Author: Bobby Rockers

Of Experience and Competence, Intelligence and Wisdom

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

There’s a basic misunderstandings that causes people to be perceived as more capable than they actually are.  A common mistake, when evaluating capability, is to associate experience with competence.  To confuse intelligence with wisdom.  In the former people have a lot of exposure to a given situation, in the latter the person has distilled that exposure in a way that allows them to gain deeper insight into future situations.

People understand this intuitively but unfortunately the vast majority of companies forget/ignore the difference when hiring people.?Even when conscience of the difference, people will go about trying to identify competence by “digging deep” into their experience or by requiring a minimal amount of experience.?Both methods are flawed and provide no correlation to the likely success of a hire.1

Experience is necessary, but not sufficient for competence (if you want to use a term from mathematical causality.)  To move from experience to competence you generally have to have done 2 things:  1) had multiple experiences to draw from that are specific to the situation you need to learn from, and 2) are intentional about questioning the lessons from those experiences. Unfortunately most people don’t question what they have done in a way that make subsequent experience testable against their assumption. Instead, they just assume the know the reasons for it. 2

For example,  I drive around 50 miles a day in my commute.  As such I almost certainly have, over the course of my professional career, driven many many more miles than rookies starting off in the Indy 500.  It lacks specificity because I don’t drive comparable car, in a comparable environment, with comparable traffic. I have lots of “experience” driving a car, but that experience lacks any validity for the wisdom need to drive in the Indy 500.   

Intentionality is much much harder to evaluate. Most people will speak with conviction of the opinions they’ve developed through their experience and will sound like they have wisdom. Assuming you have filtered someone for the specificity of their experience, what is the best way to evaluate the intentionality of those experiences.?There is no perfect solution but here are a couple handy rules-of-thumb I’ve learned are over time.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare

1. Don’t trust someone who gives you absolute answers. People with wisdom will almost always say things like “well it depends” and “in our situation” because they have enough understanding to know the limits of their own experience. Almost all experiences have a range of best solutions based on tons of criteria that are always dependent on outside variables. Competent people know that almost no two situations are identical and will hedge their answers accordingly.

If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

Ray Dalio

2. Look for people who have not only had experience but have also failed in that experiences. Inversely, distrust anyone that doesn’t offer up those failures when discussing their experience. People who have not “failed” generally lack the wisdom of those who have but much much worse are those that hide or don’t acknowledge those failures because it means they don’t value failure as a method for learning. It means they have an immature concept of what failure is, and competence can never be found in immaturity.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Winners use it to upgrade their performance; losers use it as an excuse to fail.

Ken Blanchard

3. How does a candidate, consultant, or colleague respond when you push back on the assumptions they developed from their experience. Do they look for more details or spend time thoughtfully considering how your experience might be different.?Are they stubborn in their convictions and see all situations as black or white. Look for people who have strong opinions, loosely held, because wisdom comes from constant feedback and continuous improvement. There is no improvement without being open to feedback.

A prudent question is one half of wisdom.

Francis Bacon

4. Great questions are the best indicator of competence. The source of the biggest mistakes people have in their career are not usually due to having the wrong answers, but having the right answer to the wrong questions. Find people who ask thoughtful questions!3 Great questions are harder to fake, take more insight, and are a much better indicator of competence than great answers.

The four techniques above are not magic bullets but they can dramatically increase the likelihood of getting a competent hire instead of just an experienced hire. The techniques also help with existing talent. One of my favorite ways to evaluate long term potential is by looking at how quickly a given person can turn experience into wisdom. People who can do that quickly are the future rock stars of your company.

  1. This can be exceptionally difficult for organizations that are looking for capabilities outside of their existing strengths.  They can filter and hire for people with experience but it is very very difficult to evaluate their overall wisdom if you don’t have someone internally who can accurately and unbiasedly evaluate their competence. ↩︎
  2. A great indicator of whither someone is moving from experience to competence is if you see them pushing the boundaries of those experiences to test the validity in edge case scenarios.  They are isolating more and more of the variables that have an opportunity to effect the outcome… thus allowing them to make more accurate assumptions about future experiences. ↩︎
  3. Evaluating these questions can be a difficult ask for companies that don’t have someone capable of evaluating good questions. In such cases it is probably best to bring in an outside expert to help because it is easy for non-technical people to be snowballed by technical answers if they don’t have domain specific experience. ↩︎

Engineers Perspective of Global Warming

Global warming is a much bigger problem (in terms of complexity and danger) than most people realize; while also being a significantly less catastrophic calamity than many zealots claim it is.  The problem IS NOT around politics, or will, or capability.  From the standpoint of trying to engineer a solution; the problems are known, well understood, and exceptionally difficult.  And like any exceedingly complex engineered solution, the problem cannot be resolved at mass scale without significant time.

Universal View

At a fundamental level human beings, by their very nature, use energy to reduce entropy.  It doesn’t mater if you are making software, building bridges, teaching students, or cooking dinner.  The energy may come from food, firewood, or electricity… but everything we do, as long as we continue to be alive, needs energy.  There are only really 3 fundamental components of the universe that humans interact with… space, time, and energy (matter being a form of energy.) Humans can only effectively control one of them… energy.

It is fundamentally impossible for human being to progress without using more and more energy. In a very real sense, energy use IS PROGRESS!

Modernity, or human advancement, or progress if you will; are ALL directly related to humans using MORE energy and using it more effectively.  Forget tracking calories per person, or average income per person.  Calories come from food that had to be made with energy.  Value (in the form of income or goods) comes from energy being used to make them.  Think of energy use as the speedometer of human progress.  When the dark ages happened in Europe and the economy tanked in 2008, the energy use per person dropped.  When the standard of living goes up for a city, or a country, or the planet… the energy use per person almost always increases.

I say almost because efficiency in energy use can lower total energy use in many functions in advanced society.  At their core, that is what tools do.  People may hate industrialization, but it has allowed a dramatic drop in the amount of energy needed per pound of food.  That said, it is never zero; and it can’t be because the only way to overcome entropy is using energy.

So the story of the continual development of humanity is the story of our ability to more effectively use energy to do the work of reducing entropy.  In the beginning the only general purpose machine we had for “doing/making” things was the human body.  We fed it, and it allowed us to do things.  Over time we realized we could “do/make” more by spending some of that energy to make tools that allowed us to use less energy to “do/make” the same amount of work (or even better, more work.)  The cycle continued over and over again until we understood enough of the physical world that the ability to make tools was limited only by the amount of energy we could put into those tools to do the thing we want done.  For example, we couldn’t create flying machines until the advent of the internal combustion engine because we lacked a way to output enough energy in our tool to overcome the gravity of the tool itself as well as ourselves.

Energy Density

The solution to these problems all centers around energy density.  Basically, the more energy you can pack into a smaller space with the associated reduced weight, the more things you could “do/make”. This including building the tools that would allow you to build better tools to do even more. Additionally, for low energy dense materials, the filler for these materials is generally stuff we don’t like (things like pollution and CO2.)

Humans intrinsically understood this problem without being able to describe the mechanics of it. If you want to make heat, the easiest way is to make a fire. Fire is simply one form of potential energy being release from a stored energy source. Humans will naturally prefer to burn propane over coal, coal over wood, and wood over bio mater. Each produces more energy and less pollution than the later.

So, again, much of the story of humanity is our continual movement from lower density/higher pollution forms of energy to higher density/lower pollution forms of energy. Humanity changed from cow dung, to wood, to wind/water mills, to coal, to natural gas, to nuclear. Then then, because of fears associated with nuclear weapons, we dumped nuclear and noticed that hydrocarbons were hurting our world. There is a very real argument to be made that because we backed away from Nuclear most of the problems we have around global warming, hydrocarbon consumption, resource wars over those hydrocarbons, and even inequality can be at least partially traced to backing away from the most energy dense, least polluting, most abundant energy source humans have ever discovered.

A couple of examples will make the point. Assuming we continued to build nuclear power plants at the rate we did in the mid 1980s (at its height) something close to half of all hydrocarbons consumed between the early 90s and now would never have been consumed. This undoubtedly would have driven down the cost of fossil fuels. Stabilizing those costs are a big reason for wars in the middle east, conflict with Russia, and dozens of other wars around the world. True, lowering the cost of fossil fuels would increase their use in the short run, but as downward pressure continued (due to effectively all base load generation getting moved to nuclear) the price would have increased as it became less and less profitable to invest in higher risk production like fracking and off-shore wells. It is the difference between reducing consumption and making production less valuable. If you want to reduce usage in the short term, increase prices; but if you want to reduce overall production in the long term (what the real goal of the environmental movement should be) you have to lower prices continually for the long term. You don’t permanently reduce the use of horses by making them more expensive, you do it by getting people cars.

The solution, we are told, is to move to lower density power production through the use of renewables.  However, renewables suffer from at least three major issues that will keep them from being effective downward pressures to hydrocarbon production for, at least, the next 50-100 years while we work through the technical challenges of using them at scale.

Problems with Low Density Energy

The first problem is scaling.  It is much much easier to scale if you can control output by expanding the input of a given process.  The alternative is to scale the process itself. While not entirely analogous, for much of the infrastructure of coal fire power plants you can effectively double the production of power at by using twice as much coal.  If you want to double the output of a solar farm, you have to double the “power plant” itself (you can’t double the sun.) This means extending production is X times more difficult, expensive, and time consuming than doing it with something like coal.  The total energy INCREASE globally for everything (transportation, industrial, residential, and commercial) from 2021 to 2022 could be produced with around 80 nuclear power plants.  It would take close to 50 million wind turbines to produce the same amount of power; and that is JUST the increase in global energy usage from 2021 to 2022 (i.e. not total use.)  Solar scales better but not by the factor of 1000 it would need to to offset the scaling problem.

The second problem is base loads.  Most people understand the problem of base load energy generation at this point.  Whereby low energy density sources are generally inconsistent in their production.  Solar and wind don’t work all the time and such.  There is, however, a third problem associated with low energy density production, and that is the utilization problem.  Low density energy has to be collected and concentrated for high power demands. Think transportation (flight) and matter conversion activities (smelting ore.)

Both energy density problems can be worked around in one of two ways.  Adding capacity, for example even though man power is low energy conversion you can throw more and more people at it (historically in the form of slaves.)  You could double (or triple) the number of wind turbines but that just doubles our scaling problem.  Even if you add capacity, it will run into the utilization problem. That is why low energy density collection needs batteries.  It allows you to store things like solar and wind power for use in high energy utilization activities as well as resolves the base load problem.

The battery solution is ideal if the storage mechanism is cheap or, ideally, has a low variable cost compared to its fixed cost.  For example, hydro-power is actually a much lower energy production mechanism than things like coal, but has a high fixed cost/low variable cost solution for its battery… a dam.  Electrical batteries suffer from the problem of high variable cost, and historically high fixed cost.  The fixed cost problem is a resolvable one as increased manufacturing scale, but the high variable cost problem will take a lot longer to fix.  There is not enough lithium in the world to meet the battery needs of base load utilization for just North America let alone the world and that doesn’t even include things like transportation and consumables (like your phone.)  Additionally electrical batteries suffer from another significant problem, weight.

Again, this comes back to energy density.  A 1060 lbs Tesla Model 3 battery (long range) produces around 75kWh of power.  Twenty gallons of gas weigh about 120lbs and produce about 660kWh of electricity.  Electrical batteries/engines are significantly more efficient in their energy conversion but because of the sizable amount of weight in the battery, nearly 33% of its capacity is being used to move the batteries themselves.

For humanity to be able to continue to developing using primarily low energy dense solutions, we absolutely must find cheaper, higher capacity, and lower weight battery sources.  From an Engineering standpoint, this is a much harder problem to solve than something like fitting 1000x the number of transistors on the same silicon!  The higher the energy potential of a thing, the more unstable it gets (energy has a tendency to want to escape.)  This is the reason modern, high energy density, batteries are more likely to explode then older, low energy density, batteries.  It is the same reason gasoline is so combustible, it hold a crazy amount of potential energy that is very easy to release.  This continues to hold true until you start to bond the atoms themselves, but then you effectively need to create a nuclear reaction to release the energy.  Yes, over the last 50 years battery storage density has increased 4x, but our problem (if we want to solve it in any reasonable timescale) is one where battery capacity needs to double every 2 to 5 years! This is a known physics problem and one I don’t think we even have a theoretical fix for yet.

Honestly the best solution to the battery problem will probably NOT consist of traditional chemical electric batteries, but some kind of physical potential storage mechanism (think water pumps run from wind turbines that put water behind a dam.)  The problems for “green” solutions are so difficult that I honestly don’t see them ever actually overcoming their limitations, as sources of the majority of load,  until we get to another generation of “green” energy solutions. Things like orbital solar collectors have the ability to solve these kind of problems by turning solar into a high density energy source but those are a long way off.  Notice I’m saying that orbital solar collectors are, from an engineering perspective, an easier problem to solve than the current generation of “green” energy methods! Alternative “green” energy sources can provide a bridge (things like radioactive decay batteries) but then why not just use nuclear.

Outcomes

So what do we do? Reduce the population significantly? From a global warming perspective we care about gross CO2 emissions not emissions per person, so reducing human population by half would definitely get us to the stated target of 50% of 2005’s emissions.

Totally shut off hydrocarbons?  If you shut off access to hydrocarbons without providing an alternative source of energy (remember food is potential energy) then it is impossible for people to move beyond poverty.  Human progress (which again, is literally measurable by energy consumption) will effectively stop.  It might continue in small areas if inequality is allowed to increase in other parts of the world.  More people (both in numbers and as a percentage) have escaped poverty in the last 30 years than in all of human history primarily because of low cost energy and free markets but millions still die as parts of the world lag in getting into global free markets.  Limit total energy access and global deaths due to that inequality will start to rise dramatically.  Remember also that resource access has been the cause of most wars in human history.

Live with global warming for the next dozen generations?  Honestly, if we are unwilling to give up our bias towards nuclear power this might be the best possible option.  While global temperatures will continue to increase, the number of people likely to die is in the tens or hundreds of millions due to environmental changes; but that is a fraction of the billions who would likely die in the above two options. While some disaster scenarios are exaggerated (sea level rise will not wipe out cities overnight but it will increase disease and population pressure) others are grossly under exaggerated (1,300 people die each summer due to the heat, what do you think is likely to happen there.)  And some are mixed (Easy access to energy has made shifting farm production and location something that only takes years instead of generations, so global food shortages are very very likely, and probably more common, but are likely not long term/permanent effects.)

The best option is obviously to massively invest in nuclear, continue to invest in green technology, and use natural gas as a bridge fuel as we make the transition. Natural gas produces 50% LESS CO2 than coal (the primary base load fuel) and, thanks to fracking, is plentiful.  The only country to meet the original Kyoto target numbers set for them was the US.  And we didn’t even sign the darn thing.  The reason was due to the massive shift to natural gas for electrical grid production after the fracking boom made it gas cheap and easily available.  In fact we are producing LESS CO2 in the US (in spite of the population increase) than at any time since the late 80s. Unfortunately, for all the reasons I mentioned above, “Green” production has accounted for only a small percentage of this reduction.  Ultimately though, natural gas is simply a bridge and the faster we can onboard nuclear capacity, the sooner we can get rid of all hydrocarbons used for base load.  Once energy is cheap enough on grid, it will put more and more downward pressure on transportation energy.  It will likely never be 0 (tankers and long range airplanes are unlikely to be able to use battery storage) but it will become the exception, not the rule.  By moving base load production to nuclear we also free up battery capacity for things like car, which will continue to accelerate the reduction in fossil fuels for transportation.

Take-aways:
    • Global warming will harm the planet and humanity for generations to come.
    • We don’t really know by how much. While we have seen some starting effects, the more damaging effects are either slow moving effects (ones we are likely to adapt to), are speculation, and/or are nightmare scenarios we haven’t even considered. We just don’t know.
    • Human progress depends on cheap energy… get rid of it, and your kids future will be worse than your past.  Mostly likely worse than the effects of global warming.
    • Low density energy like solar and wind are, by themself, incapable of meeting future energy demands anytime in the next 100 years.  This is not a political argument but based on physical limitation of these systems.
    • Nuclear is the only real way to resolve global warming that I can see, at least without massive human suffering.
    • The environmental movement has done more to bring attention/research to global warming than any business, government, or other institution.
    • The parts of the environmental movement that moved away from nuclear have done more to perpetuate global warming than any business, government, or other institution.
    • BOTH of the above statements can be true at the same time.
    • Oil and gas companies have profited due to the nuclear ban; that is why some of them oppose nuclear power.
    • Oil and gas companies have also done more than any environmental group to lower greenhouse gases, especially in the US.
    • BOTH of the above statements can be true at the same time.
    • These problems are HARD, really HARD, and the people shouting the loudest are the ones who effectively think technology is magic.
    • Outside of significant investment in nuclear, there is no future were global CO2 volumes decrease substantially in the next 50-100 years.
    • Activists who want all fossil fuels stopped NOW, are condemning a billion people to stay in poverty and hundreds of millions of people to die.  Which isn’t much different that what will happen to humanity from global warming.

 

The Tools We Use

“It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.”

– Edsger W. Dijkstra

Object Oriented languages suffer from a forced paradigm that fits more for UI design than solving the large scale data problems we encounter today. Languages like Java force a developer to speak in nouns and create artificial structures that don’t actually represent the systems we encounter.  The result is an inheritance tree with more and more abstract ideas being forced into shapes that don’t make sense.

Remember the QuickTime volume control? For anyone who isn’t old enough to remember, Apple QuickTime used to have a scroll-wheel volume control.  It was meant to be intuitive to the user so they could easily understand how to adjust volume.  The actual results where not what was intended.  Most users took their mouse, grabbed the tiny edge of the wheel, moved it a quarter inch up or down, released, and re-grabbed it wheel over and over until they got the volume correct.  It was painful, annoying, and substituted 30 seconds of UI training for a lifetime of frustration.

Forcing a bad model on users only works to limit the usefulness of the problem being solved.  Worse, instead of accelerating progress it debilitates our understanding of the underlying issue.  Software language paradigms multiply this mis-model understanding 100x resulting in overly complex systems, that are harder to change, and even harder to maintain.

There are lots of examples of this kind of round peg, square hole problem.  SQL is another example.  Large scale scheme enforced structured data is a solved problem.  SQL and SQL databases have done an amazing job of getting performance and consistency from data; but those aren’t issues with most startups.  Flexibility, velocity, cost, and non-specialization are the primary problems of the success of small startup teams; ACID compliance is not.   Developers with deep experience in SQL databases often have the drawback of thinking of most data like it is a table; which limits options and slows the development cycle compared to less structured data.

This has become a bigger problem because of the prevalence of unstructured data and the usefulness of map-reduce in processing that data in ways are particularly useful in web-scale systems.

The point isn’t to suggest that there isn’t a place for things like OOP development or SQL databases, but software shops that rely exclusively on these tools are dramatically limiting themselves.  A carpenter that only uses hammers, hand saws, and screw drivers is at a decided disadvantage to one that uses those tools AND a 3D printer.  The abstract thinking required to use these tools is definitely a hurdle to overcome, but the payoff is substantial.

Proof of life

Users are the only real proof that you’ve created wealth. Wealth is what people want, and if people aren’t using your software, maybe it’s not just because you’re bad at marketing. Maybe it’s because you haven’t made what they want.

Paul Graham

Inside of technology companies we have a whole host of ways we measure our progress. Key performance indicators (KPIs) I’ve seen include page hits, unique visitors, assets registered in the system, and even Google page ranks. The problem with these kind of KPIs are that they are vanity metrics that make you feel good about your “startup” but don’t actually lead to any sales.

Do you want to know how valuable your startup is? Ask yourself how many actual users you have. Investors, acquirers, and even partners will use this metric to determine your value; so you are probably better off using it to measure yourself. Paying customers is an even better! Look at the largest acquisition value multiplier for any tech company in the last decade and they will have one thing in common, paying customers.

The number of paying users is such a valuable metric that whole business spring up around customer acquisition. One of my favorite examples is the home security space…

At my last company, my partner and I were discussing a business strategy that centered around a serial home security startup founder he knew. This particular entrepreneur had sold 3 or 4 companies so far, each for around $10 million. His methodology was that he started a home security company using third party hardware and outsourced call center resources. He would then sell these systems like a mad man. He would go door to door, viral marketing, contract HOA agreements, pitch to builders… anything he could think of, while working 20 hour days, to get customers.

The beauty, from his standpoint, was these were all reoccurring monthly revenue subscriptions on 36 month contracts. If he could get a critical number of contracts (I want to say it was around 10,000 active home security systems) before the 3 year window, he could sell the entire company to someone like ADP who was happy to pick-up, and pay for, these customer acquisitions given the RMR model. He was treating the home security industry as an optimization problem where the primary metric of success was the number of users under contract and he was RIGHT!

Between Folklore & Formalism

I’ve spend a lot of time thinking about systems and engineering lately.  These are some of the more thoughtful quotes I have kept juggled in my head.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

-John Gall

Simple rules produce complex behavior.
Complex rules produce stupid behavior.

-Andrew Hunt

Rather than thinking in product categories and market segments, ask what is the job the customer is hiring this product to do?

-Clayton Christensen

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

-Goodhart’s Law

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

-John Turkey

Of Core & Contracting

A contract technology specialist I have a great deal of respect for made this comment a while back.

I’ve never understood why CIOs prefer training rather than hiring a contractor; less time, less TCO, higher quality.

Training is a long term investment in your people that can “potentially” pay off as a force multiplier in the future.  This is especially true if you are talking about a companies core competencies. Historically companies that outsource their core competencies over a long period of time get knocked out of those markets by competitors that can buy up the outsourced experience.

Investing in your people is strategic, but often unexpected opportunities demand short term tactical considerations trump long term strategy. In these situations contractors can act as the spark to jump-start initiatives and respond to unexpected problems.

Contractors make the most sense when you need high value, high quality experience as quickly as possible. Calling a contractor “the dark side” just removes a tool from a CIO’s arsenal of weapons. It is both short sighted and ignorant.

The other place that contractors really shine is for non-core competency functions. If you are not going to be an expert in some capability, you are almost always better off outsourcing that capability to someone that is. This is the reason we have seen the rise of outsourced services like HR, IT Support, and even CIOs.

Let me put is this way, if you are a company that makes X and you are the best darn X maker on the planet then you want to train future X makers so you can continue to be the best at X.  Inversely, if you are the best darn maker of X… then get someone else to install the freaking phone system!

Winter 2018 Reading

Over the course of the last year of two I’ve slowly been removing news, current events, and politics from my daily life.  Thomas Jefferson talked about the importance of a well informed electorate, and I strongly believe in the truth of such a statement; but I’ve basically decided that news and current events doesn’t actually do much to make us “well informed.”

The solution to this conundrum is that I find myself reading more history and intellectually grounded politics from many different sides of the political divide.  Honestly I believe more sociologists, philosophers, and economists should study history; otherwise they run the risk of looking foolish.  History is the test for all the soft ideas of mankind; Twitter is the extrament.

One of my favorite political economists is Thomas Sowell and his books “Intellectuals and Race” was my favorite for this round.  Other books not listed in the quotes below include an amazing kids books discussing the history of mankind called “A Little History of the World” by E.H. Gombrich, The Iliad (which I must admit I hadn’t read in its entirety before), and more history about Catherine the Great, William Marshal, and Hannibal.  Checkout my Goodreads list for February through March here.

13 Things mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin

You only as good as your worst habits

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.

Could you easily list your top five values off the top of your head? Most people can’t. But if you aren’t really clear on your values, how do you know where to put your energy, and how to make the best decisions?

The Naval War of 1812 by Theodore Roosevelt

…from which date two distinct schools in the naval affairs of the 18th century: one of these was all for promptness and audacity, which were regarded as the indispensable conditions for victory; the other, on the contrary, praised skilful delays and able evolutions, and created success by science united to prudence. But these two schools were true only according to circumstances, not absolutely… The only school always true is that one which, freed from all routine, produces men whose genius will unite in one, in knowing how to apply them appropriately, the audacity which will carry off victory, and the prudence which knows how to obtain it in preparing for it.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, is an abomination against the very origins of life on earth.  Our ancestors evolved first in the oceans of the young planet, and while some organisms managed to adapt to life on the land, our bodies retain a genetic memory of their watery origin. Fertilization for all animals takes place in some form of water; embryos float in the womb; human blood has almost the same concentration as seawater.

Iberall observed that human societies appeared to cycle through comparable phase transitions, as the energy harnessed by the society increased: moving from the gaseous state of roaming hunter-gathers, to the more settled configuration of agrarian farming, to the crystalline density of the walled city.

When the supply of surplus energy spiked, thanks to the slave labor and transportation networks of the Roman Empire, the city of Rome itself surged to more than a million people, and dozens of towns connected to the networked reached populations in the hundreds of thousands. But when the imperial system crumbled, the energy supply dried up, and the cities of Europe vaporized in a matter of centuries.

…indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.

They were not hacks working surreptitiously for Victorian interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambitions. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

so the Christian too belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes… whom wants to be among friends, to sit among  roses, not with the bad people but with the devout people… if Christ had done what you are doing, who would have ever been spared.

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium.  The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion; no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear.

Self justification and judging others goes together; as justification by grace and serving others goes together.

Brotherly love with find any number of extenuation for the sins of others, only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever.  Therefore my sin is the worst….  How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own.

The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham.  The sin confessed has helped him find true fellowship with the brethren of Jesus Christ.

Why is it that it is often easier to confess our sins to God than to a brother?  But if we do we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God.  Whether we have not rather been confessing to ourselves, and therefore granting absolution to ourselves.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Spirit:  Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm.

Ghost: To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Spirit: If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully.  There would be nothing to hope for.

George MacDonald:  The action of Pity will live for ever, but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth,  the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.

Intellectuals and Race by Thomas Sowell

By intellectual what is meant here is a people in a particular occupation mainly people whose work begin and end with ideas… Chemists or chess grand masters may have an equal or greater mental accomplishment but they are not intellectuals because their work ends with a outcome subject to empirical verification by known standards while the outcomes of intellectuals are subject to essentially peer consensus.

There is no need to replace genetic determinism with geographic determinism. While there are other factors which operate against the presumed equality of developed capabilities among people with equal potential, the point here is that geography alone is enough to prevent equality of developed capabilities, even if all races have identical potentialities and there is no discrimination. Nor is it necessary to determine the relative weights of geographic, demographic, cultural and other factors, when the more fundamental point is that each of these factors makes equal outcomes among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species less likely,

Historian A.J.P Taylor has said the first stage of nationalism is led by university professors and that the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world.

By contrast, in the twentieth century a whole generation of future Third World leaders who went to study in the West seldom concentrated on studying the science, technology, and entrepreneurship that produced Western prosperity, but instead concentrated on the social theories and ideologies in vogue among Western intellectuals in academia and elsewhere.

a common pattern among intellectuals has been to seek, or demand, equality of results without equality of causes or on sheer presumptions of equality of causes

The Foundation of Safety

I’ve been working on a tool to automate posting messages on WordPress from a Git repository. The project has been a lot of fun partily because I’ve been trying out Go for the first time, but also because it covers several different technologies at the same time. To post to WordPress I’ve been using it’s REST API. However, there is a significant issue with the current REST interface for WordPress. The way WordPress is configured by default, the entire user list for a given site is available via a non-authenticated GET request.  If you are running a site on a recent version of WordPress (it is installed by default on versions 4.7 and above) you can see for yourself with a simple curl request:

curl -X GET https://www.mysite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/users

This is simply not acceptable for most installations.  The best fix is to add a filter to the REST API itself that blocks the /wp/v2/users endpoint for any verb.  To do that, go to Plugins → Editor.  Under Select plugin to edit choose WP REST API and hit the Select button.  Under Plugin Files click on plugin.php.  In the file that come up, add the following code just after the add_filter/add_action function calls (around line 134.)

[php]
add_filter( 'rest_endpoints', function( $endpoints ){
  if ( isset( $endpoints['/wp/v2/users'] ) ) {
    unset( $endpoints['/wp/v2/users'] );
  }
  if ( isset( $endpoints['/wp/v2/users/(?P[\d]+)'] ) ) {
    unset( $endpoints['/wp/v2/users/(?P[\d]+)'] );
  }
  return $endpoints;
});
[/php]

Now click Update File and you should get a 404 response if you try your curl request again.

Month of Empty Pockets

January is always windy in Oklahoma, and the cold it carries finds its way between zippers, and seams in ways that make it more intense than even people from colder climates expect. Unfortunately this seldom brings snow, which is the very best reading weather.

So by the numbers; 6 books, only one of them fiction.  My favorite authors this January were David McCullough and Barbara W. Tuchman.  Uncle Toms Cabin was the most famous book of the month and the only fiction book I read.  What stood out to me about Uncle Toms Cabin was that 19th century religious dogma was so ingrained into the daily life of people (this was, after-all, the time of the Third Great Awakening in North America.)  My least favorite book was The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins which honestly wasn’t bad; but I read a lot of good books in January.

Below are some of the quotes that stood out and that I’m likely to want to reference.

The Great Bridge by David McCullough

Human reason is the work of God, and he gave it to us so we could recognize him.

When a demagogue want to effect an object, he always raises the cup of public virtue; and under the cover of the smoke he raises slips in himself.

The Ascent of Money by Neil Ferguson

Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that those who make their living from lending money are somehow parasitical on the ‘real’ economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing.

It is partly because debtors have tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial crises and scandals occur  frequently enough to make finance appear to be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by members of ethnic or religious minorities, who had been excluded from land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and trust.

Hunter-gatherers do not trade. They raid.

What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief,  even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not  metal. It is trust inscribed.

A bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty . . . would be to  look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners . . . For the black poor, real  progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society. People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their  society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of  tenancy do not. . .

…the Nobel prize winners had known plenty of mathematics, but not enough history.

I remain more than ever convinced that, until we fully under­ stand the origin of  financial species, we shall never understand the fundamental truth about money:  that, far from being ‘a mon­ster that must be put back in its place’, as the German president recently complained, financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.

It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place.

A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening”on a lucky day”without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.

When piety and virtue, the supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously sought.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.