In particular, this strikes me as something that bears on many discussions I’ve had about machine learning and modern statistics. And it reminds me of a cultural problem I’ve been wrestling with among genetic programming researchers and operations research people for some time. And would be useful in explaining the pedagogy and practice of engineering “craftsmanship”, and more specifically that of software development.

Oh, and complex systems research and emergence, too. That’s in there, somehow.

So you can see why I might think it’s important to understand.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something in here—perhaps obfuscated by what today we might perceive as a difficult style, but which is an attempt to convey very specific concepts in a way that tries to avoid misunderstanding—is vital to many threads in modern life. In particular, something deeply important happens down in the last paragraph, where I’ve highlighted it.

I would love to have a correspondent who could discuss this productively. Perhaps one might be found to read the original Dewey, or even the few surrounding pages extracted in McDermott’s summary, and tell me just what it is I’m responding to?

…Inquiry is the directed or controlled transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinately unified one. The transition is achieved by means of operations of two kinds which are in functional correspondence with each other. One kind of operations deals with ideational or conceptual subject-matter. This subject-matter stands for possible ways and ends of resolution. It anticipates a solution, and is marked off from fancy because, or, in so far as, it becomes operative in instigation and direction of new observations yielding new factual material. The other kind of operations is made up of activities involving the techniques and organs of observation. Since these operations are existential they modify the prior existential situation, bring into high relief conditions previously obscure, and relegate to the background other aspects that were at the outset conspicuous. The ground and criterion of the execution of this work of emphasis, selection and arrangement is to delimit the problem in such a way that existential material may be provided with which to test the ideas that represent possible modes of solution. Symbols, defining terms and propositions, are necessarily required in order to retain and carry forward both ideational and existential subject-matters in order that they may serve their proper functions in the control of inquiry. Otherwise the problem is taken to be closed and inquiry ceases.

One fundamentally important phase of the transformation of the situation which constitutes inquiry is central in the treatment of judgement and its functions. The transformation is existential and hence temporal. The pre-cognitive unsettled situation can be settled only by modification of its constituents. Experimental operations change existing conditions. Reasoning, as such, can provide means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot effect it. Only execution of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring about the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation. Since this principle also applies to the meanings that are elaborated in science, the experimental production and re-arrangement of physical conditions involved in natural science is further evidence of the unity of the pattern of inquiry. The temporal quality of inquiry means, then, something quite other than that the process of inquiry takes time. It means that the objective subject-matter of inquiry undergoes temporal modification.

Terminological. Were it not that knowledge is related to inquiry as a product to the operations by which it is produced, no distinctions requiring special differentiating designations would exist. Material would merely be a matter of knowledge or of ignorance and error; that would be all that could be said. The content of any given proposition would have the values “true” and “false” as final and exclusive attributes. But if knowledge is related to inquiry as its warrantably assertible product, and if inquiry is progressive and temporal, then the material inquired into reveals distinctive properties which need to be designated by distinctive names. As undergoing inquiry, the material has a different logical import from that which it has as the outcome of inquiry. In its first capacity and status, it will be called by the general name subject-matter. When it is necessary to refer to subject-matter in the context of either observation or ideation, the name content will be used, and, particularly on account of its representative character, content of propositions.

The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using “objects” for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiries. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries which warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they are means of attaining knowledge of something else. In the strict sense, they are part of the contents of inquiry as the word content was defined above. But retrospectively (that is, as products of prior determination in inquiry) they are objects.

[Latter emphasis is mine.]

I’d heard the news about the breach, but the first sign I had that we were involved was when I tried to use the card for an online purchase. No email, no phone call, nothing from Citi regarding the problem. When the transaction failed three or four times I knew it wasn’t the vendor website’s fault, so I checked my Citi account online. There I saw a bright red warning that my account had been shut down because of risk of compromise.

When I called (this was back on February 20th or so, I think) to complain about the lack of notice, the customer service representative explained that Citi had no time or resources to notify all the cardholders, especially given the scale of the possible breach, but had rather acted to place all the possibly compromised accounts on hold as soon as they could. I was told they had issued new cards with new account numbers, at no charge to any of us, and that the new card would be here shortly.

Well, we got the new card, and we activated it and set up online access.

Interesting thing we discover, which (aside from the general lack of coverage of the Heartland fiasco in the press and blogosphere) is why I’m bothering to write this: a strange charge we didn’t recognize, with code TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED. The amount charged ($99) was the same as the new charges that had accrued on the old account before the transfer, but “99″ is one of those numbers that makes you wonder about intentional design. In any case, this clearly implied we had either been double-charged, or charged an extra and unauthorized $99 fee.

So I got back on the phone and called customer service just now, and spoke with Jim. He explained to me that TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED was a “system message”, which represented (as it seemed) the sum of items booked to the old closed account just before the new one was set up. He explained it was an “accounting quirk in their system”, and that it would disappear at the beginning of the next billing cycle. Merchants had authorized $99 worth of charges right before the account was closed and balances were transferred, and the mysterious line item indicated the transition from “authorization” to actual charge. Jim explained that generally this transition removes the authorization charge from the billing system, but because the account changed in the interim period, the charge accrued on the new account but the authorization couldn’t be removed from the old one (or something like that). He pointed out (very helpfully) that if my card had been misplaced or stolen, the same dynamics would have kicked in there, too, and the same sort of transactions would have happened.

This got me thinking. It may be ephemeral, a “quirk of the system”, but nonetheless on the books and until the authorization is cleared I owe an extra $99 to Citi. It’s mere coincidence of timing that our account came to $99. But it seems highly likely (given the several-days typical delay between authorization and charge in many merchants’ transactions) that any regular cardholder might have one or more transactions spanning a period like this.

So here we have hundreds of thousands, or millions of credit card accounts, all compromised and all synchronously being transferred to new accounts. What fraction of those had interrupted transactions spanning the synchronized transfer, resulting in these TOTAL SEC BALANCE TRANSFR-ITEMIZED “system messages”?

The numbers are hard for me to even estimate with the information I have on hand (though Jim did allow it was “really a lot” of cards). Seems big.

The thing I have to wonder about is: just at this crucial juncture in the financial crisis, when the company is under the closest scrutiny in decades and the stock is suffering from massive loss of investor faith, Citi has double-booked a sizable Accounts Receivable sum.

And probably not just Citi….

This is something about business, project management, planning and implementation: About how a certain class of manager views the specification of goals, the sense that goals met create business value, and how those people deal with the real people whose work it is to connect the two idealizations (goal, value) to one another by applying their experience, insight, and ability to communicate.

In my experience, software developers are appropriate to the task; “computer programmers” cannot as a rule reliably deliver value from their work.

This is something about pedagogy, graduate training, the Academy and specialization: About how grant applications are written years before monies are acquired; how “real” academic projects are spelled out in grant applications as if foresight were perfect and exploration was rational, while the work is done by substitutable and inexperienced students and young faculty; how “homework” projects and evaluations are treated as if individual people can learn in a vacuum of reading and self-direction and wordy lecture, as if textbooks were helpful without conversation; as if the cost, utility, quality and duration of scholarship were all perfectly fungible with one another, perfectly liquid… subject to insignificant exchange costs not worthy of note.

In my experience, students learn when they work collectively on a shared goal, supporting one another, and in the process learn by discovering and sharing their nonoverlapping skills: when they “cheat”. “Stars” who cannot explain their work, who cannot collaborate, who disdain “cheating” (by the standards of most modern Honor Pledges and tenure review committees) by sitting quietly by themselves and doing what their massive insight has revealed is the path to what you (mere people) need… these folks cannot as a rule reliably deliver value from their work.

This is something about the theory and practice of artificial intelligence, operations research, machine learning, and metaheuristics: About the unwillingness or inability to treat techniques prescriptively except as a form of self-promotion of one’s own research or personal bias; about the strangely persistent shortfall in communicating the utility of those thousand variant methods from linear programming to fictitious play to genetic programming or graphical model learning, any one of which might potentially answer questions, identify patterns, and help people invent software or physical engineering designs; about a culture of “practitioners” who cannot be bothered to learn enough theory to explain why their approach is sufficient for their particular tasks, and a separate culture of “theorists” who cannot be bothered to learn enough of best practice to explain why their approach is necessary for any task.

In my experience, the average time an algorithm is expected to run may be of interest, but as far as my particular problem is concerned it has no bearing until I have run it for a while to see some results, see how it’s going, suss out what “kind” of problem this specific instance is—to see what value comes from “how long” it will take to run, as opposed to seeing any answer at all. I do work, I create stuff, to better understand the path from idealized goal to realized value. Things like speed, accuracy, ease of use and understandability, these are things I try to measure, not assume beforehand for some combination of problem and approach, and I want information with which to update my assessments as quickly and accurately as possible. Because for some strange reason I am unable to tell beforehand how difficult an interesting instance of a problem will be, even with the most familiar approach.

I have a great deal of both practical experience and theoretical backing in these matters, and all that has happened for me (your mileage may vary) is that I am more uncertain about my prejudices, and yours, all the time.

On average, doing something small, immediately, is better than talking a long time about the many things you could do, about potentialities and limits and average behavior. And perhaps better than doing “just anything” is considering the small set of simple incremental improvements, selecting the one that seems it will provide the most value for that scale of effort, and trying it.

In too many domains we conflate rationality with rigor, and treat the straightest path between them as a recipe for success. But isn’t “rationality” an intentionally bounded thought process? a strategy of fully dismissing alternatives as greedily and thoroughly as possible?

But I don’t want to spend my time with rigorous people. They’re fucking annoying, when you get right down to it. When I’m actually trying to solve a problem, I would prefer to collaborate with ten experienced people (some “theorists”, some “practitioners”) who can speak quickly, approximately, and explore oh so many alternatives. I want people who can use simple, stupid, non-optimal tools all of us poor fools can understand… but who in using those tools discover many paths by which we might collectively trace our way—any goddamned way as long as we arrive—from our immediate goal to our desired value.

Because value trumps method.

And value (as I’ve said) is something that may not be rationally predictable. Value comes along the way, it emerges. Value in so many cases is contingent on multiple scales of experience, long and short term, on constantly revised and discarded models, on alternative hypotheses easily exchanged. Achieving value depends on my tools, my inclination, my habit. On what I’ve done so far.

And all these change from person to person, from problem to problem. From moment to moment. In my experience, on a shorter scale than any—any—problem-solving method, whether it’s a business project, a thesis or grant, a single “simple” application of heuristic to instance.

Something deep is missing out there.

And I’m not sure how best to put my finger on it or sum it up, so let me just dump a little pile here to fester while I try to think more: A core myth of “modern” computer science and applied mathematics—a foundational one it seems—is that algorithms are autonomous and atomic.

And yes, this probably seems like a “yeah, so?” realization. But I sit here working on the Nudge system and designing it to be used interactively in exploratory settings (unlike, as far as I know, any other GP system). And I found myself rolling my eyes (again) at the senseless folderol a computer science graduate was saying about software development the other day at lunch, about how anything that “answers the question as fast as possible” is the best programming solution, QED. And so on.

I can’t think of a single example of a search, optimization, machine learning, neural net training, agent-based simulation, AMPL optimization or other programming project and “run”, in a 25 year span, where I didn’t watch what was happening, see a problem, stop the “run”, make changes, and re-start it. Not one. I’ve fiddled with training/test data breakdowns, seen symptoms of bugs and model deficiencies and statistical anomalies that lead me to intervene, or seen slowness (or over-eagerness) to converge that led me to improve my code, or seen transient patterns that were more useful or interesting than the “real” program paid attention to.

Well, OK: Maybe I’m not a very good programmer. This is a thing I would agree with.

I note that I haven’t written a paper or even an email without revision. I haven’t had an earnest conversation on a technical topic without some minor argument and restatement and analysis. I haven’t willingly programmed in maybe a decade without unit tests and a dynamic notion of “requirements” and “goals”. And I haven’t been in a seminar without questioning the direction of the research, asking about tangents and parallel tracks and the roads untraveled.

It’s what people do.

Yet in AI research, and in not just the little byway that’s genetic programming but also that broader world of computer science and operations research and machine learning and datamining and so on, people still act as if analysis, modeling, design and programming were something utterly, distantly separate from execution of code. As if there were a “right” algorithm in a general case, as if faster was always better, as if it is not the job of an engineer to know anything about domain, or to adapt in any way to “externalities”.

As if you could specify a problem up front, spell out everything in a nice three-ring binder, and “hand” this specification to some plug-compatible mechanistic “solver” or “programmer” that was optimally fast and provably convergent and correct in the limit, and the lights would flash and the bell would go “ding” and a little punch card would poke out at you like the pert tongue of Athena herself with the answer.

This is a problem for me.

Quite literally, since I gladly walked away from my last Ph.D. program (which was an excellent one in its field) for essentially this core difference. There’s something wrong, and I increasingly believe dangerous, about… well, something I can’t quite name. Call it “hubris” or “cowboy culture” or “objectivism” if you really want to get nasty. That suite of traits that includes financial engineering’s unquestioning reliance on stupid “simplifying” assumptions; and computer science’s interest in algorithmic complexity at the expense of finding answers to questions; and almost all of operations research, where “be wise, linearize” is a mantra; and my own technical specialty of metaheuristics, where even today people hand me charts labeled “average performance vs. time” no matter how many times I reject their papers and yell at them in print because I have never cared about average performance.

There’s a stink of mind:body duality in there. A kind of biased religio-mathematization that imagines there is a best, an ideal, a way of delimiting a idealized set of problems that is better and more tractable and more elegant than any single instance.

Than the real world, for example.

And increasingly, I think Herb Simon is the antichrist because of it.

When I’m designing a genetic programming system, or a multiagent simulation, or a software development (not computer science) project, or a meeting or a story for that matter, I’m not looking for autonomy.

The basis of my interest in genetic programming (and machine learning and statistics more generally) is how it aids people. The C programming language, as far as I’m concerned, is not automatically “faster” than Python, because I count the time it takes to think and write and debug and understand a C program and a Python program. If the same algorithm will take ten times longer to code in C than Python, and may hide secret bugs behind stupid pointer errors or strange type handling, and which blocks my ability to use test-driven development and emergent software design… that’s worse, not better.

And that same shortcoming is true, I realize, about the way academics approach nonlinear programming and bioinformatics and swarm-based computing and stuff, too. Papers are written, projects undertaken, grant monies spent, and graduates pooped out into the workplace as if people who haven’t even met me could determine what I wanted in a given situation.

They piss me off like the worst marketers do, in other words. [Ironically, the most beloved of my academic friends never watch TV, and the most beloved of my marketing friends never pay attention to the math....]

Here: No matter what your professor tells you, people still have to analyze and model a problem; spend time typing C or Python or AMPL code somewhere; debug semicolons or memory management or matrix definitions or recursion stacks; spend hours staring at results trying to concoct rules from their intuitions for acceptability (or risk re-running their experiments tenfold with different parameters in an attempt to “get better results”).

I count the conversations, the lab meetings, the code review and unit test writing, the peer review and the conferences and the late nights spent working waiting to see—like Kekule—the devils dance in a circle before we understand benzene’s structure. I count how hard it is to talk about something, how long it takes to see a way of solving a problem, how hard it is to understand what you have in the end, to tell whether you’re “done” or not. And how hard it is to do it again, to re-use what you’ve learned. I count that as wall-clock time, as my own measure of “net computational complexity”.

I suppose my mental model is much more a kind of heuristic conversation, a partnership between mathematics, man and machine. Where software and mathematics are a simply ways of framing special parts of a conversation.

Value does not automatically come with speed, or even with rigor. I do not value rigor in my conversations; I find it cloying. I prefer exploration (of ideas and errors) and exploitation (of good ideas and cliches) in balance, not just one or the other.

Why do you think I blame Herb? Hint: pragmatism. And if not Herb, who should I blame?

update: Part of why I want to blame Herb Simon comes from conversations with Michael Cohen, some years ago. See, for example, his “Reading Dewey: Reflections on the Study of Routine” in Organization Studies (2007) vol 28 pg 773.

[He said, waving a fist at the sky, not realizing that Gale Research might well be a different animal from the Thomson Reuters sign he was indicating. And also failing to connect in any way his disappointment in finding how expensive the Dictionary of Literary Biography actually is to his failure in reading the one he had been hosting in his own home for several weeks.]

I am writing to say that I am forced interpret your recent postal offer of “deep discounts” on several dozen poorly-written, shoddily-manufactured, untimely and obsolete vanity press offerings in fields for the most part unrelated to my work or interests, said “deep discounts” reducing the price to a mere $99 per useless volume, as a telling symptom of some sort of neurodegenerative or psychopathological disorder.

In you, I mean.

I hope you take the time to see a doctor, and you may want to set your affairs in order.

My deepest condolences, in any event, to the authors of the poorly-written, shoddily-manufactured, untimely vanity press offerings you have been foisting for decades. They will inevitably be forced to seek actual editors among their peers and readers, and rework their peculiarly isolated notions in order to appeal to an actual audience, and I am saddened to observe that you have given them little or no cultural support in those skills through the years.

That said, if you have any more 1980s-vintage Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, I am interested in taking them off your hands. Ever since I graduated (with my first degree in the sciences), I have found they are excellent for pressing flowers and leaves for art & craft projects.

The latter offered by way of solace, if you were feeling completely useless. Buck up!

When asking for directions from our farm (on Walsh Road, Webster Township) to the Dairy Queen in Hamburg Township, the driving (not walking!) algorithm suggests we stay on northbound Scully. If you saw it from a distance, the satellite image would lead you to believe that, yes.

Except that many years’ fierce argument at the county border has left a nasty but potent gate blocking the road, which will persist into the foreseeable future.

If you were to drive up the rough, mainly untended Scully Road on a snowy day, trying to get (say) to a hospital in Pinckney or something, the least that would happen is you’d waste a half-hour trying to back out of the last few hundred yards without ending up in a ditch… once you arrived at the impassable gate at the border, and well after you had trespassed on a private road at the end.

The De Lorme Michigan Atlas & Gazetteer, a nice old printed book I keep in my car, and which is so obsolete that it shows little red lines for roads of all sizes and characters, manages to catch the gap.

Now every dataset contains errors or missing information. But every time that dataset is used to make a single, summary statement, based on a single model? Badness can happen in unexpected ways. In fact, I am obliged to be curmudgeonly about it because of my professional experience in these matters: it is always wrong to present a single answer for any multi-objective or highly constrained decision-making problem. Big, fat period.

I can’t complain, in all honesty, about advice given by a black box operations-research algorithm that on inspection I knew was incorrect. You get what you pay for. But I can complain about a cultivating a misleading user experience in a ubiquitous data-driven decision support system that presents only one solution at a time to the decision-maker. Hell, every iPhone in the world has one of these on it; they’re all wrong, too.

No, I don’t think I am feeling lucky, Google. And you didn’t even ask.

I want to see a sheaf of routes. The little “adjust the route and recalculate a new one using my milestones” handles Google introduced a few years back are a beautiful thing, a cunning artifact and a useful tool! And of course, the standard “avoiding highway” or “fastest” toggles let me reach in and fiddle with the search method. But only indirectly.

I want the objectives right there, not combined. I want not just to surface the meter (to use a phrase Dan Cooney’s taught me), but surface all of them. I want choices coupled to clearly differentiable supporting arguments.

Like the basic Google Search results themselves: ten routes at a time, ranked somehow. Or not even ranked, but handed to me as a Pareto-equivalent set of alternatives, some faster, some bumpier, some with bigger roads, some with more gas stations, some more scenic. Heck, maybe I just want to know there are at least ten ways to go back and forth, so I can stage a race, or not get bored on my commute, or defend against unwanted SUV invasion by a foreign county or something.

At least sometimes. Stop assuming I’m feeling lucky.

Next time, we can bitch about the misleading user experience and illusory authority created by the fuckin’ weather forecast format. Everybody complains about the weather forecast, but nobody does anything about it.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Both came in zip-lock bags. Six pairs of socks sold in a bag with a sliding reclosure mechanism.

In both cases the package labels called out the fact of the “RESEALABLE BAG”. So clearly it’s important.

However, in both cases the bags were permanently sealed by fusing, above the line of the resealer. Without perforations, there was no way to open the bags the first time without damaging the resealer mechanism.

So: point?

I’m not the first person to have asked the question. But no clear answer is forthcoming.

Just killed them all. No more payments, no more indemnification.

What would happen?

More detail to follow, but without being pessimistic about it at all, I find myself returning to a sequence of questions that has popped into my Highly Paid Futurist’s head in each of the last five socioeconomic shocks:

• What are the chances that a Constitutional Convention will be convened in the next decade?
• Under what circumstances will state or regional secession be considered by one or more US states?
• How many “nations” (scare-quoted on purpose, since I’m suspicious the term may come to mean something new) will there be in North America in 12 years?

As I said, I’m not too worried about these things. But the increasing scale of these shocks, ranging from the Oil Crisis, to the Savings & Loan debacle, to the LTCM bailout, and now this… the HPF in me keeps wanting to use the word disintermediation.

And I don’t mean in the context of a business plan.

[Happy Labor Day, people. Especially those of you in the Academy, who don't imagine those two fellows are involved in your lofty endeavor.]

Several other bloggers, most of them academics with big important journals and conferences and departments standing at their sides, published much the same thing I did back in 2005, when I voiced my negative personal opinion about the corporate culture at a small engineering conference-organizer and journal publisher.

As far as I know, those other academic folks with equally negative opinions haven’t spent several thousand dollars of their personal savings on legal fees. Hopefully they won’t have to.

But I did.

My lawyer and the publishers’ lawyer have hammered out a binding legal agreement regarding my opinion piece. Kudos to both legal teams, dealing with two clients, both a mix of idiot and ideologue. After this explanatory post, I’ll refrain from further comment on the affair here in my blog. I have removed my blog post that annoyed the publisher, and also all comments posted by my readers in response.

That said, my personal opinion of the culture of that organization has not been improved by this ridiculous and expensive affair.

At any rate, good riddance. Let’s get back to business. I’ve deleted everything I and you all wrote about the problem, at their behest.

No great loss, is it?

Thing is, they’ve never forwarded instructions, and the general state of affairs on the Web these days means it’s nigh impossible to Google instructions on how to subscribe, what’s expected, or even what goes on there. Far as I know, an old blog entry of mine made the rounds… and nonetheless I had no idea except for a forwarded message or two, years back.

So, listserv generation: Taking a walled garden and subsequently forgetting the walls are even there? Weird and kinda scary, by modern standards. That would be feeling like a secret, invisible walled garden overgrown and emitting no noises.

Very Harry Potter, mind you.

We’ve made a lot of progress on the Nudge project recently, and it’s time to think seriously about potential applications. Infrastructure is in place for automatic discovery of structures, algorithms, patterns, models, equations… but when you’re building a tool it’s all just play-talk until you consider some interesting challenges and see if you can frame them readily as something your tool seems useful for.

At breakfast yesterday Barbara and I spent some time riffing on various “hard” design and optimization problems that it would be nice to solve. And since we’re thinking of our ubiquitous and time-stealing house, her thoughts went towards HVAC.

In particular, the esoteric (but economically important) calculation of how to size air cooling equipment for a building. The standard — that is, the Standard — is spelled out in Manual J, now in its eighth edition from the ACCA.

Here’s how it works, in principle: You want to build a house? You’ve got it designed, with floorplans and siting and what most folks think of as “design” done? Well, how large does your A/C system need to be?

A good salesman or contractor, especially one who doesn’t really care how much money you spend after you leave his care, he can pick something he’s familiar with that’s “big enough” to manage temperature control and ventilation and such, regardless of whether your house is super-insulated or what fancy-dancy windows you’ve got. Heck, that’s easy: the biggest you can afford.

If you press a professional contractor that this kind of approximation isn’t exactly what you had in mind when you set out to save energy costs and create a “smartish” house and save in both short and long-term, he can turn to Manual J to do a “proper” calculation.

Manual J is big. I haven’t seen the copy I’ve ordered from the library yet—and even that’s the abridged version—but I know that there’s a complex algorithmic calculation. The required cooling load calculation of a house depends on the size and position and material of windows, the overall envelope, the insulation, position, geographical location, foliage cover, exposed foundation, ceiling heights… loads of stuff you might consider “design variables” if you weren’t already holding a finished house plan in your hands. As far as I understand it, the contractor enters this information into an ACCA-designed spreadsheet, Excel stuff happens, and out pops a slightly less salesmanlike estimate of the HVAC needs of your house. And then you can refer to Manual S to pick out equipment.

Now looking at the ACCA description of the work, I’m seeing things like this:

MJ8 also accommodates homes that have exceptional architectural features and life style accessories such as:

• Dwellings that have limited exposure or no exposure diversity
• Homes with large south-facing glass area or rooms with unusually large glass area
• A thermally isolated solarium
• Customized internal load estimates
• …

And so on, for 561 pages, nominally.

Now you might be able to see where I’m heading by now, and you’d probably be right: That’s sounds like a nice place to slap a pattern discovery system.

And so I think we will.

But what I’m sitting here thinking about is the ACCA itself, and the social process that goes into eight consecutive editions of this sprawling empirical model. There must be reams of data… somewhere, and there must be reports and whitepapers and supporting evidence that makes clear the design process underlying the Manual J model (let alone everything up the Manual S (which is the highest-lettered I’ve seen so far).

As an indirect customer of the ACCA, I have to say it would be nice to have access to that data. To try to determine whether a simpler, clearer model might be more accurate and robust than this spreadsheet. A history of the models, a public record of how things are done. Oh, hell, maybe a conversation about what might actually be going on.

But I’m a dreamer, surely. Somebody has to pay for all that data collection. Not everybody is trained well enough to manage the complex calculations underlying the first-principles models or the empirical analyses. What would happen to standards of quality if anybody could chime in and criticize or amend something as important as these calculations?

After all, the goal of the ACCA is to make “the industry more successful.”

Nonetheless, I’d like to be considered a part of that industry, speaking as a technically astute consumer who pays their bills. I’m more successful whenever expertise is not masked by obfuscatory gravitas, when decisions can be clearly justified, when data can be re-used and expanded at will. When people can see what’s going on inside, and participate.

So I’m increasingly tempted to reach into the building trades, specifically through their multitudinous standards organizations, and start chipping away at some silo walls.

I have just registered the domain “uncannyvalleyfarms.com”

I am soliciting proposals and discussion regarding the creation of a suitable entity or institution, perhaps merely a design, to accompany this little kernel of ambiguity I discovered before my caffeine kicked in.

Friends, colleagues, utter fucking strangers: Please contact me (here, mainly, in comments) with design proposals for logos, the web site, the product line. Whatever.

All proposals will be released immediately under the least stringent Creative Commons licensing—the Public Domain Dedication—with no restrictions on reuse whatsoever. No intellectual property will be protected or kept secret, at all, in the course of this project. Your email, your comments, your drawings; you send it to me, and I will assume that you have agreed to the terms of this license.

And in one year (24 June, 2009), the domain registration for uncannyvalleyfarms.com will not be renewed. In the meantime, what should be done with it? It’s parked, for now.

Brian Kerr is
crawling towards the light

ourfounder
Crawl, bkerr, crawl until your jeans rip and your fingers bleed.

ourfounder
Crawl until you hear the rush in your ears and see the impact on your credit rating.

ourfounder
Crawl like the wind, crawl like a peanut, crawl like Hamtramack.

ourfounder
Crawl inside, crawl outside, crawl like an itsy bitsy spider

ourfounder
Crawl, bkerr, as the inspiration to a generation.

Brian Kerr
and twitter finally fucked

Brian Kerr
tomorrow I’ll be restored to health

Brian Kerr
and out in the world

Brian Kerr
and the world will be back with plurk (and maybe twitter, for you)

ourfounder
maybe twitter for all

So far it’s been falling together surprisingly well. Somewhere between 80 and 90 people arrived, sat and pitched on the order of thirty ideas for projects, companies, ill-formed ideas, work-for-hire “help my pre-existing venture” and the like, and managed collectively to organize into about a dozen teams.

No voting, no formal processes, no points or markets.

No goddamned boss.

And (Cf. below) no coordinator of facilitator to speak of.

People talking to one another can do work.

People sitting in rows of chairs cannot do work. They are delayed from doing work. You cannot productively help people by sitting them in rows of chairs and talking to all of them at once. Not in this situation, which is innovating. Creating real stuff.

If you haven’t been paying attention for 25 years, you might view this as a “support” for the principle of emergence and self-organized community-building in large groups with diffuse shared goals and values.

There were a number of naysayers and explicit skeptics in the traditional business development community. Fuck ‘em. I don’t honestly care what they think about the relative merits of their “traditional” process—golf or other sports, diligent application of chinos and polo shirts, sitting in innumerable audiences to be told What Works for Your Brand!!1!, pleading and pitching and being falsely upbeat to VC and angels who are stupider than you can imagine for merely “liking the cut of your jib”. Don’t care about the whole stultified time-tested pile of crap that these folks assume is necessary and universally applicable.

I don’t care because I don’t want economic development. All that ritualized crap is how you build and support economic development institutions themselves, not companies. Not new people. Not small people. Not the long tail of economics.

Because that’s what this is. We—small businesses, startups, independents—taken as a whole we’re more than all the large-scale corporations combined. Maybe not in revenue, but that’s a hedge until I see the numbers. But in terms of work and knowledge and agility, we win.

Don’t care what those people in the big Old world think. That’s not a slangy lyric missing its pronoun, it’s a fucking imperative. Stop caring about what those people think. Stop golfing. Stop going to dawn breakfasts to rub shoulders with people who just got lucky and think being rich is proof of their acumen. Stop going to seminars. Stop asking.

Better you ask 100 random people for help—at the same time they’re asking you—than ask one Professional for Expensive Advice.

The success (so far) of SWA2 is especially noteworthy because it’s come entirely out of Ann Arbor. This event, the community and energy and all the practicalities addressed already, these aren’t some testament to the great minds from the Startup Weekend Brand. The Startup Weekend company (as such) has suffered a sad series of disappointments and restructurings over the last few months, and as a result the fellow now sitting at the helm is cut adrift. On his own. Untrained, untried, but earnest and in his way diligent. He’s a good kid; he can go far if he adapts and thinks and participates. He needs to learn about Open Space instead of doing a half-assed job reinventing it from stupid mistakes; about what “facilitating” and “leaving things open” actually means to a mob of strangers. But he may—and his “company” may, just barely—survive encounters with people meaner than we are.

To be honest, I hope he does. Then the things he could learn and pass along would have some value. You want legacies, after all. People learning and talking, that’s the only real legacy the world allows us.

But in this case, it’s 100% us. This is 100% pure-D home-grown Ann Arbor effort, innovative results, community and experience brought to bear on a “nontraditional” thing that “shouldn’t” work. Just like all the rest of the open-access, emergent communitarian events.

We make this happen. We’re not the medium, we’re not the raw material, we didn’t get molded or shaped. We did it to ourselves.

This is life. Life is bootstrapping, not asking for permission or molded out of clay. Life is interaction and horizontal conversations and ecologies of reinvention, not respect paid and traditions long held. Life isn’t rebellion or competition, it’s simply ignoring filled niches and hierarchies and seeking or creating new ones. It’s parallelism, and concurrency, and nobody watching from the top of the pyramid in the center.

So this here, this nasty confusing roil of ignorance, is life. In both senses. Not just symbolic, but a prescription. It’s how we can live, in this crapped-up old region of ours in this crapped-up old nation of ours, with not much to do with our resources, and so little money left on hand.

This is life. Life isn’t progress, it isn’t about amphibians crawling up and getting lungs and standing up and starting to type on computers. It isn’t any of those myths you rely on.

It’s just dynamics. How things interact with one another.

Figure out, in these times of trouble, what the other things are. The other ways, so time-tested and “reliable”. By comparison to what I’m calling “life”. Right? Know what I mean, eh? This is me winking, wagging my finger with my mouth hanging open.

Life, here. What’s that other thing?

Now pick.

We design our personae, our cultural affectations and signifying traits, as a matter of almost-conscious choice. We pick stereotypes to adopt, or eschew, and set ourselves up convenient abbreviations of implication. You’re a Geek, you know about computers; you’re an Academic, you work long hours on things nobody else really cares about; you’re a Suit, you know all about public speaking and you like golf or swimming; you’re a Consultant, you’re bad with execution details but rather insightful with a 30000-Foot View; you’re Gay, maybe you dress a bit better; you’re an Entrepreneur, you’re working 30-hour days and always ready to make a cunning strategic leap; you’re a Temp, you’re running out the door at 4:45 every day; you’re a Curmudgeon, you get to swear on the Internet.

You’re not any one of those things, and you’re never obliged to suffer from any one of those traits. But it helps, sometimes, to let people know kindof where you are. Signals. Signs. Messages. Summaries. That’s what culture is: little modules of significance that help us mentally (and socially) model one another. And even ourselves; we model ourselves, too.

Personae are expeditious.

We use these personae as communication conduits, as channels through which salient information can be filtered. Integrating ourselves into the flow of conversation, to aid our interactions by glossing and masking our intrinsic uniqueness. And for blocking what we don’t necessarily want people to see. And if we’re cunning, for derailing assumptions so we can take advantage of our peers’ cognitive dissonance (nothing I love more than walking into certain meetings in my General Suit, for instance).

You should have a persona. You should strive, diligently, to use your personae as tools in your life. Because life’s easier for human beings when they don’t need to explain everything every time. We’re made to model one another’s minds; personae make that modeling easier.

Sure, things get out of hand or we slip up or we do a bad job picking or we get into the wrong context, and all of a sudden we’re suffering from the negative consequences of that “simplification”. Up to and including gettin’ killed daid by some asshole thinks he’s better than you.

That’s arguably a biggish risk, gettin’ killed daid by assholes. There are plenty of assholes in the world, more than enough to go around. You’d think the tendency would have been bred out of us by now. But regardless of the costs, the benefits mean we really all do it, all the time. And we do it because we’re constantly dealing with one another in individual social situations, and for the most part we can adapt to those situations.

Pick some rules, follow ‘em as long as it makes sense… but we all know only a bigoted idiot assumes she knows everything about a person just because she recognizes a stereotypic trait or two. That big football geek may be a D&D nut; that old man may love World of Warcraft; that C-level exec may actually be a useful programmer.

That’s how people work. You find those details out, you disclose those things or hide them, when you talk with people—when you actually interact with one another.

Face to face.

Now. In the “new world” of Social Media (which is typically read to mean “media you don’t have to ask somebody else to make for you”), we’re “all” “empowered” to “build” our own “personal brand“.

Fact: Brands are not personae.

Brands are immutable. They’re rigid, they’re committee-designed, and those committees create them for use in fucking broadcast media, people. For commercials. For newspapers. For signs.

You design your brand; you label your brand; you defend your brand. But you can never, ever adapt it contingently as the situation demands.

Branding is not for people. Branding is for cattle. Branding is for slaves. Do you imagine it’s a coincidence that branding is for property?

Branding is for immutables. Branding is what you do to shit you plan to sell in a bottle, when you don’t want to give away the recipe but do want to assure customers that it will consistently be the same shit no matter which branded bottle they open. A brand is a promise of eternal consistency.

You. Do. Not. Want. A. “Personal”. Brand. You do not want to even start to think of an individual person as having a brand. In fact, real life will not let you have a brand, you cannot “be” one, and are a fucking idiot if you approach your online (or real) life that way. I don’t care if you’re in business, or you’re some kind of maven, or you’re just an random schmoe who believes new words equal useful ideas.

Sorry: This is not a mere matter of semantics, or of usage. Not a matter of misinterpreting what people “mean” by the phrase.

No matter how much you want to deny it, you’re an individual. A complex human being. I don’t care whether you want to sell something, including yourself: It’s your goddamned responsibility to pay attention to the people you’re talking with, interacting with, having conversations with.

And adapt to them. Not “adapt your message”. Adapt your self.

And I don’t mean “that’s a good strategy for your success!” I mean it’s your responsibility as a human being. Otherwise? You’re not listening. And if you’re not listening, not participating? You’re of no use.

And that, right there, that’s what your “brand” has bought you: a clear implication of your uselessness, your immutability, your mindless consistency. You’re the same crap in a branded bottle, no matter which bottle we open.

I bet you think you want a “brand” because brands are “recognized”. Brands are famous, right?

You will always be the same branded shit in any bottle we open. You might be the best shit in any bottle in the whole wide world… but you’re the same brand, no matter what. That consistency right there is the price of fame. Ask anybody who regrets their fame, any successful author or performer, any star, any luminary. “Do that thing you always do! No, not that new one—like you used to in the old days.”

Mindlessness, uselessness, inhumanity: those are the price of fame. And you know what? Fame can be worth those costs, if you really want it strongly enough, if you reap rewards commensurate with the costs.

But only a fool would think having a brand—being a brand—is the path to fame.

Right-sized meetings, hand-made crafts, simple graceful little software projects, locally-grown food, first-hand personal experiences in our worklives and abroad. Don’t like politics, TV, mass production, don’t like best-sellers, or shrink-wrapped meat, have no truck with big-city black-suited consultants or politicians or men in gray flannel suits. We don’t revile these; we pity them and the benighted folks who ignorantly choose to deal on that level.

Want to help.

See, things are out of whack. We’re off track. A correction is in order. There’s been some kind of global cultural inefficiency, because the world’s gone too fast, too far, away from where it would have been otherwise. Too busy, too mechanized, too commercial. Soon “our” social efforts, and those magical sustainable electronic inventions some blessed insightful souls [among "us"] have brought to light recently, those forces will permeate this shadowed world and guide us all back onto the lost track.

[Where by "track" one doesn't mean to imply railroad tracks, of course; we mean sylvan wooded grassy path. Without any ticks or anything on it. But not too crowded, either.]

Back to a simpler day, in other words. The way things should have been. Before reviled patriarchal Corporate American workaday polluted greedy culture pervaded our lives, turned us (well, no, not “us” literally—mostly other people one doesn’t often encounter in our immediate circle) into little more than political stooges, and obligate poverty-ridden consumerist zombies.

“We” are some rude amalgam (no doubt the phrase “distinctly American” will crop up soon in this passage; whoops, there it goes) of Transcendentalist, Craftsman/Socialist and Decadent, boosted high by privilege, and living in a para-academic cosmopolitan world of seven-layered education and a jointly held small-world of empowerment.

Christ—I sound like David Brooks, of all things. This is all just some crappy list of straw men. Kill me now. [See? Amusing recursion! Geeky and meta.]

Anyway, to date what we do most actually has been sitting and typing on blogs and in literary magazines, among ourselves: pining for the romance, the democratizing “level playing field”, the human scale of some lovely lost golden “past”.

You might be able to tell, that sets my hackles to rising, that kind of talk.

Then, in re-reading something important about war and actual history and our self-deceptions, I remembered: Sir Walter Scott.

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them….

Twain makes the argument that Scott and his backward-looking romanticism reinforced the leanings of the people of the South before the Civil War. That he provided pre-written propaganda, accidentally reinforced the tropes and tendencies that set the South apart from the rest of the country.

And then they went to war. We did—”we” without the quotes, so far. So recently and thoroughly that if you’re from the United States you are probably no more than four steps away from knowing somebody personally who survived the Civil War.

Watch not the skies: watch the books. Watch the literate folks’ reading lists, not your opponents’. Look carefully at the blogrolls not of your political “enemies”, but your own. Watch the sharp boundaries of networking groups, the sharp divisions between what people wear or own, and who they spend their time with.

Count the number of friends who “can’t stand” other people you know. Keep track: You want that number high, not low.

Watch for “revolutions”, and “uprisings”. Watch for any over-simplification that decries a mindless, soulless local enemy, that threat to “our” lifestyle who lives next door. Watch carefullest of all for the words “we” use to blame the bad, misguided people who led us astray from the track.

Because Twain was right. He almost always was.

“We” are heading down a path that strives to build “our own” culture, a separate parallel lifestyle that preserves what “we” think is right. We don’t need the other folks; we have our own stores, books, blogosphere, our own meeting-spaces, churches. Our own candidates, our own better lifestyles.

See, maybe “we” can split off “our” culture from the ugly scar that is the rest of the misdirected world. Bring back some sensible, human-scale order locally, and will our human-scaled communities into the shapes we believe they should have had, all along.

For it is “our” communities that are, by definition, human-scaled. The rest must surely be something else to be so patently different.

Hmmm. Now what word could we use to describe them?

Watch yourself. Watch how you think of your neighbor, your boss, your political representative: the ones you didn’t like very much to begin with.

What makes you so special? Not one damned thing.

Surely not your “scale”, straw man.

Crucial points of our agreement: “…I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime.” And also: “…the nature of social scale means that the value is tied to smallness, while the publisher mindset wants bigness. As we move to the edge, everything gets small, and those holding to the center want to keep things big.”

I left a comment there, but more seems worth writing down.

First, an interesting observation, which I’m sure is 100% original with me: Groups and communities tend to form and grow dynamically and then shed participants (participants, not followers or watchers or subscribers) at a very particular scale. Might depend on the medium and the frequency of meeting and the importance of the stuff the group attends to, but in general all groups have a Goldilocks size.

That’s no doubt a novel revelation, yes? I so smart. Oh, wait, it does sound a bit like something I heard once in an introductory anthropology course, or maybe it was sociology or public policy, or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.

Well, still. I don’t hear it trotted out very often in my circles. Novel is as novel does.

As Stowe points out, the cultural assumptions and mistakes (here “Big World vs. Small World”) seem to come down to that word I highlighted accidentally up there: “participants”.

Sitting on your ass surfing? Relatively simple. Innocuous activity. We all—all of us—tend to devalue it, denigrate it, consider it a passive low-impact low-benefit time-waster. It’s consumption. It’s consumerism. Guilty pleasure. It’s TV-watching, sitting and nodding in an audience, clicking the clicker. Church. Nurenburg. Stadium concerts. Commercial radio. Bestsellers. Introductory university classes. Mass media pabulum.

Whoops, I wasted the whole day doing mindless _____! Tee hee. Silly me; I’ll do better tomorrow. My Next Work is almost complete; if only I could avoid switching on the _____!

Heed not the fact that we all do it. We all viscerally tend towards liking it, but socially we (the “we” reading and writing here, I bet) don’t really value it very highly. Loads of people like it and think nothing of it, but “we”, well we know better.

Most of “us” don’t own TVs or don’t have cars or don’t belong to a church or only buy local or don’t eat burgers or we walk to work or we eschew “marketroids and suits” like the plague or we’re missionaries or we have organic farms or we seek a Different Path or we write blogs and books or we have Macs (or Linux!) or we’re Not Employees or we live in quirky expensive “smarter” neighborhoods or we play at (of all things) community activism.

Pshaw. We don’t attend meetings, we run them. Collaborative meetings, where everybody “gets to” talk. Meetings where people are expected to get up and contribute something, dammit.

We don’t write articles, we run magazines. We don’t go to lectures, we give them at conferences. We don’t buy CDs, we have studios in our basement. We have easels, and sound mixing boards; we do digital letterpress, and use local ingredients to cook food from cuisines as far away as possible; we design our own houses, in which own servers are running software we wrote ourselves.

All that other stuff? Bah. That’s just sitting around and typing. Listening to the Muzak of the world. Surfing. Being a political sheep, a dupe, a stooge, the easily manipulated raw material of commerce and the octopoid Conservative political machine. What have you done recently? What have you personally written recently? What have you made?

How many useful comments have you left on people’s blogs, how many links to their good stuff?

How have you participated, in other words? Because consuming isn’t participating. It’s not creating if you don’t modify it and pass it along, in kind, enhanced somehow.

That stuff in your head, those unvoiced ideas and vague appreciations, those conversations you have face to face, those enjoyable moments of appreciation? Nothing; worthless. Where have you added beauty to the world? Show us the beauty, dammit. Your nodding smile isn’t good in this town, ya fuckin’ tourist.

Those other people we dismiss? They’re about monetization and mind control. We hate that; it’s greed pure and simple. Old World stuff. Filthy lucre taints the purity of our essence. We don’t do khaki, we don’t do desk jobs, we don’t do commercials. Monetization is crass.

No, we’re all about the utilization. Every click a helpful reference; every link a nugget of affecting amusement, or irony, or distilled advice. You’re not supposed to just stare at it. It’s something you’re supposed to see because it will make you make something wonderful.

U HAZ A KEY. I MADE IT FOR U: This crap I’m typing in my blog, it’s your key to freedom, intelligence, political awareness, action. A better… well, something or other.

You haven’t utilized my work enough if you haven’t jumped in and participated and created something of your own in response. What are you? Have you no Craft, Man? Where’s your authenticity?

So here’s my premise, hyperbole aside: What Stowe calls “big world”, which is a widely-accepted socioeconomic structure that most folks would identify easily as “normal stuff”, is about consumption. The implicit economic agreement is: you consume it, you should reward the producer with some combo of (a) buying something from a subscription or an an ad, (b) further and continued attention in future, (c) did we mention money? Well, maybe you just thank them now and then.

What Stowe calls “small world” — which is “new” in some sense (novel is as novel does) but is in fact what a number of pretentious but influential people in the 19th century (that godawful wordy Ruskin ass, filigreed tubby William Morris, Henry D. Thoreau, some other stupid poets I can’t keep straight [insert hyperlinks!!1!]) invented, that’s about craft. Factories were bad, see; they changed stuff. All those people who used to be just peasants and tradesmen, they became endangered by the Moloch of commerce, the ceaseless mindless inattentive drollery of… well you get it. All that green stuff we used to have, the cow manure, the muddy roads, the thundermugs, overnight replaced by stinking automobiles rolling on pavement, and soul-sucking labor-saving devices.

How horrible it was, to have lost all that local folkloric quaint charming culture in the wash of globalized industrial convenience. Before that, everybody had to do it the hard way, just like in Hobbiton, bless their button noses and fuzzy little feet.

So in response these poets and stuff did what any one of “us” would have done, given their technical limitations: They started small presses, held salons, painted outrageously transgressive works of art involving Catholicism and fairies, and wrote challenging short novels printed in heavy typefaces with a heavy impression on heavy deckled paper. Symbolism is something you’re supposed to use, see.

Note well: they didn’t broadcast, didn’t write essays and letters in magazines (except their own). For chrissakes they didn’t hold public meetings, where just anybody could come along and meander ignorantly on about their personal concerns. No: they chatted amongst themselves. Because of course every valued conversation, every consecutive creative act, that was the empowering seed of the next step towards a proper democratic thoughtful self-governed transcendent panarchic utopia. A practical, efficient economy of fungible creation, each act usefully supporting and reinforcing another’s sensibilities.

Everything important is either creation or criticism. Often both! Folks “pay” for stuff by giving you back stuff in return, as efficiently as possible. You accept (crassly, “consume”) novel beauty, but then if you’re one of “us” you are then expected to create something of beauty in return. If nothing else, by pointing out how cunning and creative we are. You may post a short accolade in the accompanying form.

In practice “in return” means merely giving credit to the source. The original author should be part of the conversation, should be standing right there next to you on the ground, not towering above. Things, designs, they must above all else to be kept on a “human scale”. We hate unsympathetic corporate sprawling international towering monsters where you’re just left unable to respond in kind, an awe-struck consumer. I mean, how is that fair? Don’ have no truck wi’ wizards in thayse parts.

Because if you like something, you’re supposed to reward the creator. Directly, if possible, and in kind.

That’s the implicit social rule, right there: Freedom comes only at the price of authentic participation. And by extension: inauthenticity dilutes freedom. Marketing, advertising, globalization: they are the enemies of freedom because they undermine the crucial human trade in authentic beauty.

So think about Twitter: Is it noise, or fun? Do you post a lot, or do you find it annoyingly “dilute”? What about email? Do you try to diligently reply to every email you get (that’s worthwhile), or do you slack off and just read it, and get around to replying when you have a chance? Facebook? Do you like looking and surfing your network’s gang-sign-throwing photos at Facebook, or do you try to empower communities by setting up groups of like-minded individuals? Do you have a blog of your own, and does anybody care if you are tardy posting useful stuff?

Now, having asked those questions: what makes you think I care?

And, finally. Do I really need to explain the role of “r/K selection” in this context? I mean, it seems kindof lazy for me not to, having promised early on. Or, wait, am I ironically breaking my social contract as an “author” by not following through on promise of my title, and trying to make a point on how you’re empowered, see, to look it up and figure out the neat puzzle all by yourself?

No, really, I’m not sure. That’s not meta-meta. Just meta.

In general, is it an act of laziness if I leave something unexplained and confusing on the Internet? Or am I being “symbolic” and soliciting participatory cunning help from my insider-laden small social world? The people that matter, they get it surely.

Is my del.icio.us feed a boring, mass-consumption piece of crap that means I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to write real useful stuff? Or am I harking back consciously to the day when a “blog” was little more than what you might call a “log of websites”, a kind of personal diary of what I find useful and interesting and think you might as well? Am I being more useful and productive by posting comments and essays in response the ones other people write, or am I being even more meta-creative by posting oblique links without any connecting explanatory mesh? Or do I need to use Arial Black for that and call it a Tumblog?

Hang on, dammit. Am I agreeing with Stowe Boyd, who says that small worlds like “ours” will trump big world designs targeting “the masses” through broadcast and consumption? Or am I questioning his (and my own) assumptions about individuation, about membership in discrete demographics or consistency of behavior, and the fundamental dynamics of social (and business) strategies?

Heavens. Disambiguation needed.

Hell. Don’t ask me. I personally don’t know which side of any of these dichotomies is the right answer. Don’t even know which dichotomy is most important.

By invoking an abstruse metaphor from mathematical ecology in a discussion of social dynamics and business models in the New Ecominny, am I implying something pretentiously ingenious? Or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.

Or maybe it’s just about history and perspective. Again. Maybe all I ever say is: What makes you think you’re so special?

Comments welcomed!

And remember: Every time you leave something confusing on the Internet, an angel eats a kitten.

What I’m going to try for a while is going to people’s blogs and looking at them and reading them and seeing what they say and responding in situ. Seeing their design, paging through their long posts, looking at the pictures. Reading their damned ads, even.

That is, having conversations.

I think that’s something I missed about feedreader city. And besides, I think I write less because I’m fed too much.

Plus the only reason I had a mere 9087 unread posts in my feedreader was the preference that only kept the most recent 20 in each feed….

Strange juxtapositions in the wind. What’s up with the world?

On the one hand, a huge kerfuffle all up and down the aisles at Scienceblogs recently over social and cultural norms of dialog, framing, and debate. PZ Myers dissed for treating assholes like assholes on his blog, and the deep philosophical and sociological consequences of being rude and being immoderate and getting mad and showing it. In the middle of a political debate of all things.

Clutch the fucking pearls.

And originally unrelated, but suddenly not: I’m doing a little side-project with some local colleagues over here at the Nudge blog, where we’re re-implementing Lee Spector’s, Chris Perry’s, Jon Klein’s, and Maarten Keijzer’s Push language for a genetic programming exercise or two. We’ve posted a few entries over there, just mainly project-related discussions and clarifications for ourselves, though as we get closer to a decent release candidate we’re hopefully going to have legible content as well. Whatever. It’s not a big deal.

It’s not what you’d call “Search Engine Optimization Ready”, OK? And not unremitting scholarly pedantry, either. What, you’re surprised? That means you don’t know me very well.

Your bad.

And, as it happens, that’s my point.

So anyway, because I like to keep the beloved couple-hundred people who read this blog up to date on things that I think are interesting, I cross-posted a bit I wrote over there, here. A short summary of some genetic programming search algorithms I like.

Now I’m, like, you know, professionally a practitioner of these arcane arts. I kinda know how to be technically specific and all advisorish and Suity about stuff. I do Suity really well, when I choose to—which is generally when somebody with more money than you is paying me.

And as some astute readers will recall, the author does also tend to fall into an academic cadence now and then, and has through the years given ample evidence that he knows how to explain things in that legible, clear Passive Voice with which one tries to elucidate finer points and convey overarching conceptual frameworks to the Gentle Reader, providing as needed all salient citations and ample background information and shit like that.

Let’s all take a moment right now and acknowledge to ourselves my guilt. I shouldn’t ever, ever, ever write the way I am right now. There’s so much potential usefulness wasted every time I fail to educate and share my knowledge and remain polite and try to make the user experience more helpful and pleasant and whenever I’m not nice to people. Every time I’m not perfectly clear about something, an angel eats a kitten.

I feel like such a frivolous pissant.

OK. Done now. Their turn.

Other, smarter people are standing by, ready to be helpful and talk to you directly, and answer your questions and concerns. If you want nice, polite discourse and helpful scholarship, go get it. Nic and Riccardo and Bill are all better people than I am, and they’ll help you find your way. I have the deepest respect for them. Plus, added bonus: it’s their job to teach you stuff about genetic programming.

This is a blog. Better: personal blog. It says it, up on top there. Go look.

You’re not reading a book, and I’m not writing one. You’re not watching an educational television channel broadcast for the good of humanity. I’m not selling something and need to make sure the branding and the value proposition are crystal clear. I’m not reviewing any blockbuster movies in hopes of getting my own picked up by a major studio. You’re not sitting in lecture at school—although maybe you did land on this page because Google lied to you and told you the answer to your fucking homework would be here.

In other words: it’s not my job to be comprehensive. Not in any way. Not here, at least (Cf. comment on “people with more money than you”). Not my job to Speak to the Ages.

I’m too busy speaking with the people I actually set out to speak to. We’re having a conversation. And even though you just dropped down out of the sky by way of Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us or slashdot, you may be surprised to find that what you’re looking at is part of an ongoing conversation. Scholarship is a conversation. Being a member of a community of practice is a matter of conversation. And that’s what blogging is, as well.

POINT OF TOZIER’S SCROLLY RANT IS DOWN HERE>>>>>; SKIP THE REST IF YOU’RE BORED!!ONE!

Seems to me that the fundamental premise of social search is broken for that very reason. I’m not sitting here ranting because I want to fill up my server with more words, or because I invested in scroll bar stock and want you to buy buy buy and every click in the right margin of a window earns me cash, or even because I got all sad and upset about something rude and foolish somebody said about My Pristine Reputation on the Internet.

[Let me tell you about My Pristine Reputation on the Internet, boyo. Spider Jerusalem, Al Swearengen? Out of work.]

Social search assumes that what we say on the Web is supposed to be read out of context. Telling somebody to go look at something that’s an explanation, or a cunning piece of summary, or useful tool, that’s easy. Telling somebody to look at a single utterance in a long, convoluted conversation with many parties and esoteric background knowledge needed?

That’s lazy. That takes more than a few tags and a 255-character comment.

Assume that the author and other commenters are in the middle of a discussion. Assume it. You land in the middle of a confusing, unhelpful Internet Site because somebody linked you there? Act like polite people at a party and introduce yourself, try to catch up by quietly watching. Find out what’s going on. Ask questions. Participate like real people do.

Not like users.

Yes, public domain works are a public good. That’s the law. Ideally, there should be no obstacles whatsoever if you want to see the text of any work published in the US before 1923. In an efficient economy, nobody would be able to claim “re-copyright” on a book whether it was a facsimile or OCR text, no scanmonkey would be able to lock a work behind a firewall, no University would block your access to it just because you’re not a matriculated student. There’s no ceasing or desisting, when a work in the public domain finally becomes public property; it’s just there, and thus everywhere.

And at the same time, large-scale commercial digitization efforts do cost a lot of money. Google’s, JSTOR’s, all the rest. Which is why those vendors (and they are vendors, nothing more) are perfectly justified in charging whatever access fees they can get, and sticking anything they’ve digitized themselves behind a license-protected firewall if they want. You need to be a member of the paying community to be granted access, and I don’t mind.

Really. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just fine. Consider it an act of charity when you pay: acknowledgement of their energetic early adoption of new technology, when you give them your nickel.

They’re sure not going to have it for long.

Because, of course, any idiot with a book and a scanner can digitize whatever they want. You don’t have to be a big, corporate, grant-sponsored idiot; even a fumblefingers like me can do it. You don’t need a robot. You don’t need to be a library, you just need to be able to go into one.

That’s the point of Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, and the multitude of crowdsourced digitization efforts out there in the world: People digitize things. They give them away. They release them. For fun. To have them. Because they should be digitized. And often as not simply because they can be digitized.

I should know. I’ve scanned some godawful crap books through the years.

So the reason I feel so strongly about redundant digitization is not some Internet Hippy trope of “information [in the form of old crappy books] wants to be free”. I want there to be multiple copies of books, and I want different people to scan and photograph and microfilm (if they must) those books. I want multiple copies, different editions, different printings, different marginalia, different noisome booger stains and pressed flowers in the pages. I want somebody to just scan the HG Wells stories from Pall Mall Gazette, and I want somebody else to scan a bound volume where the covers and advertisements are gone, and I want somebody else to scan the ads to make rubber stamps from the wood engravings, some people scanning at 150 dpi (which everybody knows is good enough to OCR) and some at 600 dpi in color because they’re anal retentive. I want booksellers to digitize them, and publishers, and aficionados, and libraries, and corporations.

All on their own dime. In any order whatsoever, though if you’re asking random order would be my slight preference.

Because somewhere in all that roil, I expect people to notice that the version of a story published in the magazine was different from the one in a bound HG Wells collected works. And I want somebody to notice that the next story after Wells’s, the one written by that no-name hack with no Google pagerank at all, is just as interesting and good, even though it’s not mentioned in the canon. I want somebody to use HG Wells as spam, and I want somebody to publish new versions of Wells with the spelling Americanized, and I want somebody to start making fake page scans of books that were never actually written. [I'm confident that the first case of book-digitization fraud has already happened, and that nobody will ever catch the cunning devil who did it.] I want Wells to be blogging right there alongside Barbellion.

And also for every one of the million other authors, for every one of the billion public-domain books and newspapers and magazines and journals, broadsheets and newsletters, correspondence and transcripts. Public domain, “orphaned works”, maybe even all the newest stuff.

But… but… won’t print die?

No not print. Print is crucial. It’s our record and our archive. We will always need print, and we will come—just watch—to rely on it more as time goes on.

I want our understanding of print to die. Our mythology. The authority of texts and citations, the abusive misapprehension of what constitutes scholarship and knowledge in our global culture. The notion of fact, of “it’s true because it’s in a book” and “I don’t have to talk to you and explain what I mean because I cited the paper in my bibliography.” Lazy people talk about books they’ve never read, cite articles in journals they’ve never heard of, as signals of their status and erudition. Fanatics cite ancient public-domain works that have seen many editions, but fail to understand the nature of mutable words and ideas. Scholars refute conversation, of all things, when collaborative conversation is what scholarship should be. Teachers emphasize memorization of texts, but never point out that the texts themselves must be questioned in turn.

That has to die.

And it will. In a bloody mess, if we’re not careful.

Seems like a trivial victory, but I actually feel good whenever I see a missing page in a Google scan of a book, or bad OCR, or a reprinter’s copyright statement slapped on a book from 1870—because it motivates me to make my own copy of the same book. To “waste my time” and make a complete, inarguably different version of the “same” electronic text. I feel a glimmer of hope whenever a typo slips into Project Gutenberg, or somebody complains that they can’t tell which is the right version of a book.

Because that’s the way print has been all along. We’ve just lost the way. Somehow the myths of The Book, of The Editor, the Archive, and even the Authoritative Word, they’ve eaten our ability to hold flexible and contingent opinions. So few of us wonder which book we have in our hands; which edition, which version, which printing, which copy? If somebody in another decade or another country picks up a different printed copy of “that book”, what words will they be reading?

Not the same ones, I’ll bet you.

Because printers, and editors, and authors themselves, they change the words on the page from manuscript to draft to prepublication review copy to hardcover to paperback, magazine extract… and digitized electronic version. A blog entry (like this one) edited six, ten, fifty times even after publication. Which is “right”? Should a preprint be suppressed by an academic publisher because it dilutes the authority of the official version? Premise: yes; conclusion: no.

The Final Word needs to die. I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s what’s killing American society. And—even though higher education doesn’t mean a damned thing when it comes to American society—it’s also what’s undermining our higher education system, where tenure depends on citation rank and Erdös numbers, and where pathological specialization sets conversation up as the opposite of scholarship.

It doesn’t serve anybody’s ends if digitization is done intentionally poorly, or shoddily. But it must surely help improve not just performance everywhere but also suspicion of texts if we all become aware of how rough the worst examples are. So I’d love to see embarrassing digitization quality measurements published, for Google or for anybody else who’s scanning Our Heritage of The Fucking Written Word (all kneel).

And when people hear how bad those electronic versions are, I want to see raving; reactionary outcries from academics and politicians worried that what people are reading is not what the publisher set down on the page. Backlash. Chaos. I want, above everything else, somebody to come right out and say it: How can you trust what you know, the authority you give to scholars and the learned, if we can’t even be sure that the words on the page are correctly captured, and will remain untouched by time?

And I’ll be pleased, because the implication is that scanned books are not “the real book”. And somebody, some cunning librarian somewhere I hope, they’ll point out that real books aren’t “the real book” either.

Someday soon the damned singularity will hit, and it won’t be Kurzweil’s brain-downloading nanobots we have to deal with. It’ll be a million Babels of broken authority.

And don’t think I’m going easy on hippy-dippy Internettist culture, either. Look at the archived Project Gutenberg editions of “great works”. Management there treats these piles of steaming crap as if they were “the electronic version of important books”, and draconian protections have been put in place to “preserve” them in the “archive” that is PG. Even when typographic errors are corrected in the texts, a new single canonical version replaces the old one—even though the original printed versions differ in points and even large-scale editorial structure. Project Gutenberg needs the same rug pulled out from under it: there can be no selective archive.

Someday people will start noticing that there are two, five, a dozen digitized versions of some worthwhile book. These will inevitably diverge. Camps will start to develop among scholars and the lay public, just as they are now with blogging vs. traditionally published research conversation, with Wikipedia vs. the editorial encyclopedia. And just as people are increasingly comfortable citing blogged texts, someday the norm of citing individual versions of texts may gain acceptance.

After that’s happened, then the conversation can start again. When people don’t assume they know what text you’re talking about merely on the basis of something as unreliably vague as the publisher or edition.

If we undertake a gradual introduction of parallel digital versions of works, starting now and ramping up all over the place, maybe the inevitable collapse of print’s authority can be safely spread out, and the damage ameliorated. Not the damage to the reputation of digitizers; the damage to our society as the way we talk to one another changes again.

So encourage skepticism of digital editions of works now, and be diligent in questioning the printed word, the authority of the journal, the newspaper, the blogger and the broadcast as well. Undermine all their authority now. Spread it out.

Just imagine what will happen if it all comes crashing down at once.

Because if there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that it will come down. Just don’t know if it’ll be slow or fast. Transformation’s in the wind, if you can get past the pong of war.

Once when I was a Ph.D. student (the second time) I was working for a few months at labs in a large drug company’s research campus near Philadelphia. A tech I knew was walking down the hall with a sequencing gel film in his hand, scratching his head.

Me: “What’s up, D——? Problem with the preps?”

D: “Just can’t figure it out. I’ve sequenced this viral prep three times now, and I just can’t get it to match the published sequence.”

Me: “… Virus, D——. Virus. Alive. The kind of alive that has DNA. And you extracted the DNA from a sample from an actual, also alive animal, and now you can’t get it to match an old sequence. Dude.”

God, how I wanted to biff him.

And there we have it in a nutshell. Time for more of you to be walking down the hall scratching your heads as you look at books, at papers, at archived materials. Time for us all to be flummoxed because the written word is not exactly what we’re expecting it to be.

A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.

I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.

Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company we formed to sell stickers. But that’s a piece of legal chaff for PayPal accounts and to give us a shared ontological framework to use as an interface with banks and Chambers of Commerce and suchlike.

No. Whatever it is, maybe an institution or collective or organization or movement—whatever we finally call it—this thing “Not An Employee” is not a consultancy, headhunting agency, subcontracting network, social club, networking infrastructure.

Not a “talent collective” or a union. Not a cooperative.

Not a coworking facility, and not coworking itself.

Not boosterism, not economic development, not merely a scam to sell stickers or present hack poetry or invoke the ancient Titans of yore. Not a cult, not a jape, not a sorry-ass quixotic windmill-tilters association.

Not even a way to change the world.

It’s a tag. That’s all it is. A tag. A complex adjective. A thing used to describe. A nonexclusive classifier.

So you are asked, What are you? And you say: I’m Not An Employee.

Tell that to me, and having thought long and hard about it I promise that I won’t assume I understand the details of what you mean. But I will suspect some of what it implies.

What are you? Not an employee. What do you do? This.

I think I’m starting to understand.

When we founded Not An Employee, we decided that we would build a new Founders’ Myth with every telling; that every face-to-face version would be measurably different. That still applies; ask any of the others around here what this thing is, what it’s for, and you’ll get a variation. Some overlaps, some differences. Some realistic but stereotyped details thrown in to make it more feasible, make it sound like it’s a general-purpose answer other folks would give as well.

They’re all different, but every one of them is the truth.

So when you tell me you’re Not An Employee, I hear you. After several months, and years before that, I think I’m starting finally to get it. A lot of people I meet every day, people with Prometheus stickers on their computers and “Better Without Bosses” badges on their lapels, I bet they’re starting to understand too.

Tell that to any of us, and we’ll suspect that you have a truly marvelous life which this margin is too narrow to contain. That you’re there, you’re in there behind your eyes, somebody watching back. Rare bird. You’re saying something important about your work, life, that it’s all complex and contingent and varies from time to time in unexpected ways.

We’ll know, more than anything, that you’ve spent a little time thinking, and have decided that the standard glib explanations just don’t work.

What do you do? What do you want? Where do you work?

Does being not an employee prohibit you from being anything else? Does it keep you from having any other tags? From being a programmer or a maid or an inventor or a mom, a gardener or a golfer or a Spaniard or a soprano?

Don’t be stupid. You are also everything else you are. It’s just a tag. A phrase that describes you. One of many.

Being a thing does not keep you from being other things. Being Not An Employee, having that tag, presenting yourself with that label, it doesn’t even keep you from being an actual employee.

If you ask me, it’s risky to assume the world is as simple as you’ve been told. Even the simple white lies you tell yourself? They’re still lies.

Every time you accept a simple explanation, you open yourself up as a tool to be used to others’ advantage. You become of use.

Now you may want to be of use. That’s a life of service, and it is admirable and honest work of its own. Many of the most blessed among us, they’ve served.

By choice. Remember that the blessed ones, they lead their lives with their eyes open. They lead regarded lives. They pay attention, and I would wager that their assumption-to-consideration ratio is really kinda low.

Not all of us choose lives of service. I haven’t, not really. And so like me you may find yourself telling somebody it’s more complicated than that; it’s not what you assume.

The more you do that, the more likely it is you’re Not An Employee.

Among other things.

One way, which is the way Most Often Sold, is to specialize: Look at all that stuff clamoring for your attention. Decide what’s Good, what’s Boring, what’s Dangerous, what’s Too Big. Give the least important things up, and focus like a champ on what your world, your peers, your bosses, and your bank tell you is the crucial, vital, right now most important stuff. Write all those things down in a big (but carefully limited) To Do list, ignore and dispense with inconsequential stuff that doesn’t give those stakeholders their immediate payoff. Cross off the thing that implies too much immediate risk. Pick the one most important to Everybody, and dammit start Getting Shit Done.

But not all that other shit. “Your” shit. By which pronoun one means, in fact, “their”. English is handy for this, since there is no distinction between singular and plural “you”: “your shit” getting done may well be others’ too. We just like to slide that in there, for convenience.

More the merrier, right?

Now, as I said, there is another way. At least I think there may be. A much harder way, and riskier, and less predictable. A way that for success surely takes some grace and skill and plenty of luck and more patience than the world grants most of us. A way of constant, embodied attention.

“Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo. So little time—so much to know!”

Just stop a second (write it on your little list) and imagine you’re allowed to be a generalist. As it happens, I believe that we all are generalists as a default, but I’m odd so maybe you need to purposefully imagine it. Set it up like a thought experiment, like an Empathy Roleplaying Training Exercise, OK?

You suck as a specialist; you’re not evolved to be one. Your meat wants you to pay attention to what’s around you, what’s inside you, the top part and the bottom part and the inside part. Your head keeps dragging you back into meandering daydreams. Your heart keeps making your head change, from day to day, subjecting your mythical “rational” mind to physiological buffets modern life doesn’t even have nonpathological descriptions for. Flowing through your blood are cortisol and adrenaline and you get a little jolt of reinforcement whenever you see a new pattern, a novelty, a pleasing distraction. Art. Ideas. Love. Facility. Engagement. Tits and six-pack abs. Any of those things.

In the Real World (not the thought experiment), we call these “attention deficit”. “Inefficiencies”. “Lack of focus”. Distraction. Setback. Obstruction. Unforeseen circumstances. Delay.

All these things you look at, in your role of the “imaginary” generalist in my experiment; all these roses you stop to smell, these friends who interrupt you with demands, these places you go and things you see and people you meet. They are delays of what? Of you?

In what way am I delayed by paying attention to more, different, inarguably interesting stuff? Gratifying stuff?

They delay completion of my many projects, right? I do so much, that nothing is ever really done. I step away from my workbench to make a new tool; I find a book on toolmaking and see another nearby; I see the book is from a series; I see the series is from the 1920s; I note that people in the 1920s could make things of metal, by themselves, with their bare hands, in their home shops; I want a home shop; I militate among my friends to make a collaborative shop where we can share costs of tools, insurance, materials, maintenance. And so on.

Am I delayed? Don’t be stupid. I’m busy. The only person experiencing “delay” was, if she existed, the customer wanting the thing I was doing at the workbench originally.

By this argument, the only real “delays” are experienced by the people who call them by that name. A delay is something that comes with an obligation to perform. I have not been delayed in sitting down to write this rant, unless by “delay” we refer in a backhanded way to the invigorating flow, the speedy and surprisingly purposive typing, the fact that I am editing and re-editing fifteen or twenty times before you see this. Am I “delayed” because I stepped away and spent almost two weeks acting on these ideas, before coming back to post it to my blog? Am I “delayed” because this is a different draft, a tighter, more coherent whole than what I would have posted two weeks ago? Perhaps my laundry is delayed; my taxes, my system administrator duties, my business ventures were “delayed” by this.

In writing this (counting both the day I started it, and the day I finished it) I have left undone one hour’s worth of the things expected of me. And in the coming days, I’ll probably be distractedly thinking back to what I’ve written, carrying it forward, and thus perhaps my “performance” will suffer.

I’ll Get Less Done.

It seems to me this morning (and still, two weeks later), that you might take all those diverse, attractive baubles of the world, the many facets that show you alluring patterns and inconstantly draw your eye and your mind and your heart—you could take them all every goddamned one of them and still manage to think about them all at the same time. No, not the “same time”: all the time.

Frame the world and model its diverse parts, and envision them as just what they are, as arcs of the Big Circle. “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” And as Charlie implied but I will say outright: it’s all one big circle.

In every one of those supposedly flitting ephemeral things that catch your eye, you should realize the common thread. I allow you, hereby and henceforth, to realize it. Go thou, be empowered, get your act together, and do so: These distractions have caught your attention because they are by definition related to one another. They draw you away from the focused, acceptable path of specialization, the burden of diligence, if only by the simple fact that you have seen them.

You are a link. That’s the point. You’re not watching the world, you’re part of the world. In it. And better yet: you’re the part of the world that links these things together..

That’s the responsible path. It’s a burden. To be part of the world takes grace, and effort, and rigor.

One cannot see one pattern everywhere. You are not a generalist but a crackpot if you see everything as connected to your personal model of the world. When you cast everything as a nail to be struck by your One Important Hammer, you’re just falling back on another flavor of specialization. The world is diverse—more diverse than any single description or model—and the proper generalist cannot be parsimonious, cannot be efficient in trying to force the world to fit.

She can’t afford to. A generalist has no more time or attention than any other person. She doesn’t see the whole of the world all as being the same, as being proof of something.

She slices the world in a different direction. Along a different axis, a personal axis.

Insofar as you have seen these many and alluring “distractions” around you, and insofar as you want or wonder or intuit something about them… then by that very argument, they are linked. They are linked because you have seen them, attended to them. They are linked through you.

So here’s what I’d like to formalize, nail down, pass on: I see these many things, all the time, and I know they are linked because if nothing else I have seen them, and perhaps if I’m lucky they are linked for deeper reasons, because of the real patterns in the real world, that like any animal I am evolved to see everywhere. The shapes that transform data into knowledge: it’s what we do. We’re made to see pattern.

The notion of Distraction, at its root, is just a symptom of the dominant cultural model. This is a model enmeshing our institutions and our lifestyles, our dominant business culture and our academies. It blocks so many paths, it canalizes our culture. If you try to do anything but specialize and focus, you try to mix your apples and your oranges, your work and your personal life, your scholarship and your business, your body and your mind, then the steady hum of the world whispers to you: it is delay! You have no right to disrupt others’ diligence.

It is a tacit sin.

And yet there are those among us who manage, despite the constant pressure of the winning side—the specialists’ team—to see and live and work in this longitudinal way I’m trying to point out.

We cope. We learn not to offend, to delay, to bring our tacit sins to light. Or else we don’t, and we fail in real and practical ways that have to do with foreclosures and divorce, an entry on the DSM… punishments society and our peers and superiors mete out to maintain their own To Do lists’ progress.

I’m talking about the Life of the Mind. The Life of the Mind is not professorship, not building a long curriculum vita, it’s not being a talking head with a big wizardy beard and a floppy hat on Discovery Channel. It’s the cultivated ability to span boundaries, cross borders of disciplines, bring what you’ve learned over there to bear over here, where they haven’t seen the connection.

The Life of the Mind is merely acting on the belief that what we see around us fits together. That everything is, in some context, of use.

Aristotle had it pretty close. “The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.”

A friend of mine, a man who could never settle down and do one thing, he points out that there are two states of problem-solving: exploration, and exploitation. His “exploration” is random sampling, the long-reaching jumps, the saltations, the visions, the major revolutions: call it “fancy”. If you want a practical use, in machine learning we think of this as something like model-discovery, the consideration of totally different meanings and patterns, qualitative alternatives. Some other fellow, he might call them “paradigm shifts”.

His “exploitation” is not a negative, not the social evil the word connotes; it’s taking what you have right now and polishing and refining and improving incrementally; call it “diligence”. In machine learning, we might think of this as parameter tuning, as finding the right numbers to optimize the fit to the model we’ve agreed upon.

Another unruly friend of mine, who I sadly haven’t heard from in a long while, he called these same notions “order” and “chaos”. Isn’t it interesting, when you think about it? Both “exploitation” and “chaos” can connote badness: errors, disruption, totalitarianism. And “order” and “exploration” they are good things: benefits, framers of our world, knowledge and progress.

And yet they’re opposites. Turns out I never noticed that before, in almost twenty years of throwing the words around. I’ll have to jot that down.

Oh, right—I just did. Where was I? Ah, yes. The path of fancy, and that of diligence.

So perhaps some of us, we should be moving towards new models, not better fits. Towards connections not yet explored. Not mere revolutions, but memories of what has been forgotten, attention to what is ignored, and the idea of what it is for.

That crap they call “innovation” these days. Morons. “We need more innovative companies!” they cry. Just think about that. Just sit for a second and think about that, about what I’ve just told you that implies and demands. An “innovative company” is probably not going to look anything like a company at all. Not if your “company” means what everybody else’s does.

So note well: The generalist should not be headed for any place where he is “done”. When are you “done” paying attention? When are you “done” talking, considering? When are you “done” learning or seeing? Specialization is easier, simpler, more comfortable not because the world demands it, but because it can be measured, commoditized, evaluated and rewarded. Because it’s a worklife that is obvious, and transparent, and self-explanatory.

Just what is it that you do?

So note well: The generalist is not headed for the place where she can take a break and spend some time with the family and get a promotion and really start on the hobbies or retire or finally have some fun. She is working, always. Maybe the work is more spread out, more even. But there is no “work day”, no “hobby”. In the limit, there is nothing that is not also something else.

I look around me, and in every case the best step ahead moves me closer to a place where even more such “work” awaits. More of the kind of work I want to do. I go to work every morning, I dream work, I am working now.

Just what is it that you do?

And I say: This.

Sometimes I wait a little while for them to hear me, because I want to see the light that tells me what I’ve said means something. “I. do. this.”

So rarely, though. So rarely. So little light, these days. So then I just make something up. Some crap about my job, some random interest. But… but I do this.

It’s true whenever I say it. No matter where I go… this is what I’m probably doing.

There is something interesting in everything; if not in the act or the thing itself, then in what it implies, in teasing out the hidden system that gave birth to it, in proposing the process that could fix it, in building the tools that the one task of Drawing the Circle demands. Go out and squat in your gravel driveway and pick up a chunk and see the fossils or the crystals in it. Go to the library and find the book that has remained on the shelf the longest, and read it, and explain it to somebody. Go to your neighbors, and see what they’re doing, and try to help them with their work. Learn to run a letterpress; learn to build a house; learn to sell old books; teach a machine to think; build infrastructure for tsunami victims; explain the origin of life.

Because that’s your work. Not those specific things, because they’re taken. That other thing you’re doing instead.

The specialist avoids what distracts, and for so many people the worst distraction is the thing that connotes meaning. When you specialize, you must not seek more questions; you seek answers.

And yet these days some of us are crippled, are considered broken, are in fact and practice avoided by society and our employers and our institutions of learning and governance, simply because we walk a path that leads to more choices, more insight, more connotation, more questions.

The best questions are the ones that raise the most follow-on questions. Not just in the Ivory Tower. In life.

You are not allowed to be a generalist, of course. For your own good. Every advisor will tell you how hard it will be to “keep more balls in the air”, to focus on so many tasks, to split your precious attention and time so many ways that you will in the end get nothing done. Nothing will ever be finished.

So smile at these advisors. Nod. But just ask them, next time they press you in your business, in your school, in your entrepreneurial training session, in your software day-structuring To Do list program, just ask them about what it means to “finish”.

Just what is it that you do? And when will you be finished?

Called a flighty dreamer all too often, I think increasingly that I stand on the side of realism. I will be finished when I’m dead.

And so will you. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.

When I paid the bill a few weeks back, the check apparently disappeared in the mail. Four (4) days after the bill was due, they started calling.

Five times in the last week, somebody stern from Citi Card Services has called to talk with my 84-year-old Mom about her overdue account. When will she pay it? Will she pay it online? Why won’t she take the few minutes to set up an online banking account and pay it online? Well OK, has she already sent the check? What was the check number? In what amount? Do you know there will be serious consequences if payment is not received?

Yeah — there surely will. You, my dear Citi Card Services person, will inadvertently disclose something that the screen of “customer privacy” no doubt hides quite handily from the inquisitive public: The same exact actuarial risk analysis algorithms used to determine who is a good or poor candidate for credit cards? Those can be used to determine who will panic and send duplicate funds, overpay their bills, get dropped off the customer rolls, get purged.

Not only could one predict with some certainty who is a good or bad risk as a continuing client. One could also predict — and perhaps with better accuracy, given internal historical records — which customer resources you can burn to balance the books. You don’t want to irritate those twenty-something overspenders; you want to kick out the little old ladies who pay their bills down to zero, the folks with “good” credit records. Kick ‘em off the lists, and move onto the big spenders.

But you know, from out here in the consumer side of things, I have to wonder how the public might perceive that. Most little old ladies, my Mom included, maintain one credit card so they have any credit rating at all. Something bad happens to it, and she’s out of luck. All permanent record negative consequences that a young twenty-something spendthrift is buffered from by juggling accounts and rolling them over? Your typical retiree widow will have no protection against.

I’m not sure how the public might perceive that at all.