Month: March 2011

Not enchanted with "Enchantment"

Posted on by John

I’ve read a fair number of business books, but I stopped reading them when they all started to sound alike. I have limited time for reading and so I want to read books that “blow my hair back” as Will Hunting would say.

I made an exception to my abstinence from business books when Guy Kawasaki’s publisher offered me a review copy of his new book Enchantment. The book confirmed my decision to lay off the business literature. I was surprised how much of it I’d already read elsewhere before it arrived. Much of it is a compilation of ideas and stories that were popular on the web last year. Enchantment isn’t a bad book, it just isn’t very original.

This made me think of Robert Ghrist‘s quip about new books:

Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache.

I can’t imagine that Enchantment would stand such a test of time. Hardly anyone will be reading it a couple years from now, much less 50 years from now.

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Augustine, Leibowitz, and evolution

Posted on by John

The following paragraph is from the science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

A fourth century bishop and philosopher. He [Saint Augustine] suggested that in the beginning God created all things in their germinal causes, including the physiology of man, and that the germinal causes inseminate, as it were, the formless matter—which then gradually evolved into the more complex shapes, and eventually Man. Has this hypothesis been considered?

A Canticle for Leibowitz is set centuries after a nuclear holocaust. The war was immediately followed by the “Simplification.” Survivors rejected all advanced technology and hunted down everyone who was even literate. At this point in the book, a sort of Renaissance is taking place. The question above is addressed to a scientist who is explaining some of the (re)discoveries taking place. The scientist’s response was

“I’m afraid it has not, but I shall look it up,” he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.

Was the reference to Augustine simply made up for the novel, or is there something in Augustine’s writings that the author is alluding to? If so, does anyone know what in particular he may be referring to? Is such a proto-Darwinian reading of Augustine fair?

Thomas Jefferson and preparing for meetings

Posted on by John

Here’s an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings.

In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the future University of Virginia. The University had been Jefferson’s idea in the first place, but (as is the case everywhere, not just in open source projects) many other parties had climbed on board quickly, each with their own interests and agendas.

When they gathered at that first meeting to hash things out, Jefferson made sure to show up with meticulously prepared architectural drawings, detailed budgets for construction and operation, a proposed curriculum, and the names of specific faculty he wanted to import from Europe. No one else in the room was even remotely as prepared; the group essentially had to capitulate to Jefferson’s vision, and the University was eventually founded more or less in accordance with his plans.

The facts that construction went far over budget, and that many of his ideas did not, for various reasons, work out in the end, were all things Jefferson probably knew perfectly well would happen. His purpose was strategic: to show up at the meeting with something so substantive that everyone else would have to fall into the role of simply proposing modifications to it, so that the overall shape, and therefore schedule, of the project would be roughly as he wanted.

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Psychological encapsulation

Posted on by John

A piece of software is said to be encapsulated if someone can use it without knowing its inner workings. The software is a sort of black box. It has a well-defined interface to the outside world. “You give me input like this and I’ll produce output like that. Never mind how I do it. You don’t need to know.”

I think software development focuses too much on logical encapsulation. Code is logically encapsulated if, in theory, there is no logical necessity to look inside the black box.

Maybe there would be no need to look inside the code if everything were working correctly, but there’s a bug. Or maybe the code isn’t buggy so much as incompletely documented. Maybe your inputs push the box beyond its designed limits and you don’t know that until you use it. Or maybe the code is taking too long to execute.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the code, but you don’t trust it. In that case, the code is logically encapsulated but not psychologically encapsulated. That lack of trust negates the psychological benefits of encapsulation. This may be the most insidious breach of encapsulation. A failure of logical encapsulation is objective and may easily be fixed.  A loss of confidence may be much harder to repair.

Developers may avoid using a component long after bugs have been fixed. Or they may use the component but be wary of it. They don’t concentrate their full mental energy on their own code because of a lack of trust in their dependencies. When a bug shows up in their code, they may waste time checking the untrusted component.

Psychological encapsulation might explain in part why people are more productive using tools they like. For example, Windows runs well for people who like Windows. Linux runs well for people who like Linux. Macs run well for people who like Macs. It’s as if the computer knows who its friends are.

Some of this is confirmation bias: we’re less likely to notice the flaws in things we like and more likely to notice the flaws in things we don’t like. But I think there’s more going on. If someone is using an operating system they distrust, they’re going to be less productive, even if the operating system performs flawlessly. Every time something goes wrong, they suspect it might be the operating system’s fault. Of course an error might be the operating system’s fault, but this is rare.

Related post: Opening black boxes