Chaotic Good
A few days ago a manager from a sister team asked me why I have “Chaotic good” in that field “What I do” of my work profile. The question now occupies my mind so I need to drain it into something.
In short, it is a silly meme from a few years ago as I decided to use as a work motto instead of “stupidity and courage” as I fell that the new one better reflects the type of work was doing at the time.
A longer version.
Childhood
In the childhood I was a huge fan of Roger Zelazny and specifically of his “The Chronicles of Ember”. In his books the main character was usually someone not particularly good or bad but an open and free minded person. The Chronicles of Ember were particularly appealing with their prince of chaos as a main character. Throughout the book Zelazny explores the idea of order and chaos working together and the idea of order emerging from chaos integrated into my world views. And me being silly little kids I adopted a variation of the symbol of Chaos, the Logrus, as my nickname.
Chaotic Good
A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. From: https://easydamus.com/chaoticgood.html
The chaotic good part appeared when I bumped into a meme something like:
| Lawful | Neutral | Chaotic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Lawful Good: Java | Neutral Good: Python | Chaotic Good: C++ |
| Neutral | Lawful Neutral | Neutral | Chaotic Neutral |
| Evil | Lawful Evil | Neutral Evil | Chaotic Evil |
| Also check Google for “Chaotic Good” memes. |
At the time I was working on a project which supported to deal with chaotic traffic spikes and I was writing in C++ so it seemed as a good match.
Later when I switched to a different project I started working on completely different problems sometimes on the opposite side from each other. One day I’m doing some data analysis, another day updating deployment pipelines, another day doing front end work etc.
Every so often I check if “Chaotic Good” is still a good description for what I’m doing in my day to day work. And it was still quite accurate writing a product vision, debugging peculiar issues in a data processing pipelines, giving a talk about optimization of a development process, etc.
Interestingly without knowing the “official definition” for Chaotic Good, in many aspects of my day to day work, I operate in “has little use for laws and regulations” mode rejecting “argument from authority” pretty often. “Let’s do Agile, Scrum, planning, review” meh, I pass. “Our leaders said so”, so what? “This is industry standard”, aaaand? I need an argument from reasoning or I need to trust a person in order to accept an argument without checking it too deep. Or as it often happens to me, I can be emotionally manipulated so that I accept an argument based on my emotions and not on logic.
From Wikipedia:
An argument from authority is a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority figure(or figures) is used as evidence to support an argument. The argument from authority is a **logical fallacy**, and obtaining knowledge in this way is fallible.
Pragmatic Libertarian
Later I realized that Chaotic Good (or Neutral) fits pretty well into my political beliefs of personal freedom, and responsibility instead of governance. It is close to Libertarian ideals but with acceptance that so laws and regulations are strictly necessary. Most of them should not exist like excessive taxes, or an institution of licensing every bloody thing. But public education, or health as an equal opportunity measure, or prohibiting insider trading are strictly necessary as they fight against fraud, covert coercion, and gate keeping.
So maybe Chaotic Neutral is more appropriate term but for the historical reasons Chaotic Good remains.
Conclusion
Sorry. No conclusion. Just want to dump all thoughts on paper to clear the mind.