I once worked in a team that had gifted it’s self a subscription to an wonderfully foolish supermarket tabloid.  We kept in the conference room.  Slowly but surely we would, all of us, read every article.  And, we came to notice that the fictions reported, entirely with a straight face, in these articles began to enter our brains as if they were true.  You’d find your self saying “I read that in Brazil they found … no wait, maybe that wasn’t true … oh nevermind.”

I have exactly that same problem with Pinker, but it’s worse.  All I can recall is that at the time I read or heard him explain X I had strong doubts about the argument’s coherence; but now – later – it’s too late.

With that warning out of the way … I enjoyed this talk he gave (video, audio, partial as cartoons).  For example it has a very fun offensive section on swearing and the functional purpose taboo words.

One thing I liked was that his had a number for frameworks I should take the time to add to my collection.  For example Alan Fiske three kinds of relationships:

• Dominance — don’t mess with me
• Commonality — share & share alike
• Reciprocity — business like or tit for tat

It is no end of fun to map those three into some of my other triples (rock, paper, scissors?).

If I actually go look into Alan Fiske’s work I bit it appears there are four kinds; let me quote from here.

P – Market Pricing (MP): Haggling over a commercial transaction between strangers who do not plan to meet repeatedly. Involves bidding, bluffing and countering while keeping one’s true buying limits a secret. Non-personal instrumental exchanges with no self-disclosure.

A – Equality Matching (EM): Equality of exchange over time, a balance of exchanged favours, accruing social debt and obligation when receiving favours, the discharge of debt or gain of credit when giving favours. Tit-for-Tat. Ground rules for peer relationships.

E – Authority Ranking (AR): Negotiated inequality, deciding over time who has more importance, status or dominance over others. Unequal exchange where the dominant obtains resource advantages but accrues an obligation to support or sustain subordinates in some way.

I – Communal Sharing (CS): People contribute what they can and take what they need. Almost always constrained to the inclusive fitness group, nuclear family and sometimes various degrees of extended family, rarely beyond.

In the four reciprocity has been split into two groups; reflecting how very different one shot transactions are from longer term transactional relationships.

Many are the top three of power-laws; i.e. Hertz, Avis, Budget.  Once you’ve noticed that you can use any sharp power-law to generate three.  For example the three top words in  english: spoken: The, You, I; written: the, of, and; adjectives: other, good, new.  And many of the geographic ones are like that, just forced onto the landscape: England, Scotland, and Wales.

Many of just regions along some natural scale: federal, state, city for example.  There are lots that are on linear or cyclic time.

There are a number that are triangles; and then you can create a plane, or balance your three legged stool.   Ordering the triangle – you have three objects and you link them into a circle with arrows rather than mere lines.  Then you can play rock paper scissors; or polish your mirror.

There are number that are pairs with a middle: buyer, seller, middleman; man, woman, relationship; in, out, door; etc.  In this context I find the triple: reflective, transparent, opaque thought provoking.

Apparently in some languages there are three words: one for a thing near me, a second for a thing near you, and finally a word for a thing distant from both of us.  But foreign languages are not my thing. In Japanese? – koko/soko/asoko

I’m particularly amused by this group:

• solid, liquid, gas
• ground, sea, air
• army, navy, air force
• missiles, subs, bombers
• beast, fish, fowl

Well, here goes:

• Race, Language, and Culture
• Buyer, Seller, Middleman
• fast, good, cheap
• culture, structure, market
• ethics, choice, rules
• 3-D
• ON, OFF, Don’t Care (1,0,X)
• “Is cup half empty or half full?”  … “Who dirtied the glass?”
• “That sword cut’s both ways.”   … “Ok, let’s talk about the sword.”
• “Men, Women” … “Shall we talk of relationships?”
• Moe, Larry, and Curly
• Groucho, Chico, and Harpo
• Knife, Fork, and Spoon
• Bell, Book, and Candle
• Lock, Stock, and Barrel,
• Butcher, Baker, and Candle Stick Maker
• Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
• Motive, Means, and Opportunity
• Red, Green, and Blue; Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
• Bombers, Missiles, and Subs
• Army, Navy, Air Force
• Three legged stool
• near you, near me, away
• Animal, Vegtable, Mineral
• Three wise men
• Harry, Ron, and Hermione
• Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
• Bad things come in threes
• Bowens system theory
• Learning: acquisitive, integrative, mastery
• Three points define a plane
• The summer triangle: Deneb, Vega, and Altair
• Meat, Fish, Fowl
• England, Scotland, Wales; New York, New Jersey, Conneticut
• Id, Ego, Superego
• Earth, Heaven, Hell
• Liquid, Solid, Gas
• Faith, Hope, Charity
• See, Hear, Speak (no evil)
• Fates: Klothe, Atropos, Lachesis
• Libertê, Fraternitê, Egalitê
• Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Happiness
• Three trials or tasks in fairy tales
• Thee Musketeers
• Past, Present, Future
• Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric
• Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic
• Perl, Php, and Python
• Equatorial, Temperate, Artic
• Right, Left, Center
• King, Queen, Jack
• Black, and White, and Red all over
• Waltzes: 3/4 time
• Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
• Lather, Rinse, Repeat
• small:medium, large
• Ford, GM:Chrysler
• Solid, Liquid, Gas
• I, you, (he, she, it)
• Earth, Wind, Fire
• Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
• Gas, Brake, Clutch
• Sharp, Flat, Natural
• Preprocess, Compile, Link
• Stop, Drop, Roll
• paper, scissors, rock
• Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia
• thesis, antithesis, synthesis
• up, down, strange (and continuing, charm, truth, bottom-beauty)
• Judaism, Christianity, Islam
• right, wrong, nuanced
• certitude, discourse, terrorism
• Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva (creater, preserver, destroyer)
• Urth, Vertandhi, Skuld (the Norns, representing past present and future)
• Executive, Legislative, Judicial
• Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
• Tom, Dick, and Harry
• Huey, Dewey, and Louie
• City, Suburb, Rural
• foo, bar, baz
• shake, rattle, roll
• reflective, transparent, opaque
• soprano, alto, tenor
• dna, rna, proteins
• beauty, truth, form
• less-then, equal, greater than (<, =, >)
• binary trees: left, right, ancestor or mother, father, child
• over constrained, well posed, under constrained
• chew, digest, defecate

• Executive = Declarations: bring forth, generate something new, lead.
• Manager = Requests: please do x by time y with condition of satisfaction.
• Worker = Promises: deliver competent performance in a domain, over and over.

I lifted that from here, but it smells like management faddism.

Chasing links we get this little table:

Executive – Manager – Worker
Lead – Lobby – Legislate
Future – Present – Past
Declaration – Request – Promise

whatever.

For example. Weber’s three basic legitimation’s of domination:

1. The authority of the ‘eternal yesterday’.
2. The authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace, aka charisma.
3. The domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ e.g. rule based and professionalism.

I should have started this category years ago, say when I wrote about my affection for having three models.

Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained a splendid example, a review article by George Steiner on the life and work of the Hungarian radical Georg Lukacs. “When I first called on him, in the winter of 1957-8, in a house still pockmarked with shellbursts and grenade spliters, I stood speechless before the armada of his printed works, as it crowded the bookshelves. Lukacs seized on my puerile wonder and blazed out of his chair in a motion at once vulnerable and amused: ‘You want to know how one gets work done? It’s easy. House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!’”

That example is splendid, but exceptional and extreme. The student of this stuff should, I think, pay more attention to more pedestrian social controls; e.g. voluntary membership in groups who’s habits we admire and aspire to. The rough edges of voluntary are far more interesting than the strong arm example of house arrest.

The essay appears in “Choice and Consequence” by Schelling. The topic of this essay is the ethical puzzle of what society can and can not do to help individuals keep their promises to themselves. This is an extended discussion of the curious fact that you can’t make contracts with your self and then go to the court to have them enforced. Schelling’s other essay in this arena “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command” also appears in this book.

Schelling also reached the conclusion I got from reading Ainslie; that the individual is a group of interests who’s governance has so much in common with the governance of other groups that it becomes useful to treat the individual as just like any other hard to manage group.

Meanwhile there is little concensus on what the secret of productivity is.

Since being reminded about that I’ve been thinking about how interfaces boundaries rub against each other and how they tend to smooth out over time.

In industrial standards work we spend a lot of time proactively creating specifications whose intent is to assure smooth efficient exchange on interfaces. It’s not uncommon to fly brilliant engineers and implementors to other continents so they can do interopt testing to assure that the resulting systems are conformant to the spec and work smoothly with each other. The cost of such coordinated efforts is extremely high; often fatally high.

Rubbing isn’t a very sophisticated approach to gettting a smooth surface. It is what I was taught to call a strong method, a method that works in all cases. Rubbing, in optics, is always the last method. When you make a lens you attempt to get it right; but latter you always use rubbing to get it right.

I distill two points out of all that.

Simple standards tend to win because they have fewer rough edges that need to be worn down when you get to the rubbing stage.

Rubbing to get things smooth and interoperable is always part of the story.

Standards that are many to many smooth out better. I.e. one of the challenges in B2B standards compared to other internet standards is the way that it’s less common to find a firm that is doing B2B exchange with a huge number of partners in a way that’s similar to the huge number of sites that web browser visits.

For example. Start to discuss the trade off of speed v.s. quality. Map speed to man, and quality to women. Map man to rude, and women to polite. Map rude to bad and polite to good. Map bad to evil, and polite to noble. If you do this really fast it’s amusing; but built up slowly it leads to nothing but trouble. The escalation is one obvious problem. Another less obvious problem is the forcing of unlikely bed fellows. For example slavery for/against used to be aligned with democrat/republican but then labor/capital is aligned democrat/republican; that wasn’t stable. Or to take another example: secular/religious doesn’t mix well with labor/capital unless you force secular/religious to align with independence/hierarchy – not a very natural mapping either. Strange bed fellows. The strangeness gets magnified as the polarization increases.

The wealth of well worn dialectics tends to make it easy to fall into these trap. To help counter that in my own thinking I’ve been seeking a a catalog to three sided things. For example geographic/political ones – New York, New Jersey, Connecticut; or England, Scotland, and Wales. Sooner or later I’ll get around to pulling together my current collection and posting it.

Moving the discussion from two to three has, of course a more general form. For example now when ever I see a list, like hardware, software, services, I ask “Can I have another?” Solutions?

At one point in my career I spent a few years deeply committed to the static typing camp. The height of that experience was an amazing day when we successfully linked, for the first time, a huge complex program. It consisted of hundreds of thousands of parts written by numerous authors and code generators. It worked! First time! Getting to that point had required tremendous labor, since the static type checking demanded by the language we were using had forced us to fix lots of stuff that might have been left for latter. At that moment it seemed worth while that we had deferred so much immediate gratification for so long.

Late in the project we had some really amazing bugs. Bugs that took weeks and teams to fix. Fun bugs with long interesting stories to tell about each of them.

During that later period I found my self writing what I came to call diagnostic typing code. This code would work to prove a complex declaration about the nature of a data structure. These declarations were put forward by the team members. For example somebody might say “All the records of type A are in the dictionary D.” and then somebody else would say “Ah, I thought the core set of those aren’t in the dictionary.” At that point I’d go off and write some code to to check if these declarations were true. It was fun because the truth was almost always much more complex than anybody thought. The bugs were all around the edges of these.

So the dialectic between dynamic and static typing is actually a kind of layered thing; with at least with three layers. Static, Dynamic, and Diagnostic. Static type checking is done at compile time. Dynamic type checking and dispatching is done at runtime. Diagnostic type checking is done intermittently; usually in response to a demand or a fear. It was extremely valuable to become explicit about some of the declarations that had been implicit.

Diagnostic type checking can be very very expensive. That makes it a lot of fun! It lets you can write all kinds of assertions about your program that would never be practical to check or enforce at the compile or runtime. You can get out the big guns: graph theory, statistics, coverage, grammars, budgets, spelling correctors. For example: all the window components form a strongly connected component via their child/parent arcs. For example: the elements of this hash table are uniformly distributed. (As an aside I don’t think I have every found a hash table that was well behaved in the wild.)

One of my favorite examples. This isn’t just for data structures you can do this on program traces too. Back in the 1970s somebody at CMU wrote a paper about using the ideas from language grammars to declare the patterns over calls on class instances. Things like: x:foo<-create(x); {open(x); {update(x)}+; close(x)}+; destroy(x)}*. In a later life I would sometimes write code to diagnostically check statements like that by using the tracing facilities in Common Lisp.

I wrote a lot of this diagnostic typing code for the persistent store using prolog. I would dump the entire persistent store into a suite of prolog assertions and then write the diagnostic typing declaration as small prolog programs who’s execution would prove or disprove these declarations. While that found a lot of very very subtle bugs I found it more fascinating how it raised raised the level of discussion about the work.

This kind of approach will, I suspect, become more common real soon now. So much of the data sloshing around on the net is full of surprises that diagnostic typing declarations would reveal. Moving the data across organizational boundaries creates a demand for tools that can frame the discussion between the parties.

One of the reasons I’m suffering a fit of enthusiasm for RDF is how it appears to offer a normal form, much as prolog assertions did for me in my previous experience, for just this kind of problem solving.

This trio: static/dynamic/diagnostic typing are all about shifting around the work, the trust, and the gratification. Don’t overlook the gratification. There is a lot of fun to be had in diagnostic typing approaches. I doubt you can write down all the declarations about the data before it starts flowing. Why defer the fun of flow?

This turns out to be an excellent question to build a career around! No shortage of fiascoes to study. No shortage of people with money scared to death they are on the road to a fiasco. Better yet there is no shortage of people convinced that those around them are on that road.

Making a decision is embedded in a context that aids and constrains the outcome that gets generated. This cartoon highlights three aspects of the context. In this view of the problem solving we ignore the actual problem and look only at the resources brought to bear on solving it.

Irving establishes a straw-man he calls “Vigilante Problem Solving.” That’s the good kind of problem solving and it outputs good decisions. The failure modes are framed as “taking short cuts” or other resource limits that preclude the good kind of problem solving.

Here’s a little enumeration of constraints on the quality of the problem solving that lifted from his book Critical Decisions along those three dimensions.

• Cognitive Constraints

• Limited Time
• Perceptions of Limited Resources
• Multiple Tasks
• Perplexing complexity of the issue
• Perception of lack of knowledge
• Ideological Commitments

• Need to maintain: power, status, compensation, social support.
• Need for acceptability of new policy with organization

• Strong personal motive: Greed, Desire for fame, etc.
• Arousal of an emotional need: e.g. anger, elation
• Emotional stress of decisional conflict

The constraints lead to failure modes. By picking apart the historical record of the various fiascos he has collected a library of these failure modes. The contribution of the Critical Decisions book bridge between the model of resource limits and various failure modes. It’s a bridge from a general model to the stories in his collection of fiascos. Each bridge is a template that outlines a given problem solving technique and then highlights how that problem solving technique goes bad.

Here’s an example. A template for a problem solving technique that plays to a person or organization’s strengths an augments those with reasoning by analogy:

We have cliches to dis this technique. “Searching where the light’s bright.” of “If you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail.

But this is a fine problem solving scheme. We all use it. It plays to our strengths and let’s us leverage our organizational muscle. It will only lead to a fiasco if the problem fails to fit the available SOP. Things fall apart when the organization starts getting highly invested in the analogy between a nail and screw. Then they start engaging in various thought stopping processes and begin singing in unison: “I gotta hammer, I hammer in the morning…” For a while they think they are happy!

Vigilance is hard work.

Rereading Clay’s essay I notice that one of the techniques he mentions is to reduce the amount of heterogenity in the system; the example he gives is hierarchy – i.e. the millitary. I’m reminded that hierarchy is one of the common solutions to the coordination problem around collective action.

It’s a cultural truism that centralized hierarchtical system often run amuck and become the prime source of abusive of power and severe inequality. The lession embedded in the power law story (i.e. appreciating that homogenous networks spontanously create power-law distributions) is: “Hold on homogenous creates hubs, and those hubs have power, and that power is just as susceptible to abuse as any centralized hierarchtical design.

Rereading Clays essay this week, this week, I’m struck by the way that firms often attempt to temper the problems hierarchy creates by creating multiple overlapping hierarchies; e.g. functional organization/proffesional hierarchies for that overlap project/product-line organization.

As a move in the game of systems design it provides a kind of check and balance. A means of auditing and oversight. Additionally it helps in creating safe niches for key activities. Inside those niches various kinds of skills, resources, public-goods can emerge.

I have model, totally ungrounded by the facts, that as the population grew the three spheres of commercial, civic, and religious activities broke apart. When people talk about the seperation of church and state they are speaking of that historical event – but just as critical was the way that commerce began to become distinct from the creating of public goods that is the work of the civic sphere.

Governance of such tangles of overlapping groups is a facinating mess. The coordination problems run deep; as they must if the groups are to remain distinctive.

A friend and I got to wondering yesterday if there are any examples of systems were tribe A elects the elites of tribe B and visa versa? You can see plenty of cases where a dominate tribe appoints the elites of a subordinate tribe. You can seem plenty of places where one tribe has numerous moves where it can check and balance the moves of other tribes.

It would be a very interesting university where tenure choices in each department were always made by other departments, for example.