Responsibility is a phenomenon not easily defined. It’s the act of deliberately taking on all of the consequences of specific actions designed to achieve a specific goal. I’d say it’s about the opposite of the “rules” that I described in my previous post as you have to take responsibility - it’s not enforced on you and can be abdicated at any time.

I remember group assignments well in college. The professor gives an assignment, but he doesn’t give responsibility. Obviously, if your group doesn’t complete it, you could all fail the class. But in that way, your failure is a kind-of “shrugging off” of responsibility. You fail through entropy. This method of failure is easy because you didn’t lose anything of yourself because you never gave anything. You aren’t any better or worse off then you were before.

The primary use of setting and following “rules” is that they give us comfort that we’re acting “correctly”. The problem with them is that, like all synthetic creations, they aren’t very good at correctly controlling the multitude of weaving, fractal pathways of nature. And we as humans are most certainly part of nature. So, if rules make us comfortable, but they’re also ineffective at what they do, we end up being comfortable with being ineffective.

A quote of Michelangelo’s has always stuck in my head

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.¹

Does a perfect solution exist for every problem, and we just need to open our eyes to it?

Software is not “settled”. It’s a world of islands - some big, some small - separated by a tumultuous sea. To an outside observer, this sea appears as a chaotic entity, constantly threatening island life. But when you look a little closer, there are rising and falling tides, waves that bring storms, and storms that destroy old, rigid, poorly-planned structures so that better structures can be erected that more properly interact with the sea.