House of Eratosthenes

I notice as I’ve gone through life, the kids who got the good grades in school have been met by the same challenges as the kids who were, uh, like me. Everyone gets knocked on their ass sometime or another. Everyone gets told at some point or another, by life itself, “Sorry…great job, wonderful natural talent…it isn’t needed here.”

It must be deflating for the ones who went Kindergarten through graduation, having never been told that. It’s a very special kind of pain. It isn’t like “Sorry, your skills aren’t sharp enough, practice some more.” To be told you’re practicing at the wrong thing, that you need to work an entirely different set of skills, and until you do you can forget all about making any kind of special impact that you thought for sure you were going to make.

It would seem humans are not hard wired to deal with this. We don’t inwardly understand the concept of a snipe hunt. Once we’ve convinced ourselves there is a snipe, we will chase it forever. This is where the fantasizing about the imminent extinction of the human race is given birth. People start to think “Well if I’m not extra special that way, then I must be extra special in the sense that I’ll be around for the final curtain call, closing credits, my story is written in the very last pages of the book.”

Snipe Hunt This is why climate change alwarmists vacillate so effortlessly between “It’s way too late now, you should have listened to us” and “We still have one last chance, we have to act within 10-20 years.” The rest of us are supposed to assume, because some of it is based on science — “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” — it’s all science. No that’s not true. The important parts of it are based on human psychology, depression, mental enfeeblement and spiritual impoverishment. It’s entire generations of motivated, ambitious, potentially accomplished prodigies being reduced to living, breathing solutions in search of problems.

Life has told them they’ll never be special unless they change the bearing of their course, and develop a different suite of skills. It’s a tough, tough message. I know. I had to learn to listen to it; it isn’t easy. Most people choose not to listen to it.

That’s why the scam works so well. We are technologically advanced — you’ll notice the doom-saying resonates best in the First World. The important work, by & large, is done. Here in the First World, where we have to re-define the word “poverty” in order to have something we can measure at all, the work that really has to get done, work that’s survival-related, is mostly done in our sparsely-populated farm country.

Where the population density is much higher, we like to think of ourselves as irreplaceable. And within a narrow stretch of time, a few people may be. But just a few, and for only that narrow stretch. The office isn’t forced to close if we call in sick for the day. In our absence, people are inconvenienced maybe but they won’t starve. After we’re gone, the people who depend on us will learn to cope. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we wouldn’t want it any other way, right?

When people talk up the perils of climate change, you’re listening to someone who can’t swallow the bitter pill. Guilty white liberals lecturing other guilty white liberals, not anybody in India or anybody in China. You’re listening to people coping with the unwelcome realization that they’re not irreplaceable. You’re listening to someone who’s having trouble with it. Lots and lots of trouble.

Call it an Al-Gore-Rhythm, maybe.

That’s the really cool thing about developing new technology: If I’m in the middle of building something and aliens abduct me or I get hit by a bus, you know what happens? Nothing! An effort to develop something new, stops. Or, we have to find another guy. It’s lost capital, and that’s worst-case. So with that uncomfortable realization out of the way, let’s see what we can do to build something that was not there before; what we can do to make other people’s lives easier and better. There is a certain level of sanity reached in it: I believe in what I do, but I’m not going to pretend I’m the one guy on the planet who has a truly irreplaceable job. So I don’t have to go chasing off after snipes or jackalopes trying to convince myself I’m somehow irreplaceable.

That’s me though. Why do other software people lean left? You’ll have to ask them. But I can offer that it’s easy in our line of work to form visions about how users will be using the systems we build — it’s necessary to get the job done — and a lot of the time, most of the time, those visions get a little bit…I’m sure you’ve seen this from running the apps…too well-formed. Too crystallized.

The guy who wrote it, knew what he knew, but he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Just like your average climate-change zealot.

Oh and nine times out of ten, he was convinced that if he took a walk or ceased to exist, the project would come to a complete stop. And he was wrong.

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