Monthly Archives: December 2009

Trolls, comments, and Slashdot: Thoughts on the response to Avatar

December 30, 2009 By in Culture, Essays, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

The vast majority of the comments attached to “Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar and Neal Stephenson’s ‘Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out’” are terrible. They tend toward mindless invective and avoid careful scrutiny of what I actually wrote; they’re quite different from the comments this blog normally gets, which is largely because I submitted the Avatar post to Slashdot, home of the trolls. One friend noted the vitriol and in an e-mail said, “Okay, the Slashdot link explains the overall tone of the comments your “Avatar” post is attracting.”

Part of the reason the comments are so bad is the hit and run nature of comments, especially on larger sites. If you have something substantial to say, and particularly if you regularly have something substantial to say, you tend to get a blog of your own. I wrote about this phenomenon in “Commenting on comments:”

In “Comment is King,” Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times, “What commenters don’t do is provide a sustained or inventive analysis of Applebaum’s work. In fact, critics hardly seem to connect one column to the next.” She notes that comments are often vitriolic and ignorant, which will hardly surprise those used to reading large, public forums.”

Furthermore, it’s easier and demands less thought to post hit and run comments than it is to really engage an argument. I deleted the worst offenders and sent e-mails to their authors with a pointer to Paul Graham’s How To Disagree; none responded, except for one guy who didn’t understand the point I was trying to make even after three e-mails, when I gave up (“never argue with fools because from a distance people can’t tell who is who”). The hope is that by consciously cultivating better comments and by not responding to random insults, the whole discussion might improve.

(Paul Graham has given the subject a lot of thought too: he even wrote an essay about trolls. As he says, “The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by trolls.”)

Not every comment I got one was terrible—this one, from a person named “Dutch Uncle,” was probably the best argued of the lot, and it mostly avoided ad hominem attacks. It, however, was very much the exception.

Most comments tended to deal in generalities and not to cite specific parts of my argument. In this respect, they have the same problems I see in freshmen papers, which often want to make generalizations and abstractions without the concrete base necessary. This happens so often that I’ve actually begun a keeping a list of all the things freshmen have told me are “human nature,” with a special eye toward placing contradictory elements next to each other, and in class I now ceaselessly emphasize specifics in arguments.

Since I’ve see this disease before, I’ve already thought about it, and I think the generalization problem is linked to the problem of close reading, which is a really hard skill to develop and one I didn’t develop in earnest till I was around 22 or 23. Even then it was only with a tremendous amount of effort and practice on my part. Close reading demands that you consider every aspect of a writer’s argument, that you pay attention to their word choices and their sentences, and that you don’t attribute to them opinions they don’t necessarily hold. Francine Prose wrote a whole book on the subject called Reading Like a Writer, but the book is a paradox: in order to develop the close reading skills she demonstrates, you have to be able to closely read her book in the first place, which is hard without good teaching.

Mentioning Francine Prose brings up one other common point I saw in the comments: few pointed to sources or ideas outside themselves, and allusions were rare. In the best writing I see, such elements are common. That isn’t to say every time you post a comment, you should cite four peer-reviewed sources and a couple of blog posts, but ideas are often stronger when they show evidence of learning and synthesis from others. In my Avatar post, I brought together Greg Egan, a New Yorker article, Alain de Botton citing Wilhelm Worringer, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the Neal Stephenson essay, and Star Trek. Now, my argument about Avatar could still be totally wrong, like an essay with hundred citations, but at the very least other writers’ thoughts usually show that more thought has gone into an essay, or a comment. Almost every article in every newspaper and magazine piece worth reading cites at least half a dozen and often many more sources: quotes, other articles, journals, books, and more. That’s part of what make The Atlantic and The New Yorker so worth reading.

Citations area common because things that are really worth arguing about require incredible background knowledge to say anything intelligent. The big response I’ve had to many of the comments, especially the deleted ones, are suggestions to read more: read How Fiction Works, The Art of Criticism, and Reading Like a Writer, then post your angry Internet screeds after you’ve thought more about what you’re arguing. These kinds of pleas probably fall on the proverbially deaf ears, but at least with this post now I have somewhere to point bad commenters in the future.

I think one reason I find Slashdot conversations much less interesting than I did as a teenager isn’t because the nature of the site has changed, but because I’ve learned enough to have learned how hard it is to really know about something. Now I’m often more engaged by pure information and less often in invective and pure opinion, especially when that opinion isn’t backed up by much. The information/opinion binary is of course false, especially because the kind of information one presents often leaves pointers to one’s opinion, but it’s nonetheless useful to consider when you’re posting on Internet forums—or writing anywhere.

Incidentally, one reason I like reading Hacker News so much is that the site consciously tries to cultivate smarter, deeper conversation, much as I wish to; it’s trying to meld technical and cultural forces into a system that rewards and encourages high-content comments of the sort I mostly didn’t get regarding Avatar. I submitted the Avatar post to Hacker News before Slashdot, and the first, relatively good comment came from a Hacker News reader.

The problem of trolls is also very old, and probably goes back to the Internet’s beginnings—hence the need for a word like “troll,” with a definition in the Jargon File. As a result, I’m probably not going to change much by writing this, and to judge from my e-mail correspondent, trying to do so via e-mails and blog posts is mostly hopeless. But a part of me is an optimist who thinks or hopes change is possible and that by having a meta conversation about the nature of trolling, one can avoid the behavior in general, at least on a small scale. At Slashdot or Reddit scales, however, the hope fades, and one simply experiences the tragedy of the commons.

EDIT: Robin Hanson has an interesting alternate, but not mutually incompatible, theory in Why Comments Snark:

Comments disagree more than responding posts because post, but not comment, authors must attract readers. Post authors expect that reader experiences of a post will influence whether those readers come back for future posts. In contrast, comment authors less expect reader experience to influence future comment readership; folks read blog posts more because of the post author than who they expect to author comments there.

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong — Terry Teachout

December 28, 2009 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I meant to write a long review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, but enough very competent sources have that I have little I contribute beyond generic praise. I know virtually nothing about Armstrong and read few biographies; therefore I’m little able to comment on how Pops deals with the genre. But those who presumably know more than I do are impressed: The Atlantic speaks here, for example, and you can read more here, here, or here, at The Second Pass.

Teachout argues that Armstrong was more complex than his jovial public persona demonstrated. To me, the more interesting part of Pops is its subtler meditation on the relationship of the artist to society—in Armstrong’s case, race was an abiding the issue—and the virtuosity of the writing of both subject and object. Two samples will have to suffice: one of my favorite lines Teachout wrote comes early, on page 23, when he says of Louisiana, “Rarely does [the Northerner] linger long enough to pierce the veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade.” I suspect that applies to many places, and it echoes Samuel Johnson’s apt, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” That could apply any vibrant, culturally ambitious, and expanding city, just I might Teachout’s comment reveals more about place than many stories of travel.

As for Armstrong, he saw through much that not all do, judging from shows like Entourage or the laments of other celebrities:

I can’t go no place they don’t roll up the drum, you have to stand up and take a bow, get up on the stage. And sitting in an audience, I’m signing programs for hours all through the show. And you got to sign them to be in good faith. And afterwards all those hangers-on get you crowded in at the table—and you know you’re going to pay the check.

It’s that last bit—”and you know you’re going to pay the check”—that resonates most, the little indignant detail that is nonetheless part of what Armstrong implies one has to do to succeed in the music and show business. Other businesses have their little indignities, and it’s one of Teachout’s considerable strengths that he never leaves the grounding of his subject yet offers many roads from his subject to the wider world. I point to just one, but there are many other available if you’re willing to walk through 400 short pages in Louis Armstrong’s shoes.

Thoughts on James Cameron's Avatar and Neal Stephenson's "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out"

December 27, 2009 By in Culture, Essays, movies, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 72 Comments

Despite reading Greg Egan’s brilliant review of Avatar, I saw the movie. The strangest thing about Avatar is its anti-corporate, anti-technological argument. Let me elaborate: there are wonderful anti-corporate, anti-technological arguments to be made, but it seems contrived for them to be made in a movie that is, for the time being, apparently the most expensive ever made; virtually all mainstream movies are now approved solely on their profit-generating potential. So a vaguely anti-corporate movie is being made by… a profit-driven corporation.

The movie is among the most technically sophisticated ever made: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has advanced the cinematic state-of-the-art. But Avatar’s story is anti-technological: humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources. Presumably, if Avatar’s creators genuinely believed that technology is bad, the movie itself would never have been made, leading to a paradox not dissimilar for those found in time travel movies.

Avatar also has a bunch of vaguely mythical elements, including some scenes that look like the world’s biggest yoga class. The Na’avi, an oppressed people modeled on American Indians, or at least American Indians as portrayed in 20th Century American movies, fight against an interstellar military using bows, arrows, horses, and flying lizards. They live in harmony with the world to an extent that most Westerners can probably barely conceive of, given that more people probably visit McDonald’s than national parks in a given year.

So why are we fascinated with the idea of returning to nature, as though we’re going to dance with wolves, when few of us actually do so? Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness may offer a clue: he cites Wilhelm Worringer’s essay, “Abstraction and Empathy,” which posits that art emphasizes, in de Botton’s words, “[…] those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply with in itself.” We live (presumably) happy lives coddled in buildings that have passed inspection, with takeout Chinese readily available, and therefore we fantasize about being mauled by wild beasts and being taken off the omnipresent grid, with its iPhones and wireless Internet access. We live in suburban anomie and therefore fantasize about group yoga. We make incredibly sophisticated movies about the pleasures of a world with no movies at all, where people still go through puberty rituals that don’t involve Bar Mitzvahs, and mate for life, like Mormons.

Neal Stephenson wrote a perceptive essay called “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,” which examines the underlying cultural values in the older and newer Star Wars films. I would’ve linked to it earlier but frankly can’t imagine anyone returning here afterwards. Therefore I’ll quote an important piece of Stephenson:

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents – not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology – and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work – as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

The tedious particulars of modern technological life are both embraced and avoided in Avatar too. The villain, rather than being political chaos, organized oppression, ignorance, entropy, or weak/ineffective institutions, to name a few of the real but abstract contemporary bad guys, is instead replaced by an army / mercenary commander who might be at home in Xe Services / Blackwater USA. The military villainy and disdain for superior firepower in Avatar is especially odd, given that the United States has held the technological advantage in major wars for at least a century; the people watching Avatar are probably also the ones who support our troops. The studio that made Avatar probably cares more about quarterly statements than about the environment. The movie villains, however, apparently aren’t being restrained by an intergalactic EPA.

Avatar is really a Western about the perils of modernity, but it gets contemporary politics utterly wrong—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that contemporary politics are utterly absent. There is no intergalactic criminal court or committee for the protection of indigenous peoples, which seems like a probable development for a race nursed on Star Trek and post-colonialism and that is advanced enough to travel the stars. In the contemporary United States, a bewildering array of regulations govern activities that might have an environmental impact on communities; the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example, requires that federal agencies to monitor and report on their activities. Such regulations are growing, rather than shrinking. They’re a staple bogeyman of right-wing radio.

But in Avatar, decisions aren’t made at the future equivalent of the Copenhagen summit. Instead, they’re fought in battles reminiscent of World War I, or the Civil War, leavened with some personal combat. The battles are jarring but anachronistic, although maybe Iraq War II: The Sequel would’ve turned out better if George Bush and Saddam Hussein had dueled with swords, but that’s not how wars are fought any more. And when one side has machine guns and the other side doesn’t, you get something as nasty as World War I, where all the élan, spirit, and meditation in the world didn’t stop millions of people from dying.

My implicit argument isn’t perfect: Avatar does criticize our reliance on oil through the parable of the cleverly named “unobtainium,” but the thrust of the movie is unambiguous. We want to fantasize that solutions are as simple as putting a hole in the right guy, which will make things right again. That’s probably a comforting notion, and an easy one to fit into a two- to three- hour movie with a three-part arc, but it’s also a wrong one, and one that ignores or abstracts the world’s complexity. The people who tend to rule the world are the ones who pay attention to how the world really is, rather than how it was, or how they would like it to be. The real question is whether we are still people who see how the world is.

The year's best in reading, not in publishing

December 27, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Like D.G. Myers, I don’t find much interest in “year’s best” lists and the like. Most of them are, as he says, boring; maybe that has something to do with the nature of the list and the arbitrary divisions that we use to mark milestones in our lives.

That being said, I read a lot, and I’d prefer to write about what’s new to me, rather than what happens to be published in a particular 12 month period. Last year I wrote about “pointless listmaking,” and I’m reminded of a comment from Rob, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, when he’s at a party given by an ex-girlfriend:

The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t… as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists.

(Emphasis added. The novel’s first sentence involves a list: “My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth…”)

Umberto Eco likes lists, or at least studies them. As previously mentioned, he said that “The list is the origin of culture.” Being the origin, however, is very different from being the destination, or the evolution, of culture, and so in that light the list might be a primitive device that is still nonetheless useful to consider. As such, after a great deal of meta commentary regarding the nature of the activity in which I’m about to engage, I’m going to give a non-numbered, non-ordered list of books I happened to read in the previous 12-month period that are books I now recommend to others, found moving, or otherwise think deserve special attention.

* Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game, which I keep meaning to write about and then not doing. If one were writing an ad for the novel, it could say, accurately, “Did you love The Shadow of the Wind? Then you’ll love The Angel’s Game!” The two novels are written in the same half-mocking Gothic style, are both set in Barcelona, and both deal with murder, love, and literature.

* Max Jamison, Wilifred Sheed’s improbably hilarious novel about an unhappy theater critic.

* The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s take on what magic school might seem like to those who are already aware of magic school and fantasy conventions. As with real school, nobility takes front seat to sex and power, which occupy the back. I also read (and haven’t written about) Donna Tart’s The Secret History, which features school and murder in a surprisingly pleasant literary package.

* Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness ought to be required reading for those who are alive.

* John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

One nice part about reading is that books are effectively inexhaustible: given constraints on time, no one can read everything worthwhile (although Harold Bloom is apparently trying). Therefore we need developed opinions, yes, but we also need pointers to books that are worth having developed opinions about, and to my mind the handful of books above meet that criterion. Apologies to those of you who have read this far and just wanted a couple books to read, and to those of you who think the whole idea of lists so noxious and boring that, even with the aforementioned meta commentary, you don’t know how you managed to get this far into the post.

New Year's Links: Elliott Bay Books, Amanda Knox, Netherland, eBooks, and more

December 26, 2009 By in Books, Links Leave a comment

* Nobody Told Me It’s Impossible, So I Did It.

* Why does it take so long to publish a book? As the article says:

“It’s not the technology that’s the problem; it’s the humans that are the problem,” said Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Twelve, which releases one title a month.

* Elliott Bay Books is moving from its home in Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill, about three blocks from where I used to live in Seattle. I visited the soon-to-be-old place two weeks ago:

* Netherland for great-novel status:

No novel better captures the background dread of everyday life these days — terrorism jitters, credit-default swaps, mutant flu strains — than Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland”. Like “The Great Gatsby” — to which it bears obvious resemblance — “Netherland” compresses the American experience into a critical mass, and then proceeds to pick it apart. Like Fitzgerald, O’Neill works principally with two characters: Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker living in New York whose wife has returned to London following 9/11, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant with countless moneymaking schemes, the grandest of which is the New York Cricket League.

Really?

* Is handwriting a hindrance to thinking?

* E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry.

* It’s an ominous sign when even the New York Times is publishing editorials like “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran,” that one way being military attack. What’s more frightening too is that the editorial’s logic, according to my limited understanding of the situation and of geopolitics, seems correct.

* Charities Rise, Costing U.S. Billions in Tax Breaks, according to the New York Times. If we can just work for 1% of those nonprofits, we’ll consider ourselves successful.

* Terry Teachout on “Technology and the End of Trend: A Critic Looks in Vain for Sweeping Movements: Now Artists Feed an Audience of Instantly Gratified Individualists.”

Our culture was always more diverse than the media let on, and now that anyone with a laptop has near-instant access to a near-infinite array of art objects, it’s becoming harder for anyone to sculpt the tastes of millions of people into anything remotely resembling a lemming-like consensus. America is well on the way to becoming a country of cultural individualists who want what they want when they want it.

* How China wrecked the Copenhagen talks.

* Ask an Academic: Why Women Have Sex talks to Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, who you might recognize from my mostly negative review of their book, “Why Women Have Sex.”

* Andrew Sullivan’s book The View From Your Window is attractive.

* Arizona’s completely bizarre criminal justice system, or lack thereof, has devolved into some kind of surreal play just this side of Kafka, as The Phoenix New Times describes. I’d excerpt a piece of the post, but it’s so strange as to resist summarization because of the bizarre accusations between levels of local government and law enforcement. The last line, however, is money:

By the time we reached the end of this press conference and read through the convoluted paperwork proffered by Thomas’ prosecutors, we only had one question: Where are the feds?

Another way of saying this is, “Where are the grownups?”

* Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times. Civil libertarians and patriots, sharpen your pitchforks and light your torches.

* Along those lines: Days of government regulation, from Philip Greenspun.

E-Readers: They’re Hot Now, But the Story Isn’t Over:

But e-reader buyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. While the shiny glass-and-metal reading gadgets offer some whiz-bang features like wirelessly downloading thousands of books, many also restrict the book-reading experience in ways that trusty paperbacks haven’t, such as limiting lending to a friend. E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.

“If you have the disposable income and love technology—not books—you should get a dedicated e-reader,” says Bob LiVolsi, the founder of BooksOnBoard, the largest independent e-book store. But other people might be better-off repurposing an old laptop or spending $300 on a cheap laptop known as a netbook to use for reading. “It will give you a lot more functionality, and better leverages the family income,” he says.

* The Amanda Knox case and gender politics.

Why de Botton (and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work)

December 22, 2009 By in Culture, Philosophy, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work has two wonderful passages on page 27: the first, concerning ship spotters—or those who watch and log ships coming in and out of a harbor:

They behave like a man who has fallen deeply in love and asks his companion if he might act on his emotions by measuring the distance between her elbow and her shoulder blade.

The ship spotters focus on statistics in large part because statistics can be found more readily than, say, aesthetic theories, or meta ideas about why we like spotting, or statistics, or fountain pens. Why do some of our activities, like ship spotting, dwell in the countable, while others, like love, tend to dwell in most people’s minds in the land of emotion? I say “most people’s mind” because some writers, like Tim Harford in The Logic of Life, have brought game theory to bear on love in the group sense in order to see what one might see.

De Botton has a partial answer:

It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.

He’s right, and I think this is why many book blogs tend pay disproportionate attention to, for example, the publishing industry or a writer’s habit than the works that the industry publishes or that the writer writes. It’s simply easier, to steal de Botton’s accurate word, to deal with systematic issues than to analyze why de Botton’s simile of the lover works so well, which at bottom might be simply “because it does,” or an unattractive analysis of how something is both like and unlike something else. Like explaining a joke, such an analysis might render the subject being analyzed dead, and thus no longer worthy of analysis.

James Cameron's Avatar

December 21, 2009 By in Links, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

“Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script.”

—Alas: it appears that James Cameron’s Avatar is all technical achievement and no story. This is the cinematic equivalent of what I wrote about here with regards to literature.

EDIT: I saw the movie anyway and wrote about it here.

Rereading A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance

December 12, 2009 By in Academia, Books Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The key moment in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance comes when Roland Mitchell, a prematurely desiccated academic, wonders why he might have stolen letters written by an invented 19th Century poet from the British Library. In explaining why, he says, “Because they were alive. They seemed urgent[….]” Nothing else in his life does, which straddles comedy and sadness. The act propels the action of the novel as well as a return of urgency and of discovery to his own life, implying that when we lack such attributes, we begin to die ourselves.

I’ve previously discussed Possession here), and the novel concerns academics who begin emotionally dead, and their intellects are perilously close to the same state. The key to their resurrection—their return to what one might skeptically call “the real world”—comes in an act of very minor theft by Roland. It’s out of character but brings him rolling to a beautiful academic, to a secret, and to the double discovery of his own romance and of someone else’s. Tracing the path of another person’s romance teaches him how to live his own; without that signal, perhaps he would remain among the academic undead, or the undead more generally. A rare forbidden act—sex has lost its forbiddenness, so theft of an academic nature will have to do—has a rejuvenating effect, reminding us of the limits and limiting nature of bounds and boundaries, sexual, textual, and otherwise. For a novel that is composed heavily of invented texts, stealing carries a larger moral rigor that it might otherwise not, and it helps Roland see his own life and work in way that is, again, finally, urgent.

Nuts: The Barnes and Noble Nook isn't very good

December 10, 2009 By in Computers/Apple, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

The Barnes and Noble Nook isn’t ready for prime time, according to David Pogue of the New York Times. Walter Mossberg of the WSJ agrees. Too bad: I was thinking about buying one, mostly for the .pdf capabilities, but I think I’ll wait—maybe for Kindle 3. I don’t think the Kindle’s current and potential dominance of the eBook market is good for books or consumers, and part of the reason that the Nook attracted me is precisely because it represents a real competitor to the Kindle. But these reviews indicate that the Nook was either rushed to market or poorly tested.

The .pdf issue is important to me because I’m a grad student in English and have to read a steadily larger number of articles and book chapters. Most get printed, but I no longer have the physical capacity to store, organize, and carry all of them, which makes something like the Kindle or Nook appealing, despite my reservations concerning the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). By the way, you might want to check out the comments section on my post “New Kindle, same problems,” as Jason Fisher and Maggie Brookes have been talking books, ebooks, and culture in that space.

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming – Peter Seibel

December 8, 2009 By in Books, Computers/Apple, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Coders at Work is consciously modeled on the Paris Review Interviews with famous writers and comes out better for it. The interviews are deep, thoughtful, wide-ranging, and show strong opinions without pedantry or needless prejudice. Many such opinions aren’t unique to programming or can be transferred easily to a wider domain area; Dan Ingalls, for example, says that “[M]y feeling about the powerful ideas that are necessary to lead a good life, it’s not clear how many of them are in this space,” this space being the intersection of computers and math. The expression is a bit awkward, which shouldn’t be surprising given that these interviews were conducted in person, but the idea of tremendous respect for powerful ideas is an attractive one that’s expressed over and over in these essays.

Coders at Work is surprisingly fun and useful, even for people whose connection to computer science is tenuous, chiefly because its metaphors and ideas about work and beauty travel. The author’s bio says, “An English major and would-be journalist in college, Peter was seduced by the web […]” and eventually became a hacker. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, I see a lot of ideas that one can apply to writing in this book. Joe Armstrong says that writing is an essential skill for programmers, and he says that writing is “actually very difficult to teach because it’s very individual.” Since I teach writing, that resonates with me, but it seems that coding is equally difficult if not quite equally individual, but the difficulty in learning both seems like a similar problem space. I write this from the position of someone with about a dilettante’s Computer Science 102 view of these things, but I see nothing in Coders at Work that’s incompatible with such a view. Both hacking and writing seem like what I call “10,000-hour problems,” or those that will require that much time to master. Ingalls implicitly agrees:

[…] I still love to just take a problem and sit down and pore over it until it’s right. There’s an analogy here: I tried to learn to play the piano fairly late in life. People said, “Oh, you should learn when you’re young. You learn so much quicker.” Although I didn’t go very far, my conclusion was that it isn’t that young people learn that much faster; it’s just they have more time. When I would put time in, I made progress.

I feel a bit the same thing with programming. When I look back on earlier times in my life, I had all the time I wanted. I would just work and work. Now there are other things going on in my life and I’ve got responsibilities that aren’t just programming. That undermines a bit of that intense focus.

Replace “programming” with “writing,” and I think the ideas about the process of learning stand. Ideas about beauty seem to transfer as well. L. Peter Deutsch says, “[… I]t’s just seeing anything around me that’s being done badly has always offended me mightily, so I thought I could do better.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Deutsch also says:

As crazy as it may seem now, a lot of my motivation for going into software in the first place was that I thought you could actually make the world a better place by doing it. I don’t believe that anymore. Not really. Not in the same way.

Maybe not: but I suspect that we make the world a better place by becoming really, really good at something—so good that no one else can do it as well as us, or some small coterie of skills that interact with one another—and then ultimately teach others that skill or suite of skills too.

The dominant idea in Coders at Work is not how to apply the skills once you have them, but the challenge and process of acquiring those skills. The coders interviewed acquire and apply them in diverse ways, but the dominant theme in all of them is starting early and intense, dedicated work. There is no other way to learn and to develop “Taste for Makers.”

One question is why more people don’t find and excel in coding, or in any particular, demanding field. Donald Knuth speculates that only about 2% of the population has the aptitude and desire for coding. Maybe. And maybe some segments of the population are turned off by the culture or cultures of coding. In a blog post, Seibel wonders whether there are “Enough women in Coders at Work?” The obvious answer from a gender parity perspective is “no,” but from a practical prospective I’d observe that a) there has been an overly low proportion of women in computer science for as long as one can remember and b) many of the interviewees came of age in the 60s and 70s, when the problem was even worse than it was now because of other institutional and cultural barriers.

Fran Allen takes up some of these issues. But Seibel is also a writer, and not directly responsible for the number of prominent, expert women coders; the fact that the issue arises is a sign of progress. Still, it is not effective to order people to learn to code or to like to code any more than it is effective to order people to become writers; the best you can do is give them an environment conducive to growth and remove institutional barriers and see what happens. Maybe some of them will learn taste and, better still, beauty.

(You can—and should—also read Joel Spolsky’s take on Coders at Work. His point: sometimes you need people who get things done.)

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