Saturday
I had a long conversation with Michelle on the phone.
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I had a dream that I was visiting Leonard and that complicated things happened which I don't remember now (I think somebody was having a really bad transit day, and a different person was having a really bad romance day); then Leonard showed something exceptionally clever he had done, and it was exceptionally clever.
I also had a dream that someone brought back my "SDS" bag. This didn't happen in real life.
Let's think about some related and famous contrasts:
An amazing number of disagreements can be lined up this way, although it's sometimes hard to tell who should be attributed to a particular side of a particular conflict.
A few examples.
Standards committees. This is probably the whole reason I'm thinking about this right now, unless it's because of other things that happened this week. I'll writing something else about the process/product issues in standardization, and I'll post that here later on.
Affirmative action. I remember thinking about this sort of issue in relation to affirmative action -- you would hear about the formal/substantive equity division in the literature of affirmative action supporters, in contexts like "They (affirmative action supporters) desire merely formal equity; we desire substantive equity". (Also "equality of treatment versus equality of outcome", which is not exactly the same thing but which is pretty closely related.)
Being accused of wanting something merely formal or being in a situation merely formally is never fun; the implicit implication is that there is a real way to want or be things, which goes far beyond the merely formal. I'm somehow reminded of Sartre's accusation against the detached scholar and critic:
It must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether cemeteries are peaceful; none of them are more cheerful than a library. The dead are there; the only thing they have done is write. They have long since been washed clean of the sin of living, and besides, their lives are known only through other books which other dead men have written about them. Rimbaud is dead. So are Paterne Berrichon and Isabelle Rimbaud. The trouble makers have disappeared; all that remains are the little coffins that are stacked on shelves along the walls like urns in a columbarium. The critic lives badly; his wife does not appreciate him as she ought to; his children are ungrateful; the first of the month is hard on him. But it is always possible for him to enter his library, take down a book from the shelf, and open it. It gives off a slight odour of the cellar, and a strange operation begins which he has decided to call reading. From one point of view it is a possession; he lends his body to the dead in order that they may come back to life. And from another point of view it is a contact with the beyond. Indeed, the book is by no means an object; neither is it an act, or even a thought. Written by a dead man about dead things, it no longer has any place on this earth; it speaks of nothing which interests us directly. Left to itself, it falls back and collapses; there remain only ink spots on musty paper. And when the critic reanimates these spots, when he makes letters and words of them, they speak to him of passions which he does not feel, of bursts of anger without objects, of dead fears and hoped. It is a whole disembodied world which surrounds him, where human feelings, because they are no longer affecting, have passed on to the status of examplary feelings and, in short, of values. So he persuades himself that he has entered into relations with an intelligible world which is like the truth of his daily sufferings. And their reason for being. He thinks that nature imitates art, as for Plato the world of the sense imitates that of the archetypes. And during the time he is reading, his everyday life becomes an appearance. His nagging wife, his hunchbacked son, they too are appearances. And he will put up with them because Xenophon has drawn the portrait of Xantippe, and Shakespeare that of Richard the Third.(What is Literature?, pp. 41-2)
This is such a powerful indictment that it's stuck in my mind (in the image of the scholar in the cemetery, practically dead himself) for almost five years. It's not that I sympathize with Sartre's view but that it's so terrifyingly powerful that it makes me listen.
This accusation is what the accusation of "merely formal" brings to my mind: you are merely formal and there is a whole world out there which is so much more real, and you don't even believe in it!
And indeed, back in the affirmative action debate, affirmative action proponents tend to have little time for formal equity (everyone bound by the same rules, everyone, we might say, input to a single vast function or algorithmic process); opponents have little time for substantive equity (everyone gets the same chances, or everyone ends up in a comparable experience, depending on which kind of substantive equity you're looking for, substantive equity of opportunity or substantive equity of outcome). People don't believe each other that the other kind of equity is really equity, that it is a part of real life. But I feel that the most painful criticism is directed against the "formal" side, by the way it's accused of being unreal. (Maybe I feel this because I usually tend toward the formal.)
I've also heard this about free trade, accusations that free trade supporters are too theoretical and ignore practical harms that result from trade treaties. So, one time I wrote to my friend Helen about the Unix security model (with various aspects like file permissions, certain system calls only executed by root, processes not able to send each other signals or read or write one another's memory, etc.) and how it had a strong internal consistency, and that there was a "big picture" about why Unix was secure.
That's interesting, remarked Helen, so it makes sense to believe that Unix can be secure, but don't people still break into Unix systems sometimes?
Yes, I replied, because historically all implementations of Unix have contained software flaws which were defects of implementation or configuration rather than of the design of Unix itself. So really Unix is secure, just not as implemented.
At this point, Helen began to ridicule me somewhat mercilessly, because I'd said that Unix itself was secure, although no implementations of Unix were secure. It made sense to me, but Helen thought it was a good joke.
Free software. One time the following exchange, involving Eric S. Raymond, Richard M. Stallman, and Linus "B." Torvalds, actually happened:
Audience: What do you want, Eric?Eric: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.
Richard: Any software that isn't free sucks.
Linus: I'm interested in free beer.
This is a remarkable summary of the different positions that divide these folks (and most readers of this diary don't need to be reminded of the details of these positions). But Eric supports free software for what it does, Richard for what it is (and perhaps Linus for what it gets you, or because it's fun!).
Now, Richard has said that, because freedom is a paramount virtue (elsewhere, you know, called a "primary good"), he would certainly use low-quality free software, software with more bugs or fewer features or whatever, rather than technically excellent, polished proprietary software. Eric generally advocates using the best available tool for a job, and can tolerate proprietary software where it's technically excellent and well-implemented. But he thinks that the trend is for free software, in practice, to produce better results most, but not all, of the time.
It's really a pretty significant division. We could say that, for Richard, free software is a way of life; for Eric, it's a methodology, a technique, something empirical you can apply to a situation to make progress. Or, again, I could also suggest (hinting at the status vs. contract thing) that free software for Richard is who you are, and for Eric is what you do.
For Eric, if the methodology makes good software, it's a good methodology. For Richard, if the process is corrupt (unfree), the results are automatically to be considered corrupt, even if they're technically excellent.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
(Matthew 7:16-20 (KJV))
Well, it seems to me that good trees do bring forth evil fruit, and corrupt trees do bring forth good fruit. (It's not quite clear whether this passage lends more support to Eric's views or to Richard's, although when I first considered it, I thought that it tended to support Eric, by giving a theoretical reason why it's acceptible to focus on outcomes.)
Actually, this is a fascinating question: is the passage above giving a definition of "corrupt tree" (the Greek is "outos pan dendron agathon karpous kalous poiei, to de sarpon dendron karpous ponerous poiei"), or is it merely an observation about corrupt trees, or a rule to help detect them?
To me, this seems like a big difference! A practical implication is that the difference produces potentially different responses if a tree thought to be good appears to produce bad fruit: someone who says that the definition of a good tree is the production of good fruit will say that, clearly, this tree can't be good. (There is an assumption that all the fruit produced by a tree will be of one particular type. If that doesn't happen, there's another problem here...) But someone who says that the production of good fruit is just a usual way to recognize good trees might say that this tree is still good, and the production of bad fruit is in some way accidental and not inherent to the tree, or other responses which account for the inapplicability of the general rule in disqualifying this tree as good.
In some sense that idea shows up in Johnson's "wedge question": "What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?"
One possible answer is that this is impossible, and that Johnson just made it up because he can't actually discredit science but he wants to plant spurious doubts in people's minds.
Another possible answer is that the evidence ("bad fruit", or at least fruit not compatible with production by the tree in question, even if it might otherwise have seemed good) does not actually invalidate the philosophy ("good tree"), and that there will be other things accounting for the bad fruit.
Another possible answer is that the evidence ("bad fruit") does invalidate the philosophy ("bad tree"), because it's not possible for.
There are other answers which might be more subtle than these, but my point is to show the rivalry between the definition perspective and the advice perspective.
(Environmentalists today might have some concerns with the advice about hewing down and burning all trees whenever they don't give "karpous kalous".)
Back in the free software world, I joined in a thread today on the fsb list about how Microsoft claimed that they would license code for Microsoft Word to some of their customers (under a nondisclosure agreement). Some people said that this was a good occasion to make Microsoft prove this, by getting some company to request a license. I said that, the fewer people see Microsoft code, the better, because seeing Microsoft code contaminates you, so that you are at legal risk if you try to work on related free software projects another time. (This is true whether the Microsoft code was stolen by people who broke into Microsoft's network, or whether you saw it legitimately under a nondisclosure agreement.)
Then I added that
The point is not that Microsoft wasn't serious [about their offer, but] that "shared source" is not even remotely comparable to open source and provides virtually none of the latter's benefits.
When I was writing this, I felt that it was a very strong statement. (I guess I could say that it's saying that "shared source" is a "corrupt tree".) After I had sent it, it was quickly followed up by a repected fsb member who strongly admonished me not to exaggerate.
Did I exaggerate? It seemed to me that the benefits of open source that were of interest to me are all abolished by "shared source". So I suppose what I was really saying was either something about what open source is really about, or what I think is really important about it. And on that account there really isn't anything to speak of in common between open source and shared source.
But there do exist other things that people are interested in about open source, and some of those things -- for example, the idea that some people other than its authors ought to review code, because the quality of the code will be higher -- are potentially shared between open source and shared source. Yet to me these things seem quite trivial in comparison to the differences, so that my statement, although it is strong, doesn't seem like an irresponsible exaggeration.
I suspect that Richard Stallman would agree with my statement and Eric Raymond would disagree with it. (See "Why ``Free Software'' is Better than ``Open Source'' (Free Software for Freedom)" and "Shut Up and Show Them the Code"; if ever there were a greater pair of process/product contrast examples, I haven't thought of them today.)
Religious belief. OK, Fish gives the examples of the difference between the view that if you follow a particular procedure for acquiring your belief, your belief will be justified (whatever it is), and the view that if you end up with a particular belief (for example, Christianity), your belief will be justified (regardless of how you came to believe in it). And indeed there are some real arguments where some people say that it's important to examine how people came to believe (for some means of transmitting or acquiring beliefs are looked down upon, as particularly suspectible to error or as not providing any guarantee of a connection between the belief and the truth), and some people say that it's only important what they believe, and not why or how. (For some people, if I believe in Jesus because I kind of felt like it after I saw a tacky evangelistic billboard one day, that's cool, but if I don't believe in Jesus because I read the Bible in three languages and read 30 other books about the history and philosophy of religion and argued with 16 believers and unbelievers and was unpersuaded -- not that this is my situation or anything -- then that's still not cool, because, say such people, despite my great procedural efforts, I have still reached the wrong belief, and, as hackers might say, I still lose.)
Work and school. People get paid for the amount of time they spend at work. (Marx calls this selling labor power, a concept I still don't understand at all.) Very few people get paid any more if they do something particularly useful, or any less if they don't. If you work hard on a project, that's good; if the project succeeds or fails, that's almost irrelevant. (I should note that this is not so much true for managers and executives, who do get promoted or fired or receive bonuses or whatever when projects succeed or fail. So maybe the point is that relatively few people in the U.S. today are considered "responsible" for the outcome of their work; their responsibility is limited to working hard on the particular tasks someone else assigns to them, and if they do work long and hard, they have done well, even if those tasks fail, or are ridiculous or evil. Maybe this is related to what Marx and others call alienation.)
There is some dispute in schools about whether people need to be encouraged to work hard on things, to spend a long time studying, etc. I often finished my work very quickly; people couldn't agree about whether to praise me for that or to send me back to do more work, because they couldn't quite agree about whether we were supposed to be learning X, Y, and Z, or whether we were supposed to be spending N hours studying. (So if someone can't learn X, Y, and Z in N hours, what then? If someone could learn T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z in N hours, what then? Some people said that the person who had difficulty and spent twice the time to learn the regular material was especially virtuous, which I think takes me off into some Nietzschean issues I don't want to pursue.)
This is even weirder in elementary school where many people say that the point is not to learn material by studying but to acquire general skills gradually by socialization and incidental experience. (That's one reason elementary schools often don't assign homework.) In this case, the point is largely being there and being exposed to things; the expectation is that the experience is more passive than later, when a person may, for example, write a PhD thesis.
Court cases. Sympathetic defendants acquitted where the language of the statute was overwhelmingly against them: the statute has to be re-examined and critiqued, its scope or applicability limited. Unsympathetic defendants convicted by a weak case, statutory language favors them, it's stretched to reach their conduct and punish them. This is not formal or procedural justice, which is blind and looks at factual merits (it does allow abstract arguments -- but not anything about the character of the parties, or the larger context of the case). But if judges are actually good at assessing a situation, it might seem to be a kind of substantive justice. (One lawyer I spoke to not long ago called this "results-oriented judging": a judge wants a certain practical outcome, thinks that outcome is most just or desirable, and so tries, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve it by interpretation of the law.)
Almost everything in Fish's book The Trouble with Principle is on these themes: criticizing people who feel that formal principles or good (general, fair, blind) procedures, impartially applied, are more important than the success of their own values and judgments. Fish analyzes a couple of court cases and is astonished to find judges who apologize for their decisions, calling themselves compelled by principles to reach conclusions they detest. The most famous such cases surround the legal protection for Nazis' speech.
So judges would write decisions in which they talk about how clear it was that the Nazis were bad and that their speech was harmful, and at the same time how committed they were to principles which implied that the Nazis could speak. Fish, for various reasons, finds this sort of situation "incoherent, or filled with a coherence I don't like". (He doesn't believe that the distinction people like to make between "public" and "private" is clear or universally shared or stable.)
Some people say that every formal principle is still substantive at a different level of analysis, that every nonconsequentialist principle is still consequentialist if you look at a particular set of consequences. This is to say that everyone cares about what actually happens, but people just worry about very different features of reality (welfare, intent, rights, universalizability, agreement with the word of God, approval by the gods, authenticity, healthy and productive community, transparency, and so on).
So, actually, I'm going to stop talking and tell interested parties to go read Fish's book, and them come back here when you're done. (Then you can read Anarchy, State, Utopia, too. Bear in mind that Nozick doesn't believe himself any more, but that doesn't mean that other people don't. Remember that Marx is supposed to have said that he was not a Marxist.) Meanwhile, I'd best read Paradise Lost.
I tried to dig up all the poems I've written that I still have copies of. If I could find this hard drive from college, I might be able to recover a few dozen particularly important ones. As it is, I managed to find nineteen on my current hard drive and in my account on zork. Usually I like to give lists of titles even when I'm talking about very personal things, but a few of these have somewhat private information even in the titles themselves.
I also remembered three poems whose text I seem to have lost. Some of them might possibly be on another machine somewhere, but I doubt I'll ever get back "Sympathetic Magic".
Reading one poem, "Catullus and Social Psychology", from February of 2000, was a major shock, stronger far than the muscle stim machine at the chiropractor's. I had totally forgotten about that one. The eleven syllables per line -- nice touch.
Maybe I'll post "II. Illusion" here from the "Six Poems for Maya", at some point. I'm really into titles, really into titles and epigraphs.
Yesterday I said that the people in American Gods who carried their gods across the sea to America "had a hard time of it, or at least the gods did", by contrast with the Aeneid. My point was not, of course, that Aeneas didn't have a hard time of his sea-crossing -- obviously he did, "multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / [...] multa quoque et bello passus". My point was that his gods had a pretty easy time; they just got to hang out, they didn't have to fight the wars, they just got free transportation, and when they finally arrived at Lavinium, they found a whole budding civilization unanimously eager to worship them.
This is not the gods' experience in Gaiman's book.
The hero of the Aeneid is a refugee ("profugus"), unlike the hero of the Odyssey, who's going home to a city already built. (And also it wasn't really a city Odysseus was going to, but that's a whole other matter.) Aeneid as refugee/exile literature? Hmmmm.
The Wells Fargo ATM statements are also printed on thermal paper such that you can leave fingerprint impressions which turn a different color than the paper itself under a flame.
I have this feeling that the old lemon-juice invisible ink trick would be relatively effective as a means of secret communication for spies today. I mean, they could write a whole page of hex digits like
0661 9e2b d9f8 7ae5 4c69 4bd0 703b f4f1 8631 7782 132b 1e38 4381 9ca5 126d e837 d69c 67b8 8c88 a291 448c a10e c132 b030 8ba5 3380 7f06 57c8 78f9 44ed e857 4b7a e7cd 31c5 6ec0 ee55 466b bd59 87a6 3a4c 7fd9 b778 bd87 03d0 5728 0add 9f42 ef59 190a 24bf 4724 db15 9caf 5057 5319 5d34 4bec c890 c7e6 de37 8467 b151 6a9a 2b43 ba87 fa94 44db 798b afdc f3de 90c1 b995 e25d a9fa e722 0d33 2468 7238 d3f6 c8b0 c4f0 ce32 2754 6094 6cd5 051f f0fb f121 b97e a84e 8262 90c2 1cda d6fe 71dc 0ca3 b79b 7f36 e452 3e1c 8523 03c9 b279 6e78 59ad fa18 8ce5 7323 4712 2398 9114 124a 63f8 bc6d cf19 fa2d 9f46 916c 227f 282f 80e2 fbbb 4601 7ee0 a558 ed42 710f 66aa 739c 83d5 b136 ee6a 0c30 6b9d 8132 65a3 6b65 18a0 965c b84f 84dd 7997 71ca ccf3 87e9 f75f de4c ad66 71ce 7639 e89d 4e7e adf1 d491 ca87 fb4a fa6a d5f8 80a5 2e64 5f2f 0739 fe2d 727e 73db 4259 edbb ff86 70c5 c6f3 eab7 72eb 586d 058e a150 8392 4cc8 fe5b f895 9c93 9c7b 9c81 c659 2238 65df 260b 89f2 c322 555c 906f 3ea4 6b7f ee65 8b9f 463c 6acd 8ccb 655a 7d9f a203 5369 c659 0067 7667 a97d bba0 cc10 98c1 7294 fc00 36c0 d755 972a 16f6 4c0d 935b 294e a2d3 201e 7db6 3038 238a 0532 d6d2 cff7 d8f0 692b b29b fe40 c2fb bece e2ae af30 a44b e7e7 efc2 befd c186 03ec f7ae
and send that in the mail, and really what the message would be was something written in lemon juice on top of this. The spies would be so busy trying to crack the cipher (and there wouldn't be any cipher) that they would hardly even look for the lemon juice message.
[...] not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.(William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic")
It's interesting how things can be too easy or too obvious and therefore successful, like the "Purloined Letter".
I typed too much, did too little cleaning, and too few errands.
I tipped over a candle in a jar after I'd put it out, but that didn't stop hot wax from spilling over my AppleVision monitor (sitting unused on the floor until I can get a new hard drive for that Mac at some point) and the floor. I seem to have bad luck with candle wax.
I couldn't find that hard drive from college days (it was the hard drive of my old computer called requiem), though I did find some other interesting things.
I went out to Extreme Pizza in the South of Market for dinner, and I walked all the way back (Yahoo! Maps seems to think that was about 2.4 miles). I had often wanted to try Extreme Pizza, so the trip got me out of the house, got me some food, fresh air, and exercise.
It was Pride Weekend and I saw tons of same-sex couples along Folsom, and heard lots of firecrackers going off. I was inside almost all day, though, so I missed the parade.
Contact: Seth David Schoen