House of Eratosthenes

Thing I Know #401. People who refuse to work with details don’t fix things. Says a mouthful — a truckload, actually, and I’ve linked to it frequently since the first of this month for obvious reasons — but there’s a sad corollary. Not so much a corollary, but an equal and opposite reaction: People are generally not fun to watch, until & unless they’re refusing to work with details. Even when they’re making themselves fun to watch by pretending to work with them. And there is something in us that makes us want these refuse-to-work-with-details people to run everything. A foible in our current era, or something inextricably and permanently woven into our fabric. I hope it’s the former and not the latter.

But I’ll tell you one thing, this latest from Sen. John McCain makes me wince a little:

“Send Air Force One out to Silicon Valley, load it up with smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. And everybody knows that.”

His 2008 opponent who is responsible for this debacle, would protest that He and His people are already doing that. Top Men…

The Obama administration said Sunday that it has enlisted additional computer experts from across the government and from private companies to help rewrite computer code and make other improvements to the online health insurance marketplace, which has been plagued by technical defects that have stymied many consumers since it opened nearly three weeks ago.

The HHS website has been updated to this effect. Well, I’m glad to know they can at least do that much with websites…

We have updated the site several times with new code that includes bug fixes that have greatly improved the HealthCare.gov experience. The initial wave of interest stressed the account service, resulting in many consumers experiencing trouble signing up, while those that were able to sign up sometimes had problems logging in…To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering. Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.

The new website — now infused with help from those really smart computer guys, the nerds who do whatever that nerd stuff is that they do.

Top.

Men.

I suppose I should find this gratifying. For close to nine years now I’ve been blogging away about our super-duper-safe society achieving greater and greater creature-comforts but at the same time becoming unmoored from the solid kind of thinking that gave us the technology in the first place, deteriorating into diseased, bacchanalian thinking as the older “genuine” dangers retreated into the rearward horizon. I have occasionally predicted that this trajectory is cyclical, and the time will come that we’ll realize, consciously or otherwise, that there is a linkage between the creature comforts we take for granted and the masculine, cause-and-effect thinking that we now consider to be overly patriarchal and out-of-step with our times. Is this not what that would look like? Shouldn’t I be glad of it? Aren’t these the signs?

Can't Buidl a Website? A part of me is inclined to say yes. But a question naturally arises about how far down does the humility go. I remember working for a software start-up back in my early days, over two decades ago, one of the major shareholders walked in, saw the source code on my screen, said it really looked like a mess and I needed to run it through the spell checker. He was KIDDING about that, of course…at least…well, I dunno about that for sure, this was a great old guy with a dry sense of humor. I don’t think the fun-to-watch ObamaCare bureaucrats would be kidding. I can see it now. “Glad you’re here, Top Man. What a mess we have for you to clean up! You can start by running all this gobbleygook through the spell checker. The guy who wrote it said something about it being ‘Java,’ don’t know what that means, but let me tell you we don’t accept excuses around here!”

People in their nice sharp suits “solving” the problem by barking out orders. A memory flashes in my mind of “Plug The Damn Hole!” When what they really need to do is get out of the way.

Well, I don’t want to be too hard on them if they’re heading in the right direction. It was very soon after the “run ‘er through the spell checker” thing that I got sent here to Sacramento in the first place, under much the same circumstances…some big debacle created, and someone important in a nice suit issued a command in a big booming voice that we should fly in a whole bunch of smart guys to fix it, they somehow scooped me up with the others, so here I came and here I still sit. But you still have to wonder. Einstein said it’s impossible to solve a problem with the same mindset that created it in the first place. That’s why I have to ask how deep the recent humbling goes. Is the mindset being changed?

References to these smart, talented wonder-geeks are still being bandied about as if they were aliens. Years and years, decades even, of hoarding more and more power over the intimate details of our lives inside the beltway and NOW, in the fourth quarter of twenty thirteen when the embarrassment has become palpable, inescapable…we need to fly in some of “those” smart people? Um, excuse me…what you call “smart” is really nothing more than recognizing butterfly effects. Oh yes, that is merely my opinion. Many others will disagree, many of them working within the industry as long as I have, and among them, many of them demonstrably smarter and enjoying better success. Nevertheless, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, that’s really all it is: Acknowledging cause and effect. You can’t really build anything without this. It’s the keystone, the primary building-block. Of anything. You push down this end of the lever, that other end will go up if the fulcrum doesn’t give way. Rotate the screw, it will go in. Calling for the flying-in of “smart” people is a tacit admission that you have to “fly in” people who simply understand that one thing affects another. Well anyway, that’s how it sounds to me. I have to wonder what kind of world do you call home, before you fly them in? What color is the sky in your world?

ObamaCare has problems because the people who “built” it don’t live in the real universe. They think selling is as good as building.

And as tasteless as those comments were five years ago about Sen. McCain never sending text messages, when his war injuries make this a physical impossibility for him, it should be pointed out that such things are said about public figures not because they’re truthful or in good taste, but because it’s anticipated that they will resonate. It happens to his old running mate, still, pretty much daily: “Dinosaurs are ‘Satan’s Lizards?’ Oh yes, that sounds like something Sarah Palin might say.” McCain, for all the content of his swelling maverick-y grab bag of assets and liabilities, has created something of a rep for himself. He looks, acts, walks and talks like a Washington insider. The kind of bumptious bloviator who solves every little problem by making, or calling for, some new rule, who is much more surprised than the rest of us by, well, any everyday surprise life has to offer. He typifies what is very clearly the real problem here, the mindset I’m afraid hasn’t been displaced. “And then we’ll have a website, it’ll open on, uh, let’s make it October 1 yes that sounds good. And then everybody will sign up and we’ll be on our way.”

What??? It didn’t work?? Well, let’s fly in a bunch of those nerds to fix it with their nerd-pixie-powder. Do whatever they do.

Top.

Men.

Liberals fetishize intelligence. Probably because they consider themselves so much smarter than the rest of us, but whatever — to the liberal, there’s no problem that “intelligence” or “education” (I’m not clear that they see a difference between the two) can’t solve.

I had this dramatically confirmed a few years back when I had a…. fight?….. with a liberal buddy on the subject of presidential intelligence. I can’t really call it a fight, because I was completely baffled as to the source of his feelings, but he was hopping mad at the suggestion that a president doesn’t have to be some kind of super-mega-genius in order to be effective. I quoted that old Buckley saw at him about being ruled by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard, and he… lost it. It was chick-like in its utter disproportion.

Part of it, I’m sure, was that this was back in the days of eeeevilll Boooosh! and he was overreacting to the fact that a moron with a sub-chimp IQ was constantly getting the better of all those deep thinkers in the Democratic Party. But a lot of it wasn’t. He was genuinely offended that someone like me — with, like, advanced degrees and stuff — would prefer a fellow with good solid horse sense and a knowledge of his own limitations over a certified grandmaster of n-dimensional space chess. It threatened his entire worldview.

If we really want to break the liberal stranglehold on the culture, we absolutely must get two interrelated ideas into the cultural bloodstream:

1) Intelligence isn’t fungible.
2) The prime characteristic of intelligence is ability to learn from mistakes.

Liberals seem to believe with all their hearts that “smart” people are geniuses without portfolio who get everything right the first time. Reality, of course, is quite different. Mechanical engineers generally make poor poets; verbally dextrous types often can’t figure out which end of the hammer is up. The best doctors by health outcomes often come from second-rate med schools, while the guy who was top of his class at Hopkins has more meaningful interactions with a microscope than his patients. &c. Liberals also seem to believe that the infallible criterion of intelligence is getting it completely right the first time, and they actually seem to admire the increasingly desperate rationalizations of “smart” people who just can’t admit that they missed something.

Maybe they should spend some time around actual smart people, in other words, rather than engaging in mental masturbation — stop endlessly proclaiming how brilliant your heroes (and, by extension, you) are, and take a look at what they actually do with those IQ points.
- Severian | 10/21/2013 @ 08:03

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Monday, October 21st, 2013