Unoriginality

A recent tweet from vjack (author of the most excellent http://www.atheistrev.com/) asked, "Why is it that nearly every Christian who comments on an atheist blog acts as if he/she is the first to ever do so?" I suspect this was in reaction to his latest Christian troll, a 14 year old with all the arrogance and enthusiasm of his tribe, along with the lack of answers or experience also common to his tribe.

In part I think that old arguments get brought up to provoke a reaction (rather than taking the time to see where they've been answered again and again and again), but part of it lies in the basics of the human ego, particularly among the incompetent. (Incompetent people, of course, have no idea they are incompetent, and tend to rate themselves more competent than people who are competent.)

Before I retired, the products whose user interfaces I and my team designed consistently made profits, took market share in expanding markets, and spurred supplies profits. Yes, these products were in a niche market where ease of use was an excellent selling point, but the point is that much, much money was made by these devices, and our work was the public face of these flagship devices.

As our success became obvious, market forces and trends happened to erode the profitability of other divisions in this Fortune 500 corporation. And here's the counterintuitive part, the one that I think ties in with vjack's question: the more money our products made, the more awards we won, the more rave reviews from customers, the harder it was for us to do our jobs.

Designing a user interface requires scientific creativity. You make several things up, you test them, you iterate, and so on and so on until, out of all your hypotheses about how different aspects may work, you end up with a theory of a usable interface that matches your customers' needs. This process involves seemingly endless research and thought and experimentation.

When you outperform others in a multi-billion dollar a year company, one where corporate "restructuring" is CONSTANT as a method for placating financial analysts, people want to be associated with that stellar performance. As our devices performed better and better across the years, more and more people tried to interfere in the development process: you should do this, our customers are going to hate that, I think this should go here and be called this, well how many people did you test, on and on and on.

And the most frustrating part of all of that almost universally worthless advice and questioning is that the majority of these incompetent hangers-on were impossible to shut up. "Yes, thank you, no one on MY team is a moron, your points have already been considered and rejected."

"But blah blah."

"Blah blah doesn't matter, it has already been considered, tested, and rejected by the exact same process that has resulted in profit making, market share taking devices for the last 9 years."

"Well, the old one did bleh, and I think that is the way to go, our customers really like bleh."

"I am the one that personally INVENTED bleh, I hold a patent on it. The same methodology that said BLEH was a good idea says that our current ideas are even better!"

And this continues for days. Weeks. Months. Years even. (We had a normal 2 year development cycle, and the same stupid suggestions would get reborn as new people, with no training in our field, no experience and little intelligence would come in and duplicate the time wasting of their equally idiotic predecessors.) I once tried sending out form letters of, "I read and understood your points. Your opinion now resides as a data point in the thousands of users and experiments whose actions and opinions and results I have absorbed. Nothing that you have said is new, and there is no reason for I or my team to spend any more time on this issue. Thanks for your input, The Pompotous."

Needless to say, I was ordered to stop using that -- too insulting, as if an untrained novice with no evidence attempting to dictate to a seasoned, educated and proven successful professional wasn't insulting! But that is corporate life. People really don't seem to understand that some ideas are correct, many more ideas are incorrect, and there are indeed instances where this can be demonstrated. Being wrong, as a scientist, is just part of life. It is part and parcel of the scientific method. Most people can't seem to internalize that, and end up wasting a lot of time with what is, quite frankly, crap.

And I don't want to give the idea that all input from untrained novices with no evidence is useless. Sometimes questions from the non-idiots can provoke a chain of thought, when answering, that opens up new doors to be explored. That's the basis of collaboration, at least the way it worked for my team: someone lays down a set of hypotheses and you start asking questions until you're down to things with all the obvious logical or technical flaws removed, something that needs to be explored through experimentation.

Too much ego is bad for the scientific method. So when scientists come along and say, "You're not only wrong, you're not worth arguing with because YOU HAVE NOTHING NEW AND THE PROCESS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED," they just go nuts with outrage. If the basis for, say, evolution was as completely worthless as the basis for, say, creationism, then speaking out would be warranted. But it's not.

I wonder if there is an atheist FAQ (or FAA, Frequently Answered Answers) that we could point to: you think Biblical Creationism is a scientific theory, you have provided no new evidence to support your ridiculous position, see tinyurl.bleh#3.

Truth part 2 -- what is truth?

Soon after I started skipping grades I had one of the many, many arguments that I've had with student teachers throughout my years. This particular young woman distributed a "True/False" test, but instead of a list of statements that could be marked true or false there were a list of questions, with question marks after them, something along the lines of:
Whiskey has a higher alcohol content than beer? True False

I objected that the choices weren't valid: questions framed in such a way could be answered yes or no, but that true and false applied to statements, and there were no statements on the test.

I might not have been such a jerk about this if the "teacher" hadn't tried to fun of me for correctly pronouncing "liquor" and "liqueur" in an early incident, causing me to a) question her age b) question her upbringing as a source for her ignorance and c) carry a grudge that expressed itself with all the vigor of a vindictive 11 year old.

In any event, Pontious Pilate cavalierly tossed off "what is truth?" and I'll just as cavalierly answer that truth is a statement that corresponds, as closely as currently possible, with all that is known of the objective universe.

The best method that we have at the moment for discovering truth is the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment. Like any field or method, there are fine details involved at each of the stages, and lay people are often mistaken about how to use the scientific method or how to interpret results.

The key feature to the scientific method, at least in my mind, is the fact that all parts of the scientific method are viewed in context and iterative, leaving the door open for correction at a later date. This is absolutely vital. I was once accused of being closed minded by a management type when (of course) the results of my team's experiments weren't what this VP wanted them to be. "I'm not close minded," I said, "I just only open my mind in the presence of evidence about my methodology or my results. Your single, biased opinion is one tiny, biased data point."

Since all of our interaction with the objective world (yeah, yeah, either it is there or it isn't, haven't seen a good argument for assuming that it isn't there) takes place through subjective interpretation, the scientific method (and associated ways of using it such as heterophenomenology) provides as much of a reality check as we can get, and being in touch with reality is pretty much the most objective definition of sanity that I can think of. Truth is something which we must always attempt to approach.

So when I talk about AGR (attenuated grasp of reality), I'm talking about having a declared position or action contrary to the current state of some truth. As an example: you send someone a letter stating X. That person then writes a bunch of people saying, "Pompotous said Y!" This is most likely AGR because "Pompotous said Y!" appears to be false statement. Evidence might be gathered showing that X and Y, whatever they may be, are functionally or semantically identical, but that's something that the Pompotous normally does to other people, not something that normally happens to himself.

Truth, part 1 -- when I'll hide it

Part 1 of series on truth

Obviously, Pompotous is not my real name. I use it in this blog as a guard against casual public discovery because my wife is a CEO who is in the public spotlight and must deal with the sort of people who might attempt to damage or hinder her work in a fit of pique over some of the positions that I espouse, particularly atheism.

The depth of my love for my wife is revealed by the fact that I've gone along with this kaka suggestion. Almost 30 years ago, as a young college student, I formed a group called "Students Against Senseless Stupidity," and served as its President and its only "open" member (meaning I was the only one whose real name was publically associated with the endeavor, which consisted of putting broadsides up around campus denouncing current stupidities). As an aside, I'm proud to say that the organization lasted for well over a decade before falling defunct, always with at least one openly acknowledged member.

So strong emotion can cause me to "hide" the truth.

Utilitarian considerations can also cause me to withhold information. When I first started at the Fortune 500 company I worked at for almost a decade, one of the leading lights of the organization told me that the free dissemination of information between departments within the company was a BAD idea. Much to my chagrin, he was correct, and I apologized to him. You see, dispersal of information is the best idea in a perfect world, but a large company is not a perfect world, and when you give information to idiots the resulting problems caused by the idiots outweigh the additional contributions from the non-idiots receiving the information.

So I'm willing to "hide" the truth for practical considerations, at least those which are also self-interest considerations (dealing with incompetents is physically, mentally and psychologically debilitating).

Yet a passion for knowing the truth is one of my principle traits (and my "telling the truth" trait is much stronger than that possessed by most other people, if my personal and professional life is any indication).

Executive compensation: what do you DO for your money?

The late, great Peter Drucker had a core question that he would ask workers and management when beginning to analyze a company: what do you do for your money? Drucker (who was incredibly influential in turning the Japanese car companies profitable) found that many, many people were unable to cogently answer that question, usually saying things like, "I go to meetings," or "I'm in charge of the blah-blah."

Drucker's viewpoint, after a long life of examining large companies, was that executive compensation should be, at most, 20 times greater than the compensation for the lowest paid worker. Obviously the exact number is subject to argument, but the important part is acceptance of the fact that what a CEO actually contributes to a company is worth much less than the hundreds-of-times the average worker's salary that they (in general) currently earn.

Even worse, executive pay is often not based upon performance -- consider the K-mart CEO who ran the company as it ground its way down over several years, all the way into bankruptcy, who resigned after the bankruptcy and received millions and millions in a golden parachute because he was "not fired for cause." And was able to turn around and get another CEO job right away. Or the recent AIG bonuses, in the hundreds of millions, going to the executives in the division responsible for AIG's de facto destruction, a heavy contributor to the current economic crisis.

In this article ( http://tinyurl.com/cxuhey ) the government appointed chairman of AIG makes use of the "We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses" argument. A common argument for outrageous executive compensation, the "reward to attract and retain" argument is, quite frankly, bullshit. (As the former CEO of Dupont once put it.) Yes, you must reward people for their work, but concentrating such rewards on executives (and to such outrageous levels) is simply part of the incestuous relationship between executives and boards and large scale stockholders. If you allow people to vote themselves obscene and dangerous amounts of bread and circuses, guess what? You'll get obscene and dangerous amounts of bread and circuses.

The same executives who outsource jobs overseas (sacrificing quality for short term labor savings -- and as a veteran in a Fortune 500 tech company I know what I'm talking about here, I worked with overseas programmers on a daily basis) don't seem likely, anytime soon, to turn that same logic on themselves. Why not outsource the CEO positions to CEO candidates in places like South America? Maybe the quality won't be as high, but they will surely be cheaper!

I do not know if the stimulus package will work. My macroeconomics courses instilled in me a healthy skepticism in the ability of a government to control something as fluid as a national or global economy. I do, however, know that the power to limit the power of executives is basically currently in the hands of the executives. The whole reason for a corporation is to evade responsibility, and those who attain the highest levels of corporate leadership are infused with that ethic.

Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings have spoken again, and the ONLY way to gain control of the runaway accumulation of power in corporations is through government limits. NOT government control (such as instituted by the Republicans in response to the crisis, and continued now by the Democrats), but by limits. Why are there game laws limiting the type and quantity of game you can gather? To create a sustainable ecosystem, to prevent, in a broad manner, the tragedy of the commons. Our economic ecosystem is in need of such limits, without them people are just too damned selfish, stupid and shortsighted to avoid periodic catastrophe.

Something good about Mississippi Part 2!

Yes, faithful readers, something ELSE good about Mississippi, and so soon!

Little Tokyo II (one of a few restaurants owned and operated by a Japanese family) serves, hands down, the best sushi that I have tasted in my life. I was in awe at the intense and interesting flavor combinations in the various "house" styles of sushi. Yes, it feels a bit funny to order a "Mississippian roll," but it is definitely worth it.

Something good about Mississippi

If you know the Pompotous, you know he is an extremely fair man. So the Pompotous needs to speak about something GOOD about Mississippi.

Our house has a fairly large courtyard. The two external walls are lined with vegetation, and the walls fronting the house are lined with french doors. This provides easy viewing of the multitude of wildlife that stops by to visit. We have had cats, mice, opossums, geese, ducks, hummingbirds, various other birds, chameleons, squirrels, chipmunks, and frogs visit from time to time. (And a deer was seen on the street outside the courtyard.)

Our latest visitors consist of two adult morning doves and their child. In addition to watching the feeding of the tyke, Pompotous and crew have observed the mama bird illustrating to the youngster how to fly, and, when leaving via the courtyard, we've observed the mama bird doing the "Oh, I'm damaged!" trick to lure us away from the baby.

It was very neat watching the mama dove demonstrate (in bits and pieces) techniques for flying, and was a positive Mississippi experience for the Pompotous and family.

Home schooling (for now the answer is "no")

As an atheist (and as what in todays terms would be an exceptionally globally gifted youngster who was radically advanced 5 grades and still ended up bored) home schooling is something I've considered for my little girl, currently 2 1/2. In our former home of Lexington, KY the top rated pre-school in the city was a secular one. The closest thing to that which we've found in Jackson, MS is the public school Montessori, which she'll be entering next fall.

Since my spouse is Episcopalian, my daughter is already exposed to imaginary friends, so atheism isn't a strong motivator for me when it comes to considering home schooling. I'm much more worried about her intelligence. It's too early to tell if she'll inherit my global gifts, but at 2 1/2 she's probably averaging 6-10 words per sentence, often ranging up into 15-20 word sentences with grammatically correct conditional clauses.

Exceptionally gifted children don't really need school to learn. (When asked how I managed to get a 31 composite on the ACT at the age of 11 I always answered, "I read science fiction.") As a former college instructor with an extensive liberal arts background, I wouldn't worry so much about providing my daughter with sufficient academic preparation for college. (Although MOST of the resources that I skimmed in thinking about this are Christian-centric.)

In some of the studies that I've been reading lately it looks like structured radical advancement has the most benefits for really smart kids, and most of that benefit seems to come from the social opportunities of interacting with people on your own level of thinking. (As one researcher put it, no one expects to mainstream a child with an IQ of 40, why should we assume that a child with an IQ of 160 should be mainstreamed?) Public schools are, as vjack says (http://www.atheistrev.com/2009/03/atheist-homeschooling.html), centers for social instruction, but that doesn't ALWAYS mean that the social aspects are beneficial (although those aspects certainly CAN be in some, perhaps most, cases).

My own daughter is extremely social. She stayed at home the first few months after we moved to Mississippi, but kept asking to go to daycare (which she'd done before I retired). She simply finds being around lots of other children absolutely fascinating. She emotionally craves that contact. At this point, for my daughter, home schooling isn't currently an option. As a rationalist, of course, new evidence can always lead to change.

I think that the real question for atheists when it comes to home schooling is, "What causes more damage? Socializing with children who are very, very different (either in intelligence or in world view), or having very limited socializing until the dangerous late-teens?" I have trouble believing that any child who is too far off the "norm" can emerge unscathed from childhood, and I think that all parents should navigate their individual courses based on the circumstances that confront them. (Duh!)