Who you calling "coder", coder?

Although Coders at Work is a fine collection of interviews with a stellar cast of software people, I hate the title and the way "coder" has become the word of choice for the kind of stuff I do. But I still haven't found a good name for it.

"Programmer" is OK but drab, "Hacker" is good but it has an unfortunate criminal second meaning, "Maker" is both too new and too broad, "Software Engineer" always sounded vaguely pretentious to me. "Software Designer" is probably the most accurate, but it never caught on. "Software Architect" isn't bad, although it tends to get interpreted too narrowly most of the time. Real architects (of buildings) integrate engineering concerns, the knowledge of and need to support patterns of human activity, and artistic striving…it's a label I'm comfortable with. Or simply "Developer", that is open-ended enough while capturing the creative essence of the activity.

But "Coder" is the worst of the lot, it suggests a drone grinding away in some 19th century office with a complete lack of creativity or engagement – someone who simply mechanically encodes ideas that were dreamt up by someone else. Blah.

Maybe it's a function of social context. I would be embarassed to be a labeled a "coder" at some non-specialist social gathering, but among software types it functions something as a badge of honor; it means that you are still hands-on and not some kind of distant manager or philosopher/flamer. Maybe it functions like "queer" or the n-word…a derogation being reappropriated as a badge of pride.

[update: I forgot "Computer Scientist", which is my actual current job title. Of course it is also quite pretentious, and it always brings to mind the adage that any field with "science" in its name isn't one]

Envy and Computational Complexity

While reading this article by Sven Birkerts on artistic envy, it occurred to me that the situation of Salieri in Amadeus has some analogs in computational complexity theory, specifically, the curious dual nature of NP-hard problems. These are problems for which it is possible to recognize (verify) a solution in a reasonable amount of time, but finding that solution almost certainly takes an unreasonable (exponential) amount of time. A typical NP-hard problem involves searching through a very large space of possible solutions (eg, the possible routes a travelling salesman could take to visit all the cities on his circuit. So, given the problem of finding a route shorter than some given value, you need to examine a very large number of possibilities, which can be impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time. But checking that a given route satisfies the conditions is fast and easy.

In Amadeus, while being a genius is hard (and thus rare), recognizing genius is pretty easy. Which is the root of Salieri's problem. He can see Mozart's genius, but there is no way he can duplicate it. Recognizing genius is not necessarily a trivial capability, probably not everyone can do it, but it's a far cry from being a genius, from being able to create (or find?) works that exceed some threshold of quality from the unimaginably huge space of possible compositions. He does not have the processing power for that, and those who do seemed possessed of something supernatural, that is, beyond conceivable mortal power.

This is something of a follow-up to this post. I've been resorting my collection of old papers and grad-school detritus, and I have to say I've been fortunate to have spent a good bit of time in the presence of actual genius, at least the computer science version of it. Like Salieri, I could readily recognize it, even if I couldn't achieve it myself. I guess I was luckier than Salieri to be also almost completely clueless about social status and rank, so at least at the time it didn't occur to me to be envious, which meant it didn't interfere with my ability to learn what I could from these semi-supernatural beings.

Hating on Haidt

I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, and may have a full review eventually. It's getting some quite nasty commentary from the left, due to its both-sides-do-it-can't-we-all-get-along conclusions. Haidt presents himself as a standard-issue liberal who has, through the course of study, come to appreciate conservatism for something other than mere selfish stupidity, and thinks that we all have to do the same. This bland bipartisanship infuriates a certain kind of leftist.


I'll reserve my own judgement about all that. But I wanted to note that some of the virulent reaction to this from the left actually works to disprove Haidt's thesis. Among the six dimensions of morality Haidt identifies, "Loyalty" is one of the three he says that liberals are generally deficient in, or do not appreciate, or do not factor into their own judgements. Yet here Haidt is getting dumped on essentially for the sin of apostasy, the quintessential sin against loyalty. Those angry leftists sure do seem to have a highly tuned sense of loyalty after all.


Yes this is only based on a random smattering of blog comments, but I thought the reflexive irony or whatever it is was so sweet as to be worth noting.


Here's a more serious critique of Haidt's sloppiness, and here's a humorous leftist jibe at former leftists.

Great and Universal Ignorance

The Internet is full of experts, people busily self-branding themself as the go-to person for whatever is the current marketable bit of technology or business or academic fashion. Personally, I've never had much interest in passing myself off as an expert, I'm more fascinated by the huge and ever-growing ensemble of things that I don't know than what I actually do know. To get Rumsfeldian about it, there are the known unknowns – the things I know I don't know (but would like to, if time were infinite), and even at my advanced age there are unknown unknowns, knowable things I am not even aware exist.

Anyway, this passage from a curious little cult book I read in my youth has always stuck with me (emphasis added):

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.

– G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form

Open Government and Private Interests

Tom Slee is an interesting writer (who occasionally comments here), who has published a good book on the limitations of markets and seems to generally fall into the "cyberskeptic" category. He recently published a couple of blog posts critiquing the Open Government movement (or "movement", since one of his complaints is that it is not actually a coherent political movement). I thought these were interesting but misguided, and felt like trying to tease out some details from my initial reaction.


First, why is this important? Well, Open Government is merely one of the many technosocial movements that seems to have spun out of the O'Reilly publishing empire and is deeply enmeshed with it. "Makers" is another, "Big Data" is another, "Web 2.0" was one a few years back but now seems to have been mothballed. All of these are bigger than O'Reilly of course, but he's played a central role in crystallizing these tendencies, generating slogans for them, and (I presume) making a boatload of money off of them.

Whenever I contemplate these I have a split reaction. On the one hand, they are all pretty damn good directions to move in, very much in tune with my own values and thoughts. He's mastered the art of slapping useful labels onto the not-quite-yet-born aspects of the tech world, labels that are just vague and suggestive enough to launch a movement. Yet there's this element of silicon valley hype cycle to them that turns me off as well. Mostly I try to ignore that latter bit, make my peace with it.


But aside from the aesthetics, there is often a huge element of economic centralization that is also happening with these very distributed movements, and that is something that deserves some closer examination. The way O'Reilly makes money off of amateur enthusiast "makers" is a relatively inoffensive example; the way Facebook makes billions off of everybody's private social lives is something more serious. (see "digital sharecropping").


I imagine Slee has somewhat similar feelings, but in his case he's turned this into an ideological conflict between "neoliberalism" and something else (progressivism, I guess). The market side of these movements is more of a turn-off for him than for me, and it may seem particularly abrasive in the case of Open Government, where it tends to support privatized delivery of what are now public services. I don't like the use of "neoliberalism" as a curse word, and am not sure it's even a very coherent ideology. Let's use the more straightforward "market-based mechanisms". These have their place; I don't think progressives should define themselves by a reflexive opposition to the market or market-based solutions to problems.


Here's Slee's most salient complaint against Open Gov:

It's co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

This seems kind of twisted towards the negative, although every element of it has some truth. It is using the language of progressivism, it does enable new ways for private interests to profit from government data, but I just can't see that as an automatic bad thing. The question is whether all that private interest is being harnessed towards the public good or is merely exploiting it, and it is too soon to tell which of those will prevail.


Anyway – one of the reason Open Government seems like a good idea is that everybody knows that Gov 1.0 is completely broken and desperately needs reinvention. Letting Silicon Valley get its hands on it doesn't seem like such a bad option, even if that means a gold rush of private interests trying to profit from the newly opened data landscape. But it would be better if these things were thought through, that actual politics was brought into the discussion, that we don't pretend (this is a common computer delusion that I probably share) that all we have to do is establish digital connections between everything together and peace, harmony, and intelligence will reign.


The real world involves interests and conflict. "Government as a platform" ignores the fact that platforms are contentious political creatures themselves. Even a purely technical platform, say, Java, is not merely technical, different corporate interests are served by its adoption, what rules it follows, etc. So yeah, government is a platform, that's really an excellent way of looking at it, as long as we realize that platforms have politics even when they aren't directly a part of state power.


I remain pretty excited by Open Government, I think it points to a whole slew of services and solutions that haven't been invented yet, and I don't mind all that much if some people are trying to make money off of it. That's how America works, it seems better to accept it than fight it.


[This is not directly relevant but presents a somewhat parallel dilemma; another way in which state power, the counterculture, and technology are intersecting in ways that are intriguing, powerful and somewhat scary.]

Intellectual Archaeology

One thing you can say in favor of electronic books – they don't have to be stored in the garage because of lack of shelf space, so they don't get used as nesting material by the local rodent population. I spent much of the past weekend mucking the rat poop out of the garage, and in the process needed to carefully examine each precious volume as I removed it from one chewed-up box into a new and hopefully impenetrable plastic one.

It's like doing archeology on one's self, every past interest is there, like shards of pottery, buried in a succession of layers. Every time I do this (during moves or major housecleanings or emergencies like this) I re-sort them, based on vague criterion of how they fit together (like "professional" vs other, but in fact I work as hard as I can to blur that line, so that doesn't really work very well). Some even make it to a box to sell or donate, but not very many this time since what remain after the last few filters are those I can't make myself part with. A few get pulled out to give to my children, but they are at the stage of where they would rather find their own books.

It is difficult to pretend that all these books, all these abandoned directions of thought, represent a coherent project, that I was after something during all that time I was accumulating them. Yet there is something that ties them all together, even if it's only my personal history. That is rather disordered, to be sure, but it's not nothing.

I guess I continue to cart around these obsolete chunks of dead trees because they do in some weird way constitute a large chunk of my identity. And just like the part of myself that lives in the head, they are falling victims to decay, to the the depradations of nature and time.

The Prophet Motive

Our shul is having an an internal debate on how much to align ourselves with the Occupy movement. So we had a teach-in, and for that, I did some research on the Biblical and earlier history of the Jubilee tradition. Turns out damaging concentrations of wealth, and ways deal with the economic problems they cause, have both been around for a long time. The Torah is full of what is basically commercial law, which has always seemed kind of boring next to miracles and war and murder and the like, but when approached with the right mindset can be quite fascinating.

One insight I did not bring to the table: The movie version of Fight Club is centered around a debt-retirement scheme, achieved in that case through violence represented by blowing up the office buildings of credit card companies.

The teach-in was only moderately successful from my perspective. I am not big on face-to-face group meeting/discussions, I vastly prefer to have such things over email or similar medium where you don't have everyone constantly jockeying for get their turn to speak, where digressions don't waste people's time, and points can be followed up at leisure…on the other hand, you can't share food that way, and that is half the point of these things.

[Earlier postings on the subject]