This weekend I read the beginning of Dan Wang's How Technology Grows. One of the themes he presses is that when a country loses its manufacturing base, it also loses its manufacturing knowledge base. This in turn damages the economy's ability to innovate in manufacturing, even on the IT front. He concludes:
It can't be an accident that the countries with the healthiest communities of engineering practice are also in the lead in designing tools for the sector. They're able to embed knowledge into new tools, because they never lost the process knowledge in the first place.
Let's try to preserve process knowledge.
I have seen what happens within an academic department or a university IT unit when it loses process knowledge it once had. Sometimes, the world has changed in a way that makes the knowledge no longer valuable, and the loss is simply part of the organization's natural evolution. But other times the change that precipitated the move away from expertise is temporary or illusory, and the group suddenly finds itself unable to adapt other changes in the environment.
The portion of the article I read covered a lot of ground. For example, one reason that a manufacturing base matters so much is that services industries have inherent limits, summarized in:
[The] services sector [has] big problems: a lot of it is winner-take-all, and much of the rest is zero-sum.
This longer quote ends a section in which Wang compares the economies of manufacturing-focused Germany and the IT-focused United States:
The US and Germany are innovative in different ways, and they each have big flaws. I hope they fix these flaws. I believe that we can have a country in which wealth is primarily created by new economic activity, instead of by inheritance; which builds new housing stock, instead of permitting current residents to veto construction; which has a government willing to think hard about new projects that it should initiate, instead of letting the budget run on autopilot. I don't think that we should have to choose between industry and the internet; we can have a country that has both a vibrant industrial sector and a thriving internet sector.
This paragraph is good example of the paper's sub-title, "a restatement of definite optimism". Wang writes clearly and discusses a number of issues relevant to IT as the base for a nation's economy. How Technology Grows is an interesting read.
I love this line from Organizational Debt:
So my proposal for Rust 2019 is not that big of a deal, I guess: we just need to redesign our decision making process, reorganize our governance structures, establish new norms of communication, and find a way to redirect a significant amount of capital toward Rust contributors.
A solid understatement usually makes me smile. Decision-making processes, governance structure, norms of communication, and compensation for open-source developers... no big deal, indeed. We all await the results. If the results come with advice that generalizes beyond a single project, especially the open-source compensation thing, all the better.
Communication is a big part of the recommendation for 2019. Changing how communication works is tough in any organization, let alone an organization with distributed membership and leadership. In every growing organization there eventually comes the time for intentional systems of communication:
But we've long since reached the point where coordinating our design vision by osmosis is not working well. We need an active and intentional circulatory system for information, patterns, and frameworks of decision making related to design.
I'm not a member of the Rust community, only an observer. But I know that the language inspires some programmers, and I learned a bit about its tool chain and community support a couple of years ago when an ambitious student used it successfully to implement his compiler in my course. It's the sort of language we need, being created in what looks to be an admirable way. I wish the Rust team well as they tackle their organizational debt and tackle their growing pains.
I ran across two great examples of humility by Nobel Prize-winning economists in recent conversations with Tyler Cowen. When asked, "Should China and Japan move to romanized script?", Paul Romer said:
I basically don't know the answer to that question. But I'll use that as a way to talk about something else ...
Romer could have speculated or pontificated; instead, he acknowledged that he didn't know the answer and pivoted the conversation to a related topic he had thought about (reforming spelling in English, for which he offered an interesting computational solution). By shifting the topic, Romer added value to the conversation without pretending that any answer he could give to the original question would have more value than as speculation.
A couple of months ago, Cowen sat with Paul Krugman. When asked whether he would consider a "single land tax" as a way to encourage a more active and more equitable economy, Krugman responded:
I just haven't done my homework on that.
... and left it there. To his credit, Cowen did not press for an uninformed answer; he moved on to another question.
I love the attitude that Krugman and Romer adopt and really like Krugman's specific answer, which echoed his response to another question earlier in the conversation. We need more people answering questions this way, more often and in more circumstances.
Such restraint is probably even more important in the case of Nobel laureates. If Romer and Klugman choose to speculate on a topic, a lot of people will pay attention, even if it is a topic they know little about. We might learn something from their speculations, but we might also forget that they are only uninformed speculation.
I think what I like best about these answers is the example that Romer and Klugman set for the rest of us: It's okay to say, "I don't know." If you have not done the homework needed to offer an informed answer, it's often best to say so and move on to something you're better prepared to discuss.
More consonance with Paul Romer, via his conversation with Tyler Cowen: They were discussing how hard it is to learn read English than other languages, due to its confusing orthography and in particular the mismatch between sounds and their spellings. We could adopt a more rational way to spell words, but it's hard to change the orthography of large language spoken by a large, scattered population. Romer offered a computational solution:
It would be a trivial translation problem to let some people write in one spelling form, others in the other because it would be word-for-word translation. I could write you an email in rationalized spelling, and I could put it through the plug-in so you get it in traditional spelling. This idea that it's impossible to change spelling I think is wrong. It's just, it's hard, and we should -- if we want to consider this -- we should think carefully about the mechanisms.
This sounds similar to a common problem and solution in the software development world. Programmers working in teams often disagree about the orthography of code, not the spelling so much as its layout, the use of whitespace, and the placement of punctuation. Being programmers, we often address this problem computationally. Team members can stylize their code anyway they see fit but, when they check it into the common repository, they run it through a language formatter. Often, these formatters are built into our IDEs. Nowadays, some languages even come with a built-in formatting tool, such as Go and gofmt.
Romer's email plug-in would play a similar role in human-to-human communication, enabling writers to use different spelling systems concurrently. This would make it possible to introduce a more rational way to spell words without having to migrate everyone to the new system all at once. There are still challenges to making such a big change, but they could be handled in an evolutionary way.
Maybe Romer's study of Python is turning him into a computationalist! Certainly, being a programmer can help a person recognize the possibility of a computational solution.
Add this idea to his recent discovery of C.S. Peirce, and I am feeling some intellectual kinship to Romer, at least as much as an ordinary CS prof can feel kinship to a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Then, to top it all off, he lists Slaughterhouse-Five as one of his two favorite novels. Long-time readers know I'm a big Vonnegut fan and nearly named this blog for one of his short stories. Between Peirce and Vonnegut, I can at least say that Romer and I share some of the same reading interests. I like his tastes.
This morning I read Tyler Cowen's conversation with Paul Romer. At one point, Romer talks about being introduced to C.S. Peirce, who had deep insights into "abstraction and how we use abstraction to communicate" (a topic Romer and Cowen discuss earlier in the interview). Romer is clearly enamored with Peirce's work, but he's also fascinated by the fact that, after a long career thinking about a set of topics, he could stumble upon a trove of ideas that he didn't even know existed:
... one of the joys of reading -- that's not a novel -- but one of the joys of reading, and to me slightly frightening thing, is that there's so much out there, and that a hundred years later, you can discover somebody who has so many things to say that can be helpful for somebody like me trying to understand, how do we use abstraction? How do we communicate clearly?
But the joy of scholarship -- I think it's a joy of maybe any life in the modern world -- that through reading, we can get access to the thoughts of another person, and then you can sample from the thoughts that are most relevant to you or that are the most powerful in some sense.
This process, he says, is the foundation for how we transmit knowledge within a culture and across time. It's how we grow and share our understanding of the world. This is a source of great joy for scholars and, really, for anyone who can read. It's why so many people love books.
Romer's interest in Peirce calls to mind my own fascination with his work. As Romer notes, Peirce had a "much more sophisticated sense about how science proceeds than the positivist sort of machine that people describe". I discovered Peirce through an epistemology course in graduate school. His pragmatic view of knowledge, along with William James's views, greatly influenced how I thought about knowledge. That, in turn, redefined the trajectory by which I approached my research in knowledge-based systems and AI. Peirce and James helped me make sense of how people use knowledge, and how computer programs might.
So I feel a great kinship with Romer in his discovery of Peirce, and the joy he finds in scholarship.