House of Eratosthenes

Was going through old e-mails, noticed some clumps of unread messages overly-invested in notifications of comments over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging. Rather than bulk-delete, I combed through them and discovered a particularly ingenious (and unusually well-worded) missive from myself.

It is a rebuttal to a point made by a lefty, who was trying to set up his fellow lefties as the sole innovators of technology, coming up with all sorts of useful contributions to humankind while the conservatives, I dunno, sit in huts made of mud, banging rocks together or something…

Certainly, I cannot refute the point directly. Who wants to provide evidence for the counterpoint that the iPhone was actually “invented” by Michael Savage fans? The assertion that the iPhone geeks predominantly leaned left, although probably not recorded and probably not provable, is probably true.

But:

The younger generation of engineers is “educated” like no generation has been ever before. The problem is in the content of their education, not in its coverage.

And because of that, the iPhone is a bad example of what you’re trying to prove. The iPhone didn’t get “invented.” It is a particularly hotly-selling confluence of evolutionary stages of features introduced in other products, years earlier. If it demonstrates something you can accomplish with liberal thinking that you can’t accomplish with conservative thinking, the proof makes liberals look like what conservatives say liberals are: Starry-eyed, intellectually slothful types overly obsessed with “Hey wouldn’t it be wonderful if X.” And X has a lot more to do with not-worrying-about something, than a human actually getting some kind of useful work done.

It’s a shame that the layman looks on these “campuses” of buildings full of engineers, as percolating hotbeds of creativity. I used to look at them that way myself. A little bit of logic, common sense, everyday math upsets that rather jarringly. Two hundred to five hundred heartbeats to a floor of a building…let us say, that is an even one hundred actual engineers. Two to five floors to a stylish, modern, tech building, ten buildings to a campus. Multiply by another ten to cover the whole company, you have 25,000 engineers…that’s just about right.

Living out the adrenaline rush that surrounded them in their teenage years, in the world of adulthood, all the way to retirement, every day of every year, all 25,000 of them. How many new ideas per year per engineer? Going at my relatively lethargic “hey I just had and idea” pace, let us say 2 or 3. And let us say 90% of those fail somewhere along the line…90% of what’s left, is folded up into bigger, more overarching ideas that become products. We should still be seeing, if our “hotbed of creativity” generalization was anywhere close to accurate, hundreds of new ideas every year. Hundreds, perhaps breaking into the thousands. Per company.

I didn’t realize this until I was working inside one of those buildings…and then called-upon to explain to my boss, why my code didn’t look like the code that might’ve been written to solve the same problem, by ten other engineers. Or twenty. My explanation was that I was using the design patterns to make the most of object-oriented programming and design, so that the code would be more easily maintainable and modifiable later on — something the team had often talked about researching, but upon which it had progressed very little. Because I made the decision to research and progress, my code looked different. And, I was introduced to the very n00b concept of, “If your code is more maintainable, but nobody else understands how it works, it isn’t maintainable.” Well that’s true, of course. Then again it is an architectural software design pattern. You are supposed to read up on how it works before you understand it. And failing that, you aren’t necessarily supposed to understand it; you have to do some reading. That’s an intrinsic part of design patterns. This defense really didn’t help me though. Maybe that’s why the team hadn’t gotten into them too much.

Employees have complained about this since long before the tech revolution. It’s called “Not Invented Here,” or NIH. It happens when one learns, far too late in cases like mine, that one’s particular occupational placement has nothing to do with creativity. What you did, meets all the goals, but the boss doesn’t understand it and now you are to be punished. Point is, if I was laboring under this expectation, that means the same must be true of the other thousands upon thousands; at least some of them. Most? Nearly all? That just stands to reason, and the results speak for themselves. A lousy iPhone? Years and years, campuses upon campuses, buildings upon buildings? Tens of thousands of heartbeats? The cream of the crop?

But then as I pointed out above, there is the matter of what the iPhone does. Surely you can come up with hundreds and hundreds of anecdotes, some imagined but credible, others real and documented, of the iPhone making something constructive happen that otherwise would not have happened. But it will be much tougher to come up with such a story in which some other device could not have netted the same happy outcome. And here we come upon an unsavory question: If the iPhone is a lousy example of what my opposition was trying to demonstrate (as my opposition ended up partially agreeing) — if it fails to stand as a decent specimen of most-modern and most-recent creative spark — then, what’s a good example?

I might offer, as a most-recent, the USB connection. How’s that? Or maybe, the alpha channel on a two-dimensional image. However that, like the iPhone, is more of a recent marketing effort than a recent technological innovation. In concept, it has existed for quite awhile. For the today-stuff, the true “gee whiz,” I’m seeing a lot of items on the published click-bait list fail to qualify as true “Hey, I just had an idea…” things. “Magic Leap,” “Nano-Architecture,” “Car-to-Car Communication,” no. “Project Loon,” “Supercharged Photosynthesis,” maybe…possibly.

But, no to the iPhone. That is a branding, not an invention.

And I’m not sure what sorts of practical things you can do, thinking like a liberal, that you can’t do thinking like a conservative. These are the people who say “climate change” and “income inequality” are pressing problems; and vote fraud, imbalance of separation of powers, swelling public debt and Islamic terrorism, are not.

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The Bad ExampleSunday, January 3rd, 2016

The Bad Example
Sunday, January 3rd, 2016