Rewriting Things

In the life of every nontrivial project, there is a point where you look back and ask yourself: "How did we get here? What a tangled web we have weaved! Can we ever recover? If we push ahead, are we digging ourselves into a deeper hole, or is there a light at the other end?"

I'd like to offer some personal advice.

If you look at your code base and say "There is so much that's right, even if it's really messy and has some serious bugs." then you should keep going, especially if other people are involved in the project. If you look at your code and say "Actually, no one is really using this yet, and if I switch things around before people have to deal with it, they'll thank me later." then you should head back. Start over. Get it right from the beginning while you have a chance, or it's really going to hurt later.

You'll know when it's ok to start over, because you won't be too worried about it. You won't deliberate very long, the choice will be pretty obvious.

But if there is some turmoil in your heart, you need to step back and get some perspective. If it's taking you weeks or months to figure out what to do, don't give up. The answer is that you need to work through it. You need to spend that time reflecting on exactly what is wrong, and what you can do about it. If you get abandon all your work at that point, you're going to regret it later. Especially if you divide the community that is contributing to it, they'll end up duplicating their effort just to learn the same lessons.

Take OpenCV as an example. The C interface was a solid backbone for thousands of developers, but the community got to a point where it needed to work past the limitations of that language. C++ looked incredibly appealing, but it would required some significant changes to how OpenCV works in order to support those features. What did they do? They didn't rewrite OpenCV from scratch, but they started building a new foundation by reflecting on what worked and what didn't work in the original interface. They took the whole community along with them and now OpenCV 2 is strong and better than ever. One of the most important things is that a lot of the same people are involved. If there was a fork, or someone decided to start from scratch, then nothing learned during the development of OpenCV 1 would be completely applied to OpenCV 2. Some of the same paradigms might be there, but a complete, continuous understanding would be missing.

On the other hand, look at pd and Max. They could have combined efforts, and learned from each other in a more direct way. But now we have two slightly different environments that are each missing features of the other.

This might all sound unnecessarily verbose for such a simple message. But that's because this is actually a metaphor for something completely unrelated to software development.

The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

The Problem of Pain

Some thoughts on "The Problem of Pain" by C.S. Lewis:

...Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them.

Determinism is generally ignored when it comes to resolving the problem (i.e., "Why doesn't God make us love Him and one another?") because, intuitively, love seems to require choice. But if God has no choice, how can He love?

...if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'.

Lewis spends the rest of the chapter explaining how God uses pain to shape us, and how it may be a means to an end that only He sees clearly. This obfuscates the issue, it doesn't matter if some 'black' is really 'white'. Any remaining 'black' at all contradicts the possibility of an omnipotent loving God. To accept this as a solution is to call all 'black' 'white', which Lewis rejects. He doubly rejects this, indirectly, in the next chapter:

'Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God' [James 1:13] Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behavior from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator.

But if all 'black' is really 'white', then it is 'white' because the evil emergent from sin is necessary.

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. [...] There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.

The "sum of human misery" is a poor rendering of a common intuition: it isn't the sum, but the universality of suffering that's unimaginable.

Love and Power

If international relations are ever going to change, the people in power will have to act in love. Unfortunately, those who love are not power hungry. And those who are power hungry win out for power over those who aren't. It seems like the only way around this is to put people into power involuntarily.

An Equality Among Men

Søren Kierkegaard's last written words:

I have nothing more to add. But let me merely say this, which in a way is my life, is to me the content of my life, its fullness, its bliss, its peace and satisfaction. Let me express this, a view of life which comprehends the idea of humanity and of human equality: Christianity implies, unconditionally, that every man, every single individual, is equally close to God...How close and equally close? Because Loved by Him. Consequently there is equality, the equality of infinity, between man and man. If there is any distinction, it is that one person bears in mind that he is loved, perhaps day after day, perhaps day after day for seventy years, perhaps with only one longing, a longing for eternity so that he really can grasp this thought and go through life with it, concerning himself with the blessed occupation of meditating on how he is loved - and not, alas, because of his virtue. Another person perhaps does not remember that he is loved, perhaps goes on year after year, day after day, and does not think of his being loved; or perhaps he is glad and grateful to be loved by his wife, by his children, by his friends, by his contemporaries, but he does not think of his being loved by God. Or perhaps he laments not being loved by anyone and does not think of being loved by God. Infinite, divine love; it makes no distinction! But what of human ingratitude? If there is an equality among us men in which we completely resemble each other, it is that not one of us truly thinks about being loved!

"All is Full of Love" by Björk:

You'll be given love
You'll be taken care of
You'll be given love
You have to trust it

Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at

Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
All around you

All is full of love
You just aint receiving
All is full of love
Your phone is off the hook
All is full of love
Your doors are all shut
All is full of love

From Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov:

...truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.

From "It's in Our Hands" by Björk:

Cruelest, almost always
To ourselves
It musn't get any better off
It's in our hands...
Well, now, aren't we scaring ourselves
unecessarily?
Aren't we trying too hard?
'Cause it's in our hands

Truth Seeking as Contradiction Resolution

For a while, this is all I've had:

• Questions are worth asking.
• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.

The first one should be relatively clear. The second I realized first — by "mode of understanding" I mean intuition, experience, and reason. There may be more or less modes — maybe I should include emotion, or combine experience and intuition, I'm not sure. The principle is the important part.

Today I realized there's an assumption I've been making unconsciously:

• Actions and beliefs requires justification.

This assumption is revealed when I ask "But why are questions worth asking?", only to produce: "Without answers, we cannot justify action or belief." What if this assumption is false?

I think I've misunderstood justification. In Jain epistemology, they recognize every truth claim as coupled with a perspective; making it silly to talk about the truth claim apart from the perspective. If we look at each mode of understanding as representing a perspective, the issue is no longer justification. Each of the Jain blind men gathered around the elephant has a justification — their perspective is the justification.

• The man by the leg says the elephant is a pillar.
• The man by the ear says the elephant is a fan.

In the same way:

• My intuition says there is hope for all things.
• My experience shows that some things are hopeless.

Since all these claims are justified, the question turns to resolving the contradictions. We understand how contradictory kinesthetic perspectives fit together in the case of the elephant, but I don't know how different "understanding perspectives" might fit together. Can we formulate a similar principle? Maybe the the modes of understanding have well-defined relationships to each other in the same way spatial perspectives do.

Without a general principle to resolve the contradictions, what should I do? The same thing the blind men do: discuss. They discuss because there is a contradiction, and act/believe when they have a resolution.

So now I have two axioms and a consequence:

• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.
• Contradictions are worth resolving.
• Questions are worth asking.

Truth (as far as we can understand it) can be defined negatively as noncontradiction. Now when I ask "Are these things important: compassion/love/selflessness, truth/trust/honesty, and passion?", and my intuition and experience say yes, while my rationality has no way of saying anything — there's a truth there.

At first it seems strange to see truth seeking as contradiction resolution, but I think it's just because I was distracted by justification and failed to realize that each mode of understanding is already justified in itself.

Hilarious Giving

I stumbled across some naïve thoughts on selflessess from freshman year (2003, unedited for the sake of honesty — there are plenty of ideological mistakes):

...The desire of a selfish relationship is understood, but what of a selfless one? What reason is there to that desire? Perhaps it is only to act on your emotion, and to trust your desire to give. Should we give? Is giving good? The Bible says so, but what sense does it make? To give is to stop focusing inward and focus outward. To do this effectively, we must acknowledge that the subjective mind of others is more important than the subjective mind of the self. An equal good for a greater amount of people? The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Perhaps it isn't the giving that matters, but the cheer. God doesn't love giving, but the mind behind it, the attitude. It is good to follow the desire to give, because it brings forth (propagates) an attitude of cheerfulness...

(This is an excerpt, but there was no "prologue"; i.e.: I didn't put on a "Christian hat" at the beginning — I was just assuming) I find it interesting that the word used in that verse I was thinking of, "God loves a cheerful giver." (Corinthians 9:7) is only used once in the NT: hilaros.

Forgotten Pragmatics

Cynics sometimes cite phrases like "bless you", "good luck", "have a good one" and "cheers" as meaningless (of course, these are the same people that would point out my improper use of the term "cynic"). Sure, "cheers" and "have a good one" have little semantic content due to their ambiguity. And it's true, a lot of people don't believe in the reality of "blessings" or "luck" in the first place. But you must consider these phrases in a social context — you can't study a swimming fish while you hold it in your hand. In a social context, these phrases do have meaning: they communicate a simple kindness... acknowledgement and encouragement. The form is irrelevant, but understanding something does not put you above it.