House of Eratosthenes

I’ve been working evenings and weekends, since about the beginning of summer, on a project that demands some specialized skills offered by not too many other people. I’m already gainfully employed the forty hours a week, and I’m learning that in spite of my past experiences working many more hours than that, these days I’m not too gifted at time-management with the 41st hour and onward. But, because of what I did manage to get done, along with other achievements on other things, I learned a couple of weeks ago I scored Employee Of The Month. Which is actually a real thing, where I work. Lots of people you have to beat to make it to the final round, I mean up to a hundred, really smart futhermuckers too. And there’s money involved. A good-sized chunk of it, when you consider that every month someone is snagging this spot. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse levels of money. Ruth’s Chris…mmm…

Om nom nom nom I am honored. I am humbled. I am…befuddled. There’s a bit of a story behind that. More about it later.

While all this is going on, at the beginning of the month a screwball opened fire with several pistols in a community college, taking out nine and hurting another nine. It happened up in one of my favorite cities, Roseburg, OR. Not that I know anybody who lives there or anything. But Roseburg is a handy halfway-point between my boyhood hometown, and where I live now. We’ve spent many a restful night in the North part of the city, when journeying there by car. Which is something we haven’t done for awhile. Nevertheless, we’re very familiar with the place.

Those who wish to know my thoughts about it, could peruse my Facebook page, which has been updated pretty constantly on that as well as on life’s little events. While the blog languishes. This is not a courteous or proper way to treat my readers…and although we’ve been calling this “The Blog That Nobody Reads” for over a decade now, the truth of the matter is that there are some. The question that may be lingering now is whether someone’s writing.

To summarize. I’m shocked and saddened like anyone else — and, I am just completely blown-away by the lack of shame, and knowledge, on the part of those who seek to further restrict the American citizen’s ownership and responsible use of firearms. The deficits seem to be embiggening, in the shame as well as the knowledge. They’re reached bedrock in both of the pits, and are continuing, against all odds, to dig further. It’s as if every active-shooter event makes them more ignorant than they were after the one that came before, and more brazen than they were after the one that came before.

A common refrain is that doing something is better than doing nothing. This is yet another example of liberals failing to understand the motives of their opposition. This is a special strain of ignorance that is shrink-wrapped with a companion-brand of matching apathy, with a side order of pride in the apathy. See, liberals don’t know what motivates conservatives, because they don’t care what motivates conservatives. They’re proud of not knowing and of not caring. They’ll be the first to tell you so, and they’ll also be the first to opine about it. If you merely recognize all of these things at the same time and point out what this means, that they’re forming opinions about a matter on which they have yet to gather any reliable facts, they’ll surely take offense. It is not within their method of understanding the world around them, to recognize that their offense is taken at the mere calculation of the sum of the parts, which they have so unabashedly provided.

They speak of magazine capacity restrictions. So far, reports have held up that the shooter had six weapons on him, seven more at his home. So although the state of Oregon doesn’t have these restrictions in place, nevertheless it seems that whole topic has already gone ’round and ’round in this case, and screwballed its way into irrelevance. They want background checks, but the shooter, again according to the information we have thus far, acquired his weapons legally and therefore in accordance with these background checks. They want registration databases. Again and again I’ve asked the question: How does that work? Alright you have a database record that says one person has all these guns. Then what?

They are displaying their deficits not only in relevant knowledge, and in shame, but also in strategic thinking. These questions of “How’s that work, exactly?” consistently fail to evoke any sort of reaction, let alone coherent response. Like a small child who wants a toy, they just want their stuff and that’s pretty much the end of the conversation.

I don’t trust them when they say they want to stop these shootings. I believe they do have emotional reactions in the wake of the incidents, and there may be some revulsion mixed in there. But I think if they were to stop and self-inspect for a bit, they might discover there is some lust mixed in there too. As in “Oh, maybe with this latest shooting we can get some of the things we want that we couldn’t get last time.” Not so much preocuppied with preventing the next shooting, as with exploiting the last one.

The repeated discussion does not seem to be getting us anywhere. The time has come, I think, to recognize this as what it is: A mental enfeeblement.

I’ve discussed this before. And it isn’t even a groundbreaking idea, psychologists have been exploring it for years. People tend to want to control other people, and when people experience difficulty maturing naturally, when their growth is stunted, of when they’re damaged for whatever reason, they start to go off on some endless question for The Perfect New Rule to make everything better.

As far as these feelings of loss of control go, every mass shooting certainly does — pardon the pun, it’s unintentional — trigger them. The feelings are reasonable. It is the response that is in error. It isn’t even sane.

The American citizen’s right to keep and bear arms goes all the way back to the founding of our Republic. The gun culture which forms a symbiotic relationship with that right, actually predates the written constitutional recognition of it. They’ve both been with us all this time; and the active-shooter phenomenon as we know it today, is a relatively recent thing. Gun-grabbing advocates know this, understand this, and are willing to admit to all of it. Once again, they have no problem with the parts but object to the sum of them, bristle at the act of mere calculation. For the sum of the parts is simply that gun control is not, and cannot be, the answer. This is clear and obvious proof that there is something else busted, some other gasket blown, some other gear stripped. Hacking away at the leafy part of the weed gets us nowhere. And worst still, if implemented, it may diguise the deeper problem.

If I write a web service and it crashes and with a malformed error message, that is two problems, not just one. Part of the reason my wife and I got our fancy dinner last night — oh yes, I’m starting to get outspoken about this, I figure I’ve earned it — is that I treat that as two problems, not just one. And ALWAYS, always always always, fix the problem with the error-reporting first. No exceptions to this. If there’s a time constraint in place and you need things working now-now-now, that’s an organizational problem and not a software problem. Take your time. Make it fail correctly, then worry about making it succeed.

There’s something else broken. Anybody who thinks it’s acceptable behavior to gun down innocents to make some sort of statement, has some threads stripped in their bolts upstairs. We’re all going to be safer if these people can somehow be denied access to the hardware? Who can conclude such a thing, save for the most mentally lazy, and the most assuredly removed from the immediate situation?

It’s just another “Those People” Conversation, about what most-recently-tweaked New Perfect Rule should be imposed upon distant strangers. How should we twiddle with the public policies, under which those people shall be living? There are people walking around, among us, building (hopefully not often) things we actually use, sharing highways with us, voting, and even accumulating levels of influence far greater than what’s available to the average voter. But not thinking. My questions about How Does This Registration/Background Check/Magazine Capacity Restriction should actually WORK, remain for the most part unanswered…can we stop pretending there is rational thought going into this rule-twiddling?

It’s a mania, a psychological malady.

We see it across a whole spectrum of other issues. Communism itself, is really little more than this sort of zaniness, rolled out to ultimate consequences. Just a bunch of shameless twiddlers, wrecking their havoc upon the innocents, the “Those People.” кто кого? They have no strategy in mind. They certainly have no desire to live under their own Perfect New Rules.

They are the McDonald’s fry cook who gets a half hour for lunch break, and can be seen sprinting over to Carl’s Jr. as fast as his little legs can carry him. No wait, they’re less like the fry cook than the executive who gets the job of revamping the menu.

Trump Built This, Obama Built That In fact, this gives way to a whole nother complaint I have about twiddlers. They are not people who twiddled with the actual work — and settled on a method they discovered to be superior, through the school of hard knocks, repeated practice, process of elimination, all that good stuff. They are idea people. Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals”:

At the core of the notion of an intellectual is the dealer in ideas, as such — not the personal application of ideas, as engineers apply complex scientific principles to create physical structures or mechanisms. A policy wonk whose work might be analogized as “social engineering” will seldom personally administer the schemes that he or she creates or advocates.

When one reads the history of their perseverence in the face of repeated failure, until they ultimately prevail after many years, sometimes decades, or even a full century — one is tempted to credit them with a positive attitude. The temptation subsides when you realize how little the upper layers of consciousness have to do with the struggle. It’s a lot more like a sexual urge, or some involuntary reflex like a cough, sneeze or hiccup. They’re not invested in the slightest, not even so much as sunbathers on a beach being surprised by a mock-interviewer with questions about an entirely fictitious “White Privilege” tax.

Nevertheless, they’ll hop on that stupid bandwagon, and every time. It shows what good people they are.

Why is it they’re never quite done showing what good people they are? After awhile, it comes off looking like an attempt to hide something. One has to wonder what that is. Are they hiding it from themselves? Just how much salving does a non-guilty conscience require?

We cannot keep our rights, any of them — except perhaps by random, and increasingly unlikely, happy accident — unless we fight these twiddlers. And all of the time, about everything. It is a chore of necessary upkeep, just like an oil change. Just like controlling any other sort of parasite. Driving the locusts away from the corn, or the moths away from the sweaters. It’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes you feel a bit foolish about it. It doesn’t matter, it’s a job that has to get done.

We’ve tried ignoring them, and we lost our health care system as a result.

They contaminate our processes. In an increasingly complex society such as ours, process is important. Not a one among us can afford, any longer, to try to be an experienced practitioner in everything. Here and there, now and then, the endeavor will call upon us to pick up a rulebook, checklist or execution script, and implement each step, with faith in the axiom that someone who assembled this was doing something to validate what they were saying, or at least talking to someone else who had so validated. But, we have the twiddlers. Twiddling is not validating. So…today, the technologies we use are complex. We all have to follow processes and we don’t have time to validate everything. Which processes were built by a validator? Which ones were built by a twiddler? It’s the same problem you have looking over a family tree constructed from dozens of different sources, going back hundreds of years — all content, no foundation. This fellow way up here on the upper branches, was really the father of all his children? There’s no way to know for sure. Questions of verity, much of the time, weren’t raised until the fingers that wrote down the names and dates had long ago crumbled into dust. Thus it is with our processes; no way to know.

My Book Says This touches back upon the celebration last night, with the Missus and me. We were celebrating the triumph of outcome over process. “Process” and “Outcome” loom large in the “weaknesses” section of my employee performance review, at the close of my first year back at The Place Where It Didn’t Go So Well. The powers-that-be put it right there in writing that I made my contributions to outcome, and in so doing showed the benefits of my experiences working at previous employment situations that placed a premium value upon this. But I caused distress to engineers who were more concerned about process, which is something I still don’t fully understand to this day. After about three years, the tension exacerbated over the differences between my processes and theirs, and I had to walk the plank. Interested friends and relatives urged me to consider the whole experience a one-off, ignore the bad feedback. But, my confidence was shattered, for a time.

Hence, my befuddlement. My own processes have not changed. How could they? I’ve been at this too long and I know what I’m doing. But I suppose these don’t work everywhere. These are processes built, in fact evolved over time, to generate a good outcome; they do not justify themselves through any other means. And once I’m left to implement them in a place where the importance of outcome is subjugated, and process becomes the point, they don’t work.

They work where I am now, and in other places, places where the project stakeholders ask “Does the damn thing work?” It is not a slope-foreheaded moron‘s question. It may be a simple question, and therefore it may even be an unsophisticated question. But it’s important. The distinction between process and outcome is important. What’s the goal?

Public safety is one area of life where outcome should be the supreme goal. It isn’t that process doesn’t have a place. Visit a gun range sometime, one where accidents have never happened. You’ll see process flying thick and fast. But it is process that, and this is key, is justified by positive outcome, with a history to support that. The process does not take the top spot. The bosses do not say, as they are heard to say in certain circles where twiddling reigns supreme, “If you didn’t follow the steps we’d rather leave the problem unsolved.” That way, you see, lies disaster.

The best-case scenario possible, ever, in an environment of process-over-outcome? Over time you will discover you are building a golden fortress of “perfect” process, that is a static structure sitting on a dynamic foundation of reality. It will be perfect within the snapshot of time. But it won’t last. Only a dynamic structure will endure on dynamic ground, and to get that you have to have people who think for themselves. That’s what it takes to react to situations on the ground.

Hey, if this was all baloney — well, I suppose that’s what we would’ve been eating last night. Baloney. Mmmm…fillet mignon…mmm…

Only downside, for Mrs. Freeberg anyway, is this. Following the events of my disgrace four years ago and the shattered self-confidence that went with them, I made a point of keeping my silence about how people did their jobs. Who am I to say, after all? They’re probably keeping those jobs; I hadn’t kept mine. (So I have been opting to confine my opinions to how they were doing their voting.) Now, the genie has been let out of the bottle.

First time I ever intoned, “As August Employee of the Month, my verdict on how that person did his job is THIS…” I got back an exasperated eyeroll. Along with a quite understandable inquiry of, Omigosh. Is that going to become some sort of a thing now? The start of pattern?

The answer to which is: You’d better believe it cupcake. Yes, there is a humility aspect to being a good Christian, and pride goeth before a fall, of course. But this is a business that requires confidence. Genuine confidence, not just cosmetic bluster. You have to form a vision of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it that way, then implement all sorts of tiny pieces for some extended period of time, confident that the eventual results will be what you have in mind. Without that, you can’t do anything. But if there somehow still is something virtuous about nursing such self-doubt, well, ya know I’ve more than done my time.

I always did know I was doing it right. I think we all know that on some level, everyone who’s actually built anything. Just like we know the twiddlers are wrong, and that they’re not harmless. This isn’t a complicated problem for us to solve. Herbert Spencer said it best:

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

And there you have it. The definition of what a “twiddler” is, a statement of the problem, and a strong suggestion of the ultimate answer, all rolled up into a single artful, elegant statement.

[…] Freeberg looks at the Oregon shooting. […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Twiddlers | 10/11/2015 @ 16:47
Preforming arts.
WOW, wasn’t that actress simply MARVELOUS?
Yes, well, SOMEBODY has to take care of all that scenery, props, lighting, costumes, painting, sound, seating, and of COURSE, the booze in the lobby before and midway through the “event”.
YES, as a matter of fact, I HAVE been hired, JUST on the “resume” of
“I was fired from (fill in the blank)”
By who exactly?”
“Ms. (fill in the blank).”
(3…2…1…)”Can you start tomorrow?”
This is literally in the position of “builder”, (and I literally mean literally) .
often including putting out the fires lit by “Idea” folks with slight grasp of the laws of physics, economics, or simple Boolean “logic”, however, quite often
adept at “hostile environment”, “labor”, lies , lies of omission, and selective oral gratification of the “flow chart” hierarchy.
- CaptDMO | 10/12/2015 @ 06:54
This one hits close to home, if only because I do know people who live and work in Roseburg. I was wondering if this was ever going to be mentioned.
I’m at (liberal) work now, so the muzzle is on. However, I’d like to address one point that the gun-grabbers never acknowledge, and is never even mentioned by those on the right.
This massacre was brought about by liberal thought. Period. Stop. End sentence.
It’s prevalent here in Eugene. It’s prevalent around LCC and the U of O. It exists anywhere liberals congregate or espouse their rhetoric.
It wasn’t mental illness. The gun didn’t kill anyone. It was ENTIRELY the fault of entitlement culture teaching a false sense of persecution. Everyone knows about the entitlement culture, but no one mentions the fake persecution-complex they’ve all adopted.
Everyone who is a liberal in Eugene has a beef with someone. They ALL have multiple groups that have been “persecuting” them en-masse since the day they were born. “Those darn Christians.” “White people have bee keeping me down.” “Black Symbionese Lesbian NAMBLA supporters have raped my culture.” Etc. Etc.
None of them can provide examples. None of them have ever experienced TRUE persecutions. They can’t answer questions, at least not without lying. If you ask “When have YOU been persecuted. What EXACTLY happened to you?”, you get a long, meandering non-answer that usually devolves into “well, ‘they’ opposed something ‘I’ or ‘my friend’ says or does.”
Yet now it turns to murder. THAT, at least, is in their nature. Gun-grabbing is just a happy coincidence.
- P_Ang | 10/12/2015 @ 10:25
“But I caused distress to engineers who were more concerned about process, which is something I still don’t fully understand to this day.”
And please Morgan…dear Gott in Himmel Please…don’t tell me you’re one of those software engineers that refuses to comment any line of code, in-perpetuum, forever and ever amen? Because if I get my QA Engineer hands on one of those people…I’ll give ’em something to cry persecution over…
- P_Ang | 10/12/2015 @ 11:39
I’ve been known to offend that way, in fact perhaps more than most. But I think my old boss would agree that wasn’t really the issue, more internal documentation would not have changed the result. Their problem really was one of technique, and there was a point where someone admitted the bureaucracy would have preferred the problems remain unsolved…which still floors me, to this day. Unorthodox == bad.

Anyway, like I said, I did spend my years in purgatory and I took the humble approach. I’ve tried to improve in places, internal documentation is part of that, but to be honest I don’t think it’s been part of any significant solution, either. The other developers still have the attitude of “Morgan wrote some magic code that does X.” Until someone can spare the time to delve more deeply, your the docs aren’t going to get read. To respond to your question, nowadays, when that day comes the docs are there, waiting. But they’re still not getting read.

At the end, we still have the puzzle. My techniques aren’t perfect. They do get the job done; they did back then, too. I haven’t really reformed anything, yet I was a spectacular failure there, and an acknowledged success over here. It’s a case of my solution not changing, but the questions posed by the environment changing. How DO you run a software shop? Reams and reams have been written about it, over years and years, and still nobody has the perfect answer. I do think one axiom that has been proven correct consistently, is that if you’ve got a team of people and success is proving to be elusive, you do have a shot at nailing the problem if you can find some article of definition that isn’t getting defined, and busy yourself with getting it defined. This is, I think, one of the very few observations in this pursuit that has been proven consistently true.

And yes, internal docs are a part of that. But as with all things: Time is money. Bang for the buck.
- mkfreeberg | 10/12/2015 @ 12:54
[…] For File CXCIX Feminism Wants Your Soul Twiddlers “Why the Right is Right” Quid Est Veritas? The Static and the Dynamic If We’re […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/24/2015 @ 10:09
[…] Sanity Every Sports Press Conference Memo For File CXCIX Feminism Wants Your Soul Twiddlers “Why the Right is Right” Quid Est Veritas? The Static and the Dynamic If We’re […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/31/2015 @ 15:21
[…] being twiddlers, are continuing to twiddle and twiddle away, twiddling to find the perfect set of laws that will […]
- Directional Sanity | H2o Positivo | 10/31/2015 @ 18:22
[…] Directional Sanity Every Sports Press Conference Memo For File CXCIX Feminism Wants Your Soul Twiddlers “Why the Right is Right” Quid Est Veritas? The Static and the Dynamic If We’re […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/15/2015 @ 10:11
[…] it’s one of those tell-tale signs that the wrong people are in charge. That we’ve got twiddlers in charge. That’s best-case scenario; worst-case is, we have insane people in charge. Because […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/14/2016 @ 06:28

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TwiddlersSunday, October 11th, 2015

Twiddlers
Sunday, October 11th, 2015