When people say “I’d like a donut”, #Science indicates that Actually, they don’t want a donut at all. They say donut, but they really mean a pastry from the paradonut family.
Exhibit A: The Coffee Roll — Phasers on Star Trek have three settings: Stun, Kill, and Coffee Roll.
Exhibit B: The Eclair — From the French for “lightning”, the eclair was invented by a psychiatrist as a delicious alternative to electroshock therapy for schizophrenics. Because when you’re eating an eclair, you can’t deny the marvelous cream-filled reality you’re actually present in.
Exhibit C: The Cheese Danish — Cheese Danishes have a mix of flavors and textures that make them, in scientific terms, “a gang-bang for your face”.
Exhibit D: The Bear Claw — The bear claw is the ugly, bewarted King Pimp of the pastry shop window, with a dozen smaller, more effeminate donuts it’s turned into its sad little bitches and tricks following behind it.
Exhibit E: The Apple Fritter — The so-called “Emperor of Pastries” makes your stupid little glazed donut look sad and weak like Barack Obama’s gay arms.
Exhibit F: The Cinnamon Bun — Cinnamon Buns have been proven to be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic and diabetic crisis, and also totally worth it.
Bonus: Worst Donuts
1. Jelly Donuts — Jelly donuts are always what’s left after people eat the real donuts. Jelly donuts are consolation prizes for losers who came late. They taste like failure for a reason. If you’re eating a jelly donut, that’s because you’re not a competitor and you don’t have any friends to set aside a good donut for you.
2. Plain Donuts — Plain donuts are also called “not donuts” or “ring-shaped bread”. Plain donuts were invented for parents who don’t love their children. They are also sometimes put out as bait for poisoning rats, though they have a 75% failure rate. Rats don’t like them either. Sometimes a poisoned plain donut will be found intact, with a dead rat next to it — rats will lick the poison off the plain donut while avoiding the plain donut itself. According to Leviticus, you are supposed to pay the dowry of an ugly woman in plain donuts.
3. Powdered Sugar Donuts — Powdered sugar donuts are made primarily by mental degenerates employed by donut shops as charity hires. They are sometimes called “Retard Donuts”. To compare powdered sugar donuts to the Holocaust would be to trivialize the horror of powdered sugar donuts.
Ace, “Science Proves That The Best Donuts Are Actually Non-Donuts”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-06-17.
March 6, 2023
QotD: The pastries of the wider paradonut family
March 5, 2023
QotD: The role of the “big” landowners in pre-modern farming societies
Of course this begins with land. The thing to keep in mind is that prior to the modern period […] the vast majority of economic activity was the production of the land. That meant that land was both the primary form of holding wealth but also the main income-producing asset. Consequently, larger land holdings are the assets that enable the accumulation of all of the other kinds of capital we’re discussing. By having more land – typically much more land – than is required to feed a single household, these larger farmers can […] produce for markets and trade, enabling them to afford to acquire labor, animals, equipment and so on. Our subsistence farmers of the last post, focused on producing for survival, would be hard-pressed to acquire much further in the way of substantial capital.
The next most important category is generally animals, particularly a plow team […] while our small subsistence farmers may keep chickens or pigs on some small part of the pasture they have access to, they probably do not have a complete plow-team for their own farm […]. Oxen and horses are hideously expensive, both to acquire but also to feed and for a family barely surviving one year to the next, they simply cannot afford them. They also do not have herds of animals (because their small farms absolutely cannot support acres of pasturage) and they probably have limited access to herdsmen generally (that is, transhumant pastoralists moving around the countryside) because those fellows will tend to want to interact with the community leaders who are, as noted above, the large landholders. All of which is to say that while the small farmers may keep a few animals, they do not have access to significantly large numbers of animals (or humans), which matters.
The first impact of having a plow-team is fairly obvious: a plow drawn by a couple of oxen is more effective than a plow pushed by a single human. That means that a plow-team lets the same amount of farming labor sow a larger area of land […]. It also allows for a larger, deeper plow, which in turn plows at a greater depth, which can improve yields […]. You can easily see why, for a landholder with a large farm, having a plow-team is so useful: whereas the subsistence farmer struggles by having too much labor (and too many mouths to feed) and too little land, the big landholder has a lot of land they are trying to get farmed with as little labor as possible. And of course, more to the point, the large landholder has the wealth and acreage necessary to buy and then pasture the animals in the plow-team.
The second major impact is manure. Remember that our farmers live before the time of artificial fertilizer. Crops, especially bulk cereal crops, wear out the nutrients in the soil quite rapidly after repeated harvests, which leaves the farmer two options. The first, standard option, is that the farmer can fallow the field (which also has the advantage of disrupting certain pest life-cycles); depending on the farming method, fallowing may mean planting specific plants to renew the soil’s nutrients when those plants are uprooted and left to return to the soil in the field or it may mean simply turning the field over to wild plants with a similar effect. The second option is using fertilizer, which in this case means manure. Quite a lot of it. Aggressive manuring, particularly on rich soils which have good access to moisture (because cropping also dries out the soil; fallowing can restore that moisture) allows the field to be fallowed less frequently and thus farmed more intensively. In some cases it allowed rich farmland to be continuously cropped, with fairly dramatic increases in returns-to-acreage as a result. And by increasing the nutrients in the soil, it also produces higher yields in a given season.
Now the humans in a farming household aren’t going to generate enough manure on their own to make a meaningful contribution to soil fertility. But the larger landholders generally have two advantages in this sense. First, because their landholdings are large, they can afford to turn over marginal farming ground to pasture for horses, cattle, sheep and so on; these animals not only generate animal products (or prestige, in the case of horses), they also eat the grass and generate manure which can be used on the main farm. The second way to get manure is cities; unlike farming households, cities do produce sufficient quantities of human waste for manuring fields. And where small subsistence farmers are unlikely to be able to buy that supply, large landholders are likely to be politically well-connected enough and wealthy enough to arrange for human waste to be used on their lands, especially for market oriented farms close to cities. And if you just stopped and said, “wait – these guys were paying for human waste?” … yes, yes they sometimes did (and not just for farming! Check out how saltpeter was made, or what a fuller did!).
Finally, there’s the question of infrastructure: tools, machines and storage. The large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford to build things like granaries, mills and so on. Now there is, I want to note, a lot of variation from place to place about exactly how this sort of infrastructure is handled. It might be privately owned, it might be owned by the village, but frequently, the “village mill” was actually owned by the large landholder whose big manor overlooked the village (who may also be the local political authority). And while we’re looking at grain, other agricultural products which don’t store as well or as easily might need to be aggregated for transport to market and sale, a process where the large landholder’s storage facilities, political standing and market contacts are likely to make him the ideal middleman. I don’t want to get too in the weeds (pardon the pun) on all the different kinds of infrastructure (mills for grains, presses for olives, casks for wine) except to note that in many cases the large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford these investments and that smaller farmers growing the same crops nearby might well want to use them.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.
March 4, 2023
QotD: Profit margins in the restaurant trade
The table that orders a starter, main and a bottle of wine – that just about breaks even for the restaurant. You can mix and match this a bit. Dessert instead of the starter, that sorta thing. But the costs of the building, the staff, the electricity, the stock that goes off, the cost of capital itself, all those things, mean that the basic restaurant experience just about covers its costs.
It’s the having the one thing extra that makes the money, the profit. A drink before the meal, having both a starter and a dessert to add to the main. The second bottle of wine, or the digestif with the coffee. This is why the waiter is so eager for you to have any one or more of these “extras”. The margin over food costs – food costs usually being around 30% of menu price – on those additions is exactly what provides a profit to the business that is the restaurant.
As to why, well, it’s the same reason that the menu prices of some well known item are going to be roughly the same across restaurants. Competition is fierce in the business. That means headline prices are pushed down to where they only just, if even that, cover costs. On exactly the same basis as Ryanair charging you spit for the seat and then a fortune for the air you breathe onboard. You get the punter in with the £20 for two steak dinners then hope like Hell they order the vanilla soup and also the vegetable ice cream in order to make your nut.
Tim Worstall, “Bar Owner Complains Of People Drinking Tap Water – Oi! Where’s My Profits?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-27.
March 3, 2023
QotD: What’s the opposite of university? “Diversity”
Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.
March 2, 2023
QotD: The rise of the overeducated mediocrity
The son of a friend of mine applied for a place at medical school and was turned down on the grounds that his personal statement was inadequate. I don’t know what was wrong with it; perhaps he employed incorrect old clichés rather than the correct new ones. Having the means to do so, my friend sent his son to a tutor who specialized in personal statements (every bureaucratic requirement is an economic opportunity for an ex-bureaucrat wanting to strike out for himself). No doubt the tutor in personal statements advised him to put in more about his passion for social justice and equality. At any rate, it worked and he was accepted.
In these statements — apparently as much a requirement in the private sector as in the public — you have to not only explain why you have dreamt all your life of this position in the marketing department (selling the unnecessary to the insolvent) and why you, of all the 7,000,000,000 people in the world, are the most suited to it, but also proclaim your deep sense of social responsibility, which you will bring to whatever task you are told to perform. People have never been entirely straightforward, thank goodness (what need of art and literature if they had been?), but we do seem to be breeding up a generation of Pecksniffs and Uriah Heeps.
I don’t want to indulge in what has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, the habit of finding the supposedly real, occult, and sinister explanation behind perfectly straightforward social phenomena, but nevertheless I cannot help but wonder what the true purpose is of mission statements and their cognates, such as annual declarations of probity and the like. I think (though of course I cannot indubitably prove) that it is to make the world safe for overeducated mediocrities.
Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.
March 1, 2023
QotD: What do we mean by “the humanities”?
By way of example, that methodological difference is why there’s a division between political science and history, despite the two disciplines historically being concerned with many of the same subjects and the same questions (to the point that Thucydides is sometimes produced as the founder of both): they use different methods. History is a humanities discipline through and through, whereas political science attempts to hybridize humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approaches; that’s not to say historians never use statistical approaches (I do, actually, quite a lot) but that there are very real differences in methodology. As you might imagine, that difference leads to some competition and conflict between the disciplines as to whose methodology best answers those key questions or equips students to think about them. Given that I have a doctorate in history and self-identify as a historian, you will have no trouble guessing which side of this I come down on, although that might be a bit self-interested on my part.
So if the STEM fields are, at some level, fundamentally about numbers, the humanities are fundamentally about language. The universe may be made of numbers, but the human mind and human societies are constructed out of language. Unlike computers, we do not think in numbers, but in words and consequently, the study of humans as thinking creatures is mostly about those words (yes, yes, I see you there, economics and psychology; there are edge cases, of course). Our laws are written in words because our thoughts form in our heads as words; we naturally reason with words and we even feel with words. Humans are linguistic creations in a mathematical universe; consequently, while the study of the universe is mediated through math, the study of humans and human minds is fundamentally linguistic in nature.
Thus, the humanities.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-03.
February 28, 2023
QotD: Politicians respond to different economic incentives than the rest of us
The temptation is to delay the tough times until your successor can carry the can.
Poor old Keynes inadvertently gave politicians the answer they were looking for – the idea that during the downturn, the government should spend money into the economy to keep it going along nicely. Making sure that those lifeguards sacked from the Skegness lido can swiftly get jobs working at a government Skegness lido prevents them claiming the dole, and keeps them in the economy earning and spending until the economy washes out all the malinvestment and starts growing again. At which point the government Skegness lido closes and the lifeguards go to work at a lido somewhere where the biting Easterly wind doesn’t sandblast your skin off. The government has bridged the gap.
There’s one problem.
The government has no money of its own, so where will it get the money for their lido?
Well, Keynes said it should run a surplus during the good times and stash that surplus money away so it can be used during the downturn – a national rainy-day fund, if you will.
But guess what? Politicians don’t run surpluses.
Why would they? Every penny spent making lives better for voters today makes it more likely they will vote for you. And every penny saved against a rainy day makes it possible for your rivals to win votes tomorrow, by doing the same once they are in power.
So politicians don’t ever HAVE a rainy day fund. But that doesn’t stop them wanting to bridge the gap.
So they borrow the money.
And now what they are doing is not Keynesian, or even neo-Keynesian, but pseudo-Keynesian
By bridging the current gap with borrowed money, they simply make sure that the next gap will be costlier to bridge. Because the interest on the borrowing means that the gap will be wider.
But that’s not even the biggest problem – the biggest problem is that the gap is intrinsically important. We NEED it, to give us pause.
Whereas bridging it enables us to carry on being silly and prevents the misallocations from being flushed out – a lido remains operating in Skegness despite having no customers, and the lifeguards continue to work. Their lifesaving skills (which should be fruitfully employed elsewhere) stagnate at a lido with no punters. Their customer service skills deteriorate as the customers disappear, and what they learn instead is how to sit in a chair and stare into space. Their skills are degrading. Hysteresis, technically.
And so by delaying the collapse of the Skegness lido in pursuit of benign conditions for the voters, the government destroys the skills of our workforce.
Sowell was right – the problems we battle today were caused by the government’s interventions yesterday.
Surely using government to solve our problems is like a man quenching his thirst with seawater?
Alex Noble, “Drinking Brine”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-06-14.
February 27, 2023
QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights
That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.
All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”
But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?
But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.
We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.
But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.
Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.
February 26, 2023
QotD: Scientology versus psychiatry
Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.
February 25, 2023
QotD: Feudalism versus “Manorialism”
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-21.
February 24, 2023
QotD: Relearning lessons as old as warfare
The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.
During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.
News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.
The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.
But they were also outfought.
In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?
In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.
Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand — at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.
Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963
February 23, 2023
QotD: Academic types
You do acknowledge, of course, that it’s in the nature of math that 50% of the population are below average?
Our default “solution” for university shooters […] is psychiatry. More access to better “mental health care”, we say, would’ve prevented this. Maybe, maybe not, but at least it’s something. The problem, though, is that the only diagnostic criterion you can realistically use is “So-and-So is a twitchy, weird loner”, which — trust me — exactly describes 99% of grad students and 100% of professors. Do we force feed all of them powerful prescription psychotropics on the off-chance?
Before you jump to agree — and yes, I fully acknowledge how awesome that would be, if you put it on Pay-per-View I’d be the first to sign up […] I’d ask you to consider two things:
First, it’s the government doing this. The same stupid motherfuckers who can’t manage to rig a poll where only a handful of addled old farmers vote. Do you really want to bet America’s future social stability on them loading the right drug into the sprayers? Given the federal bureaucracy’s sterling reputation for basic competence, they’d probably crop-dust the ‘hood with meth.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 22, 2023
QotD: The soul of the bureaucrat
I had all kinds of documents with me to prove that I was the person I said I was, namely me; besides which, it was surely obvious, even to the most casual observer, that I was a respectable citizen not given to obtaining travel or other documents by false pretensions. But these days we live under a regime, if not exactly of laws rather than of men, at least of regulations rather than of men, and an official such as the one with whom I would have to deal would be allowed to exercise no discretion in case he thereby revealed his social prejudices. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” said Cicero, which we have changed to “Though the heavens fall, let the forms be filled and the boxes ticked.”
To do my imaginary official justice, I would have behaved just like him if our positions had been reversed. There are many jobs whose sole pleasure or delight must be in disobliging the public. Bureaucrats are themselves so oppressed by bureaucracy that their only way of finding relief is to make others suffer like them. The wonder, then, is not that they are bad, but that they are not worse.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Bureaucrat’s Point of View”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-05-12.
February 21, 2023
QotD: The Gods as (literal) machines
But what do we offer? What do we ask for? How do we ask? This isn’t write-your-own-religion, after all: you can’t just offer whatever you feel like (or more correctly, you can, and the god’s silent disapproval will be the response). After all, if your plan is to get me to do something, and you show up at my door with awful, nasty Cherry Pepsi, you are bound to be disappointed; if you show up with some delicious Dr. Pepper, you may have better luck. That’s how people work – why would the gods be any different?
So different gods prefer different things, delivered in different ways, with different words, at different times. There are so many possible details and permutations – but this is important, it matters and you must get it right! So how can you be sure that you are offering the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, to the right god, for the right result?
And that’s where our knowledge from last week comes in. You aren’t left trying to figure this out on your own from scratch, because you can draw on the long history and memory of your community and thus perform a ritual which worked in the past, for the same sort of thing.
The thing to understand about that kind of knowledge is that it’s a form of black box tech; the practitioner doesn’t know why it works, only that it works because – as we discussed – the ritual wasn’t derived from some abstract first-principles understanding of the gods, but by trial and error. Thinking about the ritual as a form of functional, but not understood, technology can help us understand the ancient attitude towards ritual.
Let’s say we discovered a functioning alien spaceship with faster-than-light propulsion, but no aliens and no manual. We don’t understand anything about how it works. What would we do? We might try to copy the ship, but remember: we don’t know what parts are functional and what parts are just cosmetic or what does what. So we’d have to copy the ship exactly, bolt for bolt, to be sure that it would work when we turned it on.
Ritual in ancient polytheistic religions is typically treated the same way: given an unknowable, but functional system, exactitude is prized over understanding. After all, understanding why the ritual works does not help it work any better – only performing it correctly. An error in performance might offend the god, or create confusion about what effect is desired, or for whom. But an error in understanding causes no problems, so long as the ritual was performed exactly anyway. Just as it doesn’t matter what you think is happening when you, say, turn on your TV – it turns on anyway – it doesn’t matter what you think is happening in the ritual. It happens anyway.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.
February 20, 2023
QotD: The early “cyberpunk” writers versus the folks who built the internet
We’re not thrilled by people who rave endlessly about the wonder of the net. We’re not impressed by brow-furrowing think-pieces about how it ought to written by people who aren’t doing the design and coding to make stuff work. We’d be far happier if pretty much everybody who has ever been described as “digerati” were dropped in a deep hole where they can blabber at each other without inflicting their pompous vacuities on us or the rest of the world.
In our experience, generally the only non-engineers whose net-related speculations are worth listening to are science-fiction writers, and by no means all of those; anybody to whom the label “cyberpunk” has been attached usually deserves to be dropped in that deep hole along with the so-called digerati. We do respect the likes of John Brunner, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross, and we’re occasionally inspired by them – but this just emphasizes what an uninspiring lot the non-fiction “serious thinkers” attaching themselves to the Internet usually are.
There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative “solution” is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but don’t build.
We seldom complain about this in public because, really, how would it help? The world seems to be oversupplied with publishers willing to drop money on journalists, communications majors, lawyers, marketers manqué, and other glib riff-raff who have persuaded themselves that they have deep insights about the net. Beneath their verbal razzle-dazzle and coining of pointless neologisms it’s extremely uncommon for such people to think up anything true that hasn’t been old hat to us for decades, but we can’t see how to do anything to dampen the demand for their vaporous musings. So we just sigh and go back to work.
Yes, we have our own shining visions of the Internet future, and if you ask us we might well tell you about them. It’s even fair to say we have a broadly shared vision of that future; design principles like end-to-end, an allergy to systems with single-point failure modes, and a tradition of open source imply that much. But, with a limited exception during crisis periods imposed by external politics, we don’t normally make a lot of public noise about that vision. Because talk is cheap, and we believe we teach the vision best by making it live in what we design and deploy.
Here are some of the principles we live by: An ounce of technical specification beats a pound of manifesto. The superior man underpromises and overperforms. Mechanism outlasts policy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pilot deployment is worth a million. The future belongs to those who show up to build it. Shut up and show us the code.
If you can live by these principles too, roll up your sleeves and join us; there’s plenty of work to be done. Otherwise, do everybody a favor and stop with the writing and the speeches. You aren’t special, you aren’t precious, and you aren’t helping.
Eric S. Raymond, “Those who can’t build, talk”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-07-28.
