The Splinters of our Discontent

Version 0.4

A circuitous hyper-commentary on the commentary titled The Splinters of our Discontent by Mike Godwin

Part 1: The third system (effect) version that I might (or might not) defend (AKA the preface to the preface)

 

Yeah, I'm an idiot and an ignoramus. There for the disgrace of gawd go I. Is that why Mike dislikes me so much?

At least that's the last impression I got from Mike, so I figured I needed to start with some sort of disclaimer. I don't reciprocate the hostility, so I can only guess why he acts that way. Perhaps the worst thing I can say about Mike is that he used to be a bit of a bully. Just my theory about how he acted, but I think Mike's version would be that he was merely being challenging and a bit provocative. I'm pretty sure he would even insist that his victims learned something from being flamed. Maybe they did, but I've had a lot of teachers over the years (and even done a fair bit of teaching), and I don't remember that any of my best teachers acted like that. (One of the lessons we could have learned from the saga of Omega Man?)

So much for my "legal" disclaimer. The real question is what, if anything, I learned from Mike's second book. (I probably would have read the first one if it were available in any library around here, but it's a funny accident that I myself caused this one to become available here. (My local library may have the only copy in Japan?)) Unfortunately, I think the "big picture" answer is that I didn't really learn much, though it was an interesting and oh-so-typically Mike-like provocative read.

Conclusion first? (Try not to bury the lead?) I think I used to agree with Mike about freedom of speech much more than I do now. I still believe that the truth is more powerful than the lies, but now I understand more about the overriding importance of time. I still believe the truth is going to win in the end, but it may not matter if the lies have already done their damage. As that maps to the First Amendment, I would now say the freedom of speech does not and should not include any corresponding right to be heard, and especially not any right to push lies for selfish profits. My general solution approach would be based on earned public reputation, with the result that liars and other malefactors would find it much more difficult to earn or even buy the visibility their scams and con games depend upon.

That's the important part, and it's also the main reason I find myself so skeptical of what Mike wrote here. However, I also think personal motivations matter, and therefore I think it matters that Mike's position seems to justify some of his own behaviors. (There's even a chapter of the book that is an interview with a famous author who evidently shares most of Mike's free-speech philosophy.) Especially when it comes to philosophy, I want to think that personal motivations shouldn't matter much, but in this case I think it also explains why Mike's positions seem to have changed so little over the decades.

That's probably enough to say about the book, but in the complicated real world there's usually more to the story. In this case, I found the book quite provocative and started writing detailed reactions as soon as I started reading it. Those first detailed thoughts are mostly in the third part below. The second part was actually my first attempt to back up and get a higher perspective on the whole thing. I've decided to leave the last two parts mostly intact because they do reflect how my thinking was evolving as I wrestled with Mike's exceedingly provocative book.

 

Part 2: The counterattack of my muse

After drafting most of the third part, my muse suddenly counterattacked and decided to try and save you [the last remaining reader?] a whole lot of time by moving the conclusion to the front. The idea (at that time) was to wrap this entire thing up in 2 or 3 paragraphs, and then the rest of it would just be my personal frosting on the turkey. Yes, I enjoyed the trip, but no reason for you to tag along. So here goes:

When the introduction used the word commentary I sort of dismissed the tag. I was conclusion-leaping (again) and imagining something like The Canterbury Tales with a string of incidents strung out along a journey. However this book turned out to be something else, basically a long string of comments. Some of them are deep, and some shallow, but mostly it reminded me that Mike was a master of the game of Trivial Pursuit, and I eventually concluded that many of his comments are kind of trivial. What initially made it hard for me to figure out was that the sources, the things that Mike is commenting on, are elsewhere. He mentions many authors whose books I have read, but his comments here mostly pertain to webpages that are only referenced. Not really a problem for Mike with his prodigious memory, but a major barrier for most of us. Even for authors whose thinking I feel familiar with, I usually felt I could not assess Mike's perspective without carefully reading the cited source. At first I thought it was just a lawyerly sort of trick, but now I feel it was more like playing Trivial Pursuit with Mike, and he's almost surely going to kill you on that turf. (Amusing coincidence time: I was simultaneously reading a rather more interesting legal book (The Color of Law) that was a good example of well contextualized comments.) I'm not saying that Mike's book is like playing Trivial Pursuit, but to fully understand Mike's comments you would need to read each of the references in parallel. Just being familiar with the broad principles of the cited authors' thinking will not suffice.

Let me be clear that Mike writes well enough, but in many places it feels like an NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) journalistic presentation that leaves you wondering what Mike actually thinks. My personal perspective is a bit odd, however. I used to know Mike pretty well, to the point where I sometimes get voice-of-the-author-in-my-head flashbacks from his writing. That's something that occasionally happens when I've spoken a lot with someone (but most often when I'm reading email, since I don't know many authors that well). At first I thought that also explained why I kept using Mike's first name as I dictated this manuscript. Sometimes it felt to me almost as though we were having a discussion of the material, which might also explain why my hyper-commentary [in Part 3] ranged so widely. That's how actual discussions with Mike (over margaritas) often went. [However, on later reflection I now think I was just responding to Mike's own first-name references in the book. Unconscious imitation as a form of flattery?]

But did I reach any big conclusions after struggling so long with the long hyper-commentary and the book itself? I guess I have always felt that Mike was kind of confused, and I still think so. Let me try to theoretically orient that reaction by explaining how I perceive our differing relationships to "social" problems. When Mike is wearing his journalist hat, I imagine that he tries to see problems impartially. If he has any bias, it might be some flavor of the journalist's joke about "If it bleeds it leads." In contrast, while wearing his lawyer's hat it may be that the problems only exist if someone is paying him to fix them, where "fix" is less defined by his own principles than by the "fiduciary" responsibilities he has for his clients' interests. (Yes, "fiduciary" is a force fit, but using "ethics" would run way long.) In contrast, I have come to see most problems as illusory, even imaginary. Before you can have a problem, first there has to be a potential change that could make things better. The "problem" is only defined in the delta, in the transition to some new state of affairs. The "better state" might be defined in philosophic terms, but making the transition work in the real world usually involves realignment of motivations, and is often caused and measured by economic factors. A lot of the things people are complaining about are merely parts of the way the world is and therefore they must, in accord with the old Serenity Prayer, be tolerated. At least until a better idea comes along.

So what follows next in Part 3 can now be safely dismissed as a first draft. Or perhaps better to call it an imaginary journey of some sort. This is not the Dharma battle you were looking for? (I'm actually reminded of a former lawyer from the States who retired to become a roshi in Japan. Not even sure if his flavor of meditation has anything to do with ye olde zen.) So onward, if you insist:

 

Part 3: The long road not to Canterbury (with deepest apologies to Chaucer)

First I need to explain the map. It's going to be a long journey, and one funny part is my doubt that anyone else will follow it. I frequently write to elucidate my own thoughts for my own purposes, and I'm sure this is going to be a long and complicated trek. Some of it is going to pass through epistemology and mathematics, but otherwise I feel I can't justify my treading into the legal neck of the woods. But mostly all of this just goes to show that Godwin managed to provoke me again. Mike stirs up ideas, which is what distinguishes him from a malignant troll. But we'll probably get to that topic in its due place. [Nope, never got there. Too multidimensional?]

For the epistemological part I need to clarify what it means to understand a domain of knowledge. Another way to see this aspect is to ask what defines an expert. Let's start with the old joke about watching the expert and thinking anyone could do that, until you try and discover there's much more to it. The expert made it look easy without any attempt to fool you.

There are actually two parts of expertise. The first one is understanding the shape of the knowledge space and the other is having the skills to apply the bits and pieces of the knowledge space as needed to solve real-world problems. No, I didn't say anything about what the expert knows, but that's because by knowing the overall shape of the knowledge space the expert is able to figure out which bits and pieces of facts and data are called for. Of course it is true that the expert starts with a lot of those bits and pieces in his head, but it's actually a more important dimension of expertise to be able to acquire new bits of knowledge that are needed for new problems. And after all, these days no one can possibly know everything in any substantive domain or field of expertise. Of course that leads to the ancient joke about the PhD piling it higher and deeper until he knows everything about nothing.

This epistemological perspective shouldn't be limited to book learning, by the way. Few skills live on paper. For examples, a doctor should have some expertise in talking to patients and their families and a plumber should have expertise in threading a pipe without stripping it. We frequently ignore those things that are hard to test and measure precisely, much as economists gleefully ignore the difficulties of measuring the real (let alone irrational) values of time. Now I feel like branching into a diversion on education theory. I advocate a radical new solution approach in that area, too. But I have to draw the lines somewhere, though it gives me an excuse to mention my everything-is-just-one-thing zen collapse in passing.

Now it's time to branch into mathematics, and I'm going to appeal to three different books. One is called Weird Maths by Darling and Banerjee, the second one is titled The Irrationals by Julian Havil, and the third one is Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. My thesis is that these three books manifest three different levels of expertise, in increasing order from lowest to highest.

Weird Maths is basically a populist explanation of mathematical topics. One author is actually a heavy mathematician who probably understands a great deal of the deep mathematics, but the crucial equations are not included in the book. The other author is primarily an expert in writing explanations of technical topics, and his mathematical competence and confidence were presumably used as the baselines for selecting topics and deciding how complex to make the explanations. The result is entertaining, but I can't even assess the true mathematical expertise of the mathematician author. Sorry, but I have to file it as entertaining pablum that you might use at a dinner party. In the knowledge model think of a flashlight shining on a few interesting bits of knowledge. Short answer questions on a test.

The next book is called The Irrationals, and this is one where my own mathematical weaknesses leap to the fore. I have studied a lot of math in a famous mathematics department, but I am definitely not a heavy mathematician and this author clearly is. The book is packed full of heavy equations, far beyond my level of comprehension. I can look at each phase of the derivations, and see which parts have changed into which corresponding parts on the other side, and then repeat with the next step until I get to the end, but even with the explanations in the text for how the steps were justified, I could reproduce none of them on my own. I can't even be sure that the justifications are proper and applied in a valid way. I think I spotted one typographic error in one intermediate expansion of a continuing fraction, but when I went back and looked for it again I couldn't even find it. In the end, all I can say is that I was convinced he's a very good mathematician, far beyond my ken. Going beyond the beyond-me math, convincing myself included a motivational analysis. I can't imagine why anyone would be motivated to pretend to be an expert in the theory and practice of irrational numbers if it wasn't true. This will never be a best-selling book, so it can't be for the money. I believe he wrote it for the love of pure mathematics. I suppose I could tiptoe around the book at a cocktail party, but in terror lest some real mathematician expose my utter ignorance. (However, I do wish he had addressed the mysterious status of the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. I'm inclined to believe it must be transcendental. Maybe someone will prove it algebraic and irrational but I just can't imagine how it could be rational (though no one yet knows for sure).) Per my knowledge model, this is like turning on the lights in a room of a large house, and studying everything in that room in some detail. Corresponds to a good essay or even a dissertation.

However Prime Obsession is a book exhibiting a different level of expertise. I might describe it as "everything you ever wanted to know about the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function, but were afraid to ask". This is a book where his expertise is so deep that there is some sense of the significance of the topics even for an idiot like yours truly. The proof of the derivation in Chapter 7, near the middle of the book, is truly dazzling. I was left feeling that I almost understood how an infinite sum based on all of the positive integers could be precisely equal to an infinite product based on all of the prime numbers. He actually goes relatively light on the equations, but the hand-waving is awesome. I'm pretty sure that the author would deny any claim that he sees the bottom of the ocean of the Riemann Hypothesis, but he creates a sensation of understanding The Depths a tiny bit. The conversational equivalent with a real mathematician renders me almost mute. I may continue to ask questions and even suggest metaphors, but I usually end up wondering why they tried so hard to help me understand. (Unless they gave up and changed the subject, which also happens often enough.) It takes a higher kind of expertise to make complicated topics so clear. There's a high-level perspective and searchlights and yet the entire terrain is somehow made clear within the entire knowledge space. It's like looking at a mountain range from a tall peak on a brilliantly clear and sunny day. The equivalent is the kind of textbook that defines a field and which might have made me into a real mathematician, if I had only read it when I was much younger.

So all of that was by way of preface to justify my excursion into legal topics. but first it seems like time to throw in another speed bump, this time by questioning your motivation for having read so far. Or maybe I should speculate on the kind of search that could have led you precisely to this point? I'm still motivated by clarifying my own thoughts, and in particular I have wanted to write about Prime Obsession for a while. But who else could be interested? (Indexing robots don't count as anyone at all.)

Or perhaps I'm merely in some sense afraid of attracting the vicious attentions of the lawyers? Let me try to throw them off the track by noting that my perspective is philosophic. I'm interested in figuring out what is actually true, whereas I think the whole point of law school is to get away from such trivia as the natures of truth and goodness. (By the way, I sought in vain for counterexamples as I read Mike's book.) Yes, they are clever disputants, those lawyers, but I have seen how they earn their money. I have come to regard a discussion with a lawyer as an amusing waste of time at best, though there's usually wasted money, too. Lots of money. Lawyers certainly value their own time quite highly.

That leads to a quasi-joke about how to assess or recognize a successful lawyer. It's the lawyer who gets to pick and choose what cases to work on. My extension to the joke is that there's a second category: The lawyers who passed the bar but never practiced law. Technically a lawyer who never lost a case. (Thinking of another fellow I knew and worked for back in Austin... He also had earned an MBA he hadn't really used.)

So now it's time to try to describe how I developed my unique and special perception of the knowledge space of law, as the foundation for my intrusion into the turf of this fundamentally legal book. From my various encounters, I'm confident that the only entry point the lawyers would accept is the one they've already experienced, law school, but I never went there. Closest I ever came was taking the LSAT, basically as practice for the GRE, but I took it in the mood of a lark. I took it cold, with no preparation, and got a high score, but I'm even proud to say I never applied to any law school. I did take one sound class in the history of the English common law from Professor Drew, but that was as history, not for the study of law. From the philosophy side, I remember a course in biomedical ethics. If my memory is correct, most of the course was taught by a lawyer, though the other instructor was a physician. Both of them were linked to the Baylor Medical School. However, I have read a whole lot of books over the years that infringed upon various aspects of the law. As mentioned earlier, while reading Mike's book I also read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, about de jure racial segregation. Most of my legal reading last year involved international criminal activities, especially computer-related crimes and money laundering. Now that reminds me of a technical perspective on computer crime in a thick book called Phishing and Countermeasures by Jakobsson and Myers, in which Chapter 18 was specifically focused on the legal topic of liability. Then there were all those Perry Mason novels... Many of them included esoteric citations of odd decisions and how to apply them to odd circumstances. Which reminds me, which reminds me, which reminds me... Lemma one: I'm much too sloppy with my references. Lemma two: The law is too pervasive these days. So I guess my essential claim is that I've been so immersed in legal intrusions from so many perspectives that I've been forced to develop some sort of perspective on the knowledge space of the law, especially in America.

Still here? You really have me wondering why you haven't gone TLDR already. Don't forget that my excuse is having been provoked by Mike, but what's yours? And yet it's time to start working through the book itself in a fairly sequential way.

Perhaps the nicest aspect of the book is that it is written in small, bite-sized pieces. Basically a collection of essays. Less nice is that it seems hard to figure out what he's talking about much of the time, because he's referring to websites and discussions that appear elsewhere. Sometimes he doesn't even summarize those sources, but basically just leaves that as homework for the reader. Mike generally writes well enough, and the local focus is usually clear, but it's often like a flashlight snapped on and off, and sometimes the target of the flash is off in the distance.

The first four essays form a grouping around the privacy of personal information and free speech. At least that was the best interpretation I could come up with. The main theme seemed to be a three-part model of the participants in and arbitrators of Internet-propagated speech. I found the motivation unclear because he seemed to be remapping the usual suspects into slightly different categories. Basically just renaming the variables, which seemed irrelevant to the higher legal perspective. Back in the real world, the adversarial conflicts are still going to be binary, even if one or both of the parties are collections or groups. Even in the context of multilateral agreements, the resolution of conflicts is usually reduced to binary confrontations. (At least I don't think I've ever encountered a legal citation in the form of A v B v C... Interesting theoretical possibility, but tough on the judge.)

What I felt was missing was enough altitude to see what the problems really are, and therefore what sort of conflicts need to be addressed. Maybe these things just seem so obvious to Mike after all these years that he doesn't even see them anymore. Two possibly clarifying examples of higher perspectives came to my mind as I wrestled with this section. (And I continued searching for such perspectives all the way through the book. The first appendix was the closest approach.)

One example is the relationship of privacy and personal information to freedom. This usually starts with the idea that negative information can be used against us, which is true enough, but even the positive information, such as data about our strengths and interests, can be used to manipulate us and thereby diminish our freedoms. I don't see this as a legalistic oversight, but rather as part of a broader Libertarian distortion of their own worship words. Largely thinking of the book called Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. There's an implicit assumption that the "nudgers" know what is best for the "nudgees", but that sort of information imbalance is precisely where the Libertarians usually wind up crashing.

The other example involves the foundation of secrecy. Actually quite a hairy topic and the lawyers rarely seem to have much to say about how to justify secrecy. The lawyers take it for granted, though Mike does explicitly mention anonymity several times. I have to confess that it's a topic I've been studying for many years, but without coming to any clear conclusions. All the rationales I can come up with seem to be based on prior secrecy. Since history is fixed and full of secrets, that seems to make the justification a moot point. I'll just include a trivial example for the famous case of whistle-blowers. If the crime wasn't a (prior) secret, then the whistle-blower would not need the protection of anonymity. From a Kantian and Humean perspective, I generally think people should accept responsibility for their actions, including their words, and only more so when those actions are public and affect other people. The general principle would be that your own secret information should remain your own secret, eh?

Later in the section Mike switches to a focus on Balkin's idea of an information fiduciary. Another old idea with a fancy new-sounding label? I remember two "application" examples that date back to roughly the same time as when Mike was studying with Balkin. One was an email system acting as a kind of information fiduciary, and the other involved medical records accessed via an independent website funded by insurance companies. I recently encountered another developing business that could apply the same notion of information fiduciary in the area of fighting phishing attacks. But "fiduciary" makes it sound so much more legal and impressive?

Getting too anecdotal, eh? Actually, this ties naturally to page 47. That's near the end of the first essay in the next part of the book. It is an interesting page to cite as an example of how closely I tend to read. Here is where I bagged my first typographic error, which initially indicated to me that the book was unusually well edited. I rarely get so far into a book without spotting something. A paragraph begins "[Siva] quite properly criticizes Mark Zuckerberg's late-to-the-party recognition that perhaps Facebook may much more of a home..." [sic] The most likely fix would be to add the word "be" after the word "may". I have described it as a typographic error, though it's actually a grammatical mistake that I attributed to possible dictation problems. Actually, my own inability to dictate Siva's family name is part of the reason I referenced him by first name in the quote. (The other reason is another anecdote. I always welcome any excuse to remember the late Earl "Shiva" Cooley, a mutual friend of our Austin days.)

However from that point on the book started to have more errors, so I gradually downgraded my evaluation of the quality of the editing. On page 82, the phrase "... Facebook is the going to offer..." [sic] should not have the word "the" in it. On page 103 I noticed the missing period after the bold heading "Some Alternative Suggestions for Reform and/or Investigation" near the bottom of the page. On page 174 is a sentence begins "But even a year or two those votes..." [sic] The minimal fix would be to add "after" after the word "two". On page 181 it says "Part of that work has to teaching ourselves to have..." [sic] Minimal fix might be inserting "be" after the first "to". Page 184 has a definite problem of numeric agreement in the sentence "The best way for the companies to engage with its critics is for them to..." [sic] This is actually a complicated mess, because the context of the previous paragraph was focused on Facebook with parenthetic reference to other companies, while this paragraph seems plausible as a shift to a broader focus. In that case, the word "its" should have been "their". Less certain, but it also seems likely that the there's a different mistake in that previous paragraph, where it says "Most of the companies' missteps I believe..." In that context, the reference does appear to be limited to Facebook, so it should be "company's" rather than "companies'" there. (I did like the idea of "techlash", however.) Finally, on page 185 I noticed "...the rest of us didn't foresee this it either..." [sic], where either "this" or "it" should have been deleted. Context seems to argue for "this" rather than "it"? So much for low-level errata (though I certainly might have missed some others).

My higher level reactions? Much more contentious and mixed and even anecdotal. Returning to page 47 is a good entry point? One of the main topics there is groups on Facebook. Mike's friend Siva is arguing that the groups can be divisive, even harmful, while Mike waffles to comment that they "... may ultimately add up to a net social positive." My anecdotal evidence would involve a couple of Facebook Groups that I created and others which I observed for some years. Technology remains morally neutral, which leads to the joke about seeing the groups "as a tool or a weapon". It depends on the motivations, but I'm increasingly convinced the "bad actors" have the stronger motivations to abuse the tools to stab at the truth. My form of projection or just overconfidence? Since I think the truth is going to win, why should I strain myself to make sure? In contrast, if I were a bad actor trying to grab the cash and run away before the truth is revealed, then the motivations for extreme efforts are pretty clear. In the end, I wound up with a quite negative perspective of Facebook in general and Facebook Groups in particular, and I have become an extremely minimal visitor there. (Perhaps Mike would regard my negative reaction to Facebook as anecdotal evidence in favor of its higher value?)

So now it's time for another phase transition. Having run past my dictated draft notes, the rest of this is back to the oldfangled keyboard. How could it possibly become more convoluted or tedious?

The ending of this chapter on Facebook a few pages later was especially unsatisfactory, though it's hard to explain why succinctly. One dimension is that Mike is projecting his own skepticism and ignoring the reality that most people prefer to be trusting, even of strangers. There's a real cost of filtering out the liars and noisemakers, even if someone wants to make that effort, but the relative cost of spawning fresh sock puppets is vastly lower.

But the atmospheric effects are much more important. This chapter was focused on Facebook, where the atmosphere is deliberately designed to be friendly and trusting. The buzzword is "engaging". We're all supposed to be friends here, which gives the trolls a huge step up in pushing their trollage. However I think it would be more instructive to consider the analog of the same problem as it applies in the environment of Twitter, which was lightly touched upon in the book. The problem is much easier to see there, because Twitter enforces brevity, and there's a clear advantage for the trolls who can quickly and easily spawn many brief lies while the truth is long and complicated. Even the wisest expert will be challenged by those strict limits on characters.

Chapter 8 struck me as especially interesting as an example of presumed context, though this time it was not written, but visual context. I think the framing requires some knowledge of The Wire, and I've never seen any of it. Ditto the other references. Or maybe the problem was that this was mostly a journalistic intrusion and Mike deliberately decided to leave it open ended? However it felt especially unfocused and in need of a conclusion.

Chapter 18 struck me as especially confused and even misleading. Almost a paradox when considered against Mike's own formulation of Godwin's Law. On the one hand, I feel like Mike sounds like he's more familiar with Popper's writing than I am, but on the other hand it sounds like he doesn't understand the Paradox of Tolerance. The escape clause of "within reason" does not work for precisely the same reason that Godwin's Law eventually insures an intrusion of the "forbidden" references to Hitler or to Nazis. The point is that intolerance cannot be tolerated because it's a one-way valve. Intolerance will always try to increase the scope of what cannot be tolerated, and there is no "within reason" when reason itself is the bullseye of the target that cannot be tolerated.

The first appendix struck me as quite interesting, though I favor going after the identified sources of the disinformation. If we knew the reputation and motivations of the person who wrote something, or of the people who are propagating the material, then we can make appropriate discounts. My perspective is that time is the limit, so I'd rather spend more time with humorous and provocative sources and little to none with liars, especially the highly motivated ones.

The last appendix focused on Godwin's Law. Mostly I felt like Mike punted with a few references and the feeling I got was that he's tired of the topic.

So in wrapping up, I want to include one more joke. I thought it was a hilarious coincidence, since I ran into it just before starting Mike's book, but I also bet no one else will laugh.

"Now is the discount of our winter tents."

The source is cited as an "Advertisement in Stratford-upon-Avon camping shop". It appears on page 79 of The Book of Nothing by John Barrow. Another interesting hodgepodge. Mostly mathematical history? Physics? Or is it philosophy? Not sure which book I'd be more likely to recommend...

Really? You made it all the way to the end? Sorry, but now I have to pull the rug. I can't even tell you the truth. The only thing that I might know about the truth is that it's too complicated for me.