Sometimes I write these excessively opinionated blogs. But you don’t have to read them, you know.
I try not to repeat myself too often, but I fail miserably. Don’t worry, I know.
I once wrote on this blog that the only rational conclusion a rationalist like me can make, is that there is no black and white. No idea, nor any fact, is a black and white issue. Except abstracted ideas.
I’m interested in an idea or fact, that is black and white, yet ain’t an abstraction.
Not even ethics, among the more important things in humanity, is black and white.
The only black and white ideas, in humanity, appear to be abstractions: “I imagine this abstraction to be ‘like’ a black and white model.” However. Is this meaningful at all? A lot of humans think they are geniuses for the mere fact that they can imagine abstractions. They think they are worth something just because they can make the difference between what is real, and what is abstract.
Every idiot who’s human can make a model, everyone can make an abstraction. It’s what differentiates us from animals. I’m pretty sure science will soon prove that animals too, can make abstractions. This ain’t the point.
You are zero special if you can (which is the point). And your imagined model doesn’t prove anything.
That model isn’t sufficient to convince an idiot, like me, that ‘your black and white model’ is meaningful.
Most of the readers of this blog expect some sort of relevance to GNOME or some other subject about opensource (yeah, they do. I know this is strange). Although I don’t necessarily think they deserve it, I will give them that:
A lot of the so-called “Free Software fans” have magically turned into a group of fundamentalists whom I, as a software developer, refuse to affiliate with. They decided to start thinking ‘black and white’.
ps. Don’t try to find too much meaning in this article. I just want to debunk ‘black and white’. That’s all.
ps. I fear this is one of those blogs that I will regret having posted. Oh well. Life is more than being certain about what you do.
July 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 am
A lot of the so-called “Free Software fans” have magically turned into a group of fundamentalists whom I, as a software developer, refuse to affiliate with. They decided start thinking ‘black and white’
I don’t think it’s so much “turned into” - there’s always been a strong zealous streak running through the free software community. Indeed, it’s practically a requirement - people who develop (or use) free software frequently do so because they’re passionate about what they’re doing, often motivated by the ideology of open access to source code.
So it’s hardly surprising that some of those people take it too far, appearing to others as real extremists. To those who agree with them, they’re visionaries. To those who don’t, they’re rabid lunatic nutjobs. Which says as much about the followers as the leaders… :)
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm
@Simon: It’s surprising that usually the people who DO the coding don’t take it too far at all. I have yet to meet the first coder in the community, at a conference, who’s not pragmatic about this. Usually it are the people who ONLY TALK about it, who turn into fundamentalists.
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
@Philip - hence my last comment about followers and leaders. Yeah, thinking on it a bit more, you’re right that in most cases, the loudest people are the fans, rather than the coders. Perhaps it’s that the latter have a productive outlet for their enthusiasm, though the negative does surface now and then - you could probably name a few projects that have forked as a result of some uncompromising individual splitting the community.
But then, we’re really not all that different from the rest of the world. Some people get wound up over religion, some get wound up over politics, and some get wound up over sport. And as software people, we get wound up over our favorite programming language, or over whether the works of Microsoft are the works of the devil. Silly, but human nature.
July 23rd, 2009 at 1:22 am
Philip-
The only things that are truly absolute ‘black and white’ facts are relationships between ‘things’. This is the ultimate foundation of knowledge within a universe since it is only possible to have facts _about_ ‘things’ that in themselves cannot be absolutely defined (the things, not the facts, can’t be defined absolutely). For example, it is possible to say that some ‘thing’ A weighs twice as much as some other ‘thing’ B. Weight cannot be defined absolutely, neither can the ‘things’, but even so, we can see that the relationship between the two ‘things’ is an absolute fact within this universe. You could make the same example using length or relative position within space, etc.. These facts would be the same for any awareness, human or not.
Paradoxically, it’s what’s relative that enables what’s absolute.
/djs
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:07 pm
@dj: hmm, good point indeed.