Some ground rules for debate

For some reason, you've gotten into a debate with me about philosophy, software, psychology, history, life, the universe, and everything. Awesome!

Before we go any further, let's lay down a few ground rules to help ensure that we don't waste each other's time.

Rule 1: cogito ergo sum

If we debate long enough, it's possible that we'll become unhinged from reality and start to question everything. Perhaps the world is not what it seems. Maybe our senses are lying to us. What if this is all a dream? What if you're a figment of my imagination or I'm a figment of yours?

If we get to this point, we need to stop immediately, and back up.

All arguments boil down to just a single truth:

I think, therefore I am. - René Descartes

Unfortunately, this is not a particularly useful result. If we're going to have a debate, we need more than that.

I am, therefore I think

Even though I can't prove it, I'm going to assume that there is some sort of real world out there; that there isn't a robot deity keeping my brain trapped in a computer simulation; that my senses aren't lying to me all the time. I'm going to assume that the world is, more or less, what it seems, and our role is merely to do our best to adapt to it.

If we can't agree to these axioms, then we shouldn't waste any more time debating. If "I think, therefore I am" is the only thing you're willing to believe, then we won't make it very far anyway. After all, if everything is a lie, what could we possibly gain from a debate?

Rule 2: theories and models

Although I'll rely on some axioms as the basis for my reality, most of my claims will come from theories. I put this word in italics because it needs some explanation.

Outside of a scientific context, the word theory often means that something is uncertain or unproven. For example, people like to criticize the theory of evolution by saying "it's only a theory." 

This is an unfortunate mix-up because, in science, theory means something different. A theory is an explanation based on observation and experimentation that can be used to describe and predict something. 

In other words, a theory is a tool that you use. It is a model of reality that can be used to make predictions; whether or not the theory corresponds to some underlying truth about that reality is (almost) irrelevant.

In fact, I'll go one step further: 

All models are wrong, but some are useful. - George E.P. Box

Yep, all theories are wrong. And that's OK. For example, we know that the theory of gravity is wrong (see: general relativity); we know that Newton's laws of motion are wrong (see: special relativity); in fact, most of classical physics is wrong (see: quantum mechanics); there is a whole wiki page of superseded scientific theories. Nevertheless, all of these theories have been and continue to be incredibly useful, providing the essential tools for building airplanes, bridges, computers, spaceships, and understanding the universe.

The goal of a theory isn't to be right; after all, you can never really be right, as per rule 1. The goal of a theory is to be useful. The important question is not "is this theory correct" but rather, "does this theory let us make predictions about the world better than other theories"?

For example, the theory of evolution by natural selection lets us make some good predictions about how plant and animal species came to be and what will happen to them in the future. It may be only a theory, but it's a very useful one. On the other hand, intelligent design doesn't match our observations, isn't useful for making predictions, and therefore not a theory.

So, when you and I debate, it's not worth debating axioms, so all we can really do is debate theories. And we won't debate them based on the merit of whether they are true or not, but whether they are more useful than other theories.

Rule 3: the most important question

One final step before we can have a debate: you need to ask yourself a question. It's arguably the most important question in all of science, reason, and debate:

What would convince you that you're wrong?

Be honest. What facts, evidence, or events would convince you that your current stance in the debate is wrong? This question is the very basis of the scientific method.

If there is not a single thing in the world that could convince you that you're wrong, then your stance isn't a theory, but an article of faith. And faith cannot be debated.

What would convince an evolutionary scientist that the theory of evolution is totally wrong? That is, what would show that the theory of evolution is not a useful model? I can think of a few examples: discovering evidence that the earth was just a few thousand years old; observing a new species magically materialize with no connection to any other species; finding evidence that the entire fossil record is an elaborate hoax by the liberal media.

What would convince someone who believes in intelligent design that they are wrong? As far as I know, nothing. Apparently, numerous observations of natural selection in progress, mounds of data showing the earth is over 4 billion years old, an extensive fossil record, and countless examples of unintelligent design are not enough. This is yet another reason intelligent design is not a scientific theory and should not be taught as one in schools.

As long as a debate is about faith instead of theory, it is largely pointless, since there is nothing that can change either party's mind. This is why it's so painful to debate topics like abortion, conspiracy theories, politics, and religion.

Therefore, I propose that we only have a debate if both of us can identify, at least to ourselves, that there is at least one piece of evidence that could convince us that we're wrong.

Alright, let's do this

Made it this far?

Good.

Because I'm ready to put on a clinic.

I survived the 30 day blog fitness challenge

On July 7, Adam Nash, Mario Sundar and I started the 30 day blog fitness challenge. Today, I write my 30th blog post. For those of you keeping score at home, today is actually August 9th, so it took slightly longer than 30 days. Oh well, I'm just happy I made it.

To get here, I wrote about how much I suck at programming, the apocalypse, pulling all-nighters hacking, and doppelgängers. Occasionally, I resorted to posts that were almost entirely travel photos; at other times, I down right cheated. After one month, I managed to nearly double the number of posts in my 4 year old blog.

Let's take a look at the impact this had.

Traffic spike

Not many people read my blog. Or at least, they didn't, until shortly after this blog fitness challenge started on July 7. Since then, I've had far more traffic than usual; the absolute numbers are still nothing impressive, but it's a ~10x improvement over just about all previous months. I've only seen spikes in traffic like this twice: the most recent was from the "This is where I work" post, thanks to Jeff Weiner and other LinkedIn folks sharing it all over the place. As popular as that post was, it's only #2 all time. Can anyone guess what's #1?

Who's reading this stuff?
 

No surprises there: hello co-workers at LinkedIn! Thanks for stopping by. I must say that not only are you all good looking, but you also have great taste, both in blogs and in browsers. Seeing Internet Explorer at less than 9% of traffic makes me very happy. In fact, mobile traffic to my blog beats IE by 3%. Sweet!

Blog driven development

When you know you have to write a blog post every night, you start seeing the world a little differently. Every time I had an interesting thought, read a fascinating article or learned something new, I'd wonder if I could blog about it. Of course, being obsessed with lists, I'd write each of these ideas down in a Google Doc. The list is to 64 items now, half of which I wrote about in the last month and half of which are left over for future blogging.

One of the interesting results from this sort of thinking is what Adam described as "blog driven development". That is, when you start working on a new project, try to image out what the blog post will look like from day one. What will the title be? What are the 3-5 major points you'll highlight? What screenshots or media will you include? Working through these issues right up front is a powerful way to identify what's truly important for your project and can make it easier to prioritize and make good trade-offs.

Communication skillz

You know that whole communication thing they told you about in college? Turns out it really does matter. You see, software engineering involves far more than just writing code (although writing clean code is all about communicating your intent to other programmers). I spend a lot of my time at work discussing and debating ideas with co-workers, writing emails, IMing, filing bug reports, creating wiki pages, writing documentation, and putting together presentations. I've also become the editor for the LinkedIn Engineering Blog, which means I not only write my own entries, I also help other people write theirs.

The 30 day blog challenge proved to be a wonderful training ground for this role. Knowing I had to write an entry every night, regardless of how crazy my schedule was, taught me to write quickly, edit mercilessly, and just get things done. I've still got plenty to learn, but practice definitely makes perfect. 

New discoveries, new code

One of the delights of having a public blog are the times when someone responds to your writing.  There's a narcissistic component to it, but far more importantly, you often learn something from the replies. I got some great reading recommendations in one post, got in touch with several friends and co-workers who are interested in Crossfit from another post, and even had one of my project ideas that I hadn't had time to work on implemented for me as an open source project. How cool is that?

Time for a break

The 30 day blog fitness challenge was awesome. Kudos to Adam and Mario for suggesting it. Having said that, I'm pretty tired. I think it's time for a bit of a break to recharge and recover. But I'll be back soon. Got something you want me to write about? Let me know in the comments :)

The 30 day blog fitness challenge

At work, we recently started the 100 day burpee challenge. The rules are simple: on the first day, you do 1 burpee, on the second day, 2 burpees, on third day, 3 burpees, and so on up to day 100. If you miss a day, you have to make it up the next day: for example, if you miss day 50, you have to do 101 (50 + 51) burpees on day 51. The point of the challenge is to increase general fitness (burpees use the entire body), develop good habits, and learn the virtue of consistency.

Suffering through burpees near the end of a workout at the '10 Crossfit Games NorCal Qualifier

When Adam Nash found out about the burpee challenge, he laughed at me. I'm not sure if he was put off more by the word "burpee" or the sight of me jumping around like crazy next to my cubical. As a response, Adam, along with Mario Sundar, proposed a different challenge: a 30 day blog fitness challenge. The rules are, again, very simple: write one blog post, every day, for 30 days straight. If you miss a day, you have to make it up the next day. The purpose of this challenge is analogous: develop mental fitness (writing uses the entire brain), develop good habits, and learn the virtue of consistency.

It sounded nice until I realized that I'm supposed to keep pace with:

• Adam, a VP of Product, who already has a very active personal blog (1.7M hits!) and is a regular on the LinkedIn Blog 
• Mario, whose job title involves the phrase "Chief Blogger" and who isn't exactly a slouch on his personal blog 

And I'm supposed to do this all while writing code, winning hackdays and doing burpees? I've given it much deliberation, realized I've barely written 30 blog posts in the last 4 years, tallied up all 3 people that read my blog (hi mom!), checked my busy schedule, and made a decision.

Bring it on.

I'm unquestionably the dark horse in the race, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

1. The fact that almost no one reads my blog is a benefit: I can afford to write crap and no one will notice.
2. I have a very high pain tolerance. See burpee video above.
3. I fully intend on cheating. Meta-posts of this sort are just the beginning.

And so, dear reader(s), prepare yourselves for 29 more consecutive days of blog posts, featuring exciting topics ranging from Crossfit, to game mechanics, to open source software. Oh, and burpees.

Flatland and my adventures in Stanford's libraries

I almost forgot to post this tale, but I recently ran across the relevant photos on my phone and knew I had to write something.

A few months ago, in preparation for a trip up to Sonoma, Molly and I were at the Stanford Library to pick out a few books. Susan's house in Healdsburg is one of the few places I actually take the time to read, as opposed to listening to audiobooks; after a day of biking, wine tasting and swimming, there is nothing better than relaxing by the pool with a good story. Except the massages. But that's a different story.

The pool

I keep track of all the books I read - and all the books I want to read - on Visual Bookshelf, so I had my list ready when we got to the library. I found the nearest computer and began to search. First up was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. They had a copy, but it seemed to be on hold. Next up: The Pragmatic Programmer. Somebody already had it out. I then tried Xenocide, the 3rd book in the Ender's Game series. They had it! I wrote down the call number and headed down to the stacks with Molly.

20 minutes later, we came back to the terminal empty handed. The book was nowhere to be found. I continued searching. The Island? Out. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest? Lost. I tried a few more and finally got a hit for One Hundred Years of Solitude in another library. We wandered over there and, sure enough, it was missing from the shelves. How could this be? A world class library and I can't find a single thing to read? Close to giving up, I decided to look up one final book: Flatland. It was available, but hidden away somewhere in the basement. Expecting more failure, we headed down.

We found ourselves in a large room with a dark red carpet, low ceilings with exposed pipes jutting out and sliding stacks. We followed the call number to the proper shelf and, to our great astonishment, the book was there!

Success! I was just about to head out when one of the pages caught my attention. I opened the book up to take a closer look and this is what I found:

Scribbles. I flipped the page and found more scribbles. I flipped through the whole thing and it was nothing but jagged lines. Every. Single. Page. At this point, I was sure that I had lost my mind. Perchance to Dream anyone?

Molly captured on camera the split second when I totally, utterly cracked.

As it turns out, instead of the real Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, I had stumbled across some modern art/poetry thing with the exact same title. The "author" explains on his webpage:

For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a representation of each letter’s occurrence across every page of text. The generated result is a series of superimposed seismographic images which reduce the text in question into a  two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports.

How the hell does this crap get published? Why did Stanford buy it? WHY?

I left the library that day without a book and quite shaken by the experience. Fortunately, time heals all wounds. Time, and a nice bottle of wine.

Title goes here

This is an essay I wrote during an all-nighter for a Freshmen Writing Seminar at Cornell in 2002. The professor was not impressed, but I got a kick out of re-reading it today and thought others might enjoy it too. This thing really brings me back to freshmen year in Court Hall...

Title Goes Here

As I sit here, at 2:00AM, with nothing but the sound of my keyboard keys clicking, and the cool breeze blowing across my neck, I begin to wonder how much more pleasant my night would’ve been had I not decided that a karate match with two of my suitemates would be the appropriate activity at 9:00PM. Granted, blasting "Everybody Loves Kung Fu Fighting" and jumping around the study lounge throwing wild kicks was far more amusing, but the difficulty I’m now having in keeping my eyes open gives me an inkling that maybe my time could have been used a bit more wisely.

If there’s something every student learns the hard way, it’s that time management consists of more than writing out "lists," creatively doodling in the day planner and sticking yellow post it notes all over the monitor; it’s actually carrying through that’s the hard part. As my friend George – having spent another four ungodly hours doing Latin, uttering all the random declensions: "amicus… amici… amico… amicum… ami… a, who am I kidding" – comes in and collapses, face down on my floor, I begin to wonder if maybe we’re doing something wrong. It then slowly dawns on me that it’s what we’re not doing that is wrong: that is, homework, studying, sleeping, eating, and all the good stuff my mom yelled at me for.

Speaking of yelling, some hall mates a few doors down are now having their game of "penis" (where the goal is to have 2 people, one at a time, say the word "penis" slightly louder than the previous until they’re too embarrassed to continue) culminate to a screaming finally; ah, the nighttime sounds of Court Hall. Err, right, back to the topic on hand. Actually, perhaps that’s the problem – every little thing, whether it be study lounge kick boxing, a thought provoking game of "penis," or simply ignoring the collapsed Latin student on your floor to see which one of you will crack first and start laughing – just about everything seems more interesting than homework. 

Maybe it’s that my door is open… always open; at least the "Cornell Policy Book" is being put to good use as my doorstop. Or maybe it’s that I can’t stop making three dimensional structures out of the collection of pennies on my desk; I am an engineer after all. Anita adds "maybe it’s just me, standing here and talking, watching you type this essay." Yeah, that’s got to be it. It’s all Anita’s fault. Everything. 

Or perhaps it’s that I keep conducting "research" of procrastinology; a few minutes in the study lounge talking to Adrienne, Nabil and Ian has given me much useful data: for example, 10 minutes can vanish in just a single blink; Nabil can be exceptionally funny at 2:30AM; clocks put fascinating thoughts in my head, such as "this essay is due 11 hours and 55 minutes." Jeremy informs me that, "your arithmetic sucks – you have 10 hours and 55 minutes."

And that’s the main symptom of procrastinitis – not until some critical time limit is hit, for some 1 day, for others 1 hour, do the diseased show any visible signs. Then, all at once, the panicking and frantic rush to do everything begins. Side effects include sweaty palms, trembling hands, extreme irritability, lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of bathroom breaks, lack of synonyms and, of course, the caffeine addiction. But if you order now, we’ll not only double your order of ProcrastiNot, we’ll even include the caffeine IV for free!

Sounds of drunks, wandering the streets at night, filter into my room; some guy, singing "You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling" much akin to the sounds of a dying cat, prompts me to get up and shut the windows. As I do so, I can’t help but notice the picture of modern art lying on my desk – the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol. Nothing more than the red and white can with black text reading "Campbell’s Condensed Soup – old fashioned vegetable made with beef stock," but revered nonetheless by critics of modern art. Perhaps, procrastination is an art form too – knowing exactly how much time you can waste to put yourself in the perfect situation, where the pressure is on, the clock ticking, but the work is getting done – that can be classified as nothing other than the work of a master, even if considered as nothing but ordinary laziness by those who can’t appreciate our talent. 

What everyone can appreciate, however, is that procrastination, in moderation, does allow us to maintain at least a small level of sanity. Few things are as relaxing as sitting down in the middle of the day, taking a deep breath, and realizing that you have to do absolutely nothing. A kind of mental clarity arises, much akin to the feeling of taking a deep breath after swimming underwater for a long time, that truly rests the soul and calms the mind. Granted, it’s almost always ruined by the sad realization that if there’s nothing due tomorrow, then there’s surely twice as much due the day after, but for that one moment, life is sweet.

Democritus told us that "actions always planned are never completed." For example, I planned to do this essay Wednesday; now, it’s technically Friday. Provided the Sobe Green Tea has as much caffeine as my twitching eye would suggest, I’ll hopefully have this done before sunrise. But how did I get here? What earth shattering event could’ve prevented me from carrying out my well devised plan?

That would be sin number 5, sloth. By nature humans are lazy; or, perhaps more specifically, everything in nature is lazy. Lightning always takes the shortest path to the ground, objects at rest will remain at rest, there are even whole branches of mathematics devoted to researching optimum control – in other words, the quickest and easiest way to do anything. Human beings will do everything to avoid doing anything – which is why procrastination may be the most contagious disease known to man. As of today, there is no known cure.

And perhaps the most ironic part of all is that laziness can often make one do more work: we’ll spend hours searching the entire house for the remote, just so we don’t have to get up to change the channel; we’ll contort our body in every direction to reach a dropped item on the floor, but would never dare to get up and pick it up; and we’ll always wait till the last minute to do anything, consequently taking twice as long due to sheer exhaustion and being over whelmed. And sadly, procrastinitis does have one more serious side effect: extreme nearsightedness. Once infected, we live only in the present, being able to see but a few feet beyond our noses. As the brain attempts to block out the assignment at hand, every little detail around us becomes vibrant and engulfs our attention; even turning the dial on my watch and listening to the therapeutic clicks as the titanium bezel rotates manages to steal my attention for a few minutes. The real decision with procrastination, if we ever get around to actually figuring it out, is whether the pleasure of now is worth the headache of later.

If I hadn’t been so "busy" watching the movie "Swingers" on Wednesday but had instead even written half of this essay, three interesting things would’ve happened: first, I probably would’ve picked a totally different topic. Second, I might’ve had a more fun night, perhaps even performing a duet of "You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling." And third, I might not have been too lazy to write a conclusion.