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November 2005Does "Web 2.0" mean anything?  Till recently I thought it didn't,
but the truth turns out to be more complicated.  Originally, yes,
it was meaningless.  Now it seems to have acquired a meaning.  And
yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it
means what I think it does, we don't need it.I first heard the phrase "Web 2.0" in the name of the Web 2.0
conference in 2004.  At the time it was supposed to mean using "the
web as a platform," which I took to refer to web-based applications.
[1]So I was surprised at a conference this summer when Tim O'Reilly
led a session intended to figure out a definition of "Web 2.0."
Didn't it already mean using the web as a platform?  And if it
didn't already mean something, why did we need the phrase at all?OriginsTim says the phrase "Web 2.0" first
arose in "a brainstorming session between
O'Reilly and Medialive International." What is Medialive International?
"Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences," according to
their site.  So presumably that's what this brainstorming session
was about.  O'Reilly wanted to organize a conference about the web,
and they were wondering what to call it.I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a
new version of the web.  They just wanted to make the point
that the web mattered again.  It was a kind of semantic deficit
spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred
to whatever those might turn out to be.And they were right.  New things were coming.  But the new version
number led to some awkwardness in the short term.  In the process
of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have
decided they'd better take a stab at explaining what that "2.0"
referred to.  Whatever it meant, "the web as a platform" was at
least not too constricting.The story about "Web 2.0" meaning the web as a platform didn't live
much past the first conference.  By the second conference, what
"Web 2.0" seemed to mean was something about democracy.  At least,
it did when people wrote about it online.  The conference itself
didn't seem very grassroots.  It cost $2800, so the only people who
could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel's article
about the conference in Wired News spoke of "throngs of
geeks."  When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news
to him.  He said he'd originally written something like "throngs
of VCs and biz dev guys" but had later shortened it just to "throngs,"
and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into
"throngs of geeks."  After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably
be full of geeks, right?Well, no.  There were about 7.  Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a
suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first.  I saw
him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people "that guy looks
just like Tim.""Oh, that's Tim.  He bought a suit."
I ran after him, and sure enough, it was.  He explained that he'd
just bought it in Thailand.The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows
during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot
startup.  There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large
number of people determined not to miss out.  Miss out on what?
They didn't know.  Whatever was going to happen—whatever Web 2.0
turned out to be.I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager
to invest again.  The Internet is a genuinely big deal.  The bust
was as much an overreaction as
the boom.  It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of
the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there
was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression.The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO
market is gone.  Venture investors
are driven by exit strategies.  The reason they were funding all
those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped
to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing
all the way to the bank.  Now that route is closed.  Now the default
exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to
irrational exuberance than IPO investors.  The closest you'll get
to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for
Myspace.  That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.1. AjaxDoes "Web 2.0" mean anything more than the name of a conference
yet?  I don't like to admit it, but it's starting to.  When people
say "Web 2.0" now, I have some idea what they mean.  And the fact
that I both despise the phrase and understand it is the surest proof
that it has started to mean something.One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still
only just bear to use without scare quotes.  Basically, what "Ajax"
means is "Javascript now works."  And that in turn means that
web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop
ones.As you read this, a whole new generation
of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax.  There
hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers
first appeared.  Even Microsoft sees it, but it's too late for them
to do anything more than leak "internal"
documents designed to give the impression they're on top of this
new trend.In fact the new generation of software is being written way too
fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own
in house.  Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups
before Google does.  And even that's going to be hard, because
Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did
in search a few years ago.  After all, Google Maps, the canonical
Ajax application, was the result of a startup they bought.So ironically the original description of the Web 2.0 conference
turned out to be partially right: web-based applications are a big
component of Web 2.0.  But I'm convinced they got this right by
accident.  The Ajax boom didn't start till early 2005, when Google
Maps appeared and the term "Ajax" was coined.2. DemocracyThe second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy.  We now have several
examples to prove that amateurs can
surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to
channel their efforts.  Wikipedia
may be the most famous.  Experts have given Wikipedia middling
reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough.  And
it's free, which means people actually read it.  On the web, articles
you have to pay for might as well not exist.  Even if you were
willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them.
They're not part of the conversation.Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as
news.  I never look at any news site now except Reddit.
[2]
 I know if something major
happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it
will show up there.  Why bother checking the front page of any
specific paper or magazine?  Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole
web, with a filter for quality.  Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's
rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative
bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement.  And whereas
Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these
sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human
editors.The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection
of ideas, but their production.
I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's
sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers
and magazines.  And now I have independent evidence: the top links
on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather
than to magazine articles or news stories.My experience of writing
for magazines suggests an explanation.  Editors.  They control the
topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever
you produce.  The result is to damp extremes.  Editing yields 95th
percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are
dragged down.  5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."On the web, people can publish whatever they want.  Nearly all of
it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications.
But the pool of writers is very, very large.  If it's large enough,
the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass
the best in print.
[3]
And now that the web has evolved mechanisms
for selecting good stuff, the web wins net.  Selection beats damping,
for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.Even the startups are different this time around.  They are to the
startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media.  During
the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was
blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big
fast" in the most literal sense.  Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just
decided to make something great.  They'll decide later if they want
to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on
their terms.3. Don't Maltreat UsersI think everyone would agree that democracy and Ajax are elements
of "Web 2.0."  I also see a third: not to maltreat users.  During
the Bubble a lot of popular sites were quite high-handed with users.
And not just in obvious ways, like making them register, or subjecting
them to annoying ads.  The very design of the average site in the
late 90s was an abuse.  Many of the most popular sites were loaded
with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the
user the message: this is our site, not yours.  (There's a physical
analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some
laptops.)I think the root of the problem was that sites felt they were giving
something away for free, and till recently a company giving anything
away for free could be pretty high-handed about it.  Sometimes it
reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the
more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them.
The most dramatic remnant of this model may be at salon.com, where
you can read the beginning of a story, but to get the rest you have
sit through a movie.At Y Combinator we advise all the startups we fund never to lord
it over users.  Never make users register, unless you need to in
order to store something for them.  If you do make users register,
never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact,
don't even ask for their email address unless you need it for some
reason.  Don't ask them any unnecessary questions.  Never send them
email unless they explicitly ask for it.  Never frame pages you
link to, or open them in new windows.  If you have a free version
and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted.  And
if you find yourself asking "should we allow users to do x?" just
answer "yes" whenever you're unsure.  Err on the side of generosity.In How to Start a Startup I advised startups
never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other
company offer a cheaper, easier solution.  Another way to fly low
is to give users more power.  Let users do what they want.  If you
don't and a competitor does, you're in trouble.iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense.  Finally you can buy individual
songs instead of having to buy whole albums.  The recording industry
hated the idea and resisted it as long as possible.  But it was
obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels.
[4]
Though really it might be better to describe iTunes as Web 1.5.
Web 2.0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving
away DRMless songs for free.The ultimate way to be nice to users is to give them something for
free that competitors charge for.  During the 90s a lot of people
probably thought we'd have some working system for micropayments
by now.  In fact things have gone in the other direction.  The most
successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff
away for free.  Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad
sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the
previous generation of dating sites.Serving web pages is very, very cheap.  If you can make even a
fraction of a cent per page view, you can make a profit.  And
technology for targeting ads continues to improve.  I wouldn't be
surprised if ten years from now eBay had been supplanted by an
ad-supported freeBay (or, more likely, gBay).Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to
make as little money as possible.  If you can figure out a way to
turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry,
so much the better, if all fifty million go to you.  Though indeed,
making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the
end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more
jobs.The ultimate target is Microsoft.  What a bang that balloon is going
to make when someone pops it by offering a free web-based alternative
to MS Office.
[5]
Who will?  Google?  They seem to be taking their
time.  I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of 20 year old
hackers who are too naive to be intimidated by the idea.  (How hard
can it be?)The Common ThreadAjax, democracy, and not dissing users.  What do they all have in
common?  I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently,
which is one of the reasons I disliked the term "Web 2.0" so much.
It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened
to be new—that it didn't predict anything.But there is a common thread.  Web 2.0 means using the web the way
it's meant to be used.  The "trends" we're seeing now are simply
the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models
that got imposed on it during the Bubble.I realized this when I read an  interview with
Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite.
[6]

  Excite really never got the business model right at all.  We fell
  into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it
  adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old
  medium—which fails, and then the more appropriate models get
  figured out.

It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years
after the Bubble burst.  But in retrospect, something was happening:
the web was finding its natural angle of repose.  The democracy
component, for example—that's not an innovation, in the sense of
something someone made happen.  That's what the web naturally tends
to produce.Ditto for the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the
web.  That idea is almost as old as the web.  But the first time
around it was co-opted by Sun, and we got Java applets.  Java has
since been remade into a generic replacement for C++, but in 1996
the story about Java was that it represented a new model of software.
Instead of desktop applications, you'd run Java "applets" delivered
from a server.This plan collapsed under its own weight. Microsoft helped kill it,
but it would have died anyway.  There was no uptake among hackers.
When you find PR firms promoting
something as the next development platform, you can be sure it's
not.  If it were, you wouldn't need PR firms to tell you, because
hackers would already be writing stuff on top of it, the way sites
like Busmonster used Google Maps as a
platform before Google even meant it to be one.The proof that Ajax is the next hot platform is that thousands of
hackers have spontaneously started building things on top
of it.  Mikey likes it.There's another thing all three components of Web 2.0 have in common.
Here's a clue.  Suppose you approached investors with the following
idea for a Web 2.0 startup:

  Sites like del.icio.us and flickr allow users to "tag" content
  with descriptive tokens.  But there is also huge source of
  implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links.
  Moreover, these links represent a social network connecting the
  individuals and organizations who created the pages, and by using
  graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the
  reputation of each member.  We plan to mine the web for these
  implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy
  they embody to enhance web searches.

How long do you think it would take them on average to realize that
it was a description of Google?Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core
business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms,
"Don't maltreat users" is a subset of "Don't be evil," and of course
Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google
does.  That's their secret.    They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting
becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or
trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and
the record labels.
[7]Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way.  They try
to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing
there when it does.  That's the way to approach technology—and
as business includes an ever larger technological component, the
right way to do business.The fact that Google is a "Web 2.0" company shows that, while
meaningful, the term is also rather bogus.  It's like the word
"allopathic."  It just means doing things right, and it's a bad
sign when you have a special word for that.
Notes[1]
From the conference
site, June 2004: "While the first wave of the Web was closely
tied to the browser, the second wave extends applications across
the web and enables a new generation of services and business
opportunities."  To the extent this means anything, it seems to be
about
web-based applications.[2]
Disclosure: Reddit was funded by
Y Combinator.  But although
I started using it out of loyalty to the home team, I've become a
genuine addict.  While we're at it, I'm also an investor in
!MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.[3]
I'm not against editing. I spend more time editing than
writing, and I have a group of picky friends who proofread almost
everything I write.  What I dislike is editing done after the fact
by someone else.[4]
Obvious is an understatement.  Users had been climbing in through
the window for years before Apple finally moved the door.[5]
Hint: the way to create a web-based alternative to Office may
not be to write every component yourself, but to establish a protocol
for web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across
multiple servers.  Or it may be to write it all yourself.[6]
In Jessica Livingston's
Founders at
Work.[7]
Microsoft didn't sue their customers directly, but they seem
to have done all they could to help SCO sue them.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Peter
Norvig, Aaron Swartz, and Jeff Weiner for reading drafts of this, and to the
guys at O'Reilly and Adaptive Path for answering my questions.


addiction

July 2010What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is
that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.
Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are.  And the
scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.We wouldn't want to stop it.  It's the same process that cures
diseases: technological progress.  Technological progress means
making things do more of what we want.  When the thing we want is
something we want to want, we consider technological progress good.
If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that
seems strictly better.  When progress concentrates something we
don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems
bad.  But it's the same process at work.
[1]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing
numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like
too much.
[2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.
The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has
become increasingly common during my lifetime.  And it's clear why:
there are an increasing number of things we need it for.  At the
extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth.  Food has been
transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in
food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the
buck, and you can see the results in any town in America.  Checkers
and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille.
TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.   And unless
the forms of technological progress that produced these things are
subject to different laws than technological progress in general,
the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did
in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.  I don't
mean to imply they're all to be avoided.  Alcohol is a dangerous
drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.
Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful.
More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful
about.Most people won't, unfortunately.  Which means that as the world
becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a
normal life will be driven ever further apart.  One sense of "normal"
is statistically normal: what everyone else does.  The other is the
sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a
piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart.  Already someone
trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of
the US.  That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced.
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if
people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things.
I've seen that happen with cigarettes.  When cigarettes first
appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through
a previously isolated population.  Smoking rapidly became a
(statistically) normal thing.  There were ashtrays everywhere.  We
had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of
my parents smoked.  You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed.
In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something
that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something
movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of
addicts do outside the doors of office buildings.  A lot of the
change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation
couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though—on the order of 100 years.  And unless the
rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the
accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new
addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to
protect us.
[3]
Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine
of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a
lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselves
what to avoid and how.  It will actually become a reasonable strategy
(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect
everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough.  We'll have to worry not just
about new things, but also about existing things becoming more
addictive.  That's what bit me.  I've avoided most addictions, but
the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using
it.
[4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction.  We're
all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.
That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I
want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.
[5]
My latest trick is taking long hikes.  I used to think running was a
better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time.  Now
the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I
spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it?  It always will when you're
trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide
you.  Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric.
But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this
kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate
of anyone who wants to get things done.  We'll increasingly be
defined by what we say no to.
Notes[1]
Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you
wanted it?  Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state.
And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects.
"Good" and "bad" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated,
so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the
former.  And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs"
show, bans often do more harm than good.[2]
Technology has always been accelerating.  By Paleolithic
standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic
period.[3]
Unless we mass produce social customs.  I suspect the recent
resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction
to drugs.  In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if
their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God.  But
that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to
say no to drugs.  You end up saying no to
science as well.
I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people
plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books
a package tour.  Or worse still, has one booked for them by the
government.[4]
People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe
what they do on the Internet.  It seems to me too mild to describe
what's happening as merely not-doing-work.  We don't call it
procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.[5]
Several people have told me they like the iPad because it
lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would
be too conspicuous.  In other words, it's a hip flask.  (This is
true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as
obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those.)Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


philosophy

September 2007In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others.  One of the
less honorable was to shock people.  College was regarded as job
training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively
impractical thing to do.  Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes
or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms
of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion.But I had some more honest motives as well.  I thought studying
philosophy would be a shortcut straight to wisdom.  All the people
majoring in other things would just end up with a bunch of domain
knowledge.  I would be learning what was really what.I'd tried to read a few philosophy books.  Not recent ones; you
wouldn't find those in our high school library.  But I tried to
read Plato and Aristotle.  I doubt I believed I understood them,
but they sounded like they were talking about something important.
I assumed I'd learn what in college.The summer before senior year I took some college classes.  I learned
a lot in the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy
101.  And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact.  It was
my fault I hadn't learned anything.  I hadn't read the books we
were assigned carefully enough.  I'd give Berkeley's Principles
of Human Knowledge another shot in college.  Anything so admired
and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley.  I have
a nice edition of his collected works.  Will I ever read it?  Seems
unlikely.The difference between then and now is that now I understand why
Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand.  I think I see
now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.WordsI did end up being a philosophy major for most of college.  It
didn't work out as I'd hoped.  I didn't learn any magical truths
compared to which everything else was mere domain knowledge.  But
I do at least know now why I didn't.  Philosophy doesn't really
have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other
university subjects do.  There is no core of knowledge one must
master.  The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various
individual philosophers have said about different topics over the
years.  Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten
who discovered what they discovered.Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in
logic.  I don't know if I learned anything from them.
[1]
It does seem to me very important to be able to flip ideas around in
one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of
possibilities, or when one idea is the same as another but with a
couple things changed.  But did studying logic teach me the importance
of thinking this way, or make me any better at it?  I don't know.There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy.  The
most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of
freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker.  I learned
that I don't exist.  I am (and you are) a collection of cells that
lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I.  But
there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with.
You could conceivably lose half your brain and live.  Which means
your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each
transplanted into different bodies.  Imagine waking up after such
an operation.  You have to imagine being two people.The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life
are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard.  Even a concept as
dear to us as I.  It took me a while to grasp this, but when I
did it was fairly sudden, like someone in the nineteenth century
grasping evolution and realizing the story of creation they'd been
told as a child was all wrong.
[2]
Outside of math there's a limit
to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad
definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise
meanings.  Everyday words are inherently imprecise.  They work well
enough in everyday life that you don't notice.  Words seem to work,
just as Newtonian physics seems to.  But you can always make them
break if you push them far enough.I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the
central fact of philosophy.  Most philosophical debates are not
merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words.  Do we
have free will?  Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas
exist?  Depends what you mean by "exist."Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical
controversies are due to confusions over language.  I'm not sure
how much credit to give him.  I suspect a lot of people realized
this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than
becoming philosophy professors.How did things get this way?  Can something people have spent
thousands of years studying really be a waste of time?  Those are
interesting questions.  In fact, some of the most interesting
questions you can ask about philosophy.  The most valuable way to
approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get
lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down
like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone
wrong.HistoryWestern philosophy really begins with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
What we know of their predecessors comes from fragments and references
in later works; their doctrines could be described as speculative
cosmology that occasionally strays into analysis.  Presumably they
were driven by whatever makes people in every other society invent
cosmologies.
[3]With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition
turned a corner.  There started to be a lot more analysis.  I suspect
Plato and Aristotle were encouraged in this by progress in math.
Mathematicians had by then shown that you could figure things out
in a much more conclusive way than by making up fine sounding stories
about them.
[4]People talk so much about abstractions now that we don't realize
what a leap it must have been when they first started to.  It was
presumably many thousands of years between when people first started
describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked "what is
heat?"  No doubt it was a very gradual process.  We don't know if
Plato or Aristotle were the first to ask any of the questions they
did.  But their works are the oldest we have that do this on a large
scale, and there is a freshness (not to say naivete) about them
that suggests some of the questions they asked were new to them,
at least.Aristotle in particular reminds me of the phenomenon that happens
when people discover something new, and are so excited by it that
they race through a huge percentage of the newly discovered territory
in one lifetime.  If so, that's evidence of how new this kind of
thinking was.
[5]This is all to explain how Plato and Aristotle can be very impressive
and yet naive and mistaken.  It was impressive even to ask the
questions they did.  That doesn't mean they always came up with
good answers.  It's not considered insulting to say that ancient
Greek mathematicians were naive in some respects, or at least lacked
some concepts that would have made their lives easier.  So I hope
people will not be too offended if I propose that ancient philosophers
were similarly naive.  In particular, they don't seem to have fully
grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy: that
words break if you push them too far."Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers,"
Rod Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work."
[6]
Something similar happened when people first started trying
to talk about abstractions.  Much to their surprise, they didn't
arrive at answers they agreed upon.  In fact, they rarely seemed
to arrive at answers at all.They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at
too low a resolution.The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is
how little effect they have.  No one after reading Aristotle's
Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.
[7]Surely I'm not claiming that ideas have to have practical applications
to be interesting?  No, they may not have to.  Hardy's boast that
number theory had no use whatsoever wouldn't disqualify it.  But
he turned out to be mistaken.  In fact, it's suspiciously hard to
find a field of math that truly has no practical use.  And Aristotle's
explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy in Book A of the
Metaphysics implies that philosophy should be useful too.Theoretical KnowledgeAristotle's goal was to find the most general of general principles.
The examples he gives are convincing: an ordinary worker builds
things a certain way out of habit; a master craftsman can do more
because he grasps the underlying principles.  The trend is clear:
the more general the knowledge, the more admirable it is.  But then
he makes a mistake—possibly the most important mistake in the
history of philosophy.  He has noticed that theoretical knowledge
is often acquired for its own sake, out of curiosity, rather than
for any practical need.  So he proposes there are two kinds of
theoretical knowledge: some that's useful in practical matters and
some that isn't.  Since people interested in the latter are interested
in it for its own sake, it must be more noble.  So he sets as his
goal in the Metaphysics the exploration of knowledge that has no
practical use.  Which means no alarms go off when he takes on grand
but vaguely understood questions and ends up getting lost in a sea
of words.His mistake was to confuse motive and result.  Certainly, people
who want a deep understanding of something are often driven by
curiosity rather than any practical need.  But that doesn't mean
what they end up learning is useless.  It's very valuable in practice
to have a deep understanding of what you're doing; even if you're
never called on to solve advanced problems, you can see shortcuts
in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down
in edge cases, as it would if you were relying on formulas you
didn't understand.  Knowledge is power.  That's what makes theoretical
knowledge prestigious.  It's also what causes smart people to be
curious about certain things and not others; our DNA is not so
disinterested as we might think.So while ideas don't have to have immediate practical applications
to be interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will
surprisingly often turn out to have practical applications.The reason Aristotle didn't get anywhere in the Metaphysics was
partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most
abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.
He was like an explorer looking for a territory to the north of
him, starting with the assumption that it was located to the south.And since his work became the map used by generations of future
explorers, he sent them off in the wrong direction as well.
[8]
Perhaps worst of all, he protected them from both the criticism of
outsiders and the promptings of their own inner compass by establishing
the principle that the most noble sort of theoretical knowledge had
to be useless.The Metaphysics is mostly a failed experiment.  A few ideas from
it turned out to be worth keeping; the bulk of it has had no effect
at all.  The Metaphysics is among the least read of all famous
books.  It's not hard to understand the way Newton's Principia
is, but the way a garbled message is.Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment.  But unfortunately
that was not the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from
works like the Metaphysics.
[9]
Soon after, the western world
fell on intellectual hard times.  Instead of version 1s to be
superseded, the works of Plato and Aristotle became revered texts
to be mastered and discussed.  And so things remained for a shockingly
long time.  It was not till around 1600 (in Europe, where the center
of gravity had shifted by then) that one found people confident
enough to treat Aristotle's work as a catalog of mistakes.  And
even then they rarely said so outright.If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little
progress there was in math between Hellenistic times and the
Renaissance.In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold:  that it
was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics,
but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a
class of people called philosophers.  No one thought to go back and
debug Aristotle's motivating argument.  And so instead of correcting
the problem Aristotle discovered by falling into it—that you can
easily get lost if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they
continued to fall into it.The SingularityCuriously, however, the works they produced continued to attract
new readers.  Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity
in this respect.  If you write in an unclear way about big ideas,
you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to
inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students.  Till one knows
better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand
because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like
a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas
it represents are hard to understand.  To someone who hasn't learned
the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive:
as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope.
That was what lured me in as a high school student.This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense
built in.  When things are hard to understand, people who suspect
they're nonsense generally keep quiet.  There's no way to prove a
text is meaningless.  The closest you can get is to show that the
official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from
placebos.
[10]And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected
it was a waste of time just studied other things.  That alone is
fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims.  It's
supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people
would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might
have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating.  Bertrand
Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:

  Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those
  who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that
  few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
[11]

His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery
that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging
from the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart
person who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it
further, but for how he acted in response.
[12]
Instead of quietly
switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside.  He was
Gorbachev.The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein
gave it.
[13]
Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about
how words worked.  Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a
lot of philosophers do now.  Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the
metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do
literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like
"literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling
ambitious, plain "theory."  The writing is the familiar word salad:

  Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which
  express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that
  corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express
  precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be
  moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive
  is not something in the thing as such.
  [14]

The singularity I've described is not going away.  There's a market
for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There
will always be both supply and demand.  So if one group abandons
this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.A ProposalWe may be able to do better.  Here's an intriguing possibility.
Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what
he did.  The goal he announces in the Metaphysics seems one worth
pursuing: to discover the most general truths.  That sounds good.
But instead of trying to discover them because they're useless,
let's try to discover them because they're useful.I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised
criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering
off into a swamp of abstractions.  Instead of trying to answer the
question:

  What are the most general truths?

let's try to answer the question

  Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read
what we've written to do anything differently afterward.  Knowing
we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from
straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.The goal is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a
different direction.As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the
controlled experiment.  There's an idea that has turned out to be
widely applicable.  Some might say it's part of science, but it's
not part of any specific science; it's literally meta-physics (in
our sense of "meta").   The idea of evolution is another. It turns
out to have quite broad applications—for example, in genetic
algorithms and even product design.  Frankfurt's distinction between
lying and bullshitting seems a promising recent example.
[15]These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general
observations that would cause someone who understood them to do
something differently.Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely
defined.  Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're
doing math.  So starting from utility won't entirely solve the
problem I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical
singularity.  But it should help.  It gives people with good
intentions a new roadmap into abstraction.  And they may thereby
produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions
look bad by comparison.One drawback of this approach is that it won't produce the sort of
writing that gets you tenure.  And not just because it's not currently
the fashion.  In order to get tenure in any field you must not
arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree
with.  In practice there are two kinds of solutions to this problem.
In math and the sciences, you can prove what you're saying, or at
any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not claiming anything
false ("6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the treatment").
In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions
(e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw conclusions
so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.The kind of philosophy I'm advocating won't be able to take either
of these routes.  At best you'll be able to achieve the essayist's
standard of proof, not the mathematician's or the experimentalist's.
And yet you won't be able to meet the usefulness test without
implying definite and fairly broadly applicable conclusions.  Worse
still, the usefulness test will tend to produce results that annoy
people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe,
and people are often upset to be told things they don't.Here's the exciting thing, though.  Anyone can do this.  Getting
to general plus useful by starting with useful and cranking up the
generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get
tenure, but it's better for everyone else, including professors who
already have it.  This side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope.
You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific,
and then gradually make them more general.  Joe's has good burritos.
What makes a good burrito?  What makes good food?  What makes
anything good?  You can take as long as you want.  You don't have
to get all the way to the top of the mountain.  You don't have to
tell anyone you're doing philosophy.If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an
encouraging thought.  The field is a lot younger than it seems.
Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about
2500 years ago, it would be misleading to say the field is 2500
years old, because for most of that time the leading practitioners
weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or
Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading
army.  In the times when they weren't, philosophy was hopelessly
intermingled with religion.  It didn't shake itself free till a
couple hundred years ago, and even then was afflicted by the
structural problems I've described above.  If I say this, some will
say it's a ridiculously overbroad and uncharitable generalization,
and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from their
works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their
time.  So in a sense the field is still at the first step.
[16]That sounds a preposterous claim to make.  It won't seem so
preposterous in 10,000 years.  Civilization always seems old, because
it's always the oldest it's ever been.  The only way to say whether
something is really old or not is by looking at structural evidence,
and structurally philosophy is young; it's still reeling from the
unexpected breakdown of words.Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500.  There is a lot
more to discover.Notes
[1]
In practice formal logic is not much use, because despite
some progress in the last 150 years we're still only able to formalize
a small percentage of statements.  We may never do that much better,
for the same reason 1980s-style "knowledge representation" could
never have worked; many statements may have no representation more
concise than a huge, analog brain state.[2]
It was harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than
we can easily imagine.  The story of creation in the Bible is not
just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's roughly what everyone must
have believed since before people were people.  The hard part of
grasping evolution was to realize that species weren't, as they
seem to be, unchanging, but had instead evolved from different,
simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time.Now we don't have to make that leap.  No one in an industrialized
country encounters the idea of evolution for the first time as an
adult.  Everyone's taught about it as a child, either as truth or
heresy.[3]
Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse.  This must
have affected what they said.  If you try to write about the nature
of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation.  Prose
lets you be more precise, and more tentative.[4]
Philosophy is like math's
ne'er-do-well brother.  It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked
at the works of their predecessors and said in effect "why can't
you be more like your brother?"  Russell was still saying the same
thing 2300 years later.Math is the precise half of the most abstract ideas, and philosophy
the imprecise half.  It's probably inevitable that philosophy will
suffer by comparison, because there's no lower bound to its precision.
Bad math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense.  And
yet there are some good ideas in the imprecise half.[5]
Aristotle's best work was in logic and zoology, both of which
he can  be said to have invented.  But the most dramatic departure
from his predecessors was a new, much more analytical style of
thinking.  He was arguably the first scientist.[6]
Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp, Wiley, 1985, p.
94.[7]
Some would say we depend on Aristotle more than we realize,
because his ideas were one of the ingredients in our common culture.
Certainly a lot of the words we use have a connection with Aristotle,
but it seems a bit much to suggest that we wouldn't have the concept
of the essence of something or the distinction between matter and
form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.One way to see how much we really depend on Aristotle would be to
diff European culture with Chinese: what ideas did European culture
have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, in virtue of Aristotle's
contribution?[8]
The meaning of the word "philosophy" has changed over time.
In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in
scope to our "scholarship" (though without the methodological
implications).  Even as late as Newton's time it included what we
now call "science."  But core of the subject today is still what
seemed to Aristotle the core: the attempt to discover the most
general truths.Aristotle didn't call this "metaphysics."  That name got assigned
to it because the books we now call the Metaphysics came after
(meta = after) the Physics in the standard edition of Aristotle's
works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later.  What
we call "metaphysics" Aristotle called "first philosophy."[9]
Some of Aristotle's immediate successors may have realized
this, but it's hard to say because most of their works are lost.[10]
Sokal, Alan, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46/47, pp. 217-252.Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to be most attractive when it's
aligned with some axe the audience already has to grind.  If this
is so we should find it's most popular with groups that are (or
feel) weak.  The powerful don't need its reassurance.[11]
Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912.  Quoted in:Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991,
p. 75.[12]
A preliminary result, that all metaphysics between Aristotle
and 1783 had been a waste of time, is due to I. Kant.[13]
Wittgenstein asserted a sort of mastery to which the inhabitants
of early 20th century Cambridge seem to have been peculiarly
vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been raised religious
and then stopped believing, so had a vacant space in their heads
for someone to tell them what to do (others chose Marx or Cardinal
Newman), and partly because a quiet, earnest place like Cambridge
in that era had no natural immunity to messianic figures, just as
European politics then had no natural immunity to dictators.[14]
This is actually from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus (ca.
1300), with "number" replaced by "gender."  Plus ca change.Wolter, Allan (trans), Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson,
1963, p. 92.[15]
Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit,  Princeton University Press,
2005.[16]
Some introductions to philosophy now take the line that
philosophy is worth studying as a process rather than for any
particular truths you'll learn.  The philosophers whose works they
cover would be rolling in their graves at that.  They hoped they
were doing more than serving as examples of how to argue: they hoped
they were getting results.  Most were wrong, but it doesn't seem
an impossible hope.This argument seems to me like someone in 1500 looking at the lack
of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a process.
No, they were going about it wrong.  It turns out it is possible
to transmute lead into gold (though not economically at current
energy prices), but the route to that knowledge was to
backtrack and try another approach.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.


unions

May 2007People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor
generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age.
In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing
jobs that boosted the median income.  I wouldn't quite call the
high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it
are reading too much into it.Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize
where the high-paying union job came from.  In a rapidly growing
market, you don't worry too much about efficiency.  It's more
important to grow fast.  If there's some mundane problem getting
in your way, and there's a simple solution that's somewhat expensive,
just take it and get on with more important things.  EBay didn't
win by paying less for servers than their competitors.Difficult though it may be to imagine now, manufacturing was a
growth industry in the mid twentieth century.  This was an era when
small firms making everything from cars to candy were getting
consolidated into a new kind of corporation with national reach and
huge economies of scale.  You had to grow fast or die.  Workers
were for these companies what servers are for an Internet startup.
A reliable supply was more important than low cost.If you looked in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude
must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as
the new model isn't delayed.In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was
worth.  Circumstances being what they were, companies would have
been stupid to insist on paying them so little.If you want a less controversial example of this phenomenon, ask
anyone who worked as a consultant building web sites during the
Internet Bubble.  In the late nineties you could get paid huge sums
of money for building the most trivial things.  And yet does anyone
who was there have any expectation those days will ever return?  I
doubt it.  Surely everyone realizes that was just a temporary
aberration.The era of labor unions seems to have been the same kind of aberration,
just spread
over a longer period, and mixed together with a lot of ideology
that prevents people from viewing it with as cold an eye as they
would something like consulting during the Bubble.Basically, unions were just Razorfish.People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union
organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now?
The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of
people living in fallen civilizations.  Our ancestors were giants.
The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral
courage that's lacking today.In fact there's a simpler explanation.  The early twentieth century
was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure.  And
we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned
whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying
union job.  We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies
overspend on different things.


apple

Want to start a startup?  Get funded by
Y Combinator.

November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process
is broken.  Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that.  Now a lot of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store?  A third?  Half?  And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess?  Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes.  Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed,
reluctantly.  But this model doesn't work for software.  It doesn't
work for an intermediary to own the user.  The software business
learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed
that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together,
the underlying concepts don't.  Software isn't like music or books.
It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary
between developer and user.   And yet that's what Apple is trying
to be with the App Store: a software publisher.  And a particularly
overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced
house style.If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now
that software development has evolved from a small number of big
releases to a constant stream of small ones.  But Apple doesn't
understand that either.  Their model of product development derives
from hardware.  They work on something till they think it's finished,
then they release it.  You have to do that with hardware, but because
software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and
iterate.  Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays
each time you release a new version.Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful
when they submit a new version to the App Store.  They would say
that.  But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to
turn back the evolution of technology.  Programmers don't use
launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness.  They use it because it
yields the best results.  By obstructing that process, Apple is
making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple
would.How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in
OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had
to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what
they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App
Store tends to be an old and buggy one.  One developer told me:

  As a result of their process, the App Store is full of half-baked
  applications. I make a new version almost every day that I release
  to beta users. The version on the App Store feels old and crappy.
  I'm sure that a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is
  "I'm not really proud about what's in the App Store", and it's
  combined with the emotion "Really, it's Apple's fault."

Another wrote:

  I believe that they think their approval process helps users by
  ensuring quality.  In reality, bugs like ours get through all the
  time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved,
  leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don't work.
  Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms
  that have immediate approval processes.

Actually I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the
complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem.
They must hear developers complaining.  But partners and suppliers
are always complaining.  It would be a bad sign if they weren't;
it would mean you were being too easy on them.  Meanwhile the iPhone
is selling better than ever.  So why do they need to fix anything?They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because
they make such great hardware.  I just bought a new 27" iMac a
couple days ago.  It's fabulous.  The screen's too shiny, and the
disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't
make yourself care.So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.
I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a
bad human rights record.  That was new.  In the past when I bought
things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure.  Oh boy!  They make
such great stuff.  This time it felt like a Faustian bargain.  They
make such great stuff, but they're such assholes.  Do I really want
to support this company?* * *Should Apple care what people like me think?  What difference does
it make if they alienate a small minority of their users?There are a couple reasons they should care.  One is that these
users are the people they want as employees.  If your company seems
evil, the best programmers won't work for you.  That hurt Microsoft
a lot starting in the 90s.  Programmers started to feel sheepish
about working there.  It seemed like selling out.  When people from
Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where
they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having
gone over to the dark side.  But the real problem for Microsoft
wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired.  It was the
people they never got.  And you know who got them?  Google and
Apple.  If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance.
And it's largely because they got more of the best people that
Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals?  Partly
because they can afford to be.  The best programmers can work
wherever they want.  They don't have to work for a company they
have qualms about.But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil
begets stupidity.  An organization that wins by exercising power
starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.  And it's
not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas
aren't the ones that win.  I think the reason Google embraced "Don't
be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world
as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
[1]That has worked for Google so far.  They've become more
bureaucratic, but otherwise they seem to have held true to their
original principles. With Apple that seems less the case.  When you
look at the famous
1984 ad
now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the
dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
[2]
In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a
prophecy of the App Store.

  We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of
  pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests
  of contradictory and confusing truths.

The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them
is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you.  If
anyone should know this, Apple should.  VisiCalc made the Apple II.And programmers build applications for the platforms they use.  Most
applications—most startups, probably—grow out of personal projects.
Apple itself did.  Apple made microcomputers because that's what
Steve Wozniak wanted for himself.  He couldn't have afforded a
minicomputer.
[3]
 Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
for little microcomputers because
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them.  It's a
rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use.The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
have iPhones.  They may know, because they read it in an article,
that Blackberry has such and such market share.  But in practice
it's as if RIM didn't exist. If they're going to build something,
they want to be able to use it themselves, and that means building
an iPhone app.So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple
continues to maltreat them.  They're like someone stuck in an abusive
relationship.  They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't
leave.  But they're looking for a way out.  One wrote:

  While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they
  place on the App Store does not give me the drive to develop
  applications as I would like. In fact I don't intend to make any
  more iPhone applications unless absolutely necessary.
[4]

Can anything break this cycle?  No device I've seen so far could.
Palm and RIM haven't a hope.  The only credible contender is Android.
But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not
the way Apple cares about the iPhone.  Apple cares about the iPhone
the way Google cares about search.* * *Is the future of handheld devices one locked down by Apple?  It's
a worrying prospect.  It would be a bummer to have another grim
monoculture like we had in the 1990s.  In 1995, writing software
for end users was effectively identical with writing Windows
applications.  Our horror at that prospect was the single biggest
thing that drove us to start building web apps.At least we know now what it would take to break Apple's lock.
You'd have to get iPhones out of programmers' hands.  If programmers
used some other device for mobile web access, they'd start to develop
apps for that instead.How could you make a device programmers liked better than the iPhone?
It's unlikely you could make something better designed.  Apple
leaves no room there.  So this alternative device probably couldn't
win on general appeal.  It would have to win by virtue of some
appeal it had to programmers specifically.One way to appeal to programmers is with software.  If you
could think of an application programmers had to have, but that
would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone,
you could presumably get them to switch.That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds
as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the
way laptops displaced desktops.  You need more control of a development
machine than Apple will let you have over an iPhone.Could anyone make a device that you'd carry around in your pocket
like a phone, and yet would also work as a development machine?
It's hard to imagine what it would look like.  But I've learned
never to say never about technology.  A phone-sized device that
would work as a development machine is no more miraculous by present
standards than the iPhone itself would have seemed by the standards
of 1995.My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with
an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by itself when
traveling.  If there was a version half the size I'd prefer it.
That still wouldn't be small enough to carry around everywhere like
a phone, but we're within a factor of 4 or so.  Surely that gap is
bridgeable.  In fact, let's make it an
RFS. Wanted:
Woman with hammer.Notes[1]
When Google adopted "Don't be evil," they were still so small
that no one would have expected them to be, yet.
[2]
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally;
it's IBM.  IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but
they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.[3]
He couldn't even afford a monitor.  That's why the Apple
I used a TV as a monitor.[4]
Several people I talked to mentioned how much they liked the
iPhone SDK.  The problem is not Apple's products but their policies.
Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly
if they want to.  Handy that, isn't it?Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher,
James Bracy, Gabor Cselle,
Patrick Collison, Jason Freedman, John Gruber, Joe Hewitt, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Teng Siong Ong, Nikhil Pandit, Savraj Singh, and Jared Tame for reading drafts of this.


boss

Want to start a startup?  Get funded by
Y Combinator.

March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural.  Our bodies
weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.I began to suspect this after spending several years working
with startup founders.  I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've
noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their
own startups and those working for large organizations.
I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily;
starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put
it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is
happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating
doughnuts.Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be
working in a way that's more natural for humans.I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that
I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they
seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times
more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working
for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living
in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.
Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed
for.
TreesWhat's so unnatural about working for a big company?  The root of
the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
groups.Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
each species thrives in groups of a certain size.  A herd of impalas
might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10.  Humans
also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
is really unwieldy.
[1]
Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in
groups of several hundred.  And yet—for reasons having more
to do with technology than human nature—a great many people
work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide
themselves into units small enough to work together.  But to
coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure.  Your
boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree.  But when
you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention
explicitly.  In the group one level up from yours, your boss
represents your entire group.  A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way.  It's really
a group of groups.  Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
person's worth of freedom between them.In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were
one person.  But in a large organization divided into groups in
this way, the pressure is always in that direction.  Each group
tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals
that humans were designed to work in.  That was the point of creating
it.  And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree.
[2]Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this.  You
can feel the difference between working for a company with 100
employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corn SyrupA group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake
tribe.  The number of people you interact with is about right.  But
something is missing: individual initiative.  Tribes of hunter-gatherers
have much more freedom.  The leaders have a little more power than other
members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to
do and when the way a boss can.It's not your boss's fault.  The real problem is that in the group
above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.
Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels
both right and wrong at the same time.   On the surface it feels
like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major
is missing.  A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,
but is disastrously lacking in others.Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with
the usual sort of job.For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
at least for programmers.  How bad could it be?  Well, food shows
that pretty clearly.  If you were dropped at a random point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.  And yet if
you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
"Normal" food is terribly bad for you.  The only people who eat
what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
weirdos in Berkeley.If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common?  There are
two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal.  You
may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first
couple bites feels great.  The other is economies of scale.
Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't.
Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth
spending a lot to market it.If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
think most will choose?It's the same with work.  The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
and they'll get paid a good salary right away.  It's the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch.  The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
malaise.And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like
the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley:  though a tiny minority
of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
ProgrammersThe restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on
programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new
things.  Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support
people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a
piece of code you don't need to write it again.  So a programmer
working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each
person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're
going to face resistance when you do something new.This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness.  It's true even
in the smartest companies.  I was talking recently to a founder who
considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to
work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there.
He didn't learn as much as he expected.  Programmers learn by doing,
and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes
because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's
code wouldn't let him.  Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead
of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions
imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a
fraction of the things he would have liked to.  He said he has
learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has
to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at
least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.An obstacle downstream propagates upstream.  If you're not allowed
to implement new ideas, you stop having them.  And vice versa: when
you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.
So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same
way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup, of
course.  But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big
company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing
the startup.You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size
of company you work for.  If you start the company, you'll have the
most freedom.  If you become one of the first 10 employees you'll
have almost as much freedom as the founders.  Even a company with
100 people will feel different from one with 1000.Working for a small company doesn't ensure freedom.  The tree
structure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom,
not a lower bound.  The head of a small company may still choose
to be a tyrant.  The point is that a large organization is compelled
by its structure to be one.
ConsequencesThat has real consequences for both organizations and individuals.
One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger,
no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo.  It's a
consequence of the tree structure that every large organization is
forced to adopt.Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if
they avoided tree structure.  And since human nature limits the
size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine
for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no
structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work
together the way components of a market economy do.That might be worth exploring.  I suspect there are already some
highly partitionable businesses that lean this way.  But I don't
know any technology companies that have done it.There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves
as sponges:  they can stay small.  If I'm right, then it really
pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.
Particularly a technology company.  Which means it's doubly important
to hire the best people.  Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
them to solve a given problem.For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small.  It will always
suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization,
the more it will suck.In an essay I wrote a couple years ago
I advised graduating seniors
to work for a couple years for another company before starting their
own.  I'd modify that now.  Work for another company if you want
to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
startup, go ahead.The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately
was that I felt most would fail.  And they will.  But ambitious
programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than
going to work at a big company.  Certainly they'll learn more.  They
might even be better off financially.  A lot of people in their
early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even
faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school.
At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
zero rather than negative.
[3]We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have
enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from
working for a big company.  The people who've worked for a few years
do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only
because they're that much older.The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of
conservative.  It's hard to say how much is because big companies
made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
made them work for the big companies in the first place.  But
certainly a large part of it is learned.  I know because I've seen
it burn off.Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that
convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small
group, is the natural way for programmers to live.  Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees.  Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[4]
Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
time.  Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
wild.Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear
that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to
programmers.   In the first couple weeks of working on their own
startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
the way people are meant to.Notes[1]
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a
certain way, I mean by evolution.[2]
It's not only the leaves who suffer.  The constraint propagates
up as well as down.  So managers are constrained too; instead of
just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.[3]
Do not finance your startup with credit cards.  Financing a
startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt
stupidest of all.  Credit card debt is a bad idea, period.  It is
a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.[4]
The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged
undergrads to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I used
to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby
Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for
reading drafts of this.


desres

January 2003(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting
of NEPLS.)Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that
Americans like to begin a conversation by asking "what do you do?"
I've never liked this question.  I've rarely had a
neat answer to it.  But I think I have finally solved the problem.
Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight
in the eye and say "I'm designing a
new dialect of Lisp."
I recommend this answer to anyone who doesn't like being asked what
they do.  The conversation will turn immediately to other topics.I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages.
I'm just designing one, in the same way that someone might design
a building or a chair or a new typeface.
I'm not trying to discover anything new.  I just want
to make a language that will be good to program in.  In some ways,
this assumption makes life a lot easier.The difference between design and research seems to be a question
of new versus good.  Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to
be good.  Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new.
I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design
surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research
solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving.
So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching
it from different directions.What I'm going to talk about today is what your target looks like
from the back.  What do you do differently when you treat
programming languages as a design problem instead of a research topic?The biggest difference is that you focus more on the user.
Design begins by asking, who is this
for and what do they need from it?  A good architect,
for example, does not begin by creating a design that he then
imposes on the users, but by studying the intended users and figuring
out what they need.Notice I said "what they need," not "what they want."  I don't mean
to give the impression that working as a designer means working as
a sort of short-order cook, making whatever the client tells you
to.  This varies from field to field in the arts, but
I don't think there is any field in which the best work is done by
the people who just make exactly what the customers tell them to.The customer is always right in
the sense that the measure of good design is how well it works
for the user.  If you make a novel that bores everyone, or a chair
that's horribly uncomfortable to sit in, then you've done a bad
job, period.  It's no defense to say that the novel or the chair
is designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.And yet, making what works for the user doesn't mean simply making
what the user tells you to.  Users don't know what all the choices
are, and are often mistaken about what they really want.The answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design
for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply
what he says he wants.
It's much like being a doctor.  You can't just treat a patient's
symptoms.  When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure
out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.This focus on the user is a kind of axiom from which most of the
practice of good design can be derived, and around which most design
issues center.If good design must do what the user needs, who is the user?  When
I say that design must be for users, I don't mean to imply that good
design aims at some kind of
lowest common denominator.  You can pick any group of users you
want.  If you're designing a tool, for example, you can design it
for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design
for one group might be bad for another.  The point
is, you have to pick some group of users.  I don't think you can
even talk about good or bad design except with
reference to some intended user.You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include
the designer himself.  When you design something
for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people
you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated.That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently,
seems inevitably to corrupt the designer.
I suspect that very few housing
projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live
in them.   You can see the same thing
in programming languages.  C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for
their own designers to use.  Cobol, Ada, and Java, were created
for other people to use.If you think you're designing something for idiots, the odds are
that you're not designing something good, even for idiots.
Even if you're designing something for the most sophisticated
users, though, you're still designing for humans.  It's different
in research.  In math you
don't choose abstractions because they're
easy for humans to understand; you choose whichever make the
proof shorter.  I think this is true for the sciences generally.
Scientific ideas are not meant to be ergonomic.Over in the arts, things are very different.  Design is
all about people.  The human body is a strange
thing, but when you're designing a chair,
that's what you're designing for, and there's no way around it.
All the arts have to pander to the interests and limitations
of humans.   In painting, for example, all other things being
equal a painting with people in it will be more interesting than
one without.  It is not merely an accident of history that
the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people.
If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige
that it does.Like it or not, programming languages are also for people,
and I suspect the human brain is just as lumpy and idiosyncratic
as the human body.  Some ideas are easy for people to grasp
and some aren't.  For example, we seem to have a very limited
capacity for dealing with detail.  It's this fact that makes
programing languages a good idea in the first place; if we
could handle the detail, we could just program in machine
language.Remember, too, that languages are not
primarily a form for finished programs, but something that
programs have to be developed in.  Anyone in the arts could
tell you that you might want different mediums for the
two situations.  Marble, for example, is a nice, durable
medium for finished ideas, but a hopelessly inflexible one
for developing new ideas.A program, like a proof,
is a pruned version of a tree that in the past has had
false starts branching off all over it.  So the test of
a language is not simply how clean the finished program looks
in it, but how clean the path to the finished program was.
A design choice that gives you elegant finished programs
may not give you an elegant design process.  For example,
I've written a few macro-defining macros full of nested
backquotes that look now like little gems, but writing them
took hours of the ugliest trial and error, and frankly, I'm still
not entirely sure they're correct.We often act as if the test of a language were how good
finished programs look in it.
It seems so convincing when you see the same program
written in two languages, and one version is much shorter.
When you approach the problem from the direction of the
arts, you're less likely to depend on this sort of
test.  You don't want to end up with a programming
language like marble.For example, it is a huge win in developing software to
have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a
read-eval-print loop.  And when you have one this has
real effects on the design of the language.  It would not
work well for a language where you have to declare
variables before using them, for example.  When you're
just typing expressions into the toplevel, you want to be
able to set x to some value and then start doing things
to x.  You don't want to have to declare the type of x
first.  You may dispute either of the premises, but if
a language has to have a toplevel to be convenient, and
mandatory type declarations are incompatible with a
toplevel, then no language that makes type declarations
mandatory could be convenient to program in.In practice, to get good design you have to get close, and stay
close, to your users.  You have to calibrate your ideas on actual
users constantly, especially in the beginning.  One of the reasons
Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to
her family.  That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty
descriptions of landscapes,
or pretentious philosophizing.  (The philosophy's there, but it's
woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.)
If you open an average "literary" novel and imagine reading it out loud
to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too
keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader.In the software world, this idea is known as Worse is Better.
Actually, there are several ideas mixed together in the concept of
Worse is Better, which is why people are still arguing about
whether worse
is actually better or not.  But one of the main ideas in that
mix is that if you're building something new, you should get a
prototype in front of users as soon as possible.The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy.
Instead of getting a prototype out quickly and gradually refining
it, you try to create the complete, finished, product in one long
touchdown pass.  As far as I know, this is a
recipe for disaster.  Countless startups destroyed themselves this
way during the Internet bubble.  I've never heard of a case
where it worked.What people outside the software world may not realize is that
Worse is Better is found throughout the arts.
In drawing, for example, the idea was discovered during the
Renaissance.  Now almost every drawing teacher will tell you that
the right way to get an accurate drawing is not to
work your way slowly around the contour of an object, because errors will
accumulate and you'll find at the end that the lines don't meet.
Instead you should draw a few quick lines in roughly the right place,
and then gradually refine this initial sketch.In most fields, prototypes
have traditionally been made out of different materials.
Typefaces to be cut in metal were initially designed
with a brush on paper.  Statues to be cast in bronze
were modelled in wax.  Patterns to be embroidered on tapestries
were drawn on paper with ink wash.  Buildings to be
constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood.What made oil paint so exciting, when it
first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you
could actually make the finished work from the prototype.
You could make a preliminary drawing if you wanted to, but you
weren't held to it; you could work out all the details, and
even make major changes, as you finished the painting.You can do this in software too.  A prototype doesn't have to
be just a model; you can refine it into the finished product.
I think you should always do this when you can.  It lets you
take advantage of new insights you have along the way.  But
perhaps even more important, it's good for morale.Morale is key in design.  I'm surprised people
don't talk more about it.  One of my first
drawing teachers told me: if you're bored when you're
drawing something, the drawing will look boring.
For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you
decide to draw each brick individually.  You can do this
if you want, but if you get bored halfway through and start
making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one,
the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested
the bricks.Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good
for morale because it keeps you engaged.  In software, my
rule is: always have working code.  If you're writing
something that you'll be able to test in an hour, then you
have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you.
The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting.
Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually
refine it.
If you work this way, then in principle
you never have to end the day with something that actually
looks unfinished.  Indeed, there is even a saying among
painters: "A painting is never finished, you just stop
working on it."  This idea will be familiar to anyone who
has worked on software.Morale is another reason that it's hard to design something
for an unsophisticated user.   It's hard to stay interested in
something you don't like yourself.  To make something
good, you have to be thinking, "wow, this is really great,"
not "what a piece of shit; those fools will love it."Design means making things for humans.  But it's not just the
user who's human.  The designer is human too.Notice all this time I've been talking about "the designer."
Design usually has to be under the control of a single person to
be any good.   And yet it seems to be possible for several people
to collaborate on a research project.  This seems to
me one of the most interesting differences between research and
design.There have been famous instances of collaboration in the arts,
but most of them seem to have been cases of molecular bonding rather
than nuclear fusion.  In an opera it's common for one person to
write the libretto and another to write the music.   And during the Renaissance,
journeymen from northern
Europe were often employed to do the landscapes in the
backgrounds of Italian paintings.  But these aren't true collaborations.
They're more like examples of Robert Frost's
"good fences make good neighbors."  You can stick instances
of good design together, but within each individual project,
one person has to be in control.I'm not saying that good design requires that one person think
of everything.  There's nothing more valuable than the advice
of someone whose judgement you trust.  But after the talking is
done, the decision about what to do has to rest with one person.Why is it that research can be done by collaborators and
design can't?  This is an interesting question.  I don't
know the answer.  Perhaps,
if design and research converge, the best research is also
good design, and in fact can't be done by collaborators.
A lot of the most famous scientists seem to have worked alone.
But I don't know enough to say whether there
is a pattern here.  It could be simply that many famous scientists
worked when collaboration was less common.Whatever the story is in the sciences, true collaboration
seems to be vanishingly rare in the arts.  Design by committee is a
synonym for bad design.  Why is that so?  Is there some way to
beat this limitation?I'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires
a dictator.  One reason is that good design has to
be all of a piece.  Design is not just for humans, but
for individual humans.  If a design represents an idea that
fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's
head too.Related: