For the microsite.
Yes, I know the video sucks. One day I will have a budget for the hottest Hollywood star, and the background will be from Industrial Light and Magic. But guess what? When that day comes -- I'll be at the beach!
Spent some time today gathering together the many ways Agile Backlogs are wrong.
It was a painful journey -- very sad to remember the different, many ways we screw up doing backlogs. But it was for a worthy cause: I have a new microsite positioned around Agile. Part of the site is a bunch of landing pages, part is a blog.
I've never blogged tightly around one subject before -- quite frankly, the concept drives me nuts. But I'm wiling to give it a go. I have a lot of experience with Agile teams. Perhaps I can take some of my SEO/Microsite experience, some of my Agile experience, some of my e-book experience, and make something useful out of it. Who knows? Never know unless you try.
There's a bit of truth to that. Philosophy -- the real stuff, not the stuff you learn mostly in college today -- makes you deal with a lot of things you'd rather not.
Your death is imminent. No way around that. In the big scheme of things, you're not even an ant. In fact, you exist for such a vanishingly-small amount of time and have such a tiny impact on anything that for all intents and purposes you don't exist at all. The question shouldn't be "How can I really know the rest of the universe exists?" The real question is more like "How does the universe really know I exist?"
Science is just a bunch of guesses. Yes, we've gotten really good at guessing, but for all we know we're just getting better at describing the workings of the computer simulation we all live inside of. We can do amazing things by empirically observing things, noting patterns, creating possible rules, and testing those rules. Science rocks. But there's always the chance we didn't observe enough, that our model is lacking fidelity and we just don't know. There were no black swans -- until somebody saw a black swan. Newton's laws worked awesomely well -- until they stopped working. Induction, the idea that if we see something over and over again we can infer a general pattern, works until it does not work. The turkey thinks the farmer is a friend and always brings food -- until the day he shows up with a hatchet. Mars had canals, hell they were empirically observed by multiple scientists, until we realized we were just looking at the backs of our own eyeballs.
Everything really cool is always going to be 20 years away -- right up until the day you die. Twenty years is about the size of something that looks possible, yet has so many problems we're not really sure how long it will take. So when people ask experts how long it's going to be until some super-cool new thing comes out, the answer more than likely will be "20 years." One day you'll be dying of disease X and read that a cure for disease X is only 20 years off. That's probably going to suck a lot.
Trans-humanism is going to take a lot longer than people think. On one hand, we're already at the singularity: people are integrated with machines to a point right now where only twenty years ago it would have been a miracle. The folks from twenty years ago could not have predicted how all the technology is starting to interact with each other. On the other hand we can get carried away with this very easily. To take the idea of a singularity to it's most extreme level, to say that some mystical far-out world will come into existence where literally everything will be possible? Not so much. Even if the technology races ahead, we are in for a long struggle as the human side of the changing world adapts. Don't expect this to happen overnight. Odds are we end up with a machine in a few decades that has the horsepower of a human mind; and then we abuse it or fight over it for years afterwards. We have no history of welcoming new intelligent species with open arms. Don't expect that to change.
Science will never be able to transfer your mind into a machine. Yes, maybe one day in the distant future some miracle will happen where all of your mind can be analyzed and copied, but that will only be a copy. The "real" you will die. There will just be a twin that's born with everything about you. You won't magically pop over from one head to the other. Yes, "you" might continue, but only in the sense that a new person begins that's just like you -- a super twin -- while you die. Not a pleasant thing to look forward to. However the future works out, the wetware that exists inside your skull is subject to the limitations of being a biological device. Not going to change. Ever.
The religious people were right all along. Given all this uncertainty and almost pointless nature of existence, the only rational course of action is to creatively speculate on what values you want for your life and why. Then make decisions every day based on that creative speculation. Remember that the driver of all religions is each individual having to make value decisions based on incomplete information. This is a good thing and, in fact, the only thing you really have. Don't confuse that with religion in the sense of an organized social structure. I'm not saying join a church, or start believing in a deity (although many religions have rather vague deities which sound a lot more like "the universe" or "nature" than anything else.) The existentialists argue that any formal, self-consistent religious structure is necessarily broken -- God is dead -- not that the essence of religion, finding meaning by artistically living an authentic life, doesn't work. Living life is an art, based in your own creative speculative imaginings of what the universe expects of you. You can start with somebody else's imagination of how it all fits together, but at the end of the day it's up to you to take ownership of this -- complete with all of the doubts that you might have made the wrong choice.
While these things are indeed sucky, they are also reality, which means we might as well get used to them. After all, there are some pretty good things too. You live at the pinnacle of modern thought. Billions of years of evolution has happened to put you exactly where you are today. Nobody else has lived in a time where lifespan is so extended, living is so easy, and people from all over the world are so connected. The poorest person in the United States has things that Louis XIV could have never imagined.
But you can't experience the total awesomeness of life unless you own the bad parts too. It's been my experience that you have to absorb these sucky things -- take them in and let them wash over you -- in order to truly move past them and enjoy life. Otherwise they always seem to be nagging at your heels. You can live in total denial of reality, or you can push through these sucky things to the other side. Being in the middle is unpleasant. Yeah, college can screw you up for the rest of your life. You can end up thinking nothing is true and everything is pointless. But that should only be a pit-stop on the way to the "dancing above the void" that marks a truly meaningful and enjoyed life.
As a libertarian, I do a lot of whining and complaining. Seems like the government is always taking up for special interests and consuming more and more of my freedom in the process. No matter which party is in power, I can count on having less freedom by the time they're through with me. Sometimes each party wants to screw me over different ways, but many times both parties are paid off by corporations and such and the only difference is what kind of political bullshit I have to listen to while my freedoms are being restricted.
Every week, it seems like it just gets worse and worse. SOPA/PIPA, NDAA, and so on. We keep getting laws passed with names like "The Protection of Bunnies and Children Act" which end up letting government do all sorts of nasty things that nobody who has really thought things through would agree with.
I'm getting tired of complaining. Today I thought I'd put some possible solutions out there. Suggest some ways to refactor the government:
- Constitutional Amendment: The government shall not abridge the digital communication of data between people.
- Constitutional Amendment: digital data collected by a person as part of a wearable or embeddable computational device shall be considered an integral and internal part of that person.
- Constitutional Amendment: For any year that the Federal Government increases operating expenses more than 3%, or that the total federal tax burden is more than 20% of GDP, currently elected officials will not be eligible for re-election. (Also known as the "Warren Buffett" rule)
- Constitutional Amendment: No federal law shall be valid for more than 40 years or less than 1 year.
- Constitutional Amendment: The only form of tax collection authorized to the Federal Government is a flat tax on consumption, with blanket exemptions for certain types of consumption created and managed by law.
- Constitutional Amendment: Each Congressional Representative shall represent no more than 100,000 people. (This would increase the size of the House to around 3,000 members, easily manageable by technology yet much more difficult for a 2-party system to control)
- Constitutional Amendment: Senators shall be appointed by the legislatures in each state (This takes the Senate back to being an aristocracy, which was the intention of the body, and not just another place for populist grandstanding)
Admittedly there are probably a lot of problems with my suggestions. I would point out, however, that amendments are supposed to be simple and broad. They are later "colored" by court action. So although we have freedom of speech, we can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Likewise, although we might have freedom of digital data transfer, this probably wouldn't be construed to allow incarcerated drug lords to control their crime empires from prison. There will be many reasonable limitations to these amendments which will come out like always, through judicial interpretation.
I'd also caution against taking facile pot-shots at some of these ideas. It's easy to sound like you're making a valid criticism when in reality that's not the case. For instance, one of the reasons we have a popularly-elected Senate is because the states did such a bad job of it. At one point a businessman in Illinois basically paid-off every legislator so he could be a senator. This makes for a wonderfully dramatic rhetorical point, but looking back I think it was a major overreaction to change the entire system simply because of local abuses. The way it was supposed to work was that the House was filled with people who lived next door. The Senate was filled with rich banker and lawyer types. That's because the system is set up to be a balance between aristocracy and representative democracy. (Most graduates of High School civics classes are probably unaware of this fact.) What we've ended up with is both houses being full of banker and lawyer types -- the reason is that the House is too small, limiting the number of seats available, and the Senate is too dependent on national political parties for their election. Let's have some Senators chosen by states with 50/50 Democrats and Republicans. We know from past experience that we end up with a Senate that's much less partisan and full of more calm, thoughtful, diplomatic members.
I could go on, but the point isn't to defend each item. It would make for too long of a blog post. I just wanted to point out that I've heard many of the objections to these ideas. This wasn't something I saw on TV somewhere or read about in the back of a libertarian comic book.
The important thing is putting something on the table. Complaining is easy. Suggesting fixes is not. The only way we can improve is to discuss our problems enough so that we can then begin outlining ways we might fix them. Democracies work on conversations. Whining and complaining is a good way to begin a conversation, but at some point you have to move on to the next step.
Shot a video for my ScumMaster book last night.
I think that's mostly it for the landing pages -- at least the big parts. I have a few more reviews coming in and I need to run some standard checks on the pages. Then, of course, the rewrite.
Somebody told me the video wasn't that good -- my head is down in the bottom of the frame and it runs on too long. Meh. I spent three hours shooting it. What do you think? Should I re-do it? Or is it good enough for now?
The other day when I posted my article about startups being like ice cream factories, a famous person from the startup community sent me a tweet. Something like "Great article! Keep it up!"
This was awesome! As a rule, I'm very stingy about who I follow. It's not that I don't like folks, I just like using Twitter as a conversation tool and not an endless stream. But here was famous person X telling me how awesome I am! I went immediately over to Twitter and started to click the "follow" button.
But then I caught myself.
You see, this was not the first time I've had a famous person pop over with a compliment. I really like this -- hey I can use the encouragement! -- but Joe Sixpack tweeting me with an "Awesome, man!" and famous person X doing the same thing are different things entirely.
Why? Take a look at what happens next. I click "like" or "follow" and become part of 27,421 other people following famous person X. Personal conversation with that person then ends.
I have nothing against the person who tweeted, and like I said, I'm immensely thankful. The guy that tweeted to me is a truly nice person whose work I admire. But there's a bit of game theory going on in social media. Eyeballs have value. If you are not careful, your stream becomes polluted with all sorts of people who just randomly said something nice to you one day.
It works pretty nice from the other end. If you're famous person X and building a mailing list! Hell, I might even try it myself someday. Take an hour each day and tweet, IM, or email authors of articles I see on HN and tell them how awesome they are. I bet you could pick up between 20 and 30 new followers a day. Do this for a month or two and soon the network effect would start to take hold.
But if you're not into noisy streams, as a recipient you have to resist the urge to follow when approached like this, especially from people with huge followings. (Or who are building huge followings.)
Yes, it's a good thing, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. You've probably just been a victim of a drive-by-tweet. :)
Daniel Markham
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