Stigmergy, You Say?

“Every aspiring young materialist dreams of growing up to be a robot.”

Roland, as transcribed by David Bentley Hart

First Things, February, 2015

Or a termite?

One of the disappointments of David Bentley Hart writing much less for “First Things” is that I no longer get to enjoy the late-night wisdom of his dog, Roland.  That line above has stayed with me for several years and it comes to mind repeatedly when I think about stigmergy.

I don’t remember by what chain of Wikipedia searches I first came across the term “stigmergy.”  I was reading about termites but – why?

Here are some definitions of stigmergy, all from the Wikipedia article:

  

Stigmergy is a consensus social network mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.

Stigmergy is a form of self-organizing social network. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.

The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma "mark, sign" and ἔργον ergon "work, action", and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.

When thinking about termites – for whatever reason – or ants or other hive creatures, this idea of simple agents leaving unintentional signals for each other that trigger follow-up actions is a reasonable hypothesis.  That is, a hypothesis to account for seemingly intelligent structures without a termite architect and a termite foreman.

Darwin came at this question from a different angle in “Origin of the Species” while considering slave-master ants.  There are ants that carry off pupas after a successful raid on a target colony.  They hatch them back home and the foreign ants become workers in their captor’s colony.  How did this come about?  Darwin did not know for sure, but applying the idea of natural selection -- the idea that variation produces tiny advantages and disadvantages for species, which advantages accumulating over many generations lead to significantly improved adaptations (and the disadvantages lead to fewer offspring and perhaps extinction) – he wondered if long ago some of the pupas carried home as food hatched instead.  In some instances the foreign ants would have fought or been killed out of hand.  In the range of variation, in some colonies they would have survived.  These colonies, having the advantage of additional workers, might have gained a survival advantage and their behavioral adaptation could have become dominant in the species.  (This is all supposition and this series would have relied on further, related adaptations.)

As a matter of fact, the whole idea of natural selection seems “stigmergic” once you think about it.  But that’s not why I think about it.

I think about stigmergy because I come across attempts to explain intelligence, or find ways to mimic intelligence, through “self-organizing” non-deliberate mechanisms.  From the Wikipedia stigmergy article:

On the Internet there are many collective projects where users interact only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the FreeBSD kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Yes, you could compare Wikipedia to a termite’s nest – but you could also contrast it to a termite’s nest: the basic structure was designed and did happen randomly.  While contributors may suggest unexpected new topics there is an overall governance in place.  All the contributors know what they are doing and are aware of the larger effort of the wiki. It also has a purpose exterior to the efforts of the termites contributors which is the gathering and dissemination of knowledge.  Insofar as a termite’s nest has a purpose it is the survival and propagation of termites.

All of this is obvious to anyone with a mind.  One’s initial conclusion upon reading the above would be that someone heard about stigmergy and just got analogy-happy.

Except for this, also from the same Wikipedia article:

Heather Marsh, associated with the Occupy Movement, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, has proposed a new social system where competition as a driving force would be replaced with a more collaborative society. This proposed society would not use representative democracy but new forms of idea and action based governance and collaborative methods including stigmergy. "With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus (cooperative) to propose an idea or initiate a project."

If that quote doesn’t send a shiver of apprehension up your representative democratic spine, I have a nice, busy hive-mind to send you to.  They twitter with excitement for your assimilation.

I have been pondering this idea of stigmergy for a long time and hoping to write an essay or, now, a blogpost, about it.  The problem is that the topic really keeps unfolding into other areas, there are so many pheromone paths to follow – so many, so many -- what am I to do?

I am to cut it off here and keep thinking about the rest of the material I’ve gathered and will gather.  In the meantime, because he really is quite a dog, here is a fuller quote from Roland:

“It’s all about freedom, you see,” he said; “that’s what makes this picture of an interior psychomachy so delectable to late modern persons. It’s a passion for determinism—physiological, subconscious, socioeconomic—what have you. It’s all to do with the final triumph of the mechanistic philosophy in every sphere, even that of consciousness. How silly. As if machines could delight in bacon, or in the chasse sauvage when some impudent rabbit scampers past one’s nose, or in that romp that amuses you so—what’s it called? ‘Fetch?’ Yet nothing so excites the modern materialist as the possibility of proving that consciousness is reducible to physiology, that freedom is an illusion, that mind is a ghostly epiphenomenon of unconscious metabolisms. Every aspiring young materialist dreams of growing up to be a robot.”

Winter of Darwin II

Winter of Darwin II

Voyaging with Beagle…

I realized with a start that germ theory had not yet been developed when Darwin wrote of his voyage on the Beagle.  While in Polynesia he notes a missionary who observed that “most of the diseases which have raged in the islands during my residence there, have been introduced by ships; and what renders this fact remarkable is, that there might be no appearance of disease among the crew of the ship which conveyed this destructive importation.”  (p. 375-376)  Darwin and his contemporaries knew that there was some method of transmission and that some exposed people were affected and some were not.  But they did not know the means of transmission.  Some ideas we learn to take so thoroughly for granted that we assume they must have been known forever. 

On the subject of missionaries, by the way, Darwin was generally approving of the English missionaries in the islands and found their work among the natives to be a positive influence.  Not so the Catholics in South America: "...but he could scarcely have been an Indian, for the race is in this part extinct, owing to the Catholic desire of making at one blow Christians and Slaves." (p. 252)

Through most of his voyage and his book, Darwin registers his disapproval of something with a quick observation and moves on – as with the comment on Catholics above.  But near the end of the book, in Brazil, he launches a spirited, eloquent condemnation of slavery with the sentence, "I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country." And he continues for an uncharacteristic two pages, giving examples from his travels of mistreatment observed.  “And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth!  It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty…” (pp. 426-427)

It is a truism now that his visit to the Galapagos Islands spurred Darwin’s thinking along the lines of natural selection.  He was already keenly observant of how geographic barriers affected species population (see p288, for a non-Galapagos example re the Andes Mountains).  Certainly the many species unique to the Galapagos – or even unique to specific islands – made him think.  The islands were over 500 miles west of South America.  In his words, (p329), “…hence, both in space and time, we seem to brought somewhat near to that great fact - that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this Earth.”

On the Origin of Species…

Where the “Voyage of the Beagle” benefits from the narrative framework of a voyage, “Origin” is a scientific thesis.  Still, there are numerous charming details sprinkled throughout whenever Darwin uses his own experience to buttress a point.  Thus we learn that he has long kept and bred pigeons, he has an extensive garden, he floats seeds in fresh and in salt water to see how long they float and if the germinate after, he tracks ants hundreds of yards to their nest, he collects bird droppings to see what seeds survive in them, and on and on.  If he hadn’t published a pivotal scientific work, he would have been thought an eccentric, slightly daft old codger.

Darwin made it a point to include likely objections to his theory of natural selection.  I like the intellectual honesty of this and I was struck by how many of these objections are repeated by modern opponents of evolution – as if newly discovered!  The eye, for example.  How could something so complex as the eye have evolved?  By the gradual accumulation of advantageous variations over countless generations, Darwin posited.

It seems to me that Darwin and his contemporaries did not have a reliable estimate as to the age of the earth.  Darwin refers to countless ages or generations, but he does not name a figure.  I don’t think it was until radioactive dating in the 20^th century that scientists were led back and back to the 4.5 billion year estimate we hear now.

This did leave Darwin and his theory necessarily vague on how long nature would have had opportunity to vary and select among the species.  I’ve always thought it a weakness of evolution to appeal to as many millions of generations as needed to explain a given result.  Lacking a good estimate of the earth’s age, Darwin avoided speculating on specific time boundaries.

And while on the subject of things Darwin didn’t know there is the source of the variation that he made the basis of his theory.  The fact of variation of offspring from parents was widely known and was used by breeders to cultivate favorable traits in domesticated animals, but the source of variation would not be unraveled for decades after Mendel’s 1866 paper.

Everyone feels free to have an opinion of the theory of evolution but what strikes me is how thoroughly steeped in nature studies Darwin was.  How informed, therefore, his conclusions by ceaseless observation.  Somewhere in “Beagle” Darwin writes to the effect that, “it is as difficult not to have an opinion as to have a correct opinion.”   How many of us consciously make that distinction – whether about evolution or anything else?

Winter of Darwin, Voyaging with Beagle I

Winter of Darwin, Voyaging with Beagle I

1831-1834

After geological ages of reading about evolution pro and con and about Charles Darwin pro and con, I decided to read his “Voyage of the Beagle” and “Origin of the Species.”  My goal is to finish “Voyage” in time to start “Origin” as my son at Thomas Aquinas College begins his spring semester with it. Hopefully we can read it together and compare notes.  But first, “Voyage of the Beagle.”

It was during this voyage, after all, that Darwin got the inspiration for natural selection – supposedly at the Galapagos Islands.  The Galapagos have become a symbol, kind of a Mt. Sinai for devoted evolutionists.  Does the account in “Voyage of the Beagle” warrant this esteem?  What does the book, as a whole, say about Darwin and world he explored and what he made of it?

As background, Darwin was not the first or the last naturalist to take advantage of European navies and colonies to explore the natural world of newly discovered lands: Joseph Banks, Alexander Humboldt, and Thomas Henry Huxley are among the men made famous by such endeavors.  In the excellent “Master and Commander” novels by Patrick O’Brian, the surgeon, Stephen Maturin, is a fictional embodiment of this model.  (O’Brian also made Maturin a master spy and, eventually, very wealthy but he remained an absent-minded naturalist to the end.  And lest anyone think Maturin, as naturalist, is a straight copy of Charles Darwin, let it be pointed out that O’Brian also published a lengthy biography of Sir Joseph Banks.)  The image of Dr. Maturin, however dressed up for dramatic fiction, helped this reader with the context in which Darwin worked.

From December, 1831, to October, 1836, the Beagle sailed around the world, spending the bulk of its time surveying the coast of South America.  Darwin spent most of this South American time ashore, traveling far inland over the pampas and by river, cataloging plants and animals and geology – and observing the people and communities that he encountered.  (Small communities, that is.  He has very little to report regarding any large cities – except how far he had to travel to get to anything of interest to a naturalist.)

Given the controversies that followed publication of “Origin of Species” and all later discoveries and elaborations of the theory of evolution, it is impossible to read the “Voyage” without looking for hints of the later theory.  Actually, the accepted timetable makes this both murkier and more necessary: Darwin is supposed to have thought of the theory of natural selection in 1838; he published the first edition of “Voyage” in 1839; then in 1845 he updated “Voyage” with more developed views and hints at his theory; he did not actually publish “Origin of the Species” until 1859.

But whether placed strategically as foundations for his theory’s later publication or included as natural observations, the questions that the natural world provoked in Darwin’s mind would eventually have been synthesized by someone into something like his origin of the species by natural selection.  (In fact, Alfred Russel Wallace was drawing to similar conclusions concurrent with Darwin.)

My reading of the “Voyage” has reached the middle of the book, the end of 1834 and completion of the Beagle’s South American coastal surveys.  While he has not reached the Galapagos Islands at this point, there are several topics that already hint at natural selection:

• ·         Page 144: in describing a particular “niata” breed of oxen, Darwin notes that during droughts these animals need special attention or they would perish; the structure of their lips do not enable them to browse on twigs and reeds.  He does not use the term here, but this observation suggests fitness for survival in changing conditions.
• ·         On page 164, Darwin notes the relationships, the similarities between extinct species and living species.  Throughout his South American tour, he looks for fossils and speculates on the changes in environment since the animals (often giant sloths) passed away. 
• ·         Considering the fecundity of nature, Darwin speculates that “some check is constantly preventing the too rapid increase of every organized being left in a state of nature.”  (Page 166) He does not here use the term “natural selection” but a basic supporting observation has been made.

Whether these were innocent observations or whether Darwin was deliberately hinting at his synthesis, the modern reader can hardly help but to spot seeds of evolutionary theory.  These observations should also remind us that the facts which Darwin interpreted were there to be seen by anyone who looked.  While he is to be credited with the vision and intellectual courage to grasp and build his theory the facts – those stubborn things – were there.

Interestingly and not surprisingly, Darwin was an Englishman of his times.  One practice that jars modern sensibilities is the casualness with which he kills animals for specimens.  At one point he describes how he snuck up on a fox which was engrossed in watching his companions and dispatched it with a hammer blow to the head.  Of course, one has to gather specimens somehow, but the frank act of killing them brings one up short.  (Those who have seen the “Master and Commander” movie and recall the specimen hunting on the Galapagos Islands will remember that they were all alive in cages – and that Stephen had them all released when the group had to dash back to camp.  I hadn’t previously thought of that episode as possibly anachronistic.  And to digress further in a “the book was better” direction, among Stephen Maturin’s unnatural accomplishments was that he was a dead shot.)

Moreover, as an Englishman Darwin definitely sees things from that perspective:

“The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization…  In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved.  At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another.  On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power.”  Page 209

Which states the case for property and hierarchy as the basis of ordered civilization. 

And yet, Darwin can note the downside of civilization:

“The Gausos of Chile, who correspond to the Gauchos of the Pampas, are, however, a very different set of beings.  Chile is the more civilized of the two countries, and the inhabitants, in consequence, have lost much individual character.  Gradation in rank are much more strongly marked: the Gauso does not by any means consider every man his equal; and I was quite surprised to find that my companions did not like to eat at the same time with myself.  This feeling of inequality is a necessary consequence of the existence of an aristocracy of wealth.” Page 232

These sociological observations have little bearing on the origin of species, however latent, except perhaps indirectly: noting the inevitable human adaptations to certain circumstances.  Rather, what make me mark them is the ambivalence these passages reveal in Darwin’s view of civilization.  Who among us hasn’t thought much the same two things: We need order!  We need individuality!

His honest appraisal of humanity – which we can all validate – lends credence to his appraisal of nature – which is more remote to our very evolved, civilized selves.

Shay’s Rebellion, Now and Then

Shay’s Rebellion, Now and Then

From Wikipedia, Shay’s Rebellion Seen Now:

Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Massachusetts, mostly in and around Springfield during 1786 and 1787. American Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) in a protest against perceived economic and civil rights injustices. Shays was a farmhand from Massachusetts at the beginning of the Revolutionary War; he joined the Continental Army, saw action at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Battle of Bunker Hill, and Battles of Saratoga, and was eventually wounded in action.

In 1787, Shays' rebels marched on the United States' Armory at Springfield in an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry and overthrow the government. The federal government found itself unable to finance troops to put down the rebellion, and it was consequently put down by the Massachusetts State militia and a privately funded local militia. The widely held view was that the Articles of Confederation needed to be reformed as the country's governing document, and the events of the rebellion served as a catalyst for the Constitutional Convention and the creation of the new government.

The shock of Shays' Rebellion drew retired General George Washington back into public life, leading to his two terms as the United States' first President. There is still debate among scholars concerning the rebellion's influence on the Constitution and its ratification.

There are two points I’d like to make.  One is that it is difficult to assess the real significance of some events at the time they are happening.  This is a commonplace, but it bears frequent repeating in a world of 24x7 hyperventilating news cycles.

The second point is that even where the historical ramifications of an event are unknown, contemporary reactions can reveal characters and tendencies that themselves will take a generation to unfold.

Shay’s Rebellion, Seen Then:

In my gradual reading of “The Adams-Jefferson Letters” and of the first volume of the “John Quincy Adams Diaries,” we can see an interesting example of how a latterly historically important event was viewed by some contemporaries:

John Quincy Adams, then a student at Harvard, made a single entry in his diary specifically about the rebellion, September 7, 1786: the Commonwealth is “in a state of considerable fermentation.”  He recounts how about 400 men had twice prevented the Court of Common Pleas from sitting and how the Governor was working to raise a militia and was calling on the people to support the Constitution.  (That would be the state constitution.)  John Quincy fears blood will be shed.  While he acknowledges some of the rebels’ grievances, he blames the rebels for their idleness and dissipation.  He also suggests that such disturbances might be “highly medicinal” to a Republican Government if properly managed.

John Adams, then the US ambassador to England included in a November 30, 1786, letter to Thomas Jefferson in France, this seemingly sanguine paragraph:

Don’t be alarmed at the late Turbulence in New England.  The Massachusetts Assembly had, in its Zeal to get the better of their Debt, laid on a Tax rather heavier than the People could bear; but all will be well, and this Commotion will terminate in additional Strength to Government.”[1]

(However mild he may have conveyed the story in his letter, the rebellion seemed to spur Adams in finishing a work he had already begun, his “Defence of the Constitutions of the United States.”  This book is thought to have helped prepare the ground for the work of the convention in Philadelphia in June, 1787.[2]

Abigail Adams, in January, 1787, wrote to Jefferson is stronger tones, describing “Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principals,” with disparate and contradictory slogans leading mobs to stop the courts in several counties.  She also, like her husband and son, foresees that this trouble will prove “salutary to the state at large.”[3]

Interestingly, although the three Adamses differ in the intensity of their alarm, all three see in the rebellion an opportunity to improve or strengthen the government.  There are similarities in this optimistic view with the famous statement from Jefferson, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.”[4]

On the one hand, it is natural that all of the Revolutionary generation would share, to some degree, in this sentiment.  They had just fought a long war to free themselves from the tyranny they saw gripping them from England.

On the other hand, each of the Adams family saw the Rebellion as regrettable and they stood on the side of orderly government.  They felt that through dealing with the uprising, orderly government and support for it would be strengthened.

Jefferson saw it from another angle.  A fuller version of his quote:

the people can not be all, & always, well informed. the part which is wrong [. . .] will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.

Here, even if they are mistaken, they should throw off lethargy and resist.  The purpose of their resistance is to warn the rulers that they “preserve the spirit of resistance.”  Afterall, “what signify a few lives lost”?

In an earlier post I wrote about how the historical, detailed Adams and Jefferson of their letters did not look like the thumbnail sketches we hold in our minds.  But here, in their respective, contemporary reactions to Shay’s Rebellion, we can begin to some daylight between them, some significant differences begin to emerge.

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[1] “The Adams-Jefferson Letters,” edited by Lester J. Cappon, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1959, p. 156.

[2]  Ibid, p.167.

[3] Ibid, p. 168

[4] Jefferson in a letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, as quoted on http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/100

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

“The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent”

By Lionel Trilling

(2008, Northwestern University Press)

Last week, wondering if George Orwell’s essay, “Notes on Nationalism” was in the Orwell Reader we’ve had for years, I went hunting in the nook.  A couple of summers ago, Ben and Denise lined up book cases in a “U” in our basement, put a lamp and a nice chair in it and migrated hundred of our books onto the shelves.  The books are sort of ordered and Ben remembers where he shelved most of them… but Ben had just gone back to school and I didn’t want to bother him.

I did not find the Orwell Reader because I was arrested in my search when I spotted The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling.  I had gotten this as a gift awhile back and it must have been swept off to the nook without my realizing it.  Which is great because now I have the happy surprise of rediscovery.

Trilling attended Columbia University in the 1920s and later taught English at Columbia his whole career. (He was the first Jew in the department and mentioning this gives me opportunity to digress and mention that my parents gave no example of racial or ethnic prejudice that I can remember.  I went for years in my teens reading Isaac Asimov without twigging that he was Jewish.  It was for some friends in high school to disbelievingly say, “You know, Jews, with names like Goldstein!” for me to get an incredulous clue.)

I read his collection of literary essays, The Liberal Imagination, somewhere in the mid-80’s and again five or six years ago.  His long essay on The Princess Casamassima by Henry James eventually proved my entrée to the works of James.  What I think brought me back to Trilling was his being a colleague of my man, Jacques Barzun.

The title, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” stops one in one’s tracks.  It might be patronizing: I’m intelligent, are you pulling your weight?  But I don’t take it that way.  I take it that we all really do have an obligation to educate ourselves and think unceasingly in whatever sphere we work.[1] 

“Trilling never encountered a good reason to postpone thinking,” writes Leon Wieseltier in his introduction to this volume.[2]  In times like ours – which are really like all times – we cannot take the truths we are handed without critically examining them.  That sense, which has accreted in my own awareness through reading science, testing software and studying history, tells me that we must study things from many angles.  It leads me to make most of my judgments very provisional – something I suspect my family finds maddening.  Wieseltier on Trilling again: “The intellectual life, if it is genuine, is a life of strain.”

To return to Orwell (I’m still keeping an eye out for that Reader), or rather to Trilling on Orwell.  I think this explains Trilling’s point and the title and the need:

[What any of us] could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance on being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them.  He liberates us.  He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope.  He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively.  He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men.[3]

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[1] The title “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” came from a lecture and then an essay by one of Trilling’s professors, John Erskine.

[2] This book was published in 2008, before Wieseltier was swept off the stage by the #MeToo movement – which demonstrates that intelligence is not one’s only moral obligation.

[3] P264 in the present volume, in the essay, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth”, 1952

Coding for Everyone. Right.

Although I’m very appreciative of it, I have not subscribed to “The Economist” for years.  Even I can’t read that much each week.  However, I have been traveling some for work recently and when I do I treat myself to the latest issue on the airport newsstand.  That’s where I most recently saw an article about the popularity of the Python programming language.  “Everybody” seems to learning it.

Python is just one of hundreds of programming languages.  It is popular now and in wide use.  But it isn’t the only widely used language.  But if everyone should learn to code, why not Python?

“Coding” in general seems to be the mantra of educators and Technological Evangelists everywhere these days.  I’ve been puzzled by this for a long time.  (That’s an actual job title, “Technological Evangelist,” I’m not making it up.)

Now, it’s valuable to have some idea what goes on under a computer’s hood and a programming class can help with that.  Also, programming may be the only formal logic training most of us get these days: how to think through a decision tree is Very Valuable.

But coding-for-everybody seems to emphasize the wrong thing. 

·   First of all, one can’t get very far into any programming language without discovering how hard it is.  Even supposedly English-like languages like Python quickly become not English at all.  Here is a fairly early exercise from an online Python class I took last summer.  This was to show how string indexes and the find function work.  Any idea why the output of this routine is 18?  (Answer at the end of this piece.)

s = 'here, there, everywhere'

t = 'where'

i = 0

print (s[i:].find(t[i:]))

·         Ostensibly, in teaching everybody to code the idea is they could get jobs as software coders.  This seems mis-directed.  Coders are the minority in most IT shops.  They are certainly the most invisible.  Coders are usually kept behind a human or procedural firewall from the project teams they serve.  It’s the analyst who interfaces with the project team on their behalf who provides the real value.  Coders often seem like commodities.  (“Agile” teams supposedly put the coders in the midst of the project team, but over time I’ll bet a similar segregation grows.)
·         Finally, most coding is maintenance of existing code.  It isn’t the fun creation of new worlds, it’s the painstaking study of someone else’s existing code to figure out how to add a function or fix a bug.  (When I used to manage programmers and ask one to tweak an existing program, the constant whine I got back was: can’t I just rewrite this from scratch?)  I wonder if coding classes include maintenance in their curricula?  I did a quick search and, while not finding a lot of hits, I did see a book: “Find the Bug: A Book of Incorrect Programs.”  I have not seen the book and I know nothing other than the title, but I like the idea.

As alluded to above, the real value is business & systems analysis and communications – oral and written communications.  One can be trained in these, too, but that’s harder and not as sexy.

Why the answer is 18:

s = 'here, there, everywhere'

t = 'where'

i = 0

print (s[i:].find(t[i:]))

·         So, s and t are string variables, that is, strings of alpha/numeric characters.
·         Individual characters can be enumerated in a string starting with zero for the first position.  In the string called t above, with the value “where” the ‘w’ would be zero and the ‘r’ would be three.
·         You can perform operations on portions of a string with an ‘index’ which is an expression inside square brackets.  This means our string could be approached thus t[3] where the result would be ‘r’.
·         If you add a colon to the index you are asking for everything in the string up-to or from the value.  This means that t[3:] gives ‘re’ – that is, from the ‘r’ to the end of the string.
·         For more fun, you can put a variable into the index.  If we let i=0 and then we execute t[i] we will get ‘w’ because the value of i is zero and the zero position in t is ‘w’.
·         If we combine that variable with the colon like t[i:] we get ‘where’ because we start from the zero position of t and go to the end of the string.  That expression t[i:] appears in the code above inside the parentheses of the ‘find’ function. 
·         By the same process we can define the string s as ‘here, there, everywhere’ and i being zero, s[i:] is the same as s, ‘here, there, everywhere’.
·         The find function consists of string.find() where the computer looks in the string for whatever is in the parentheses and returns the position of the first character.  In the code above, (s[i:].find(t[i:])) then is this…

‘here, there, everywhere’.find(‘where’)

·         And to get the answer we just have to count, starting at zero for the ‘h’ and the substring ‘where’ begins at 18.

I apologize for that explanation’s length.  It was challenging to write and probably more challenging to read.  When I first found that example I thought it might be too easy but now I wish I had found something more elementary still.  Which rather makes my point.

The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1785

The retirement correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is lauded as two giants of the Revolution reflecting on what they had wrought and their roles in it.  That’s what I assumed this volume to contain.  And it does, but it also contains the complete extant correspondence between the two men as well as letters between Abigail Adams and Jefferson.  In fact, 38% of this collection is letters from years preceding Adams being inaugurated as Vice President and before the French Revolution.

Our thumbnail sketches of historical figures don’t capture the whole person, of course: cranky, monarchical John Adams and abstract, democratic Thomas Jefferson are labels of convenience but as these work-a-day letters show, the thumbnails are far from their lived reality.

This is an example of something I have felt intuitively for years but which I have lately learned is an aspect of Bonini’s Paradox.  Paul Valery’s summation of it: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."  This idea affects business and computer models and maps and history.  I was recently explaining to one of my kids an odd cycle of reporting by corporate IT to management to which I have been subjected over the years: management wants a “dashboard,” a quick way to see the health and progress of a project.  Once the dashboard is before them, the managers begin to ask for details to support the readings.  This is reasonable; they need to validate what we are reporting and take action where results are lagging.  But the dashboard becomes, as a result, more complicated, more elaborate as it attempts to capture more and more detail.  Until finally, frustrated management declares it needs a summary dashboard that tells the story simply.  Bonini’s Paradox!

This whole digression was prompted by the Adams/Jefferson letters from 1785.  In reading these, one has to set aside the thumbnail descriptions of the people and observe what they were laboring over day after day. 

1785 was two years after the end of the War for Independence.  The Philadelphia constitution lay in the future. Congress, governing under the Articles of Confederation, had sent Adams and then Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin representing the new country in France.  With peace and Franklin’s return to America, what was needed were commercial treaties to foster trade with Europe.  And that’s what Adams and Jefferson labored over in 1785. 

When John Adams was appointed ambassador to England and Thomas Jefferson remained as ambassador to France, the two wrote frequent letters back and forth.  Supposedly abstract Jefferson was as much in the details as Adams, pitching the value of shipping flour to Portugal rather than wheat (but facing Portuguese resistance to protect its own millers) and countless other details.

The details are fascinating because they are so… everyday.  Adams had ordered crates and crates of French wine to follow him to London.  When he discovers that his ambassadorial status will not exempt him from import duties, he hurriedly writes to Jefferson to intercept the shipments, take some for himself, return what he can.  Portions of many letters include the efforts to deal with this and to settle accounts between them.  Jefferson wants the London newspapers but it was no easy thing to get them cheaply in Paris and they write that maybe this Duke or that Count could help.  Odd characters keep accosting the ambassadors with tales of how they helped the Revolution this way or that way and now they need their expenses reimbursed – each writes to the other: have you heard of this fellow? Sometimes they write in code, but at one point their cipher sheets get out of sync and they have to write in the clear to correct each other’s encryption. 

The letters between Jefferson and Abigail were more playful, often satirizing their respective host governments or one asking the other to buy shirts from London or figurines from Paris.

Weightier matters occupied them too, of course.  Buying off the Barbary Pirates, for example.  But even here, it was a matter of countless details.  This man could go to Morocco but not Algiers.  This one for Algiers then.  But we must send with him a secretary to keep us independently informed of his actions.  Yes, but who can we trust?  Has Congress authorized these delegations yet?  Do we have authority to make these arrangements?

There was at this time no love lost between England and America and John and Abigail Adams bore the brunt of this in London.  They, for their part, were fiercely impatient with the British Press and the British government and frustrated at the dismissive attitude toward trade with the former colonies.  This attitude also took the form of individual, everyday events: a snub here, a cancelled meeting there, a scurrilous newspaper story to rebut.

And in what would today be a scandalous conspiracy of political incorrectness, both men wrote the other to work out the best way to market American whale oil in Europe!

So the Adams and Jefferson of our thumbnail sketches had not yet appeared on the stage – as if they ever would.  I’ll check back in on this a few years down the road in their correspondence…

ADDENDUM: I have long observed at work that activities improve as management pays special attention to them.  I came across this way of phrasing the same idea in a letter of Jefferson’s: “The king sets out on the 21^st inst. for Cherburg in order to animate by his notice the operations there.”  I love that “to animate by his notice.”