It’s easier to hijack something abstract , war on terror, too big to fail, war on drugs, etc than something concrete: income tax rates under Eisenhower were 90 percent, Canada health-care system is paid for through taxes.

Abstractions live longer than details. Information fades away faster than abstractions. Since specifics will change, position them where they will cause the least amount of pressure to change. Anything that acts as metadata. if an abstraction makes things more complicated, it’s the wrong abstraction. Use abstraction to hide the implementation details of something behind a single idea. 

We abstract to refer to intractable qualities, ideas, and concepts. We know that things like “truth,” “meaning, and “grace theoretically help us solve problems. The problem being a Cthulhu abstraction will be created when we fail to solve a problem. … Stuff that looks the same may not always change the same way. What used to be a generic abstraction now behaves differently depending on the situation. New requirements. Other variables to consider. Add another conditional. Loop until it all becomes unintelligible. Your life takes a drastic turn for the worse 

Abstractions have sunken costs that represent time and effort put in, and we’re very motivated to extract rent for time and effort even though it has become now a disorder that interweaves a variety of unrelated concepts difficult to comprehend but easy to destroy. Moving forward with the wrong abstraction will cost you. Adding features is expensive and every success further complicates convincing you are in the right path when you’re lost in the woods If you can move from “I must protect my sunken costs in this abstraction” to “This abstraction made a lot of sense at the time sense but maybe we’ve learned all we’re going to from it To advance in a better direction is not a retreat. Advance in reverse