To be sure, the idea of democratizing knowledge is not exactly foreign to me: I did do my masters on that topic. Still, I agree with the panelist’s point because I feel its sting all the time, and not because anyone had meant any harm, but because stereotypes are so darn convenient. We live at a time when the wonders of yesterday become the norm of today. And to the average layperson, what I do (sit hunched in front of a keyboard all day, looking at what may as well be ancient Sanskrit) on a daily basis doesn’t look so different from the kid banging away towards supremacy in the latest shooter, or the other kid who’s learned to program in scratch and is producing cute stories that her parents could never have imagined, simply because they lacked the tools that encapsulate so much knowledge. For those who are not experts in the field (the so-called laypeople), it is nearly impossible to distinguish the difference. As a result, I am in fact devalued — the investment that I made is actually learning the lower level details, the ones that let me solve complex problems in more robust ways is valued the same as the knowledge of someone who can use the OSX interface editor to make a UI.

Note that this has nothing to do with the fact that that I can program “better.” In fact, the person I am being compared to may in fact do it better by many metrics. However, ability is not equivalent to experience, and experience can only be conveyed by thick description, while it is simple to convey ability. As such, when faced with a layperson, the quick description of what I can do (my ability) appears equivalent, which my capability is in fact different. In democratizing, we democratize ability, but do not necessarily democratize the gaining of experience. The transition from ability to experience is rather apparently logarithmic: the step from no programming to simple programming opens up an entire world, but from there, there remains a significant amount of boring, tiresome slogging to understand the intricacies of cache structures, balanced trees, goodness of hash functions, and the myriad other factors that allows me to write scalable and robust software. Since democratization so conveniently democratized away structure (”go do what you want to”), nothing forces the learning of these frankly boring minutiae. Moreover, communities based on democratization are based first and foremost on the internal sharing of information. These complex topics get discussed relatively more rarely under such circumstances, since there are many more beginner questions than advanced ones. Finally, such communities generally have no use for what production-quality systems require: the aforementioned scalability and robustness in hostile environments. The focus is on “you can do it,” not on “you can make it bulletproof.” So to me the panelist is correct in a very superficial way, but he’s missing the crucial nuance — democratization devalues experience and in-depth learning of a skill, not the skill itself.

In closing, a few words about trivialization and devaluation. The statement “democratization devalues experience and in-depth learning of a skill” can use devalue and trivialize synonymously, but only in this context, when the value of experience has been lowered by setting up an expectation that the experience is a trivial addition to ability. In a purely monetary sense, devaluation has occurred to the person (and to expertise in a skill), while trivialization is the vector for the devaluation. If the skill as a whole was trivialized, it would mean that the skill was so simple (like sweeping the floor, for example), that anyone could do it and thus there would be no merit to studying it. This, of course, is patently false. Even if I could learn something about everything (a goal that I strive to), it is obvious that in my limited lifespan, I would be only able to get to a few of those things. I could become experienced in some limited number of things, though I might become enabled in any number of things based on my patience and the willingness of others to share their expertise in understandable ways.

Experience, without fail, takes time. So I welcome democratization, but I do have concerns about the the ignorance of the masses. Democratization is akin to the act of Prometheus: it gives of fire of the knowledge to the people. But without understanding of what that fire is, and the limitations inherent to it, this fire will not only give light, but burn the very things that made the democratization possible by dissuading those who might seek expertise and the ability to pass on and grow the knowledge from seeking its depths.

There are two contradictory matters at play here. Behind us is always the past: that which makes us, in part or whole, what we are (or so it is said). At the same time, we cannot travel backwards. The inexorable flow of time requires motion, and we are carried, willingly or unwillingly, in some direction. As within any flow, we have a choice of lefts and rights, but unlike the city grid (excepting the devious thoroughfares of Boston), the avenues of time allow us no path to the past. This being the case, it is interesting to logically consider for a moment the available overarching navigational choices. But first, it is necessary to accept a basic axiom. It is a given there will be mistakes and misfortunes, things that we would prefer did not happen, or perhaps would prefer to have happen differently. Mistakes are a necessary side effect of the foggy vision of the future we have access to, and misfortunes are likewise derived from the shared nature of the world, or ultimately, due to the limitations of the mortal coil. It is natural to want to prevent these negative impacts. Faced with the memory that is sorrow, we come to the choice.

The simplest option is to attempt to stop. Of course, stopping itself is impossible, but it is within our purview to stop that which we do: we have the choice of not navigating. Without navigation we float to whatever destination the flow brings us to, while we look inward to the memory of that which no longer is. This is the choice of not making a choice: a choice that leads along a meandering path that ends with the end of our fleeting spark. It is ultimately useless to choose such a path, because space and time care not for our the childish tantrum of our making.

The next simplest option is to take two rights and find that the next right will not lead to the place from which we started, because the world has moved beneath our feet. It is, to some extent, a better choice. At the very least, it is activity rather than withdrawal. However, it is different because it involves choice, and it gives the traveler a view of the past through the lens of time. In seeing the past and attempting to return to it, it is possible to see the past itself not through the fickle lens of memory, but rather the telescope of experience, and perhaps the new view of the past has at least the hope of creating a new course, even if the traveler always travels this course with his back to the rays of the coming dawns.

When I began writing this entry, I thought that perhaps greater action was the answer, but I now find that this is not the case, for one may also choose to always chase the past: an activity without effect. There are those who bemoan a series of mishaps, and thus consider the inability to reach the past a mishap in itself. Unlike the previous lot, they do not come to stop, but instead chase in a circle the shadow of their past selves through their memory, circling forever while drifting aimlessly in the larger scheme of things. While this is choice, the choice is obscured by the veil of memory into a circular search for the past made ever more unattainable by the distortions of memory.

Lastly, there is the option of accepting the dichotomy between memory and past, between choices made and choices possible. It is in fact memory that shapes us, not the transitory and forever unreachable past. One need not look back to be touch with memory. Looking backwards gives insight and introspection, but it cannot change the present except insofar as it can help shape the future. The same is true of choices. Even if it were possible to consider the ramification of a choice, that is not the nature of choice, and thus the possibility itself is fallacious. Choice is layer on choice. An instance of choice rests on the past choices, and supports the future choices. It is no more possible to consider a choice as changeable in isolation than it is to consider a memory or idea in isolation. Ultimately, a change is a choice already past requires a change in the person making the choice, and the future person, built from that choice, can no more understand that change as he or she can exist in all the ramifications of that choices. As such, though it be an interesting thought exercise and fodder for many a story, it is only conceivable, but not achievable even in a thought exercise.

Accepting these dichotomies, a person following this path can shed the past and choose to live without regret. By this I do not mean lack of regret as in remorse, but lack of regret regarding the paths not taken. The process is, in some sense, sporadic. The past often does not slough off continuously. It must build up to where it has sufficient coherence for us to grab onto it, which can allows it to be pulled off and left by the wayside. The act is also not without risk. The past can both weigh down and protect. Without it, the world is capable of inflicting more heavily, both with possibilities and dangers. The moment is also one of irreversible transition as the past is shuttled into the domain of memory alone, and the person changes into a different being, unable to return the the self that was. This new self has its own strengths and shortcomings, and does not necessarily better the previous self. Regardless, this path gives the choice of choice, the possibility of always facing the coming dawn, whether it is with sadness or delight.

Perhaps, being human, it is impossible to choose a path and stick to it religiously. Perhaps all of the modes have different conditions under which they are necessary. And more than likely, the analysis is incomplete and there are many more possibilities. Nonetheless, I am enamored to the idea of making the next choices without regret. Often the path is not for one to choose but to accept. But I hope that when it is for me to choose, there is among the selection this one choice: the choice of going only forward…

With this in mind, let us get back to giving and taking. To give much, certainly, is highly regarded. But this begs the question: why is everyone not endlessly enthusiastic about giving? Why is it that something that is admirable is not something that we, at a deep level, do not wish to aspire to? Taking also has this duality, though it is perhaps harder to see. Taking too much, or perhaps more appropriately, “more than one’s share,” is of course frowned upon. But taking too little is just as bad. Take for example a person who chooses to accept no kindness or social token. This person would be perceived as distant, or worse, arrogant and standoffish. This may be interpreted as simply the counter-instantiation of a social norm, but it can also be seen as a negation of the efforts of one who is perceived as good (the impeccable giver), which of course, in the world of polar formulations, relegates to the non-taker the role of “villain.”

Also interesting is the idea of “one’s share,” which ties directly into the concept of normalcy or centrality, and thus requires polarity (negative polarity, one may suppose, except for in the mind of the extreme capitalist). To add further twists, we must of course have exceptions to the so-called rules. In the case of dire need, to take excessively is not as bad. We never call a person being rescuee of a dangerous fire a villain for taking selfishly of the fireman’s self-sacrifice. In fact, we have invented a word for the authorized over-taker: the victim. At the same time, it is not as unacceptable to give little as it should be, because presumably effort went into the excesses being enjoyed. We variously label this capitalism, free market economy, or enlightened self-interest. Toss it all together, shake well, and it’s pretty much literally all good!

So now that we have danced around a bit, we can discard the prybar of giving and taking and cut to the meat. The difficulties with the pseudo-morality of giving and taking show us two things: a) the difference between ideals, moral/social evaluations, and practice and b) the difference between correctness and goodness. The definitional polarity of the terms are residues of social ideals. They are meant neither to be evaluated realistically nor to be practiced. In reality, the design of society does not allow for anyone to be that giving without going penniless and having to take (and thus reduce goodness), and the counterbalance prevents anyone from taking from everyone limitlessly. I do expect some resistance to the latter idea, but in the end, even the most heinous of takers must give something to survive, or be hunted down. Since the polarity of the words do not help us in any practical situation, we must thus have a separate metric for evaluation. This metric can be described loosely as deviation from the virtual centroid of the give/take space relative to the person or to society in general. The metric is made uneven because we have found ways to cheat with the metric in order to not feel too negatively. However, they are a metric nonetheless.

If the metric is the distance, then the practice is effectively centralism, or attempted congruence with the accepted centroid of the space. The upshot is that the “ok” state is in fact not the “good” state, but the “not too good and not too bad state,” which allows us to keep the relativistic model in play. It’s a longish discussion as to fully explore why we cannot accept outliers into the set while using a relative moral model, but to sum, sufficient numbers of outliers would either constantly redefine the centroid (making it definitionally unusable) or causes fracture of the common definition of the center. This provides segue into point (b), as well as the crux of this exercise. I will take as given that the give/take (or any other) terminological polarization is a social phenomenon. I will presume as safe the assumption that “society” is some set of individuals who subscribe to the same set of terminologies and definitions (ie, they can communication and make sense to each other). If the polarization is a social phenomenon (ie, everyone agreed on it, however tacitly), then we cannot have any extreme outliers in the set given the way things stand. In short, we can have neither heroes nor villains among the “us.”

That said, the idea of heroes and villains, their roles, and their otherness is fascinating as a tool for social inspection. Perhaps the change in the aspect of the hero, and some thoughts on what this means to the “us,” would make a good topic for a part II to this posting.

Perspective, like the ground you stand upon, cannot be ignored. It sits at the back of the mind, gnawing at the edges of every delusion that could be a convenient truth. Sometimes, it’s really a royal pain. It can make you seem paranoid or jaded. In fact, it can actually make you paranoid or jaded. Turns out, that’s just about always a bad thing. It’s especially a bad thing if you are actually right. To illustrate the point, I will diverge a little. NPR has a segment named This I Believe, a set of essays on things people believe in (very worthwhile reads… it does the soul good). Once, the featured essay was from a law professor, on belief in the rule of law. I think I didn’t quite realize what he meant when I first heard it. The rule of law, like so many other things we take as “natural,” is a construct. We construct it out of our own needs. Like lights to dispel the darkness at night, we seek it instinctively. We surround ourselves with constructs such as the rule of law in order to create a stable perspective from which we can consider the world in a sane way. The problem with good perspective is that perspective is almost always the ability to look at your feet and realize that you’re walking on water, not ground. One the plus side, you can now walk on water. On the minus side, you might now fall in.

Living with perspective is the fine line between believing in the magic strongly enough to not fall, and weakly enough to know the truth behind it. It’s the ultimate form of drinking your own CoolAid, a test of what you can handle. Also, perspective is not a very simple thing. Because the thing that you see with it is chaos (or order therein), it is by nature chaotic and varied. Everyone has some. Some are more useful than others. It’s hardly ever the same as anyone else’s. Still, it’s surprising that folk thinking is so naive about it. It seems everyone chases that piercing insight. In truth, like most blades perspective cuts both ways, and the keenness of the blade extends to both edges. To put it shortly: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but he knows that everyone is ugly. So do you still want to be king?

At the end of the last post, I spoke of the parallels between all acts of thought and creativity. However, to start off, let’s just go back to programming for a bit. In that context, looking at many people, many projects, many failures, I feel fairly confident in saying that everyone undergoes these stages of evolution of discipline. However, “all” and “everyone” is qualified here by the condition that the practitioner is in fact trying to change. Legion are those who do not fall within this category. In coding, we disparagingly call them “code monkeys.” These people exist only within a field, but are not versed in any discipline. Like monkeys, given appropriate training, these members of society can do certain things. However, they do not think about what they do (insofar as the discipline is concerned), and therefore never transcend their current situation. They may be excellent workers, and accomplished at their tasks. However, they do not evolve. To return to the metaphors of Buddhism, they do not progress in the eternal cycle.

This brings forth an interesting issue: the concept of progress of thought. What is it, and how can we achieve it? Well, withholding disbelief of what I have said in the last post, then progress is to move from exploration to structure to overarching concepts. But even accepting all the caveats, how do we go about achieving this progress? After all, to ask thoughts to evolve is just as ludicrous as asking genes to evolve. While we can engineer genes, that is not evolution. There is no discovery, no mistake, no hindsighted explanations of the order of things involved. It is merely construction, where the knowledge comes a priori. It’s the same fallacy that infects attempts to teach innovation, or creativity, or interest. These things, like progress in though, cannot be constructed. They can only be nurtured, from within and from without.

Having twisted one question into another, we are still short of an answer to the question of how to nurture progress in thought. Frankly, I don’t quite know (or I would be out there giving grandiose lectures on how to do it). I do know, though, a few ways not to do it. Perhaps the easiest way to fail is to become too fond of one’s own thoughts. It is quite natural, since across the board, we hold all our own possessions as more valuable than the rest. That is not to say that one should not take ownership of thoughts. Thoughts must be owned to be examined and pursued. It is even necessary to defend the idea, and temper it through critical discourse. However, to defend does not mean to defend till death. A good strategist of thoughts must be willing to give way when the situation demands it. Giving way on thoughts leads to an understanding of good thoughts and bad, and a capability to discard those without merit. Without this, there can be no evolution, because the most meritorious thoughts are not allowed to flourish above the rest

Another way to lose the path is to become too lazy or too secure; to rest on one’s laurels. Good ideas, thoughts, and plans are all hard to come by. Even when a good one has been identified and made to flourish, the temptation is to keep squeezing that one thought instead of cultivating new disciplines. But an unused blade dulls with time, and likewise the keenness and ability to nurture good disciplines erodes with disuse. As much as it is necessary to have patience to succeed, it is necessary to have audacity to explore. While a good discipline can bring tangible benefits, it cannot bring forth other good disciplines, and the search, it seems, must always go on.

If there is an apparent tension between waiting to nurture, and jumping to explore, then it is perhaps made worse by the need to act. Thoughts are, ultimately, immaterial. It is possible to think about thoughts, and about actions, and about acting. To communicate and hold discourse, it necessary to act in some way, be it speaking, writing, or building. As long as the thought is not expressed, it is always safe in the confines of the mind. Once expressed, it interacts with other thoughts and becomes discourse. Some of the discourse attacks the idea, and becomes critique. The idea fights back, and that is defense. However, it all begins with expression. Even if the whole of the idea cannot be expressed so simply, it must be made tangible to make a difference. It is easy to shelter the thoughts too much, avoiding the tempering which allows it to grow (or to die, as perhaps it should).

Ultimately, there are no recipes for succeeding and attaining this nirvana of thoughts. As with the nirvana of the soul, the path for each is rich and varied, and cannot be prescribed, because by the act of prescribing itself, the thought is doomed. Many thoughts will never make it. Some will be deserving and fail. A few will make it all the way. We the creators have the duty to oversee the thoughts in this cycle, and to keep the cycle going, so that we may have the privilege of experiencing the success of the few.

To ground things a bit, let’s walk this path in the context of disciplines in computer science. Computer science, for my purposes, is not a discipline but a field within which many disciplines dwell. Coding python or java, designing a CMS or a multimedia app, or creating a security aware or high availablility system is a discipline. Each discipline requires a slightly different mindset. This differentiates it from a field, which only requires some basic understanding of the logical underlayments of the field. So let us choose a discipline and proceed.

The first steps is almost always the logical soup stage. The logical soup stage is exemplified by a lack of logical and functional structure, combined with an intuitive exploration of the space. In reality, it is a search for structure — the stumblings in the dark that may allow a blind man to describe an elephant. Through the haze, one can glimpse facets of the structure that should, or perhaps could, be. Often, there is neither time not opprotunity to grasp or fully implement the perceived structure, but these glimpses inspire nonetheless. The final product operates at merely a functional level — nothing more.

The second stage derives from the first, and this incarnation is the straightjacket stage. This stage is fraught with an overabundance of structure. Contemplating the structure glimpsed in the first stage, the creator now attempts to solidify the glimpses into rules and patterns. The internalization of a bewildering array of often-conflicting rules leads to the creating of even more rules to unify the varying models. The overstructuralized product trades off intuitiveness for generality, creating a product which could be infinitely extensible, but in reality would require far too much effort to extend due to the multitude of rules one must contend with. The structure nonetheless provides benefits beyond function, and the code is now not only functional, but in some ways understandable.

The final stage derives, as again, from the previous. The creator, feeling suffocated by rules and constraints, in some sense rebels against the structure. Experience now truly comes into play, and intuitiveness returns, accompanied by a critical reflection on structure. In this stage, there is a tention between intuitiveness and structure, and an understanding of moderation is both directions. The moderation leads to two levels of rules. The first level is the sort of rules seen in the straightjacket stage, specifying the logical structure of things. The second level is new, and specifies meta-rules for applying structural rules. These rules allow others to grasp the creator’s reasoning, and infer rules even when the rule is not written down. Unlike the straighjacket stage, the code is now not only carries meaning, but intent and vision.

Though I said earlier that any mental discipline would do, I chose coding for a reason. Coding is in many ways not so different from anything thinking. It’s a dual-purpose discourse. While ostensibly speaking to the machine, code also speaks to those who read the code (be it the original writer or another reader). This is also true for acts of thought, and research in particular. When we do research, we contemplate matters not only for ourselves, but also for others. When we create frameworks, material or mental, we as again speak not only to our own needs, but to others as well. When we think, these thoughts are of little value to the universe unless actualized by action.

If coding is like thought, then it’s also clear that thought has structure and substance, form and function, affordance and legibility, and many other things more easily attributable to code in common parlance than to thought. And like coding disciplines, substantial thought along any avenue is multi-staged. It also starts as a soup of ideas, first intuitively felt, then structured, then relaxed and re-intuited into a final form. The thoughts thus produced in the final steps have the same dual structure that code has in its final evolution, and carry both the information we can convey in words, and the feelings we can convey over those words. The benefits of the evolution of code, as well as the pitfalls that come from these stages, can thus all apply.

Already this entry grows rather long, so I shall lay out the rest of my thoughts on the stages of thinking in my next post, The Nirvana of Thoughts.

Sometimes I wonder if all bloggers are like that. Having read my share of them, I think not. At some point, I thought it was just self-important blather… and for most intents I still do. This is, of course, discounting all the news sites masquerading as blogs, all the corporate newsholes, and all the other fashionable things wandering out there like wannabe-movie-stars in New York cafes. Many blogs are just online journals. They represent cathersis, not discourse. In this world of digital communication, we are better connected to people on the other side of the planet whom we already know, than to people who stand next to us and share in our real-life circumstances. In this half-virtualized world, blogs represent contact points where we can speak out randomly and have people hear it if they wish. The audience stands before the blogger invisible and unknowable, and to the largest degree, the cathertic blogger does not care about the actual presence of the audience, but the believed presence of one through the asynchronousity of the digital medium. Perhaps this is what my friend means when he says that he prefers to keep his thoughts to himself. On the other hand, to take oneself seriously is to be self-important. So as long as I use the pronoun “I”, this may all be self-important blather regardless of my intent. Such is life.

That said, walking on the razor’s edge is a little different, at least insofar as my intents are concerned. Of course, the readers still witness in invisibility. On the edge, though, the thoughts are not purely expository. The difference is that the carefully chosen words can reveal a bit of the thoughts never spoken, and so perhaps can make people think about those thoughts. To see why, it’s better to start at the basis of blogs: language. We must use language in order to communicate, and because language is a formalism, we must simplify and discipline thoughts to fit into this imperfect formalism. When I discipline my thoughts, I have to make choices. I have to think about the things worth saying, and in the process discard the things not worth saying, even if the things not worth saying are themselves contextually worthy of saying elsewhere. The razor’s edge slices through these discarded thoughts to produce discourse which contains bits of the many meanings behind the quantized words.

So finally, to the answer. Why? Why spend time writing in this web page when a myriad persuits await? I think the best reason is that walking on the razor’s edge makes me think. It makes me search. It makes me take the things under the surface and give them form. The razor is the separator. It separates the soup of ideas into details worthy of words, and thoughts to be forgotten. As I refine the ideas into words, new ideas are birthed from these words, and perhaps some of these ideas are themselves worthy at a higher level. I give something up, and I get something in new. Hopefully, those who read these words also get something… perhaps even something that I no longer have. The formative process becomes the entry, and vice versa. So that’s the why… at least for today. Perhaps tomorrow, today’s children will have answers anew?