Month: January 2010

Post from John Udell on an interview with Larry Lessig  about his New Republic essay Against Transparency. John says …

We don’t really want naked transparency, we want transparency clothed in context. The Net can be an engine for context assembly, a wonderful phrase I picked up years ago from Jack Ozzie and echoed in several essays. But it can also be a context destroyer.

Exactly. Too much access to too much information can destroy meaningful context.

BTW – liked this Software Carpentry post from John too.

And unconnected, but wanted to capture this link from Johnnie Moore on the complexity of organizations.

“Organisations are not things but patterns of interactions between people”.

Maybe we need to spend less time trying to find the levers of power and more time noticing the more subtle ways in which we interact with and influence those around us.

Understanding patterns of value.

… dumber than she looks after all ? I live in hope of a double bluff.

It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news. [Sarah Palin on joining Fox]

This is fun, and cute, and smart, and ….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktjx8umlaOI

Go Coco.

I’m close to finishing Hitchens’ “God is not Great” and come to a few important points – minor points really in terms of disagreeing with his otherwise convincing words, but worth recording to clarify my own position.

Ironically, having just mentioned Chris Locke in the earlier Euan Semple related post, that there is some content in GING in common with a response to Chris I have sitting in draft in WordPress. In warning against “Eastern” alternatives to the monotheist big-three, Hitchens (like Locke) cites Brian Victoria’s “Zen at War” amongst many other examples of Buddhist perversions leading to human wickedness. There are two points here from one such as myself prepared to defend Zen philosophical thinking in its place.

• One is that these are examples of religion as “organized religion”, where the religion itself has “interests” and those interests become hitched to political authority. Buddhism and Hinduism are no different there. Which sane persons would defend that ?
• The other is the “shoes and minds must be left at the gate” meme. So easy to parody the idea of leaving the “mind” out of sane considerations and reduce it to the idea that Zen “despises” intellect. Of course like so much koan-like rhetoric, it’s meant to be thought-provoking, deliberately breaking easy logic to encourage the need to “think” differently. Rhetoric is only a pejorative term if you choose it to be – the meaning doesn’t have to be in the content. Intellect has become too tightly associated for its own good with the received wisdom of objective rationality, and a little loosening opens the mind. Surely, only bad for a mind that mind is under the authority of organized religion.

Different subject but Hitchens protests too much again with his straw-men in the chapter on “original sins”. He makes a distinction between “Love thy neighbour as thyself” being an impossible to obey “order” whereas the golden rule “treat others as you would have them treat you” as a helpful “enjoinder”. I can’t believe such linguistic pedantry was ever in the minds of anyone uttering such sentiments. Anyway, all ideas evolve, so what matters is are they any good in their current state of evolution. Who cares whether “do as you would be done by” is a Christian sentiment or not, if it is a useful adage for any human (humanist or otherwise). The primary reason to reject it as Christian thought is the organized religious authority angle, not the thought itself ?

And a small surprise – the chapter “Is Religion Child Abuse ?” opens with a memorable quote from Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov, but includes no Dawkins reference – maybe Dawkins didn’t coin that phrase after all. Anyway, a convincing chapter.

Microsoft guilty of infringing someone else’s patent when adopting a standard like XML ?

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

I support the power of blogging (and other social media) but you’ve probably detected I also see a problem with over-communication. In the clamour for attention, bad information can drive out good – the memetic problem as I call it.

There is a moral imperative to say what needs to be said – and that may demand courage in some scenarios. But there is also a duty to communicate how, where and when it will contribute to the desired end. Ends and means have variable qualities and intentions. Trust is an important part of it.

Euan Semple is one of the web’s most intelligent bloggers (and twitterers) and I was struck by 4 or 5 posts from Euan since the new year that reflect the paradox here. Is more power to communicate always better, when saying and doing the right thing always demands courage ?

The first post, Blogging will change the world, is not contentious, if we focus on the power to make people think, but Euan does also highlight the status and influence aspect of such power in changing behaviour. Interestingly given the other posts, he quotes Brenda Ueland …

Because the best way to know Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence ….  but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e, share it with others?

In Standing up and being counted Euan says

The people who [cynically mis-market unhealthy foods] have to know it is wrong and deceptive. They must sit in meetings discussing doing this. Not all of them can feel comfortable.

Following on from my last post about bullying attitudes in the workplace one of my aspirations for social media in business is that one day, when people get confident enough to say what they think, enough of them might just get the gumption together to stand up and say “guys this is wrong”. Maybe then we could put a stop to this sort of crap.

[Aside – I ask that people think of the DeLorean question of “why committees of moral men make immoral decisions”.]

And in that previous post Hard men are wankers he had said, after referring to antler-clashing, blokeishness, (and I might say, flame-war tendencies) in social media exchanges and recalling management bullying experiences, he then admits

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen. Forget Enterprise 2.0. The promise of social media will not become reality until you do something to reduce the power of the bullies.

ie with or without “Web2.0” (or the semantic web, I might say) people with the power to communicate and influence need “decency”. Interestingly in that same post Euan quotes Brenda Ueland again …

I hate [criticism] because of the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages,that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.

A common theme of mine that criticism is fine only in moderation – the scientistic mentality that attempting to undermine every possible truth is the sole means of progress is flawed.

 And in Terrorism, ooh that’s interesting after speculating on how the Detroit Christmas Day Delta attack might have been different if people seeing the security arrangements being circumvented had also been twittering, he says …

Yes, all of this could be misapplied and one could easily imagine scenarios where it led to panic and possibly injustice. … don’t we have it within our grasp to weed the weak signals from the strong ones? To work out well enough who we trust and what is real quickly enough to at least help the authorities do the right thing?

Strong, weak ? Since when was the right thing about power ?

[Post Note … here is the opposite problem.]

How do we work out whose communications we trust ? Interesting that Euan also sees real trust and decency in the eyes, in the flesh, in a hug with Chris Locke. Truth and beauty reside in trust (and dare I say, love) not in link counts or power.

(And again W3C Fig 7 says it.)

As I mentioned, I’m reading Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”, after originally avoiding it as just part of the God vs Science hysterical debates of the past two years, but discovering I like what Hitchens has to say.

OK so GING is “the case against” religion, an unrelenting damnation that could easily offend his target audience. Hard for anyone to argue against the rehearsed arguments on metaphysics, design and revelation. The chapters unpicking the mono-theist texts, revealed by the key prophets and embellished by their priests, are almost too easy as to be boring, were in not for Hitchens style – clever, witty entertaining. I’m reminded of Clayton’s rhetorical put down of Dawkins “after all, he writes so beatifully“. But this is after all a war of wits.

Despite the unrelenting attack, Hitchens’ real quality does shine through. In Chapter 11 “The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings, he focusses on the charlattans that have invented (and abandoned) new religions and cults for their own nefarious purposes – Mormons, and assorted perverted evangelist churches for example. After acknowledging Darwin’s “stamp” in the chapter title, and opening with a quote from the “simply divine” Gibbon …

“The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

He acknowledges Dennett’s analysis of religion as a natural phenomenon, and following his section  on the Mormon fraudster Joseph Smith (and others) he concludes …

“In other words was he a huckster all the time, or was there a pulse [of greater but misguided good] inside him somewhere ? The study of religion suggests to me that, while it cannot possibly get along without great fraud and also minor fraud, this remains a fascinating and somewhat open question.”

Hooray. Good intentions can only ever be an excuse for bad decsions and actions, but believed intentions need to be understood, explained and made more likely to result in good decisions and actions in future. And what is good …

Bill Thomson on the “.me” Montenegro domain name.

“More and more people just go to their favourite search engine, type in what they’re looking for and don’t actually look for where it’s going.”

“So, although people might want a good domain … I just don’t think they’re as important as they were. And I don’t think they should be.”

Can’t argue with the final sentiment. Certainly they have initial attention grabbing value, in any new venture, but the names that stick go beyond fashion.