For some people, life is about passions to be discovered, for me, it’s a series of obsessions that need to be managed. I’ve installed a bar in my room a few days ago and I’m currently in the process of massively geeking out about cocktails. Already, I’ve got a list a mile long of things I want to try: Exotic simple syrups, infused liquers, home made bitters, custom made ice, evaporative reduced grenadine…

This is a common pattern with me, if I choose not to become involved with something, I’m quite happy to keep my distance and only maintain an educated layman’s perspective on things. But if I dive in too deep, the only solution is to reach the very bottom of that knowledge pool and become somewhat of an expert.

This is the reason I refuse to touch coffee, I’m sure it tastes great and could become a great love but I have a sense of how deep a knowledge is required and I simply don’t have the time or money to pursue it to the degree that would satisfy me.

To a lot of liberal Christians, evolution has become, dare I say, almost a point of identity. Even the Catholic Church has reaffirmed it’s view that evolution is totally compatible with faith and that Intelligent Design is a cruel sham of a belief. A lot of Atheists are keen to encourage this because anything that gets liberal Christians on our side and away from the Fundamentalists is a good thing. Unfortunately, I’m about to take a massive piss into this font of goodwill by stating that I think the belief that evolution is compatible with faith is based on a misunderstanding of evolution that is so prevalent even Atheists are guilty of perpetuating it.

The easy part of evolution to understand is the mechanistic aspect, the “how” of evolution. Mutation happens and features get evolved and some things become more popular because they lead to increased survival and this is how we have the natural world we see around us. Based on an understanding of this how, it’s perfectly plausible to then believe the why comes from God. God works through evolution and gives it a nudge once in a while at the right points. Evolution is just a cog in God’s plan. Of course, this is an unfalsifiable assertion so it falls outside of the domain of science. The scientists are happy, the liberal Christians are happy, why make so much fuss?

But to understand why evolution had the profoundly explosive effect it did on the scientific world and why Darwin was named the most influential scientist of the past millennium by Scientific American, one must move past the mechanistic understanding of evolution and understand the teleological aspect of evolution: the why of evolution.

Imagine for a second that you rolled a pair of dice a million times and noticed that they added up to 7 roughly 1/6th of the time. Why did the dice land the way it did? Why 1/6th and not some other number like 1/3rd or 1/12th? If you were wholly ignorant about probability, then you could believe that God decreed that all dice rolls should fall to his accord and the reason for 1/6th was because it was pleasing to his eye. But what probability does is it not only explains how it is 1/6th, but also to boil the why down to *shrug*, that’s just the way it is. Fundamentally, the why of it is that there is no why, not only is the why not God, it’s not anything. What probability does is explain away the why.

The real impact of evolution was not that it explained the natural world, it was that it provided science with a path to explain it away. Why do birds fly and beasts walk? Why are we the most intelligent of all the animals? Why do we love and war and yearn for the stars? *shrug*, that’s just how the world is. Evolution showed how complex forms and intelligent beings could have arisen following the same natural laws that govern how dice roll and planets move and by doing so, it not only removed the need for an intelligent creator, it removed the need for anything. Even 200 years after Darwin this is the basic point of evolution that is still misunderstood and this is why evolution is far more of a dilemma to faith than most people will admit.

It’s important to note though that this process is far from complete. Darwin only put humanity on the first step towards this understanding and in the last 200 years, scientists have been steadily working away towards this goal. Our understanding of how is still gradually improving every year but none of this could have happened unless Darwin had the stroke of insight that there could be no why.

Is it possible to believe in evolution and still in God? Sure, but It would be akin to showing how you could bend a spoon via sleight of hand and still believing that Uri Geller is bending them with his mind. If that’s the way it’s done, then he’s doing it the hard way.

Here is a short list of projects I’ve always wanted to do were I to have the sufficient time and means but I secretly know I’ll never get a chance to do them. If anyone else wants to take them on, be my guest:

• An investigation of what determines success by interviewing a large group of potentially successful people before they become successful. What things genuinely determine success? What things are just post hoc explainations which get engrained as superstition?
• A “Museum from the future”, with exhibits of contemporary late 20th century life from the perspective of 500 years. What will they pick to be important? What will they misunderstand? How will their differing moral and intellectual standards impose a narrative on our lives?
• A universal screen scraper framework for games education. This piece of software would be comprised of 3 components: A base layer which provides basic functionality for screen scraping games, a library of game specific adapters which turn what you see on the screen into a set of API calls that would allow you to control that game and then a user generated “AI” that could attempt to play those games. I think this would be an enormous boon for teaching kids how to program and fall in love with programming as it allows them to immediately tackle real world tasks with immediate feedback. For example, a rudimentary blackjack betting program would take all of 5 minutes and a few lines of code to code up but imagine progressing from that to building a Worms player and having it battle online with other Worms AIs.

A post on the O’Reilly Radar mirrors some thoughts I’ve been having. We have passed over a distinct phase shift in history from when only some things were remembered to when everything is rememebered and in the future, this distinction is only going to get more and more stark. In the future, every single edit in wikipedia will be preserved, every tweet and every livejournal entry, we’ll have more information on a 3rd rate reality tv star from 2005 than most presidents and this is going to radically alter the way future generations interpret the past.

The curious thing is that phase shift happened a long time before anyone thought there would be a phase shift. I estimate the phase shift to be at the point of the first world war. Everything before then will cross into a vague sort of blur, Greeks, Romans, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution. Events spaced 100s of years apart. But after that point, it’ll be WWI, Depression, WWII, Cold War. Events spaced 10 years apart.

However, the very nature of this enormous amount of data also casts a certain shape on how we understand our past. Already, I’ve noticed there are certain things which are very hard to Google for. For example, material about a person/thing before it got famous. Finding out what the world was like 10 years ago through Google turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Another rather curious quirk of Google is that it’s almost impossible to find out anything about Wikipedia. Any search you do only results in Wikipedia articles.

When most people think about the future, they map their own notions of significance onto future generations. But they often fail to account for the vagaries of time and fashion and how the future will project it’s own inevitable biases on us as we do on our past.

Every once in a while, I run into someone arguing that innovation and progress is now dead and the argument usually runs something like this:

Think of all the world changing “modern” inventions: Computers, the internet, cell phones etc. All of these things were actually invented over 40 years ago. We haven’t actually had any major innovation since then, only minor variations on a theme like Facebook and SMS. Ergo, we have already left the golden era of innovation.

However, this is a fallacious argument, if we were to go back 40 years, we could make the exact same claim. Telephones, rockets and the jet aircraft were the world changing modern inventions of that era and no world changing innovation has happened since then.

In the same way that it’s easier to see your hand than your nose, innovation also looks the most clear from a comfortable distance away. What this also means is that, if you know where to look, you can spot the shape of 2049. Innovations that will be considered world changing then are brewing right now and all it requires to predict it is a sufficient degree of insight about the present day.

One small bright spot for media companies in this recession is the abundance of shovel ready content to fill the pages. Consider this article from the New York Times on the social effects of a recession.

I’ve been seeing more and more of these types of articles over the last few weeks and the great thing about them is that they require absolutely no journalistic content and can, thus be produced by the bushel.

At some point in your professional career, you will make a mistake and you will do something that ends up causing serious inconvenience or harm to the people you are working for. In these circumstances, I see people default into one of two different attitude, make it right or make it go away.

Making it go away entails doing the least possible to get the person in front of you to stop complaining. Shift the blame, absolve responsibility, offer enough to restore the situation to the status quo.

Making it right entails doing enough that the person in front of you goes away satisfied and this is much more rarely seen.

The first step of making it right is owning up and it goes something like this:

You’re right, I’m sorry, I should have…

Each of these 3 components is essential. The “I should have” is important because it communicates to the other person that you understand the scope of the problem and what needs to be done to fix it. It allows both parties to come to an agreement over the extent of the grievance.

But too many people think that just owning up is enough to make it right. It’s not, owning up is cheap and just owning up by itself is merely an advanced form of making it go away. The next step is to remove the hurt.

You did something wrong, it’s not the end of the world but you did hurt someone. Merely restoring things back to the status quo does not remove the hurt. Instead, you need to transfer the hurt onto your shoulders and show that the consequences for your mistake hurt you more than it hurt them.

If your site had half an hour of downtime, don’t just give people half an hour of credit, give them 2 days of credit. If you make a mistake on your billing, don’t just refund the discrepancy, write off the entire section you billed them for. If you accidentally wipe all of their personal data from your servers, well, you’re pretty screwed, I have no idea what you should do.

The only way to remove the hurt is to show people that you’re equally as motivated as them for the hurt never to happen again. This is the only way you can restore trust in someone that you won’t be making the same mistake again.

This is great, you might be thinking. Making it right sounds like some noble, code of honor type shit which only an idiot would not want to follow. But making it right is also fucking hard as well. It requires an extraordinary level of effort to keep yourself at the standards that are imposed by making it right. I personally think that making it right is important enough to strive towards those standards but understand that it’s not something that can be undertaken lightly.

A friend of mine recently asked me to put down some of my thoughts on how to more effectively network. Being a natural introvert, networking is not something that’s come easily to me. But after putting some conscious effort into improving my skills, I’m at the point where people are usually quite surprised to discover that I’m an introvert by nature. I’m not an expert on networking by any stretch of the imagination but here’s some tips I’ve gathered over the years:

• Networking is a technique, not an activity. For too many people, networking feels foreign and forced because they think of networking as a specific activity. The imagine a big group of people who come together to “do networking” and rightfully run away from this image in horror. Networking should never be an activity, it should always be a means to an end rather than an end of itself. You’re always networking in order to achieve something whether it’s to learn background knowledge about an industry, form a contact who you can collaborate with later or trying to recruit someone for a job. Networking is a way to achieve your goals which naturally leads to…
• Know what you want out of networking. There’s a lot of different things you can get out of networking and there’s a different way of doing it for each goal. At different points in you’re life you will be looking out for different things and you need to adapt your approach to suit. I always keep a rough mental checklist at the back of my head for the types of stuff that I need. For example, a few months ago, I was really interested in swapping concepts and ideas in order to spark a burst of inspiration whereas now, I’m more interested in learning about how I can accelerate my development or opportunities to work with someone. Having that list allows you to direct the conversation to a more productive path.
• Know your spiel. Your spiel is your way of communicating to other people about who you are. “These are the project I’m working on, this is what I think my job title is, these are some cool things I’ve done in the past, this is what I consider myself an expert on”. After some experience with this, you should be aiming to get the patter down so you can rattle it all off in a smooth fashion. Your spiel is important because it allows other people to know who you are. I’ve been at one time or another been known as “the social networking guy”, “the security guy”, “the identity guy”, “the startup guy” etc. Having an easily attached identity is important because it allows the other person to answer the most important question in their mind:
• “What can this guy do for me?”. Boiled down, networking is two people coming together so they can both answer this question. Paradoxically, what I believe in is that the best way to answer this question is to flip it around and instead ask “What can I do for you?”*. All the best networkers I’ve ever met were marked by their incredible generosity and the feeling that they genuinely cared about you more than them and that’s what made them great networkings. As a result, I’ve adopted a position where the first question I try to answer when I meet someone is “What is their problem and how can I help them fix it?”. That being said, you only have a certain amount of energy and time and so choose the people you choose to help wisely.
• Be genuine. People get the impression that networking is this smarmy, insincere post that you need to put on to get ahead. That may be how networking is portrayed in the movies but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Networking is only useful if it’s a genuine effort. You don’t have to enjoy it but you at least have to be sincere about it.
• The road to the top will be long and hard. A lot of people start out thinking that with the right combination of tricks and diligence, they’ll soon be reaching the inner sanctums in which they will be networking with the true power brokers. Simple mathematics quickly dispels this notion, not everyone can be in the inner sanctum or it wouldn’t be inner anymore. The brutal truth is that you’re only useful to people to the extent that you can provide them value. Networking can help you parley your skills into opportunities but they won’t help a whit unless you do the hard work of developing those skills in the first place.
• Honor your commitments. If you say you’ll look up something for them, do it. If you say you think you can introduce them to someone, do it. If you tell them you’ll email them, do it. If you don’t think something might be possible, don’t say it is. In any circle small enough to be worth networking into, your reputation will follow you wherever you go so make sure it’s sterling.
• Always be on. For the serious schmoozers, networking isn’t just a tool, it’s a way of life and it’s integrated into everything they do. If they’re reading the newspaper, they’re thinking about how the news might help one of their friends. If they meet someone at a bar, they’re running their networking stack in the back of their brain. If they’re brushing their teeth… well, they’re probably just brushing their teeth, nobody is that extreme. But there’s a transition point you make from networking being a thing you do to a thing you are and jumping over that gap turns you into a different person. I’m hesitant to say that this is a necessary of even desirable transition but it’s an important one for anyone who’s gone through it.

I don’t put much credence when people say they’re not suited to networking or that it’s not important for them. I think especially for a lot of geeks, there is an almost defensive fear about conscientiously developing the social skills necessary for effective networking as if that diminished their technical credentials in some way. Networking is not some arcane activity or bizarre social ritual, it’s a natural part of human interaction which, like many others, can be greatly improved with some assiduous practice.

* There is a Chinese parable that Hell is to be seated at a giant banquet table filled with all manner of delicious food and yet be unable to taste any of it because each person at the table is equipped only with 6ft long chopsticks. Heaven is the exact same table and the exact same feast, yet everyone is enjoying themselves because they are feeding each other.

There’s a popular misconception about the legal system which a lot of technical people fall under which regards the legal system as a set of laws and the role of lawyers and judges is to enforce those laws. Such a mental model is understandable as it maps well to what we’re used to in the world of computers. The laws are the source code, the legal system is the machine and the citizen is the user. Unfortunately, it’s not correct.

Unfortunately, a too strict interpretation of this model can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings of the law. In a practical sense, laws aren’t laws until they’re applied. That not all laws are applied consistently and universally is a feature of the system, not a bug.

Al Capone was prosecuted for tax evasion. Do you really think the tax evasion law was put into place to catch tax evaders? No, it was deliberately put in place as an overly broad law that is only ever enforced when no other charges can be brought.

How laws are enforced add’s a more nuanced and flexible layer to the legal system which allows it to adapt to the complexities of human society. The issue of enforcement is often ignored (usually to the arguer’s advantage) in legal discussions and it leads to a distorted and absurdist view of the legal system.

PS: I’ve just noticed that my last blog post was the 100th post on this blog. Go me!

When presenting an idea, especially to a wide audience which isn’t going to pay much attention, it’s certain doom if you make it sound to close to a similar but subtly different idea. The process most people go through when evaluating a new proposal is to first decide whether it’s novel and then decide whether it’s true. If you trigger their duplicate detector, then they’ll automatically pre-load their canned responses and switch off the thinking portion of their brain.

Sometimes, in order to avoid this trap, you have to deliberately alienate the reader. Rather than taking the most direct route to an idea, cast it in unfamiliar terms so that some struggle is needed to grasp it. If it’s completely unavoidable, confront the issue head on by saying that my idea X is not Y. However, this can often backfire by making the digression take over the thrust of the article.

For readers, try reversing the order of your filters. First decide whether something is true, then decide whether it’s novel. You might be able to catch some insight which other people have missed.