Klarinet Archive - Posting 000709.txt from 1999/11

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: RE: [kl] Dichotomitis
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 06:17:59 -0500

On Mon, 15 Nov 1999 16:12:44 -0800, kevinfay@-----.com said:

> What follows is a short epistle to give the other listmates some idea
> of what Tony and I are sniping about. (In reading it, please remember
> who I work for. I'm happily assimilated into the Borg, and don't at
> all pretend to be unbiased).

There are a lot of straw men in 'what follows'.

All I have wanted to say is that when you are dealing with increasingly
complex systems, on which the world increasingly relies, it makes sense
to use a model of enquiry that allows the parallel debugging talents of
the world community to correct errors, as in open science, rather than
use a model of enquiry that relies on a closed and inevitably
self-interested group of people trying to maximise profit, in the hope
that that will be sufficient for them to make the correct decisions that
affect us all.

My view is that we are best served by supporting the first model of
enquiry rather than the second, or at least being willing to
investigate whether that may be the case.

I'm quite entitled to say this without being lumped together with
religious fanatics and 'not-fair' criers.

In fact, if there is a 'religious' attitude anywhere, it's the religion
of 'the marketplace as the necessary provider of the solution to our
problems', rather than merely the one of the contexts in which we may
try to solve them.

> A loose practical translation of Tony's assertion about software above
> is that Microsoft software sucks (i.e., is inevitably of low quality)
> because it's not open source. Because we own it, it can't be good.

No. I'm reliably told that it *is* of quite low quality, some of it (I
don't use it myself) but as you say, it's difficult as yet for personal
users to appreciate the alternatives. That will come, though, even
against M$oft manoeuvres and market forces.

(My ISP is having a lot of trouble with their M$ software at the moment,
but they maintain it's better than say, Apache (have I got that right,
Mark? Could an ISP use just Apache?) I'm not so sure. Someone who's
become relatively expert at dealing with mines may not be so welcoming
of minesweepers.)

I wasn't complaining about profit in itself, except insofar as it is
made the *primary* objective in this case.

> There are actually two levels to the issue. First, one must accept
> that there could be activities so important that an open ownership
> model is necessary. Tony posits bioengineering. Personally, I don't
> buy into the argument -- too many drugs and other biomedical advances
> have been created with profit making as a primary motivation for me to
> say that all medicine needs to be done on a non-profit basis.

I wasn't talking about drugs: I was talking about genetic engineering,
which is a whole order of magnitude more complex.

> The second level of the problem is the assertion that computer
> software is one of the areas where open ownership is to be enforced.

Well, no, but certainly to be argued for, and perhaps even to be given a
chance against dirty tricks.

I think, as you say, it depends on who you spend your time with, really,
Kevin. If you talk to professional scientists, struggling to defend
basic (and therefore within the business model mostly unjustifiable)
research, and to get their most talented students any sort of a grant,
then you start to have a different slant on the benificence of the
business model in complex situations.

You start to get a feel for the fact that at the limits of our
understanding of complex systems -- for example the upper atmosphere --
there are dangers that we cannot say for certain will not overwhelm us
unexpectedly. You start to get a feel for the idea that the best way to
find out about these things may not be to leave the circumstances of
their investigation to be controlled by market forces, which inevitably
encourage interested parties to 'buy' their own 'scientific' opinions in
order to protect themselves.

We now know that even market forces themselves are 'chaotically complex'
in a technical sense, which means that under certain circumstances they
may be wildly unpredictable.

On the other hand, if you're part of defending an opportunistic,
monopolistic, even braying business concern, then you see things
differently, I'm sure.

The business model has served us in many ways. But it is intellectually
criminal, and unscientific, to assume that it will always do so.

(For anyone interested in this topic, there are three papers written by
Prof. Michael McIntyre, very interesting also about music, called
'Lucidity and Science' at http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/
If you're not particularly interested, it's worth a visit just for the
'walking lights' demo, which appears immediately.)

Another point. There appears to be a tendency to derive an 'ought' from
an 'is', here. If I say that something other than a business model is
desirable, I am told that what I am saying is not what actually occurs
in business, and that I need to be realistic.

But discussing what we ought to do is different from saying what we do
do. (This sort of consideration came up in the 'legal' thread about
touching students, too.)

People can have motivations, and defensible motivations, other than
business ones. I'm surprised that this isn't more appreciated on a list
devoted to music.

...though on second thoughts, it's *not* so devoted to music, is it?-)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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