Some Unsorted Thoughts on Ordinal Time, Not Being a Cafe Person, and big(O) of learning

Posted on January 07, 2026

Scattered thoughts I’m not going to expand on here…

I remember first encountering the idea that a number can be Ordinal or Cardinal in an intro stats class nearly 20 years ago. In the past year or so I’ve come to appreciate that the labels applied to time. A server’s uptime is a matter of Cardinal time. Productivity advice often assumes Cardinal time that needs to be optimized. Any of the 24 hours of the day could be wasted and your goal was to get 100% out of them.

But talk to a tree for a while and you’ll learn that a living thing’s time is a matter of Ordinal time. You do a thing, then the next thing. It might take a lot of time or a little. You might go faster or slower. But optimization doesn’t make sense because it’s not a closed system of easily observed and controlled variables. Time is a series of moments, not a box of roughly homogenous time to be allocated efficiently.

Life is about computation, not optimization.

An excellent piece of advice for learning something is to start by working hard at coming up with your own answer long before you go read what the experts have to say. You’ll probably turn out to be wrong, but you’ll have a deeper understanding and there’s a non-0 chance that you stumble on something unique.

If you start with Answer A, you’ll be caught in Answer A’s intellectual rut.

I only go to cafes when I’m traveling. It’s a side effect of roasting my own coffee; coffee at home is cheaper and better than the alternative 9 times out of 10. As a result, there’s a big hole in my knowledge around what a cafe should be and how it should work. But I’ve been trying my own thing without Answer A, and it’s been largely positive. Answer B comes with a different set of overlapping problems, blind spots, and assumptions. I’m pretty happy with Answer B so far, but I’m keeping my mind open.

I don’t think I’d actually want to have The Answer all at once. I think I prefer iterating over the messy data of life and adapting my approach as I go.