I hope this is not my legacy

It’s always nice when someone tells you that you are right. It’s even better when its not just to flatter you, its because they actually agree.

I find it hard to agree with people even if I actually do agree with them. I am forever the devils advocate, often to the annoyance of whoever I am talking to, because there aren’t a lot of decisions which are black and white and I can usually see how my opinion is wrong. Obviously the intelligent thing to do would be to say “I think x, but I can see problems y and z”, whereas I tend to actually say “y is definitely correct, prove me wrong”. This is sort of an apology to everyone I have ever talked to, certainly to people who find me argumentative and/or pedantic.

What actually made me think to post this was that last night I was reading an interview by Fran Allen (first female winner of the Turing award for her work at IBM Research since 1957) and this bit caught me eye (taken from Coders At Work:

Siebel: So why do you like it [computer science]?
Allen: [Skipped first paragraph for brevity]

Isaac Asimov made a statement about the future of computers- I don’t know whether it’s right or not- that what they’ll do is make every one of us much more creative. Computing would launch the age of creativity. One sees some of that happening- particularly in media. Kids are doing things they weren’t able to do before- make movies, create pictures. We tend to think of creativity as a special gift that a person has, just as being able to read and write were special gifts in the Dark Ages- things only a few people were able to do. I found that the idea computers are the enablers of creativity very inspiring.

This is one of the things which I was really trying to say in my post about open source software the other day, just put in a more concise way. I think I would replace the word creativity with productivity (which I think encompasses it) because humans becoming more efficient at things like mechanical/structural design and computation isn’t really creative, but it is definitely forwarding the human race in an inspiring way. Chris commented on the post saying that he was interested in the idea of having basic computing functions thought of as human “rights” now that the internet is being put forward as such by the Constitutional Council of France. I agree, and I think that it is a mark of human progress that absolute human rights such as shelter, food and water gave way to abstract things like freedom of speech, the right to marry and the right to education, and now these are being surpassed by even higher level ideas of connection with the whole world. Alternatively I think you could say that the ability to produce word processed documents, emails, and all of the other fundamental things we use computers for are actually just the methods for expression today, and by producing software for everyone to use we are allowing this. Either way, I want to get involved!

Anyway the main point I am trying to make is that I read that paragraph and got a great rush of agreement with Frances Allen, and that reminded me why I like to read. When I read about people having the same opinions as me, I feel good. When I read things that I don’t agree with, it annoys me. An example of this was The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, though I’m actually going to save my thoughts on that for another post. I still think that it is totally worthwhile reading books written from different viewpoints from your own, because it is great to internalize other peoples opinions, but overall I think that there is much more chance of [me] having a change of opinion from a book which I largely agree with. This may seem obvious, certainly Dale Carnegie knows, but it was a revelation to me.