The McGuffin Delusion arises when someone argues that an instance of technology, and not the individual who controls the technology, represents the source of a problem. This delusion shows up in a lot of technology-related political discussions.
That essay really bugged me. I don't agree with the author's premise at all, and found that
her remarks on each of the three examples overly simplified the issues to render them
almost meaningless. It seems like a cheap trick that one would apply to a complex set of
interrelated ideas in order to avoid having to think about their complexity. For example,
arguing that people and not guns are the real problem is disingenuous at best. Certainly
the real set of problems lies in the intersection between human nature and technology.
Sure, guns would present no problem if people weren't hotheaded, impulsive, aggressive
beings. But don't try to convince me that a murder of passion is as likely to happen with a
knife or a club as it is with a gun.
I don't like the idea of labeling one's concerns with certain artifacts and their use a
delusion. These artifacts, be they weapons or drugs or computers, are not simply inert,
powerless things that possess no meaning or influence in absense of the individual human
who decides to engage with them. Artifacts both support and constrain human behavior
and cognition. We do not think or act independently of the physical and social structures
around us. The author's argument against the "McGuffin Delusion" assumes that we do.
I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.
It is also helpful for academics who need to show that their published papers are being cited. Helps with grant applications and tenure review, I would assume.
Sure, I know that, but the client did not.
And he didn't think that the configuration of his local machine was somehow to blame, but rather came to us because our application was "broken".
Yeah I know, welcome to the world of tech support.
One of our products has a web-interface that relies on pop-up windows to display messages and other necessary information.
The client had installed SP2, and set up aggressive pop-up blocking. Then complained that our applicaiton was now broken.
Now, when confronted with a similar complaint, I've added to the list of questions I ask: "are you running Service Pack 2?..."
A nifty diagram is available here.
As I seem to recall, there are a group of asteroids in the L4 and L5 points (with regards to the Sun and Jupiter) called the Trojan Asteroids. Not shure that this is relevent, but the factoid just popped into my head.
Correct. There is a thriving industry removing Underground Storage Tanks (USTs). Nifty lingage on the dangers of gasoline-USTs can be found here and here and here
What's cool is that LUST is the acronym for Leaking Underground Storage Tank.
Well, it's simple really.
Once some neutrinos own property, say a few acres of land in the suburbs, they can finally have a secure place to reproduce.
Since neutrinos are really small, they can breed to vast numbers in just a small area of real estate. Soon vast numbers of neutrinos will be roaming the landscape!
I read the article, and I still don't have much of an idea what a Golomb Ruler is good for, and why you need this in addition to a trusty straight-edge, tape measure, or laser distance finder. But hey, I'm not a mathematician.
I do know that people like to study problems that have no practical use (yet) and get completly engrossed in them.
Why bother with Fermat's Last Theorem? Why try to find the least number of colors necessary to color an n-dimensional map? Why obsess over twin primes?
Because it's darn fun, that's why!
Hail to all obessed mathematicians and impossible problem solvers !
Good luck with your 25, 26 and... n -mark Golomb Rulers.
Oh, we just have a few PowerEdge 4400 servers. Nice beasts, but if they get sick, not so fun. Any time you deal with rackmount designs, space is always an issue, and internal component designers seem to have a different idea of "easy access" than I do.
It's also not fun to have the phone support try and talk you through a solution you know probably won't solve your problem, but they won't release an on-site tech unless you go through the hoops listed in their support manual.
Though that particular incident was a few years ago, and since then, things have improved. Now when I call, and ask for a technician to come on site, per the very expensive support contract that my company paid for, I usually get one.
A courier brings out a part from a central supply wharehouse, and usually a few minutes later (excellent timing, often) a contract-technician comes out (usuall from WANG, of all places) and replaces the power supply/backplane/cooling fan or what have you.
It's just that the configuation of the servers is so differnt from desktops that I'm not used to mucking about in their innards. And, because of design ideas that try to fit the most possible components in the least amount of volume, there isn't much room to poke about if you aren't really famillair with the hardware. That's all.
Hear hear! I like your attitude towards IT. Individuals are responsible for their own actions, and should be held accountable should they engage in improper activities.
There is no way that IT can create a truly 100% abuse-free environment either through hardware or software controls. If you treat your employees like prisoners, they will likely behave that way. If you treat them like responsible people, educate them to the best of your ability, and they probably will live up to your expectation.
If keeping out a particular component on say, an order of 100+ machines will save goo-gobs of money, and you are fairly certain that some business critical applicaiton won't come around that requires the use of this application, then by all means, don't deploy [X] on your desktops.
But be careful in assuming that "nobody could ever need more than 64 Megs of RAM"!
A "useless" component today may become a "critical" component a year from now.
Perhaps the engineers at Toyota believe that all Nipponese 3-year-olds are smarter than to run into where a car is parking, or perhaps that there will be a parent watching over a kid that is playing near the street.
I, for one, would prefer an autodrive system that could safely and reliably take some of the decision making out of the hands of the driver.
It would be great if I could just sit back and relax while my car took the most optimal route to work, avoiding crazy drivers, potholes and anyother dangers allong the way.
Yeah, and my car should fly too.
And be powered by "Mr. Fusion"
Another nice thing about buying from one supplier: you only have to carry arround a small number of drivers to make your user's desktops right again after they have fubared some setting trying to get their [forbidden piece of hardware] or [forbidden desktop novelty] to run.
The really bad thing about using Dell is that they use custom power supplies and motherbords. I can't get a replacement power supply for about six machines I have in my boneyard, because Dell does not sell the part. Oh, and they do make each and every internal cable just short enough that you can't upgrade or change anything around without getting a differnt cable as well.
Dell does have some decently designed cases though. Most of their desktops are easy to get into and fix, and most parts are easy to swap out for others, even from different models. Dell Servers are another story, but that's where 4-hour on-site service contracts come in handy:)
Yes, I remember that Mr. Stephenson pointed out that it would be possible to drive a car using a GUI interface, it just wouldn't be very safe.
His exact words were:
We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are easy-- or at least the GUI makes it seem that way. Of course, nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous.
Hopefully, the presence of Windows CE in the car is not an attempt to change the car's user interface.
And according to Netcraft, it's doing not so badly either.
It would be interestering (but even further offtopic) to find out why they made the move this past April to FEMA.
Why not the Department of Homeland Security? or the Secret Service? Why does FEMA get to host the PR website for the Whitehouse?
"Think of this as a partnership," Gates said. "Like the ones and zeroes of the binary code itself, we must all work together to make the promise of the computer revolution a reality. As the world's richest, most powerful software company, Microsoft is number one. And you, the millions of consumers who use our products, are the zeroes."
Or perhaps whuffie, which is pretty much the same thing. But while it worked in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom the concept of respect as a currency needed a complex infrastructure in place for it to work.
Perhaps dedicated anarchists could set up the system and keep it working, but a material object like gold (or wepons as also mentioned) is often useful for the people who don't like to just trade promises with one another.
MOD PARENT UP: Re:Singularity
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
To expand a smidge further: as covered earlier on Slashdot, the problem that the singularity presents to futurists is troubling. By definition the singularity is the point at which the rate of technological change is faster than can be imagined.
How does that sort of thing bother you as an author of futurist/speculative fiction? Wouldn't you rather there be a nice crash of civilization to keep the pace of technological advancement slow enough so that predictions in your books get outpaced by the march of technological "progress"?
Of course, given said crash of civilization, you'd best have most of your assets in gold. And it might be unlikely that your publisher would continue writing you checks, but that's a different story.
Which only underlines the point that copier manufacturers are jamming all sorts of needless functionality in there to try and maintain relevance. Yes, I said needless. Who actually uses the copier anymore? For that matter the FAX machine?
I use the copy machine, FAX and good old US mail every day. I also administer our PBX. Yes it has a nifty interface over TCP/IP now, but it uses the same old Cat-3 wires and 66-punch-down blocks as always. And, [RANT] considering that our company's procurement policies are so restrictive that buying a new $300 FAX (single-purpose stand-alone) required a huge hassle from corporate purchasing; [/RANT] there is no way in heck that we are going to spend the $$$ to change our phone system.
For brand new companies, yes VoIP technology is great, it saves money and so on. But old dinosaurs that barely survived the mass-extinction of the Go-Go-90's aren't investing in anything right now.
As far as paper is concerned, we print more paper now than ever, and like it that way. We also have huge rooms full of paper documents and pallets of document boxes taken to long-term storage every month. At the end of the month, we generate stacks and stacks of reports to send to our clients to let them know that we are doing a good job, and we have to keep paper copies (as well as electronic) for 7-years.
We generally spend over $600 on postage every month, and that's at pre-sort rates mind you. Even though the majority of our business transactions go over EDI, sometimes sending a good old paper invoice, bill or statement helps collect the money.
Until digital signatures or some other form of really strong encyrption becomes commonplace, "hardcopy" documents won't be dissappearing any time soon from business operatinos.
2. This is the not the first time a US prez. has lied to goto War. Check our chequered history and you will find many such men.
To totally agree with you on this point, let me give the instance of the Spanish-American war, where the now-deemed-to-be-accidental explosion on the USS Maine was intrepreted to be an act of Spanish sabotage. Cuba, the Phillipenes, Guam & Samoa are now no longer part of the Spanish Crown.
I was there about ten years ago, with a college field trip. Being from the Midwest, I haddn't seen any real volcanos until then. I was looking forward to seeing the terrific devistation and other formations left by the 1980 eruptions. While driving up the windy mountin road to get to the park, our van turned a bend, and suddenly I saw before me a swath of devistation so utterly complete that I knew only some tremendous force could have removed all the trees and other signs of life. I asked the "vetrans" of the group if we had reached the blast zone already. They responded: "Nope, that's just a clearcut. The blast zone now has much more wildlife." Ah well. I was just there to look at the rocks anyway.
4. Work hard to reduce medical expenses. This is a huge problem and incredibly complex. I suspect that improving public health (reducing smoking, alcohol abuse, fat-assedness, etc.) would help tremendously. Working on decreasing the price of perscription drugs is a help, but it's drops in the very big bucket.
5. Put a Medicare tax on stuff that makes people sick. Cigarettes, booze, and restaurants would be a great start. Why should some Americans get to enjoy a butt, a beer, and a double burger -- and then enjoy health care paid for by those who treat their bodies better. Drinking, smoking, and eating crap food is part of the American way... but those doing the enjoying should be paying their fair share for their future added costs.
Just to be a bit dismal, I think you miss one of the key problems with both Medicare and Socical Security: Longevity.
When both Social Security and Medicare were conceived (heck most pension plans for that matter) life expectancy wasn't much pas age 65 or so. If you managed to live long enough, you could benefit from your company's penson plan, or the government backup (Social Security) and get government medical benefits so that getting sick once didn't wipe you out financially (Medicare).
However, medical technology, good dentistry, and the "health craze" movement have all added years on to people's lives. Now people live longer, and expect to partake in the government largesse. People who live longer need expensive medications and surgeries to help them live longer. The longer they live, the more Social Security and Medicare money they soak up.
Just look at President Clinton or VP Dick Cheney. Both men would be dead (or unable to do much more than lay in bed) without nifty cardiac surgeries. Those surgeries cost thousands and thousands of dollars. (I am not saying that the price of these procedures is too much, just that they cost lots of money.) Now that their lives have been prolonged, they can expect to continue taking medicines to keep their cholesterol down, blood pressure down, and so on for the rest of their lives. This costs more money. When they finally make it to the age where cancer starts to take them down, they can expect to use more money on cancer treatment.
The longer you live, the more it costs to keep you alive. Multiply that by all the people eligible for Medicare, and you can see how the policy of providing medical treatment to people is a positive feedback loop that rapidly chews up all your spare money.
How do we solve this problem? Heck if I know. I don't want to turn us into some parody of Logan's Run where people are forcibly retired from living at age n. But I do want those who run for political office and who claim "leadership" as one of their defining adjectives, to discuss this seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
That essay really bugged me. I don't agree with the author's premise at all, and found that her remarks on each of the three examples overly simplified the issues to render them almost meaningless. It seems like a cheap trick that one would apply to a complex set of interrelated ideas in order to avoid having to think about their complexity. For example, arguing that people and not guns are the real problem is disingenuous at best. Certainly the real set of problems lies in the intersection between human nature and technology. Sure, guns would present no problem if people weren't hotheaded, impulsive, aggressive beings. But don't try to convince me that a murder of passion is as likely to happen with a knife or a club as it is with a gun.
I don't like the idea of labeling one's concerns with certain artifacts and their use a delusion. These artifacts, be they weapons or drugs or computers, are not simply inert, powerless things that possess no meaning or influence in absense of the individual human who decides to engage with them. Artifacts both support and constrain human behavior and cognition. We do not think or act independently of the physical and social structures around us. The author's argument against the "McGuffin Delusion" assumes that we do.
I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.
It is also helpful for academics who need to show that their published papers are being cited. Helps with grant applications and tenure review, I would assume.
Sure, I know that, but the client did not.
And he didn't think that the configuration of his local machine was somehow to blame, but rather came to us because our application was "broken".
Yeah I know, welcome to the world of tech support.
New market opportunity:
The pop-up blocker actually caused some problems.
One of our products has a web-interface that relies on pop-up windows to display messages and other necessary information.
The client had installed SP2, and set up aggressive pop-up blocking. Then complained that our applicaiton was now broken.
Now, when confronted with a similar complaint, I've added to the list of questions I ask: "are you running Service Pack 2?..."
A nifty diagram is available here.
As I seem to recall, there are a group of asteroids in the L4 and L5 points (with regards to the Sun and Jupiter) called the Trojan Asteroids. Not shure that this is relevent, but the factoid just popped into my head.
Correct.
There is a thriving industry removing Underground Storage Tanks (USTs). Nifty lingage on the dangers of gasoline-USTs can be found here and here and here
What's cool is that LUST is the acronym for Leaking Underground Storage Tank.
Live near Boulder Colorado? See the active LUST sites near you!.
Well, it's simple really.
Once some neutrinos own property, say a few acres of land in the suburbs, they can finally have a secure place to reproduce.
Since neutrinos are really small, they can breed to vast numbers in just a small area of real estate. Soon vast numbers of neutrinos will be roaming the landscape!
I read the article, and I still don't have much of an idea what a Golomb Ruler is good for, and why you need this in addition to a trusty straight-edge, tape measure, or laser distance finder. But hey, I'm not a mathematician.
I do know that people like to study problems that have no practical use (yet) and get completly engrossed in them.
Why bother with Fermat's Last Theorem? Why try to find the least number of colors necessary to color an n-dimensional map? Why obsess over twin primes?
Because it's darn fun , that's why!
Hail to all obessed mathematicians and impossible problem solvers !
Good luck with your 25, 26 and ... n -mark Golomb Rulers.
You know, "steve.jobs" was the first thing I thought of when I read this item. I am truly surprised that no other /.ter thought of it before you.
Congrats, I guess.
Oh, we just have a few PowerEdge 4400 servers. Nice beasts, but if they get sick, not so fun. Any time you deal with rackmount designs, space is always an issue, and internal component designers seem to have a different idea of "easy access" than I do.
It's also not fun to have the phone support try and talk you through a solution you know probably won't solve your problem, but they won't release an on-site tech unless you go through the hoops listed in their support manual.
Though that particular incident was a few years ago, and since then, things have improved. Now when I call, and ask for a technician to come on site, per the very expensive support contract that my company paid for, I usually get one.
A courier brings out a part from a central supply wharehouse, and usually a few minutes later (excellent timing, often) a contract-technician comes out (usuall from WANG, of all places) and replaces the power supply/backplane/cooling fan or what have you.
It's just that the configuation of the servers is so differnt from desktops that I'm not used to mucking about in their innards. And, because of design ideas that try to fit the most possible components in the least amount of volume, there isn't much room to poke about if you aren't really famillair with the hardware. That's all.
Hear hear! I like your attitude towards IT. Individuals are responsible for their own actions, and should be held accountable should they engage in improper activities.
There is no way that IT can create a truly 100% abuse-free environment either through hardware or software controls. If you treat your employees like prisoners, they will likely behave that way. If you treat them like responsible people, educate them to the best of your ability, and they probably will live up to your expectation.
If keeping out a particular component on say, an order of 100+ machines will save goo-gobs of money, and you are fairly certain that some business critical applicaiton won't come around that requires the use of this application, then by all means, don't deploy [X] on your desktops.
But be careful in assuming that "nobody could ever need more than 64 Megs of RAM"!
A "useless" component today may become a "critical" component a year from now.
Perhaps the engineers at Toyota believe that all Nipponese 3-year-olds are smarter than to run into where a car is parking, or perhaps that there will be a parent watching over a kid that is playing near the street.
I, for one, would prefer an autodrive system that could safely and reliably take some of the decision making out of the hands of the driver.
It would be great if I could just sit back and relax while my car took the most optimal route to work, avoiding crazy drivers, potholes and anyother dangers allong the way.
Yeah, and my car should fly too.
Ah well.And be powered by "Mr. Fusion"
Another nice thing about buying from one supplier: you only have to carry arround a small number of drivers to make your user's desktops right again after they have fubared some setting trying to get their [forbidden piece of hardware] or [forbidden desktop novelty] to run.
The really bad thing about using Dell is that they use custom power supplies and motherbords. I can't get a replacement power supply for about six machines I have in my boneyard, because Dell does not sell the part. Oh, and they do make each and every internal cable just short enough that you can't upgrade or change anything around without getting a differnt cable as well.
Dell does have some decently designed cases though. Most of their desktops are easy to get into and fix, and most parts are easy to swap out for others, even from different models. :)
Dell Servers are another story, but that's where 4-hour on-site service contracts come in handy
My favorite businesspeak phrase in the article:
Yeah, globalization, would, by it's very nature, occur in many parts of the world. Sheesh!
His exact words were:
Hopefully, the presence of Windows CE in the car is not an attempt to change the car's user interface.
And according to Netcraft, it's doing not so badly either.
It would be interestering (but even further offtopic) to find out why they made the move this past April to FEMA.
Why not the Department of Homeland Security? or the Secret Service? Why does FEMA get to host the PR website for the Whitehouse?
Or perhaps whuffie, which is pretty much the same thing. But while it worked in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom the concept of respect as a currency needed a complex infrastructure in place for it to work.
Perhaps dedicated anarchists could set up the system and keep it working, but a material object like gold (or wepons as also mentioned) is often useful for the people who don't like to just trade promises with one another.
To expand a smidge further: as covered earlier on Slashdot, the problem that the singularity presents to futurists is troubling. By definition the singularity is the point at which the rate of technological change is faster than can be imagined.
How does that sort of thing bother you as an author of futurist/speculative fiction? Wouldn't you rather there be a nice crash of civilization to keep the pace of technological advancement slow enough so that predictions in your books get outpaced by the march of technological "progress"?
Of course, given said crash of civilization, you'd best have most of your assets in gold. And it might be unlikely that your publisher would continue writing you checks, but that's a different story.
I use the copy machine, FAX and good old US mail every day. I also administer our PBX. Yes it has a nifty interface over TCP/IP now, but it uses the same old Cat-3 wires and 66-punch-down blocks as always. And, [RANT] considering that our company's procurement policies are so restrictive that buying a new $300 FAX (single-purpose stand-alone) required a huge hassle from corporate purchasing; [/RANT] there is no way in heck that we are going to spend the $$$ to change our phone system.
For brand new companies, yes VoIP technology is great, it saves money and so on. But old dinosaurs that barely survived the mass-extinction of the Go-Go-90's aren't investing in anything right now.
As far as paper is concerned, we print more paper now than ever, and like it that way. We also have huge rooms full of paper documents and pallets of document boxes taken to long-term storage every month. At the end of the month, we generate stacks and stacks of reports to send to our clients to let them know that we are doing a good job, and we have to keep paper copies (as well as electronic) for 7-years.
We generally spend over $600 on postage every month, and that's at pre-sort rates mind you. Even though the majority of our business transactions go over EDI, sometimes sending a good old paper invoice, bill or statement helps collect the money.
Until digital signatures or some other form of really strong encyrption becomes commonplace, "hardcopy" documents won't be dissappearing any time soon from business operatinos.
To totally agree with you on this point, let me give the instance of the Spanish-American war, where the now-deemed-to-be-accidental explosion on the USS Maine was intrepreted to be an act of Spanish sabotage.
Cuba, the Phillipenes, Guam & Samoa are now no longer part of the Spanish Crown.
Even made-up wars have lasting effects.
I was there about ten years ago, with a college field trip. Being from the Midwest, I haddn't seen any real volcanos until then. I was looking forward to seeing the terrific devistation and other formations left by the 1980 eruptions.
While driving up the windy mountin road to get to the park, our van turned a bend, and suddenly I saw before me a swath of devistation so utterly complete that I knew only some tremendous force could have removed all the trees and other signs of life.
I asked the "vetrans" of the group if we had reached the blast zone already. They responded: "Nope, that's just a clearcut. The blast zone now has much more wildlife."
Ah well. I was just there to look at the rocks anyway.
Proposals and some nice illustrations like what you describe can be found here:
Lecture16A
Just to be a bit dismal, I think you miss one of the key problems with both Medicare and Socical Security: Longevity.
When both Social Security and Medicare were conceived (heck most pension plans for that matter) life expectancy wasn't much pas age 65 or so. If you managed to live long enough, you could benefit from your company's penson plan, or the government backup (Social Security) and get government medical benefits so that getting sick once didn't wipe you out financially (Medicare).
However, medical technology, good dentistry, and the "health craze" movement have all added years on to people's lives. Now people live longer, and expect to partake in the government largesse. People who live longer need expensive medications and surgeries to help them live longer. The longer they live, the more Social Security and Medicare money they soak up.
Just look at President Clinton or VP Dick Cheney. Both men would be dead (or unable to do much more than lay in bed) without nifty cardiac surgeries. Those surgeries cost thousands and thousands of dollars. (I am not saying that the price of these procedures is too much, just that they cost lots of money.) Now that their lives have been prolonged, they can expect to continue taking medicines to keep their cholesterol down, blood pressure down, and so on for the rest of their lives. This costs more money. When they finally make it to the age where cancer starts to take them down, they can expect to use more money on cancer treatment.
The longer you live, the more it costs to keep you alive. Multiply that by all the people eligible for Medicare, and you can see how the policy of providing medical treatment to people is a positive feedback loop that rapidly chews up all your spare money.
How do we solve this problem? Heck if I know. I don't want to turn us into some parody of Logan's Run where people are forcibly retired from living at age n. But I do want those who run for political office and who claim "leadership" as one of their defining adjectives, to discuss this seriously.