DANGER POINT

March 19th 2013

From this review of To Save Everything, Click Here, a new book by Evgeny Morozov. In my undergrad I did a lot of work in the philosophy of science, and I came away from it with a deep appreciation for Kuhn. When research paradigms change, the new one isn’t chosen by anything much resembling rationality; theory choice seems to always be underdetermined by existing evidence. And that means that pretty much everything is value-laden, which is OK, because what isn’t value-laden isn’t interesting for humans. For instance, stats are hard because you need to know how to effectively but also responsibly use models and techniques.

What grounds the discussion of quantification (and I have a hunch that quantification’s problems, as described by Morozov, are the problems of all symbolic systems, and certainly also problems that narratives face) is the fact that these models work and matter only insofar as they aim at truth. And sure, you can be a dick about it like Morozov, but that’s no fun, and you’re going to miss out on a whole lot of important, truth-speaking stuff if you take a Luddite’s view towards all the tools of science. Sure, you might avoid seeing the wrong bits that make you feel uncomfortable. But why not actually contribute? Why not actually be a part of the refining of quantification? Why not see where it can go, and bring in your knowledge also about what is moral?

What seeeeeems to be important is that we aim at truth, so let’s not silo ourselves too much. There’s a reason why the subtitle of this blog is “at the tech frontier of the liberal arts.” It’s because I’ve found there’s too much benefit in being a scientist about the real human shit I care about to ever go back to thinking that theory has all the answers.

Posted at 7:12pm and tagged with: philosophy, evgeny morozov,.

“

We need an ethics of quantification, Morozov cries, and I cry with him. When is it good? When is it bad? How can it be used to further our ends, as opposed to being celebrated as its own end?

”

September 7th 2012

Philosophy and tech startups go pretty well together

1 note |#

I’m a philosophy grad. I mostly cared about analytic philosophy, especially the philosophy of science, but also the philosophy of race. I decided to study philosophy because it seemed to be the closest thing to what I did in high school: argue.

I argued incessantly on forums, chatrooms, comment threads, and my first period sciences sociales class with Mr. Mitchell. I argued there in French, and I did it for 5 minutes a day at least. I tried my damndest to communicate my opinions, and after five years of doing that, I could speak the language pretty decently.

My need to argue has helped me learn a lot of things - including how not to argue, and to instead be fair to someone’s point. But there’s one skill that has become especially important in my life, and which is serving me incredbily well at my new job at a tech startup called GoInstant. It’s the ability to find counterexamples.

Counterexamples
In philosophy, especially in earlier classes, basically all you do is analyze an argument until you understand how it fails to account for one very obvious, very important thing: a state of affairs we call a ‘counterexample.’ It’s simply the one state of affairs that shows the argument your interlocutor is making must be inadequate in some way. When Callicles says that the best people are the strongest people, Socrates points out that the masses are pretty strong, and they do some pretty horrible shit. Bam. Counterexample.

The development process is awfully similar, except the states of affairs that you’re hunting aren’t called counterexamples: they’re called bugs. And the uncovering of bugs is the challenge that keeps developers busy.

At GoInstant, we have an unbelievably enormous project: we’ve got to make our software work on the entire web. Every single webpage should work within our browser, and if one doesn’t, we have to figure out how to do make it work, so that that one state of affairs will be covered by our code.

The greatest good for the greatest number
Except, of course, it’s not that simple. It’s not just as simple as finding all the bugs, all the states of affairs in which our software doesn’t work. Instead, we must first decide: what is most important? 2nd most? 3rd most? etc. etc. ad nauseum.

There’s a normative project behind every single app that has been ever designed: what matters most, given that we have limited time and money to put towards the project? It is the question that fuels all design decisions, for anything. It is the question whose answer separates great products from awful ones. It is the question I intend to spend the rest of my life answering, because it is that complicated and nuanced and fucking cool to work on.

Good answers for the hardest question
This question is a question of what good design really is. There are a lot of answers, but there’s only one way to solve it: find counterexamples. And these counterexamples are states of affairs in which human beings are using an app* and finding it wanting, unable to fulfill its purpose as well as it should (to borrow some more normative terms).

But the complicated thing is that for a design to matter, it also has to be just one thing in an ecosystem of creation: an ecosystem that makes yet more wonderful things. It has to be the product of a deeply talented team, because it’s not easy to make that one thing. It has to generate revenue to power every stage of its development and creation. It’s an organism that’s created and which can give the power to create, and that’s kind of awesome.

Finding a niche
It’s also unbelievably rare. If it grows and has any staying power, it is because it occupied a niche that was brought about from the combination of available technology, models of commerce, political dynamics, and social trends at a particular time and place. To read those signs well is impossible; it’s easier to just occupy the time and place and see what it is that you’ll find yourself needing in five years time. That is to say, it’s always a crap shoot.

There’s someone, or a group of someones, in the design process who will have to make the tough decisions about their little organism. They’ll have to see the connections between commerce and possibility and usefulness and human need, the ones who’ll have to tinker with their creation until it fits. After that, they’ll have to do everything they can to make everyone else aware of those connections. That latter part - the making aware of - is called marketing. Everything before it is product management - or intelligent design, if you think of designers as the sort of god figures of this weird ecological analogy.

So what do you do if you have an idea? To turn it into anything important, you need to do more than just make it a physical object or a collection of lines of code. Importance is determined by how it fares. You need to find out where it sits, and you need to get it there. If there is no spot for it, or if it bleeds money while crossing a desert in search of an oasis, then shit. You’re out of luck, this time. I hope you didn’t risk too much, and I hope you can still change it enough so that it can thrive, somewhere. Probably not where you expected, though.

There’s always the rare possibility that you find the spot for your app, and it grows and flourishes and makes everything that nurtured it just all the stronger for having gotten it to this point. It’s not something that happens often, and a lot of the time, it’s less about being the perfect solution than it is about just having been good enough for the time and place. Until, of course, the perfect solution comes along.

There’s a problem with perfect, though. Nothing that evolved has ever been perfect. And no theory is immune to counterexamples. As long as those two things are true, and they always will be, opportunity can be found. Apps can be made, and can thrive. The universe will keep spinning, and entropy will gather in the practiced hands of an unusual, unpredictable force.

*I’m just gonna use app as shorthand for anything that can be used by a person, ever.

Posted at 10:23pm and tagged with: apps, counterexamples, development, lean development, philosophy, tech, tech startups, writing,.

July 25th 2012

|#

Some good advice from Dr. Allen Stairs, philosophy’s most prolific tweeter. Resolving disputes between multiple moral factors isn’t something I’d pretend to know much about, but here’s a handy principle: instead of thinking about ‘duties,’ apply everything you learned in kindergarten and you might just be a good person.

While a narrow focus on “duties” can lead you to do stuff that’s just plain insensitive and cruel, there’s also a risk that fixation on duties can lead you to do far more than you should. Sometimes, people will tell you that you have a duty to act, or a duty to protect, or a duty to do something that you really don’t have a duty to do.

To varying degrees, we have duties to lots of people in our lives - special obligations formed by virtue of having certain concrete relationships. Parents have duties to children, and children might also have duties to their ageing parents. But duties are not the only factor in determining right action, and your duty to one person (or yourself) may matter more than your duty to another. There are lesser and greater duties - stronger and weaker obligations. And when something truly wrong or at least excessive is expected of you, and the reason for your action is that it is your duty, unless you’re keenly aware that there is more to morality and life than duty, it can be hard to separate a dutiful action from a supererogatory act, or from an immoral one.

So here’s what I think a corollary of Allen’s advice is:

If you’re acting from duty, you had also better consider what the decent, kind, honest, or helpful course of action is - and you had better consider what duties you also have to yourself.

Posted at 1:18pm and tagged with: philosophy, advice, ethics, duties,.

“

… [C]oncrete moral situations seldom reduce to a single question, especially when they involve our concrete relationships with other people. Thinking in terms of “duties” is less useful than asking about the decent or the kind or the honest or the helpful thing to do—not to mention about how we would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.

”

July 8th 2012

|#

Another knockout from The Stone @ NYT blog. To spoil it for you: analytic philospohy couldn’t possibly be more lucid, more individualistic, and more elegant. Lucidity is par for the course; individuality permeates the form, even though it’s allegedly just a transparent vehicle for arguments and the furthering of philosophy; and elegance? Waugh figures this is just the thing that causes you to really fricking enjoy reading something, and I can tell you now that nothing compares to the boost of serotonin I got when I first understood what Donald Davidson was talking about in Actions, Reasons and Causes. For a certain sort of glutton, the harder it is, the greater the payoff.

Timothy Williamson, the current occupant of the illustrious Wykeham Chair of Logic at Oxford, makes a virtue of the ‘long haul of technical reflection’ that is analytic philosophy today. Does it bore you? Well, he says, too bad. ‘Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.’

But as if we needed analytic philosophy to look any douchier, there’s this little nugget in the article. My attention span is not at all anything to brag about, yet somehow I still enjoy analytic philosophy - and perhaps especially so when it’s there amongst those lower pleasures, like watching a whole season of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or obsessively refreshing a pregnant twitter feed. Until the douchiness filters out of the practitioners of analytic philosophy, Evelyn Waugh has the last word on it: “a parlor game of logical quibbles.” Bravo, señor badass.

And sidebar to any analytic who disagrees: it’s possible to be a moral and metaphysical realist with a very science-friendly ontology and still think that being a douche about it to other people is not helpful. call it… pragmatism.

Posted at 3:30pm and tagged with: analytic philosophy, philosophy, lit, literature, quotes, evelyn waugh, the stone, nyt, new york times,.

“

Does anybody read analytic philosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature? … What distinguishes literature from mere communication, or sheer trash? Waugh had an answer to this too. “Lucidity, elegance, individuality”: these are the three essential traits that make a work of prose “memorable and unmistakable,” that make it literature.

”