Abandon Text! - Science & Technology

The Not-So-Simple Life

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:32:00 -0700

In some of our discussions on pantheism, Kenny pointed out that some of environmentalism is really a repressed desire to return to a simpler way of life. Lauren also sent on an article that described how some fans of Avatar were actually suffering from depression after seeing the movie, because they felt like their own lives could never have the beautiful richness and simplicity of the Na'vi in the film.

I have some mixed reactions to this sort of back-to-the-land nostalgia for a simple way of life. As with much nostalgia for the past, it is a longing for something that never existed in the first place. David McCullough made this clear in a recent lecture: "There never was a simpler time. The colonists in the 1700's needed to know a vast array of skills to survive." The perils that threatened their very lives – disease, weather, wild animals, Indian raids – made their lives chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and anything but simple. They had to work extremely hard to enjoy even the most meager of comforts. Technology, it turns out, removes complexity as much as it generates it.

What people are longing for is not simplicity per se, but connection to something that feels real and significant. A side effect of our recent technological advances is that it is vastly more possible to live without direct interaction with a community of people. Our economic transactions are automated and anonymous; we hardly ever know the person who sells us our food and clothing, much less the person who made them. We are often far removed from the people who benefit from our own work; lots of corporate worker-bees spend their entire careers without ever meeting a customer. Our entertainments used to be primarily social – singing, dancing, playing music, playing games were all done with other people. Now all those things can be done alone, and usually are. The net result is we feel supremely disconnected from everything in our world. Our actions have little visible purpose, our roles are interchangeable, our human interactions shallow and unremarkable.

So, what the homesteader achieves, and the rest of us often lack, is a tangible and immediate relationship to their environment. If you build your own house, make your own clothes, grow your own food, and even create your own entertainments, you can literally surround yourself in the fruits of your labor. You literally eat, sleep, and breathe your accomplishments. And if you trade the products of your labor with others, you have the satisfaction of knowing your customers, since they are usually your neighbors. Pride in craftsmanship takes on huge significance when your family, friends, and community are counting on the quality of your work.

Of course, even a modern American can experience all these things. Even a cube-dweller can take pride in his code. It's just that the "simpler" life makes it all so much more tangible, concrete, and inescapable. The homesteader lives in the knowledge that everything they do matters, both to themselves and the people they love. We don't need to be rescued from complexity -- just complacency.

Comments welcome

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:08:08 -0700

To all those who have provided your comments over the months and years -- thank you!

To all those who have tried to provide their comments, and failed because the stupid captcha features weren't working correctly -- my humblest apologies. I turned on the captchas because I was getting overrun by comment spam, but only later learned I was losing legitimate comments.

I have made some adjustments to the anti-spam features that I hope will resolve the difficulties some of you have had in posting comments. Please feel free to write to me at georg [[[at]]] selfknowledge [[[dot]]] org if you continue to have problems posting. If you forward your comments to me I am happy to post them, and even happier to help troubleshoot the issue so I never have to apologize for my blogging software again.

Geek Surprised by Technology

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:25:16 -0700

I drove the same VW Golf for about thirteen years. When I finally broke down (only slightly ahead of the car) and bought a brand-new car, I found myself marveling at advances in features that others had already long ago accepted as normal and had passed into unconsciousness. Cup holders – neat! An interior button to pop the trunk – how cool is that! Power windows – well, I had seen those before, of course, but now they are in my car! It's mildly embarrassing to find yourself geeked out over features that are over a decade old. It's like listening to an octogenarian effuse over the miracle of e-mail. But my tech-savvy is usually overpowered by my sense of thrift. I might buy a state of the art digital camera, but then I keep it for ten years.

So, I shouldn't be surprised that I once again find myself surrounded by amazing features that are old news:

Picassa. I had been using JASC Paint Shop Photo Album for the last five years to organize digital photos. At the time it was pretty decent package at a decent price, from the makers of Paint Shop Pro, a Photoshop knock-off that had served me well. But I had trouble browsing the directories after I installed Mozy, an off-site backup service. "Maybe it's time to upgrade," I thought. Of course, five years is geologic time in the software world. JASC had been acquired by Corel, which itself is something of an also-ran in the digital graphics world. The product I thought to upgrade no longer existed, and the feature set in comparable packages didn't seem to warrant the $50 price tag. So I Googled for "digital photo album," and of course Google was happy to tell me about Picassa – the photo album software owned by (surpise!) Google itself. I would be suspicious of Microsoft-like monopolist behavior, but hey, Picassa's free, so why not?
To my astonishment, Picassa was great. Basic features for browsing, editing, and organizing photos were vastly superior to those in my old JASC package. I created an album with pictures of my brother-in-law's family from the last year in a matter of minutes, and burned it to a disk with a single click. Uploading to Google's online albums for sharing was a breeze. Once I got the photos uploaded, I tried out their experimental technology for face recognition, which was spookily good at correctly identifying faces in photos after a little bit of training. No wonder Google is conquering the world. The only thing that was missing was the ability to annotate photos with keywords . . . but it's not like I ever tried to do that more than once anyway.
Sony Cyber-shot. I bought the original Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-S70) eight years ago, shortly before my first son was born. Since the batteries in it were starting to crap out, and Janet had broken her film camera, I decided to get her the latest generation of the Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-W120) for Christmas. It was an order of magnitude better on nearly every conceivable measure. It was a fifth of the mass, and slim enough to slip into a pocket. (That was the biggest feature requirement, for me; we just didn't bother to break out the old digital that often, except for birthday and holiday events at home, since it's the size of a box of animal crackers.) The battery lasts about 5 times as long, and it comes with a separate wall charger so you can easily carry extra batteries as backups. (No more, "You forgot to charge it up again?!?" as the candles are being lit.) The 1 GB memory card is 15 times bigger than the 64 MB capacity in the original. It starts faster, shoots faster, and even has a smile detector for snapping the picture at just the right moment. Darn, now I'll probably never pick up that S70 again.
Tivo. Anticipating Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse in the spring, we knew we would need to record the whole season. A digital video record seemed logical, and they were so darned cheap by now ($150) that it was as much a no-brainer as buying a DVD player five years ago. I just set it up last night, and once again, I'm wondering what took me so long. I might actually watch TV again.

Seed

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:14:39 -0700

"Science is culture." So says Seed Magazine on its cover. A friend of mine gave me a subscription to Seed, though I am only vaguely aware of why. Maybe it was because he knew I was a scientist as well as a spiritual seeker, and he was hoping that a regular dose of rationality would somehow sway me to enlightened agnosticism.

Seed is a curious kind of magazine. It's hard to know who, exactly, it is trying to appeal to. There are some features that clearly are appealing to the scientists themselves -- the rank and file bench workers and post-docs slaving away, with little more than their own high self-regard to comfort them. They have a regular feature, "Workbench," which is just a picture of some scientist's work space -- a desk or office or cube or laboratory -- with little annotations about the pictures and tchockas and books and papers that fill the space. I liked that, because that shows a lot of insight into what the lives of these people are like. Scientists spend a lot of time at the desk, and the view from that desk is as good a symbol as any of the monk-like existence that they lead. I was reminded of the movie Into Great Silence, a documentary about French Trappist monks, and the long shots they would take of snowy scenes outside a monk's cell. The scene that monk would look at for the rest of his life. It has beauty in it, but a bleak kind of beauty, and not what I would call hope.

I think that's part of the problem with Seed. In style it mimics other magazines of the mega-cool future, especially Wired. It has the same trippy two-page color spreads with call-out quotes from an article, something that is supposed to be provocative and compelling. The layout sometimes has the crazy collage quality of Wired, with colorful exploding graphs and maps. But then lapses just as suddenly into the clean staidness of a 1970's Scientific American. Clearly it wants to taken more seriously than billowy lightweights like Popular Science or Psychology Today. But the content falls into this weird space, more technical than puff-piece but not nearly the page length to sustain really complex content, like you would see in Scientific American. And it has social issues on its mind, and it's so serious about its seriousness about social issues that you come away with no other thought than, "Boy, do those guys take themselves seriously." None of the featured scientists smile. Well, maybe in a long shot you might see a smug smirk in the distance. A few non-Caucasian women venture real smiles, but the North American men and women . . . well, they are just too important to be caught smiling.

So the overall tone is . . . cold. Add to it the fact that it's very light on advertising -- just a smattering of full-page officious feel-good propaganda from big pharmas and big oil companies and one or two eco-cable channels. Cold, cold, cold. If the purpose of this magazine is as evangelical as it seems, to make science and scientists look more important and influential and cool . . . Well, they seem to have missed entirely on the "cool" part. The primary missing ingredient is joy. Wired Magazine explodes with enthusiasm, because its guiding ethic is capitalistic and optimistic. The people featured in it tend to have a wild gleam in their eyes, because they're planning on making a few million dollars in their twenties and getting laid tonight, and besides they are having the time of their lives, and, oh yeah, I guess the world will benefit from this cool stuff we're doing. By contrast, the people in Seed look . . . Sad? Bored? They look like people who wish other people took them more seriously. And so, of course, we don't.

The Height of Victory: Being Taken for Granted

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:33:37 -0700

When some new progress is made in society, science, or technology, there is usually a lot of fanfare around it. People cheer, people "wow!", people get happy. But the truest measure of progress being absorbed into the society is when it loses the "wow" -- when it becomes completely normal and accepted and utterly taken for granted. And because it becomes quickly taken for granted, people often have the sense no progress is being made at all.

We're used to seeing this in technology all the time. Technologies that happened in the previous generation -- commercial air travel, space flight, central heating and air conditioning -- are not even thought of as "technological breakthroughs" in our consciousness. Even most technologies that emerged in our own lifetimes are utterly taken for granted. I remember when I was six years old, a salesman came to our house to give a demonstration of an amazing device called a microwave oven. That was a brand new consumer item in my lifetime. When was the last time you heard someone say, "God, aren't microwaves great!" I had lost all consciousness of their greatness until I lived in an apartment in Houston that didn't have one. (Apparently the restaurant scene in downtown Houston was so great that no one ever ate at home.) For some reason, boiling water on a stove for coffee or tea seemed primitive and strange . . . Even though I myself did that, in my own lifetime.

Computers! The desktop computer happened in my lifetime! The tool that I spend most of my waking hours in front of . . . In my lifetime! Nobody says anymore, "Gosh I love computers." Instead they say, "My %^&^&*/! computer hung again this morning . . . Could you resend that attachment?"

The Internet happened in my adult lifetime. I remember being in the workforce before email. You still occasionally hear people say, "Wow, I love the internet!" but only because of Google -- something that only happened in the last decade but is rapidly becoming routine. "Duh, why didn't you just google it?" is commonly heard in schools and offices.

Cell phones, iPods, cable TV, really good coffee . . . All very recent, all utterly taken for granted. They are so taken for granted, in fact, that many college students sit around (surrounded by cell phones and iPods and TVs and double-shot-lattes) thinking that the economic standard living for the average joe has decreased. "The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer" . . . And yet nearly everyone is enjoying enormous lifestyle boosts that couldn't have been foreseen even ten years ago.

Why do I bother cataloging all these changes? It's because of the way people have greeted the results of this election. The same sort of changes have been happening in our social sphere for the past sixty years, with steady regularity . . . And yet everyone in the whole world is standing around gawking, like we reinvented ourselves overnight, because, "holy shit, we just elected our first black president!" Yes, yes, yes, it's an important milestone, but why is everyone so surprised?

I was so gratified to hear an interview on NPR with singer/songwriter Janis Ian, who voiced exactly the same sentiment. "I hear people say, 'We haven't made any real social progress,' and I tell them, oh my gosh, you have no idea how far we've come. In my lifetime an outed homosexual could be put in an institution and lobotomized."

Does no one remember that a couple years ago the "inevitable" candidate for the Democratic nomination was a woman? We have been expecting history to happen for some time now.

I do not mean to trivialize the accomplishment of Obama's election. I know that civil rights, equality under the law, and broad acceptance into society has been a long hard journey for African Americans . . . and women . . . and homosexuals. It took a lot of work, perseverance, and sacrifice. But then again, so did the cell phone. And black leaders might be mildly disappointed when the children or grand-children of our generation hear of the first African-American president, and they don't say, "Wow." They will say: "So?" The ultimate victory will be won when it is completely forgotten.

The geek shall inherit . . .

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:44:47 -0700

"What happened to the blog?" I'll tell you: I was overcome by my inner geek.

The stereotype is that geeks are social outcasts -- awkward, repulsive people who cultivate relationships with machines because they can't relate to other people. And yet, as technology becomes a bigger and bigger part of the popular culture and everyday life, people with technological skill are generally well-loved and respected. I have no lack of fans, at least among those who need my help.

And . . . There is always a need for technological help. Confessing to be a techno-geek at a party is almost as bad as being a doctor; people immediately start telling you about their computer problems and asking you to help them.

And the geeks do help. I've rarely found a geek who wasn't willing, nay, dying to share his expertise with others. That is, after all, how they constitute their self image. In our own minds, we are super-heroes. I am not exaggerating; we really do see ourselves as the specially-endowed saviors of humanity.

Consider the following scene:

Someone cries for help. Something awful has happened. Their world has turned upside down. Something very dear to them is terribly imperiled by a threat they do not understand, some kind of monster, and nobody around them can help. Others have been powerless to help. The victim is on the verge of despair. Suddenly, someone new arrives . . . Someone who is not afraid. "I've seen this sort of thing before, ma'am." Using powers that seem mystical and strange, the stranger banishes the evil, restores balance and peace to the world. The rescued victims are so thankful. "However can I repay you . . . ?"

This is a stock scene from Superman, yes? It is also what happens when you recover someone's email files from a corrupted hard disk. The thrill of power and purpose is probably about the same.

I used to think that the pull of being a superhero was only a small part of my motivation. Surely I have other motives -- personal profit, intellectual interest. But the drive to be the super-hero consistently trumps all other desires. I will give up billable hours, even my own free time, even food and sleep, all for the sake of hearing someone say, "You saved me. You're awesome."

No doubt lots of good comes from it. And yet, it is an unmanageable addiction, one that leads to over-commitment, poorly planned projects, and misplaced priorities. My boss once told a customer: "Don't ask Georg to do anything that's not on this list . . . Because saying 'please' to him is, like, kryptonite. He loses all willpower, he does whatever anyone says."

So . . . As I started making free time to pursue my writing, I was filling it instead with more technical heroics . . . This time unpaid technical heroics for my kids school. It all needed doing, and I'm glad I did it, but it's not what I set out to do. It's time to change that.

My thanks, as always, to the friends and colleagues who kept asking me, "Where's the blog?" Sadly, I need that. I need that a lot.

Why Immortality Isnâ€™t All Itâ€™s Cracked Up to Be

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:34:45 -0700

My critiques of Ray Kurzweil's vision of the future are not wholly honest. I have at lot at stake in these debates . . . and not merely because I want to believe my consciousness is more than mere computation. Kurzweil's vision of artificial intelligence has been eclipsed by his vision of human immortality. He really, truly honestly believes that human beings alive right now can become immortal, merely by living long enough for the accelerating scientific knowledge to eliminate death. Or, as he puts it, "Live Long Enough to Live Forever." And this is not merely idle speculation on his part; he is personally pursuing every radical intervention he can find to prolong his own life, including radically reducing his caloric intake and taking every conceivable supplement and pill he can find that even vaguely promises to extend life. He seems to be succeeding, too; he has already staved off impending diabetes and high cholesterol, and cuts a trim figure at age 60.

I give him a lot of credit for actively living his philosophy. He has, as Richard Rose would put it, "made himself a living laboratory," putting into action whatever his philosophy dictates. Not content to merely predict the future, he intends to meet it himself. And the guy has a long enough track record of technological brilliance to think he's got a shot at beating death. His credibility has me half-convinced. I don't know if he personally is going to make it, but it is not inconceivable to me that humanity might seriously tackle super-longevity within the next century or so.

You would think that this would be good news. "Hey, guess what? You might not have to die!" So why does the thought of physical immortality fill me with dread? Why, instead of cheering and planning for century upon century of life, does this feel more like the end of the world?

The most obvious answer is mere envy and laziness. I know for a fact that I will not be nearly as industrious as Kurzweil in his quest for immortality, and that I am doomed to die. Even the remote possibility that I could live forever if I worked hard at it twists a knife in my Puritanical, American work-ethic soul. For all of our biological imperative at self-preservation, it's so much easier to accept death as inevitable than to seriously consider escaping it. Damn his eyes for making me think about it.

But there is also something morally bent about this quest for immortality. It feels wrong. For starters, it cultivates a mind-set of supreme selfishness. "I will subjugate everything in the universe to the sole goal of preserving Me." Billionaires like Bill Gates, who might have spent their vast wealth helping millions of people, may instead squander their fortunes trying to enshrine themselves for the future. Personal immortality is the ultimate in Ambition, something that could suppress all manner of goodness in lieu of a mad, megalomaniacal dash to become a god. This is hardly a new theme, either. How many science fiction and fantasy novels have hinged on some super-villain committing world-destroying atrocities in an attempt to secure their immortality? Kurzweil is not Voldemort, but that's the general moral direction we're headed in: "To hell with other people â€“ let's save me, Me, ME!" It's rather like running for U.S. Presidency â€“ anyone who is able to achieve the office automatically disqualifies themselves from deserving it. We may wind up preserving the worst specimens of our species.

Nor does this spirit of selfishness end once immortality is achieved. An immortal would also have to be invulnerable for him to enjoy any peace, because otherwise they would perpetually dedicate themselves to preserving their eternal life. Even the remotest possibility of death suddenly becomes unbearable: the immortal wouldn't ride in a car, or ride a bicycle, or travel to places where foreign diseases may lurk, or associate with other humans who might murder you. The immortal would lock his doors, draw the blinds, and live out his eternal days in perpetual paranoia. Some life.

Even if we could somehow transfer our consciousness to indestructible, immortal machines (as Kurzweil predicts), I think the futurists have vastly underestimated our potential for ennui. After a few centuries, I think most people would be sick to death of themselves. Most religions do not merely promise perpetuity to the departed. They also offer transcendence â€“ the chance to leave behind their limited sense of themselves and find union with God. And eternal life without transcendence might be an altogether different sort of afterlife. It might, indeed, be hell.

The Singularity is Not Even Close

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:57:19 -0700

Ray Kurzweil bugs me. The futurist has been predicting for the last decade or so that some lucky people alive today will see the day when machines become smarter than humans. Thanks to the exponential growth of computer processing power, he foresees the coming of "The Singularity" â€“ the point at which self-aware machines take over their own evolution and leave humans in the dust. Rather than seeing the rise of artificial intelligence as a dystopia, a la The Matrix or Terminator, Kurzweil believes that the explosion in intelligence will sweep up mankind, ultimately making us immortal when our consciousness can be transformed into non-biological media.

Seeing our eventual immortality in machines has always struck me as wrong â€“ both erroneous and wrong-headed. In his Are You a Robot? lecture, Kenny Felder explicitly argues against the notion that lots and lots of really fast computations will ultimately result in consciousness. Consciousness, he said, was a completely different phenomenon than computation, and a bazillion calculations per second does not translate into the conscious experience of life and thought. That position resonated with me philosophically, but I until recently I hadn't seen anyone else try to back up that concept with harder science.

In the latest issue of Wired Magazine, though, Mark Anderson does flesh out the current science that challenges the notion of singularity. I was gratified to see that he starts exactly where Kenny did: "This notion sweeps under the rug a messy philosophic problem: An algorithm is only a set of instructions, and even the most sophisticated machine executing the most elaborate instructions is still an unconscious automaton." But even setting that aside, he pointed out the scientific puzzles that could derail the notion of immanent AI:

The existence of gamma waves. Brain scientists have long correlated gamma waves to consciousness; when you're awake and conscious, the brain pulsates in a measurable frequency. And yet, no one knows why. Cells that have no direct connection between them manage to stay in synch. Even more confounding, the pulsing is happening at the neurons input, in the dendrites, instead of in their output through the axons. Even with our current biological understanding of the brain, we may be completely confused about how the wiring actually works . . . and, by extension, how the brain could give rise to consciousness.
Computers within computers. Most neuroscientists have been paying attention to the networks of neurons in the brain. But new research suggests that the sub-cellular structures of microtubules might themselves be providing trillions of computations per second inside each neuron. Imagine a supercomputer inside each individual cell of your brain, and you start to get the idea of how phenomenally complex our brains really are.
Quantum phenomena. Some researchers go so far to suggest that the complexity might not stop at the molecular level. According to some physicists, some perplexing aspects of visual perception are most easily explained by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, it seems to me, is the point at which science squints really hard to explain things, where uncertainty reigns and the most mysterious things happen. If consciousness turns out to be a quantum phenomena, then it may lay at the very extreme edge of what is even comprehensible.

None of this disproves Kurzweil's vision. Humanity, together with our very powerful computer friends, may yet sort it all out and construct consciousness. But it may take a few centuries longer than we expected.

The Evolution of Morals

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:16:19 -0700

Some excellent points were raised by several people, both online and off, about my recent comments on technology's impact on our societal ability to trust and be trustworthy. So, some clarification:

Just because I blamed technology for the decline in one particular aspect of morality does not mean I am anti-technology. I am not a reactionary Luddite who thinks we would all be better off if we turned the clock back a few decades, or a few centuries, or a few eons. Obviously, technology is good for lots of things. We are fantastically more wealthy, live longer, endure less physical suffering, and have vastly more opportunities to learn and create, all for the sake of technology, and that's unambiguously a Good Thing. Yay, technology.
Just because pre-industrial societies valued trust and trustworthiness more than our current prevailing culture does, does not mean that I romanticize those cultures as paragons of virtue. A medieval peasant might well understand the importance of keeping a promise, but he probably also was an ignorant, bigoted, superstitious, chauvinistic oaf. We do not need to create a mythic "noble savage" in order to appreciate certain values of particular cultures, current and past.
Just because certain values have atrophied in our current culture does not mean thatÂ all values have atrophied. As I explicitly pointed out in my last post, our culture has developed greater regard for individual rights across a broader range of humanity. The moral and legal equality of the races and sexes is a welcome improvement in our culture. I think it's important to recognize that moral development is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and just because I critique certain aspects of the moral climate doesn't mean I think it's all bad. The converse also holds: just because we celebrate the triumphs of humanism doesn't mean we need to accept all new moral developments as unquestioningly good.
I think it's important to differentiate the effects of modernity (e.g. humanism, science, democracy, rule of law, etc.) from the effects of technology (automobiles, telephones, televisions, computers, internet, etc.). Both are forces that have arisen recently, and while they are interrelated they are not the same thing. One does not necessarily imply, or cause, or contribute to the other. I'm generally a big fan of modernity (though I think it has some blind spots). I am much more suspicious about technology, since technology often creates as many problems as it solves, and is capable of both creation and destruction.
For the last century, technology has changed so rapidly that our culture has not had time to react, especiallyÂ to fully digest the moral implications of what we are doing. We set of some atom bombs, andÂ only belatedlyÂ struggle with the prospect that we might destroy the planet before we get our shit together. We develop massive capacities for manufacturing and consumption . . .Â only later to find that we're using upÂ our resources at an alarming rate, especially the living ones. We build incredible networks of communication that can facilitate unprecedented knowledge and understanding . . . but then use them largely to rot our brains with depictions of sex and violence. We have the power of angels, and yet our judgement is not much better than any other animal. This is really what I was trying to get at in my last post -- we have barely begun to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle effects of what technology has brought into the world. While I remain hopeful that our moral sensibilities will catch up with our power, I have plenty of evidence to suggest that the opposite is happening.

And since the comments were dominated by the topic, tomorrow I'll talk about sex.

What happened to trust?

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:46:18 -0700

Kenny raised a good question about my assertion yesterday that the proliferation of lawyers was due to a general lack of trust in our culture:

Why it is that everyone sues everyone over everything, and didn't used to? What changed, and how can it be changed back? (*Note: obviously the problem is not the lawyers per se, although they make a convenient symbol, and I really do think their sheer numbers are a cause as well as an effect. But there is a larger context. I'm just not sure what it is.)

What caused our culture to degrade? Well, even that's a loaded question, because it contains the implicit assumption that our culture is getting worse rather than getting better. Many people point to greater gender and racial equality in the last fifty years and think, on the whole, that we're getting better. (And some people will argue whether even that has happened. But hey: a woman and a black are frontrunners in the presidential election. Something has definitely changed.)

But looking at the loss of trust, as evidenced by the proliferation of lawsuits and divorces, let's just say something degraded. What happened? I think the answer may surprise you, coming from a geek: technology happened. Specifically, information technology happened: telephones, television, computers, and the Internet. That, and automobiles.

The beginning of the end of trust came with mobility.Â For the vast majority of human history,Â everyone lived in pretty much the same place, and with the same people, forÂ their entire lives. Everyone in the village or town knew everyone else, and were highly dependent on each other. In such a context, trustworthiness was exceedingly important; if you screwed over your neighbor, that neighbor and everyone else would soon know about it, and that would have both an immediate and a long-lasting implication for your quality of life. If village excluded you because they didn't trust you, you would not only have a miserable time, but your very survival might be threatened. Everyone had strong incentives to both trust and be trusted; you couldn't just write off the blacksmith who cheated you, and go down the road to some other blacksmith -- there might only be one blacksmith for miles around. SoÂ the community would bring strong pressure to bear on people to conform to basic standards of trustworthiness.

AsÂ humans' potential for mobility increased, soÂ did their dependence on others decrease. If you ruined your reputation in one town, you could always move on to the next one and start over. For the last several hundred years mobility was possible but extremely difficult -- if you wanted to move on to another place, you pretty much had to be a literal pioneer and go into the wilderness. Even as late the 1800's, you effective sphere of socialÂ and economic life was tightly circumscribed. The automobile changed that range extremely quickly; suddenly vast mobility became commonplace. Moving from town to town became the norm, and one's effective range for daily interactions was magnified by several orders of magnitude. In a world with automobiles every individual has vastly more potential economic and social partners, and so one's dependence on any particular relationship diminishes significantly. People become strangers to their own neighbors.

The limits of the geography, already pushed far back by the automobile, were utterly banished by electronic communication media: telephone, television, and the internet. It was within my lifetime that these technologies went from merely existing to being utterly ubiquitous. The most profound effects of the communication media were:

Acceleration of mobility, by expansion of national and global trade. Now it is not only possible to deal economically with distant people, but impossible not to deal with distant unseen people.
More and more human interaction has become virtualized -- that is, we don't communicate face-to-face anymore. Our net of relationships has both expanded and diffused: we have more relationships with somewhat less depth than before.
All these technologies have gradually increased our capacity for constant immediate gratification. Extremely diverse forms of entertainment and information are readily available to anyone, anytime, and with almost no interaction with another human being. It used to be that almost every form of human entertainment was primary social: music, dance, drama, poetry, games, and stories were activities directly shared with other people in the immediate community. No longer -- in fact, these media and the economy they have spawned have made it possible for people to live out their entire lives in almost complete isolation.
The massive amount of freely exchanged cultural information has undermined traditional sources of moral authority. Kenneth Gergen detailed in The Saturated Self how exposure to different religions, cultures, and values has generally diluted the authority of one's own culture and the moral codes it imposes. A certain amount of relativism, and its accompanying confusion, are inevitable when one is mobbed daily by a thousand contradictory opinions.

For a while I think the culture was able to coast on some of its momentum from previous generations. Very rapidly, though, the culture is losing its collective moral memory. People no longer have a clear conception of why we ever had restrictions on sexual behavior, or why cheating or breaking the law is bad.

The sum result: we don't treat our relationships with the same care as before, because in a modern world we don't need them as much. Or, at least, we don't think that we do. Our technologies have created vast wealth and opportunity, so much so that we are threatened with being smothered by it, lost in decadence.

Thales and the Blue Screen of Death

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 04:04:25 -0700

I started listening to a series of recorded lectures on the ancient Greek philosophers. Though I have been trafficking in philosophy for fifteen years, I always felt self-conscious about the holes in my education, and the Greeks were always biggest elephant I had ignored. Absolutely everyone glosses Socrates and Plato, and I was aware of Nietzsche's debt to Heraclitus, so I figured I had to come back to studying the originals at some point.

In some ways I'm glad I waited so long, because I'm not sure I would have appreciated the full import of their thinking in my twenties. The series starts with Thales, the most ancient of the pre-Socratics, who breaks with the usual tradition of using mythology to explain the world and instead proposes a logos, a rational explanation for the nature of things, based on his own empirical observations. Never mind that his rational explanation (that the archae, the origin of all being, is water) is a little loopy; the breakthrough was that for the first time, someone believed that the world could be understood rationally. The birth of Western civilization starts here, with the notion that men could really know something, just by looking around and using their noggins.

At this point, I imagine most nineteen-year-olds in Philosophy 101 rolling their eyes and staring blankly at their pencils. "Whatever." Rationally understanding the universe is so basic to our world-view that we have a hard time believing there was ever a time we didn't know that. It's kind of like imagining a time before people invented the wheel, or money, or writing. It seems like incredibly old news.

And yet . . . I find that the basic attitude that informed mythic thinking is still alive in well, even in our modern culture. While everyone supposedly believes in rational causes for physical phenomena, most people think that bigger questions of meaning, purpose, and the origins of the universe are still best left to the realm of the mythic. When I teach about mystical traditions, it usually comes as a shock and a revelation to people that they personally might directly experience the nature of God and the world.

Nor is the instinct to explain things rationally, even physicalÂ and technological things,Â nearly as deep as we might suppose. As a software consultant, I am amazed at how often people accept and embrace mythology to explain their computer problems.Â A program crashes, and I asked, "Why did that happen?" The users will often say, "It just does that sometimes. I think it doesn't like Mondays." Now, I can forgive the end users for saying that, because technology is often indistinguishable from magic. But sometimes I even go back to the programmer who built the program in the first place, and ask him, "Why did it crash?" and evenÂ he will say, "It just does that sometimes." He isn't just being lazy -- sometimes he really believes that some things just happen, for no particular reason, and who is he to question why? And I feel like Thales when I make the pronouncement: "Everything happens for a reason. And when we finally understand the reason, and fix it, these crashes won't happen again." Â Every bug I fix is another triumph for Greek philosophy. And everyone, from the programmer up to the VP of Sales, seems slightly amazed to hear that the world can be understood.

Geek Thrills

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 06:03:39 -0700

Iâ€™ve picked up Sarah Susankaâ€™s The Not So Big Life again. (My wife absconded with it for a few weeks, as she was trying to figure out her own life-direction.) One of her first exercises is to ask the reader to write down significant events in their life, i.e. â€œthe ones that moved you to tears, filled you with awe, or made you feel that your heart was going to explode.â€ The idea (I presume) is that by recalling specific times when you were moved, the seeker will see patterns in what inspires them, and be able to identify those essential things that makes their life worth living.

Here's one experience I wrote about:

I remember some significant events that lead me down the road to being a techno-geek, which was certainly not a path I would have envisioned for myself coming out of college. I was doing some contract writing work for a software company where my fiancÃ©e worked. The company had just started selling a new web development tool called HAHT â€“ this was back in the day when the web was young, ASP and Java hadnâ€™t even been born yet, and stateful database-driven web applications were the holy grail of development. The sales department was looking for ways to get web developer leads. I found listings for web development companies on a search site, but of course it was painfully tedious to click through each one and locate contact information for each one. Fresh from the academic world, I was still using a Macintosh computer, and my twin brother had recently introduced me to AppleScript. I had a sudden flash of inspiration, and realized I could write an AppleScript routine to search through all the web development listings, get the domain names, grab the technical contact info with a whois query, and write it all to a spreadsheet.

I realize, in retrospect, that snagging domain registration info for cold-calling was not my own novel invention, nor was it ethically advisable or even sound business. But these were the Wild West days of the internet, and my bosses encouraged audacious forays in marketing and sales, and it seemed so . . . clever. I was, as Joe Pierce would say, â€œseized by the ideaâ€: I could do this. I . . . could do this. I started working that evening. I was so excited I worked all night. By dawn I had kludgy little process that had seized a couple hundred names and phone numbers, and I was still basking in my first Programmerâ€™s High.

Years later, talking with other programmers, I found they were all seduced by similar experiences. â€œItâ€™s like being a magician,â€ said Mark Uland, an accomplished programmer who developed the first virtual reality software for the personal computer. â€œYou string together the right commands, and suddenly you can make the computer do impossible things, all because of you. Itâ€™s a feeling of power, of control. Nothing else in the universe â€“ not people, not things â€“ ever obeyed you as completely as the computer did. That why you do it. Thatâ€™s why we all do it.â€

And itâ€™s not just programmers . . . artists, too, report the feeling of security and creative power when ensconced in their private sketchpad worlds. Itâ€™s the joy of lining up all the dominos, and then making them all fall down, just as you had planned it, with the slightest touch of your hand. It is the stereotypically masculine intellectual pleasure â€“ I think, therefore I control the World.

Oddly enough, I donâ€™t see this and other Programming Highs as a sign of my lifeâ€™s vocation and destiny. It is pleasant, ego-enhancing, exciting, addictive, and capable of inducing obsessive attention . . . and yet, I do not find it to be terribly meaningful, any more than I would find a particularly good video game meaningful. Programming is Fun . . . but writing, in itâ€™s finer moments . . . ahh, that can induce Joy.

The Art of Engineering

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:53:09 -0700

I wasn't quite done flogging James Ogilvy for his various rhetorical sins in Living Without A Goal: Finding the Freedom to Live a Creative and Innovative Life. As you may recall, Ogilvy's central theme was that living with a grand overarching Goal was ultimately dehumanizing because it reduced the person to being a functionary, a cog in a galacticÂ mechanism, which would ultimately be dreary, constraining, and repetitive. The alternative, he thought, would be a life lived artistically, for its own sake, which would be full of freedom and beauty.

You can see the bias very clearly: engineering = mechanical = lifeless. Art = Beauty = Freedom. This is, as far as I can tell,Â the attitude of someone who has never actually built a thing in his entire life. Engineering -- the organizing of elements into a system that can do something -- is hardly a lifeless endeavor. It takes enormous creativity to start with an end in mind, and then concoct an unlikely array of components to all work smoothly together to that end. Effectiveness is hardly a binary affair, either, but rather becomes more and more subtle. The mathematicians and engineers will speak of elegant solutions versus clumsy ones, inspired solutions versus cliched ones. To the non-engineer, that watch or computer program or mathematical proof may appear to be "lifeless." But that's just because they lack the imagination to see the life within it.

So, what is Ogilvy really saying, when he dismisses "engineering" a life instead of artistically "creating" one? He is saying nothing at all, other than revealing a rather clumsy and unsubtle bias against things he doesn't understand. Striving toward a goal is not without its own art, its own creativity, subtlety, adventure, and joy. That I put all my capacities towards a single end does not in any way limit the number of lives I can lead . . . if anything it allows one to live deeper, as the goal pushes us beyond the bounds of our imagination, into lives we never even dreamed possible. Or, as St. Paul put it: "In slavery to Him is perfect freedom."

I imagine Ogilvy would not disagree with me, but just claim my argument to be his own. "Yes, engineering becomes alive, becomes free, the moment it becomes art!" Ahh, but he would only be sealing the fate of his original argument. His distinction between mechanism and freedom has dissolved, unmasked as an incomplete metaphor. Both the engineer and the artist are revelling in the moment-by-moment beauty of their respective crafts, both alive to the process of discovery. The man who engineers his life to serve a Goal is undiminished, while the artist foresaking the Goal is the one who might find himself at a loss.

Social Contagion

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 02:36:56 -0700

Absolutely everyone has been commenting on the recent The New England Journal of Medicine study that finds obesity is socially contagious -- that people are more likely to get fat if their friends get fat. The fact that the correlations exists is obvious -- people tends to hang out with people like themselves -- but what surprised everyone was the relative scale of the effect and the clearly causetive nature of the phenomena. We all know that our friends influence us, but we like to think the effects are subtle and on the edges. Our weight is something so personal, and yet so quantitative and unmistakably obvious, that this study's finding shoves it in our face: the influence of your friends matters a lot. Our American sense of individuality is mildly offended by the sudden realization that we are not islands.

All the comments about the study, though, seem to stay focused on health issues -- obesity, smoking, drinking, sex -- and not on (to me, at least) larger issues with a moral dimension. What this study means is that everything has a social aspect, one that is ignored at one's peril.Â One's spiritual life, too, is going to be affected by the company you keep. I imagine the same sorts of correlations exist for religious life -- ifÂ a friend becomes "born-again," youÂ have a much higher likelihood of doing the same. (Or, more ominously: if you have a friend who becomes a suicide bomber, you are more likely to do the same.)

So what should you do about it?

Form social group connections with people who share your values. A colleague recently asked me, "Do you think it's possible for someone to be a good person without being in a church?" I replied, "Sure . . . but you're probably going to need some kind of community of people who share your values." That group could be almost anything: a service organization, a school, a political movement, a chess club. Churches just have the advantage that they are explicitly about sharing and reinforcing specific values. I suspect that most people already know this, consciously or unconsciously. Most church-goers are not there for the theology; most of them don't really understand it, and a sizable number don't even truly believe it, but they all know that these are the people they want to associate with.
Make lots of friends. Aside from all the many well-documented advantages to having lots of friends, you'll be diversifying the pool of people who exert influence upon you, minimizing social risk in the same way that diversifying a financial portfolio insulates you from financial ruin.
Make time for friendships. Obligations to career and family can easily eat up all available time, leaving you stranded in a life where your relationships are defined by roles and not by choice. Getting along with your co-workers is not the same as having friends. Friendship, almost by definition, requires a personal sharing that goes beyond the bounds of defined roles. Often those connections can and should start spontaneously, but you have to make them a priority if you want them to grow. Personally, I'm lousy at this sort of thing; I make lots of time to work with others in groups, but rarely have a given enough attention to cultivating personal ties to individuals. Who would have thought it was so important to just hang out?
Don't presume to be immune to the influence of your friends. If you form a bond with someone, that relationship will influence your behavior. You can't touch and not be touched. Choose your friends carefully.

Zen and the art of testing software

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 18:15:16 -0700

In my geek hours, I've been reading Software Testing Foundations (Spillner, Linz, and Schaefer, 2nd Edition, 2007), the internationally recognized intro primerÂ on the subject.Â My conclusion:Â Software testers are spiritual masters.

I've been a programmer for over ten years, but only in the last few have I reached the satori of serious software testing. Lots of people learn to cobble together code, but few become enlightened to the truths of the software tester:

It is nearly impossible to test your own code. You might think that, since you're the person who wrote it in the first place, you would be the one most qualified to tell whether it's really working. But someone else will find flaws in your work exponentially faster than you will.
If it hasn't been tested, it doesn't work. Or, to put it another way, "Nothing works completely correctly the first time you write it." All programmers should chant this mantra as they work, especially when they are making seemingly trivial changes and are tempted to skip testing. Until the code compiles, until you step through in debug mode and see it doing exactly what it ought to be doing, and see the correct results, only then can you believe that you actually did any good.
Even if it works, it doesn't necessary work well or in all cases.Â Or, put another way, "The first way you write it is usually not the best way to write it." Robust design usually emerges from the fires of continuous challenge.
Nothing can be exhaustively tested. You cannot prove that software has no errors. You can only find errors and fix them, and play the odds that no significant issues will arise in the course of normal use. The same truth can be stated another way: "With sufficiently time and diverse conditions, all software will fail."
Testing works best when it is methodical, conscious, planned,Â done early, and done often.Â (As opposed to being done haphazardly, unconsciously, ad hoc, and at the last minute.) Testing is a discipline. It takes will, and courage, and persistence, and faith to conscienciously do it. If you don't do it, you will be continually blindsided by the unexpected.

So am I just a ISO2000-certified geek pushing a spiritual metaphor too far? No, actually I think all of these principles can be mapped back onto spiritual life and spiritual experience:

It is nearly impossible to know your character from the inside out. A total stranger can, in five minutes, discern in you flaws, rationalizations, egos, and illusions that you would never detect in decades of mediation or introspection. If you subject yourself to a process of "peer review," and allow your believes and character to be challenged by impartial observers, you will suss out your shortcomings much more rapidly.
Spiritual practice and belief must be validated through action. If you haven't tested your beliefs by real-world application, they will probably be shallow and relatively fragile. Your convictions (especially your convictions about yourself) need to be tested. This is what Nietzsche was getting at when he subtitled one of his books ("Twilight of the Idols"), "How to philosophize with a hammer" -- by conscienciously rapping on your most treasured beliefs, we find out what's real and what's hollow.
A life that "works" isn't necessarily a good or meaningfulÂ life. You might be holding a job, practicing a profession, raising a reasonably normal family, and in every discernable way have your act together . . . and still not have filled the hole in your soul. If you arrived at your current life unconsciously, following whatever was in front of you and "going with the flow," you're most likely not going to have the ideal life. As Richard Rose said: "You can talk all you want about 'going with the flow.' But I followed up a few flows in my time, and they all wound up in the same place: the sewer."
The truth can only be arrived at subtractively. You can't prove that something is true; only that it's false. Rose called spiritual life a "retreat from untruth" -- you keep consciously throwing out the BS until you are left with nothing by the true. Many spiritual traditions have similar language for the same process: apophatic mysticism, via negativa, "the way down", "dying before you die" . . . reject the false to find the true.
Spiritual testing is a discipline. Although spirituality is ultimately dealing with an indescribable, transcendent reality, the path to reality is describable: a conscious, deliberate discipline of self-inquiry. While nothing is guaranteed, you can be fairly certain that they more you do it, the better your life will turn out.