confusionAlways loved a good quote
beggs
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke [wikipedia.org] died today at 90. A long and productive career, as a Sci-Fi author and contributions to science and science literacy, come to an end.
Having killed for religious beliefs and then political beliefs, I believe we are now on the threshold of killing for economic beliefs.
Dr. J.W. Spellman, quoted from 1971 Winter Soldier Hearings: “What are we Doing to Vietnam?” [alternet.org]
That’s a fairly prophetic statement… in fact you should read the rest (the quote is on page two of the cited article) which follows that morsel:
It takes no prophet to predict that there will be destruction and riots and killings in the name of economic creeds in the future. And that these will seem just as valid as religion and politics have seemed to our predecessors historically.
It’s interesting that this was said by a college professor ten years before Reagan [wikipedia.org] and Thatcher [wikipedia.org] politicized the IMF and World Bank and used them to push the Washington Consensus [wikipedia.org]. The tactics, if not the basic ideas, that the IMF and World Bank pushed onto developing countries are a source of anger for many people in developing countries. Many people have linked these policies and their implementation to the Anti-American and Anti-western attitudes that have increased since the 1980s. It’s not a stretch to suggest that the current situation in Iraq is seen by many — even the majority of — people in the world as ‘killing for economic benefits.’ The Neo-con [newamericancentury.org] agenda and the many links between high level members of the Bush administration and American big-business (especially the Chaney-Halliburton situation) lend credence to this belief. True or not, it looks like we are killing for economic beliefs.
“The 20th century was about sorting out supply… [t]he 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.”
Gavin Potter, quoted in This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize [wired.com]
Won’t it be great when the computers are figuring out both the supply and the demand? The computer in my TV can decide I want to watch Gilligan’s Island reruns 24 hours a day and the networks computer can decide that Gilligan’s Island is the only TV show worth showing. Everyone will be happy!
The only kinds of fights worth having are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun and joy of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
I.F. Stone [wikipedia.org]
If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there’s too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it’s too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the “users”) could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with.
Bennett Haselton, quoted from Next Year’s Laws, now out in beta! [slashdot.org] Read on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
The whole article is worth a read, don’t let the computer programmer jargon in the quote scare you. Some of the comments are quite insightful too and worth a read. I like the idea of the double blind test for laws that Haselton describes but as one of the comments points out, it is impossible to predict how a law will be read in the future, which is why we have courts and lawyers in the first place. But I think looking at the Software Development Life Cycle [wikipedia.org] is helpful here too; it is impossible to fully predict how the users of your software (or any other product) will use the product or what changes will be desired in the future. The SDLC does not end when the software goes into production, if the software works there will no doubt be updates, if it does not work there will be updates or new software or the software will die. Maybe we should not just use the double blind test when a law is written, maybe when the courts need to step in the law itself should be subjected to possible change and modified so that it meets up-to-date test cases.