The Irish Penguin

Moral Code, Actual Code and Becoming Management - Ought You?

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 08:42:41 +0000

I’ve just read a very interesting blog post by Charity Majors, which tackles the question:

How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

There are some great points in that post. It prompted me to try to define the role of manager as an acid test for would-be managers or those wondering whether to continue with management or change course. Indeed, there does appear to be a simple principle that can guide us - though not necessarily to an easy answer:

Your job as a manager should be to act as a proponent and propagator of moral action for your team
… and, in some way, for your organisation and wider society.

(But let's scope this to the first one for now and not get overly ambitious 😀)

If you disagree, then you may be on shaky ground…

Photo by Mango Matter under the Pixabay license.

Charity Majors’ post may or may not agree with this conclusion, and I will not put words in anyone’s mouth. However, in part, it appears to allude to this when noting some of the responsibilities of a manager:

To ‘pick up on someone’s anxiety’ and help
To ‘argue someone into receiving a well-deserved raise’
To ‘wielding your manager powers for good’

That last one hits it on the head (assuming one knows what good is; admittedly, that is a big assumption). A crucial one to add to that list of responsibilities, the trait that, no doubt, many have seen as lacking in their leaders over the years, is:

Don't throw people under a bus when the 💩 hits the fan.

That takes courage. And if you don’t think you have that yet, then you should try to put that right before you accept or seek to be a manager. In aggregate, enough managers lacking in this area makes for a horror show software house. If you do think that you have that kind of virtue - and that doing the right thing doesn’t drain you to the point that you are an empty husk - then you at least have a foundation to potentially extract satisfaction and worth from being a manager. If not, you should be wary. The point here is not to make a judgement call on whether you have enough courage in this regard to deem you a good person. The point here is do you have enough courage to make it sufficiently easy for you to do your job.

Beyond Courage…

There is more to say on all this of course, such as the extra hours that it can sometimes take because you are, at least partially, responsible for the result of other people’s work. And, I agree that missing out on the problem solving and solution design nearer the code-level can be fatal enough to one’s happiness to decide against being a manager. In the unlikely event that you have hours left over at the end of the day, there may be that occasional moment that affords the chance to look into a new technology (it’s assumed that you won’t have enough true code-level context to efficiently dive into an existing problem that needs code implementation in your organisation - hence, the suggestion to look into a new technology instead).

My claim, that there exists a moral core requirement to have a shot at being a satisfied manager, may come into conflict (or may not; again, not wanting to put words in any mouths) with at least part of Charity Majors’ blog post:

There seems to be precisely one acceptable answer to the question of what motivates managers: loftily waxing on and on about how they get ALL their joy and fulfilment from empowering others and watching other people succeed without ever personally building anything tangible or receiving ANY of the credit. I call bullshit. (This bugs the ever-loving crap out of me.)

Sidenote: Charity's follow-on analogy to sleepless, vomit-coated parenthood is hilarious 😀

My claim of a moral core requirement may appear too closely tied to a manager fundamentally getting their kicks out of positively empowering others. I do believe, however, that if your core is not about doing right by others then you will find the going difficult. If your moral code isn’t set up for success then neither will the actual code be, nor your team, nor your chances of ongoing satisfaction. On the point of praise, or lack of, I do not know if it is commonplace for an organisation to skip giving credit to managers altogether, so I’ll skip over that here.

What if you are a moral monster 👹 yet still want to be a manager?

Well, the good news is that much of morality can be learned. In many ways, you are what you read. So, skipping a few of the blog posts on the latest tech trends and finding some enjoyable and informative podcasts or books on ethics and philosophy can help. These can give you a solid foundation to extract happiness from managing and to be a more effective manager. Reducing the three demons of lies, Lip-Service Development (perhaps the topic of a future blog post, but you can guess at the meaning for now) and dogma is a great place to start.

P.S.

The skillsets required for being a good manager can differ from the skillsets required for being a good engineer, but there are plenty of other excellent resources on that. So that’s been out-of-scoped for the purposes of the above discussion. It is suffice to say, however, that a moral compass is an important part of the engineer’s toolkit as well as a manager’s.

On Gender, Sex and a Spectrum of Influences

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 22:48:45 +0000

The issue of transgender rights has come to the fore quite prominently in recent times, in part no doubt due to the clampdown on such rights by the Trump administration. Bans on serving in the military and a plethora of bathroom bills across the US have ensured a fiery reaction. It is unsurprising then that the number of articles and editorials on the nature of trans has increased in scientific publications, such as Nature and Scientific American. These articles have posited scientific evidence and facts that are likely to be well received by the transgender community. However, in a recent Quillette article, Colin Wright counters with an accusation that this movement could be dubbed ‘The New Evolution Deniers’. His analysis is explored here, where the question as to whether these articles claimed that biological sex should be considered a spectrum is scrutinised. This question is important because clarity is needed as to whether a trend exists, in these scientific publications, in moving away from a binary definition of biological sex.

Photo by Max Pixel under the CC Zero license.

It is worth noting at the outset that the treatment of the discussion here neither seeks to take a position on how biological sex should be defined, nor is it intended to be in any way hostile to Wright nor the articles he references. It is instead an attempt to look for objective facts that can form the basis of further discussions. It does seek to (unemotionally) unpick conflations to provide clarity on the fundamental issues. Finally, it is written in good faith with the intention of furthering the discussion rather than fuelling flames. Hopefully, that comes across or else it is a failure in the writing of this article itself.

Wright’s central concern is in what he sees as ‘social justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex […] is a social construct.’ He stakes out his own position as acknowledging ‘the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous’ but states that ‘this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary.’ [1]

Wright takes issue with the journal Nature, which in his view, “published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex ‘on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned’”. [2] However, if one takes the fuller literal quote from the Nature article (which so happens to be its title and subtitle), the context sheds new light:

US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science.
A move to classify people on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned. [3]

We see that the subject is actually gender not sex, something that is non-obvious from how the quote was referenced in the Quillette article.

In a second extract from Nature, Wright finds the phrase ‘the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female’ as contrary to his position. [4] However, this quote does not indicate that Nature is calling for a non-binary definition of biological sex. The only thing clearly posited is that there is an underlying complexity that the scientific community, as well as the population at large, was unaware of.

In a third quotation of the Nature article, Wright examines the article’s motives, claiming that they are to counter the opinion that:

acknowledging the reality of biological sex will ‘undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.’ [5]

However, the phrase ‘who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female’ never claims to relate to biological sex in the Nature article. [6] It can be granted that the paragraph preceding it (in Nature) did refer to ‘the sex on a birth certificate’ as part of discussing the Department of Health and Human Services memo. [7] However, that is a separate paragraph and it is far more likely that the ‘male or female’ in the discrimination quote is referring to gender when talking about ‘binary categories’. [8]

It would appear that the Nature article has been carefully written to keep terminology such as sex and gender as distinct and appropriately utilised in all cases. And that the Quilette article is confused in its interpretation of it.

Moving onto the first of the Scientific American articles, Wright’s response is less susceptible to correction as the title and subtitle illustrate:

Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic
Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male [9]

However, the main body of the article does not bear that out. The parts of it that come closest to doing so never cross the gender/sex line. For example, Ainsworth notes that ‘studies of DSDs have shown that sex is no simple dichotomy.’ [10] Initially, that may sound like a reaction to the idea of binary biological sex. However, a more nuanced reading shows that it:

a. Conveys the general spirit of the difficulty, in some cases, of assigning a biological sex (which is relatively uncontroversial) and

b. In no way rules out the possibility of biological sex as a dichotomy. It very much allows, and is compatible with, a hypothetical statement such as ‘Studies of DSDs have shown that sex is a complex dichotomy.’

The article comes closer to the topic of social constructs where Ainsworth writes, ‘when it comes to sex, there is still intense social pressure to conform to the binary model.’ [11] Again, at first glance this can seem like an attack on the binary biological sex model. However, the sentence that follows it, “This pressure has meant that people born with clear DSDs often undergo surgery to ‘normalize’ their genitals […] usually performed on babies, who are too young to consent, and risks assigning a sex at odds with the child’s ultimate gender identity”. [12] Again, it is clear that there is no call to redefine biological sex as a spectrum here, simply that ‘doctors and parents should at least wait until a child is old enough to communicate their gender identity’. [13]

Even the article’s closing quote by (an oft-referenced source in the article) Eric Vilain, ‘at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter’, revolves around gender, not biological sex. [14]

The only line where the article directly considers biological sex as a spectrum is:

Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state
will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. [15]

Even in this case, Ainsworth appears to be alluding to the fact that the evidence presented is insufficient to make a strong claim of biological sex being a spectrum. Perhaps, the biggest source of confusion is between the article title/subtitle and its content. If one was to conclude that this epistemologically detracts from the article then it is unfortunate for the contents of the article itself, which outline an array of interesting science. Though Wright would seem to have some justification to cite this article as being in opposition to his point of view.

In the final article Wright references, again from Scientific American, entitled ‘Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum’ the author, Amanda Montañez, is unambiguous:

DSDs […] represent a robust, evidence-based argument to reject rigid assignations of sex and gender. [16]

In this case, it is clear that the article is worthy of being positioned as contrary to Wright’s definition of biological sex.

In summary, it would seem, ironically, that we have arrived at a spectrum of sorts; as we move from the Nature article to the latter of the Scientific American articles, we go from a place where no non-binary definitions of biological sex are being proposed towards one where there is.

Whilst this commentary takes no position on the definition of biological sex, there appears to be one point of agreement that can be universally stated. Whatever about a consensus view on the ‘spectrum of outcomes’, of observable and testable data points to objectively define biological sex 100% of the time, it is certain that the ‘spectrum of influences’, the genetic development and hormonal interactions, is much more complex than ever imagined. Perhaps this can form the basis of a productive discussion going forward - one that caters to the reality of each individual’s circumstances, while at the same time catering to the objective necessity of science. To channel Aristotle, we need to honour truth above our genitals.

References

Colin Wright, “The New Evolution Deniers - Quillette”, Quillette, 2018 [Accessed 1 December 2018].
Wright, “The New Evolution Deniers”.
“US Proposal For Defining Gender Has No Basis In Science”, Nature, 563.7729 (2018), 5-5.
”US Proposal For Defining Gender Has No Basis In Science”.
Wright, “The New Evolution Deniers”.
”US Proposal For Defining Gender Has No Basis In Science”.
”US Proposal For Defining Gender Has No Basis In Science”.
”US Proposal For Defining Gender Has No Basis In Science”.
Claire Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined: The Idea Of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic”, Scientific American, 2018 [Accessed 1 December 2018].
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined”.
Amanda Montañez, “Visualizing Sex As A Spectrum”, Scientific American Blog Network, 2018 [Accessed 3 December 2018].

Why Religion As a Belief May Not Hold Water

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 21:36:12 +0000

The clock is ticking down in the run up to Ireland’s blasphemy referendum on October 26th. Few commentators think that the references to blasphemy should remain in the Irish constitution. However, John Waters featured in The Times, proposing that they should be kept in place to safeguard respect and belief [1]. His argument is confused on two grounds.

Photo by Ansonlobo under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Firstly, just because something is held as a belief should not mean that it is automatically worthy of respect. For example, you could hold the belief that it is right to slaughter 5000 innocent women and children, however it does not follow that this belief should be respected. Secondly, and perhaps worth exploring in more detail here, is the question of the meaning of belief itself. It could be argued that religions, typically, do not truly offer a set of beliefs. Rather, they assert to know. This may seem like a trivial difference, but it has important consequences. We can flesh this out with a thought experiment.

I may be looking for my jacket at the end of an evening at a friend’s house. I am standing in the hall and vaguely remember leaving the jacket in the kitchen, which is directly off the hall. If it is in the kitchen, but I do not have a clear line of sight to it, then I may believe that the jacket is in the kitchen. However, if I do have a clear line of sight to the jacket, then I will know that it is in the kitchen. The effect of these two differing mindsets can be tested. If I merely believe that my jacket is in the kitchen, and someone then tells me that it is in the sitting room, then I will most likely accept their suggestion as a possibility. I will not dogmatically argue with them that, in fact, the jacket is in the kitchen. I will not get angry at them. Nor will I demand that it is offensive for them to suggest that the jacket may be in a different room to the one I had in mind.

However, if I am asserting that I know that the jacket is in the kitchen and someone tells me otherwise, there is a good chance that I would robustly disagree with them. For I would know that the jacket is in the room; I may even be pointing at the jacket with conviction. Which of the two - belief or assert to know - best describes the position of those who would argue for the preservation of blasphemy legislation? Do they ever put forward their beliefs and then qualify them by saying they might be wrong? Do these sound like the kind of beliefs that may need defending by a constitutional or legislative protection? Do these sounds like beliefs at all?

This difference, between belief and asserted knowledge, is not a new concept being introduced here. Rather, it has been at the heart of civilisation for over two thousand years - as epistemology - the study of how certain we can be of things. This is one of the core fields of philosophy, arguably first argued by Xenophanes in the 5th century BCE. Since then, Plato, Aristotle and pretty much every significant philosopher has had something to say about it. [2] This difference is crucial and can guide us as to whether we want to live in a country with blasphemy legislation, or without. The former is the current situation in Ireland and other jurisdictions that have legal measures in place to repress critical thinking. We have an opportunity to put clear light between Ireland and countries that would threaten, sanction and, in some cases, torture those who would defy religious belief. [3] So what is to be done on Friday, October 26th? We are at a point in history where we can assert to know that repealing this law is the right thing to do.

References

Coyne, Ellen, John Waters Launches Campaign To Keep Blasphemy In Constitution, Thetimes.Co.Uk, 2018
Adamson, Peter, 3 - Created In Our Image: Xenophanes Against Greek Religion, History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, 2018. Transcript of quote: ‘He [Xenophanes] is distinguishing between believing something and really knowing it, a distinction that will be tremendously useful down the line when we get to Plato’ (16m20s)
Blasphemy Referendum - It Is Important That We All Vote, irishexaminer.com, 2018

P.S.

The field of epistemology, the discerning knowledge from belief, is an extensive one. Trying to cover it here in detail would not do it justice. We will likely explore this in a future post with reference to the above.

Discussion On When To Debate

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 21:16:12 +0000

This post is the expansion this tweet.

Photo by Mohamed Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan under the CC CC0 Public Domain licence.

On the question of - is it pointless to debate if there will be no actionable outcome?

Here’s why I think engaging may be worth considering…

The Socratic method - Socrates coined the approach of debating simply to grow in knowledge, not necessarily to produce an actionable outcome, and that has underpinned much of philosophy and science for millennia. This is abstract but to make it concrete - what if an idea emerges during the debate that isn’t hostile and turns out to be a net benefit to humanity?
Regarding “if society agrees on the answer, then why debate?” - debating how absurd the other side’s argument is will always be an important way to keep the lessons of history alive. I’ll channel Angela Merkel with this except from her Davos speech…

Today, when Europe is very much the focus of the discussions at this Davos Forum, I would like to recall that the First World War ended 100 years ago, in 1918. It is described as the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century. Worse catastrophes followed it. Like sleepwalkers, the politicians of the time blundered into a terrible situation. Today, 100 years later, when there are fewer and fewer surviving eyewitnesses to the Second World War, we need to ask ourselves if we have really learned from history or not. I think the generations of people born after the Second World War will need to prove whether they have really learned something.
If reasonable people don’t debate the question then it will solely be left to the radicals to debate and control the narrative.
The originating Twitter thread itself is, at some level, proof of the value of debating what was presented as a taboo topic in the tweet initially quoted. I learned a lot from the pressure put on my position. It’s crystallised many fleeting thoughts as written words and there’s a clearer understanding of each person’s position, with many ambiguous points clarified.

Regarding the questions relating to the Fox News piece, asking “should we have an ethnically diverse population in a country?”

This is a good example of when decisions get tricky. Should we be afraid of this question being asked? No. I haven’t seen the rest of the Fox News piece other than the clip shared but I suspect Japan could be used as an argument for the pro-low diversity argument (NB: do not take the mentioning of that argument as an endorsement of that point of view). Would the act of putting together a counter argument to this make the pro-diversity argument stronger? Yes. Is there something else in Japanese culture that we should consider reflecting on to see if we can isolate a way to improve Western society? Maybe. Could some (not all) people be talked out of taking a radical point of view by engaging on the topic? Probably.

However, there are caveats. To start with, one needs to be very wary of engaging with “bad faith” actors. It is wise to err on the side of not engaging - unless you’re…

Confident of success despite the other parties bad faith tactics and
There’s real value in having the conversation.

In other words the “threshold for engagement” goes up exponentially. When making the decision, care must be taken that you don’t end up being part of a crude platform for destructive speeches. And having a firm moderator to ensure points are backed up is also a likely requirement. These are all things that will need to be weighed up depending on whether/where you believe the other party falls on the spectrum of bad faith actors.

One final point is that if you do engage be aware that you may be misquoted based on what you say long into the future. You can end up having audio or video content re-edited to negatively reflect what you say out of context. There may be little you can do about that and it might be something that you will just have to accept as a price for engaging. It is entirely reasonable that you decide it’s a price not worth paying - the takeaway is that the decision is highly context sensitive. There can be a lot of nuance to the situation, and to how you may approach it, and it is unlikely that a “one size fits all” solution of “never debate” is a satisfactory recommendation.

There Is No Place Quite Like Hell

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 09:16:12 +0000

So I recently came across a headline somewhere outlining that Pope Francis said that hell did not exist. Given a recent uptick in my interest in philosophy, it struck me as an interesting article to dive into. Of course, anytime you really want to find an article you recently swiped past, the forces of the universe will conspire against you to make sure that you never succeed in finding it. So I resorted to the only thing that can consistently mitigate the forces of the universe - Google. A quick Internet search later and we were back in business. And I had got something altogether different.

Photo by Luc Viatour under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic licence.

Apparently the Pope did not say that hell did not exist but instead was misquoted. Rather the doctrine states that “the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God”. Well, let’s go Aristotle on this and see if this latter interpretation is logically possible…

God is omnipresent
Sidenote (and axiom) - God created hell
Hell is defined primarily as a separation from God (as noted in the linked article above)
But God must be present in hell otherwise he is not omnipresent (ie. there would be places he cannot be - a contradiction)
Therefore it is not possible for one to be separated from God - as God is omnipresent
Conclusion - hell cannot exist as per that definition

So we may not quite have put the fallible in papal infallibility yet but we have arrived at an interesting place. Now there are some lines of attack on the above conclusion.

Omnipresent Slipperiness

The first place to cast doubt on the above logic is to bend the meaning of omnipresent. As we humans are well versed in experiencing and thinking about “being present” as a occupying a place in space and time, this can lead to defining presence as a physical location. And one could argue that hell could exist beyond what we know as space and time. To satisfy the separation from God claim, however, God still cannot exist in this hell. That would imply that there is an area beyond space and time that God does not exist in - and it would seem unlikely that this is a satisfactory conclusion for any interlocutor. So omnipresent means omnipresent in space and time as well as beyond space and time - no exceptions.

Separation Slipperiness

If omnipresent is taken to mean omnipresent in the broadest sense of the word, as noted in the previous point, then a next reasonable line of attack is to pressure the definition of separation. This, it could be argued, means a feeling of isolation from God rather than the (meta)physical separation from God that would immediately spring to mind. This would require God to somehow impart thoughts of isolation in the mind of the condemned. For the purposes of this argument we need to grant that something akin to feeling, thoughts and mind are possible in the metaphysical world. Once granted, we would also accept that God has omnipotence as per the doctrine and is all powerful. Indeed, this omnipotence could then be used to impart the thought of isolation. However, this would appear to be a rather bizarre employment of illusions - inducing a feeling of isolation in a subject that you created, for the purposes of punishing them for actions they took based on how you created them. At this point it would begin to simply look like a sadistic abusive relationship, which would hardly be compatible with the spirit of the doctrine (if you excuse the pun).

Dimensional Quagmire

One can argue and expend much energy on things like - if the logic proposed entertains a hell, which resides outside of space and time then how can it be created by God in the first place - as there would be no time dimension to allow hell to come into existence. However, the logic leading to the conclusion that “hell cannot exist as a separation from God” at the core of this article adds and subtracts nothing from the existing doctrine. So feel free to think for as long as you want about these issues but it would appear to be out of scope.

There you have it - there is no place quite like hell!

On Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray at Dublin's 3Arena. And Why...

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:14:28 +0000

An event that caused plenty of controversy in some quarters went down in front of quite a full house of eight and half thousand in the 3Arena on Saturday 14th of July. Here, a few of the Intellectual Dark Web’s (IDW) leading actors interlocked for the first time in Dublin. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He became infamous in 2016 for announcing his objection to the Canadian government’s Bill C-16 and said he would not use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty. This, along with his disdain for what he describes as the radical left, make him a divisive figure to say the least. Sam Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, and author of the Waking Up podcast. He is a strong critic of religion and posits that science can provide the answers to improving human well-being and society. Douglas Murray is a British author, journalist and political commentator. He is a particularly strong critic of recent European migration policy and advocated the case for Britain to vote “leave” during the Brexit referendum.

The evening largely figured Jordan Peterson painting colourful if somewhat meandering arguments in favour of religion as the necessary basis for the moral development of society. Meandering is both a regular criticism and virtue of Peterson. If he was a body of water he would be an oxbow lake. Peterson’s position in favour of religion was in contrast to Harris’ fact-based rational view of how to progress humanity towards his definition of society’s twin ethical goals - the minimisation of suffering and the maximization of human well-being. These were goals that all the panel could agreed on. A fuller account of what they discussed is covered in the accompanying article Peterson Vs Harris, and the Facts of (Moral) Life, which contains the philosophical detail of Harris’ and Peterson’s points of difference. It has been kept separate for the benefit of readers who’d rather not dig into the philosophical depths of the debaters’ minds. But you are encouraged to read it.

"If Peterson was a body of water he would be an oxbow lake."

The evening contained a large mix of topics. In addition to the morality debate, time was devoted to steelmanning an argument, immigration, Brexit, blasphemy legislation and why some of the panelists get accused of being nazis. Your opinion of the event will largely depend on what you want to take from it. You can take the pure philosophy, with many examples detailed in the accompanying article linked above. You can take it to be an event of interest to people on the right of the political spectrum. You can even take it as an event for political extremists. However, it certainly has as much content for someone on the left of the landscape, or in the centre. It is, in part, the misassumption of the motives of an attendee of the event that lead to the authoring of this article. More than anything, conversations like this one at the 3Arena showcase the ability of people with strongly divergent views to civilly debate in good faith. It is a training ground for developing the art of critical thinking. It is highly likely that you won’t entirely agree with one of the panel on everything - so you can be more of a fan of a panelist’s position in an argument than being a fan of the panelist making the argument. That said, it is undoubted that the panelists each have a fan following. That’s human nature. But often coverage of these events has focused on this point - on a narrative of cult-like adoration being the story. This is to miss the point - the debating of different viewpoints and taboo topics against the backdrop of a world where politics and people are becoming increasing polarised. A world that sleepwalked in Brexit, Trump and populism. Societies where virtually the entire population, mostly likely including you, consumes their news through a filter bubble - forever swiping on a smartphone in an enclosed sphere where you only hear the voices of people you like and are like you. Welcome to identity politics.

"Your opinion of the event will largely depend on what you want to take from it."

One of the greatest problems in Irish politics has historically been identity politics - with both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael maintaining a true cult-like hold over their support on the basis of identity rather than ideas. The same is true for Healy-Rae voters and other “esoteric” political actors around the country. And so these actors get demonised by the other side - they go back to their tribe to say how “everyone is against us”, double down on their core base, and get re-elected. And so the wheel turns. You can argue that identity politics was a positive force in the recent 8th amendment referendum. However you can also argue that, without Micháel Martin stepping outside of the traditional Fianna Fáil identity, the dynamics of the referendum conversation would have been different - if not the winning margin itself. It’s conjecture but it’s not an unreasonable statement. It may be the left that has the most to lose from identity politics. In the immediate aftermath of the same referendum, the ink had barely dried on the tweets of relief at the result when this twitter thread erupted regarding gender identity. A messy fight on how the referendum was won, dividing would-be allies.

Identity is important. Group identity is important. But play too much politics with it and the sound of backfire is all but assured. Many of the IDW conversations look to push back on this. Instead of seeking to amplify the differences of opinion, they revolve around looking to find common ground between two differing points of view, around reaching across the aisle, around civil disagreement. It is hard to see how this is not important as we stand on the cusp of an increasingly tribal world ready to detonate. It has been mentioned that a significant part of the audience for this kind of event is made up of depressed marginalised men. Though one cannot rule out that depressed marginalised men were at the event, there was certainly a level of gender balance (and emotional balance) on show. Take what you want from this event, but it would be impolite to assume that this is what everyone else is taking too. It is in ears of the beholder. Maybe this is something we will have to civilly disagree on.

Peterson Vs Harris, and the Facts of (Moral) Life

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:14:27 +0000

This breakout article accompanies the summary of the Intellectual Dark Web event in Dublin on Saturday July 14th - On Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray at Dublin’s 3Arena. As that article frames much of the conversation below you are encouraged to start there first.

Photo by Dan Mason under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic licence.

The title of this breakout is a little uncomfortable. The conversation on the evening isn’t really best described as Peterson vs Harris. Rather it was a case of both debaters, along with Douglas Murray, trying to work towards more a common viewpoint. Though they never quite got there on the core issue. To give this core issue a descriptive title, let’s coin a phrase “fact-only morality”. What is this and why does this matter? Well, if there can be agreement that a moral way to live can be based on facts and truth claims alone, then it undermines the idea that humanity needs a little bit of extra supernatural embellishment to coerce ourselves into doing what’s best for both us and our neighbour. First up we need to establish one piece of jargon - “human values”. These are defined as the principles that are the foundation for how to live a moral life. What consitutes a human value may not always be clear. For example, what is best for one group of people may be negative for another. So as we navigate the solution space of what is “net best” for the complete set of groups (which may overlap), there will be tradeoffs to make. Now that this definition is out of the way¹, let’s dive right in…

Peterson provided interesting anecdotes ranging from how, in moving from a simplistic creature such as a sea sponge to a higher level animal such as a human, there is simply too much information processing by the brain occurring to be explained by a simple mapping of facts to human values. He argued that within this space there must be some unit other than facts at play - a unit that is a function of human perception and human interpretation of the sensory data arriving at the brain. The intractable problem of not being able to anchor these non-fact based units of human thinking to human values meant that religion was necessary - to provide that anchoring.

Harris disagreed and countered with a view of the human brain’s information processing as “facts all the way down” - that what Peterson had claimed as non-facts due to their complexity and unknowability was still simply facts. He argued unknowablity does not preclude us from making truth claims about an unknowable answer. For example, we don’t know whether we have an odd or even number of hairs on our body, yet we should be confident in asserting that the number of hairs on our body is odd or even. On the other hand, he illustrated that even when artificial systems - such as neural networks in computer science - can provide answers to questions, we do not fundamentally know how they have arrived at their conclusions. Being a black box, the neural network provides a similar space in which we could consider non-facts as existing; yet we don’t need a religious wedge to fill the void there.

"Anytime it entered the crosshairs of the conversation, Harris used an Occam-like razor to quickly carve religion off the carcass of the moral debate."

Many of the other points Peterson made followed a similar arc - often punctuated with elegant language and showman-like gestures. He has a talent for explaining complex biological subjects in a simple manner. One of the interesting features of the night was that he avoided the meat of religious discourse and doctrine. Instead he went as far as to say that he was going to consciously focus on explaining his religious argument in purely biological and scientific terms. He kept to his word. Nonetheless, whether through biological reasoning or otherwise, anytime it entered the crosshairs of the conversation, Harris used an Occam-like razor to quickly carve religion off the carcass of the moral debate. Peterson voiced a concern with the purely secular approach to society building as lacking in storytelling and not being sufficiently inspiring to unify large groups of people to co-exist together. Unsurprisingly Harris disagreed. All the time Murray bridged the space between them, leaning more towards Peterson’s side on these latter concerns.

That was the main topic of the evening. So with this sidebar over, you can return to where you were in the On Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray at Dublin’s 3Arena article. Or enjoy a well-deserved coffee break or something stronger after powering though all of the above.

¹ Being relatively new to the subject matter in this paragraph, I have outlined my understanding of the term “human values”, which I don’t recall being explicitly defined on the evening. Please comment if this understanding is erroneous.

Morning Moments from UXDX Conf 2016

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 23:13:35 +0000

The RDS was looking stunning for the arrival of UXDX Conf on the Dublin scene. By genius or by co-incidence the organisers had picked a day on which the schools were off, making for a pleasant low-traffic commute. As you would expect, the registration process was smooth ( and exhibited good UX :) and the coffee kicked the cobwebs off any latent sleepiness hanging around. Here are some moments from the first half of the day, far from a comprehensive roundup. Any talks excluded were simply victims of resourcing constraints, whilst trying to write this up on the day.

Douglas Powell, Design Principal at IBM got the day off to a positive start…

"This is an amazing time to be a designer."

Douglas expanded on why by outlining the increasing count of designers that are now involved as VCs, the number of design students in China, and the design course that’s been plotted by industry ever since 2007 and the arrival of the iPhone. A significant subset of people arriving to UXDX are probably feeling their way in design, perhaps coming from different backgrounds, and Douglas had plenty of advice for them. In particular, he pointed anyone not familiar with the work of John Maeda towards the #designintech report, a crucial resource to help keep abreast of some of the latest design thinking. Here is the 2016 edition.

Douglas talked about the importance of diversity in the product team in order to build teams capable of arriving at great designs. He filled us in on some headline figures, including IBM’s ratio of designers to developers, which has evolved over the years from 1:33 to 1:8. And he closed his session by stressing the importance of empathy within your team as well as within the design process itself…

"Empathy, first with each other then with our user."

Another one of the mornings talks was by Rasmus Skjoldan, Lead Product Manager of Magnolia CMS. He challenged certain mantras such as “Rapid Prototyping is always awesome”, warning of the danger of taking this too far. While good for early feedback, it can lead to teams prematurely narrowing down the breath of potential solutions in a rush to get a product to market. He noted the fashion industry’s approach to mitigating this by baking multiple trends and ideas into a single concept car or piece of haute couture - ie. a deliberately unsellable product. From here, distinct lines of sellable products can be then developed.

Later, Frontend’s Founder - Fiona Murphy - continued the call to arms…

“Design like you give a damn.”

… and she posed the question of whether UX could change the world. This was a talk littered with feel good moments. She outlined the positive effects of the Estonian government’s declaration of access to Internet being a fundamental human right and how UX can improve the experience of migrants by simplifying processes.

Adrian Trenaman, SVP Engineering at HBC Digital/GILT gave a very entertaining talk on organising multi-discipline teams and how this evolved over time at GILT. Early on, they realised that to create autonomous teams they needed to…

“Give engineers a problem, not a solution.”

… and look to make engineers “agents of change”. These autonomous teams followed a KPI driven development process to ensure they were on the right track. But they found that, initially, autonomous teams would be struck with stage fright soon after having taken control of the steering wheel. And they invested considerable effort in correcting this.

In these solutions, Adrian frequently offered contrarian viewpoints. He took a Peter Drucker quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and added his own twist…

… as well as noting that…

“Great culture is necessary but not sufficient.”

Adrian continued to put the controversial cat amongst the pigeons, promoting a “code first” then ask questions later approach to evolving a solution, as well as not being afraid to back away from the data driven approach in favour of empathy. He also praised the technique of using a Gantt-like chart for planning out 90 day windows. And rather than dividing up the design team and permanently embedding them within development teams, they kept this “spiritual brotherhood“ together. Breaking them apart would not have been good for a team which loved working together as a unit.

For the motivation of all the teams within the organisation, Adrian cited 3 crucial factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose. These three factors would be echoed by David O’Donoghue, Head of Engineering at Zalando, later on in the day so this trio likely deserve careful attention. They were originally put forward in a talk by Daniel Pink available here when researchers observed how teams tackled the Candle Problem.

Finally, Adrian signed off with a tremendous set of values…

Adrian’s slides are available online and well worth a look.

Next up, Travis George, a Gaming Industry Product Specialist talked about Designs that Resonate.

He expanded on this by saying products with resonance are those that make you feel like the product was made just for you. He warned that great products are not just about smooth user flows, they are about making a connection. His talk focused on ensuring that your product/development team really feels the same way as the end users about the game or product being built…

"Sympathy is not the same as empathy."

There were many more talks to follow and unfortunately we didn’t have the bandwidth to try and capture them all. Many thanks to the organisers - especially Catherine and Rory - for organising the event, and it will be interesting to see where UXDX goes from here. No pressure! :-)

Hopefully you enjoyed the coverage of a few early moments from a wonderful day at UXDX Conf 2016, especially if you didn’t have the privilege of attending.

P.S. Despite restricting the above to just the pre-lunch sessions as a matter of practicality, it would be remiss to omit the closing keynote entirely - a talk given by Kai En Ong, Head of UX & Design of the BBC. She covered a wide diversity of topics, too many to detail here, but she made two interesting points on improving the gender balance in teams.

Firstly, simply count - measuring and talking about the diversity in your teams and on your boards helps bring a focus to the issue. Secondly, and less obviously, is check your job description for gender specific keywords - you can unintentionally bias your hiring process by using language that is coded for one particular gender.

Fixing a VirtualBox 4 to 5 Upgrade by Reinstalling Guest Host Additions

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 20:26:12 +0000

This upgrade did not go quite as smoothly as expected but after a bit of shouting at the computer we got there. The issues may have been specific to the state of my virtual machine image and possibly won’t affect other people upgrading. Anyway in my case, after I upgraded to VirtualBox 5 and began to use my image with it, I realized Copy & Paste between the host and the guest would not work.

Additionally Shared folders between the host and guest would not work. This left me with no option to communicate a piece of text between the host and guest, so rather than limping on like a dying goldfish I was forced to confront the problem head on.

Turns out I needed to uninstall and reinstall the Guest Host Additions (GHA). As mentioned before this may be a problem specific to my image. It might have only become a problem when I did a software update on the guest OS (Ubuntu 14.04). The takeaway point is if Copy and Paste stops working, check to see if your Guest Host Additions are borked.

I had to reinstall the GHA according to the non-open source VirtualBox instructions.

I found the solution to performing a correct GHA reinstall at this link. Here is a summary below.

Uninstall GHA as follows

NB: Don’t unmount the existing GHA iso from the Optical Storage media (if you do you can re-add it at the correct location on the host - eg. /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso)

With that in mind here is how you can perform an uninstall. Run the following within the guest OS.

cd /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-X.Y.Z (where X.Y.Z is the old version of VirtualBox)
sudo ./uninstall.sh

Reinstall GHA as follows

Ensure you don’t have any Ubuntu based guest host additions installed. The command “aptitude search VirtualBox|grep add” should return no installed packages.

Now you are ready to do the reinstall. Run the following within the guest OS.

cd /media/yourusername
cd VBOXADDITIONS_X.Y.Z_BUILD
# ... where X.Y.Z is the NEW version of VirtualBox and BUILD is presumably a build number
sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Now your GHA should be correctly reinstalled and things like Copy & Paste as well as Shared folders should work again!

Title Image Attribution: By Matthieu James (https://code.google.com/p/faenza-icon-theme/) [GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

My Embarrassing First Steps with the Javascript fetch() API

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 23:57:12 +0000

Spoiler: If you are more interested in the destination than the journey then skip to the last code example in this article. So after a decade of the dollar, the great $ symbol that is ubiquitously associated with jQuery (and mostly AJAX), we’re finally moving on. Moving on to what promises to be a leaner, more modern API in the shape of fetch(). My motivation came from this post about waiting for multiple async calls in Redux. I’d been using jQuery (or a layer on top of jQuery such as Backbone) to talk to remote servers since James Blunt hit the charts with “You’re Beautiful”. And since moving to React it didn’t seem to make much sense to pull in all of jQuery just to make a few simple remote calls - so trusting in Dan Abramov (has he ever put a foot wrong?!) I decided to polyfill in fetch() and friends, and embrace the simplicity of this new standard. Trouble is, it’s not as straightforward to get started as you might think it is.

First up, my understanding of promises is fairly rudimentary - basically they are a fancy way of returning a function that will be called at some point in the future, and can handle a happy code path and a sad code path. I’d read that jQuery’s way of doing promises (deferreds) “are a bit… unhelpful”. And that you should cast them to standard promises, which is worth doing as soon as possible, . So I had an immediate distrust of jQuery’s deferreds from what I had read and was ready to go all in on the shiny new fetch() API to ensure that I was using the most standard version of promises that bitcoins can buy. By this point we’re really up for doing the fetch() thing correctly.

The first hit on Google for “fetch javascipt” is the Mozilla Development Network’s article on the Fetch API and from here it is a short hop to the Using Fetch article. So I rushed to the first example, which is

var myImage = document.querySelector('img');

fetch('flowers.jpg')
.then(function(response) {
  return response.blob();
})
.then(function(myBlob) {
  var objectURL = URL.createObjectURL(myBlob);
  myImage.src = objectURL;
});

and wrote the equivalent code (slightly ES6-ified) that I needed which was…

fetch('my-json-serving-url')
.then(response => {
  debugger
  //return response.blob();
})

I got rid of the second then() because I figured my use case is simpler than theirs. And I figured that if I could drop myself into the Chrome debugger I could work out the appropriate method on the response object to get whatever I needed out. It was all looking familiar and simple, just like it said on the tin.

So I got to my breakpoint and I saw a friendly text() method available as well as a json() method. And indeed I called them - and frustratingly got the following back in my JS console…

[[PromiseStatus]] : "resolved"
[[PromiseValue]] : undefined

So I googled around for “pending status fetch promise” and the first hit was StackOverflow - trusting in StackOverflow (have they ever put a foot wrong?!) I clicked through to question but saw the answer didn’t look quite as relevant to me as I’d hoped. So I moved along - along to lots of articles like this, which sounded very complicated for the “Hello World!” of the fetch() world that I was trying to piece together, so I gave up. I knew that there was new-fangled streaming stuff in the new fetch() and I must be tripping up on that - might be best to read about that on my aging Nexus phone on the commute home.

As I was closing down the hundreds of tabs I had opened about fetch() - one by one - like a roadie taking down marquees at the end of a music festival, I paused before X-ing the tab where it had all started. It occurred to me that instead of going for the cheapest item in the shop, I should probably try the second cheapest. I’ll try two then() calls one after the other.

fetch('my-json-serving-url')
.then(response => {
  return response.json();
})
.then(responseBody => {
  debugger
  // oh responseBody, just please have something in you that isn't pending!
})

Boom! Like a green light at the end of a unit test there was finally something tangible in the responseBody argument. Encouraged by this I could now make sense of more of the original Mozilla Developer Network page, in particular their Checking For Success example…

fetch('flowers.jpg').then(function(response) {
  if(response.ok) {
    response.blob().then(function(myBlob) {
      var objectURL = URL.createObjectURL(myBlob);
      myImage.src = objectURL;
    });
  } else {
    console.log('Network response was not ok.');
  }
})
.catch(function(error) {
  console.log('There has been a problem with your fetch operation: ' +
error.message);
});

I didn’t give a monkey’s for checking for success in my embryonic attempt at calling fetch() earlier. But now I could see that I could do the chaining all in one…

fetch('my-json-serving-url')
.then(response => {
  response.json().then(responseBody => {
    debugger
    console.log(responseBody)
    // Go'on the responseBody, ya beauty!
  })
})

The ES5 equivalent is something like…

fetch('my-json-serving-url')
.then(function(response){
  response.json().then(function(responseBody){
    console.log(responseBody)
  })
})

Call it perceptual narrowing when my initial attempt went pear-shaped, or call it laziness, or stupidity. Whatever it was, that was one long journey towards calling fetch(). Anyway, I hope someone else finds this useful and doesn’t have to travel around the Internet a dozen times to ditch the dollar and fire off a fetch().

Title Image Attribution: “By JavaScript”,Pixabay (pixabay.com) [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons