I write that sentence after reading Andrew Brown’s post on how the failure to appreciate history on its own terms clouds the thinking of fundamentalists. (In this case, he’s talking about fundamentalist atheists.)
This is the paragraph that grabbed me:
Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian’s comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can’t imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends — the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages — but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.
It’s impossible to properly appreciate anything without understanding, to some degree, where it came from. Failure to appreciate things in their own context is a problem I often find when people talk about software development. I read arguments about the superiority of Ruby on Rails to J2EE without any appreciation of the fact that Ruby on Rails is built upon many lessons that were learned the hard way as Java frameworks evolved. Without the 1999 article Understanding JavaServer Pages Model 2 architecture, Struts, and plenty of other lessons learned along the way, there would be no Rails as it exists today. Without Active Server Pages there would have been no Java Server Pages. Without CGI there would have been no ASP. Without Perl and Lisp and Scheme there would have been no Ruby.
Whether the topic is programming, history, politics, or music, attempting to explain or criticize things without judging within their own context is waste of time and energy. The only upside is that when someone persists in doing so, it’s a good signal that their analysis can be safely dismissed without further consideration.
]]>You can get an idea of how the guidelines were applied in the trailer for Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.
This is the best piece of Kinkade snark since Janelle Brown wrote Ticky-tacky houses from “The Painter of Light™ back in 2002, about a Kinkade-inspired golf course community in California. The prices of those houses have not fared well in the current climate — here’s the 5 year pricing chart for one of the houses in the neighborhood from Zillow.
]]>Best to clear your mind and emotions of group loyalties and resentments and ask, if this belief gave me no pleasure of rebelling against some folks or identifying with others, if it was just me alone choosing, would my best evidence suggest that this belief is true? All else is the road to rationality ruin.
This made me think about a recent political issue — whether the government should somehow bail out the US automakers. On one hand, we have the evidence that these companies are lost causes and principled objection to using taxpayer dollars to bail out certain failing businesses. On the other hand, we have the possibility of massive job loss at car factories, dealerships, parts suppliers, and so on. What’s best for America? What’s best for me? I don’t really have any idea.
To accept that means accepting a certain level of uncertainty that I think most people are uncomfortable with. To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with it.
What I do know is that the political party I most closely identify is against letting these companies fail. Many of the bloggers I most often agree with think we should bail them out as well. I think that’s all most people need.
Most big problems are too complex for an individual to fully understand, and rarely can experts agree among themselves on the best solution. So rather than just admitting to themselves that they have no idea what we should do, most people prefer to succumb to their biases and accept the ideas put forward by the group or faction they’re loyal to.
Maybe that’s the ultimate human bias — the bias toward believing that we know what we’re talking about.
]]>This isn’t to say that ISPs will never violate network neutrality. A few have done so already. The most significant was Comcast’s interference with the BitTorrent protocol last year. I think there’s plenty to criticize about what Comcast did. But there’s a big difference between interfering with one networking protocol and the kind of comprehensive filtering that network neutrality advocates fear. And it’s worth noting that even Comcast’s modest interference with network neutrality provoked a ferocious response from customers, the press, and the political process. The Comcast/BitTorrent story certainly isn’t going to make other ISPs think that more aggressive violations of network neutrality would be a good business strategy.
And here’s his argument for why legislation is a bad idea:
So it seems to me that new regulations are unnecessary to protect network neutrality. They are likely to be counterproductive as well. As Ed has argued, defining network neutrality precisely is surprisingly difficult, and enacting a ban without a clear definition is a recipe for problems. In addition, there’s a real danger of what economists call regulatory capture—that industry incumbents will find ways to turn regulatory authority to their advantage.
I agree with him that legislating network neutrality is fraught with peril in terms of unintended consequences and problems defining what, exactly, network neutrality is. What his arguments would indicate is that there’s a pressing need for transparency in this market.
First it’s up to the market to demand transparency, but if that doesn’t work out, I think it’s completely appropriate to pass laws that require Internet service providers to disclose how they handle traffic on their networks. Comcast tried to get away with throttling BitTorrent traffic without telling anyone last year, and I imagine that this is the usual sort of anti-network neutrality activity that we’ll see. If Time-Warner launches its own Internet TV operation, RoadRunner could silently throttle traffic from Hulu.com, for example. If this sort of activity were all disclosed, customers would be in a better position to decide whether they want to subscribe to a service provider that interferes with this fashion.
It’s also much easier to define disclosure requirements for ISPs than it is to define and regulate network neutrality. I’d much rather see the government put effort into creating the conditions that enable the market to work most effectively than to make winners of companies most able to game the system created by a new regulatory regime.
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