Posted in Philosophy by AST on Monday, March 13th, 2006
This post was inspired by background reading that came out of an interesting discussion from last week on the XML-DEV mailing list. One of the things which was discussed was the concept of legitimacy. This post discusses some thoughts on legitimacy and suggests that it is, in fact, the most important consideration for the future evolution of the World Wide Web.
According to Brian Whitworth and Aldo de Moor [WHIT03], legitimacy is essentially the principle that interactions between people are conducted “fairly” within a common environment. However, what is “fair” within an environment depends entirely on an understanding of the environment in question. It is not sufficient to define “fair” in terms of any individual observer, because an individual’s perspective is controlled by their explicit and implicit assumptions about how that environment should be. The observer may be from a different culture, a different sex or a different religion than the members of the environment they observe, meaning that their sense of fairness, along with some of their underlying assumptions, may not be applicable in this environment. This set of assumptions was defined by Senge as an individual’s mental models [SENG90]. Instead, the individual must establish the context in which the environment exists in order to establish its governing principles and ethics. Only then can any individual action be evaluated to determine its legitimacy with any accuracy. One of the best ways to establish the boundaries of a given context is to ask the question Why? [SENG94].
The question of Why? is the fundamental foundation of both philosophy and science. At some point, someone wanted to know why something was the way it was. Since then, humanity has come up with a multitude of answers to this question, but each time an answer is given, it is ultimately limited by a context. Bohm eloquently states the problem as “all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains.” He later continues, “we have to be careful here not to identify truth as nothing more than ‘that which works’ [given a particular context]” [BOHM02]. Feynman echoes this thinking in a personal letter from 1963, “the only principle [of the scientific method] is that experience and observation is the sole and ultimate truth of an idea” [FEYN05]. Experience and observation allow the determination of “that which works”, but only through continued questioning relating to why it works can the extent of the context be determined. Therefore, context is the key to understanding, because understanding is the result of establishing this context.
The understanding gained by definition of a context is absolutely critical for effective action within that context. Bohm again explains the reason for this relationship quite clearly [BOHM02]. He says “the persistent holding to a truth beyond its proper limits, has evidently been one of the major sources of illusion and delusion throughout the whole of history and in every phase of life.” If you don’t understand at least some of the limits of your environment, you cannot possibly exert any influence over it. These limits provide the context, and within that context your understanding of it determines the legitimacy of your actions. Legitimacy is only meaningful in social interactions, because it is “a social adaptation to a group problem (conflict)” [WHIT03].
OK. So, what’s this got to do with the Web?
You see, the Web is fundamentally a social system. It was designed to enable more effective collaboration and communication between scientists and researchers whose background was the early Internet and previous ARPANET. It was a vaguely Utopian, but certainly closed, system of people living Bill & Ted’s “Be excellent to each other” philosophy. This worked because there was a shared set of assumptions about what was “right” (ethics) that were a by-product of their environment. While there have always been unethical researchers, the majority of them played by the same unwritten rules of legitimacy.
Whitworth and de Moor point out that in software systems, the creators of the software are responsible for the definition of legitimacy within the system. Like the real world’s legal system, the system constraints define what is and is not allowed. The main difference is that, since it’s a virtual environment, the degree to which someone (or a process acting on their behalf) can “break the law” is more easily controlled than in the real world. Since the Web grew out of the Internet’s essentially lawless environment, it inherited this lack of laws. For the early participants (mostly ethical people with a common background), this was not particularly a problem. However, as the Web has became more and more accessible to the masses, it is experiencing conflicts between legitimacy contexts. Whitworth and de Moor quote Meyrowitz [MEYR85] to imply that we are “hunter-gathers in an information age”, but I think we’re more like Billy the Kid, Jessie James, Doc Holliday & Wyatt Erp in the American West of the 1890’s.
The period of American history between 1870-1890 was characterized by a clash of contexts. There was an established culture and ideas of legitimacy “out West” and “back East” which caused problems as the settlers looking to make their fortune either through homesteading or adventure entered the “Wild West” culture predominately defined by a “might makes right” sense of ethics. Most of the people entering the environment had their concepts of legitimacy established in the “Civilized East”, and so were unprepared for any difference they encountered. This eventually led to lots of conflict and loss of life before the situation was reversed by enough people realizing that something needed to be done to establish a “civil” society. These people banded together, made or recognized laws, and hired powerful men to enforce them. Eventually, through example and conditioning, order was more-or-less restored.
With the Web, the situation was nearly the opposite. The essentially quiet little community was invaded by hordes of people who didn’t know the rules, and, unfortunately, on the whole didn’t know enough to know that there should be rules. The Web and the information contained in it are best described as an instance of Hardin’s “commons”, or shared resource amongst a group of people [HARD68]. This idea led to the creation of Senge’s “Tragedy of the Commons” system archetype [SENG90] for use in Organizational Learning.
Briefly, the idea is that there is a commons and people who use it. If the users of the commons do not collectively care for the well-being of the commons over and above themselves, it will eventually be destroyed. The system archetype is used to illustrate this as the convergence of n reinforcing processes resulting in net gains for the individual, leading them to do more of the same behavior. However, these individual activities create a separate activity whose existence creates a delay in feedback to the individuals that their shared resource is in danger. Often, by the time the individual realizes this, it is too late to save the common resource. The example used by Senge is that of overgrazing grasslands in Africa. The larger the herds, the more grass they needed to survive, meaning that the consumption of the grassland exceeded it’s ability to restore itself. Eventually, there was no more grass due to overgrazing and the cattle died, resulting in economic ruin for the herdsmen [SENG90].
If the Web is a social system, then the commons is not only the information contained in it, but also the freedoms provided by it to its users. The influx of the hordes of “greenhorns” to the Web has been not only tolerated, but encouraged, in much the same manner as expansion into the American West. This influx of users was necessary to establish new market opportunities as well as to allow the Web to reach the “critical mass” of users necessary to ensure those markets. Once vendors realized the potential of the Web, the main motivation seems to have been along the lines of, “if nobody comes, there’s no party”.
These are the overriding objectives of the corporations and larger entities who have embraced the Web for economic gain. There is nothing inherently wrong in economic gain if it comes from legitimate actions [WHIT03] except that when the economic gain becomes the goal rather than the by-product of a stable, self-sustaining environment, the “Tragedy of the Commons” archetype kicks in. The reason is stated by Whitworth and de Moor is that when the design of the community is controlled by an entity, then the design is naturally biased towards that entity and not the community [WHIT03]. It is a great thing if people publish content on the Web because it increases its value for everyone, but everyone still needs to respect the ethics of the environment.
The current danger is the backlash against people who have been using the Web (and the Internet) illegitimately to their own advantage. History has shown that while legislation of morality does not immediately change the world, consistent enforcement of ethical laws does eventually create a new context where the desired legitimacy traits exist. Since the Web essentially has no such laws, and has allowed the cultural reinforcement of the “just go get it on the Internet; it’s free” attitude, the net effect is to undermine the original ethics on which the community was established. The current emphasis on Copyright law, DCMA and other similar efforts are a direct result of illegitimate behavior by a few (or in some cases, a large majority) who do not share the same legitimacy context, or that use the apparent anonymity of the Web to avoid accountability for their actions. The effects of this illegitimacy can be found in everything from “copy-protected” CDs to identity theft from successful phishing scams.
The people who define the way the Web should evolve to address these issues cannot afford to only attempt to add new laws (system constraints) without attempting to address the social issue of legitimacy. If the establishment of a common context of legitimacy can be achieved (and we’re a long way from this happening), it will allow the Web to develop into the world-wide, collaborative community it was originally envisioned to be. Without focusing on the laws as a way to reinforce this legitimacy and surface the awareness that the freedoms of the Web and it’s content as the commons is in jeopardy, the Web will never achieve this goal. Whitworth and de Moor’s reference to Fukuyama provides the warning which should guide this future evolution: “Legitimacy is thus a foundation stone of any prosperous and enduring community, and communities that ignore it do so at their peril.”
References
- [BOHM02] Bohm, D. (2002). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London, Routledge Classics.
- [FEYN05] Feynman, R.P, ed. M. Feynman (2005). Don’t You Have Time to Think?. London. Penguin.
- [HARD68] Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243-1248.
- [MEYR85] Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior.. New York. Oxford University Press.
- [SENG90] Senge, P.M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline. New York, Currency Doubleday.
- [SENG94] Senge, P.M, et al (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. New York, Currency Doubleday.
- [WHIT03] Whitworth, B., A. de Moor (2003).
Legitimate by Design: Towards Trusted Socio-technical Systems. Behavior and Information Technology, Volume 22, Number 1, 31-51.
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Posted in Philosophy by AST on Monday, May 16th, 2005
I was reading through my ACM TechNews email this evening and was struck with how well it is put together. I get a lot of summary mails because I don’t have a lot of time to surf or read RSS feeds, but I want to try and keep up with what’s happening in the industry. I can’t escape email, so at least it’s in front of me rather than having to deal with RSS. I have to say that the ACM article summaries are some of the best I’ve seen. Some of the articles were condensed so well that I really didn’t get any more out of reading the full article. Well done, ACM.
Anyway, why I’m bothering with this entry has to do with this article from MIS Magazine’s Asia Edition. The title of the article is What CIOs need from IT schools and includes quotes from Steven Miller, dean of Singapore Management University’s (SMU) School of Information Systems. One of these is:
As a university, it is our job to prepare students to enter the workforce, and to adapt to what we know will be a very dynamic and uncertain future over the next several decades.
I don’t know much about SMU, and considering this quote is from a magazine focused on MIS rather than Computer Science, I’m guessing that it would be classified as more of a business college or something similar in the US. I do have a major issue with the dean of something called a university (even in Asia) making claims that the goal of education is to make people employable. I believe the fundamental goal of education is to teach people how to think, and to think critically. If you can do this, you can learn nearly anything else.
To be fair to Mr. Miller, he does also mention that they must focus on both the near-term and longer-term needs of their students. Balanced education is certainly a good thing, but if you’re dealing with a fixed amount of time, I wonder what kinds of topics get priority and which are left on the cutting room floor. I deal with a number of people on a daily basis from a wide array of backgrounds. The ones that continually stand out are the ones who both know their own capabilities and limitations and who can figure out how to solve problems. This can be computer problems or people problems.
The article also points out how more vendors are establishing relationships with colleges and universities so that students are exposed to their tools and products. Of course, they say it’s so the students are prepared for the “real world” and are ready to be employable. I say that this is simply a well known marketing tactic put to good use (and one that has been done for quite a while). Of course, if you use Oracle or some other product when it’s free, you’ll take the experience with you into the “real world” and be more inclined to use it when you have to convince someone else to pay the licensing costs. It worked for me and NeXTSTEP (I bought one when I was still in school).
However, clever marketing aside, the real question here is if the student is learning the concept or the tool? All too often, the focus is on learning a specific tool without the underlying concepts. This is especially true of “Tech Institutes”, Business Colleges and other educational institutions of a similar nature. The problem with this is you get a person who doesn’t understand the why, they only know the how. When the how breaks, it takes them much longer to figure out what happened. It also serves to constrain their thinking into what is possible/easy to do with a given tool rather than what you can accomplish with any tool of a given type (or what was used to build the tool in the first place). People who can think and who learn the why are more likely to achieve anything they decide they want to do.
I’m sure SMU will be successful in their curriculum. The IT market is picking up all the time. Maybe the broader background will force some of their students to learn to think, maybe it won’t. I know that I was pretty busy with getting to take all the classes I wanted to and still graduate before I was 60. However, my experience with the US educational system was pretty good: I learned how to learn. These days, I do a lot of reading, and I’ve recently dusted off my critical thinking cap to push myself to be better at what I do. What this means to me is that I’m reading stuff on psychology, philosophy, business, software architecture, security, leadership, software development, process improvement, management and history. I can do this effectively and without a lot of supervision because I learned how to learn.
It would be a dark day indeed if education really became “how to make Joe employable” rather than “how do we teach Joe to learn”. It’s really back to the whole idea about giving people the tools they need to be successful (teaching them to fish). If you look around, there’s an awful lot of people out there looking for a free dinner. We don’t want to encourage this behavior anymore than we have to do.
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Posted in Philosophy, About the Site by AST on Sunday, March 6th, 2005
First of all, I should explain the new title and description. One of the things I’ve been doing over the last month or so is doing a lot of reading. For those of you who know me personally, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The book that sparked this all off recently was Synchronicity: The Inner Path to Leadership, by Joseph Joworski. A very enlightening book which has since lead me to the works of David Bohm, Eric Fromm and Peter Senge.
All of this reading has convinced me that there really are only insights that lots of people take as truths. According to Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, “all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains.” He later goes on to say that “we have to be careful here not to identify truth as nothing more than ‘that which works’ [given a particular context].” The important thing is the context, for “the persistent holding to a truth beyond its proper limits, has evidently been one of the major sources of illusion and delusion throughout the whole of history and in every phase of life.”
All this to explain a little about what I’m publishing here. These are my insights—my way of viewing the world. Take them at your own risk. Agree or disagree. Hopefully, it’s entertaining and/or useful.
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Posted in Politics, Philosophy by AST on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005
Generally speaking, I don’t really share my political beliefs with others. Most of the time, I feel it’s my business, but this is how I was raised. Those last few words are kinda the point of this whole article, so keep them in mind. There will be a quiz.
At the moment, I’m sitting on a BA flight to Helsinki for a meeting. In line with not having vocal political beliefs, I don’t often read general news, but airplanes are great places for this sort of thing. Fortunately, BA (God love them) still provides a level of what I would consider “real” service in the air. You have your choice of 4 newspapers, real food (OK, so it’s small), free drinks, a real magazine or two and power points in their business class seats–all for the price of admission. Out of habit and previous experience, I grabbed a Wall Street Journal Europe and the Financial Times. Normally, if you read both of these papers, you have a fairly balanced view of what’s going on in the world.
So, there I was, reading away about the latest situation in Iraq, Ukraine cargo planes getting seized due to lawsuits, Oracle’s issues with the confidence of it’s inherited PeopleSoft customers and then I get to page A3, which has as the main article In Divided U.S., Who Gets the Kids? Mind you, I’m not criticizing the fact that the WSJE published this article (by Jeffrey Zaslow, if you’re interested), but I was deeply disturbed by the situation described within it.
The thrust of the article is that both the Republican Right and the Democratic Left are looking for new voters. Where will they find these voters? Yep. Some of the children of today will be voting age by 2008. Fair enough. This stuff has gone on for a long time. Most of us were heavily influenced by the beliefs and values of our parents (this is the reference to sentence 2). It’s the natural order of things. They tell us what’s right and wrong both by what they tell us as we grow up, but also by what they show us. The article presents several kids of different political backgrounds ranging in age from about 7 to 18. What’s most disturbing is some of the bone-headed statements of absoluteness regarding what is “right” and what is “wrong”. The topics range from Iraq, Prayer in School to Gay Marriage and homosexuality in general, but the sense of one side of the issue being “right” and the other being “wrong” expounded by these kids is absolutely frightening.
Think about this in context for a minute. On page A1, there’s an article by Farnaz Fassihi called Iran’s Influence Worries Iraq Voters. Leaving the question of “Iraq Voters” or “Iraqi Voters” aside, this article discusses the issues regarding a perception within Iraq that people who have been living in exile within Iran for some time will push the Iranian agenda of a more fundamentalist Islam onto Iraqi culture. Talking about fundamentalism, if you haven’t read parts of the 9/11 Commission Report, you probably should. I started it but unfortunately, got sidetracked from finishing it. It has some interesting references to fundamentalism and some good explanations as to what it really is. If you asked the majority of Americans if they thought “fundamentalism” was a good or a bad thing, I think that they would say “bad.” However, if you asked the parents of one Natalie Hair, 15 who is a regular attendee of First Baptist Church of Orlando if they think there’s anything wrong with their child “witnessing” via telling public-school classmates what the Bible does and does not condone, I’m sure they’d say no.
The article also points out a lot of cases where the kids in question (KIQ?) respond as Ms. Hair does when describing her feelings towards her church teaching creationism. She is quoted as saying, “That helps me defend my belief that evolution is false.” Apologies for picking on Ms. Hair, but she was presented early in the article when I was looking for references.
There’s nothing wrong with beliefs. We all have them. Some of them are eventually proven false (as far as I know, there really isn’t a Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, but when I was 4, you bet. Where’d they go?). Others are more complicated and are based on our experience and on what we’ve encountered in our life.
Most of us have heard the old joke (apologies to the devout Catholics) about the man who died and went to heaven. St. Peter is showing him around the place and they come to a 100 foot tall brick wall going as far in both directions as the eye can see. When the man asks, “what’s in there?” St. Peter replies, “Oh, that’s the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones up here.”
Of all the Catholics that I’ve known in my life, nearly 95% of them would at the very least chuckle slightly at this joke. It’s known as humility for those who are interested. The reason the joke exists is that regarding certain issues, Catholics have historically held an “all-or-nothing” attitude. Thus, someone had to come up with a joke about it.
I don’t claim to have the wisdom of the sages, but the way I see it, things are a lot closer to the old Live song “The Beauty of Gray” than they are to anything which is truly “right” or “wrong”. An individual’s beliefs guide them through these decisions on a day to day basis through these shades of gray. Life is really about the journey anyway, so this makes everything interesting. Sorry, drifting a bit off topic here, but it does all fit together.
Since I left the U.S. in 2001, I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of cultures firsthand. The majority of these cultures have been Western European ones (Spainsh, French, Irish, UK, Dutch, Portuguese and Norwegian), but they all have intrinsic values which are just as valid to them as Ms. Hair’s fundamentalist Christian ones. Does this make Ms. Hair right or wrong? Now things start to get interesting, don’t they? Just because people in the Middle East, Asia or Africa view things differently than they do in Mattoon, IL, are they right or wrong?
Before everyone gets excited here, I’m not talking about basic human rights issues, or saying I left the U.S. for any other reason than I wanted to be a better Traditional Irish musician. I’m not, and I didn’t. What I am talking about is once you look “over the wall” you realize that there really are other people out there with different beliefs than you have. You can even be friends. No, you don’t agree with everything they say or do, but they’re still your friends. From my time in Europe, it seems that generally speaking, Americans tend to get more polarized in their thinking than other cultures I’ve seen. How does this happen? It may happen because there’s not a lot of awareness that part of what made us a great nation was diversity. You don’t have to agree with people, but you do have to respect them and accept the fact that their beliefs may different from your own. It might happen because it’s easy to influence children’s beliefs. It may happen because generally, once someone’s mind is closed to other ideas, so is their circle of friends and so is their community. I’m also not saying Christianity is a bad thing. For a lot of people, it helps them deal with things like grief, joy and daily life. But if you look at the other side of the coin, some of the most horrific things in history have been done in the name of Christianity. Rape, plunder, looting, pillaging, genocide… Pirates? Outlaws? Nope. Try the Crusades for one of the ones off the top of my head.
The failure isn’t that one thing is “bad” and that one is “good”, it’s the loss of the objectivity crucial for the fate of the world going forward. Last time I checked, the world’s getting smaller, not larger. More and more people are communicating, interacting and conducting business than ever before. Who is going to decide this fate (providing we avoid some sort of cataclysm between now and then)? The young people of today, their children and their children’s children. How will they be best prepared to do this? If the parents of the world recognize this fact and begin to focus on the similarities rather than the differences. Recognition and tolerance does not necessarily mean acceptance and adoption. Maybe it’s time we start “looking over the wall” as a nation and realize we’re not the only ones in the world. Republican or Democrat doesn’t really matter that much to the rest of the world. We’re the United States of America: One Nation under God, (and hopefully) Indivisible.
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