Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear. None of them could catch a break, and not for want of trying. In a sense, it’s “for trying” that they got smacked with misfortune, disappointment, and disaster. Often times because of the fatal flaw… a fatal flaw being something that can drive success but has the seeds of undoing built within. SO, if you’re pushing yourself to the limit trying to solve some problem and whatever you’re doing isn’t working… take a step back and ask yourself if the thing you consider to be your best quality might not be very same quality preventing you from “leveling up”.

As for a Tragedy in StackOverflow land: it’s like posting: “No matter how hard I try, I can’t get my React JavaScript to do ‘this thing’ that I want it to do… I’ve tried a thousand different things and NOTHING works.” And the reply you get back isn’t “lol, you idiot.” but more along the lines of “sadly, friend, there’s a bug in the system that prevents you from doing the thing you want to do”, or “that’s the whole reason they invented Redux.”

Depending on where you are in your learning journey, or who you’re talking to… one person’s tragedy might be another’s comedy: it’s not impossible that your tragic introduction to Redux might take the form of “lol, that’s the whole reason they invented Redux, you idiot.” After all, the ancients often feared that their tragedies were comedies in the eyes of Zeus and his friends on Olympus. QUICK ASIDE: in contemporary times, tragedies and comedies are sometimes differentiated in that: there is pain in a tragedy, but not in comedy. For the ancients this was not true. There was always pain. If you were to make the ancient definition contemporary: comedies could be HORROR films (just as easily as comedies); for all the bad decisions that characters in horror movies make. Think: Wes Craven’s Scream.

Lastly, we have EPIC. I repeat the definition from the top of this article: “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

To put “Epic” in the context of learning and doing… it’s not to say there are no obstacles, no struggles, no setbacks, but that NO MATTER THE OBSTACLE, NO MATTER THE STRUGGLE, NO MATTER THE SETBACK, the hero of the epic is undeterred. Odysseus of The Odyssey, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Jean Valjean of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables are all epic heroes we can learn from. And NOTE! being an epic hero is not to say you always win, but the situations you lose out on are situations that enable you to learn from failure, to grow, to become better for next time.

In a sense, the main difference from a tragedy and an epic is the mindset of the hero or heroine. In tragedy, they don’t learn from their mistakes, or at least they don’t learn to identify the mistake that matters. In epics, they do.

And, as we strive to be the best software engineers we can be (or really the best anything), I believe that life imitating art (and vice versa) will enable us to become the heroes of our own quests, on whatever path we pursue.