December 2002 Archives

• Patterns for Personal Web Sites found via epersonae
• Tim O'Reilly on book and other forms of intellectual property piracy. Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution

• Practical advice on making Communities of Practice work. via Curiouser and Curiouser and Column Two.
• Is the Computer Desktop an Antique? by Stephen Johnson at Slate
• Tom Munnecke blog
• Book on storytelling in knowledge management. via Ming's Metalog

Peter Merholz puts up a critique of the canard that 'kids' are better at understanding new technology than adults.

Peter Lindberg, blogger at tesugen.com, linked to an intriguing interview with Richard Gabriel, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, about the poetry of programming.

Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it -- the software that's interesting to make is software that hasn't been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, "Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?" The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built. Someone says, "Oh, let's build a bridge across this river. The river is this wide, it's this deep, it's got to carry this load. It's for cars, pedestrians, or trains, so it will be kind of like this one or that one." They can know the category of bridge they're building, so they can zero in on the design pretty quickly. They don't have to reinvent the wheel.
...
So, because you can program well or poorly, and because most of it is creative (in that we don't really know what we're doing when we start out), my view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. People may say,"Well, that sounds really nuts." But what do people do when they're being trained, for example, to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don't look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don't look at their design. You don't study the lives of great software designers. So, you don't study the literature of the thing you're trying to build.

I was particularly intrigued by the parallel Gabriel draws between studying a body of existing literature in poetry and studying examples in programming. In my limited experience of studying programming there are lots of examples to be found that tackle small problems, solutions or modules that take a few hours or days, at most, to figure out. Students write reasonably large projects as part of their classwork but they rarely read the large projects of others. I'm reminded of work on literate programming. Gabriel's work on the Feyerabend Project also intrigues.

Dennis Dutton in Philosophy and Literature reviews Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: a Study in Decline. On the 'jeremiad school' of argument:

The chapter on the “Jeremiad School” of public intellectual traces the varieties of public pessimism back to The Education of Henry Adams and Spengler’s Decline of the West. Posner identifies the jeremiad as showing up on both the right and left sides of the political divide, although it is primarily a right-wing phenomenon, where it assumes that (1) the 1950s were America’s last echo of a golden age, (2) the 1960s began the slide into barbarism, that (3) the present is an era of decadence, and (4) the future is bleak. The blame of course rests with modern liberalism and the permissiveness it instilled, along with feminism, multiculturalism, and so forth. Much of the rot is traced back to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, while the proof for our fallen (and falling) state derives from “telling anecdote and selective statistic.” Posner says, “Declinist works get much of their rhetorical force from contrasting an idealized past, its vices overlooked, with a demonized present, its virtues overlooked.” His main targets are Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork, though he cites liberals or leftists such as Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), Jeremy Rifkind, Christopher Lasch, and even Richard Rorty as falling into the category. Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun also cop flak.

I recently wrote a short critique of The Spirit of Community by Amitai Etzioni that made the same complaint, too much whining about the decline of morals and the idealized world of the 1950s.

On art and tragedy:

I have an abiding love and fascination for the arts of New Guinea, especially the carving that comes out of the Sepik river region of northern New Guinea. I’ve gone so far as to do fieldwork among carvers of the Sepik in order to learn for myself a little of their craft and to gain direct familiarity with their indigenous aesthetic values, their ways of judging works of art good and bad. Prodigious carving talent flourishes in those parts of Melanesia, as it has for a long time. And yet, though it is uncomfortable to say it, the quality of Sepik carving is not today what it once was: the extraordinary, haunting carvings collected by early Europeans (uncollected carvings from a century ago have long since perished in the insect-infested tropical Sepik) are a long way from the bland, vapid, kitschy, but technically excellent carvings sold to tourists today. Why? The answer is that the early carvings of New Guinea peoples express the values of a darkly passionate, animist, headhunting society. The intense and deadly culture of headhunting in New Guinea resulted, in my opinion, in some of the most powerful art ever made. Some outsiders, especially Catholic missionaries, have tried with modest success to keep alive the New Guinea carving tradition. But the only way really to recapture the somber spirit of old New Guinea carving would be to bring back headhunting. Now headhunting society, for those who know its practices and history, is one of extreme cruelty and brutality; no one in his right moral mind would seek a return to such barbarity. But there, staring us in the face is the tragedy of the situation: the greatest art of Sepik peoples seems to have been contingent on the existence or organized murder. I offer this simply as an observation; the observation contains no implicit recommendation, and the general point is not unique to New Guinea: if it could be shown that the architectural wonders of the ancient world, the Parthenon, for instance, depended on a slave system, no one would ask for a return to slavery to revive the art. What I think Posner finds lacking in the social programs of Rorty and Nussbaum is any analogous sense that making an indisputably better world can entail losses. Headhunting is terrible, but so the disapperance of headhunting arts. Nevertheless, the colonial powers knew what they had to do for the sake of New Guineans, and the loss of the arts is tragic.

This contrasts nicely with my earlier entry on George Steiner.

Virginia Postrel has an interesting column and comment in her weblog regarding the success of the Industrial Revolution. Joel Mokyr, author of The Lever of Riches, has a new book The Gifts of Athena in which he argues the success of the Industrial Revolution was due to cultural encouragements to share information.

Through most of human history, periods of invention did not create sustained economic growth. Population might increase because, say, agricultural yields improved. But eventually the standard of living returned to its old equilibrium.

That pattern changed in the 19th century. Individual inventions not only flourished but also sparked still more inventions and continuing economic growth.

"The true question of the Industrial Revolution is not why it took place at all but why it was sustained beyond, say, 1820," Professor Mokyr writes.

The reason, he argues, lies in what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment, a series of cultural changes that connected practical and theoretical knowledge and made both more widely accessible.

Beginning in the late 18th century, he writes, the Industrial Enlightenment "sought to reduce access costs by surveying and cataloging artisanal practices" so best practices could spread.

I've noticed a couple of intriguing software tools for clipping items from the internet or other sources and then annotating and compiling the information to send to someone or store for the future. So far I count at least three products in this group: NetSnippets, ClipManager, and Insight's NetKnowledge Tools.

Peter Lindberg links to a very interesting piece on the power of groups to promote creativity and innovation. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in a review of books about comedy, Saturday Night Live and the Sociology of Philosophy makes the following point:

One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.

Via McGee's Musings who got it from OL Daily comes this interesting paper "Beyond Selfishness" in contemporary culture. The authors Henry Mintzberg, Robert Simmons, and Kunal Basu are business professors from McGill, Harvard, and Templeton College, respectively.

The essay describes and responds to some of the common beliefs adopted and promoted over the past decade.

A tight little model - we call it a syndrome of selfishness - has taken hold of our corporations and our societies, as well as our minds. It builds on a set of half-truths...from a narrow view of ourselves, as economic man; to a distorted view of our values, reduced to shareholder value; to a particular view of leadership, as heroic and dramatic...

I'd quote more but the PDF security settings don't allow copying. :(

Here are some recent finds:

• Pew Global Attitudes Project, a Recent Survey of attitudes of citizens around the world.
• Why do books cost so much?, from Salon
• Screenage wasteland? by Andrew Leonard, from Salon. When video games look as good as action films, commercials are more fun than cartoons, and everything screams "Buy!" it's easy to lose your bearings.

In my continuing effort to read across the spectrum of politics I'd like to commend two pieces and the routes I found to them. The first comes from Erin O'Connor, the author of Critical Mass, a weblog I should probably read more often. If there is a political tendency to the posts it is more conservative than liberal. Recently she pointed out a piece by Eric Raymond about a contemporary 'Treson of the Intellectuals'. Raymond is in full polemic mode when he takes intellectuals to task for refusing to condemn terrorism or support the war in Iraq. He rightly points out that relativism can be an ideology as dangerous as any other.

Today, the leading form of treason of the second kind is postmodernism — the ideology that all value systems are equivalent, merely the instrumental creations of people who seek power and other unworthy ends. Thus, according to the postmodernists, when fanatical Islamists murder 3,000 people and the West makes war against the murderers and their accomplices, there is nothing to choose between these actions. There is only struggle between contending agendas. The very idea that there might be a universal ethical standard by which one is `better' than the other is pooh-poohed as retrogressive, as evidence that one is a paid-up member of the Party of Dead White Males (a hegemonic conspiracy more malign than any terrorist organization).

The second comes from Michael Fraase who points to a column by Dan Gillmour about the recent elections. Gillmour predicts that the Republicans will continue their crony capitalism.

America is now firmly in the hands of centralized power brokers -- large corporations, an increasingly authoritarian government and allies including ideologically focused people from the religious right. What they have in common is their utter certainty that they know what's best for everyone else, and that they can act on their knowledge with impunity.

Congress and the president will keep on finding ways to reward the people at the top of the wealth charts. They'll expand the reckless new round of budget deficits and let the rest of us (and our kids) foot the bill. Then they'll scream ``class warfare'' when common sense makes people realize the danger of these fiscal acrobatics.

Somehow I keep hoping to find a way between the two sides. I think there is a way I just don't know how to express it yet. The best term I can currently apply to both of these ideas is a concern for the 'commons.' Our intellectual commons is occupied by relativists who refuse to respond to the moral outrage of terrorism. Our political commons is occupied by businessmen and politicians who refuse to believe that there is such a thing as a common economic interest beyond the market. The search for a metaphor to unite these will need to continue.

OpenDemocracy carries an intriguing essay about the different ways the left press treats fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam. After 9-11 the press has gone out of its way to present a positive portrait of Islam. In the past they've been less kind to moralistic Christians.

Multiculturalism is good but can go too far. It mustn’t be allowed to trump universal human rights. All cultures are not as good as each other: some are racist, some preach death to homosexuals or Jews, some believe the weak should go to the wall, or all non-Christians to hell. Multicultural postmodernists cop out when they pretend all is relative and no value set is better.

All of this is the result of recent criticism of a Islamic woman in the Netherlands who criticized her own faith for mistreating women.