An extract from The Last Lost World

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Tozier

As I’ve mentioned, I’m reading and enjoying Pyne & Pyne’s The Last Lost World, insofar as it isn’t a “popularization” of Pleistocene paleontology so much as it is a useful and well-built construction combining aspects of literary criticism and science reporting to that field. That is, in this book we’re actually talking about narratives, and surfacing the tension in scientific discourse between the creation of general robust facts and observations as opposed to the continuously multi-scaled dynamics of the actual world: the ways in which a “species” becomes “real” for example.

Mid-book, I find the following lovely little passage. In a sense it says: perhaps finally we can proceed mindfully. Maybe that’s what I’m asking for when I harp so much and often about the lack of science (and please, someday, engineering) books like this one: that it is time now to be mindful of our roles in the world we create or discover.

It was how that transfiguration had happened [from Darwin to Neodarwinism] that perhaps holds the most interest. In concluding the Origin of Species Darwin imagined “a tangled bank” overflowing with living forms yet organized by discernible laws, and while full of “grandeur,” a scene that did not result from a preformed pattern. Yet as Ernst Cassirer has argued, “Man cannot escape from his own achievement.” Darwin’s tangled bank has been replaced by a “tangled web of human experience” that weaves together language, myth, art, religion, and all the other strands of humanity’s “symbolic net.” That peculiar capacity of human thought remade Darwin’s tangled bank into a shelf of braided narratives in which the entwining of genomic and geographic data had to play out over a cultural landscape: that was where, to continue the analogy, the selection would take place. The revival of neo-Darwinian concepts, however, too often brought with it a neo-Darwinian scientism that failed to apply to its own informing conceits the perspective it demanded of others. In particular, it made Darwinian evolution an act of special creation.

It was a simplistic narrative that assumed that ideas could be discovered out of data the way bones could be found in sandstone or tuff, and it viewed the progress of biological science (and archaeology) in a way partisans scorned when others applied it to their own fields. They did not appreciate the extent to which their explanatory ideas, even the theory of organic evolution, had a long history, and that, like Equuus caballus within the equids or Homo sapiens among the hominins, the idea was not the intended end product towards which all research had trended but the selected survivor of ancient stock, a product of happenstance, historical contingency, and usefulness. Disciplinary histories tended to be teleological, as narrative must be; the history of the idea of evolution was thus orthogenic in ways the theory’s advocates denounced when applied to nature.

Darwinian evolution was less a special creation, the spark of a divine insight, than it was the rough, imperfect, best adapted, useful, and cantankerous outcome of a tedious and often errant chronicle of observations and imaginings. It was a powerful idea, and once discovered, destined (so it seemed to many) to ramify across whole continents of learning. It offered a promised consilience, which could seem the apex to which all prior study had tended. But such apparent inevitability was an inherent construct of narrative, and just as an organism’s traits are not intrinsically better or worse but better or more poorly adapted to its setting, so it is with ideas. The evolutionary paradigm achieved much of its power and reach because it tapped into very old traditions of thought. Far from being a radical innovation without precedent, Darwinian evolution had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoariest concepts in Western civilization, the Great Chain of Being.

The March of Revision

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Tozier

A long time ago, several careers ago indeed, a bunch of us graduate students nabbed the Department van and drove from Oxford to Columbus to see Stephen Jay Gould speak at Ohio State University. For those of you too young or unfortunate to have heard Gould speak: he was good. Not merely TED-talk good, but a man who spoke as he wrote: with parentheses and ellipses and em-dashes, long big-bite cogent thoughts, paragraph-structured. And musical.

So imagine him. Imagine him alive or as a ghost, and in particular speaking about the Myth of Progress. I don’t honestly recall whether he talked about the Myth of Progress when he was speaking in Columbus that night; it might have been about Creationism (which was hot in those days) or some other irrationality. But today you and I, we’re going to chat a bit about the Myth of Progress, and I’m invoking Gould as its stalwart foe.

That said, this isn’t going to be about how Science (done right) can help people think in the world. Indeed, it’s about how Science (as she is done) is fucking up how people think. Including, I should emphasize, the majority of Science. And Engineering. And more or less all public policy therefrom derived.

So as it exists in my head, the Myth of Progress lives somewhere between being a folk heuristic, a bad habit of visualization, and a formalized misunderstanding of how the biological world actually works. The Great Chain of Being is one facet: the notion, expanded and locked in since the Neoplatonists, that the world is organized along a lovely axis leading (in some static sense) from imperfectly primitive on up to perfect and holy. The March of Progress illustration you’ve seen parodied in so many advertisements is another facet: the gamboling monkey, the crouching ape, the slumped cave man, the dude striding purposefully ahead, and so on. And so on.

Now Stephen Jay Gould, he wrote a lot on the subject of the Myth of Progress. I am not him, and heaven forfend I tread even near his eminent footsteps, so I am going to summarize what he said on the Myth of Progress for my own purposes here: It is not just bullshit, it’s dangerous bullshit.

Evolution doesn’t collapse down into a linear anything, and it’s not just wrong but misleading to take the branching network of descent and cross-breeding and abuse it that way. Evolution doesn’t proceed by discrete steps, and it’s not only wrong but misleading to imply that species replace one another. Evolution doesn’t even proceed when you get right down from it. It is always happening, everywhere, all over: all the things that ever happen among organisms and their environments are in a real sense “evolution going on”.

There are subtleties in this, of course. A lot of the more insidious ones even biologists fall prey to. There’s the tendency towards calling bacteria “primitive” because they were first. And don’t get me started on the swarm of philosophical traps that comprise the ill-formed notions of beginnings and endings, births and extinctions, even the nature and definitions of “individuals” and “species”. Some day when we’ve both got more time, we’ll do a bunch of onerous mythbusting on these themes.

Maybe. Who knows? But this morning I’m here to talk about writing.

Ah, tradition. You start with an idea or two, and maybe you outline or you blast out a textual draft, and then maybe you print it or you step away and come back to the top of the file, and work through it all, and maybe restructure it, and then there’s this phase where you see inconsistencies on a number of scales or notice shortcomings in references or links or illustrations, and you converge and you refine and you stay up late and then you’re done.

You write a little gamboling monkey of a draft, and you work your way up to the cocky dude with a spear on his shoulder. You slap him into an email attachment or a manila envelope, drop a cover letter on him, and off he goes, done. In the Record. Your baby.

Your property, among other things. Your reputation, your name, your ideas or at least your re-presentation of carefully acknowledged other people’s ideas.

OK, maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe you’ll get it back with some suggested corrections, and you’ll do a couple of further steps of the dance to move it to a more advanced state, and then that’s what’s done. Or maybe you realize later than is typical that there’s a different qualitative structure of your written thing called for, perhaps something that became apparent only after you’d mostly-completed an earlier version, and you revise, but then the refinement process starts again and… well, done is done.

You own that done thing. If you’re collaborating, maybe all of you own it. But it’s owned, right?

Now, some Unthinkable Things:

You return to an earlier version of a written work in progress, and start refining that—without abandoning the other branch. In other words, you take a “written work” two different directions at once.
You keep changing a work after it has been delivered without explicitly indicating that it has been changed.
Somebody else takes an earlier (private) version of your work, and revises that in a different direction, without supplanting or replacing your completely personal one.
You don’t give credit to other people’s ideas that appear in your work. No links, no citations, not even any block quotes.
Somebody else builds on a “final” version of your work, and doesn’t explicitly acknowledge your contribution.

Bad, bad stuff. Icky squicky stuff for writers and scientists and photographers and more or less anybody in the Life of the Mind.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Stuff happens, doesn’t it? All of them happen. Students of course do this stuff, mere primitive Students who have not yet been corrected. And insidious scoundrels, who have not yet been brought to justice. Oh, and the absent-minded sometimes will do some of those, especially the ones where they forget to give credit where due. And there’s unconscious plagiarism of course, and self-plagiarism, and there are some ritualized ways one can (for example) take a prior work and bundle it up in a new work by expansion or repurposing.

So those happen.

And then there’s this odd thing about the Public Domain: It permits all those things. You could put zombies in Pride and Prejudice if you wanted, without mentioning the lady who wrote it, but it might not be as widely read without the invocation of her reputation. If instead you took an obscure magazine-serialized anti-Catholic novel of the 1850s and set it in space, and nobody had ever seen it besides maybe ever-watchful Miriam Burstein… but it might [well] end up being a better book.

That’s just to speak of intention. There’s also just noise, isn’t there? What is “done”? You write until the writing is done, but you don’t count typesetting: there are a dozen other people sometimes between you shipping off your “finished” dude with his spear and the discounted book on the remainder shelf at the side of the book store. There are copy editors (hopefully), and copy-and-paste errors, and typesetting, and printing and imposition… all sorts of variation can crop up from “the system”.

And a librarian or a bookseller or an Information Scientist or maybe even just that rare English student who pays attention will spend as long as you like speaking on the subject of “versions” and “works” and “editions” and “variants”.

So, then. What is a book or a paper or a blog post or an invention, that a species is not? You cannot make the argument that a species is “real” where a work is not, because of course the notion of species is just as fraught. Which is why Stephen Jay Gould is in the room, his ghost watching and grinning (I hope), ready to jump in with a long well-formed sentence to remind you: None of these things is a thing. They can be useful. They can help us do work, and tell better stories about the world. But “species” has a history, and has bad edges; “individual” and “descent” even have bad edges, when you get right down to maternal effects on development and microflora and epigenetics and all that other stuff that’s useful in speaking of exceptions in biology.

Those exceptions are evident to any advanced practitioner. They leave the biologist a choice: to either steer well clear of problematic areas, or to jab a finger down inside to see what happens.

jab

In software we have the beginning of a very different notion of the bounds of things. There is collaboration, there are anastomoses in the “tree” of software, and a growing cultural norm that reuse and reusability are not only permitted but rewarded. There are licenses, and there are reputations and livelihoods made by sharing. Great Minds of our day, like Clay Shirky and Steve Johnson, they’re poking at these very holes in the context of property, progress, ownership and collaboration. The law and the Internet, the social and the academic.

Me, I’m no Great Mind. I’ve got a monotonous boring old thing I always always do: I ask why? You might be tempted to spank a five-year-old who plays too often with the iterated “Why?” In my case… well, consider that astute observation of George Bernard Shaw’s before you try that approach.

What might happen if you let one of those Unthinkable Things happen? Just let it go. What might happen?

Why?

I don’t know. That’s why I ask. But there’s one thing I learned a long time ago about life in the world: Eventually everything happens. There is a niche, a context, a way of life in every approach.

Too long. Do not read.

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Tozier

The other day I wrote a bit about remembering, and things otherwise unremarked tied together to make the cloth of history. This was framed a bit as a reaction to purgers, cleansers, simplifiers and the norm, but really? Really it was a circle’s line crossing several times (they can do that, you know).

I use that phrase “drawing a circle” often. It’s Charles Fort’s, originally. Go look it up if you need reminding. He was a crazy old crackpot of a fellow, Charlie was. Amusing, though: he could after all tell an engaging story.

Anyway, a decade is a foolishly long time to draw a circle; fifteen years, twenty years, a lifetime even crazier. You get wild sometimes along the path, or jittery, or buffeted off course, or just plain bored. Eventually you don’t end up with anything quite so precise or Zen as a “circle”. But you draw, and what you draw you call a circle because that’s what the metaphor demands: it’s always a circle.

I think 1997 it was I had a chance to visit Trinity. The place with the bomb, and the place about which I wrote my first blog-ramble thing about my father’s stories of working on high-speed cameras capable of taking photographs of nuclear explosions, and how (because surely the records are gone, or at least unremarked) those photos of the growing blossom of Trinity’s explosion must therefore be his, mine, ours, that camera’s. I called it “nanohistory” back then; it was a bit of a gag on nanotechnology I thought, and the future, and also multiscaled phenomena which we were all doing back in the day, but that was the thing I saw and wrote.

By now some of the folks who ate Green Chili Cheeseburgers with me at the Owl (best in the world) and rode the Trinity bus that day have had strokes. Some Ph.D.s are granted; some wives are dead. They’ve moved out of their well-preserved Moderne homes along the Turquoise Trail, they’re still living in Santa Fe, they’re where they went. And so on. Years of little accumulated drifts have piled up around the line they drew collectively. Unremarked (at least by me) since the day I filled a roll of 35mm film with their portraits lit by White Sands sun.

And in that time I’ve emptied out the house where my father’s and mother’s material stories, their “memorabilia”, was stockpiled, and picked up new habits and careers, had deaths and all kinds of wiggles of my own. Even the rambling essay I wrote in Santa Fe is nearly gone from the world. Its earlier versions are surely gone, as I never have been bothered to keep older versions, early edits, that sort of thing, and I just threw away the diskettes a week or two back. In the trash. There is no machine in my house that could read them, after all, so why bother with drafts of unread rambles?

This is normal stuff. Mundane; entirely of the world. But it’s about remembering. Being reminded.

We were inventing Big Data back there in the late 1990s. Have I told you that? I think I’ve apologized for it already. But some of the very people at Trinity with me that first Saturday in October fifteen years back were the founders of bioinformatics. Some of us are the data miners who wrestle piles and reams of ASCII and pixels into cobbled-together contraptions we built from folk wisdom and jury-rigged repurposed components we dragged out from the garage. We were discovering how to render data down into clarified, burning utility: models, predictions, and above all controls.

Control was a big one, and I think the most ironic. After all, we were complexologists: for fuck’s sake we were the End of Science, with our hand-waving anecdotal subjective contingent agent-based models. We were about emergence, the not just uncontrolled but inexplicable.

Though it didn’t really work out that way somehow. Nowadays not many of us are left here in the Proverbial Woods. There’s a fad or a revolution or a war or something, or so I hear, and the vast majority have put on ill-fitting suits and gone down to the City to be hired up by Big Data Distilleries—Big Brother, Data Science, and even a few at the Tower of Words. Those folks stroll the aisles now under suspended ceilings of fluorescent-lit data centers, patting earnest workers in (proverbial) white lab coats on their shoulders. Either that, or they fell to the service of corporations, and their work became the jargon of the Street, which dearly loved our Edges of Chaos and Emergences and Nonlinearities as handy excuses for doing what had already been decided: making this world we live in.

Just a few of us left here Ending Science these days. A little bit at a time, the work goes on until we’re all bought off or dead. We’re not a colony in any sense now of course; more in the role of folksy fogeys in the shadows of the diner downtown, talking up contingency and narrative, while clinging to an obsolete humanistic definition of “emergence” and “path-dependence” nearly all worn to thread like a quilt in a barn.

Yeah, well. At least there’s coffee.

Hey, here’s a funny thing: Did you know it’s no longer obsessive compulsive disorder when you collect a petabyte of data from a particular rat neuron and absorb your months’ attention focused on just the lovely patterns in the spike trains? Or that it’s no longer hoarding when you’re driven to stockpile every digitized book in the entire world? Or that even the old saw about trying the “same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes” doesn’t really come into play nowadays when the things you keep trying are the functional capacities of combinatorial variants of protein sequences? And! And! It isn’t eavesdropping—you are not a scary neighbor lady—when all the phone calls of a city are pressed into your service of knowing what those damned kids are doing over there, with their parents away (it shouldn’t be allowed)!

That’s inference now, not madness.

It’s the frontier we (and others not far out along our social networks) opened up for you all, about the time we rode the dusty road into Trinity. All those things are now new kinds of service. Not a sad lone madness left among them.

[“Isn’t that interesting, isn’t that interesting.” That’s what my sharp old friend Lew Tilney would have said, without a single question mark at all, when I was dazedly walking the halls of Leidy Labs trying desperately to discover what was wanted of me by my superiors. He’d walk up and slap his hand down on your shoulder and say, “Tozier! You know about trees! I was just reading about trees! Did you know there’s absolutely no damned way water can get to the top of trees? Physics won’t handle it! Now isn’t that interesting.” And he’d stride down the hall in his red socks and I’d wish I could see what came of that thread, instead of having to justify the counting of combinatorial proteins’ functions to people who found it mad. I learned years too late that Lew was always right every time he told you, “Now isn’t that interesting.” It was and is always interesting, salient, connected. There is never any question to mark.]

So a point is, that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a time around 1900 when talking into boxes and expecting an answer stopped being considered madness. Or a time when acting as though you knew what a person far away was doing that very day didn’t make folks laugh. And so on. You get that picture? Now isn’t that interesting.

At any rate, some of the people on that bus to Trinity, and plenty more who didn’t make the trip that day, or who I met later or earlier in my life by a few years one way or the other—they made all these madnesses into stuff you see on magazine covers and RSS feeds.

And I love that. I can’t tell you how lucky I’ve been to fall into this hobby of watching smart people noticing things.

It feels like “madness” periodically becomes the fabric of societies, in turns, as new transformative technologies come online and escape and spread and do their stuff. I could be more focused I’m sure, more journalistic. I could refer to one of those Philosophers of Science you only really see in epigrams these days, Kuhn or Lakatos or somebody. But not this time; this is mere folksy rambling, not observation of a sort that’s useful.

I just noticed, is all. Way I see it, this is me just having fun watching smart people starting to try to realize they ought maybe to notice something again. And undoubtedly I’ll just sit here and watch for a while more, and when nothing’s forthcoming, maybe I’ll just change the subject.

Not worked it out? Well, that’s fine, that’s fine. No reason to stop chatting, is it?

Maybe we ought to shift gears, talk about the humanities for a while. Wikipedia (I smile for some reason whenever I link there these days) says the humanities are disciplines that study the human condition. “Disciplines” is another word that makes me smile nowadays, too, thank Abbott.

You know, I have a fond respect for those poor folks in the humanities. Personal fondness even. When I was a kid, it was decided I was either going to go to Case and be a biologist, or go to Oberlin or what’s that other place’s name that begins with a D—I can’t recall—and be an English major. A writer sort. Senior year it was old Bill Cawley, my high school English teacher (so hard not to say “professor”, isn’t it?) who slapped a hand down on my shoulder and told me people actually still could make a living, if a hard one, writing. But I picked the other, and luckily too because I met my beloved wife of twenty-five years (amusingly enough in a History of Science course, about stories, words, though we barely paid attention at the time for love), and as a pretty good science sort I got eventually to that bus in Trinity, and learned or to some extent made up the skills of Big Data. And here I am. A folkways practitioner of complexology.

Along the way I spent time in various academies and such. Over there sat the archaeologists, writers, the historians and all those other humanities folks (who I swear actually wear tweed sometimes), clinging to shrinking islands of departments in the context-focused Transformed Universities of the Austere Era. Trying diligently to instill a love of letters, or story, or memory or something in the thousands of kids who trooped through the lecture halls.

Kids are still, at least for the moment, expected to get an embedding cultural framework slapped around them, if only to keep them good citizens and informed voters and able to see perspective on the human condition. Though not too much.

Whatever is the “human condition” these days? Surely it’s 2.0 by now. It’s a kind of madness to think it hasn’t changed, that people haven’t been transformed utterly by all this networking and having machine intelligences at hand with which they can sift the raw data of the revolution to produce information, utility, weal and woe of various sorts. I mean: we have a new ubiquitous sensorium! A different world, in which Science didn’t End at all.

And see all of public policy seems now to want to do away with the waste Great Works entail, the distraction from what kids want and what’s best for them. Ideally they should be getting jobs, and learning skills, and preparing for whatever it is Big Data uncovers “automatically”. That’s what I seem to hear. Politically conservative folks want to do away with the thoughts that the humanities provoke; politically liberal folks want to do away with the ties to benighted and inhuman Bad Old Hegemonic Times the humanities rehumanize. In both cases I think it’s maybe the sense of inconsistency you get from read literature and discussed history that’s the biggest threat. We talk of the humanities in terms of waste and inutility, but really they’re seen as a threat.

They’re confusing. They dilute the story of the present and the future.

Letters, you see, are complex. History isn’t glib, it’s really never glib: it’s got folds tucked into its folds, and everything seems to mean something else to somebody else. The humanities are onerous because they’re all so tied together by these confusing personal subjective accidental ramified networks that reach back down into the stacks of libraries we’re emptying, and meanings and usage we’re glossing over these days.

And so they’re dangerous. Lean times call for leanness; what’s needed now is an efficient ability to frame every actionable item and sort it on the basis of delivered value. History doesn’t have a lane on the kanban.

It’s a wasteful kind of madness to dive down too far into old books. And a dangerous kind of madness to force kids who might better be working in the present and building our future to sit quiet and look instead into the past. What could they possibly gather up from that well-trod cemetery soil? Things are different now.

By now you’re thinking I’m bemoaning the end of the humanities departments and the closure of libraries and the loss of all that tweed. Really? You know, that would be a nice simple story you could distill out of this path if you like: “Dagnabbit, wouldn’t it be better if we taught kids Greek again? Why not add Letters and History to STEM, and make it… STEMLH. Crap. We’re going to need more vowels. Get Art on the phone, stat.”

But no, that’s not what I’m encircling. That’s been done, and besides I’m supposed to be Ending Science.

The trick is, Science is all tied and twisted up in the Humanities, Snow notwithstanding. They’re jealous siblings, copying one another in turn. Now isn’t that interesting.

Here’s what I love about the humanities, at this juncture: Just as every family gathering has that memorable crazy Aunt or Uncle, the humanities still insist on coming to our metaphoric Thanksgivings and rambling on about their personal hobby horses.

Brutal frankness: I like them humanities folks much better these days than I like most of my Sciencey Engineery cohort, or most any of the folks who sit with me at conferences of learned societies nowadays when I deign to drag myself down to the City and attend. They’re all good people who compute and sift and train up the Future, but they are nonetheless a boring old bunch. That stereotype is still just as true as the tweed humanists’ trope.

Ah but see, those humanities folks, they can tell a story. And they remember stuff. Crazy stuff, like how to read the shipping manifests of third century Asia Minor, or how some elliptic references to “death” are really horny poet-talk while others are about tuberculosis. And this one is best, as I see it: They’re willing to use the word “remember” to refer to acts of construction.

They apologize a little bit to the rest of us when they “remember”, just to explain the weird affectation they have that telling a story is building a thing. The mode in science these days, and also engineering, is that remembering is paring away mistakes, and disclosing the real truth of the world so it can be shared and consistency may reign on Earth as it does… (well you know the rest of that one). Among themselves the humanities folks all know remembering is a special kind of making, that recalling and recording is constructing novelty, that it’s not computation or reduction or scouring away matrix. And even better: they know how to make this special mad kind of making useful, or at least engaging and entertaining. Often as not they spend most of their time entertaining one another, reading their papers aloud at conferences and such, but sometimes one will be lifted up from their shrinking island preserve and be presented in the popular press, as a kind of Outsider Artist or something.

That thing they do, I like that. I like their mindfulness, that they act as if knowing were making.

Not many of us like it so much any more, though. It’s a mad notion when you look at it from a modern perspective: history and literature, poetry and classics, archaeology and dancing about architecture. “Mad” for the same reasons you’d be put away in a rest home for standing up in a busy public place where people are trying to go off and get their proper work done, yelling and ranting and invoking archaic names in ceaseless demands that they slow down and notice, see what’s there—or more likely what isn’t there.

Crazy people tell folks to slow down in lean times. They question what’s real and known and true all over again, stuff we’ve shipped, the truth we’ve accumulated. As if when you examined it again for the hundredth time, the old photograph of a bomb exploding would this time be more than an image of reality hanging on a fence in a desert. Some kind of story you made up on the spot, different next time.

But of course you and I know remembering is simply looking stuff up.

It’s not making things up. Data access, which is why we’re all so earnest in our recording and curation of the facts. Data access is what drives Big Science now, and marketing and all statistical miracles that have come to pass and are nascent in the world. It’s the real world, the world of data that’s important, not the made-up world of fiction and history. A cancer cure is not a story, nor is the money in the bank you made from high-speed trading, nor even the counts of the number of times the gendered pronouns appeared in our digitized Early Modern books. Those are facts, written down right there on in public.

And yet there are still a few of these other poor folks, sitting down and quietly reading old stuff and acting as if modern statistics and data-driven explanations were anything at all like story-telling. Mad folk. Fiddling in back-country hollers of the academy, little ivy-covered museums and even lone shacks off the beaten track, refusing for whatever reason to move down to the City and get themselves a proper job adjuncting or something.

Ayup.

No, that was it. I was just thinking out loud about the humanities, is all. Sad to see them go, you know. But it’s for the best.

Say, I bet you know about data! I’ve been thinking a little about data lately. Did you know that there’s so much data now that there’s no damned way to consider every model, prediction, or control mechanism—even for one given data stream? Let alone all of them! It makes no sense. Data’s all there, models are simple to build, and so now all the work is boiled down to arguments over technique, concocting various approaches and invoking conflicting proofs, and worrying about utility functions and constraints and contingencies. Hell, it’s like now we have the data, only the hard part is left: figuring out what questions to ask first.

Now isn’t that interesting.

The problem with “Customers”

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Tozier

Several foundational aspects of agile project management focus on the role of the Customer. The role is of course best-defined in the context of work-for-hire, or consulting, or even in places where the team is doing volunteer work in an Open Source setting for a specified Maintainer. And historically this makes sense.

In the early days, I remember a lot of people in software projects would conflate the Customer with the User, even when they weren’t the same person. And then of course there’s the (risky?) conflation of Customer with Bill-payer, or (maybe more dangerous?) Customer with Project Owner (in a Scrum sense). But those are known problems, and the agile coaching community seems to have handled them reasonably well—in the context of traditional professional settings—if nothing else by repetitive correction.

The trouble I’ve found recently is how often the term puts off explorers, those who are tempted or solicited to try an “agile for one” (or “agile for us”) approach to their investigatory work—the just-try-it-and-see-what-happens projects that fill our days as engineers, scientists, artists and Makers more generally. To some extent the problem is the word and the freight it carries, and the diverse languages and cultures of from which those folks come, and the cultural antipathy prevalent between communitarian life-of-the-mind folks and doing-it-for-the-money folks.

I know, having spent so much time among the uppity agile rebels, that this “Customer” can be you, or all of you together (as long as you can arrange to Speak with One Voice), or nobody in particular. I understand that the point of the role is some combination of (1) identifying the most valuable thing to deliver next so you can focus on that and deliver it next, and (2) avoiding the Mission Creep and Babbage’s Disease that keeps projects from ever delivering anything of use at all, and (3) learning the (surprisingly rare) skill of Not Producing Unintelligible Crap.

But the word itself, and the freight it carries, seems to put off people—not least students and other academics—who I have to say are among the most “at risk” for failing to ship any useful work at all, ever. The deep usefulness of the Customer concept, as far as I’m concerned, is that somebody ought to be able to dynamically and adaptively sort the many things you might do next into an ordered list that reflects current perception of value.

To me, “being Customer” in my projects—whether I’m doing open-ended research or targeted software development—is a visceral change I make in my beliefs, desires and intentions. If I’m sorting stories or planning the next day or week, I try to look not at the subjective experiences I’ll have when making progress and doing work, but instead at the value I expect (right then) to obtain from the statement of purpose each story represents. It doesn’t matter than I’m the Customer and the “Development Team” on certain projects, as long as I can differentiate the stance I take when making decisions in those two roles. It doesn’t matter that the “story” is “make one and see what happens”; as a Customer I see that as a time-boxed deliverable, and demand it change to “spend one day making one, and publish a result at the end of that day”.

(What I try never to do as “Customer” is assign expectations of how long something will take. I am there, at that moment, only to see the value in various stories as they’re presented, and add new ones, and rearrange their order. If I need to decide how much might be done before the end of the iteration, or even whether one single “story” won’t or can’t fit in the allotted time, I’ve got to consciously switch over to “Maker” role. Oh, and also I try to avoid ever saying, “Go away, and never come back!” to myself….)

That’s how I try to run my research, and what I want to see in others. It’s safer exploration. It’s the opposite (as far as I can tell) of how academics and STEM folks think most often, and absolutely the opposite of how schoolwork and most technical professional work is planned, because those are simply given lists of comprehensive requirements. Bit three-ring binders full of “it must do all these things”.

Maybe the problem is that these folks, starting off as they do with such deep antipathy to the culture that led to the term, think the “Customer” role is some sort of permit for premature assessment, some kind of master:slave relationship, a debt and an onerous promise to fulfill that debt. But in practice, sorting tasks by value does not entail punishing failures to deliver on those tasks (and this is the deepest reason why measuring “velocity” is so fraught). “Let’s spend a day getting this better!” is not the same as “Get this done by Friday!” The former implies that no matter what happens—we get distracted, we had an emergency, we couldn’t think of a way to make it better, we make it better enough that it goes away entirely—there’s always another round of planning in which we can do the same thing again, another day somewhere down the line where there is perceptible value in working on that thing a bit more. And by the same argument, it means that progress on other fronts is (for the moment) more valuable than working on that thing until it’s “done”!

It saves huge amounts of time to use the Customer role explicitly. That saves my life, some days. It lets me have something to show for my work every day. Me, the “Customer”. Otherwise me, the “Developer” would wander off somewhere doing whatever random crap caught his attention, and end up rushing the useful work at the end.

I don’t know a better word than “Customer”. But I don’t know a better word than “agile” yet, and it’s getting close to the day when that also will need to change. I don’t think I can use the word in print any more, so I’m looking for a replacement soon. Spend a day thinking about it and send me whatever you find by the end of that day, OK?