What is there to stop your ideal non-interventionist society turning into a dystopia where people just do what they will, with nothing to stop the strongest and meanest doing whatever they want with no regulation to stop them?
Magic pixie dust. Since a system that has magic pixie dust is more efficient than one that doesn’t, market forces will inevitably ensure that magic pixie dust is available. – Alan Braggins (USENET)
We may actually run out by next week. Some of these go back to 2004, when del.icio.us started, but I’ve checked to see the sites are still there, and hey,
Other guys imitate us
But the original’s still the greatest.
Without further ado, but promises of future adieu, let’s woot! Musically!
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* FAQ.It’s not just Evolutionary Psychology that is stupid in practice, I’ve discovered. It’s Psychology in general. Carol Dweck is a psychology professor at Stanford University – a perfectly credible school (our host may have heard of it – the Johns Hopkins of the west, some call it…) and one which we can assume has a sufficiently rigorous vetting and tenure program to ensure that its faculty are among the best.
So how do we explain this morsel of genius reported in the Washington Post today?
Dweck and her colleagues conducted a study in which fifth-graders were divided into two groups. After taking a relatively easy test, half of them were praised for their intelligence, the other half for their hard work. Dweck found that telling children how smart they are is, in essence, a false promise.
“It’s saying you can just sit here with your brains and talent, and success will come,” Dweck says. “In real life, you’ve got to go out and self-promote….”
Really? That’s what the lesson is?
Because from where I sit, the lesson seems more like “psychologists are idiots.”
And you can add this to my long list of evidence for the self-destruction of journalism as a profession. Why didn’t Julia Feldmeier, the Washington Post Staff Writer responsible for reporting this, adopt a critical pose? Shouldn’t that be what we demand from our journalists? Because if all we want are press releases, why do we need a Staff Writer as the middleman?
(It occurs to me there is an alternative explanation – that Dweck is everything one might expect a Stanford professor to be, but Julia Feldmeier hopelessly misunderstood and misrepresented her comments. In fact, that’s so plausible that I’m holding an apology for the psychologists in escrow.)
Yeah, and it’s just as credible as it was under it’s previous label of Social Darwinism.
I’ve complained about EP here before, but this time I’m going to show you exactly how it works, and why it is not credible.
Paul Rubin has an article in the Washington Post outlining his theory about the social and economic implications of evolution. A bad analysis, but typical in important ways of what passes for EP and how that is different from science.
Watch how this works.
Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially
static; there was little societal or technological change from
one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors
lived in a world that was zero sum — if a particular gain
happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense
of another.This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day,
we often see the gain of some people and assume it has come
at the expense of others. Economists have argued for more
than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether domestic or
international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else
the exchange wouldn’t occur.
You see, if your intuitions resist the idea that a restoration of the 19th century robber-baron class is a good thing, it is because you have a primitive brain. (Note the obvious, glaring, catastrophic error: is primitive economics a zero-sum game just because they don’t have cell-phones and dishwashers? What if the primitives were engaged in voluntary trade of a static and stable technology? Would a capitalist economist really insist that it was a zero-sum exchange?)
The author is really more concerned about immigrants than robber barons:
This zero-sum thinking leads us to see trade and immigration as conflict (‘trade wars,’ ‘immigrant invaders’) when trade and immigration actually produce cooperation and mutual benefit, the exact opposite of conflict.
But that only makes the argument more stupid. Robber barons, then and now, were involved in technological development. Immigrants are working in low-tech manual labor jobs by and large and thus static-technology and, presumably, zero-sum exchanges like our primitive ancestors evolved with. The immigrants Lou Dobbs is concerned about aren’t holding H1B’s and PhD’s.
But back to the point. Analyzing the argument will give you insight into the scientistic approach of the typical EP argument. Let’s see how it works:
1) Conclusion: defend the growing disparity of wealth in the US.
2) Softpedal it: When the rich get richer, we all benefit.
3) Equivocate it: Economic transactions aren’t zero-sum.
4) Ad hominize it: If you don’t see that, it’s because you have a primitive brain.
5) Gild it with science: It’s a simple question of your evolutionary psychology.
6) Make up evidence: Cave men lived in a zero-sum world.
7) Invert the process when you write it down so the fallacies aren’t as transparent.
The bulk of the EP I come into contact with follows at least the basic formula of 1, 5, 6, 7. (The more venal aspects, the 2, 3, and 4 are not inevitably present, though still more often than one would like.)
And just like the grotesqueries propagated under the name of Darwin (social darwinism, for example) don’t mean that Darwin’s theories were wrong, so the junk research peddled as EP doesn’t mean that our psychology isn’t a product of evolution. But it does mean humans aren’t very good scientists or logicians.
If the intellectual’s task is to seek the truth, this already difficult mission has long been exacerbated by the widespread popular acceptance of the unscientific and ahistorical “meta-narratives” (in Jean-François Lyotard’s words) peddled by totalitarian ideologies like religion. – Rayyan Al-Shawaf
Isn’t that a marvelous way of putting things: “totalitarian ideologies like religion”. It rolls off the tongue like thunder. It’s from Al-Shawaf’s review of Christopher Hitchens’ new book, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in this week’s eSkeptic. And it has a foundation in the book itself, in Hitchens’ pithy:
Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a “total” solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision.
It goes without saying that the day to day running of that “higher supervision” is inescapably put into the hands of some very low people indeed.
I’m not entirely sanguine about recommending Hitchens’ book, given the number of fascist and debauched sentiments that have tripped off his tongue in recent years, but I can recommend Al-Shawaf’s review unreservedly.
In an earlier article I suggested that some of the principles of Yoism, an open source religion, were inconsistent. And I wondered if that inconsistency might not be inevitable. Now we can get to the actual systems engineering in the title.
Conventional wisdom about committees (and I think a wiki is enough like a committee to serve in this example) is that if you need good ideas, a committee is the wrong place to get them. But if you want to ferret out bad ideas, the committee is exactly the right tool. If the members of the committee study the material on the agenda before the meeting, you’ll catch and shoot down even more bad ideas, as everyone knows who’s done a proper walkthrough.
The inconsistency in Yoism suggests that another thing you can’t rely on a committee to deliver is consistency.
System architectures are rare and fragile creatures, particularly architectures for product lines or systems of systems. We aren’t exactly infested with designs, either. It’s pretty common to search through UML and Unified Process artifacts for the design and discover (shock! horror!) that there isn’t one. [Sorry, I'm not going to dignify "a box of loose parts that sort of satisfy the use cases" with the word "design."]
I wonder how often we fail to find the design, the architecture, the internal consistency, the simplicity in a system because those very things have fallen victim to walkthroughs and design reviews that weeded out the things that design (etc.) needed to survive: things that may be less than optimal themselves, but that work together with other design elements and processes to make up an overall system.
The design of a system requires deliberate tradeoffs, both in the choice of design elements and in the choice of processes, and if you give too much weight to groups that are essentially committees, no matter how diligent and how structured their processes are, design and architecture are unlikely to survive their efforts.
Paradoxically, the better these committees do their job, the worse the overall architecture and design are likely to be. A design needs a designer, an architecture needs an architect, and without a great deal of care, some of the very well accepted systems engineering methodologies may turn their work into a dog’s breakfast.
Pretty much like the original article was. Hope it’s clearer (or even that it’s more clearly wrong) now.
I said in an earlier article that using rational methods (evidence of our senses, repeatable experiments, and logic) is inconsistent with learning about the divine. Very briefly, this is why I think that’s so.
The truth as revealed by our senses and experiments and logic is truth about things that reside in the universe. Why? Because reason and observation rely on connections between things, and an object that’s outside the universe isn’t connected to anything that’s in it. It’s a matter of definitions: if you find an entity that you declare to lie outside the universe, even though it’s connected to something inside the universe, you’re just being bloody-minded. And you’ve fashioned a rod for your own back, because now you have to come up a plausible definition for what’s inside the universe and what’s outside. Far simpler (and more powerful) to say, if it’s got connections, it’s inside the universe; if it doesn’t, it isn’t.
In fact, the things we can reason about (using rational methods) reside inside the much smaller universe of what we’re capable of sensing and inferring with today’s tools. Today’s tools include not just our senses and our instruments and our intellectual capacity, but the things we already know. Newton spent a substantial portion of his life trying to solve the mysteries of chemistry without knowing of the existence of the elements or electric charge. He failed. Not even Newton’s bootstraps are that long.
So if we apply those very good methods to the divine, we’re willy-nilly restricted to knowing about divine entities that reside inside our mini-universe. Well, a God that lives inside the universe isn’t much of a God, is he? For one thing, he’d have been created, not the creator; acted upon, not the prime mover. So to the extent that we can know about God through rational means, the thing we end up knowing about isn’t very Godlike; and the more Godlike he is, the less knowable he is though rational means.
Yes I know many people hold as an article of faith that all truth is God’s truth, and that all ways of knowing lead to the same truth, but I don’t know how they manage to get over the problem I’ve just sketched out, and my suspicion is that they don’t get over it at all.
And yes I know standard Christian theology holds that God is both immanent and transcendent: he is both in the universe and outside it. Unfortunately, apart from phatic sentiments, I don’t know what’s being communicated with those words. If you’d like to say that part of God is immanent and therefore knowable with rational methods, while part of him is transcendent, then the question is merely rephrased: what can you know about the transcendent parts from the immanent parts? And the answer isn’t very comforting to believers, because the overwhelming bulk of the evidence (from AIDS virus to the Holocaust) falls on the side of God being negligent or cruel.
Which is why religions have employed the argument from authority, revelation, mysticism, and other supernatural methods to know about the divine. It’s not that they wouldn’t want to use the methodology that’s brought us so many blessings: cures for diseases, vehicles that hurtle through the skies, and girls on trampolines. But the people in these religions often recognize that there isn’t much chance of our knowing very much about something that’s outside the universe when we and our tools are stuck inside it.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with accepting the potential validity of revelation and those other ways of knowing. True, it seems at first glance like you could go into your stove seeking enlightenment and I could go into mine with the same hope and nothing would prevent us from emerging with contradictory “knowledge”, but maybe that’s not so. We could at least give it a chance. And if it turns out that the alternative ways of knowing don’t provide us with anything valuable, we can stop using them.
And that’s what I wanted to say about why rational methods won’t get you very much useful knowledge of the divine.
If the opening paragraph looks familiar, it’s because I used it in an earlier article, which I’ve withdrawn. Here’s why I did, and what I’m planning to do with that article. For now, let’s begin at the beginning.
I feel really stupid admitting that I can’t figure Yoism out. Allegedly an open source religion, it seems on the one hand to rule out mysticism, revelation, and other non-rational ways of getting knowledge (leaving only the evidence of our senses, replicable experiments, and logic), and on the other to insist on the existence of the divine.
Both the ideas are arguably good (I like the first a lot better than the second), but they’re wildly inconsistent. And there’s nothing in an open source process that enforces consistency.
Actually there is. Here’s what mozilla.org says about their process:
We call [our software development model] the Benevolent Dictator model. Dictator because there is one person (or organization) who eventually gets final say in the case of disputes; and Benevolent because the dictator always tries to do the right thing. Because if the dictator stops doing the right thing, the dictator becomes ignored, and ceases to be a dictator at all.
Alas, I have yet to find a benevolent or any other kind of dictator on the Yoism wiki. Maybe there is one, or maybe the plan is to wait for some leadership to emerge. Certainly a leap of faith.
And I’m not even convinced Yoism isn’t a parody. I’ve lost all my bearings. Can anybody help?
There. That’s what I wanted to say about Yoism.
“in less than a year, my stats show that the number of people using 800×600 went from 35% on average to 8% on average” – from a private list
The world on your screen is getting bigger. Lots of folks have screens 1280 pixels wide and more. Ordinary users have the practical ability to keep several applications going on screen, overlapping, not just on top of one another, without the need for virtual desktops and dual monitors.
There’s a practical downside, though. There were a lot of Web pages that were constructed when 1024 x 768 was the maximum size anything but high powered workstations could display, and some of them are looking a little strange now. I’m giving Kelly’s Tudor site a makeover right now.
Normally when I start to write an article, I just think of something and start typing, confident that I’ll get somewhere. Often I arrive at a familiar, even obvious destination, but I’ve always relied on the kindness of this blog’s readers. And occasionally I arrive somewhere new.
And occasionally the article turns into a total dog’s breakfast. Case in point, the article that appeared in this space. One of its problems was that it’s actually three articles. If it were only two articles stuffed into one sack, I’d probably let it slide. But three is ridiculous. So I’m withdrawing the article and reissuing it as three separate articles.
It may turn out that instead of one bad article we’ll have three bad articles, but at least I’ll have given each of the three things I was trying to say a fair chance.
Just in case you have a mad desire to display that date for yourself at the appropriate time tonight, you can either run this script on crispen.org (which runs in the U.S. Eastern Daylight Saving Time zone) or copy this script to your own machine and fire up your web server. Maybe this will provide an incentive to stop putting it off and go install EasyPHP on your PC.
Btw, I’ve got it set up to display the hour in 12-hour format, so if you’re in the USA and you miss it tonight, you just need to roll out of bed before 2:00 tomorrow afternoon.
Or you could change one line in the script and it wouldn’t matter when you ran it. 
<?php the_time('h:i:s'); the_date('m/d/y'); ?>.I’m avoirdupoisically gifted, as you can tell from my picture. I wasn’t always that way. Swim team and cigarettes had me down to a trim 165 at one point. But having quit both of them, I’ve found that even the fast paced world of software engineering just doesn’t keep me in fighting trim. Mostly it’s just fast sprints away from the alien life forms I’ve transferred from other dimensions, nothing aerobic. Danger is my business, but so is sloth.
Which is why I was glad to hear from fellow (and far too infrequent) Ex Cathedra pundit The Other Bob about a sure-fire new diet. This new program, called the Remnant Fellowship, helps you realize that not only is overeating unhealthy, overeaters are courting eternal damnation. Yes, it’s a diet and a religion.
![[The Olsen Twins]](/images/olsen-twins.gif)
The only weight loss program I’d ever followed that even comes close to that was the years I spent in the Fellowship of the Blessed Mary-Kate. But that was no cult. Oh sure, I had all the Olsen Twins’ movies, just like everybody else. And yeah, I did spend too much money on those “special” videos of theirs, and I even fell for that snuff video where the twins supposedly whacked Bob Saget, which was soooooo fake. But I hadn’t lost control.
And later when I started collecting movies about other twins and other kinds of diets, I was just broadening my horizons.
And frankly, I needed a little help to get over the pain. I mean, I always knew Ashley was no good. Give me credit for that much. She never loved me. And she never really wanted me to lose those extra pounds. Not like Mary-Kate did. Well, I mean, like she did before Ashley started whispering all those things about me and the judge granted that stupid restraining order….
Perhaps we’ve strayed from our subject. Where were we?
Oh yeah, cult diets. I mean, real cult diets. And about those, I can say I’ve never had my minister screeching in front of the whole congregation that I was a walking billboard for sin.
It just might work.
A friend on a big band jazz list I belong to posted this:
With more major record labels cutting back, consolidating or eliminating their jazz divisions, the necessity of thinking small is greater than ever. – Copley News Service
Whereupon the Rev. was enlightened. And lo I observed my fingers and they were typing a reply.
Before we get to it, you need to know two quick things that were making the news: The International Association of Jazz Educators meeting was in progress, and Universal Music Group, the parent company of famous jazz label Verve had just slashed Verve’s sales staff.
Here’s an expanded version of what I said:
Jazz in general and big band jazz in particular are on the “long tail”.
If you don’t know what “long tail” is, get up from your deck chair, lean over the rail, and look at what’s painted on the bow. It’s “Titanic” isn’t it?
Find out about the long tail now! Here’s a good introduction to the topic on Wikipedia with some basic links. Read at least that introduction and the Chris Anderson article at Wired.
This is the blurb on the Anderson article: “Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”
See what I mean? You need to know this.
We’re living in a long tail world, and the corporations in the media cartel are stuck with a short tail business model. They’re fucked.
If you didn’t skip over all the commercials on the NFL playoffs, you saw an acknowledgment by yet another classic short tail company, Blockbuster, of just how fucked they are. They’re trying to cope with the nut-punches Netflix has been giving them by getting into the Internet mail order business themselves.
A short tail company trying to adopt a long tail technology? Forget it. They’re dogfood. If you’re looking to set up a nice indie coffee shop or ice cream store, call up Blockbuster’s real estate department. You’ll find some real bargains.
But be sure you do it soon. You don’t want to have to be dealing through the bankruptcy court.
[back to the Copley News Service article]
“It’s a major paradigm shift,” said Bill McFarlin, IAJE’s [International Association of Jazz Educators] executive director.
“It may not be as huge as the shift from silent movies to talkies, but it’s a big turning point. What you’re seeing is the result of a shift in the way music is produced and consumed, and in the way people pay for it. One thing IAJE is trying to do is create a dialogue about where we’re going. The survival of the recording industry will be very important for jazz.”
Bzzzzzzt! Sorry, Bill. The survival of the “recording industry” is not only inimical to jazz, as we’ve seen so many times, it’s irrelevant to jazz. And it’s not like the shift from silent movies to talkies, it’s bigger!
Unfortunately for starry-eyed dupes who are still in love with the old system, the fall of the media corporations is going to be ugly.
Verve is the latest victim. The folks who acquired them are trying to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the corpse before they cast it aside. Why slash the sales staff? Geez, people, think! They’re going to bury their catalog in a rat-infested warehouse someplace and take depreciation on it for the next however many years the law allows. This is business, people! If the previous owners cared a nickel’s worth about Verve’s legacy, they were thoroughly fooled.
But that’s what big corporations do, isn’t it? Fool people. Considering how much damage to the public good will be done by sequestering the back catalogs of Verve and the other labels, maybe it’s time to start thinking about ways within the legal and legislative systems that the public can ensure that these corporations live up to their obligation of stewardship.
Forget the media cartel. Build alternative distribution networks like ArtistShare and Friends of Big Band Jazz [warning: embedded audio]. Build fanbases on the model Creative World pioneered so many years ago. Build record companies on the model of Sub Pop and Wax Trax and the hundreds of others that carried the punk and grunge and alternative and ambient artists when the short-tail corporations didn’t want anything to do with them.
Hitch your wagons to nonprofits like public radio stations (in the world of the long tail, public radio stations are performing an increasingly essential public service). But start recording podcasts anyway. Play live and from the time the club opens till it closes, have somebody at the door to sell CDs (hint: jazz artists are totally neglecting the EP format) and collect names for your mailing list.
For years we’ve suffered the condescension of the media corporations (the major labels, the radio station cartels). They didn’t like us, and truth to tell, we don’t like them much. But we needed them.
Guess what — we don’t need them any more. They need us — but most of them are too stupid to figure it out.
Shhhhh. Let’s not tell them.
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history. – Peter Gutman, “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection“
Mind you, I’ve been saying since 1997 that Microsoft is going to have a cash flow problem, and I’ve been wrong every time. It doesn’t look like I’m going to do any better this time.
I certainly did my part to give Microsoft that cash flow problem. I was the last person on the planet to ditch WinMe — what can I say? I had one of the 3 machines in the world it liked — and I have no plans to go to Vista anytime soon. In fact, when I discovered that I’d let the free Vista upgrade offer for this laptop expire, my reaction was to shrug and toss the sales slip in the trash. One less thing stuffed in my wallet. Now that coupon for 50¢ off of Big Bob Gibson BBQ sauce, that’s some seriously good ‘Q sauce.
I’ll probably get Vista when I get a new computer. I can’t even get upset that upgrading hardware is going to morph from a pain in the ass with XP to a horror show with Vista. I’m done with custom hardware and shoving new stuff inside my computer every couple of weeks, thanks very much.
Did anybody else notice that Microsoft shipped two security fixes to its MSXML engine a couple of days apart? I happened to be doing some fiddling with XSLT in between those patches, and I noticed that when I ran a cscript command or double-clicked on a Javascript file that did some XSLT, Kerio told me WSH wanted to connect to localhost, which was reasonable. But it also tried to connect to SourceForge! I’d love to find out what open-source library they were using before they discovered it.
I was not alive when John F. Kennedy was President, but my parents were huge supporters of his. Likewise, though I remember several events from my first three or four years on this Earth, including the first landing on the moon, I don’t have a recollection of such traumatic events as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
The deaths of JFK and RFK obviously still haunt us to this day, and it is difficult to determine how our nation would have been different had one or both men lived a full life. It seems to me, though, that most of the evolution would have been positive. Perhaps some of the current cynicism and mistrust of our politicians and the political process would have been significantly avoided.
As the Democrats take center stage during the early stages of a long Presidential campaign, it is also hard not to imagine how a figure such as John F. Kennedy Jr. would have fared. He certainly would have had much if not more of the star power that Barack Obama now enjoys, and despite his fatal lapse of common sense, he definitely gave me the impression that he had inherited many positive qualities from his parents, such as grace, compassion, intelligence, and the ability to see things from a much deeper, more human perspective.
I should confess that this post was inspired by a recent viewing of the film “Thirteen Days,†which documented the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. JFK somehow managed to stave off the warmongering actions, both overt and covert, of his entire Department of Defense, which of course led to a peaceful diplomatic solution to the crisis, avoiding World War III in the process. Would any President since JFK have had the confidence in his humanity to accomplish a similar feat?
We all know what the result would have been had the 43rd President been in office in 1962.
Here’s to hoping that somehow, whomever becomes the 44th President can restore our people’s faith in its own government, and the world’s faith in the better angels of our nature.
Ornette Coleman’s Pulitzer has caused quite a buzz in musical circles. The WSJ has gotten into the act as theater critic Terry Teachout asks the musical question,”did Ornette Coleman deserve the Pulitzer?“.
Let’s clear the decks. I think we can safely ignore Teachout’s jaw-dropping solecism “most jazz is improvised, not notated”. And while the vehicle is unreasonably tempting — the WSJ can always be counted on to step up to bat for the majority over the minority, the overprivileged over the underprivileged — perhaps we can hold our fire briefly, because Teachout does make an interesting point: classical music deserves all the help it can get.
The point is interesting under any circumstances. The point is valid if you accept the notion that there’s a place for everything (one place for each thing of everything) and everything in its place. Do you accept that notion?
Me neither. If the 20th century was the century of hierarchies and genres and nested subgenres, the 21st is the century of tags and genre bending.
That piece you just played — what is it really? Classical music? Jazz? Uhhh, really, it’s nothing. It’s just itself. It’s got some things in common with jazz (you can stick that tag on it) and some other things in common with classical (so you can stick that tag on it too), and the animals playing accordions and nude clog dancing plumbers are a lot like that weekend I spent in New Jersey.
Tag, Terry Teachout, you’re old.
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