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 ```
 Date: 20 Nov 2011 04:52
 Topic: Who's Your Daddy?
 Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:05
 ```
 __If I Had A Dime…__
 If you have the stomach to follow political debate at all in the United States, you cannot avoid the constant references to the government’s “Founding Fathers” - the small group of political heroes that make up the grand pantheon of antique moral authorities invoked to justify almost every form of political action engaged in today.
 Fundamentalist Christians insist that the “Founding Fathers” were all devout, Jesus-loving, church-going believers who wanted nothing more than to perfect the world in preparation for their lord’s imminent return. They invoke the sainted spirit of the Founders constantly, in breathless adulation, and refer to snippets from the framers’ writings as though they were revealed scripture [proclaiming the United States to be a “Christian Nation”](http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=78). George Washington’s writings seem to be the most popular amongst this group.
 Secularists respond in pained, tedious lectures insisting that [the fundamentalists had gotten it all wrong](http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html), that the Founders were really deists, atheists, or some form of ambivalent, as expressed in the way they “separated” church and state. They place enormous importance on the precise wording and attribution of quotes and judicial rulings, and the motives those writings conferred on the Founders. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia and his personal bible are especially popular tracts with these people.
 Leftists and Marxists, too, get into this game. Especially the academics. An enormous amount of energy is spent researching the lives and histories of the Founding Fathers, to discover what they really wanted, and who they really were, and how they really lived, in an effort to use them as anti-heroes. The [Chomskys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZASu3ax-c) and [Parentis](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UUKj-7_9rU) of the world are fond of reminding us of the Founders’ landed-gentry status, that most of them owned slaves, and that they were deeply entrenched in the upper class. All of this, in an effort to demystify the founders “actual intentions” as a strategy for undermining confidence in them.
 Political Libertarians - especially Ron Paul supporters, these days - are by far, the most energetic at invoking the bygone glory of the framers, and work especially hard to associate - even to equate - Paul with the mythical titans of 18th century Philadelphia. They’re especially fond of including Paul within the hallowed inner circle of [Thomas Jefferson](http://www.newsmax.com/DougWead/thomas-jefferson-ron-paul/2010/07/09/id/364219), [James Madison](http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2011/09/07/james-madison-agreed-with-paul-on-welfare/), and [George Washington](http://www.dailypaul.com/174725/george-washington-saw-this-before) (occasionally tossing in [John Adams](http://www.nolanchart.com/article4522-john-adams-ron-paul-the-constitution-and-liberty.html) and [Benjamin Franklin](http://lobobreed.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/ron-paul-and-benjamin-franklin-doctors-of-capitalism/) for good measure). Like the fundamentalists, they are also consummate quote-miners. Amusingly, mainstream neo-cons have attempted to engage Ron Paul supporters on this level as well. Forbes magazine’s Richard Miniter, for example, made a [special effort](http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardminiter/2011/10/13/ron-paul-is-wrong-about-the-fifth-amendment/) to tell them exactly what George Washington really intended.
 But my intent here is not to dispute any of the specific claims of any of these groups. The content of these debates isn’t really what I find interesting, anyway. Rather, I would like to pose one simple question to the reader: Why?
 Why does practically everyone engaged in the political game today need these men to be on their side? Why do the long-stale opinions of 200-year-dead politicians matter so much to the minds of the living in 2011? Why do we care that Jefferson might have been a closet atheist, or that Washington might have been a “reluctant leader”, or that Madison may have been secretly anti-war? What did these men possess in the nooks and crannies of their erudite prose that reason and evidence cannot provide us now?
 __It’s Not About Reason__
 The only fact I can state with any real certainty about “human nature”, if indeed we even have one, is that everyone - no matter how good or evil - wants to believe that what they are doing is righteous. Whether or not our actions actually are righteous is far less important to us than that we believe they are, and we will seek out the most emotionally potent support available for that belief. Most often, this does not include reason or evidence.
 I don’t think it’s an accident or a mere convenience that the analogy we apply to the political class that created the constitutional republic under which we all now suffer, is that of “fathers”. States throughout history have employed this analogy frequently and enthusiastically, to refer to the individuals imposing their will on their populations: The Fatherland, The Holy Father,  etc. Surely, this is because it works.
 When I was a little boy, there was no feeling more gratifying to me than the feeling I got when my father agreed with something I’d said. No logical proof, no preponderance of evidence, no revelation of insight was more emotionally satisfying to me, than to have my father look at me approvingly and declare, “that’s right, son!”. My father was much more than just a source of descriptive certainty. He represented the center of the physical universe, the polestar of social navigation, and the standard of moral truth. I deeply feared his judgment, and lusted for the power to judge others with the certainty that he appeared to possess. How much he valued me, was all that mattered to me - and when I judged the world around me, I thought of what he would think of my judgment.
 As I grew older, I relied less and less on him for my own survival. This is as it should be, of course. As we get older, we’re supposed to grow more independent of our parents. But it’s not the whole story. My gradual material independence increasingly distanced me from his explicit authority. But I was never equipped in childhood with any of the tools to replace that need, and when the day inevitably arrive that required them, I was never really able to escape the underlying need for the hierarchical relationships inherent in that early state of dependency. Without an unassailable authority that I trusted and believed in, how could I be certain that my beliefs were righteous? How could I be justified in my actions? I needed that approving look, that reassuring countenance, those words of validation. But the more the pressures of growing older pulled me away from my father’s watchful eye, the less and less I could look to him to confirm that my choices were good and true. I had to find a substitute, for the sake of my own sanity.
 __The Power And The Glory__
 For most, that substitute comes in the form of an absolute projection. They look to gods and holy books, and to the men who actually sometimes even call themselves “father”, for the comfort of an absolute authority to whom they can appeal for reassurance of their goodness. For them, the edicts of Leviticus, or the parables of Christ, or the allegories of the Koran, or the myriad rules of the Talmud as privileged to them by their holy men, are enough. They are comforted by the reassurances of their holy men, and in awe of their judgment. The framework of hierarchy is preserved, and the anxiety of self-justification is avoided.
 For others, the ghosts of ancient history are not enough. The abstract desert wanderer figures of Abraham and Isaac are too vague, too irrelevant. More recent specters are needed. Some latter-day saints, whose experiences are close enough to our own to allow us to identify with them, yet far enough away to make them untouchable.  Real faces, real names, but mythological lives. This is where the “Founding Fathers” come in. In many cases, [the allusion](http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353) is [appallingly explicit](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Apotheosis_of_George_Washington.jpg). Interestingly, the Romans did this, too - elevating their political leaders to the pantheon of worshiped gods, as they died.
 With the aid of powerful emotional icons safely ensconced in the past, whose words, deeds, and intensions I can safely receive from special experts, I don’t really need to make much of an argument for the necessity of the state, or for its particular constitution or character, do I? Why, of course we need this that and the other! After all, James Madison said this, and Thomas Jefferson said that, and if that’s not enough, George Washington agrees with the other! Well, if Jefferson said so, it must be correct.
 __Freedom From Fear__
 In an ideal world, my childhood reverence for my father would have come from his capacity to help me become an individual - to teach me to help myself. This was not the case. It derived from his power over me. Not just his power to deprive me of life or liberty, but mainly his power to judge me. And he used this power enthusiastically to exact that reverence early on.  He taught me to fear him. But more importantly, he taught me to fear my own freedom. By depriving me of the intellectual and emotional tools I’d need in my development to know the world, and to make judgments about it confidently, he left me with one alternative: find another authority to whom I could surrender myself, because thinking and acting for yourself will only lead to the chaos of disapproval and abandonment.
 My story is not an uncommon one. Most of us, whether we grow up in an abusive situation not, are conditioned to fear and obey authorities, for no other reason than that they are authorities. This is why the “Founding Fathers” have so much power over our hearts and minds. They are absolute authorities, judging us unconditionally from the past. But imagine, if you will, a world in which each individual is raised in the confidence of his own capacity to reason and to judge; a world in which rational self-interest is the basis for social exchange, and negotiation is the means.
 Such a world could exist, if we wanted it. In such a world, who said something would seem an almost irrelevant fact, in judging whether what was said was true or not. But  until we equip ourselves and our children with the intellectual and emotional tools needed to escape the trap of obligate hierarchy in our personal relationships, we will be forever appealing to empty authorities like the “Founding Fathers”, and the voluntary society we yearn for will never come.
--- a/Daily-Anarchist/whos_your_daddy.md
+++ b/Daily-Anarchist/whos_your_daddy.md
@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
 ```
 Date: 20 Nov 2011 04:52
 Topic: Who's Your Daddy?
 Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:05
 ```
 __If I Had A Dime…__
 If you have the stomach to follow political debate at all in the United States, you cannot avoid the constant references to the government’s “Founding Fathers” - the small group of political heroes that make up the grand pantheon of antique moral authorities invoked to justify almost every form of political action engaged in today. 
 Fundamentalist Christians insist that the “Founding Fathers” were all devout, Jesus-loving, church-going believers who wanted nothing more than to perfect the world in preparation for their lord’s imminent return. They invoke the sainted spirit of the Founders constantly, in breathless adulation, and refer to snippets from the framers’ writings as though they were revealed scripture [proclaiming the United States to be a “Christian Nation”](http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=78). George Washington’s writings seem to be the most popular amongst this group.
 Secularists respond in pained, tedious lectures insisting that [the fundamentalists had gotten it all wrong](http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html), that the Founders were really deists, atheists, or some form of ambivalent, as expressed in the way they “separated” church and state. They place enormous importance on the precise wording and attribution of quotes and judicial rulings, and the motives those writings conferred on the Founders. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia and his personal bible are especially popular tracts with these people.
 Leftists and Marxists, too, get into this game. Especially the academics. An enormous amount of energy is spent researching the lives and histories of the Founding Fathers, to discover what they really wanted, and who they really were, and how they really lived, in an effort to use them as anti-heroes. The [Chomskys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZASu3ax-c) and [Parentis](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UUKj-7_9rU) of the world are fond of reminding us of the Founders’ landed-gentry status, that most of them owned slaves, and that they were deeply entrenched in the upper class. All of this, in an effort to demystify the founders “actual intentions” as a strategy for undermining confidence in them.
 Political Libertarians - especially Ron Paul supporters, these days - are by far, the most energetic at invoking the bygone glory of the framers, and work especially hard to associate - even to equate - Paul with the mythical titans of 18th century Philadelphia. They’re especially fond of including Paul within the hallowed inner circle of [Thomas Jefferson](http://www.newsmax.com/DougWead/thomas-jefferson-ron-paul/2010/07/09/id/364219), [James Madison](http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2011/09/07/james-madison-agreed-with-paul-on-welfare/), and [George Washington](http://www.dailypaul.com/174725/george-washington-saw-this-before) (occasionally tossing in [John Adams](http://www.nolanchart.com/article4522-john-adams-ron-paul-the-constitution-and-liberty.html) and [Benjamin Franklin](http://lobobreed.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/ron-paul-and-benjamin-franklin-doctors-of-capitalism/) for good measure). Like the fundamentalists, they are also consummate quote-miners. Amusingly, mainstream neo-cons have attempted to engage Ron Paul supporters on this level as well. Forbes magazine’s Richard Miniter, for example, made a [special effort](http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardminiter/2011/10/13/ron-paul-is-wrong-about-the-fifth-amendment/) to tell them exactly what George Washington really intended.
 But my intent here is not to dispute any of the specific claims of any of these groups. The content of these debates isn’t really what I find interesting, anyway. Rather, I would like to pose one simple question to the reader: Why? 
 Why does practically everyone engaged in the political game today need these men to be on their side? Why do the long-stale opinions of 200-year-dead politicians matter so much to the minds of the living in 2011? Why do we care that Jefferson might have been a closet atheist, or that Washington might have been a “reluctant leader”, or that Madison may have been secretly anti-war? What did these men possess in the nooks and crannies of their erudite prose that reason and evidence cannot provide us now? 
 __It’s Not About Reason__
 The only fact I can state with any real certainty about “human nature”, if indeed we even have one, is that everyone - no matter how good or evil - wants to believe that what they are doing is righteous. Whether or not our actions actually are righteous is far less important to us than that we believe they are, and we will seek out the most emotionally potent support available for that belief. Most often, this does not include reason or evidence.
 I don’t think it’s an accident or a mere convenience that the analogy we apply to the political class that created the constitutional republic under which we all now suffer, is that of “fathers”. States throughout history have employed this analogy frequently and enthusiastically, to refer to the individuals imposing their will on their populations: The Fatherland, The Holy Father,  etc. Surely, this is because it works.
 When I was a little boy, there was no feeling more gratifying to me than the feeling I got when my father agreed with something I’d said. No logical proof, no preponderance of evidence, no revelation of insight was more emotionally satisfying to me, than to have my father look at me approvingly and declare, “that’s right, son!”. My father was much more than just a source of descriptive certainty. He represented the center of the physical universe, the polestar of social navigation, and the standard of moral truth. I deeply feared his judgment, and lusted for the power to judge others with the certainty that he appeared to possess. How much he valued me, was all that mattered to me - and when I judged the world around me, I thought of what he would think of my judgment.
 As I grew older, I relied less and less on him for my own survival. This is as it should be, of course. As we get older, we’re supposed to grow more independent of our parents. But it’s not the whole story. My gradual material independence increasingly distanced me from his explicit authority. But I was never equipped in childhood with any of the tools to replace that need, and when the day inevitably arrive that required them, I was never really able to escape the underlying need for the hierarchical relationships inherent in that early state of dependency. Without an unassailable authority that I trusted and believed in, how could I be certain that my beliefs were righteous? How could I be justified in my actions? I needed that approving look, that reassuring countenance, those words of validation. But the more the pressures of growing older pulled me away from my father’s watchful eye, the less and less I could look to him to confirm that my choices were good and true. I had to find a substitute, for the sake of my own sanity. 
 __The Power And The Glory__
 For most, that substitute comes in the form of an absolute projection. They look to gods and holy books, and to the men who actually sometimes even call themselves “father”, for the comfort of an absolute authority to whom they can appeal for reassurance of their goodness. For them, the edicts of Leviticus, or the parables of Christ, or the allegories of the Koran, or the myriad rules of the Talmud as privileged to them by their holy men, are enough. They are comforted by the reassurances of their holy men, and in awe of their judgment. The framework of hierarchy is preserved, and the anxiety of self-justification is avoided.
 For others, the ghosts of ancient history are not enough. The abstract desert wanderer figures of Abraham and Isaac are too vague, too irrelevant. More recent specters are needed. Some latter-day saints, whose experiences are close enough to our own to allow us to identify with them, yet far enough away to make them untouchable.  Real faces, real names, but mythological lives. This is where the “Founding Fathers” come in. In many cases, [the allusion](http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353) is [appallingly explicit](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Apotheosis_of_George_Washington.jpg). Interestingly, the Romans did this, too - elevating their political leaders to the pantheon of worshiped gods, as they died. 
 With the aid of powerful emotional icons safely ensconced in the past, whose words, deeds, and intensions I can safely receive from special experts, I don’t really need to make much of an argument for the necessity of the state, or for its particular constitution or character, do I? Why, of course we need this that and the other! After all, James Madison said this, and Thomas Jefferson said that, and if that’s not enough, George Washington agrees with the other! Well, if Jefferson said so, it must be correct. 
 __Freedom From Fear__
 In an ideal world, my childhood reverence for my father would have come from his capacity to help me become an individual - to teach me to help myself. This was not the case. It derived from his power over me. Not just his power to deprive me of life or liberty, but mainly his power to judge me. And he used this power enthusiastically to exact that reverence early on.  He taught me to fear him. But more importantly, he taught me to fear my own freedom. By depriving me of the intellectual and emotional tools I’d need in my development to know the world, and to make judgments about it confidently, he left me with one alternative: find another authority to whom I could surrender myself, because thinking and acting for yourself will only lead to the chaos of disapproval and abandonment. 
 My story is not an uncommon one. Most of us, whether we grow up in an abusive situation not, are conditioned to fear and obey authorities, for no other reason than that they are authorities. This is why the “Founding Fathers” have so much power over our hearts and minds. They are absolute authorities, judging us unconditionally from the past. But imagine, if you will, a world in which each individual is raised in the confidence of his own capacity to reason and to judge; a world in which rational self-interest is the basis for social exchange, and negotiation is the means. 
 Such a world could exist, if we wanted it. In such a world, who said something would seem an almost irrelevant fact, in judging whether what was said was true or not. But  until we equip ourselves and our children with the intellectual and emotional tools needed to escape the trap of obligate hierarchy in our personal relationships, we will be forever appealing to empty authorities like the “Founding Fathers”, and the voluntary society we yearn for will never come.
--- a/For-Love-Of-Ideas/For
+++ b/For-Love-Of-Ideas/For
@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
 ```
 Date: 05 Apr 2012 18:57
 Topic: For Love Of Ideas About Page
 Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:05
 ```
 I love ideas. Not just any ideas, but the most important ones. I want to talk about the ideas that drive us forward, pull us backward, push us sideways, send us careening off cliffs and climbing mountains, as well as hiding under our beds and looking over our shoulders. The ideas that become the solid containers into which we pour our very lives.
 This podcast is how I’ve decided to talk about them. It is going to be about what these ideas are, where they came from, why they matter, and how we use them in practice. It’s going to be about studying them, understanding them, evaluating them, observing them, and implementing them. It’s going to be about how they stand on their own, how they relate to each other, and how we relate to them.
 Most importantly, it’s going to be about acting on them. Knowing what we’re acting on, why we’re acting on it, and what we’re saying about ourselves when we do. If ideas matter, they matter most in how they’re expressed, and they’re expressed best through our actions. To do this, I will mostly be talking about myself. About my own experiences. About my own attempts to use the ideas I talk about here, and the effect that they’ve had in my life. The changes I’ve had to make, the problems I’ve encountered, and the ways in which I’ve either solved those problems, or failed to.
 This podcast was inspired by two sources. The first, Mortimer Adler, and his amazing “The Great Ideas” series (also known as the Syntopicon in the old Encyclopedia Britannica). It had a huge influence on me when I was young, and I’ll be cribbing from his list a lot. It’s impossible not to borrow from him, I think. His list is a huge part of what most philosophers do, and ideas like ‘judgment’, ‘science’, ‘sense’, ‘beauty’, and ‘habit’ are essential to what I want to talk about.
 But one thing that’s always frustrated me about his work. It’s extremely abstract. You’ll learn all about what the greatest minds in history have said about these ideas, but there will be no clear path from there, to where they show up in your own life – in how you ought to change your own behavior according to these ideas. Adler liked to say “Philosophy is everybody’s business,” and he did a beautiful job of making the loftiest concepts accessible to anyone able to read and write. But I think he missed something essential. Business is done, not just thought about. As Arnold Glasgow said, “An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.”
 This is where the second greatest influence in my life, and the second most important source for this podcast, comes in. He’s perhaps not a philosopher you’ve heard of (unless you’re active in the Libertarian community). But his work in that arena is probably the most important since Adam Smith or Henry David Thoreau. His name is Stefan Molyneux, and he runs a philosophy podcast called Freedomain Radio. He’s the missing link between thought and action; between theory and practice; between concepts and reality. He makes ideas not only actionable, but personal. He urges us to constantly examine ourselves, our relationships, and our environment, to be sure that what we actually do, is what we say we want – and to find ways to change things until “the outside matches the inside.”
 For Love Of Ideas is my attempt to do just that. If we are to know how to act – how to make the inside and outside match, we need to know which ideas are the good ones, which are the bad ones, and how to tell the difference. We need a starting point to think about them, and to consider how they’ve influenced our behavior up to now. We need to be conscious of them when they are at play in our lives.
 Somewhere between the purely disinterested consideration of men like Adler, and the passionate advocacy of men like Molyneux, lies the meaty middle-ground of earnest study, self-reflection, and personal commitment to change. That is why For Love Of Ideas needs to exist, and that is why I am doing this.
 I hope you’ll come to agree.
--- a/For-Love-Of-Ideas/For
+++ b/For-Love-Of-Ideas/For
@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
 ```
 Date: 10 Apr 2012 18:55
 Topic: For Love Of Ideas Introduction Post 
 Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:05
 ```
 “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
 I want to talk to you about ideas. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it’s amazing just how difficult a project like this can be. The concept is so lofty, and so prone to dissipation into clouds of abstraction that nearly everyone who tries it ends up no better off than when he started. Many a philosopher has spent immeasurable amounts of energy, and innumerable hours noodling on the nature of belief, the vagaries of existence, and the gray edges of morality, never seeming to get anywhere tangible.
 My biggest fear with this project is exactly that; getting myself – and you – lost in a paralyzing cloud of vague abstractions – the mental and emotional equivalent of the chinese puzzle.
 My first impulse to this fear was very Randian – I wanted to start by giving you fixed definitions and precise explanations full of science and psychology and epistemological justifications. What is an ‘Idea’? What does it mean to ‘believe’ an idea? How do they form? Where do they come from? What part of the brain are they made of? How do we know any of it is true? All incredibly fascinating questions, to me at least. But after falling flat a few times trying to reinvent that wheel, I realized something was missing.
 I was forgetting the very purpose of this podcast – the link to the personal. While they are incredibly important, there’s nothing immediate, urgent, or relevant, in mere definitions and semantics. My main goal for this podcast is to help carve easily recognizable and comfortably traversable paths from the abstract notions of ideas to the toothbrush-and-coffee-cup life you’re living right now, and to try to help you become more aware of how ideas are affecting your moment-to-moment life, influencing your behavior, affecting the quality of your relationships, and attenuating the happiness you are capable of attaining.
 In essence, what I want, is to help you understand your relationship to ideas, so that you can better understand your relationship to yourself, and to the people you’ve included in your life.
 So, what is our relationship to ideas? I think if I’m going to have any success at trying to answer this question, I’m going to have to start by telling you what kind of relationship I have – and have had – with them. Truth be told, I have a very selfish motive in this task. I’m hope to learn as much from this podcast as I hope you are. But undoing the tangled threads of memory, experience, and emotion from the ideas that formed the raw cotton of those threads in me, is a task I’m finding incredibly difficult to tackle.
 I’m neither a writer nor a speaker by trade or avocation, so please bear with my while I stumble my way through this. I suppose I’ll start with a memory. Let’s see where it leads.
 As far back as I can recall, I’ve always been excited, exasperated, frightened, exhilarated, and fascinated by the “big” ideas. What do I mean by “big”? Well, in short, the ideas of the philosophers. Ideas about human life and the world, like “justice”, “love”, “fairness”, “knowledge”, “society”, “sacrifice”, and “self”. Ideas I’d originally only ever heard priests speak of, when I was very little. Ideas whose consideration I was constantly told were meant for moments of pure idle indulgence; for days when the snow was falling so hard that shoveling would be pointless. Days when all your “real” work was done, and you couldn’t think of anything else to help the household out. For moments that didn’t matter.
 From the sound of it, one might think I lived on a farm as a boy. Nothing could be farther from the truth — or a more accurate descriptor. I lived in a middle-class suburb of Chicago with a father who tried very hard to run the house as if we were living on a 19th century farm. So, wiling away hours on books and contemplation were not prized activities, to say the least. Though, my brothers and I did manage to spend plenty of hours in front of the television, without much complaint.
 Very early on, I realized somewhat unconsciously that idleness wasn’t really the problem, but the flood of questions and curiosities that filled the void of that idleness. Serious thought frightened my parents. And so, for a time, it frightened me too. When I rode home on the school bus, or walked behind the lawn mower on the weekends, or sat over a can of nails that needed straightening on a rainy day, I would spontaneously think thoughts like, “why do we believe in god?”, or “what makes something ‘beautiful’?”, or “where does happiness come from?”, or ” what kind of life do I want?”, or “why is there so much aggression in the world?”, but I’d never openly verbalize them. Usually, I would only give them a subtle glance, and then bat them away before anyone became suspicious of me. They were my dirty, guilty little secrets. Self-indulgences that would get me ridiculed or punished if I’d admitted to wasting time on them.
 Books of this nature were also rare contraband in our household. While it was perfectly fine to bring library books home on topics such as marine biology or electrical engineering, topics like truth, beauty, love, and life were something to be avoided.  As such, it wasn’t until I was was in my early teens, before I was really able to sink my teeth into anything that had substance – at least to me. And it happened by sheer accident.
 When I was 13, my father was very thankfully bedazzled by an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman into believing that his sons were doomed to menial labor work much like he’d done most of his life, if he wasn’t willing to invest in our education, through the fine burgundy-leather-bound set of books the salesman was generously offering him.
 The basic set of encyclopedias came with an additional “bonus” set of books. This after-thought was to become the genesis of my first real awakening.
 My father didn’t quite know what to do with them. After paying so much money (what would have been the equivalent of a base model compact car, in today’s dollars) he couldn’t bear the thought of disposing of them. We were middle-class, but just barely. Still, the way the salesman explained it, he really didn’t want his kids reading these things either. They asked a lot of questions. Questions he wanted nothing to do with. But if he forbade us from reading them, he might appear anti-education to us. That was out of the question. So, instead, he framed our access to them as a “special case”. If we could justify access to them, or did something extraordinarily productive, we’d be “gifted” time with a select book. Of course, this achieved the same effect: they were fundamentally out of reach to us — and he could insure this, because they were wrapped in cellophane.
 That extra set of volumes was known as “The Great Books“, a compendium of what Mortimer Adler considered the authoritative canon of western thought. It included just about everyone you could think of from Aristotle to Orwell. My father had no idea who these people were or what they had to say, but he had very strong suspicions. If he had actually read any of these books, he’d have immediately hid them from us.
 I’m not really sure what the debate in his head must have been like. Was there some part of him that secretly wished for us to soil ourselves with them? Was there some ancient part of his soul that yearned to live vicariously through our own voyage of self-discovery? What part of him kept them wrapped in cellophane, and meted our access to them, as though they were bottles of alcohol? What must the internal barbs of self-criticism and self-hatred been like for him to experience? I have an idea, because for years I was infected with the same poison of internal division. But I’ll never know the full truth.
 Eventually, I was able to wear down my father’s recalcitrance, and my own anxieties, enough to gain access to JS Mill and The Federalist Papers. Somehow, I knew those would be relatively “safe” books to start with. The excitement was so great that I devoured them both in a few days time. My mind was overwhelmed with new information, new concepts, and new questions. I couldn’t wait to put what I’d read into actual practice. I spent the next few weeks grinding through my chores and my homework as fast as I could, in order to have time to work on my own project for our family, based on what I’d read in those two books.
 You see, what I’d written, was a three-page document that was going to reconstitute our family. A Constitution. A Constitution Of The Family. I was mindful of the permanence and authority of my parents’ position, so I structured it as a Constitutional Monarchy. My father, the permanent executive; my mother the permanent Judiciary. My brothers and I were to take on the role of the legislative and various departmental executive tasks (there were four of us old enough for the responsibilities). Having read the commentaries on rights, I took special care to include a Bill Of Rights for us kids, to guard against encroachments by my parents where the rules were not clear.
 It was going to be a masterpiece of ingenuity guided by the minds of James Madison and J.S. Mill, everyone was going to love it, and our family was going to be so much more happy and just and peaceful, when it was all explained and adopted. After all, my father was a reasonable man. Surely, he’d see this, and realize it was exactly what was missing in our lives!
 I couldn’t possibly have been more mistaken.
 One Sunday morning, I brought the pages down with me to breakfast, and sat on them waiting for my turn to talk. When I was given the floor, I pulled them out, held them up stiffly and began to read the first lines anxiously. My father interrupted. What was this? Why was I reading it? I handed them to him. He glanced over them quickly, a smirk snaked across his jaw, and he spoke.
 “Is this what you’ve been spending your freetime on?”
 “Yes! And I think it could work, if we…”
 He held his hand up, stopping me. “Look, I understand you’re excited by those books. But this is just ridiculous. The way your mother and I handle this family has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. I admire your enthusiasm, but you really need to put this energy to better use, young man.”
 And with that, he handed the papers back to me, without another thought, and without any additional opportunity for discussion. My brothers tittered around the table, feeling my humiliation and embarrassment for me. As for me, I was enraged and despairing. What had just happened? How could he just dismiss me like that? Why wasn’t this at least worth a healthy discussion? Why even put those books out for us to see, if they weren’t ever going to be taken seriously? Why couldn’t I be taken seriously?
 Pouting and stomping were punishable by force, so instead, I sulked up to my bedroom, tore and crushed the papers in my fist as hard as I could, tossed the ball into my waste basket, dropped my head on my desk, and cried – as silently as I could manage.
 I realized that day – whether I was right or wrong about the Constitution Of The Family – that ideas mattered more than anything in the world. They mattered so much that my own father would sooner humiliate and shame me in front of my entire family, than face the possibility that the ideas he held about himself and about his family might be wrong.
 If there is anything that can be said for certain about human nature, it is that we all want to believe that what we are doing is right, and good.  That Sunday morning so long ago, I learned that valuable lesson. As far as my father was concerned, believing he was right was far more important than my believing I was loved.
 For a very long time after that, I stopped caring about being right or being loved.
 This podcast, then, is about how I regained my capacity to care – about being right, and about being loved.
--- a/George-Gets-Married/09
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 Date: 09 Jan 2012 04:15
 Modified: 09 Jan 2012 04:25
 Today, I want to talk about changes. It occurred to me this morning that it’s been nearly six years since I started the journey that landed me here, and it’s not even over yet. Sometimes I feel like I’m living someone else’s life, and that my life is now being lived by some other poor soul, 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/Another
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 Date: 01 Nov 2011 03:37
 Topic: Another Halloween Entry
 Modified: 01 Nov 2011 04:17
 So today is actually Halloween. Not yesterday. Anyway, this blog is not about Halloween. I’m just using that as a jumping point for writing. 
 Several weeks ago, CJ and I discussed the possibility of my joining the Brooklyn Conservatory, to study music part time again. I chose to join, and she was really excited to see me return to something I’d loved very much when I was younger. 
 At the time, my justification for taking this on, was to examine the emotions I felt around it. To return to this period of my history, to try to understand the choices I made around it. To find a way to resolve it. But the truth is, I’m already resolved about it. And every time I go back, I am tempted to treat it anew. To commit myself freshly to something I gave up decades ago. To believe there is still life to be breathed into this corpse. All I’m doing is creating a zombie. A walking dead. A beast that has animation, but no life. A homunculus. Acting out the passion, but not really feeling it. 
 The more of these rehearsals I attend, the more resistance I feel toward them. The more enmeshed I get in the group, the less and less I want to be a part of it. I keep picking a fight with the nature of the music - the religious content, and the manic abject slobbering praise of a sadistic god that tortured the people who were forced to listen to this music. All of that is true. All of that is horrible. But it’s not the core of what’s going on here. At least, I don’t think it is. 
 More later. Lots more. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Maybe some day, it will be something I can share. Not right now.
--- a/George-Gets-Married/First
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 Date: 14 Sep 2011 05:20
 Topic: First Post Notes
 Modified: 02 Oct 2011 00:51
 To that end, I will begin with myself. 
 George was born to parents who did not anticipate his arrival, so much as fear it. He was the inexorable necessity of Catholic obligation. His parents did not love each other, but needed each other for reasons of which neither were ever really conscious. When George did arrive, it cemented that obligation. What began as a merely unconscious and dysfunctional union, became a 30 year sentence of indentured servitude with his birth. And all that rage, fear, frustration, resentment, shame and guilt was to be loaded onto his back one brick at a time, each and every day of it.
 This may sound like hyperbole. It is true that my writing has a tendency to lean toward the dramatic. But in this case, it's not very far from reality at all. I was bottle fed not because my mother was medically or physically unable to feed, but because the mere idea of having a child sucking at her breast disgusted, revolted, and enraged her. She also suffered 
 As a child, I was beaten severely for everything from yelling to tardiness to wetting the bed. I was taught to hate my body, to hate all of it's natural impulses - especially pleasure and self-expression -- and to fear anyone who loved those things. I was constantly given mixed signals as to what I should enjoy, should desire, should believe, should expect of the world, and I was constantly punished for being unable to intuit which preference was the correct one in any given moment. 
 As I grew older, and began to develop sexually, the constant white noise of suspicion and disgust that swirled around me worsened exponentially. My friendships were monitored, my bedroom was regularly searched, and my reading habits were constantly scrutinized. Fast forward to my teen years. From the years 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/Learning
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 Date: 23 Dec 2011 04:11
 Topic: Learning To Hate The World
 Modified: 23 Dec 2011 16:15
 From as far back as I can remember, it was my goal to prove to myself that I didn’t need anyone, for anything. There were some things for which you simply couldn’t avoid needing other people. So, for a significant portion of my adult life, I practiced a careful detente with my employers, coworkers, and landlords: make sure you can tell them what they want to hear, and can give them what they want, and they’ll give you what you need and leave you alone otherwise. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/Marriage
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 Date: 04 Oct 2011 06:53
 Topic: Marriage Means
 Modified: 04 Oct 2011 14:07
 Helping each other do scary things, and trusting each other enough to dare to take risks, knowing that we are not on our own. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/One
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 Date: 01 Dec 2011 01:28
 Topic: One Moment I Regret
 Modified: 23 Dec 2011 15:58
 I am going to break the chronological chain here, to talk briefly about a recent memory that’s been haunting me. I think it’s important.
 I first came to New York in 2009. It was CJ, in fact, who invited me here (and found me a job). After being here about a month, CJ invited me -- because I was still too cautious to invite her -- to a performance of Peter And The Wolf narrated by one of her favorite fiction authors, Neil Gaiman. We had a fantastic night. We met up for dinner, had a long conversation about her travails in Russia, and the struggle with her fledgling business, and then we walked to the mall to watch the performance. 
 After the break, they padded out the evening with a short list of movie music and crowd-pleasers, topping it all off with a Strauss waltz. I’d felt it coming the director paused to encourage everyone to get up and dance. The urge to ask her was so strong that I started hiding in my coat, sliding away, tapping my foot. How could I? I wasn’t even dating her at that point. We were just friends. I’d just moved there. I was so much older. I couldn’t dance anyway. I’d embarrass her. The mind filled with reasons as many reasons were needed to shore up the tide rising in my heart. Mustn’t let the river overflow its banks. 
 Those excuses are like bricks. Building up one by one. Gradually loading me down. I could feel my body getting heavier and heavier as they accumulated in the form of tension around my shoulders and neck. 
 CJ stood up. She wanted me to ask her. I could see it in her face. But I told myself it was because she wanted to leave.  One last surge. I looked at her and smiled. “I love this music!” I whispered. The cover story. I’m agitated because I enjoy Strauss waltzes. Heh. She was swaying a little, but not too much. I don’t think she realized she was. 
 This was nonsense. I was deluding myself. How shameful. How manipulative. This is entirely inappropriate. This is NOT why she brought you here. I sat back down. The guilt and shame bricks are always enough to bring my to my senses. 
 The music came to an end, and we left the hall out the back entrance. We drifted slowly along the length of the pier, continuing our conversations from earlier, all the way back to the subway. We both felt joy in that evening, and our friendship was strengthened by the outing, but ever since, I’ve always felt just a twinge of regret. 
 Why? Well, because it was a missed opportunity. CJ and I eventually did open up to each other, and this blog is a testament to that. But that moment during the concert, when I let decades of self-doubt and self-hatred rule my relationship with her, I passed on a chance to be _free_. To show CJ who I really was, what I was really experiencing, how I really felt. I passed on a chance to let her decide what to do with that information. I passed on a chance to trust her. To trust myself. To love her fully. 
 And I wanted to share this here, because it occurs to me, that it might _never_ have come again. And that would have been a supreme tragedy. A failure in failing to risk failure. A surrender to fear and self-loathing. And I don’t ever want anyone to feel what that’s like. Yes, I have felt it before. Which will be the subject of upcoming posts I’m sure. But for now, I just wanted to say, don’t let the fear of the pain of rejection push you away from what you know is good and true. Don’t let your fear of rejection become a self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation.
 Dare to be honest, and love will come to you.
--- a/George-Gets-Married/The
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 Date: 03 Jan 2012 04:07
 Topic: The Drowning Pool Of My Adolescence
 Modified: 09 Jan 2012 04:15
 I thought I would have more to say about my adolescence and early adulthood. I can’t remember much of it, though. I spent the better portion of it lost in a fog of rage, humiliation, self-denial, and intense bitterness. I don’t have many memories of those years. Those that I do have, are either angry, or sad. 
 Throughout the length of my life in middle and high school, I avoided social gatherings of all kinds but one: music. It was the only thing I clung to for the sheer joy of it. I hid amongst the choir so as not to appear too satisfied, and to minimize my visibility to my parents. But even this pastime was not beyond the reach of self-destruction. When I quit college at age 20, years of accumulated sheet music, tape recordings, stuff I’d written myself, and study materials went into a dumpster behind the supermarket near my father’s home. 
 My friendships were sparse. I had one friend in middle school. The entire relationship constituted me riding my bicycle to his house on Saturdays to watch MASH marathons on UHF television. I had one friend in high school. A brilliant violinist, actually. Someone much like myself. He could never quite put his heart into his music. If he had, his own mother would have torn him to shreds. As a result, he was never able to love it. After 5 years of scholarship funded schooling, he abandoned music for a career in I.T. and real estate. Again, much like me, only more motivated.
 I regarded girls with intense suspicion and contempt. They were eager to return the sentiment. In fact, they were happy to validate all my fears. Because I’d taken up my own fear of females as a kind of moral sword, or personal “super-power”, it strangely enough did give me a kind power most other boys did not have. I took great pride in the fact that I drove girls away from me. Each encounter reminded me of my promise under my breath to my parents. The more intense the overtures from girls around me, the more intense was my smugness, anger, and disgust. This provoked a great deal of anger and contempt in them in response. Pubescent girls don’t cotton to open rejection in an environment where every male is expected by default to pursue you with a degree of vigor determined mostly by your level of physical attractiveness and popularity. I spurned them all equally. Thus, I was fed a steady diet of ridicule and contempt that scaled with the relative desirability of the girl, and my own smugness. It was both a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a self-reciprocating system. The more I rejected, the more I was rejected. The more I was rejected, the more “evidence” I had, that I was “right”.
 Below all of this noise, of course, I was swimming in a deep pool of despair, loneliness, and isolation. I had only a couple social connections outside of my family, and neither the strength nor the motivation to maintain them. The older I got, the harder it was to tread water. I nearly drowned in high school, but I don’t think I was fully submerged until I my 21st birthday.  That was the year I decided to join the army. That summer, I dropped out of college, tossed all my work into a trash dumpster behind the local grocery store, and joined the army on the Delayed Entry Program. I wasn’t in-processed until February of the following year. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/The
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 Date: 30 Oct 2011 21:47
 Topic: The Halloween Entry
 Modified: 31 Oct 2011 02:05
 For what it’s worth, this has nothing to do with Halloween.
 This is  a tough blog to write for. On the one hand, I have all this stuff I want to say. Stuff I want to say to someone. Want to say to someone who understands it, and will learn from it, and will gain value from it -- and will appreciate my struggle. On the other hand, it’s nobody’s business what I do with my life. It’s private stuff. CJ hates that I’m talking publicly about this. The more public I make it, the more our relationship becomes everyone’s relationship. The more I share, the less that belongs to us. I don’t know if there’s enough savings in the bank for that. 
 The older I get, the further away from the origins of this transformation I get, the more I forget. The less I am able to explain the transformation. The less I am able to accurately portray the emotions. The less and less relevant it feels anymore. I want to say something important. But what’s so important about what I am doing? What is the point of what I am doing? My mind is drifting. I can’t concentrate with all the noise. It’s not the noise. I’m distracted for some reason. I’m blaming it on the music in the shop. Blaming it on the people outside the window. I’m blaming. Stop blaming. Why am I resisting? I haven’t written anything for the blog in a whole month.
 Learning a new skill takes hours. Lots of hours. Hours spent in repetition and practice. Hours spent focused on that skill. Focused on that repetition and that practice. My mind. It wanders everywhere. One minute on history, the next on my coffee, the next on the chill in the air, the next on my harris tweed jacket. I can’t focus anymore. Yes I can. I am struggling to focus. I’m not sure why. I want to write something. I want to post a good update to the blog. My relationship with charlotte. OUR relationship together. 
 Two old men sit at the table in front of me. One wears a smug, critical, half-smile, eyebrows elevated as if he’s surprised by everything. But the smug expression says he’s surprised by nothing. His incessant condescending barking keeps drawing my attention away from my love for CJ.  A woman on the street walks by, she bears the same soft, friendly face, open stance, and round body CJ has. I feel a wave of longing. I think of her. I want to hug her. Kiss her. Stroke her face. See her smile. A flock of pigeons circles Bartel-Pritchard square. They’re looking for scraps of food. It’s too late for that. Tomorrow November begins, and already snow is on the ground. 
 My coffee has grown cold and bitter now. I never want to grow cold and bitter. I once believed I would. I once believed my life would end before ever having a chance to feel love. To feel joy. Joy of the kind I feel with CJ. She has changed everything. I have changed everything. I am not the same man who was waiting to grow cold and bitter. I am the man who fights against that now. I am the man who does not have to fight against it. It has gone away on its own. The cold and bitter future has become the fiction. The warm and joyous and passionate future has become the reality. Love is not just a movie theme. It’s not just a story. The world is a very different place than it was five years ago. I made that world. It is my world. I live in it. I do not live in the world I left behind. It is still there waiting for me to return. I never will. I know the path back, but I no longer have the means or the desire to return to it. My ship is sailing elsewhere. The wind no longer will let me return to that continent. 
 I am the slowest goddamned writer on earth. If I was doing this for a living, I’d starve to death. 
 My history with the opposite sex is not an easy one to talk about. As you can see from my previous post, my starting position was anger, resentment, and deep suspicion. I was unable to form any deep friendships at all as a youth, but the potential for friendship with females was especially poisoned by my parents. To succumb to the desire for commerce with girls, was to fall prey to my parents, and the evil they represented in my mind. I was never going to allow myself to lose this war. 
 So I looked askance at all girls. I focused on my feelings. I identified them, isolated them, trapped them, and subjected them to interrogation and torture. Never, would they be allowed a moment of unguarded escape. This was my general demeanor. Suspicion. Fear. Cynicism. Disgust. Contempt. As far back as I can remember, I never so much as looked a girl in the face, let alone spoke to them, unless I was in a situation in which the alternative was far, far worse. This strategy carried me entirely through grade school, and high school. I never let my guard down for a moment. Ever. 
 That’s not true. I did let it down twice. Once in 7th grade. Once in 8th. 
 The 7th grade story went like this:
 As I sat minding my own business in Social Studies class, working on some catchup reading before class began, a fellow classmate approached me. He told me that one of the girls in the class wanted to talk to me, but I’d have to meet him after school, in an exit hallway on the far end of the school. I was deeply suspicious, but also extremely curious. I knew this was going to end badly, but I just couldn’t help myself. I had to know what it was they had in store for me. I agreed to meet. 
 The end of the day came, and I made my way to the exit hall, and stood at the double-doors waiting. This hallway was relatively isolated. Nobody used it, because it emptied into a fallow field, which was typically muddy. A former farmer’s field that now belonged to the district. They fought for years over what to put on the property. Anyway, there I stood for about 10 or 12 minutes. Just before giving up, I heard a noise coming down the hallway ‘round the corner.  Scuffling, and some yelling. A female voice. I recognized it as one of the girls in Social Studies. I was confused, and a little fearful. Why the yelling? I found out.
 What rounded the corner, was a mass of bodies. Four boys, each grasping a limb of the horizontal girl, who was by now howling and cursing, demanding to be let go. They dragged her down the hallway toward me, laughing and cackling. I stood at the double-doors, frozen. Stunned. I’d never seen anything like this. I was speechless. 
 After some struggle, the group had finally reached me, and the girl managed to wrestle her way free, and scramble to her feet, howling curses the entire time. She dusted herself off, turned and stomped away. There was a pause. The boys turned and looked at me.
 I waited a few seconds. My mind was blank. I felt rage and terror. I felt disgust and horror. Finally, I spoke.
 “Are you quite done, then?” I said, in the best William Buckley matter-of-fact tone I could muster, under the circumstances.
 They all looked at me quizzically, but said nothing. 
 I turned toward the doors, pushed the handle and stepped out into the field, leaving them behind. 
 I walked home that day, through the field, and out onto the highway leading home. It wasn’t a long walk. Perhaps an hour door-to-door.  I walked because the bus had already left. But also because I didn’t want to see, hear, or even sense another human being. I wanted to be away from human beings, as far as I could get. I didn’t belong with them. I was in a different category. I didn’t know what category, but whatever it was, it wasn’t what those four boys were or that girl was. It was something better. Something purer. Something harder. Something more solid and more self-sufficient.  I felt vindicated in my attitude. I felt sad and disappointed to be vindicated. I felt angry and proud. I was right, and I wanted to be right. I loved being right. But I was lonely in my certitude. Lonely in my awareness of my singular stature. More committed than ever, to living  a life of loneliness. 
 It’s interesting, looking back, to see how willing my peers were at helping me learn to isolate myself. I don’t blame them for their actions, or for my isolation. But I do find it fascinating just how easily we fall into our respective roles as children. They were to be the judges. I was to be the judged. It could not have been any other way. When their judgement was finished, the roles reversed, and I became the judge, and they the judged. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/There's
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 Date: 27 Oct 2011 02:49
 Topic: There's nothing to see here
 Modified: 27 Oct 2011 02:56
 People close to us seem to think there’s something amazing or inspiring about what we’re doing. I don’t question the veracity of their feelings. However, I can tell you that there’s nothing that we’re doing that’s remarkable. We’re living our lives together. We’re doing things that range from the banal to the fulfilling. We’re struggling with money. We’re planning vacations. We’re dissatisfied with our jobs. We’re having conversations with each other about all these things. 
 But what does any of this have to do with anyone else? Nothing. There’s nothing to see in our relationship that you haven’t already seen in your own. I don’t have any magic spells to give you. I don’t have any secrets of success. I don’t have any tips to avoid failure. All I have is one man’s experiences, one man’s joys and disappointments. One man’s frustrations and regrets. Nothing more. 
 The more I try to write, the less and less I have to say to any of you. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/Vendetta
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 Date: 16 Nov 2011 00:51
 Topic: Vendetta Against The Self
 Modified: 23 Dec 2011 16:02
 My experience (and a few very wise friends) have taught me that the seeds of our future are planted in very early childhood. My life is no exception. 
 From my first post, you have probably been asking yourself the question, how is it possible that I can love anyone, let alone CJ? How can I love myself, even? I’m not sure I can answer the question entirely in short order. But what I can do, is tell you the story of how I got here, and maybe that will fill in the blanks.  It’s a long story. A very long one. I hope you have time to read.
 This one goes back to at least 1970, but I suspect much earlier. Much of this story is supposition, deep inference, and extrapolation from snatches of distant, fragmented, and dim memory. Much of it is dark and deeply tragic, and cavernously lonely. 
 This all sounds fantastic and incredibly melodramatic, I know. At least, when I play it back in my own mind. But it’s all true. As far as I can tell, anyway. All I have are memories. This memory is particularly vivid and intense, though very short. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I think, I committed myself to a grudge. A passionate vendetta. A hatred, really. I know this because of the vividness of the memory. I  can still feel the bitterness in my chest, when I conjure the memory.
 I was seated at the dinner table, legs dangling because I was too short at the time to reach the floor. To my right, my father sat at his throne gesticulating, and distorting his face. To my left, my mother sneered and snarled. Apparently, I’d opened up enthusiastically about a neighborhood girl, with whom I’d spent the afternoon playing.
 “Awwww… Isn’t that sooo cyoooot?!?! George-y has a girl-friend! George-y has a girl-friend! Tell-us-what-her-name-is! Tell-us-what-her-name-is!” She chanted as though we were both in a schoolyard, and I’d just wet my pants, and she really wanted to get me in trouble with the yard monitor for offending her in some strange way. Years later, I would understand that offense, but more on that later. 
 “Haha! You? Get out of here! No girls would like you! Just look at you. You don’t do your homework, you don’t wash your hands, you dirty your mothers clothes as soon as you put them on! Besides, you’re practically a baby. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”, as though the two of us were jealous classmates, and he felt horribly threatened by even the hint of possibility that my infatuation might mean that some other soul cared for me.
 It began as a searing pain in my head. A bar of cold hard steel that seized my temples, locked my spine, and froze my shoulders. I could feel my ears burning. In my chest, a boiler reached white-hot temperatures, and overflowed into my limbs. They went numb. I knew not to show anything. Even at the age of 6. I knew tipping my hand was dangerously stupid. I said nothing. I stared at my plate. Inside, roiling, surging, swirling, overflowing, erupting like an ancient volcano awakened after centuries of silence. Outside, still, sullen, expressionless as an undertaker. 
 A dire thought burst over my consciousness like a black explosion. My eyes narrowed, as I contemplated it, as I felt the power and the comfort of it washing over my body. I heard it echo in my head, loud and clear: “They will never see me love anyone, ever again, as long as I live. I will never, ever give this to them. I will never let them do this to me again. Ever.” 
 Somehow, I instinctively knew they would expect me to fall in love in the adult sense one day in the future, to take on serious love interests as I grew, and to take on a wife as I entered adulthood. I resolved, in that branding-iron moment of personality fusion, that  no matter what the cost, I was going to drown them in their own unrealized anticipations. Their long, slow, painful revelation of utter disappointment in me would be my great schadenfreude, my best vengeance. I also somehow intuitively understood, that this would be sublimely effective, as I was my father’s oldest son. 
 I offered them the most tender part of myself - my own capacity to love, and be loved - and they ripped it from my hands, paraded it around the room like a gutted sacrificial gamecock, and tossed it on a pyre of their own terror and resentment of me. And somehow, deeply, I got it. I wasn’t conscious of it. But the memory of my response tells me that somehow, I understood. 
 You may think to yourself that this is a ridiculous claim. What a minor incident. How could this possibly have lead to a life-long commitment to self-denial in the name of a toddler’s grudge? 
 Well, to a child - especially a child who is passionate, a child who yearns to know what is good and true, and yearns to live his values to the fullest, a solemn vow is a solemn vow, and a debt is a debt, and they owed him the debt of his pain. Decades later, I was given an opportunity by sheer chance, to cash in on this debt, after nearly half a life alone. 
 I was meeting my parents for brunch at a local blue-hair diner, one Sunday. They always arrived before me, so they were already in the restaurant slurping coffee, by the time I showed up. I hated these meetings. They were always stultifying and frustrating for me, so I always tried to register my displeasure by showing up late. They always laughed that they had come to expect my tardiness, because “that’s just George!” 
 I hopped out of my truck and quick-paced to the entrance. Another woman was already in the air-lock. As she opened the inner door, we both stepped through, and as chance would have it, the maître d’ chose to seat the woman immediately, as I made my way down the aisle toward my parents’ table. Their eyes saucered, and their jaws dropped. Then I made my way to their table, and sat down.
 My parents looked at each other briefly, vague expressions of bemused disappointment and relief on their faces. Their stature that day was shriveled and somewhat doddering, compared to the thick-fleshed monsters at whose table I’d been transformed into a burnt offering so many decades earlier. 
 My father turned to me, my mother with a half-smirk on her face again. I recognized it, faintly. “My, God! We thought you were about to drop a bombshell on us!” 
 I feigned ignorance, “What in blazes are you talking about?”
 Awkwardly, he actually tried to explain. I felt the anticipation of black glee rise up in me. A little spark of my old hatred flashed over my mind. “You came into the restaurant with that woman. We… your mother and I…. we almost thought…. we couldn’t believe our eyes… was there going to be an announcement?” There was actually enormous excitement in his voice. It quivered in his voice as he spoke. My mother was restraining nervous laughter. 
 The little boy at the dinner table rushed back to me. NOW! NOW IS OUR TIME! DO IT! So, I did. I laughed loudly enough to disturb the table behind us, but wryly enough, that it immediately disintegrated the expressions on both their faces. 
 “Hahaha! Are you kidding me? Please. Get over yourselves. Her? What in the hell were you thinking?”, I changed my tone to half-joking but I was cemetery serious at this point, “You can just forget it, because I’ll never, ever give either of you the satisfaction of THAT!” 
 I felt sick. I was expecting to suddenly find myself towering over them like an olympic giant. I was expecting to watch them shrink in agony, begging me to give them a grandson, pleading with me to give love a chance. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They did shrink. But not in agony. They barely reacted at all.
 “Hrmph. I guess not”, my father shrugged, as the two slouched back over their eggs and bacon. 
 That little boy and I could both see now, something had gone wrong. But what? Why were they not dismayed? Why did they evacuate their own anticipation so quickly? Not only was the debt not reclaimed, but we both knew in that moment, it never would be.
 It would take several more years before I would be able to put the pieces together. What I did not understand when I was a child, was that when I committed myself to drowning them, I condemned myself to drown with them. My impotent anger had become a weapon against myself, at the same time I was trying to wield it against them. 
 Even worse, was that I was right to understand that they would only consume any joy I exposed to them, but not because they sought my joy. Rather, because they sought my destruction. Revealing to them that I was willing to sacrifice myself, my wants, my desires, was not  so much a pleasure for them, but a relief - they didn’t have to work very hard at my destruction, because I was willing to undertake it myself, and was doing a fine job at that. Which is why they quietly returned to grazing at our suburban trough, rather than beseeching me to try again.
 In the intervening years between that early memory, and my adulthood, the vendetta took on grotesque and disturbing proportions. From the age of about 13 onward, I warred with myself constantly, and left a trail of collateral damage everywhere I went. 
 In a subsequent post, I will attempt to describe this war, and how it ultimately led to my early self-identity as a secular monk.
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 Date: 04 Nov 2011 03:12
 Topic: What's Next
 Modified: 04 Nov 2011 03:47
 I keep writing these journal entries, hoping to find something new to say about my life with CJ.  I’m feeling quite stuck. The idea was to write about my history, to begin with, to give the reader some context. Some reason to understand why my marriage is so surprising, why our relationship is so remarkable. 
 I hated women, but now I don’t. Why the change? What brought it about? Pushing projections back into myself. That’s what it’s all been about. Projecting my mother onto every woman that ever existed, and hating them. But why? Because I carried around a split, within myself. 
--- a/George-Gets-Married/Where
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 Date: 16 Oct 2011 05:53
 Topic: Where To Even Begin?
 Modified: 23 Dec 2011 17:07
 As you can see by the title of this blog, I am married.
 I never thought I would be. I never thought I wanted to be. These are words I never imagined I'd ever be writing in a thousand lifetimes. If I were to go back in time 10 years and suggest to my former self that this whole concept was even possible, he'd have laughed me out of the house as some kind of nut case.
 Lots of guys have girlfriends and sex lives. _Not me. _Lots of guys get married. _Not me. _Lots of guys struggle with conflict, negotiation, and communication, in their relationships. _Not me._
 No, really. Not me.
 I am a hardened bachelor of 43 years. I've never had a romantic interaction of any kind, let alone a full-blown relationship. Yes, that includes decades of sexual abstinence, to the point of absolutely chaste self-denial.
 For decades, I've oscillated between fear and loathing of my desire for love, and sarcastic incredulity at my capacity for it. As a consequence, I studiously limited my social interactions to only those that kept me employable, and never engaged in conversations of a personal nature with anyone. I desperately feared the possibility that my vulnerability would get me hurt, or worse. So complete and so intense was my own self-surveillance, that I would not even permit myself the luxury of movies that included romantic interactions, let alone sex scenes.  As a friend once described men like me, I was quite literally a "philosophy monk."
 Well, all that has changed. On Sunday, September 11, 2011, at around 2:30PM, my one true love CJ and I exchanged solemn vows with each other before good friends in a private ceremony in our home that lasted just about 15 minutes. And now, I am a deeply, intensely, happily married man.
 But, wait a minute!
 How does an emotionally emaciated man of 43, after 30 years wandering in a desert of lonely exile (only partly self-imposed) somehow find his way out, and manage to stumble onto the love of his life on the first encounter? How is this possible? Doesn't this sort of thing only happen in movies?
 No doubt, you are thinking I must be deluded, or trying to put a fast one over on you. I certainly would have though that, reading these words 10 years ago: "It can't be."
 I'm here to say now, it can be. It is. I wish I could _give_ you how it feels, because describing it just doesn't do it justice. My heart is awash in gratitude, joy, pleasure, excitement, and any number of other emotions, 24 hours a day.
 It wasn't easy. Not at all. And, to be completely honest, I wasn't simply stumbling out of the desert. I had help. Lots of help from a few extremely important people, without whose understanding, patience, kindness, and willingness to brave the storms of my transformation, I would not now be writing this.
 There is so much to say about how I got here, that I just can't fit it all in this post and expect you to read it entirely. But that's what this blog is all about. How I got here, what life is like for me and CJ now, and where we are going in the future.
 So hang in there, fellow travelers, as I episodically recount for you my experiences and introduce you to the various characters that contributed to this odyssey. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll expose the spectacle of how I exploded my former sheltered life in the suburbs of Chicago, and of course, how I met CJ and how we fell in love forever.
 It is my hope that you might find some inspiration or insight in the stories I will tell, but I make no pretense at being any kind of superior thinker or expert in any way. I just want to share. In any case, I can assure you at least one thing: if nothing else, you will be entertained.
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 Date: 22 Jul 2014 22:19
 Topic: Character Creation
 Modified: 23 Aug 2015 22:49
 __From: [http://www.wikihow.com/Develop-a-Character-for-a-Story](http://www.wikihow.com/Develop-a-Character-for-a-Story)
 __
 __1.__ Begin by creating the character's personality. Once that's done, it's much easier to imagine the character and what they look like physically. Take a blank sheet of paper and fold it in half. On one side, write all of the qualities you find good in people. On the other side, write all of the qualities you find bad in people. Use this as a reference for creating both antagonists and protagonists. A protagonist is the hero of your story, and an antagonist is the person who opposes, or is against the main character.
 * Keep a notebook close, and write down little details about real people. Does your friend have a strange way of twisting her hair when she's excited? Do you notice how your brother has a comeback for everything? These little details make up the character.
 * Do not make your protagonist perfect. That makes it harder for the reader to relate to them, along with making your story less believable and harder to engage the reader in. Instead, use a mix of qualities from both columns to make a more rounded character. However, make the character 60% good, and 40% bad.
 * Just as you don't want to make your protagonist the perfect being, you should avoid making your "villain" of the story all bad. Use the same method of rounding the character as described before, but instead make your antagonist 60% bad and 40% good.
 __
 __	•	Create character personalities that are ranging from 90% good and 10% bad to 50/50. The closer the character is to the protagonist, the more rounded they should be. Instead of making the protagonists friends 90/10, try making them 60/40 or 50/50. Once again, they are easier to relate to this way. Repeat to create the antagonists' peers and associates, except making them 90% evil and 10% good, and so on.__
 2. __Create the appearance of your characters. What are the physical features of some people you admire? How about those of whom you don't like too much? Get out another sheet of paper and make another list. Again, use a mix of qualities from both columns to create your protagonist. The protagonist does Not have to be perfect. You could take a fashion magazine and flip through it, noting down facial and bodily features that catch your eye.
 __
 3. __Think of creative names. In your notebook, keep a record of names you might like to use one day. These include your friends' names, your relatives' names, and names you spot one day while you're reading or surfing the net. Names like Katie and Joel are common and easy to remember, but you should record names like Arista and Montague, which you don't see very often.
 * Names should be relevant to the setting of the story. A post-modern Japanese woman would be named Sakura and a teenage boy in Harlem would have a common name, like Tom. Fancy and syllable-heavy names should be saved for Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories, and should be used sparingly.__
 __
 __4.__ Flesh out your character. If you are developing one very important character, have fun with it! Give your character an entire profile! What is his/her name? Where were they born, and when? Do they wear striped socks or solid ones? Is their hair blue or flame-red? Write down a bunch of these details, even if they may not be necessary for the story. If you are writing a character's personality off of someone you know,keep in mind that the reader doesn't know who you're writing about. Make it so that the reader has a clear picture, and don't leave any important information out! You can't assume that the reader knows the character as well as you do.
 __5.__ Be prepared to let your characters and their responses surprise you; that's when you know you're really getting somewhere. Even imaginary people are resistant to living in a completely determined world.   
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 Date: 24 Jul 2014 22:39
 Topic: Character Dev Tips Website
 Modified: 24 Jul 2014 22:40
 [http://users.pgtc.com/~slmiller/characterdevelopment.htm](http://users.pgtc.com/~slmiller/characterdevelopment.htm)
--- a/Writing-Tips/Character
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 Date: 22 Jul 2014 22:15
 Topic: Character Development
 Modified: 23 Aug 2015 17:46
 From here: [http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/the-9-ingredients-of-character-development](http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/the-9-ingredients-of-character-development)
 WHAT IS A CHARACTER-DRIVEN  NOVEL ANYWAY?
 I don’t write character-driven novels. Heck, I’m not even sure what the term means. I used to think it was when an author spent hundreds of pages muddling around inside a character’s head just to fill the gaps between a couple paragraphs of action.
 I prefer to write plot-driven suspense thrillers. But how does the low-brow thriller writer create good characters? I’m still a novice on the subject so this is by no means a definitive exposition, just 9 ingredients I jotted down to make a clever acrostic: CHARACTER.
 (Look here for a list of thriller agents.)
 1. Communication style: How does your character talk? Does she favor certain words or phrases that make her distinct and interesting? What about the sound of her voice? Much of our personality comes through our speech, so think about the way your character is going to talk. Her style of communication should be distinctive and unique.
 2. History: Where does your character come from? Think out his childhood and adolescence. What events shaped his personality? What did his father do for a living? How about his mother? How many siblings does he have? Was it a loving family or an abusive, dysfunctional one? What events led him to the career choices he made? You may not need to provide all this background to your reader, but it’s good to know as the writer. It helps give him substance in your mind as well.
 (How much should an outside edit cost writers?)
 3. Appearance: What does she look like? This may be the least important ingredient to make your character a person to the reader, but you should still know it in your own mind. Not every character needs to be drop-dead gorgeous, by the way. Most people aren’t.
 4. Relationships: What kind of friends and family does he have? How does he relate to them? Is he very social or reclusive, or somewhere in between? People can be defined by the company they keep, so this can be a good way to define your character.
 5. Ambition: Just as this is the central letter of the acrostic, so too this concept is absolutely central to your character and plot. What is her passion in life? What goal is she trying to accomplish through your story? What is her unrecognized, internal need and how will she meet it?
 6. Character defect: Everyone has some personality trait that irritates his friends or family. Is he too self-centered? Too competitive? Too lazy? Too compliant? Too demanding of others? Don’t go overboard on this. After all, you want your reader to like the character. But he’ll feel more real if he has some flaw. This is usually connected to his unrecognized need (see Ambition) and often gets resolved through his character arch.
 7. Thoughts: What kind of internal dialogue does your character have? How does she think through her problems and dilemmas? Is her internal voice the same as her external? If not, does this create internal conflict for her? In real life we don’t have the benefit of knowing someone’s innermost thoughts, but a novel allows us to do just that, so use it to your advantage.
 (Can you query an agent for a short story collection?)
 8. Everyman-ness: How relatable is your character? While James Bond is fun to watch on screen, most of us aren’t uber-trained special agent-assassins so it’s a little hard to relate to him on a personal level. On the other hand, Kurt Russell’s character in the movie Breakdown was far more ordinary and relatable, creating a more visceral experience. Be careful not to make your character too elite or he may be too difficult to live vicariously through. And that, after all, is the key to suspense.
 9. Restrictions: More than a personality flaw, what physical or mental weakness must your character overcome through her arch? After all, even Superman had Kryptonite. This helps humanize your character, making her more sympathetic and relatable.
 The goal is to make your readers feel something for your character. The more they care about them, the more emotion they’ll invest in your story. And maybe that’s the secret.
 Maybe every novel is character-driven after all.
--- a/Writing-Tips/Characterization.txt
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 Date: 22 Jul 2014 22:17
 Topic: Characterization
 Modified: 23 Aug 2015 22:49
 Character development
 A well-developed character is one that has been thoroughly characterised, with many traits shown in the narrative. The better the audience knows the character, the better the character development. Thorough characterisation makes characters well-rounded and complex. This allows for a sense of realism. As an example, according to F.R. Leavis, Leo Tolstoy was the creator of some of the most complex and psychologically believable characters in fiction. In contrast, an underdeveloped character is considered flat or stereotypical.
 Character development is very important in character-driven literature, where stories focus not on events, but on individual personalities. Classic examples include War and Peace or David Copperfield. In a tragedy, the central character generally remains fixed with whatever character flaw (hamartia) seals his fate; in a comedy the central characters typically undergo some kind of epiphany (sudden realization) whereupon they adjust their erratic beliefs and practices, and avert a tragic fate. Historically, stories and plays focusing on characters became common as part of the 19th century Romantic movement, and character-driven literature rapidly supplanted more plot-driven literature that typically utilizes easily identifiable archetypes rather than proper character development.
 Direct vs. indirect characterisation
 There are two ways an author can convey information about a character:
 Direct or explicit characterisation:
 The author literally tells the audience what a character is like. This may be done via the narrator, another character or by the character him- or herself.
 Indirect or implicit characterisation:
 The audience must deduce for themselves what the character is like through the character’s thoughts, actions, speech (choice of words, way of talking), looks and interaction with other characters, including other characters’ reactions to that particular person.
 Characterisation in Drama
 In performance an actor has less time to characterise and so can risk the character coming across as underdeveloped. The great realists of dramaturgy have relied heavily on implicit characterisation which occupy the main body of their character driven plays. Examples of these playwrights are Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov. Such psychological epics as The Seagull indirectly characterise the protagonists so that the audience is drawn into their inner turmoils as they are slowly revealed over the 3 hours of time spent with the characters. The actors taking on these roles must also characterise over a long period of time, to the point that there seems to be no direct statement of who the character is at any point, this realism in acting requires the actor to characterise from their own persona as a starting point. The audience therefore does not recognize a realistic characterisation immediately.
 However the playwright and actor also have the choice of direct characterisation in a similar vein to the writer in literature. The presentation of a character for a sociological discussion only has to be as real as the discussion requires. In this way a character can be used as an iconic reference by a playwright to suggest location, an epoch in history, or even draw in a political debate. The inclusion of a stock character, or in literary terms an archetypal character, by a playwright can risk drawing overly simplistic pictures of people and smack of stereotyping however the degree of success in direct characterisation in order to swiftly get to the action varies from play to play and often according to the use the character is put to. In explicitly characterising a certain character the actor makes a similar gamble. The choice of what aspects of a character are demonstrated by the actor to directly characterise is a political choice and makes a statement as to the ethics and agenda of the actor and the play as a whole. Examples of direct characterisation are found in mime especially, and in Epic theater, yet also in the work of Steven Berkoff, The Wooster Group, and Complicite.
 Both implicit and explicit characterisation in drama can result in a problematic, politically unstable character, even a stereotype. And conversely both direct and indirect characterisation can make complex and unique characters depending on the choices made by those doing the characterising.
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 Date: 24 Jul 2014 22:36
 Topic: The 100 Questions
 Modified: 04 Aug 2015 07:33
 From Here: [http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976908598](http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976908598)
 THE 100+ QUESTIONS
 Welcome to over one hundred of the dumbest questions about your character. These are things that, if someone were to ask you in real life, you could answer without giving it any thought whatsoever. Most characters, however, can't answer this because authors never think about it - it's unimportant. Well, these things are going to help you define you character more.
 Some tips: Answer these in character, but only in a situation where your character would be 100% honest with themselves and with the person asking the question. Otherwise, answer as an author, and still be 100% honest.
 Mandatory Questions
 1. What about you is heroic?
 2. What about you is social? What do you like about people?
 3. Of what benefit could you be to the current group?
 4. Why would you choose to join the current group?
 5. Invent an adventure/plot that your character would actively undertake (as opposed to just tagging along)?
 Personal Questions
 1. What is your real, birth name? What name do you use? 
 2. Do you have a nickname? What is it, and where did you get it? 
 3. What do you look like? (Include height, weight, hair, eyes, skin, apparent age, and distinguishing features)
 4. How do you dress most of the time?
 5. How do you "dress up?"
 6. How do you "dress down?"
 7. What do you wear when you go to sleep?
 8. Do you wear any jewelry?
 9. In your opinion, what is your best feature?
 10. What's your real birth date?
 11. Where do you live? Describe it: Is it messy, neat, avant-garde, sparse, etc.?
 12. Do you own a car? Describe it.
 13. What is your most prized mundane possession? Why do you value it so much?
 14. What one word best describes you?
 Familial Questions
 1. What was your family like?
 2. Who was your father, and what was he like?
 3. Who was your mother, and what was she like?
 4. What was your parents marriage like? Were they married? Did they remain married?
 5. What were your siblings names? What were they like?
 6. What's the worst thing one of your siblings ever did to you? What's the worst thing you've done to one of your siblings?
 7. When's the last time you saw any member of your family? Where are they now?
 8. Did you ever meet any other family members? Who were they? What did you think of them?
 Childhood Questions
 1. What is your first memory?
 2. What was your favorite toy?
 3. What was your favorite game?
 4. Any non-family member adults stick out in your mind? Who were they, and how did you know them? Why do they stick out?
 5. Who was your best friend when you were growing up?
 6. What is your fondest, childhood memory?
 7. What is your worst childhood memory?
 Adolescent Questions
 1. How old were you when you went on your first date? 
 2. It is common for one's view of authority to develop in their adolescent years. What is your view of authority, and what event most affected it?
 3. What were you like in high school? What "clique" did you best fit in with?
 4. What were your high school goals?
 5. Who was your idol when you were growing up? Who did you first fantasize about in your life?
 6. What is your favorite memory from adolescence?
 7. What is your worst memory from adolescence?
 Occupational Questions
 1. Do you have a job? What is it? Do you like it? If no job, where does your money come from?
 2. What is your boss or employer like? (Or publisher, or agent, or whatever.)
 3. What are your co-workers like? Do you get along with them? Any in particular? Which ones don't you get along with?
 4. What is something you had to learn that you hated?
 5. Do you tend to save or spend your money? Why?
 Likes & Dislikes Questions
 1. What hobbies do you have?
 2. Who is your closest mundane friend? Describe them and how you relate to them.
 3. Who is your worst mundane enemy? Describe them and why you don't get along.
 4. What bands do you like? Do you even pay attention?
 5. What tape or CD hasn't left your player since your purchased it? Why?
 6. What song is "your song?" Why?
 7. What's been your favorite movie of all time?
 8. Read any good books? What were they?
 9. What do you watch on the Television?
 10. When it comes to mundane politics, do you care? If so, which way do you tend to vote? If not, why don't you care?
 11. What type of places do you hang out in with your mundane friends?
 12. What type of places do you hang out in with your normal friends?
 13. What annoys you more than anything else?
 14. What would be the perfect gift for you?
 15. What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?
 16. What time of day is your favorite?
 17. What kind of weather is your favorite?
 18. What is your favorite food? What is your least favorite food?
 19. What is your favorite drink? (Coffee, Coke, Juice, Beer, Wine, etc.)
 20. What's your favorite animal? Why?
 21. Do you have any pets? Do you want any pets? What kind? 
 22. What do you find most relaxing? (Not as in stress relief, but as something that actually calms you down.)
 23. What habit that others have annoys you most?
 24. What kind of things embarrass you? Why?
 25. What don't you like about yourself?
 26. How would you like to look?
 Sex & Intimacy Questions
 1. Would you consider yourself straight, gay, bi, or something else? Why?
 2. Who was the first person you had sex with? When did it happen? What was it like? How well did it go?
 3. Have you ever had a same-sex experience? Who with, what was it like, and how did it go?
 4. What is your deepest, most well-hidden sexual fantasy? Would you ever try it?
 5. What was the wildest thing you've ever done, sexually? Who was it with and when did it happen?
 6. Is there any sexual activity that you enjoy and/or practice regularly that can be considered non-standard? (Bondage, Fantasy Play, etc.) Why do you like it?
 7. Is there any sexual activity that you will not, under any circumstances, do?
 8. Do you currently have a lover? What is their name, and what is your relationship like? What are they like? Why are you attracted to them?
 9. What is the perfect romantic date?
 10. Describe the perfect romantic partner for you.
 11. Do you ever want to get married and have children? When do you see this happening?
 12. What is more important - sex or intimacy? Why?
 13. What was your most recent relationship like? Who was it with? (Does not need to be sexual, merely romantic.)
 14. What's the worst thing you've done to someone you loved?
 Drug & Alcohol Questions
 1. How old were you when you first got drunk? What was the experience like? 
 Did anything good come out of it? Did anything bad come out of it?
 2. Do you drink on any kind of regular basis?
 3. What kind of alcohol do you prefer?
 4. Have you ever tried any other kind of "mood altering" substance? Which one(s)? What did you think of each?
 5. What do you think of drugs and alcohol? Are there any people should not do? Why or why not?
 Morality Questions
 1. What one act in your past are you most ashamed of? What one act in your past are you most proud of?
 2. Have you ever been in an argument before? Over what, with who, and who won?
 3. Have you ever been in a physical fight before? Over what, with who, and who won?
 4. What do you feel most strongly about?
 5. What do you pretend to feel strongly about, just to impress people?
 6. What trait do you find most admirable, and how often do you find it?
 7. Is there anything you think should not be incorporated into the media or art (sex, violence, greed, etc.,)? If so, what and why, and if not, why not?
 8. Do you have any feelings in general that you are disturbed by? What are they? Why do they disturb you?
 9. What is your religious view of things? What religion, if any, do you call your own?
 10. Do you think the future is hopeful? Why?
 11. Is an ounce of prevention really worth a pound of cure? Which is more valuable? Why do you feel this way?
 12. What's the worst thing that can be done to another person? Why?
 13. What's the worst thing you could actually do to someone you hated?
 14. Are you a better leader or follower? Why do you think that? If you think the whole leader-follower archetype is a crock of shit, say so, and explain why?
 15. What is your responsibility to the world, if any? Why do you think that?
 16. Do you think redemption is possible? If so, can anyone be redeemed, or are there only certain circumstances that can be? If not, why do you think nothing can redeem itself?
 17. Is it okay for you to cry? When was the last time you cried?
 18. What do you think is wrong with MOST people, overall?
 Post-Supernatural Awareness Questions
 1. When did you go through whatever made you supernatural? What was it like (in your opinion)?
 2. What do you think now of being supernatural? Is it cool, or have you been screwed?
 3. Do you have a mentor? Who are they? How did you become their student?
 4. Do you have any magical items? Where did you get them?
 5. What do you think of the other denizens of the World of Darkness? Why for each? (If you haven't met something, do you think it exists, and if it does, is that bad or good?)
 6. Think of a major event that happened during your training/initiation. What was it?
 7. What is something you had to learn during your training that you hated? Why did you hate it?
 Miscellaneous Questions
 1. What is the thing that has frightened you most? Do you think there is anything out there that's scarier than that? What do you think that would be?
 2. Has anyone or anything you've ever cared about died? How did you feel about it? What happened?
 3. What was the worst injury you've ever received? How did it happen?
 4. How ticklish are you? Where are you ticklish?
 5. What is your current long term goal?
 6. What is your current short term goal?
 7. Do you have any bad habits? If so, what are they, and do you plan to get rid of them?
 8. If you were a mundane person, what would you do with your life? What occupation would you want, and how would you spend all your time?
 9. What time period do you wish you had lived in? Why? (Looking at this as an attempt to change history doesn't count.) What appeals to you about this era?
 10. How private of a person are you? Why?
 11. If you were to gain an obscenely large sum of money (via an inhertiance, a lawsuit, a lottery, or anything else) what would you do with it?
 12. What would you wish for if you found a genie?
 13. What do you do when you are bored?
 14. What is the most frightening potential handicap or disfigurement you can conceive of? What makes it so frightening?
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  <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">Context-Driven Testing, Bonusbox Style</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Overview</b></span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">For those unaware, &#34;Context-Driven Testing&#34; is a testing concept </span><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://context-driven-testing.com/">conceived by James Bach and friends</a></span><span class="author-p-199106"> that essentially bundles basic common sense pragmatism into a set of seven general principles. This list of principles is more or less how we function at Bonusbox:</span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="1" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">The value of any practice depends on its context.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="2" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">There are good practices in context, but there are no best practices.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="3" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">People, working together, are the most important part of any project’s context.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="4" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">Projects unfold over time in ways that are often not predictable.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="5" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">The product is a solution. If the problem isn’t solved, the product doesn’t work.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="6" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">Good software testing is a challenging intellectual process.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-number emptyGutter"><ol start="7" class="listtype-number listindent1 list-number1"><li><span class="author-p-199106">Only through judgment and skill, exercised cooperatively throughout the entire project, are we able to do the right things at the right times to effectively test our products.</span></li></ol></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">How do we apply these principles at Bonusbox? For Bonusbox, the first two principles liberate us from the constraints and costs of a lot of traditional QA behaviors. But principles 3 and 7 force us to regularly re-evaluate our practices (or perhaps, &#34;anti-practices&#34;), as the company, and the product continues to grow and mature. Now, on to the specifics!</span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Breakin&#39; The Law</b></span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">There are a number of testing practices at Bonusbox, that at first glance, might make us appear to be what used to be called &#34;cowboy coders&#34;. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a method to this madness. However, it&#39;s quite true that this method runs directly counter to a number of ancient &#34;industry standards&#34; when it comes to QA as a role, and testing as a practice. Here are the 4 most obvious ones:</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>Think Outside The Black Box -&nbsp; </i></span><span class="author-p-199106">To test at Bonusbox, you need to understand Rails and object oriented concepts the way a dev understands them. You need to be able to do everything a dev can do, with the possible exception of actually writing his code. The days of requirements checklists, and hand-testing an opaque user interface are long gone. To add value to the team, you need to be able to identify the source of problems, including employing whatever technical tools are necessary to do that, even to the point of being able to fix them yourself.</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>Staging Is For Sissies - </i></span><span class="author-p-199106">The motto at Bonusbox is &#34;break it fast, fix it fast&#34;. In order to execute successfully on continuous deployment, the tester does his work from the same basic environment the developer does: his desktop. Anything that requires external resources that cannot be duplicated or properly mocked, will get tested directly in production. For such cases, breaks will not be backed out unless they&#39;re completely irreparable. Instead, they are fixed immediately.&nbsp;</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>The Dog Ate My Test Plan</i></span><span class="author-p-199106"> - Test plans are traditionally drawn up at the time requirements are defined, during feature planning. This is simply untenable in an environment where features change shape and size almost hourly, as they make their way through the development process of a lean startup. Testers must be able to stay on top of this changing landscape, by staying connected to the code, and to design and development discussions in Trello.</span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>Open Borders - </i></span><span class="author-p-199106">In legacy development environments, the tester&#39;s value was defined by how much he slowed the progress to production. Bug counts, feature rejections, and defects passed into production, were all metrics that gauged his competency. He was something of a gatekeeper, standing guard over the business owner&#39;s anxiety. Today, the situation is almost entirely the opposite. The QA is a free agent, a special forces commando. He is far less interested in completely sealing off borders, than he is in tracking down and pacifying threats on their own turf. He moves from team to team, working to help them get to deployment as quickly as possible, but also </span><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>as cleanly as possible</i></span><span class="author-p-199106">.&nbsp;</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Talk To Me</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">As you&#39;ve probably intuited already from the above, </span><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>good communications</i></span><span class="author-p-199106"> and </span><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>good relationships</i></span><span class="author-p-199106"> are key to the success of the modern QA Engineer. Though this is listed at the bottom, it is probably the most important feature of QA at Bonusbox. The QA must be capable of negotiating difficult conflicts and analyzing complex problems dispassionately, and he must be willing to communicate his findings with both developers and product managers, in their own language.&nbsp;</span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199053 line-list-type-comment emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-comment listindent1 list-comment1" ><li><span class="author-p-199053">and I&#34;d stop here. And we&#39;d have a bomb of a blog post...</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-comment emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-comment listindent1 list-comment1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">Hey Vuk, I&#39;ve made the suggested edits above (and a few others). Feel free to post it wherever you wish.</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>FAQ</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Should testers be involved in defining requirements?</b></span></li></ul></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Should testers fix bugs?&nbsp;</b></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent2 list-indent2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">It depends on the role of QA on a particular project.</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent3 list-indent3" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">I tend to agree with </span><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://sqa.stackexchange.com/questions/5194/should-tester-fix-bugs/5231#5231">this fellow</a></span><span class="author-p-199106">:&nbsp;</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent3 list-indent3" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>&#34; </b></span><span class="author-p-199106">If QA has been involved in the software development lifecycle, if QA has played a role in defining requirements from the start of a project, and if QA feels like they have the support of project management to take a proactive role, I&#39;d say go for it. I&#39;ve always welcomed testers and QA people with an engineering focus to take some time to understand the code that underlies the systems they are testing, and there&#39;s no better way to learn a system than to fix bugs in a project.</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent3 list-indent3" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">On the other hand, if QA isn&#39;t involved in the overall project, if QA doesn&#39;t have a seat at the table during the requirements phase and during the implementation of a project, then you are going to want to consider that QA may not have enough information to fix bugs without introducing more complexity (or even without understanding how the bug affects the overall development effort). Having QA fix bugs without the involvement of a developer or someone in project management could cause a range of problems. Maybe development has decided to delay the implementation of a feature because the business hasn&#39;t fully elaborated on a requirement? Maybe a particular bug is present because a developer is waiting for clarification? &#34;</span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent2 list-indent2" ><li>&nbsp;</li></ul></div>
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  <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">Empirical Testing - Intellectual Toolset</span></div>
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 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Common Concepts In Logic / Empiricism</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">Degrees of Certainty</span></li></ul></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>Falsifiability / Confirmation Bias:</i></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 attrembed embed">*</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent3 list-bullet3" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 url"><a href="file:///Users/gmgauthier/Downloads/PPIG_2010-calikli_arslan_bener_camera_ready_version-libre.pdf">file:///Users/gmgauthier/Downloads/PPIG_2010-calikli_arslan_bener_camera_ready_version-libre.pdf</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 i"><i>Inference To The Best Explanation</i></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent3 list-bullet3" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">Also called &#34;Abductive Reasoning&#34;. This is a common tool in technical problem-solving, and makes use of P and Q in interesting ways: </span><span class="author-p-199106 url"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning</a></span></li></ul></div>
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 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-bullet emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-bullet listindent2 list-bullet2" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">How would [X] use this feature?</span></li></ul></div>
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 # Fear As A Heuristic For Testing
 Second only to critical thinking and empiricism, *self-awareness* is the single most useful and important tool in the toolbox of a tester.
 After absorbing experiential input from any given event, the emotional data that is subsequently returned from within is a crucial piece of evidence necessary for interpreting and understanding the event, and for deciding how you want to respond to that event.
 This may seem, at first, like nothing more than a complicated way of saying "action = reaction". But that's not quite what I mean. This simplistic restatement describes exactly how most people regard their emotional lives: on the periphery of consciousness, autonomously driving preconditioned behaviors, accumulated in childhood and early adulthood.
 What I am suggesting, instead, is that we can retrain ourselves, to consciously *observe* and choose an appropriate response, rather than merely reacting. While I'm not a subscriber to either Stoicism or Buddhism, both philosophies offer a notion of "mindfulness" that closely describes what I want to encourage.
 As technicians, and testers, if we can get to a point where we are able to "inspect" *ourselves*, as we are exploring some new build, or product, or technology, additional insights become possible. 
 There is one emotion that I find especially important to this task: *Fear*. When this emotion occurs in the wild, it instinctively drives avoidance behaviors. The behaviors designed to keep you from being mauled by a tiger, or bitten by a snake. But in the context of testing a software project, these behaviors are maladaptive.
 Among the various "threats" we sense in our day-to-day lives as testers and technicians, are that of unfamiliar technologies, or tools. And the anxiety that comes to the surface around these things can be intense. Particularly in situations where we are surrounded by other very smart folks, whose judgments of us may affect our careers.
 #### Turn In The Direction Of The Skid
 For a large part of my early career I was plagued with a problem that I mistakenly thought only I had. I was terrified that eventually, inevitably, someone was going to "find me out"; I was going to be discovered as an incompetent who'd somehow managed to sneak past every interviewer in the company I happend to be working for. 
 In response to this fear, I withrew from any opportunity that might put me in a situation that stretched the limits of what I knew, or what I was skilled at -- in other words, anything that might expose me as a fraud. For a long time, this trapped me in a box of narrow possibility and narrow value. Withdrawal was perversely creating exactly the situation I incorrectly feared I was in to begin with. 
 Reversing this process was difficult, and the details of that journey are the topic for a different blog post at a different time. But for the purposes of this discussion, it's important to note that the work began with a key realization: I wasn't wrong about not knowing things. I was wrong to think that I was the only one who didn't. And even more wrong to think that I was the only one who was *afraid to admit it* (in fact, it turns out this is a [common psychological phenomenon](1)).
 What's more, when I started paying attention to the folks who seemed to excel where I could not, I noticed they were not the ones who *already knew* what they were doing. They were the ones asking questions, reading books, and experimenting. In otherwords, they were the ones who seemed unafraid to admit they didn't know. 
 In fact, it turns out, they still feared that admission as much as I did. But they did something different with that fear. Rather than using it to avoid judgment, they were using it to point them in the direction of *new knowledge*. They were willing to risk calling the bluff of the fear, for the potential benefit of new opportunities. 
 #### Into The Lion's Den
 This is a lesson that is very hard won, but also very much needed in the testing community. Not only for career potential, but also for the reward it offers in day-to-day testing itself. The more risks you're willing to take, the more chance you have at discovering new bugs and potential usability problems with the product you're testing.
 I have experienced this many times over the last ten years or so. Every job I've had, I've been faced with the terrifying realization that I had no idea what I was looking at, or how I was going to test it. But instead of withdrawing, as I would have in my old life, I dove in head first. And in doing so, I was able to dramatically increase the value I had to offer to my employers, as well as dramatically improving the quality of the products I was helping to test:
 * Finding flaws in python SQLAlchemy calls to an Oracle database, that threatened the integrity of data that belonged to many large institutional clients. 
 * Working side-by-side with .Net developers to provide C# unit test coverage on several key pieces of a highly profitable enterprise elearning product. 
 * Identifying critical problems with key functionality like LDAP authentication, compatibility issues in a supported database platform, and feature authorization leaks, in a product meant to be used by developers in an enterprise environment.
 I point these examples out especially, not because I want to demonstrate how much I know, but rather, because these are dramatic examples of how much I *did not know*. They represent moments of accute fear for me. Moments that required me to notice that fear of the unknown, of "being found out", of "appearing incompetent", and to decide how I wanted to respond to it. 
 #### Doing The Work
 What I decided to do, was to emulate the behavior of those I'd noticed in the past, who were excelling: admit my knowledge gap; ask for help; and then research, read, and experiment on my own. And in doing so, I've acquired skills I didn't have before. And I was able to make that choice, because I've been slowly practicing the skill of "inspecting" myself, when I inspect the software I'm testing.
 Admittedly, it's not easy to aquire the mental habits necessary to be able to face that fear, and make that decision consciously. There are many [places](2) to go on the internet to find ad hoc [advice](3) on how to turn fear into a personal asset. But on this front, I'd suggest considering some professional advice, from a good cognitive therapist. As with tech questions, it can be equally as useful to admit there's a lot about ourselves that we don't know, either.
 From my own testing experience, I can offer three rough ideas that you might find helpful for kick-starting the process: 
 First, when you're surveying a new application, all of its components, and its infrastructure, note down when you feel least comfortable. What were you looking at when you first started feeling uncomfortable? Are there any common areas where you feel least comfortable? Are there any areas you find yourself impulsively ignoring or avoiding? All of these areas might be candidates for further investigation. 
 Second, when you are in morning standup or in feature design or sprint planning sessions, do you ever find yourself completely lost or afraid to admit to your devs that you don't know what they're talking about? This might be a good opportunity to take one of them aside afterward, and ask for some time to go over the technical details, or to ask for a good resource that you can pursue.
 Third, and most important: Have you noticed things landing in user support tickets or bug reports that deal with aspects of the product that you didn't realize you were unfamiliar with, or have been unable to test properly because of something you've been avoiding about it? This might be something you'll put at the top of your "must learn" list.
 #### Conclusion
 It seems to me, that emotional evidence is an untapped area of exploration, in testing. This post focused entirely on fear, but there are probably other emotions that could be identified as useful signals of potential improvement in the way we work, or of potential sources of new knowledge, or quality insights. This post obviously isn’t a comprehensive look at fear. There’s a lot of room for discussion on this topic alone. But hopefully, this is enough to get people thinking about the subject.
 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
 [2]: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-to-make-performance-anxiety-an-asset-instead-of-a-liability/
 [3]: http://hearingtheheartbeat.com/2013/06/17/how-to-turn-fear-into-an-asset/
--- a/new-testing-blog/Getting
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 # Getting the juices flowing
 This is an attempt to get my writing engine restarted. The initial attempt will be a post for my professional blog. I haven't written anything regularly in at least a year. I've been a full time employee at MOO for a little over two months. I've tried other hobbies in between, but not seriously. Mostly, I find myself exhausted and unmotivated. 
 Just the mention of that, sent me fleeing to amazon to buy something. I'm easily distracted, when it comes to my own discomfort. 
 The two that asked to sit at my table, are german. I wish Charlotte was here to translate. Do you capitalize "german" when you use it in text? Are they German or german? I don't know. I can understand about 20% of what these two are saying. 
 Anyway, I have no idea what I want to talk about in this blog post. Let's make a list, shall we:
 * The constant questioning of testing as either relevent or valuable to software development.
 * Fuck it. Just do chapter 4 already.
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  <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106">QA Notes And References</span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Quick Reference Card</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Repositories</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">Bonusbox front-end framework: </span><span class="author-p-199106 url"><a href="https://github.com/bonusboxme/bbox-qa-autotests">https://github.com/bonusboxme/bbox-qa-autotests</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line longKeep gutter-noauthor">&nbsp;</div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Articles</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106">Context-Driven Testing: </span><span class="author-p-199106 url"><a href="http://context-driven-testing.com/">http://context-driven-testing.com/</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li>&nbsp;</li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 emptyGutter"><span class="author-p-199106 b"><b>Books</b></span></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596159825.do">Beautiful Testing</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven/dp/0471081124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406106952&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Context-Driven+testing">Lessons Learned In Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Testing-Practical-Guide-Testers/dp/0321534468/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406107075&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Agile+Testing">Agile Testing</a></span></li></ul></div>
 <div class="ace-line gutter-author-p-199106 line-list-type-indent emptyGutter"><ul class="listtype-indent listindent1 list-indent1" ><li><span class="author-p-199106 attrlink url"><a class="attrlink" href="http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book">The Cucumber Book</a></span></li></ul></div>
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 # Replication: Another Parallel Between Science And Testing
 One of the key features affecting the reliability and authority of the results of any given scientific finding, is the ability for others in your discipline to reliably reproduce the results of your experiment. 
 Replication is a method for mitigating the effects of confirmation bias, and for 
--- a/new-testing-blog/Say
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 ### Say What?
 Lately I've been noticing a dramatic uptick in the repetition of a certain phrase. It's a phrase I've heard ocassionally over the years mostly from my friends on the political left. But these days, I'm even hearing it from many on the right. The phrase is usually triggered by topics charged with some sort of social significance, often the result of some recent sensational event, like a church shooting or a rape revelation, and it usually comes out a little something like this:
 > I'm for equality, but...
 The "but" is typically followed by some statement considered high herasy in whatever political circle this phrase is uttered, and hairdos all over the room burst into flame immediately. Much attention is paid to the trailing phrases. Things like, "I'm not a feminist", or "there's too much immigration", or whatever. 
 But nobody pays much attention to the phrase I'm talking about. For the person who utters it, it is an innoculation; a self-justification; a moral safety blanket. For the receiver, it is the call of the mockingbird; an imposter; an infiltrator; a liar. For both, it is an unspoken fundamental agreement. An agreement that niether seems to realize they are entering into regarding an object about which niether seems to fully understand, let alone demonstrate any awareness of. 
 ### All Things Being Equal...
 So, what exactly are you saying, when you say you are "for equality"? It turns out, this is an incredibly difficult question to answer. The concept of "equality" is one of the most difficult to understand, and most muddled, of the major questions of philosophy. 
 Why, then, are we so quick to align ourselves with it? What impulse is driving our self-identification with whatever it is we think "equality" means? 
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 <h1 class="header">Serial Book Review, Part 1: Lessons Learned In Software Testing</h1>
 <div class="journalentry" id="mj-14A82035-4625-4CD6-AA9C-28030C2DC357">
 <b>Date:</b> 19 Jul 2015<br>
 <b>Time:</b> 14:57:31 CEST<br>
 <b>Topic:</b> Serial Book Review, Part 1: Lessons Learned In Software Testing<br><br>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">A few weeks ago, a colleague queried me for advice regarding implementing a testing role on a project for which he is a product manager. Over the course of that discussion, one book frequently sprang to mind as an ideal tutorial for product managers and new testers, alike: the remarkable collaboration of [James Bach](http://www.satisfice.com/blog/), Brett Pettichord, and Cem Kaner, [*_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*](http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven-ebook/dp/B000S1LVBS/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&amp;me=). </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Since then, it has ocurred to me that businesses relying on tech for their bread and butter -- especially startups and small ventures -- are really suffering for lack of awareness of this book. All around me these days, I see the symptoms: [profound](https://dzone.com/articles/qa-dead-long-live-qa) [ignorance](https://medium.com/product-management-weekly/why-product-managers-should-do-all-their-own-qa-testing-8481289dddd4), [hubris](https://mysoftwarequality.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/should-developers-test/), and [contempt](http://igaffa.blogspot.de/2015/07/on-bugs-and-qa.html) for the role of quality and testing in various organizations and projects. A chronic condition that, at the very least, might be treatable with books like this one. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">In lesson fifteen of *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*, the authors state explicitly, *"...Don’t expect anyone else to read [this book]. It’s up to you to let your clients know what you need in order to do your job effectively..."* As a tester and an individual contributor on any team, I definitely take this to heart. I try always to raise the "quality awareness" of the team, and to be sure that our quality choices are conscious decisions. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">But it seems to me that the lessons in this book would have far greater reach and far more impact if they were known to more than just a handful of good testers. It would broaden everyone's understanding of the nature of quality, raise the standard for what is expected from a good tester, help to rein in ignorance-borne attitudes like those I've linked to above, and ultimately, improve the output of an entire industry.</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">So, I've decided to do a chapter-by-chapter review of this book in the hope that a public hearing might help to raise awareness and encourage conscious decisions about quality, not only for the teams in which I participate, but across the tech sector as a whole.</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Over the next few months, I'll cover a chapter per post, roughly once a week. This week, obviously, starts with chapter one. And its focus, appropriately, is perhaps the most pressing question for software development today:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">#The Role Of The Tester</span></p>
 <p> <span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;"></span></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">No single question about testing could be more important than this one, or more misunderstood. As I noted above, we live in a world where the very notion of testing as a distinct role on a project is rapidly becoming synonymous with obsolescence. If testers do not find their voice in this new tech economy -- out here on the startup frontier, where the death of the elderly vertical giants is not a mere speculation, but an active and ongoing project -- then they will cease to have a voice at all. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Is it possible that this death is necessary, like buggy-whip manufacturers in the age of the automobile, or lamp oil distributors in the age of the electric light bulb? Maybe. Or maybe the discipline just needs to learn to be flexible, and to pivot with innovations when they come, the way IBM managed to transition from mechanical tabulating machines into computers in the 1930's. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">*_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_* doesn't directly address these larger questions, but the implications are clear in the lessons discussed in chapter one. All throughout this chapter, the reader is constantly reminded to be mindful of his value to the organization. For example:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">&gt; You serve the business... perform your work in a way that takes into account the short-term and long-term interests of the company... If you spend time and effort on requirements that your clients don’t care about, you risk being treated as irrelevant or counterproductive. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">For testers to remain valuable and relevant to any team, therefore, they must be clear about their mission, understand their value, and work to negotiate these things as equal partners with their team members. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">#Relationships</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">An essential prerequisite to understanding your value, according to the authors of *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*, is to understand that you are in a **relationship** with your team (whether they are your clients, your coworkers, or your colleagues). Good relationships are built on an exchange of shared value, and that shared value is discovered and defined by negotiation. This theme is an explicit and urgent one for the authors:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">&gt; A role is a relationship. That means you don't control your role, but you can negotiate it... If you can’t come to agreement on the mission, you won’t have a good foundation for anything you do... When you're clear about your role - when you have negotiated it - you have a foundation for setting expectations in any situation that may arise. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">The principle behind this lesson cannot be overstated. Every meaningful and lasting thing we do in life involves relationships, and requires our ability to engage in them and navigate them effectively. The more open, honest, and peer-oriented they are, the better we will understand what is expected, and the more satisfying and effective the relationship will be. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">However, if you or your teammates misjudge or misunderstand the nature of your relationship, everything you attempt together will suffer a much lower chance of success. If you see yourselves as adversaries, trust will be almost impossible to achieve, and negotiations will be frought with suspicion and deadlock. If you treat the relationship as exclusively transactional, you will limit opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, and lengthen the duration of your feedback loop. If you are trapped in a heirarchical mindset, the project will be encumbered by leadership bottlenecks and "down time.” </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">One important factor to bear in mind is that all relationships are a two-way street. For negotiation to be successful, you must be as mindful of your negotiating partner's goals and desires as you are your own. *Empathy* is an important tool here. And, though the authors of *Lessons Learned...* were not explicit about this, I think they show an intuitive understanding of this tool in tips like this:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">&gt; Your success is measured primarily by how well you serve your clients’ desires and best interests. That might not be so hard, except that testing has many clients. They all have their own needs, and their collective needs don’t necessarily align...</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Having a clear understanding of what the team wants to achieve means having a clear understanding of what motivates each role in the team, where the incentives and challenges lie, and how they all interact. All of this requires a good deal of empathy and curiosity. These are two traits I find indispensible as a tester, and two traits that have served me well in relationships outside of my profession as well.</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">#Education</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Lastly, as I alluded to in the introduction to this post, the need to educate our peers -- and ourselves -- cannot be emphasised enough. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">The last lesson in chapter one addresses this problem exclusively. The authors focus on insuring that you clearly communicate the needs of your particular role within the context of the project. But embedded within this task lies a much more important goal for all of us:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">Salvaging software testing from the dustbin of ignorance and hubris. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">So say the the authors:</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">&gt; An important part of the role of testing is to explain testing to our clients. Your explanations are like a flu vaccine -- healthy and not that painful, but the effect wears off, so you have to do it over and over again.</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">This is one of the largest reasons why this blog exists. I want to explain testing to more than just my teammates. I want to explain it to as many people as I can reach. It is one of the least well understood roles of the software development process, and as a consequence, one of the most endangered roles. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">This is also why I am eager to promote books such as *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*. Whether or not you necessarily agree with every position these authors take, what they've done with this book is to provide a plain-spoken manual, not only for the successful tester, but also for making the role of testing itself a success once again. </span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">#Conclusion</span></p>
 <p></p>
 <p><span style="font: 12pt Helvetica;">In keeping with this spirit, I will be continuing this series next week, with a review of chapter two from the same book, entitled, "Thinking Like A Tester". Wherein, I'll be enthusiastically bloviating on one of my own favorite subjects: Critical Thinking Skills. :D </span></p></div>
 </body>
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--- a/new-testing-blog/Serial
+++ b/new-testing-blog/Serial
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
 Date: 19 Jul 2015 14:57
 Topic: Serial Book Review, Part 1: Lessons Learned In Software Testing
 Modified: 19 Jul 2015 21:59
 A few weeks ago, a colleague queried me for advice regarding implementing a testing role on a project for which he is a product manager. Over the course of that discussion, one book frequently sprang to mind as an ideal tutorial for product managers and new testers, alike: the remarkable collaboration of [James Bach](http://www.satisfice.com/blog/), Brett Pettichord, and Cem Kaner, [*_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*](http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven-ebook/dp/B000S1LVBS/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=). 
 Since then, it has ocurred to me that businesses relying on tech for their bread and butter -- especially startups and small ventures -- are really suffering for lack of awareness of this book. All around me these days, I see the symptoms: [profound](https://dzone.com/articles/qa-dead-long-live-qa) [ignorance](https://medium.com/product-management-weekly/why-product-managers-should-do-all-their-own-qa-testing-8481289dddd4), [hubris](https://mysoftwarequality.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/should-developers-test/), and [contempt](http://igaffa.blogspot.de/2015/07/on-bugs-and-qa.html) for the role of quality and testing in various organizations and projects. A chronic condition that, at the very least, might be treatable with books like this one. 
 In lesson fifteen of *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*, the authors state explicitly, *"...Don’t expect anyone else to read [this book]. It’s up to you to let your clients know what you need in order to do your job effectively..."* As a tester and an individual contributor on any team, I definitely take this to heart. I try always to raise the "quality awareness" of the team, and to be sure that our quality choices are conscious decisions. 
 But it seems to me that the lessons in this book would have far greater reach and far more impact if they were known to more than just a handful of good testers. It would broaden everyone's understanding of the nature of quality, raise the standard for what is expected from a good tester, help to rein in ignorance-borne attitudes like those I've linked to above, and ultimately, improve the output of an entire industry.
 So, I've decided to do a chapter-by-chapter review of this book in the hope that a public hearing might help to raise awareness and encourage conscious decisions about quality, not only for the teams in which I participate, but across the tech sector as a whole.
 Over the next few months, I'll cover a chapter per post, roughly once a week. This week, obviously, starts with chapter one. And its focus, appropriately, is perhaps the most pressing question for software development today:
 #The Role Of The Tester
 No single question about testing could be more important than this one, or more misunderstood. As I noted above, we live in a world where the very notion of testing as a distinct role on a project is rapidly becoming synonymous with obsolescence. If testers do not find their voice in this new tech economy -- out here on the startup frontier, where the death of the elderly vertical giants is not a mere speculation, but an active and ongoing project -- then they will cease to have a voice at all. 
 Is it possible that this death is necessary, like buggy-whip manufacturers in the age of the automobile, or lamp oil distributors in the age of the electric light bulb? Maybe. Or maybe the discipline just needs to learn to be flexible, and to pivot with innovations when they come, the way IBM managed to transition from mechanical tabulating machines into computers in the 1930's. 
 *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_* doesn't directly address these larger questions, but the implications are clear in the lessons discussed in chapter one. All throughout this chapter, the reader is constantly reminded to be mindful of his value to the organization. For example:
 > You serve the business... perform your work in a way that takes into account the short-term and long-term interests of the company... If you spend time and effort on requirements that your clients don’t care about, you risk being treated as irrelevant or counterproductive. 
 For testers to remain valuable and relevant to any team, therefore, they must be clear about their mission, understand their value, and work to negotiate these things as equal partners with their team members. 
 #Relationships
 An essential prerequisite to understanding your value, according to the authors of *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*, is to understand that you are in a **relationship** with your team (whether they are your clients, your coworkers, or your colleagues). Good relationships are built on an exchange of shared value, and that shared value is discovered and defined by negotiation. This theme is an explicit and urgent one for the authors:
 > A role is a relationship. That means you don't control your role, but you can negotiate it... If you can’t come to agreement on the mission, you won’t have a good foundation for anything you do... When you're clear about your role - when you have negotiated it - you have a foundation for setting expectations in any situation that may arise. 
 The principle behind this lesson cannot be overstated. Every meaningful and lasting thing we do in life involves relationships, and requires our ability to engage in them and navigate them effectively. The more open, honest, and peer-oriented they are, the better we will understand what is expected, and the more satisfying and effective the relationship will be. 
 However, if you or your teammates misjudge or misunderstand the nature of your relationship, everything you attempt together will suffer a much lower chance of success. If you see yourselves as adversaries, trust will be almost impossible to achieve, and negotiations will be frought with suspicion and deadlock. If you treat the relationship as exclusively transactional, you will limit opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, and lengthen the duration of your feedback loop. If you are trapped in a heirarchical mindset, the project will be encumbered by leadership bottlenecks and "down time.” 
 One important factor to bear in mind is that all relationships are a two-way street. For negotiation to be successful, you must be as mindful of your negotiating partner's goals and desires as you are your own. *Empathy* is an important tool here. And, though the authors of *Lessons Learned...* were not explicit about this, I think they show an intuitive understanding of this tool in tips like this:
 > Your success is measured primarily by how well you serve your clients’ desires and best interests. That might not be so hard, except that testing has many clients. They all have their own needs, and their collective needs don’t necessarily align...
 Having a clear understanding of what the team wants to achieve means having a clear understanding of what motivates each role in the team, where the incentives and challenges lie, and how they all interact. All of this requires a good deal of empathy and curiosity. These are two traits I find indispensible as a tester, and two traits that have served me well in relationships outside of my profession as well.
 #Education
 Lastly, as I alluded to in the introduction to this post, the need to educate our peers -- and ourselves -- cannot be emphasised enough. 
 The last lesson in chapter one addresses this problem exclusively. The authors focus on insuring that you clearly communicate the needs of your particular role within the context of the project. But embedded within this task lies a much more important goal for all of us:
 Salvaging software testing from the dustbin of ignorance and hubris. 
 So say the the authors:
 > An important part of the role of testing is to explain testing to our clients. Your explanations are like a flu vaccine -- healthy and not that painful, but the effect wears off, so you have to do it over and over again.
 This is one of the largest reasons why this blog exists. I want to explain testing to more than just my teammates. I want to explain it to as many people as I can reach. It is one of the least well understood roles of the software development process, and as a consequence, one of the most endangered roles. 
 This is also why I am eager to promote books such as *_Lessons Learned In Software Testing_*. Whether or not you necessarily agree with every position these authors take, what they've done with this book is to provide a plain-spoken manual, not only for the successful tester, but also for making the role of testing itself a success once again. 
 #Conclusion
 In keeping with this spirit, I will be continuing this series next week, with a review of chapter two from the same book, entitled, "Thinking Like A Tester". Wherein, I'll be enthusiastically bloviating on one of my own favorite subjects: Critical Thinking Skills. :D 
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 There has been a rash of [nail-biters][1] lately, all [nattering][2] about how horrible technology is, and [faffing breathlessly][3] about how the internet is destroying everything. Despite [more reasonable][4] voices appearing at [irregular][5] [intervals][6], the persisting social mythology is that all this new-fangled wizardry is [rotting your brain][7], and [making you lonely and depressed][8].
 At some later date, I may spend some time speculating as to the source of this irrational anxiety (it predates the computer age, actually). But in the meantime, I would rather do my part to provide a counterpoint to the cacophony of disaster scenario dramas. So, here - in proper SEO friendly format - are the four reasons why I think modern technology is really super awesome and cool.
 ### 1. Computer Programming Languages
 This may seem like a rather esoteric point. But, aside from writers like [Mortimer Adler][9] and [Isaac Asimov][10], learning to program was the single biggest influence on my capacity to reason and think critically. Computer languages, particularly the object oriented ones, enforce a kind of structural discipline in the conceptualization of a project that teaches you how to categorize and classify different kinds of ideas, in ways you wouldn't otherwise have tried.
 They also provide a great practice for critical thinking. Though the syntax of computer languages isn't actually a strict lesson in propositional logic, I've found the procedural rigor in them to be fantastic exercise for the kinds of thinking required to analyze complex arguments in any persuasive context.
 I do have one caveat to this, though. Here's an analogy: logic and the scientific method are excellent tools if your goal is problem solving, but they don't teach you problem solving itself. In the same way, programming languages are excellent tools for discovery and problem solving. But they also do not **teach you how to solve problems**.
 Problem solving is fundamentally a **psychological** process, in which an impediment toward a goal is identified, and solutions are imagined with which to remove or mitigate the effects of that impediment. Computers offer one means of realizing solutions, and programming languages give us the basic grammar, syntax, and semantics with which to express ways of using that solution. This is where that structural discipline I mentioned earlier comes into play.
 But as you can now see, programming languages are best understood as the cognitive interface between our underlying desires, and the real world in which we wish to realize them. They are the blueprints for the house. Not the house itself. And it takes a good engineer years of practice to transform them into a house of durability and elegance.
 ### 2. The Decentralization Of Learning
 The reason Mortimer Adler and Isaac Asimov had such a significant influence on my early cognitive development, was because _I had easy access to them_. Their works were cheap, and so filled the bookshelves of my childhood home. I call this the Gutenberg-Bismark era of education, because most knowledge was only available in print books, and found in institutions like state schools and libraries. It is an era that came to an end only about 7 years ago. In it's place, a new era of learning is just on the horizon, and it may indeed finally put the last bullet into the dying horse of institutional "education".
 For decades, futurists have been making grand (and ultimately disappointing) promises about how computers were going to radically reform classroom education. The irony in thier pronouncements, is that they were _not forward thinking enough_. Not only is technology "transforming the classroom", but in the coming decade, it is very likely to completely obliterate it. And you can see hints of this all over the internet today.
 Obtaining the resources to receive an education in just about any subject of interest is getting easier and easier, and the way in which we judge the work of those who undertake those studies independently, is changing dramatically along with that. Society is becoming less and less reliant upon the implied authority of credentials and certifications, while the expectation of demonstrable skills, knowledge, and accomplishments are replacing them.
 This decentralization is of course, not without its own challenges and flaws, but over the long term, the positive impact of technology in this sphere of society will be almost immeasurable. The elimination of cartelized clusters of knowledge means the elimination of a significant hierarchy, and the diminution of a large _center of systemic power_. It means the economic empowerment of millions of people who would never have had the opportunity without the technology. It means learning to cope with a society of far less structure, and far more dynamism than ever before. And we can already see the effects of this beginning with the various "dot com" booms of the last decade or so.
 And all of this has taken place as a result of a free market. The longer we can cope with the freedom, the more transformative the effect will be. I hope it is continuous.
 ### 3. The Decentralization Of Media
 Right now, no industry is more obviously an example of the decentralizing effect of technology, than the media. Corporate giants that once seemed like immutable oracles of news, are crumbling like so many high rises in a San Francisco earthquake. Journalists in every sector are facing intense waves of scrutiny from the critical eyes of wary and resourceful readers, all over the world, often aided by their saavy use of technology. New sources of information are bubbling up to the surface all the time, and the patterns of dissemination of this information look less and less like a pyramid, and more and more like overlapping spiderwebs.
 There are many in the nail-biting community, who bemoan the potential atomizing isolation of narrow-casting for niche audiences. But this fear completely misinterprets the new media environment through the lens of a one-to-many relationship between producers and consumers of content. It also
 The actual many-to-many environment that the internet has produced, is one of constant self-monitoring and self-correction, and has the paradoxical effect of providing the very same sorts of common narratives around which social groups already cluster in traditional media circles.
 ### 4. The Grenzenlos Society
 I used to think my wife and I were a pair of anomalies that somehow managed to find each other by accident. Over the last 10 years, between us, we've had seven different home addresses in three different countries on two different continents (and we're not done yet). It's been a serious struggle to make all this happen, but mostly the challenges have been with political institutions impeding our movement. More on this, in a moment.
 We both have careers in tech, in particular specialties that are considered "high demand" in the countries we've moved to (this was one of the factors lowering the barrier to entry for us). But neither of us is remarkably unique, in the sense of being diplomatically important, extremely wealthy, well-connected politically, prestigiously educated, or possessing any of the other typical "privilege" factors one would consider necessary for international travel that's not simple tourism.
 As it turns out, we're not as unique as I thought we were. The tech field is positively swarming with people from all over the world, who live and work all over the world. And this new mobility is starting to spread to other industries. Technology is enabling a free market in labor, in ways nobody ever imagined possible, before the internet.
 * Intellectual Property, DRM, Region restrictions, etc.
 * Visas, work permits, immigration quotas, etc.
 * Nationalism, territorialism, etc.
 [1]:	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uquRzrcwA18
 [2]:	http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/25/technology-intelligence_n_5617181.html
 [3]:	http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2962509/How-internet-destroying-pioneers-hoped-web-transform-society-devastating-new-book-says-way-diminishes-humanity.html
 [4]:	http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10844201/No-evidence-normal-internet-use-damages-brains-of-teenagers.html
 [5]:	http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation
 [6]:	http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21614088-neuroscientist-warns-will-internet-eat-your-brain
 [7]:	http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/clive-thompson_n_4111195.html
 [8]:	http://www.wired.com/2014/09/is-the-internet-scrambling-our-teenagers-brains-we-dont-know-but-probably-not/
 [9]:	http://www.britannica.com/biography/Mortimer-J-Adler
 [10]:	http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_titles.html
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 # Topics For The Testing Blog
 **First Post**
 The challenges of test automation. 
 * The cost of automating
 * The cost of not automating
 * The lack of community
 * The lack of visibility
 * The nay-sayers
 * What can we do about it?
 **Second Post**
 How I work. 
 * Why I do what I do
 * What I think works, and doesn't work
 * What I think matters, and why it matters.
 **Third Post** 
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 I have championed of the concept of Behavior Driven Development for several years, spanning a few different employers, during my testing career. In that time, I've made a few discoveries about BDD, and the broader software development community's relationship to it, that have really been bothering me, lately. So, I thought I'd take a moment while I'm on hiatus from *Lessons Learned*, to share my findings with you all.
 The first lesson, and perhaps the most important, is that people don't really understand what it is, or what it's for. Most folks equate BDD with Cucumber itself, confusing a tool for a methodology. Everyone equates Cucumber with acceptance testing, confusing collaborative design with test automation. And, as a result of all of this, BDD and its tools have largely been either ignored, or badly misused.
 In the startup world, where I work, collaboration and negotiation are the single most important aspects of any software development project. Small development teams cannot afford *not* to stay connected with the needs of the business itself, and the people driving the project. In my view, this makes BDD, and its associated toolsets, an essential component for success, since it enables clear and definite understanding between technical and non-technical team members about what promises the software is meant to keep.
 But because Cucumber and Behave are technical tools, and because they look alot like test automation tools, and because nobody is teaching the methodology, the product managers and owners that I've known won't even talk about BDD, let alone even consider using something like Gherkin, as a documentation tool. 
 I've had better luck approaching some development team leads. Particularly in environments where product managers are not present (surprising, perhaps, but this is a commonplace reality in the startup world). It's a risky venture, to be sure. But with a little patience and good coaching, it's not difficult to help the tech leads on a team see the benefit. Especially when they are being pressed to satisfy many of the demands put on product managers. Namely, negotiating and documenting feature design and requirement specification.
 The first step of hooking them with the promise of test automation will get you in the door, but you'll have to work quickly and persistently, to re-orient the minds of the dev team and tech lead. Your task is to get them to put themselves in the skin of a user, rather than a developer (the first thing he'll want to know how is to specify SQL connection strings Gherkin).  
 To do this, I've been been tutoring my present tech lead in Behavioral Driven Development by insisting on two things: 
 First, that we absolutely must write out our scenarios during the planning and refinement sessions for any given feature or sprint. That's been a challenge, to be sure. But it has yielded a number of positive results, both in getting the devs to think more laterally and strategically about the features they're building, and in shrinking the amount of churn between the dev team and the CTO (who sets the product direction, presently). 
 And Secondly, I have imposed some conceptual and implementation constraints on the way that we use Gherkin to write our specifications. These "rules of thumb" are not wholly canonical, but I find them extremely powerful for getting devs to really understand what they're being asked to do, and how they're being asked to think.
 1. Firstly -- and most importantly -- Gherkin frameworks like Cucumber and Behave are not meant to function as substitutes for proper traditional unit, functional, or integration testing. if you're using Gherkin to test input field validation, for example, then you're testing the wrong stuff. If you want to test that input fields are properly empty when a dialog is displayed, you should be writing javascript (or php, or python, or ruby) unit tests. If you want to test that the dialog or light-box is displaying and disolving correctly, you should be writing functional tests. If you want to test that the data in input fields is being stored properly in the database, you should be writing integration tests. But if you want to test that *you're keeping the promises you make to customers*, then you should be writing Gherkin. Or rather, your Product Manager, your Tester, and You should be working together to write it. 
 2. Gherkin specs are not quite product specifications. Rather, they are a description of a user's desire to accomplish a goal (what Product Managers might call a "user journey"). Our challenge, then, is to write down all the promises we make to end users about what they will be able to accomplish with this software. Which is a different task than writing down in detail, all the things that the software is capable of.  
 3. Gherkin should not be used to "explain how" the user accomplishes his goal. Unless the test is about a specific step along a path, the specific steps are not needed. Gherkin is not user documentation. It is a document describing a contractual agreement with your business team. In short, Gherkin specs describe the "what" of the scenarios, not the "how". What I tell developers specifically, is to beware of trying to embed the *step definitions* into the scenario assertions.   
 4. Gherkin specs should not insist on there being one way to do something. In other words, Gherkin should not simply be telling the programmer what to program. I often joke with developers that they should not be using Gherkin as a "macro language for python". They should be free to code up any solution they want in the application, and in the step definitions, that gets the Scenario to its stated goal. Gherkin should not care, as long as the behavioral end-goal is satisfied.
 Ultimately, the goal is to get the team to change the way it relates to a software development project as a whole, and to change the way they think about software design. And I've seen some positive moves in that direction with my current team. We've even done a few feature planning sessions with complete specs already, that have yielded insights into the product that led to important improvements and changes.
 But, as with all projects -- especially in an Agile environment -- change and improvmement is a gradual, *incremental* phenomenon. Time will tell whether my broader goal is achievable. But for now, I'm just satisfied to see the team writing clean, coherent, manageable Gherkin specifications. 
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 Chapter three of *Lessons Learned In Software Testing* begins by pulling us down from the cloud of philosophical abstraction we've been revelling in, to talk about actual testing practices. The authors take us from the ideal to the concrete by first providing a classification system of their own making, and walking us through nearly every known test technique, explaining how the technique fits into the system.
 #### Testers Are Experiment Designers
 While this chapter may first appear as though it is merely a mundane catalogue of testing activities, what Bach, et. al. are really offering us (in keeping with the metaphor of science), is an intellectual toolbox from which to begin our own *[Experimental Design](http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/top_research-project_experimental-design.shtml)* in software testing. Through the descriptions offered of each testing technique, the authors are conditioning us to think very carefully and systematically about what we actually want to *do* to test a software product, and why we would want to do it. 
 One approach to systemetizing our testing, taken by the authors in chapter three, is the "Five Fold Testing System". Given this framework as a basis, what we are really being tasked with is *designing testing experiments* that answer questions about the product under test, or attempt to falsify assertions about that product.
 The "Five Fold System" is not a direct analog to the techniques and categories employed in the design of actual scientific experiements. Yet, if we look at the system's five aspects specifically, we can see that they share many similarities with a scientific experiment:
 > * Testers [People]: Who does the testing. For example, user testing is focused on testing by members of your target market, people who would normally use the product.
 This might be understood as test subject selection. This is where a social scientist would be considering problems like demographics, sample size, environmental conditions, and so forth. 
 > * Coverage: What gets tested. For example, in function testing, you test every function. 
 In the design phase of an experiment, a scientist might consider this the "scope" of his experiment. If I'm working on the chemical effects of Cannibas on the body, do I limit my experiment to only neurochemical effects, or do I include other physiological factors as well?
 > * Potential problems: Why you’re testing (what risk you’re testing for). For example, testing for extreme value errors. 
 This third category might be thought of as the hypotheses themselves. What questions are being asked? What assertions are we trying to prove, or disprove? 
 > * Activities: How you test. For example: exploratory testing. 
 This category is about the "method" of the experiment. To borrow from the social sciences again, this might be about whether I'm going to rely entirely on self-reporting surveys, or entirely on neurological data, or a mix of both, or something else entirely.
 > * Evaluation: How to tell whether the test passed or failed. For example, comparison to a known good result.
 If you've read any published scientific papers, you'll recognize this as the analysis and conclusion of a scientific experiment. What results did we get? What can we reasonably say about those results? What are the implications? What needs further study? One important feature of evaluation, in both science and testing, is the degree of reproducibility of your results. I'll go into this topic more in the future.
 Ultimately, the idea of this framework is to provide testers with a tool for "making better choices" about the testing techniques applied to various software testing problems:
 > Despite the ambiguities (and, to some degree, because of them), we find this classification system useful as an idea generator. By keeping all five dimensions in mind as you test, you might make better choices of combinations.
 Better choices make for better test plans, better test plans make for better testing, and better testing makes for better software. 
 Bach, et. al. pack this chapter thick with specific details and examples, and focus intently on all the ways one could scrutinize a piece of software or its features. And, although it is admittedly not a comprehensive "how-to" guide, it does provide a solid path of further study for any motivated tester who reads the book.
 I've decided to end my review of chapter three here, rather than to discuss each technique in detail. There is so much material to cover, it would fill at least one thick volume on the topic. 
 Yet, they deserve discussion. So, what I'm going to do is to turn chapter three into a to-do list for this blog. I'll be discussing each technique outside the context of this book review, providing examples and context from my own testing experiences, and those of my colleagues.
 Up next week: I'll cover chapter four, in which the authors talk about another very concrete and very immediate topic of testing: bugs. 
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 The first chapter of _*Lessons Learned In Software Testing*_ argued that the tester is in a relationship with his teammates, and that his role is determined by a process of negotiation made possible by that relationship. 
 In chapter two, "Thinking Like A Tester", we will discover that the tester has an equally important relationship with reality, and with himself. Bach, et. al., show us that competence as a tester is very much dependent upon the set of mental tools the tester employs to navigate that reality, and to negotiate with himself when that task becomes difficult. 
 ### The Attitude Of A Tester
 There is a common hyperbolic stereotype of scientists that paints them as obdurately reductionist killjoys who seek only the schadenfreude found in aggressively shattering the metaphysical wonderment one experiences from the delicate grandure found in a work of art like the universe. 
 I find this stereotype fascinating, because it describes a very similar phenomenon experienced by many testers. This can be seen in the phrase "negative thinker", often used to characterize the difference between a programmer and a tester. As Bach, Et. al. describe in the book, some charge that "testers complain... [and] take a special thrill in delivering bad news". I've even seen a few testers take this identity to heart, revelling in "[making developers cry](http://blog.codinghorror.com/making-developers-cry-since-1995/)".
 But, as Bach, Et. al. correctly point out:
 > [good] testers don't complain; they offer evidence. [good] testers don't like to break things; they like to dispel the illusion that things work. [good] testers don't enjoy giving bad news; they enjoy freeing their clients from the thrall of false belief.
 In other words, it is a serious mistake to assume that because programmers think in terms of positive goals, and testers think *differently*, then it must mean that testers *oppose those goals*. Nothing could be further from the truth. In addition to being just plain wrong, it seems to me this sort of adversarial characterization is also part of the reason why the discipline of testing is in so much trouble. 
 A better way to understand the mindset of the tester, particularly in relation to the developer, is to understand that they both have the same goal, but they get there *from different directions*. In effect, the developer is making an argument, or a claim about reality, and the tester wants to help him by seeing if the claim holds up to scrutiny. To put it in simpler terms: If programming is [the art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming) of software development, then testing is its [science](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2224780/opensource-subnet/the-new-science-of-software-testing.html). 
 And, like any good scientist, at the core of a good tester's character, is his reliance upon the methods of science, his commitment to critical thinking in conjunction with it, and his passion for (and proper understanding of the value of) sharing the discoveries he makes, with his teammates.
 ### The Toolbox Of A Thinker 
 A central tenet of this mindset, according to Bach, et. al., is an epistemological commitment to a variety of empiricism peculiar to Karl Popper (and, indeed, all of modern science). The authors stress the importance of an awareness of philosophical concepts like [Justified True Belief](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#JTB), logical tools like [abductive inference](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/), and methods such as Karl Popper's [conjecture and refutation](http://www.amazon.de/Conjectures-Refutations-Scientific-Knowledge-Routledge/dp/0415285941) (more colloquially understood as "[falsificationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Falsificationism)"). 
 But they don't stop there. In addition to critical reasoning and empiricism, The book outlines three other forms of thinking essential to the thoughtful tester: Technical, Creative, and Practical. Each of these forms of thinking is punctuated by lessons particular to it. The "technical" lessons identify the need for analytical skills, and the ability to model systems accurately for succesful testing. The "creative" lessons identify the need for lateral thinking, and its role in determining the boundaries of your testing efforts. Lastly, the "practical" lessons identify the need for technical competency, and implicitly warn testers that a limit here will necessarily limit what is possible for them, regardless of how creative they might be. A discussion of these forms of thinking could fill a whole post each on their own (and I've decided, as you'll see later, that I'm going to do just that).
 ### Looking Inward
 Before I get into the practical application of this toolbox, I want to highlight one final piece of mental equipment mentioned in this chapter. And, while I hesitate to elevate cognitive psychology in importance above all the other forms of thought, it is very difficult for me to imagine the other forms being very effective without this. Bach, et. al. Acknowledge this importance by giving cognitive psychology its own stand-alone lesson (lesson 18), but they seem only dimly aware of the breadth and depth of the implications of applying this tool, in one's individual life. They state:
 > Lots of people who never studied these subjects have done good testing. If you want to be better than good, studying cognitive psychology will help you understand the factors that affect your performance as a tester, as well as the factors that affect how people interpret your work.
 Help you understand, indeed. I don't think this point could be any more understated. Bach, et. al. tease us by highlighting this as an independent lesson, but leave us with little more than a tepid suggestion. 
 This lesson, in my view, is about much more than simply obtaining facts about the reliability of senses and memory, or insights into the neurology of cognitive awareness and thoughts, or even individual awareness of cognitive influencers like stress, or fear, or pattern recognition. Though such things are very important to understand, they are secondary to the development self-awareness and empathy in oneself, and cognitive psychology is perhaps the most powerful approach to this need.
 Self-awareness and empathy are the third leg of a three-legged stool that includes Popper-style empiricism, and critical reasoning, altogether making up a stable platform from which to ground all relations in life, not just your testing relations. Without self-awarness and empathy, you cannot understand yourself, much less imagine the motivations and experiences of your users, or the developers you work with. If it were up to me, I'd put everyone in tech through at least one course in cognitive psychology, and couple it with "lab work" in a therapist's office. 
 Bach, et. al., offer the uninspiring goal of getting "better than good", for the effort of understanding cognitive psychology. But, I would argue that if we all took it seriously, humanity as a whole would be much better than good. We'd be fantastic.
 ### Doing Science
 With that said, let's explore a little more of what Bach, et. al., have to say about all of this thinking, as it is applied. For starters, they assert in lesson 24, that "*all tests are experiments performed to answer some question about the relationship between what the product is, and what it should be.*" A better way to state this might have been to say, "...between what the product is, and what the your team team asserts that it is". 
 But your goal as a tester, is not to get to the answer that your team (most probably wants) wants. Your goal, as an empiricist, is to answer the question as precisely and confidently as you can. And, if Popper's view is to be accepted, this is accomplished by executing an experiment that applies a technique of **falsification**. 
 This lesson is important, because it sets the stage for an important insight into good testing, and its similarity to good science. The tester is not "validating" a product. He is not setting out to [*prove the hypothesis* by experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism). His job is to *falsify* specific assertions. Here's a very simple example: 
 _The product team asserts:_ "Given such-and-such conditions, the login screen includes a functioning link to a password recovery form".
 _The tester asks himself:_ ***not*** "Is this true?", but rather, "What if this ***isn't*** true? How could I discover that it wasn't true? How could I be confident of such a discovery?", and then designs a test -- an experiment -- to answer those questions. 
 In short, the team offers the *conjecture*, the tester offers the *refutation*. In this way (and at the risk of elevating the tester to even more grandiose heights in this review), the tester is quite literally, a scientist. He knows that it is impossible to prove the hypothesis "true" under every circumstance, and that positive approaches to the hypothesis leave him especially vulnerable to cognitive errors like [Confirmation Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) (which will be discussed at length later). 
 One might also suppose that this is another reason why testers are seen as "negative". 
 ### The Story Of Testing
 Ok, I'm already well over budget on the length of this post. So, I've decided to separate the review of this chapter into multiple posts, which I'll describe more in a moment. 
 But, to end this post, I'd like spend some time on one seemingly throw-away phrase in lesson 19. A note that deserves a great deal more attention than was given by the authors of this chapter. Bach, et. al. tell us, in lesson 19:
 > The difference between excellent testing and mediocre testing is how you think: your test design choices, your ability to interpret what you observe, ***and your ability to tell a compelling story about it***. [emphasis added]
 So much of this book is absolutely littered with random nuggets of essential wisdom. Little mentions, almost asides, that any casual reader would breeze past, but that make all the difference. The bit that I have highlighted above, is just such a nugget. 
 What does it mean to *"tell a compelling story"* about our testing, our test design choices, and our ability to interpret what we observe? Well, let's look at what we know. The world is chock-a-block with good analysts, technicians, mechanics, engineers, researchers, and scientists. But among these multitudes, who are the ones that stand out? The ones we admire? The ones we envy? Who are the ones who inspire us to their view of life, and the world? It is the great storytellers. And, as it happens (and contrary to the popular stereotype), science and technology are positively teaming with examples. Just off the top of my head, I can think of three:
 * Carl Sagan, especially his [Cosmos TV Series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7n71pm0K04)
 * Richard Dawkins, especially his book [Unweaving The Rainbow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4)
 * James Bach, especially his book [Secrets of a Buckaneer Scholar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCGd7S9gnIQ)
 And there is one more example I want to highlight, specifically because they are perhaps the most accomplished testers, particularly as ***storytellers***, in the western world. The show is called [**Mythbusters**](http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/). Adam, Jamie, and the other hosts, have been applying the scientific method to empirical questions for 14 years, and the show is still going strong. They ask many of the same kinds of questions that testers do, they must design good tests to answer those questions, and most especially they must *tell a compelling story* about their observations. You really can't get any more accomplished than that.
 So, what do all these folks have in common? What is it that makes their stories *compelling*, as opposed to simply inspirational or convincing? I have come up with a short list of traits that I think together comprise the necessary ingredients for a compelling story, and a compelling storyteller:
 1. A commitment to the principles we've talked about in this post: Critical reasoning, scientific empiricism, and self-knowledge.
 2. A willingness to empathize with your audience, and to regard them as equally curious and intelligent as yourself.
 3. A strong sense of humility in the light of #1 and #2. This is described in the book, in lesson #40: "...the person easiest to fool is the one who is absolutely convinced he cannot be fooled..." 
 4. A passion for sharing your findings, even in the face of strong opinions or fearful opposition. Mr. Bach is certainly no stranger to this.
 As to how this applies specifically to reporting testing on particular projects, Bach, et. al. actually offer great advice in subsequent chapters, which I'll be covering in later posts.
 ### To Be Continued...
 And speaking of later posts, we're not quite done with chapter two, yet. Given the scope and depth of this topic, I've decided to parsel this part of the review into four parts. The good news is, you've already finished reading part one.
 Following on from this, I will be posting the following, over the next few weeks:
 1. Chapter 2, Part 2: The four kinds of thinking: Critical, Creative, Technical, And Practical
 2. Chapter 2, Part 3: Busting Common Myths of Testing
 3. Chapter 2, Part 4: Appendix: Common Cognitive Biases and Logical Fallacies
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 ### The Death Of Democracy
 There is a very conscious and very important reason why I have been using the term "decentralization", rather than "democratization", throughout this article. What we are witnessing today, is not the democratization of society, but the genuine *liberalization* of it. And this change is being facilitated largely by the turbulent, disorganized, and _*unplanned* free market_ of modern technology. 
 Democracy is a very old social technology; it is very ill conceived, and very inadequate at meeting the challenges and the needs of a highly diverse, highly mobile, highly educated, and highly empowered human civilization. It suffers from the same crippling atavistic narcissism and hubris that command-and-control and utopian political ideologies also suffer from. 
 The internet, and the free and open market of ideas and entrepreneurial energy it has made possible, is slowly replacing this dinosaur of social technology. And those who still cling to the dinosaur are not going to give it up, without a hard fight.
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 Today, will be the third and final installment of my coverage of chapter two of *Lessons Learned In Software Testing*. I want to briefly discuss three common industry misconceptions that Bach, et. al. either hint at, or point out explicitly in the chapter. These misconceptions often affect the way testing, as a business value, is evaluated. And mostly, the effect is negative. 
 ### The Myth Of Ignorance
 The first, and perhaps the most pervasive, is the notion that testers are - and must be - by definition, ignorant of the software they are testing. As noted in lessons 22 and 23, this is often associated with traditional "black box" testing. In other words, an ignorance of the application's source code. The underlying implication that Bach, et. al., do not address, is that it is this view of ignorance that makes the tester seem far less valuable to the team than the developer, in the minds of managers and engineers. 
 But knowledge of the product extends far beyond just the underlying code. And much of this can have a significant impact on testing approaches. The authors seem to agree with me, that it is a mistake to take the narrow view that ignorance of the code is a defect in the testing role. In lesson 22, they point out that:
 > We don’t object to a tester learning about how a product works. The more you learn about a product, and the more ways in which you know it, the better you will be able to test it. But if your primary focus is on the source code and tests you can derive from the source code, you will be covering ground the programmer has probably covered already...
 The authors would probably not go as far as I would, however, in arguing that the tester's role on a project could in fact be just as valuable as the the engineer's role. Distinctions in the domains of knowledge do not necessitate a hierarchy of value. It is certainly possible that on some projects, testing may not be as necessary as other roles. But this is a circumstantial pressure on the value of the role, not a structural one. 
 As I've discussed in the first installment on this chapter, and as the authors of *Lessons Learned* have also argued implicitly up to this point, the tester demonstrates his value to the team precisely by bringing to the table a different skillset and a different knowledge domain than the developer.
 ### The Myth Of Certainty
 The myth of certainty, loosely stated, is the belief that testing will grant your project the blessing of certitude against failure. It is this false belief that drives impulses like quality "gatekeeping", and release "certification" exercises. As the authors clearly warn in lesson 30:
 > Beware of tests that purport to validate or certify a product in a way that goes beyond the specific tests you ran. No amount of testing provides certainty about the quality of the product.
 As noted in the second installment on this chapter, this is due to the the kinds of questions that our tests are answering. As with any good scientific experiment, the best an experiment can offer is that the hypothesis is not falsified. Cumulatively, then, we can only say that the product could not be demonstrated to be defective given the suite of tests we ran. Bach, et. al., state it very succinctly in lesson 35, this way:
 > In the end, all you have is an impression of the product. Whatever you know about the quality of the product, it’s conjecture. No matter how well supported, you can’t be [absolutely] sure you’re right.
 One thing the authors do not address directly in chapter two (perhaps they do later), is how many project teams are extremely uncomfortable with having this knowledge made conscious. Uncertainty, I find, is one of the most unwelcome states of mind in most areas of our lives. Software projects are no exception. The software tester should not fall into the trap of thinking that he can somehow provide this certainty. Neither should managers or other team members fall into the trap of thinking that this devalues the role of testing. To believe that it does, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of testing within a project.
 Instead of letting anxiety drive brittle pursuits for concrete certainty about the product, teams should strive for an agreed upon degree of confidence that promises to customers are being kept, taking conscious account of the potential risks. This more honest asssessment of the state of the product will facilitate better decision-making, and minimize the number of unpleasant surprises that arise after release. 
 ### The Myth Of Precision
 This myth is one primarily harbored in the minds of my fellow testers. And Bach, et. al., describe it perfectly, in lesson 32:
 > If you expect to receive requirements on a sheaf of parchment, stamped with the seal of universal truth, find another line of work... A tester who treats project documentation (explicit specifications of the product) as the sole source of requirements is crippling his test process.
 This is one way in which the myth of certainty shows up in the tester's own mindset. A tester who is expecting his team to be more certain about the desired state of the product than he is about the actual state of the product, is deceiving himself, and treating his team mates unfairly. 
 The origin of this myth, it seems to me, harkens to the days of factory testing, where teams of testers are given fixed lists of requirements and test cases from manufacturing engineers and designers, and are expected, much like the factory's assemblers and packers, to simply execute their piece-work. 
 By contrast, authors of *Lessons Learned* describe a far more modern ideal. One including a highly collaborative process of "Conference, Inference, and Reference", when gathering requirements for software testing. My own 7 years of experience in the field is very much consonant with this description. Particularly in Agile environments, where software development teams value "[working software over comprehensive documentation][1]", a good tester must be extremely persistent and flexible when attempting to discover all the implicit and explicit expectations for any given feature. 
 Bach, et. al., only hint at this, but what all of this suggests is that good testers will want to learn to be good negotiators. In an environment where requirements are dynamically defined as part of an ongoing set of interactions between team members, the best negotiators will set the standard for how the product's requirements are set, propagated, and refined. Testers, clearly, have a significant role to play in that effort.
 And, in the end, negotiation does not give you precision. It gives you tentative conclusions, and temporary compromises. A good tester will learn to cope with these conditions, and as stated in lesson 33, will learn to *"use whatever references are required to find important problems fast."*
 ### Taking Responsibility
 All of the ideas raised in chapter 2 have led me to an inescapabable conclusion. If the role of testing in software is to be rescued from the dustbin of 19th century industrial anachronism, it is not just the business leaders and the engineers who's minds must be changed. It is our own. 
 Within each of these myths (and a few others unmentioned), runs a single, constant golden thread: Testers need to step up and take responsibility for their role on the team, and in the organization. And, absent the will to do so, it doesn't matter how many managers we try to convince of its value. 
 The beginning of that work, starts with taking responsibility for our capacity to think like *real testers*, and not simply rely upon the antique photograph stereotypes because its more comfortable, or more safe.
 Taking responsibility means learning to think critically, and scientifically. It means being willing to make judgements and decisions, and being robust enough to bear the burden of critical analysis of those choices, by supporting those judgments and decisions with facts, and evidence, and solid reasoning.
 Taking responsibility means also learning how to negotiate, and to compromise, and to have the empathy to take our negotiating partners seriously, and to treat them as peers. It means not relying on the comfort and security of subordination and deference to authority. 
 For a tester to be valuable to any software development team, then, means being a *thinking human being*, who tests. And not simply a "mechanical turk" substitute for a turing machine that has yet to be invented. 
 ### Up Next...
 I'll be moving on to chapter three in the coming weeks, but first, I'm going to take a short break from the book, because I want to talk about a few other things that have come up in the last few weeks.
 [1]: http://www.agilemanifesto.org
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 # The Unicorn Tester
 Learn to code. It's that simple. Learn the fundamentals of programming, the core principles of functional and object oriented application development, and practice writing simple applications. There's really no other thing to say about this.
 For a tester to claim that he ought not need to know how to program, is basically the same as a scientist to claim he ought not need to know how to set his own experiments up. 
 There is a subtle but significant transformation taking place in software development that has enormous implications both for the way product teams are organized, and for the future of the roles within those teams. 
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 # Role Models Of Testing Passion
 In the late 1980's, BASF [advertise on television](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NQuMr45xd4). They used a slogan that strongly resonates with me, as a software tester:
 > "We don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy, better."
 If it weren't for a briefly produced line of discount VHS tapes, and that commercial, I might never have even heard of BASF. And their commercial slogan from that era implicitly admits the problem. 
 As a software tester, I don't make a lot of the products you use. I just make a lot of them better. And you (more than likely) have never, ever heard of me. If you work in the tech sector, I'm sure you're probably aware of QA as a role that's talked about, or even a minor function of your own daily development routine, but I bet the smaller your shop is, the less likely you are to actually have a working relationship with a dedicated tester. 
 #### The Need For Champions
 Head on over to Google and punch in "famous software programmers." You'll get quite a list. Literally hundreds of nearly household names, spanning the alphabet from Andreesen, Berners-Lee, and Hanson, all the way to Wall, Wozniak, and Zuckerberg. Many of these people have their own professionally produced bio-flicks accompanying their names. 
 Now, do another search. This time, try "famous software testers." You're going to find basically 4 names: James Bach, James Whitaker, Cem Kaner, and Martin Fowler. And I'll bet you're probably only vaguely aware of Bach and Fowler, because they're the only ones who have cultivated a public persona for themselves. And because, actually, Fowler is a software engineer, not a tester (though his work has contributed a lot to testing paradigms in software development). You get my point: nobody in the tech press is waiting breathlessly for any Steve Jobs-like keynote announcements from James Bach, and I doubt Zach Galifinakis or Oliver Platt are ever going to be asked to portray him on screen.
 #### The Unanswered Question
 It's fairly easy to see why BASF would choose to be BASF instead of Walmart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or even Goldman Sachs. They are the largest chemical company in the world, and a well-heeled veteran of Forbes' list of the 100 largest public companies by market value. In terms of revenues, they're even bigger than much more familiar names in chemistry like Bayer, Dow, and DuPont. BASF is trading notoriety for *profit* -- whack-loads of it.
 But it's much harder to imagine why someone like James Bach (who is also a fairly skilled programmer, excellent speaker, and a very competent writer) would opt for a career battling against thankless anonymity in an industry that's positively crowded with mega-stars and a celebrity starved press just waiting for the next Uber-Geek. Perhaps its because the playing field for testing rockstars is still so open? I doubt it. There's certainly no Zuckerberg-style payoff waiting at the end of the testing rainbow. And for those of us who don't invest a great deal of effort into a social media presence, the payoff is even smaller. The best testers are the ones you never even realize were ever even there. It's the ultimate stealth profession.
 What's worse, the "no news is good news", get-it-to-market-now environment has testers constantly on the defensive, trying to prove their value to the managers who hired them in the first place, trying to earn credibility from the developers who are either afraid of them or resent them, or both. They are only ever answering for failures because their successes are mostly invisible. Except when they make a point of showing them. At which point, you risk being labeled a 'flag waver'. Which makes this one of the most thankless professions in IT as well. 
 So why do we do it? 
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 # The Why Of Software Testing
 In the late 1980's, BASF used to [advertise on television](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NQuMr45xd4). They used a slogan that strongly resonates with me, as a software tester:
 > "We don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy, better."
 If it weren't for a briefly produced line of discount VHS tapes, and that commercial, I might never have even heard of BASF. And their commercial slogan from that era implicitly admits the problem. 
 As a software tester, I don't make a lot of the products you use. I just make a lot of them better. And you (more than likely) have never, ever heard of me. If you work in the tech sector, I'm sure you're probably aware of QA as a role that's talked about, or even a minor function of your own daily development routine, but I bet the smaller your shop is, the less likely you are to actually have a working relationship with a dedicated tester. 
 Head on over to Google and punch in "famous software programmers." You'll get quite a list. Literally hundreds of nearly household names, spanning the alphabet from Andreesen and Berners-Lee to Wall, Wozniak, and Zuckerberg. Many of these people have their own professionally produced bio-flicks accompanying their names. 
 Now, do another search. This time, try "famous software testers." You're going to find basically 4 names: James Bach, Martin Fowler, Adam Goucher, and Michael Bolton. And I'll bet you're probably only vaguely aware of Bach and Fowler, because they're the only ones who have cultivated a public persona for themselves. And because, actually, Fowler is a designer, not a tester. You get my point: nobody in the tech press is waiting breathlessly for any Steve Jobs-like keynote announcements from James Bach, and I doubt Zach Galifinakis or Oliver Platt are ever going to be asked to portray him on screen.
 It's fairly easy to see why BASF would choose to be BASF instead of Walmart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or even Goldman Sachs. They are the largest chemical company in the world, and a well-heeled veteran of Forbes' list of the 100 largest public companies by market value. In terms of revenues, they're even bigger than much more familiar names like Bayer, Dow, and DuPont. BASF is trading notoriety for *profit* -- whack-loads of it.
 But it's much harder to imagine why someone like James Bach (who is also a fairly skilled programmer, excellent speaker, and a very competent writer) would opt for a career battling against thankless anonymity in an industry that's positively crowded with mega-stars and a celebrity starved press just waiting for the next Uber-Geek. Perhaps its because the playing field for testing rockstars is still so open? I doubt it. There's certainly no Zuckerberg-style payoff waiting at the end of the testing rainbow. And for those of us who don't invest a great deal of effort into a social media presence, the payoff is even smaller. The best testers are the ones you never even realize were ever even there. It's the ultimate stealth profession.
 What's worse, this "no news is good news" environment has testers constantly on the defensive, trying to prove their value to the managers who hired them in the first place, trying to earn credibility from the developers who are either afraid of them or resent them, or both. They are only ever answering for failures because their successes are mostly invisible. Except when they make a point of showing them. At which point, you risk being labeled a 'flag waver'. Which makes this one of the most thankless professions in IT as well. 
 So why do we do it? 
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 In last week's post, I covered the core thesis of Chapter 2, in *Lessons Learned In Software Testing*. But, in spite of how much there was to cover in that post, there was still a great deal more in the chapter that deserved attention. So, here we are. 
 This week, I want to cover lesson 21, in which the authors raised a very interesting point. Having a rational and empirical attitude toward your work is not enough, they say. To be an excellent tester, one must cultivate four different modes of thinking: Technical, Creative, Critical, and Practical. 
 ### The Yin-Yang Of Testing
 The authors did not elaborate much on the forms themselves, but offered enough detail that I believe they can be distilled into two simpler categories: analytic and synthetic (not to be confused with the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction in philosophical argumentation). 
 If we look closely, we can see that the Technical and Critical forms are fundamentally *analytical*. They describe Technical Thinking as:
 > The ability to model technology, and understand causes and effects... and predict the behavior of systems. 
 ...and Critical Thinking as:
 > The ability to evaluate ideas and make inferences... the ability to detect and eliminate errors from your thinkin.
 In other words, the ability to purposefully dissassemble something, whether it is an argument, or a watch. To understand it's component parts, how they all function, and how they interact with each other. And to see where the problems and flaws are. 
 This sort of skill is the bread and butter of the mechanic, the engineer, the philosopher, and the scientist. It is the fuel that powers the engine of curiosity and the acid that burns away the fog of ignorance. This form of thought is both destructive, and reparative. You have to kill the frog, to dissect it. But once you do, you know how every other frog works.
 This is the kind of thinking that compels a tester to become a hacker. As we saw in my previous post, it is analytical thinking that challenges the tester to ask his team "what if we're wrong"? It is analytical thinking that gives him the tools to answer that question. 
 Similarly, the Creative and Practical forms of thinking are clearly *synthetic* forms, at their core. They offer this description of Creative Thinking:
 > The ability to generate ideas, and see possibilities.
 ...and Practical Thinking is described as:
 > The ability to put ideas into practice.
 These descriptions are short, but packed with meaning. The kind of thinker they are describing here, is the *inventor*, the *architect*, the *artist*. The kind of thinker who is capable of taking the constraints of time, or physics, or budgets, or resources, and repurposing them into a sculptors chisel. 
 ### Becoming A Better Artist
 As a life-long lover of science and reason, and having made my career primarily in production operations, the analytical mindest is second-nature to me now. I suspect this is true for many in technical roles. 
 But over the years, I have also discovered that the analytical mindset is like myself as a small boy with a transistor radio and a screwdriver: After two hours of tinkering, my bedspread is covered in small parts, I can tell you where I got each part, how I found it, and with a reference book, I might even be able to describe its function for you. But if you gave me all the parts already disassembled, didn't tell me what it was, but gave me a reference book describing each part's function, I would be hard pressed to reassemble it, or even to give you a reason why you'd want to. 
 This is because (for reasons not relevant here) I lacked any practice at *synthesis*. And this is why I consider lesson 21 to be so important. Because it points out that, in order to be successful, testers must be capable of what the coder does, when he writes code. Namely, giving form to the nearly formless expression of a problem, by outlining it with a solution. The tester must be as capable of building things as he is of breaking them.
 In a nutshell, synthetic thinkers are problem solvers. And I find several activities helpful at giving me good opportunities for building up my own synthesis muscles: building tools like automation frameworks, or writing utilities for use with testing activities, or pair programming when an opportunity arises. And, there is one other activity that is refreshingly eye-opening, albeit a little contraversial. If you have the stomach for it, a **coding challenge** of the variety you get in some job interviews, is a perfect tool for telling you how much you don't yet know, and for testing your synthetic mind (I'll discuss this more in a different post unrelated to this review). 
 ### Outside The Box 
 But to really maximize our creative and practical modes of thinking, I think we need to challenge ourselves outside of the context of software. As the authors point out:
 > ...when the test process fails in the most damaging ways, the root cause is most likely tunnel vision. In other words, its not that we ran 10,000 tests and should have run 10,001. It's that we failed to imagine an entire category of test; testing we wouldn't have performed even if we had twice the time and resources.
 I think this tunnel vision is due in part to our over-dependence on analytical thinking in these situations. Employing lateral and creative forms of thinking will make those other "entire categories" accessible again. 
 The best opportunities for exercising these weaker mental muscles, in my view, are in creative hobbies. In addition to avid readers, testers should be inventors, artists, musicians, explorers, writers, and developers in their spare time. They should experience the pain and struggle of creation, the same as the creator experiences it. If for no other reason, then to better understand their own role in the creative process. 
 ### Conclusion
 Next week, I'll be covering some key industry myths about testers that were raised both by implication and explication in chapter two. 
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 The psychological and social significance of the open source movement, or my love/hate relationship with computer “science”, or the mathematics of music, or the personal flaws of Guido van Rossum, or a movie review of something like “The Imitation Game” (when it finally comes out), or a flaming response to the wave of Luddite anti-internet videos I see popping up on YouTube lately
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 # Advocacy vs Observation
 ### Scientist, Storyteller, or Spokesman?
 Chapter four of James Bach's _Lessons Learned In Software Testing_ ("*Bug Advocacy*") was quite a difficult read for me. Not because it's any more obtuse or intellectually dense than the first three chapters. But because it's so conflicted.
 The question I ask in my subtitle is an interesting one, to me. In some ways, a tester is actually all three. Ultimately, there's no single right answer to this question. Some great storytellers are also respectable scientists. And some excellent scientists are amazing storytellers. But the more specific question here is how we should think of ourselves when we are creating and stewarding our bug reports within a team? Bach, Kaner, and Pettichord offer us a very mixed answer to that question.
 With the lessons provided in this chapter, the authors paint two significantly different - and deeply contradictory - portraits of the tester. On the one hand, he is a disciplined, objective, and thorough *reporter*, who steels himself against the urge to exaggerate, providing only the cold hard facts necessary in order for the appropriate authorities to make rational decisions about how to respond to his reports:
 > You are an information service... Your responsibility is to report bugs accurately, and in a way that allows the reader to understand the full impact of the problem... If you make the bugs you report seem more serious than they really are, you'll lose influence... Your job is to report problems, not identify root causes... keep your tone of voice neutral... Don't insist that every bug be fixed; pick your battles...
 On the other hand, he is an *advocate*, emotionally invested in (and politically motivated by) the outcome of all his bugs. He is willing to exploit office power relationships in order to end-run his colleagues in an effort to achieve a preferred objective with regard to those reported bugs:
 > Any bug report that you write is an advocacy document that calls for the repair of the bug... your bug report is a sales tool; it's designed to convince people... you can take a relatively minor-looking bug and discover more severe consequences by doing follow-up testing... To get a bug fixed, you have to convince the Change Control Board to approve the fix... if you think it might be difficult to convince the programmers to fix a bug, but you want it fixed, consider who else in the company will benefit if this bug is fixed...
 Which portrait is accurate? Which is preferable? We don't really get a good sense of this, from the lessons provided in this chapter. Actually, I'm not sure a universal principle can be extracted from these lessons. The reality is that sometimes you have to be a reporter and sometimes you have to be an advocate, and knowing which to be at any given time requires the wisdom of experience. I just wish Cem Kaner and James Bach had offered a bit more of their own, in this regard.
 #### Stick To The Truth
 In my own experience, I have found that taking the objective approach is far more productive than trying to be an advocate. In keeping with the view I've held in my reviews of previous chapters, I think testers need to see themselves more like research scientists, than as science journalists.
 Our job is to design and execute experiments that provide us with demonstrable knowledge about the test subject, and then to report that knowledge as thoroughly and accurately as possible. When we vary from this, inevitably, we drift into the realm of confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and tunnel vision. No longer are we simply reporting the observed effects of caffeine on the biochemistry of the body, we are *demanding that somebody do something right now* about the dangers of coffee drinking.
 The minute you lose your objectivity as a tester, you become someone with an agenda. Someone who needs to be "handled", or resisted, avoided, or at best, suspected of partiality. Bach, et. al. were careful to point this out in lessons 65 and 66, and 86, warning us not to use bug statistics as performance measurement tools, and to avoid emotionally charge language in reports. But they didn't seem to notice the same problem when suggesting in lesson 64, that we use stakeholder authority to pressure programmers into doing work they would not otherwise do. This approach, in my view, is just as toxic as the toxicity mentioned in lessons 72, 98, and 99, of letting fallow or ugly bugs disappear into the system.
 Staying dispassionate gives you an authority you would not otherwise have. Even our authors recognized this when, in lesson 84, they stated:
 > Your credibility is fundamental to your influence. If you make the bugs you report seem more serious than they really are, you'll lose influence.
 #### The Tester's New Clothes
 In my view, the most valuable lessons of Chapter 4 are lessons that the authors could not have penned explicitly themselves at the time this book was written. But, to their credit, did indeed hint at it throughout the chapter. They are lessons that the authors are teaching implicitly (perhaps by accident), to those of us who enjoy the vantage point of a retrospective future.
 Software development as an organizational activity, and testing as a discipline within that activity, has undergone substantial upheaval since the authors penned this book in January of 2002. The processes and tools used to bring new technologies and applications to market now is almost unrecognizable, compared to the processes and tools used in the very early days of the internet -- most of which had been borrowed from the legacy years if the 80's and 90's.
 In 2002, "Agile Developers" were some fringe splinter sect of renegade XP programmers, who themselves were rare and defiant unicorns in a world full of heirarchy, bureaucratic structure, and physical paperwork.
 It is within this context that we get the first implicit lesson, in the form of lessons 91, 92, and 95 (destined to become an industry standard 10 years later):
 > Meet the programmers who will read your reports... As soon as they find a bug, some testers walk over to the programmer who covers that area and describe it or show it off... the tester can learn from the programmer, and the programmer has access to the system... let him talk with you when he's ready... if a bug fix fails repeatedly... take it directly to the programmer.
 In the modern world of small, nimble, and highly focused development teams (ones dominated at least nominally by informal verbal commitments to Agile principles), testers sit not only on the same project team as, but usually in the same space with, developers, product managers, and designers. Short feedback loops between commits and test reports are not only encouraged, they are essential to the success of the project.
 Even where "Agile" is not a formal commitment, this arrangement seems to be true. I have worked in organizations in the US, UK, and Europe where the first principle of "people and interactions over processes and tools" has been accepted implicitly (almost accidentally) as the most effective approach to software development.
 #### Our Challenge
 The second implicit lesson, is one we see by comparing the world described in the book, to the one we exist in now. Organizational structures like "Change Control Boards" appear comically whimsical, in a world where "move fast, and break things" is the motto of the second largest web service in the world.
 Yet, Bach, Kaner, and Pettichord seem to sense that this transformation was imminent, and vaguely recognize the implications of that transformation, in lessons like 69:
 > Test groups can make themselves more capable of evaluating design errors by hiring people into the group who have diverse backgrounds. A tester with domain expertise... can focus tests and explanations... If one tester knows database design, another knows network security, another knows user interfaces, and so forth, the group as a whole is positioned to make knowledgeable and useful evaluations...
 In modern software development, it is no longer enough for testers to simply be good critical thinkers, and good skeptics. They must also be technically competent. Technologies and applications have grown exponentially in complexity and sophistication since the days of the 16-bit desktop computer. The pace of change has quickened, and market demands have kept pace with it.
 In this new world, testers must be mindful of the agile admonition to value "responding to change over following a plan", and to value "working software over comprehensive documentation". What this means, in practice, is that there can no longer be any distinction between a "tester" and a "technical tester". Every tester must be a "domain expert" in his own right. He must be just as capable of building a server from scratch as any resonably competent devop. He must be just as capable of debugging a faulty java class as any reasonably competent programmer, and he must be capable of working with the tools those skills require. Things like the command shell, version control systems, and developer tools like debuggers and editors, should be common knowledge to the tester.
 Without this basic grounding of technical skills, the tester's critical thinking skills are really no better to him than a high performance auto engine without a transmission. All sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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 # Advocacy vs Observation
 ### Scientist, Storyteller, or Spokesman?
 Chapter four of James Bach's _Lessons Learned In Software Testing_ ("*Bug Advocacy*") was quite a difficult read for me. Not because it's any more obtuse or intellectually dense than the first three chapters. But because it's so conflicted. 
 The question I ask in my subtitle is an interesting one, to me. In some ways, a tester is actually all three. I've [talked about good examples of this, before][1]. And, ultimately, there's no single right answer to this question. Some great storytellers are also respectable scientists. And some excellent scientists are amazing storytellers. 
 But the more specific question here is how we should think of ourselves when we are creating and stewarding our bug reports? Bach, Kaner, and Pettichord offer us a very mixed answer to that question.
 With the lessons provided in this chapter, the authors paint two significantly different - and deeply contradictory - portraits of the tester. On the one hand, he is a disciplined, objective, and thorough *reporter*, who steels himself against the urge to exaggerate, providing only the cold hard facts necessary in order for the appropriate authorities to make rational decisions about how to respond to his reports:
 > You are an information service... Your responsibility is to report bugs accurately, and in a way that allows the reader to understand the full impact of the problem... If you make the bugs you report seem more serious than they really are, you'll lose influence... Your job is to report problems, not identify root causes... keep your tone of voice neutral... Don't insist that every bug be fixed; pick your battles...
 On the other hand, he is an *advocate*, emotionally invested in (and politically motivated by) the outcome of all his bugs. He is willing to exploit office power relationships in order to end-run his colleagues in an effort to achieve a preferred objective with regard to those reported bugs: 
 > Any bug report that you write is an advocacy document that calls for the repair of the bug... your bug report is a sales tool; it's designed to convince people... you can take a relatively minor-looking bug and discover more severe consequences by doing follow-up testing... To get a bug fixed, you have to convince the Change Control Board to approve the fix... if you think it might be difficult to convince the programmers to fix a bug, but you want it fixed, consider who else in the company will benefit if this bug is fixed... 
 Which portrait is accurate? Which is preferable? We don't really get a good sense of this, from the lessons provided in this chapter. Actually, I'm not sure a universal principle can be extracted from these lessons. The reality is that sometimes you have to be a reporter and sometimes you have to be an advocate, and knowing which to be at any given time requires the wisdom of experience. I just wish Cem Kaner and James Bach had offered a bit more of their own, in this regard.
 #### Stick To The Truth
 In my own experience, I have found that taking the objective approach is far more productive than trying to be an advocate. In keeping with the view I've held in my reviews of previous chapters, I think testers need to see themselves more like research scientists, than as science journalists. 
 Our job is to design and execute experiments that provide us with demonstrable knowledge about the test subject, and then to report that knowledge as thoroughly and accurately as possible. When we vary from this, inevitably, we drift into the realm of confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and tunnel vision. No longer are we simply reporting the observed effects of caffeine on the biochemistry of the body, we are *demanding that somebody do something right now* about the dangers of coffee drinking. 
 The minute you lose your objectivity as a tester, you become someone with an agenda. Someone who needs to be "handled", or resisted, avoided, or at best, suspected of partiality. Bach, et. al. were careful to point this out in lessons 65 and 66, and 86, warning us not to use bug statistics as performance measurement tools, and to avoid emotionally charge language in reports. But they didn't seem to notice the same problem when suggesting in lesson 64, that we use stakeholder authority to pressure programmers into doing work they would not otherwise do. This approach, in my view, is just as toxic as the toxicity mentioned in lessons 72, 98, and 99, of letting fallow or ugly bugs disappear into the system.
 Staying dispassionate gives you an authority you would not otherwise have. Even our authors recognized this when, in lesson 84, they stated:
 > Your credibility is fundamental to your influence. If you make the bugs you report seem more serious than they really are, you'll lose influence. 
 #### The Tester's New Clothes
 In my view, the most valuable lessons of Chapter 4 are lessons that the authors could not have penned explicitly themselves at the time this book was written. But, to their credit, did indeed hint at it throughout the chapter. They are lessons that the authors are teaching implicitly (perhaps by accident), to those of us who enjoy the vantage point of a retrospective future.
 Software development as an organizational activity, and testing as a discipline within that activity, has undergone substantial upheaval since the authors penned this book in January of 2002. The processes and tools used to bring new technologies and applications to market now is almost unrecognizable, compared to the processes and tools used in the very early days of the internet -- most of which had been borrowed from the legacy years if the 80's and 90's. 
 In 2002, "Agile Developers" were some fringe splinter sect of renegade XP programmers, who themselves were rare and defiant unicorns in a world full of heirarchy, bureaucratic structure, and physical paperwork. 
 It is within this context that we get the first implicit lesson, in the form of lessons 91, 92, and 95 (destined to become an industry standard 10 years later):
 > Meet the programmers who will read your reports... As soon as they find a bug, some testers walk over to the programmer who covers that area and describe it or show it off... the tester can learn from the programmer, and the programmer has access to the system... let him talk with you when he's ready... if a bug fix fails repeatedly... take it directly to the programmer.
 In the modern world of small, nimble, and highly focused development teams (ones dominated at least nominally by informal verbal commitments to Agile principles), testers sit not only on the same project team as, but usually in the same space with, developers, product managers, and designers. Short feedback loops between commits and test reports are not only encouraged, they are essential to the success of the project. 
 Even where "Agile" is not a formal commitment, this arrangement seems to be true. I have worked in organizations in the US, UK, and Europe where the first principle of "people and interactions over processes and tools" has been accepted implicitly (almost accidentally) as the most effective approach to software development. 
 #### Our Challenge
 The second implicit lesson, is one we see by comparing the world described in the book, to the one we exist in now. Organizational structures like "Change Control Boards" appear comically whimsical, in a world where "move fast, and break things" is the motto of the second largest web service in the world. 
 Yet, Bach, Kaner, and Pettichord seem to sense that this transformation was imminent, and vaguely recognize the implications of that transformation, in lessons like 69:
 > Test groups can make themselves more capable of evaluating design errors by hiring people into the group who have diverse backgrounds. A tester with domain expertise... can focus tests and explanations... If one tester knows database design, another knows network security, another knows user interfaces, and so forth, the group as a whole is positioned to make knowledgeable and useful evaluations...
 In modern software development, it is no longer enough for testers to simply be good critical thinkers, and good skeptics. They must also be technically competent. Technologies and applications have grown exponentially in complexity and sophistication since the days of the 16/32 bit desktop computer. The pace of change has quickened, and market demands have execrated right along with it. 
 In this new world, testers must be mindful of the agile admonition to value "responding to change over following a plan", and "working software over comprehensive documentation". What this means, in practice, is that there can no longer be any distinction between a "tester" and a "technical tester". Every tester must be a "domain expert" in his own right. He must be just as capable of building a server from scratch as any resonably competent techop. He must be just as capable of debugging a faulty java class as any reasonably competent programmer, and he must be capable of working with the tools those skills require. Things like the command shell, version control systems, and developer tools like debuggers and editors, should be common knowledge to the tester. 
 Without this basic grounding of technical skills, the tester's critical thinking skills are really no better to him than a high performance auto engine without a transmission. All sound and fury, signifying nothing.
 I'll have much, much more to say about this in the coming months, but for now, it will suffice to say that if you are a tester and you are not training yourself as a *technician* (as well as a critical thinker), you're hobbling your career. 
 [1]:	http://gmgauthier.com/serial-book-review-lessons-learned-in-software-testing-chapter-2-part-a/
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 Aristotle in Software:
 The four causes:
 * Material Cause: From where did it come? (What substance gives rise to it)
 * Formal Cause: What arrangement of component parts caused it? What shape does the material take?
 * Efficient Cause: How do I make it? (process of bringing material and form together)
 * Final (Teleological) Cause: What purpose does it serve? (What is it _for_?)
 * Stories aren’t the requirements; they’re discussions about solving problems for our organization, our customers, and our users that lead to agreements on what to build.
 * Your job isn’t to build more software faster: it’s to maximize the outcome and impact you get from what you choose to build.
 ### The Material Cause
 The material cause of software is the human mind. This is a strange thing to call "material", but it is true that our 'minds' are ultimately a collection of functionally interrelated processes taking place in the brain. The brain exists as an outcome of natural selection filtering for survivable traits in a given natural environment. Traits that survive the selection process aren't necessarily traits that make us better thinkers. Confirmation bias and intentional stance are good examples of this. However, survival need not eliminate good reasoning habits either. It's often less genetically "expensive" to leave a "neutral" trait intact, than to remove it. Pattern recognition, creativity (causal synthesis) and the capacity for abstract conceptualization are good examples of this. Human beings are exceptionally good problem solvers, as living species go. 
--- a/new-testing-blog/code-comments-documentation.md
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 #### Introduction
 Test automation consists of two types of software project: The tool or utility application, and the test suite. Each has its own context and purpose. Worse yet, each programming language has built up around it, a set of standards and practices that are unique to that language. Because we work with two different development languages, this requires us to maintain not two, but four different documentation / and code commentary standards. For the sake of brevity, the list of conventions that are common to both will be aggregated into a single set of general conventions for both languages.
 #### Definitions
 -   __Documentation:__ written material that provides official information or evidence or that serves as a record of a subject.
 -   __Comments:__ human readable annotations in source code, intended to improve the readability of or clarify the code itself.
 -   __Documentation comments:__ Annotations in source code that are meant to be parsed by a document generator, intended to function as human readable documentation.
 #### General Conventions
 __Comments__
    DO: Keep them short. 80 Characters or less is ideal, though slightly longer may be tolerable. If you're writing a short story, maybe you need to rethink your code.
    DO: Make them informative. If your comment cannot answer a "why" question, it's probably not needed, or you need to rethink your code.
    DO: Keep them current and relevant. If this is a TODO comment, include a link to the JIRA ticket for it. If the work is done, remove it.
    DON'T: Restate your method name in english. //Get Current Record ID is not a comment. It's a method name.
    DON'T: Describe the functionality. If I can't figure out what the code is doing, either the method needs rewriting, or I need to educate myself.
    DON'T: Disable code. If there is code that is not needed, unhelpful, or broken, REMOVE the code. If you need to recover it, that's what git is for.
 __Documentation__
    DO: Be as concise as possible: While clarity and thoroughness are necessary, this doesn't necessitate writing a book.
    DO: Provide a context, and a goal: under what conditions will I be using this method, and what will I be trying to achieve?
    DO: Describe all functionality: Unlike comments, documentation is DESIGNED for the purpose of description.
    DO: Include examples: where they add to clarity and shorten descriptions, examples can be excellent forms of documentation.
    DON'T: Tell a story. Future readers aren't going to care what happened on a specific day in the life of a library module. That's what release notes and commit histories are for.
    DON'T: Describe intentions or desires: Future readers aren't going to care what you wish the code did or might do in the future. Only what it actually does.
    DON'T: Describe removed or deprecated features: Only describe the officially supported and maintained functionality.
--- a/new-testing-blog/cucumber-essentials.md
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 ```
 DRAFT
 ```
 #### Introduction
 In addition to acting as a source of documentation close to MOO's application code, our automation is itself a software product. Although we are testers, when writing test automation we should nevertheless also see ourselves as software developers of a product that tests products. As software professionals (both testers and developers), it behooves us to keep in mind the essential principles and practices of quality software development.
 What I will cover here are a mixture of guidelines for good BDD practice, and principles commonly taught in programming classes, and employed in the practice of unit testing. Interestingly, the fundamentals of good unit testing are also almost entirely applicable to creating high value,  feature scenarios. If we can reach a common understanding of these principles, our automation products will perform more consistently, and provide more valuable results.
 __Know what you’re testing__ - I know it seems cliché to say so, but knowing what you want to accomplish (and why) with any given test is an essential starting point for writing effective tests. There are a number of ways to apply this principle when writing Gherkin specs:
 _Clearly define your feature:_ - We need to discuss this more with each of the dev teams (especially the product owners) to discover what our specific features are, but in general, a “feature” should be understood as some finite set of functionality that is meant to enable a user to accomplish a finite set of goals related to that functionality. Given this rough definition, what should be clear is that an entire product is not a feature, it is a collection of features.
 The goal that the user wants to accomplished is best expressed as a user story. The story should help you discover who your user is, what he wants, and how he thinks he can get it from the software. From this, you should be able to model some behaviours.
 _Collaborate on scenarios first_, then steps (i.e. You are writing tests secondarily, but a [product design spec](https://cucumber.io/blog/2015/03/24/single-source-of-truth) first):
 - Limit yourself to scenario titles in planning meetings: Product managers should be collaborating with you directly, on what feature behaviours are the most important. Treat these collaborations as brainstorming sessions, rather than code reviews. Once you have a clear set of situations, then you can go back and flesh out the steps in each situation.
 - Limit your scenarios to the minimum necessary to demonstrate that we’re delivering on our promises: The scenarios in a feature file are promises to users. We are promising that the user will be able to accomplish some specific goal, and that the software will behave in a certain way when she uses it to accomplish that goal. We should not be writing scenarios for every conceivable way in which the product might behave under any possible condition. That is what exploratory testing is for. I will have more to say on this later.
 - In your scenario title, remember *who* is acting. To clearly understand the conditions, actions, and outcomes of a given test, it is helpful to keep in mind who the “I” in your test is. What does he or she want? Why do they want it? What do they do to get it? Focusing on context in the scenario title will narrow your focus and make writing your steps much easier, by allowing you to put yourself in the user’s shoes.
 _Understand that your scenarios are simple_ “[finite state machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine)”: ([original source](https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/the-truth-about-bdd)) - As testers (or script coders), we feel a powerful impulse to write scenarios as step-by-step instructions, as if we’re providing imperative commands to the computer, or documenting reproduction steps for a bug. But using Gherkin in this way, is to misunderstand its purpose both as a design language, and as a testing tool.
 - Scenarios can be seen as [state-transition tables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_transition_table) that only have one row in each table: The “Given, When, Then” syntax is really meant to express the three arguments in a state transition: Condition, Event, Result (or “state 1”, “transition event”, “state 2”). Under this model, scenarios are not imperative in any way. They are descriptive: “Given initial condition A, When transition event X occurs, Then resulting condition B is produced”. This approach will force you to keep scenarios terse, and well defined, and will improve readability and maintainability over the long run.
 - Scenarios can also be understood as “unit tests”: Seeing features as state machines affords us another benefit. You can think of each scenario (or state transition) as though it is testing a “unit of product behaviour”, and all of the essential rules of unit testing will apply: independence - scenarios should not be reliant upon the execution of any other scenarios; isolation - scenarios should be self-sufficient and avoid polluting each other; determinism - scenarios, like lawyers, should already know the answers to the questions they’re asking; single-focus - scenarios should zero in on one specific behaviour of the product.
 __Self-sufficiency and discreteness:__
 Scenarios should be discrete, and independent. Meaning, each scenario should be able to run all by itself, without relying upon any other scenario. It should test and report on a finite, single-focused circumstance and a single path through the application, to the user's goal. The best way to demonstrate this, is to show it.
 Let's imagine a text editor application. We're defining a scenario for users who want to save a newly created file they've just edited.
 *Non-Discrete Scenarios:*
 ```yaml
 Scenario: User creates a new file
    Given I am at the editor window
    When I click on "new"
    Then A new file appears in the edit window
 Scenario: User edits the new file
    Given The new file is open in the edit window
    When I type some text
    Then the text appears in the file edit space
 Scenario: User saves edited file
    Given The file has been edited
    When I click the "save" button
    Then the edited file is saved
 ```
 These scenarios lack discreteness and self-sufficiency in a number of ways:
 - The scenarios are sequentially dependent upon each other - they are obviously meant to be run in sequential order, making the lower scenarios vulnerable to failures accumulated in the early scenarios.
 - The scenarios share the same fixture data - the edited text file is the same throughout the sequence.
 - The scenarios will mask multiple failures - if a problem occurs with an early scenario, any additional bugs in later scenarios will be invisible, until the first is fixed.
 *Discrete Scenarios:*
 ```yaml
 Background:
    Given two existing files for editing
    And
 Scenario: User
    Given I am at the editor window
    When I request a new file
    Then a new file appears in the edit window
 ```
 __Parsimoniousness:__
 - **Simplify your steps:** A sort of "Ockham's Razor" of test writing should be applied to scenario steps - what is the simplest and least verbose way you can state the situation, while still accomplishing your goal? The best approach for achieving this is with the state-machine analogy. Scenarios written as state transitions help to distill the test down to its essential components, and will train you to avoid thinking about them as "steps to be executed". It will help avoid the brittleness of overspecification, and take the focus off implementation details and place it on test results.
 - **Simplify your step definitions:** The same razor can be applied to your step definitions as well. What is the minimum necessary to create a reliable test? Can we execute this step "under the covers"? The principle of staying close to the code applies here. As Matt Wynne put it, [just because you're writing Cucumber, doesn't mean you must open a browser](https://cucumber.io/blog/2014/09/10/when-cucumbers-go-bad). But, always be mindful of what you're testing. If the goal is to exercise some piece of the UI as part of the user's journey, then the browser becomes a necessary component of the test.
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 # Testing And The Division Of Labor
 One of The 18th century Enlightenment's most influential thinkers was a fellow by the name of Adam Smith. His seminal effort, "[The Wealth Of Nations](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html)", began the work of describing and defining free market economics as we understand it today. At the center of his thesis, is a concept known as "the division of labor", in which Smith identifies both a quantitative and qualitative distinction between various productive activities. 
 By "qualitative", I mean he identified a *fundamental* distinction in the *kind* of work being done. For example, the difference between the farmer who cultivates wheat, and the miller who grinds and prepares the raw materials for baking (yet another division):
 > "*It is impossible to separate so entirely, the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer, as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith. The spinner is almost always a distinct person from the weaver;*" (On The Wealth of Nations, I.1.4)
 By "quantitative", I mean he identified an impulse to divide the same *kind* of work in to ever smaller parts. His famous example of the pin-maker's factory highlights this distinction: 
 > "*One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations;*" (On The Wealth of Nations I.1.3)
 These two kinds of division are essential to the efficient production of various goods, according to Smith, and this efficiency results in new value for the producer, as well as the society as a whole. The division of labor is, therefore, an intuitive impulse arising out of our own self-interest. 
 While Smiths conclusions are of course debatable, his observations offer a key insight into the situation we face as software testers, and the push to automate the task of testing is an important clue to this insight. 
 * The broad commercial and consumer market for software is extremely young. Software has only been available as a purchasable good since the late 1970's. 
 * 
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 ```
 Date: 21 Oct 2015
 Topic: RST Retrospective
 Modified:
 ```
 # Rapid Software Testing Class
 ## Newcastle, UK, October 2015
 ### James Bach, Instructor
 Babe Ruth is famously attributed as saying, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it!". This is James Bach in a nutshell. His brand of enthusiastic confidence is an enormous breath of fresh air in the otherwise timid and demure testing community. Bach serves as both an expert resource and an excellent role model for those of us yearning for professional success in the industry.
 I was fortunate enough to experience this first-hand in Newcastle, UK this week, at his Rapid Software Testing class. Bach's boisterous, jovial personality, coupled with his relentless, intense commitment to socratic questioning and critical thinking, makes viewing one of his short lectures on Youtube a real challenge. Now, imagine getting on that roller coaster for three full eight hour days. 
 There is a great deal to discuss about the principles and techniques of RST outlined explicitly in this course, but 
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 # Story Crafting Checklist
 Testing well requires at least some familiarity with the entire product development life-cycle. Of particular importance, is the very beginning. The point at which we want to start work on a new piece of functionality, or a feature we want to offer our customers. This is the time when we begin the process of designing not just the product feature, but what story we want to tell ourselves about the work. It is the time when we imagine what the journey will be like, and when we set expectations for that journey.
 This is why it's essential that we become good storytellers, both as engineers and as testers. As with any genre of storytelling, certain habits will improve the kind of story you are telling. Many authors who have written on the subject of writing itself, have offered various guidelines and tips to that effect. As it turns out, some storytellers in the genre of product user storytelling, have also done this for us. The following is an excerpt from "_User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product_" [^1] . I recommend reading the entire book, but this excerpt deserves highlighted attention. In particular, note the use of the five questions: Who, What, Why, When, How. These are essential questions in any storytelling effort, and any journalist will tell you they are the central pillars of any crisp, timely narrative, that will help to distill the essential moral of the story we are telling. This will help us focus our stories, and make the journey more enjoyable. Testers, pay close attention: each of these questions will have implications for testing. Namely, the what and the why of the testing story will be heavily influenced by the way these questions are answered.
 > ### Really talk about who
 > Please don’t just talk about “the user.” Be specific. Talk about which user you mean. For Gary, he could talk about the band manager or the music fan. Talk about different types of users. For many pieces of software, especially consumer software, there are very diverse types of users using the same functionality. Talk about the functionality from different users’ perspectives. Talk about the customers. For consumer products, the customer (or chooser) may be the same person as the user. But for enterprise products, we’ll need to talk about the people who make buying decisions, their organization as a whole, and how they benefit. Talk about other stakeholders. Talk about the people sponsoring the software’s purchase. Talk about others who might collaborate with users. There’s rarely just one user who matters.
 >
 > ### Really talk about what
 > I like my stories to start with user tasks — the things people want to do with my software. But what about services like the kind way beneath the user interface that authorizes your credit card for a purchase, or authenticates you on an insurance website? Your users didn’t make a deliberate choice to get their credit cards pass:\[ authorized\] or have their credentials verified. It’s OK to talk about the services and the different systems that call them. It’s OK to talk about specific UI components and how the screen behaves. Just don’t lose sight of who cares, and why.
 >
 > ### Really talk about why
 > Talk about why the specific user cares. And dig deeply into the “whys,” because there are often a few, and they’re layered. You can keep “poking it with the why stick” for a long time to really get at the underlying reasons why. Talk about why other users care. Talk about why the user’s company cares. Talk about why business stakeholders care. There are lots of great things hidden inside why.
 >
 > ### Talk about what’s going on outside the software
 > Talk about where people using your product are when they use it. Talk about when they’d use the product, and how often. Talk about who else is there when they do. All those things give clues about what a good solution might be.
 >
 > ### Talk about what goes wrong
 > What happens when things go wrong? What happens when the system is down? How else could users accomplish this? How do they meet their needs today?
 >
 > ### Talk about questions and assumptions
 > If you talk about all those things, you’ve likely stumbled across something you don’t know. Identify your questions and discuss how important they are to get answered before you build software. Decide who’ll do the legwork to get those questions answered, and bring them back to your next conversation. You’ll find it takes lots of conversations to think through some stories. Take time to question your assumptions. Do you really understand your users? Is this really what they want? Do they really have these problems? Will they really use this solution? Question your technical assumptions. What underlying systems do we rely on? Do they really work the way we think? Are there technical risks we need to consider? All these questions and assumptions may require deliberate work to resolve or learn. Make a plan to do just that.
 >
 > ### Talk about better solutions
 > The really big win comes when those in a story conversation discard some original assumptions about what the solution should be, go back to the problem they’re trying to solve, and then together arrive at a solution that’s more effective and more economical to build.
 >
 > ### Talk about how
 > When sitting in a story conversation, I often hear someone anxiously say, “We should be talking about the what, not the how!” By that they mean we should be talking about what users need to do, not how the code should be written. And I feel the same anxiousness when we talk about the “what” without talking about the “why.” But the truth is, we’re trying to optimize for all three in a good story conversation. What goes wrong is when either party assumes that a particular solution or the way it’s implemented is a “requirement.” Without explicitly talking about how (and if you’re a developer, I know you’re thinking about it), it’s difficult to think about the cost of the solution. Because, if a solution is too expensive, then it may not be a good option. Be respectful of the expertise of others in the conversation. Don’t tell a highly trained technical person how to do her work. Don’t tell someone intimately familiar with users and their work that he doesn’t understand. Ask questions, and genuinely try to learn from each other.
 >
 > ### Talk about how long
 > Ultimately, we need to make some decisions to go forward with building something or not. And it’s tough to make this sort of buying decision without a price tag. For software, that usually means how long it’ll take to write the code. In early conversations, that might be expressed as “a really long time” or “a few days.” Even better is comparing it to something already built — “about the same as that feature for commenting we built last month.” As we get closer to building something, and we’ve had more conversations and made more decisions, we’ll be able to be a bit more precise. But we always know we’re talking about estimates here, not commitments.
 [^1]: Patton, Jeff; Economy, Peter. User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product (Kindle Location 1946). O'Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.
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 This document is an initial attempt to describe the responsibilities and commitments that the Test Automation team will be making, to the Architecture principles being drafted by Cláudio Ferrete and his team. With regard to automated testing, our team's first core principle should be [Designing For Testability](http://www.scaledagileframework.com/design-for-testability-a-vital-aspect-of-the-system-architect-role-in-safe/), in a [contract-driven](http://se.inf.ethz.ch/old/people/ciupa/papers/esecfse07.pdf) approach to development.
 "__Testability__", in the context of our _tests_, essentially means that what we say about our applications should be testable hypotheses. In order for that to be possible, our “contracts” (here at MOO, they are essentially acceptance criteria), need to adhere to the following criteria:
 - Consistent - criteria should not contradict each other, for example.
 - Complete - if the feature under development includes things like special error messages, then it should be found in requirements
 - Unambiguous - “fail gracefully” is pretty ambiguous.
 - Quantitative - a requirement like “fast response time" can not be verified
 - Verifiable in practice - it should be feasible not only in theory but also in practice with limited resources
 "__Testability__", in the context of our applications, means that the product about which we are making testable hypotheses, should be engineered to facilitate the testing of those hypotheses. To that end, we should begin to judge the products we generate each sprint, for their "testability" according to the following criteria:
 - Controllability: The degree to which it is possible to control the state of the application, as required for testing.
 - Observability: The degree to which it is possible to observe (intermediate and final) test results.
 - Isolatability: The degree to which the application can be tested in isolation.
 - Discreteness: The degree to which the tested application has a single, well defined responsibility.
 - Understandability: The degree to which the tested application is documented or self-explaining.
 - Automatability: The degree to which it is possible to automate testing of the application under test.
 - Heterogeneity: The degree to which the use of diverse technologies, test methods, and tools in parallel are required for testing.
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 # Desperation At Scale: Nobody Is Coming To Save You
 This week, I attended [Test Automation And Continuous Delivery At Scale](http://www.ministryoftesting.com/training-events/test-automation-and-continuous-integration-at-scale/), a one-day class hosted by [The Ministry Of Testing](http://www.ministryoftesting.com/), and headed by [Noah Sussman](http://infiniteundo.com/) and [Dr. Jess Ingrassellino](http://www.teachcode.org/blog). 
 The summary on the Ministry of Testing site was enticing enough, and the name Noah Sussman certainly caught my attention, but the *"At Scale"* in the title was what had really convinced me I needed to attend this class. 
 Like a moth to the flame, I ran into this class hoping, at last, I would find others who've had to grapple with the hairy and barely tangible problems of testing a patchwork quilt of an application, that's been divided up and dispersed amongst disparate internal teams like so much beef, in a lion's den.
 I yearned for a well structured curriculum chock full of dense and important principles and critical technical implementation details that would load up my intellectual tool belt with everything I needed to solve all the test automation challenges facing me any my automation team.
 Of course, that's not really even close to what I got. Which is not to suggest that the class was without value. On the contrary, what I did take from it, was well worth every penny invested. It's just confounding how the value I think I'm going to get from these events is never really the value I end up with.
 ### The Fog Of War
 Jess and Noah are highly skilled and experienced, and earnestly worked to provide the room with as much insight and expertise as they could muster. Jess did a terrific job of encouraging group discussion, and Noah was chock full of fascinating concepts, and technical tips. However, I definitely got the sense that neither really had a clear idea of what it was they were trying to teach us.
 Jess opened the class by surveying the room for an open-ended list of test automation problems experienced by class participants. Many of the most usual suspects of testing ended up on that list: "too many tests", "flakey tests", opaque frameworks, difficult relationships with developers, and so forth. She then promised the class that these "pain points" would all be addressed in the day's lectures. Indeed, most of them did end up being topics of discussion throughout the day (though a few, only tangentially). 
 But rather than focusing the class, I think this approach actually fundamentally changed the class into something it originally was not. Because, with the exception of a few of Noah's lectures, almost all of the rest of the class seemed to me like on long digression from the title of this class. We spent a great deal of time discussing inter-disciplinary relationship issues, frustrations with product and business team members, what it means to be a tester, how the tester mindset is different from the developer mindset, why testers are often treated like second-class citizens, and other classic favorites on the Woeful Tester Top 40 List. 
 ### The Nutty Professor
 Noah did his level-best (though it seemed to me a somewhat scatter-brained attempt) to introduce some essential philosophical concepts that lie at the heart of "scaling" any software development endeavor. He opened abruptly with a brief explanation of "Oracles" as they're applied to testing. This is something I thought might be really interesting, as it's a favorite buzzword in "context driven" circles, and I was intrigued to see how the idea could be brought to bear in the implementation of automated tests in a complex environment. But, just as abruptly as the concept was introduced, he terminated it. Almost nothing was said about Oracles after this.
 Another concept Noah spent a great deal of time on, was the problem of [Intractable Complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory#Intractability). His description of the problem is a bit different than the understanding I was accustomed to, however. He described, in the abstract, a "complex" system, and argued that the amount of detail needed to describe this system is in fact infinite, because the layers of specificity are effectively infinite, and because "complex" systems are "living" systems, in the sense that every interaction with them changes them in some fundamental way. I could vaguely envision how this could apply to large scale test automation implementations, and it was intriguing to ponder the challenge we face as test automators through this sort of fractal mental lens. But the thin mental strings tethering this concept to anything real were tenuous at best. 
 The last conceptual presentation for the morning, dealt with epistemology. Attempting to link the presentation to the concept of Intractable Complexity, Noah illustrated in graphics how the domain of the knowable is necessarily finite, and the domain of the unknowables ("unknown unknowns") is necessarily infinite. 
 To hammer home the idea of [combinatorial explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion), as it applies to software development problems, we were taken through an exercise meant to emulate the problem posed by the [Abelian Sandpile Model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_sandpile_model). However, the boards were drawn too large, and the rules of the game were not explained nearly well enough to make any sense of it. It took me a day of research after the class, to understand what it was he was trying to teach us. For that, I suppose, I am quite greatful. 
 As Noah's "big-ideas" discussions grew more and more abstract, his alternating "tips" presentations detailing the many clever uses of command-line tools like curl, xmlstarlet, and spark, made him seem progressively more schizophrenic, and left me with a serious case of mental whiplash.
 Noah's afternoon presentations were almost entirely devoted to the hands-on demonstrations of command-line tools for extracting useful information out of development and ops tools like git and netcat. However, he did attempt one last very brief prescriptive conceptual presentation, specifically on the topic of scaling, in which he argued that the three main challenges of any scaling effort are communication, configuration, and performance. He offered one great insight during this presentation: tools like Jenkins and Github are, fundamentally, *communication* tools. They are designed to automate the coordination of efforts between engineering teams, which is ultimately a communication task.
 ### Rallying The Troops
 Periodically interspersed between 
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 Chapter three of James Bach's *Lessons Learned In Software Testing* begins by pulling us down from the cloud of philosophical abstraction we've been revelling in, to talk about actual testing practices. The author takes us from the ideal to the concrete by first providing a classification system of their own making, and walking us through nearly every known test technique, explaining how the technique fits into the system.
 #### Testers Are Experiment Designers
 While this chapter may first appear as though it is merely a mundane catalogue of testing activities, what Bach, et. al. are really offering us (in keeping with the metaphor of science), is an intellectual toolbox from which to begin our own *[Experimental Design](http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/top_research-project_experimental-design.shtml)* in software testing. Through the descriptions offered of each testing technique, the authors are conditioning us to think very carefully and systematically about what we actually want to *do* to test a software product, and why we would want to do it.
 One approach to systemetizing our testing, taken by the authors in chapter three, is the "Five Fold Testing System". Given this framework as a basis, what we are really being tasked with is *designing testing experiments* that answer questions about the product under test, or attempt to falsify assertions about that product.
 The "Five Fold System" is not a direct analog to the techniques and categories employed in the design of actual scientific experiements. Yet, if we look at the system's five aspects specifically, we can see that they share many similarities with a scientific experiment:
 > * Testers [People]: Who does the testing. For example, user testing is focused on testing by members of your target market, people who would normally use the product.
 This might be understood as test subject selection. This is where a social scientist would be considering problems like demographics, sample size, environmental conditions, and so forth.
 > * Coverage: What gets tested. For example, in function testing, you test every function.
 In the design phase of an experiment, a scientist might consider this the "scope" of his experiment. If I'm working on the chemical effects of Cannibas on the body, do I limit my experiment to only neurochemical effects, or do I include other physiological factors as well?
 > * Potential problems: Why you’re testing (what risk you’re testing for). For example, testing for extreme value errors.
 This third category might be thought of as the hypotheses themselves. What questions are being asked? What assertions are we trying to prove, or disprove?
 > * Activities: How you test. For example: exploratory testing.
 This category is about the "method" of the experiment. To borrow from the social sciences again, this might be about whether I'm going to rely entirely on self-reporting surveys, or entirely on neurological data, or a mix of both, or something else entirely.
 > * Evaluation: How to tell whether the test passed or failed. For example, comparison to a known good result.
 If you've read any published scientific papers, you'll recognize this as the analysis and conclusion of a scientific experiment. What results did we get? What can we reasonably say about those results? What are the implications? What needs further study? One important feature of evaluation, in both science and testing, is the degree of reproducibility of your results. I'll go into this topic more in the future.
 Ultimately, the idea of this framework is to provide testers with a tool for "making better choices" about the testing techniques applied to various software testing problems:
 > Despite the ambiguities (and, to some degree, because of them), we find this classification system useful as an idea generator. By keeping all five dimensions in mind as you test, you might make better choices of combinations.
 Better choices make for better test plans, better test plans make for better testing, and better testing makes for better software.
 Bach, et. al. pack this chapter thick with specific details and examples, and focus intently on all the ways one could scrutinize a piece of software or its features. And, although it is admittedly not a comprehensive "how-to" guide, it does provide a solid path of further study for any motivated tester who reads the book.
 Each of the different test design techniques cannot be covered here in detail. There is so much material to cover, it would fill at least one thick volume on the topic (See Cem Kaner for more on this[^1]). Yet, they each deserve discussion on their own merits. So, in future posts, I'll be discussing each technique outside the context of this book review, providing examples and context from my own testing experiences, and those of my colleagues. Stay tuned for that!
 [^1]: http://kaner.com/?p=100
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 __"That which is known is superior to that which is believed."__
 This is our motto. It means there is real value to be gained in [knowledge](http://www.iep.utm.edu/knowledg/). As any good scientist will tell you, [knowledge (so far as we can claim it)](http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eensiweb/mart.nos.pdf) is derived by [testing](http://lets-test.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/C_Wiedemann_Scientific_Method_v1.0.pdf) what we believe against reality, using a [reliable method](http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/feature/Applying-the-scientific-method-to-software-testing). That is the mission of the tester in any organization committed to producing a quality product.
 The tester is not simply an organisational role, or a specific person. The tester is an [attitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism), a [way of looking at the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism), a [mental habit](https://blog.udemy.com/analytical-thinking/), and a set of [cognitive skills](http://www.umich.edu/%7Eelements/5e/probsolv/strategy/ctskills.htm) that enable that habit. In other words, anyone can be – and ideally, everyone will be – a tester.
 I seek to encourage the attitude and mental habit of the tester in every member of a MOO crew. I hope to facilitate the the pursuit of those skills, and the perfection of those habits, that will make everyone good testers. I invite those who engage in the practice of testing in any crew, to become an ambassador, a champion, and a model for the tester as a mindset and a way of working.
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 ### Confronting Reality
 Recently, I attended [Test Automation And Continuous Delivery At Scale](http://www.ministryoftesting.com/training-events/test-automation-and-continuous-integration-at-scale/), a one-day class hosted by [The Ministry Of Testing](http://www.ministryoftesting.com/), and headed by [Noah Sussman](http://infiniteundo.com/) and [Dr. Jess Ingrassellino](http://www.teachcode.org/blog). 
 The summary on the Ministry of Testing site was enticing enough, and the name Noah Sussman certainly caught my attention, but the *"At Scale"* in the title was what really convinced me I needed to attend this class. 
 I went in hoping, at last, I would find others who've had to grapple with the hairy problems of testing a patchwork quilt of an application, that's been divided up and dispersed amongst disparate internal teams like so much beef in a lion's den. But it didn't turn out that way.
 Jess and Noah are highly skilled and experienced, and earnestly worked to provide the room with as much insight and expertise as they could muster. Jess did a terrific job of encouraging group discussion, and Noah was chock full of fascinating concepts, and technical tips. However, I definitely got the sense that neither really had a clear idea of what they were actually trying to teach us, or how they wanted to teach it.
 Throughout the day, we meandered wildly between high-flung concepts like the problem of [Intractable Complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory#Intractability), and microscopic bits of advice like how to use the [`lynx`](http://lynx.browser.org/) command line browser to scrape google for minute bits of useful data.  Noah clawed his way though several broad philosophical concepts of testing alongside these micrscopic details, clearly desperate to reveal some single coherent thread of wisdom to us. But struggle as he did, it all seemed a bit arbitrary and confusing.
 ### The Blind Leading The Blind
 Near the end of the day, I suddenly realized: nobody, really, has any clear idea of what we're supposed to be doing. Either as testers, or as automators. But more importantly, from a broader perspective, I think it may actually be too soon to expect such clarity.
 A perfect illustration of this, came in the form of a question, near the end of the class:
 To be fair to Noah, he actually did a fairly good job of emphasising the importance of trying to find ways to bring *useful and meaningful information* to the surface (a key objective of testing) through the use of programmatic tools; He highlighted the problem of communication breakdowns between dev and test, and described how a clever application of technology could improve improve communications. What's more, the group seemed to eagerly agree that one of the most satisfying things about being a tester was learning the *"how"* of things. 
 Yet, after all of this, an hour before we were scheduled to end, this question still arose: "**Do testers *really* need to learn how to code?**" 
 <center>![facepalm](http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/554/facepalm.jpg)</center>
 To her credit, Jess answered with an enthusiastic yes (at least, insofar as learning to read it). She seemed to understand the larger point, when defending her position: "Maybe if you're testing medical devices, you can get by without it; but we're testing *software*, and that domain knowledge is essential...". But I wonder if she understood the implications of what was going on right there, around us.
 As soon as she answered, the room immediatly erupted in a cacophony of debate. Here we all were, in a class intended to provide insight into test *automation* -- in which they all agreed that *knowing how* is fundamental to the task -- and the occupants of the class still can't even agree on basics like literacy in development. 
 ### Wakeup Call
 I want to take a moment here, and emphasize that this is *not meant as a disparagement of the hosts/instructors* of the class. They were very professional, and obviously highly skilled. But I do think the lesson to be taken from this class was not quite the lesson they intended. And I think I can sum it up borrowing from a [comment I made](http://theadventuresofaspacemonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/questioning-premise-of-testing.html?showComment=1453727683323#c790477739473665542) a while back, on a [blog post](http://theadventuresofaspacemonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/questioning-premise-of-testing.html?showComment=1453727683323#c790477739473665542) that raised very similar alarm bells for me:
 > Any scientist that would ask whether he really needs to make his experiments reproducible should be immediately suspect (if not dis-barred from his field). And, if I were a scientist, I would be incensed if I discovered somehow that my work had *not* been properly peer reviewed (especially if some had claimed it was).
 >Likewise, software developers should be *demanding* that their code be tested, not looking for ways to avoid it. And if its not being tested, they should refuse to publish it. Just like any good scientist would do.
 >But this puts a burden on many testers that I don't think they are willing to accept, yet. Because, just like scientists, it expects testers to be just as competent as developers - able to read code (and even write it if necessary), able to use debug and trace logs to isolate problems, able to execute (or even create) build jobs, able to manage their own workstation development environments, and so forth. This is all *in addition to* the particular skills a tester needs to design/execute his tests, not in lieu of them.
 >Think of something like Underwriters Laboratories. Goods manufacturers in the 1970's and 1980's used to fall all over themselves to get the U.L. seal of approval. And the people working in those labs were not just "monkey pushes the button" drones. They were highly skilled and highly paid mechanical, electrical, chemical, and structural engineers *in their own right*.
 > We need to think of ourselves in the same way. And when I see developers sneering at testers and testing, it tells me that we don't.
 Indeed. This is a debate that stretches back more than 30 years. And we're still having it. Until we grapple with our own growth anxiety, and settle this question, I think it's way too soon to be reaching for more complex conceptual problems like how to properly automate testing. 
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 # The Narrative of Testing
 Jordan Peterson describes storytelling as a narrative art in which we recount the most important parts of the process of encountering and learning to cope with the unexpected, when moving through the world.
 This is a fascinating way to frame the act of storytelling, because it is precisely the activity any good tester engages in, when he reports the discovery of a bug.
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 There is a common hyperbolic stereotype of scientists that paints them as obdurately reductionist killjoys who seek only the schadenfreude found in aggressively shattering the metaphysical wonderment one experiences from the delicate grandure found in a work of art like the universe.
 I find this stereotype fascinating, because it describes a very similar phenomenon experienced by many testers. This can be seen in the phrase "negative thinker", often used to characterize the difference between a programmer and a tester. As Bach, Et. al.[^1] describe in the book, some charge that "testers complain... \[and\] take a special thrill in delivering bad news". I've even seen a few testers take this identity to heart, revelling in "[making developers cry](http://blog.codinghorror.com/making-developers-cry-since-1995/)".
 But, as Bach, Et. al. correctly point out:
 > \[good\] testers don't complain; they offer evidence. \[good\] testers don't like to break things; they like to dispel the illusion that things work. \[good\] testers don't enjoy giving bad news; they enjoy freeing their clients from the thrall of false belief.
 In other words, it is a serious mistake to assume that because programmers think in terms of positive goals, and testers think *differently*, then it must mean that testers *oppose those goals*. Nothing could be further from the truth. In addition to being just plain wrong, it seems to me this sort of adversarial characterization is also part of the reason why the discipline of testing is in so much trouble.
 A better way to understand the mindset of the tester, particularly in relation to the developer, is to understand that they both have the same goal, but they get there *from different directions*. In effect, the developer is making an argument, or a claim about reality, and the tester wants to help him by seeing if the claim holds up to scrutiny. To put it in simpler terms: If programming is [the art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming) of software development, then testing is its [science](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2224780/opensource-subnet/the-new-science-of-software-testing.html).
 And, like any good scientist, at the core of a good tester's character, is his reliance upon the methods of science, his commitment to critical thinking in conjunction with it, and his passion for (and proper understanding of the value of) sharing the discoveries he makes, with his teammates.
 ### The Toolbox Of A Thinker
 A central tenet of this mindset, according to Bach, et. al., is an epistemological commitment to a variety of empiricism peculiar to Karl Popper (and, indeed, all of modern science). The authors stress the importance of an awareness of philosophical concepts like [Justified True Belief](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#JTB), logical tools like [abductive inference](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/), and methods such as Karl Popper's [conjecture and refutation](http://www.amazon.de/Conjectures-Refutations-Scientific-Knowledge-Routledge/dp/0415285941) (more colloquially understood as "[falsificationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Falsificationism)").
 But they don't stop there. In addition to critical reasoning and empiricism, The book outlines three other forms of thinking essential to the thoughtful tester: Technical, Creative, and Practical. Each of these forms of thinking is punctuated by lessons particular to it. The "technical" lessons identify the need for analytical skills, and the ability to model systems accurately for succesful testing. The "creative" lessons identify the need for lateral thinking, and its role in determining the boundaries of your testing efforts. Lastly, the "practical" lessons identify the need for technical competency, and implicitly warn testers that a limit here will necessarily limit what is possible for them, regardless of how creative they might be. A discussion of these forms of thinking could fill a whole post each on their own (and I've decided, as you'll see later, that I'm going to do just that).
 ### Looking Inward
 Before I get into the practical application of this toolbox, I want to highlight one final piece of mental equipment mentioned in this chapter. And, while I hesitate to elevate cognitive psychology in importance above all the other forms of thought, it is very difficult for me to imagine the other forms being very effective without this. Bach, et. al. Acknowledge this importance by giving cognitive psychology its own stand-alone lesson (lesson 18), but they seem only dimly aware of the breadth and depth of the implications of applying this tool, in one's individual life. They state:
 > Lots of people who never studied these subjects have done good testing. If you want to be better than good, studying cognitive psychology will help you understand the factors that affect your performance as a tester, as well as the factors that affect how people interpret your work.
 Help you understand, indeed. I don't think this point could be any more understated. Bach, et. al. tease us by highlighting this as an independent lesson, but leave us with little more than a tepid suggestion.
 This lesson, in my view, is about much more than simply obtaining facts about the reliability of senses and memory, or insights into the neurology of cognitive awareness and thoughts, or even individual awareness of cognitive influencers like stress, or fear, or pattern recognition. Though such things are very important to understand, they are secondary to the development self-awareness and empathy in oneself, and cognitive psychology is perhaps the most powerful approach to this need.
 Self-awareness and empathy are the third leg of a three-legged stool that includes Popper-style empiricism, and critical reasoning, altogether making up a stable platform from which to ground all relations in life, not just your testing relations. Without self-awarness and empathy, you cannot understand yourself, much less imagine the motivations and experiences of your users, or the developers you work with. If it were up to me, I'd put everyone in tech through at least one course in cognitive psychology, and couple it with "lab work" in a therapist's office.
 Bach, et. al., offer the uninspiring goal of getting "better than good", for the effort of understanding cognitive psychology. But, I would argue that if we all took it seriously, humanity as a whole would be much better than good. We'd be fantastic.
 ### Doing Science
 With that said, let's explore a little more of what Bach, et. al., have to say about all of this thinking, as it is applied. For starters, they assert in lesson 24, that "*all tests are experiments performed to answer some question about the relationship between what the product is, and what it should be.*" A better way to state this might have been to say, "...between what the product is, and what the your team team asserts that it is".
 But your goal as a tester, is not to get to the answer that your team (most probably wants) wants. Your goal, as an empiricist, is to answer the question as precisely and confidently as you can. And, if Popper's view is to be accepted, this is accomplished by executing an experiment that applies a technique of **falsification**.
 This lesson is important, because it sets the stage for an important insight into good testing, and its similarity to good science. The tester is not "validating" a product. He is not setting out to [*prove the hypothesis* by experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism). His job is to *falsify* specific assertions. Here's a very simple example:
 _The product team asserts:_ "Given such-and-such conditions, the login screen includes a functioning link to a password recovery form".
 _The tester asks himself:_ **not** "Is this true?", but rather, "What if this **isn't** true? How could I discover that it wasn't true? How could I be confident of such a discovery?", and then designs a test -- an experiment -- to answer those questions.
 In short, the team offers the *conjecture*, the tester offers the *refutation*. In this way (and at the risk of elevating the tester to even more grandiose heights in this review), the tester is quite literally, a scientist. He knows that it is impossible to prove the hypothesis "true" under every circumstance, and that positive approaches to the hypothesis leave him especially vulnerable to cognitive errors like [Confirmation Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) (which will be discussed at length later).
 One might also suppose that this is another reason why testers are seen as "negative".
 ### The Story Of Testing
 Ok, I'm already well over budget on the length of this post. So, I've decided to separate the review of this chapter into multiple posts, which I'll describe more in a moment.
 But, to end this post, I'd like spend some time on one seemingly throw-away phrase in lesson 19. A note that deserves a great deal more attention than was given by the authors of this chapter. Bach, et. al. tell us, in lesson 19:
 > The difference between excellent testing and mediocre testing is how you think: your test design choices, your ability to interpret what you observe, ***and your ability to tell a compelling story about it***. \[emphasis added\]
 So much of this book is absolutely littered with random nuggets of essential wisdom. Little mentions, almost asides, that any casual reader would breeze past, but that make all the difference. The bit that I have highlighted above, is just such a nugget.
 What does it mean to *"tell a compelling story"* about our testing, our test design choices, and our ability to interpret what we observe? Well, let's look at what we know. The world is chock-a-block with good analysts, technicians, mechanics, engineers, researchers, and scientists. But among these multitudes, who are the ones that stand out? The ones we admire? The ones we envy? Who are the ones who inspire us to their view of life, and the world? It is the great storytellers. And, as it happens (and contrary to the popular stereotype), science and technology are positively teaming with examples. Just off the top of my head, I can think of three:
 * Carl Sagan, especially his [Cosmos TV Series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7n71pm0K04)
 * Richard Dawkins, especially his book [Unweaving The Rainbow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4)
 * James Bach, especially his book [Secrets of a Buckaneer Scholar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCGd7S9gnIQ)
 And there is one more example I want to highlight, specifically because they are perhaps the most accomplished testers, particularly as ***storytellers***, in the western world. The show is called [**Mythbusters**](http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/). Adam, Jamie, and the other hosts, have been applying the scientific method to empirical questions for 14 years, and the show is still going strong. They ask many of the same kinds of questions that testers do, they must design good tests to answer those questions, and most especially they must *tell a compelling story* about their observations. You really can't get any more accomplished than that.
 So, what do all these folks have in common? What is it that makes their stories *compelling*, as opposed to simply inspirational or convincing? I have come up with a short list of traits that I think together comprise the necessary ingredients for a compelling story, and a compelling storyteller:
 1. A commitment to the principles we've talked about in this post: Critical reasoning, scientific empiricism, and self-knowledge.
 2. A willingness to empathize with your audience, and to regard them as equally curious and intelligent as yourself.
 3. A strong sense of humility in the light of #1 and #2. This is described in the book, in lesson #40: "...the person easiest to fool is the one who is absolutely convinced he cannot be fooled..."
 4. A passion for sharing your findings, even in the face of strong opinions or fearful opposition. Mr. Bach is certainly no stranger to this.
 [^1]: https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven/dp/0471081124
--- a/new-testing-blog/three-myths-of-testing.md
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 Today, I want to briefly discuss three common industry misconceptions that Bach, et. al.[^1] either hint at, or point out explicitly in the book "Lessons Learned in Software Testing". These misconceptions often affect the way testing, as a business value, is evaluated. And mostly, the effect is negative.
 ### The Myth Of Ignorance
 The first, and perhaps the most pervasive, is the notion that testers are - and must be - by definition, ignorant of the software they are testing. As noted in lessons 22 and 23, this is often associated with traditional "black box" testing. In other words, an ignorance of the application's source code. The underlying implication that Bach, et. al., do not address, is that it is this view of ignorance that makes the tester seem far less valuable to the team than the developer, in the minds of managers and engineers.
 But knowledge of the product extends far beyond just the underlying code. And much of this can have a significant impact on testing approaches. The authors seem to agree with me, that it is a mistake to take the narrow view that ignorance of the code is a defect in the testing role. In lesson 22, they point out that:
 > We don’t object to a tester learning about how a product works. The more you learn about a product, and the more ways in which you know it, the better you will be able to test it. But if your primary focus is on the source code and tests you can derive from the source code, you will be covering ground the programmer has probably covered already...
 The authors would probably not go as far as I would, however, in arguing that the tester's role on a project could in fact be just as valuable as the the engineer's role. Distinctions in the domains of knowledge do not necessitate a hierarchy of value. It is certainly possible that on some projects, testing may not be as necessary as other roles. But this is a circumstantial pressure on the value of the role, not a structural one.
 As I've discussed in the first installment on this chapter, and as the authors of *Lessons Learned* have also argued implicitly up to this point, the tester demonstrates his value to the team precisely by bringing to the table a different skillset and a different knowledge domain than the developer.
 ### The Myth Of Certainty
 The myth of certainty, loosely stated, is the belief that testing will grant your project the blessing of certitude against failure. It is this false belief that drives impulses like quality "gatekeeping", and release "certification" exercises. As the authors clearly warn in lesson 30:
 > Beware of tests that purport to validate or certify a product in a way that goes beyond the specific tests you ran. No amount of testing provides certainty about the quality of the product.
 As noted in the second installment on this chapter, this is due to the the kinds of questions that our tests are answering. As with any good scientific experiment, the best an experiment can offer is that the hypothesis is not falsified. Cumulatively, then, we can only say that the product could not be demonstrated to be defective given the suite of tests we ran. Bach, et. al., state it very succinctly in lesson 35, this way:
 > In the end, all you have is an impression of the product. Whatever you know about the quality of the product, it’s conjecture. No matter how well supported, you can’t be \[absolutely\] sure you’re right.
 One thing the authors do not address directly in chapter two (perhaps they do later), is how many project teams are extremely uncomfortable with having this knowledge made conscious. Uncertainty, I find, is one of the most unwelcome states of mind in most areas of our lives. Software projects are no exception. The software tester should not fall into the trap of thinking that he can somehow provide this certainty. Neither should managers or other team members fall into the trap of thinking that this devalues the role of testing. To believe that it does, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of testing within a project.
 Instead of letting anxiety drive brittle pursuits for concrete certainty about the product, teams should strive for an agreed upon degree of confidence that promises to customers are being kept, taking conscious account of the potential risks. This more honest asssessment of the state of the product will facilitate better decision-making, and minimize the number of unpleasant surprises that arise after release.
 ### The Myth Of Precision
 This myth is one primarily harbored in the minds of my fellow testers. And Bach, et. al., describe it perfectly, in lesson 32:
 > If you expect to receive requirements on a sheaf of parchment, stamped with the seal of universal truth, find another line of work... A tester who treats project documentation (explicit specifications of the product) as the sole source of requirements is crippling his test process.
 This is one way in which the myth of certainty shows up in the tester's own mindset. A tester who is expecting his team to be more certain about the desired state of the product than he is about the actual state of the product, is deceiving himself, and treating his team mates unfairly.
 The origin of this myth, it seems to me, harkens to the days of factory testing, where teams of testers are given fixed lists of requirements and test cases from manufacturing engineers and designers, and are expected, much like the factory's assemblers and packers, to simply execute their piece-work.
 By contrast, authors of *Lessons Learned* describe a far more modern ideal. One including a highly collaborative process of "Conference, Inference, and Reference", when gathering requirements for software testing. My own 7 years of experience in the field is very much consonant with this description. Particularly in Agile environments, where software development teams value "[working software over comprehensive documentation][^2]", a good tester must be extremely persistent and flexible when attempting to discover all the implicit and explicit expectations for any given feature.
 Bach, et. al., only hint at this, but what all of this suggests is that good testers will want to learn to be good negotiators. In an environment where requirements are dynamically defined as part of an ongoing set of interactions between team members, the best negotiators will set the standard for how the product's requirements are set, propagated, and refined. Testers, clearly, have a significant role to play in that effort.
 And, in the end, negotiation does not give you precision. It gives you tentative conclusions, and temporary compromises. A good tester will learn to cope with these conditions, and as stated in lesson 33, will learn to *"use whatever references are required to find important problems fast."*
 ### Taking Responsibility
 All of the ideas raised in chapter 2 have led me to an inescapabable conclusion. If the role of testing in software is to be rescued from the dustbin of 19th century industrial anachronism, it is not just the business leaders and the engineers who's minds must be changed. It is our own.
 Within each of these myths (and a few others unmentioned), runs a single, constant golden thread: Testers need to step up and take responsibility for their role on the team, and in the organization. And, absent the will to do so, it doesn't matter how many managers we try to convince of its value.
 The beginning of that work, starts with taking responsibility for our capacity to think like *real testers*, and not simply rely upon the antique photograph stereotypes because its more comfortable, or more safe.
 Taking responsibility means learning to think critically, and scientifically. It means being willing to make judgements and decisions, and being robust enough to bear the burden of critical analysis of those choices, by supporting those judgments and decisions with facts, and evidence, and solid reasoning.
 Taking responsibility means also learning how to negotiate, and to compromise, and to have the empathy to take our negotiating partners seriously, and to treat them as peers. It means not relying on the comfort and security of subordination and deference to authority.
 For a tester to be valuable to any software development team, then, means being a *thinking human being*, who tests. And not simply a "mechanical turk" substitute for a turing machine that has yet to be invented.
 [^1]: https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Learned-Software-Testing-Context-Driven/dp/0471081124
 [^2]: http://www.agilemanifesto.org
--- a/new-testing-blog/what-is-a-tester.md
+++ b/new-testing-blog/what-is-a-tester.md
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 # What Is A Tester
 Last time, we talked about what a test is, and what sort of skills would be necessary to craft and execute effective tests. This time, we'll be discussing how this skillset is embodied. Namely, what constitutes a tester?
 There seems to be three different senses in which we can consider this question:
 1. What sort of person is a tester? What kind of character does he have? What is his psychology?
 2. What kind of role does a tester have within the organization of the software development team? What differentiates her functionally, from her development, design, and product colleagues?
 3. What activities does a tester engage in, and what skills are required for those activities?
 The third sense is the sense I referred to in the previous post (What is a Test?). .
 ## Tester Mindset
 How the tester sees himself, and how he interacts with the world around him, is a complicated question. Depending on the context and circumstances, the effective tester is any one of six different people.
 ### The Scientist
 * Anthropologist, Psychologist, Technician
    * Hypotheses & Experiments
    * Inference / Induction are the main mental tools.
 ### The Explorer
 * Tracker, Surveyer, Investigator
    * Synthesis from disparate and varied information channels
    * Intuition / Heuristics
 ### The Skeptic
 * The Mythbuster
    * Analysis of claims
    * Deductive / Reductive
    * Cognitive bias and logical errors
 * Trust but verify
    * Listen, but always compare it with reality.
 ### The Reporter
 * What kind of information: Quality
    * Context
    * Currency
    * Consequences
    * Relevance
 * How much information: Quantity
    * What is "enough"?
    * What is "too much"?
    * What is "too little"?
 * Narrative as a selection tool
    * Bias influences
 ### Advocate
 * Product Advocacy
    * When Bias Is Useful
 * Customer Advocacy
    * Testers as users
 ### The Engineer
 * The Continuous Improvement of testing
    * Automation, and its uses
    * Tester as software vendor
--- a/new-testing-blog/what_is_a_test.md
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 # What is a test?
 To put it succinctly, a 'test' is an attempt to answer a question. However, only certain kinds of questions. Two kinds, to be precise: discovery, and comparison. In the former case, I begin with no (or few) preconcieved notions, and seek information with which to form an opinion about the object of my attention. It is the "what if?" question. In the latter case, I begin with an expectation and I seek information that either confirms or denies my expectation. This question challenges assertions or assumptions. It is the "is that so?" question.
 In both cases, I am seeking a certain kind of knowledge when I ask these questions: _empirical_ knowledge; facts about the actual state of affairs in the real world. However, the method by which I obtain this knowledge -- the way in which I attempt to answer the questions -- will depend on the type of question. The "is that so?" questions -- comparison questions -- are best answered by a method we familiarly call experimentation, while the "what if?" questions -- discovery questions -- are best answered by a method of exploration. When we act out either the method of experimentation or the method of exploration, we are engaging in a _test_. Thus, when we think of a "test", we should be thinking of an _activity_, not an _artifact_.
 Our task, as testers, is to be sure we're engaging in these activities effectively. To do that, we should also be asking ourselves questions _about questions_. What are the questions that matter to this particular piece of work? What is the best way to ask those questions? What sorts of answers might I expect to get? What is the best way to deal with answers I don't expect? What are the implications of answers I do expect? What's more, each of these two methods, experimentation and exploration, come with their own set of risks and best practices testers should be aware of. Keeping them in mind will help you ask and answer those questions about questions.
 ## Experimentation
 As the label implies, experimentation is the process of _hypothesis testing_. There is a load of good literature on the topic of hypothesis crafting, and experiment design. For our purposes, a hypothesis is a question about the application under consideration, stated in the form of an assertion. For example, "_Users who have previous business card orders can see them in their order history_", and our task is to answer the question "_is this so?_". This may seem like a straightforward problem. But, as Karl Popper has explained at length [in Conjectures and Refutations](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conjectures-Refutations-Scientific-Knowledge-Routledge-ebook/dp/B00K1ZV0PS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=), if we come at this problem from the wrong direction, we may not actually answer our question -- and even worse, _may not realize_ that we haven't actually answered it. The way he put it:
 >> Every _genuine test_ of a theory is an attempt to _falsify_ it, or to refute it. _Testability is falsifiability_; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
 But why are the only "genuine" tests, ones in which we attempt to falsify an assertion? Well, because [confirmation bias](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) will delude us into thinking we've succeeded, when we may not have. As Popper puts it, again:
 >> It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory -- if we look for confirmations... Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory -- an event which would have refuted the theory.
 In other words, the most effective test of our assertion would not be "_is this so?_", but rather, "_is there some way I can show that this isn't so?_". This helps us avoid the problem of confirmation bias, and helps to keep our claims about the health of the application tentative and attenuates our confidence to a level more appropriate to our actual understanding of the application.
 This is a difficult attitude for many people to adopt. The reason is, because it requires one to dwell in a continuous state of some degree of uncertainty. Why is this? Because _falsification_ does not justify positive claims. Applying this to our example, "_Users who have previous business card orders can see them in their order history_", falsification will not prove this to be true. It will only prove (in the best case scenario) that we cannot show that it is false. But there could be a context within which this assertion is false (we just haven't found it yet).
 As we can see, hypothesis testing -- experimentation -- requires not only knowing what questions to ask, but also knowing how best to ask them. What we want to accomplish, ultimately, is to narrow the delta between the model of the application in our minds, and the actual application in reality. The better the questions, the narrower that gap will be.
 But what do we do when we don't have anything we're trying to compare? How do we discover more about the application in the absence of a specific question to ask? We ask a different kind of question...
 ## Exploration
 Interestingly, there is very little literature on the topic of exploration, outside of software testing and travel writing. As much as we romanticize the idea of explorers and adventurers, it seems very few of us are willing to take on the role, and talk about it (at least, in print). The two best books on the subject come from James Whittaker and [Elisabeth Hendrickson](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Explore-Increase-Confidence-Exploratory-Testing-ebook/dp/B00I8W50T8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1492519512&sr=8-1). Hendrickson applies precisely the metaphor of tourism to exploratory testing in her preface, but is careful to point out that meandering tourism is not quite enough:
 >> When I travel, I always reserve at least a little time to wander the back streets and find hidden gems. I escape the tourist areas to find the restaurants where only locals go and the shops that cater to everyday needs. It is in these meanderings that I begin to understand the local culture and become acquainted with the real character of the place. It’s true of software as well. If you want to learn about the real capabilities and limitations of your software, you have to navigate off the beaten path. Yet there is a difference between wandering at random and real exploring... If you meander without direction or purpose, you’ll spend much time wandering for precious little insight: you’ll be lost.
 To employ another adventure metaphor, the difference between the meandering experiences of the software user, and the careful explorations of the software tester, is the difference between the tourist and the woodsman-tracker. I'll let Hendrickson expand on this:
 >> You watch carefully, looking for subtle clues about where there might be a nest of bugs lurking. Observing is crucial: the better you are at observing, the more you’ll learn. It’s also harder than it sounds. You have to look past what you expect or hope to see in order to see what’s really happening.
 But why are we exploring? This gets us back to the thesis of this post. There are questions we want to ask, and that we want to find answers to. The overall goal is _learning_. Exploration that has no initial focus in mind may or may not provide us an opportunity to learn what we want to learn. As such, while it begins as an open-ended process, effective exploration will rapidly narrow the range of possibilities, and focus your effort. This is what Hendrickson calls "steering":
 >> You use your curiosity, fueled by what you’ve learned so far, to suggest the next most interesting piece of information to uncover. Steering while focusing on the most important information to discover is one of the core skills of a master explorer.
 What is an "interesting" piece of information? That which will answer a question. Where does this question come from? From the results of your initial exploration combined with your curiosity. How does that initial exploration begin? Hendrickson suggests what she calls the "charter" approach. This is analagous to writing a feature story, only it is designed to focus your "expedition" and prepare it to succeed (in the same way that Jefferson's charter to Lewis and Clarke did for them). Similar to an Agile story, Hendrickson suggests a template of the form:
 ```
 Explore:     {target}
 With:        {resources}
 To Discover: {information}
 ```
 Her specific model isn't the point, however. The point here, is that the charter, like the story, confines us to a finite space, and gives us a goal. There is something else that needs to be highlighted, that Hendrickson doesn't really address, though. Using her template, What if we had a charter that read:
 ```
 Explore: the northwest territory
 With: survival gear, weapons, excavation equipment, and a team of men
 To Discover: Gold, coal, and other precious metals
 ```
 Immediately, something stands out. The need for _technical expertise_ that extends beyond just being able to survive in the wilderness, and track our position. We need to know at least a little something about geology, about mining, about the local politics and tribes, about team management, and perhaps other skills like smelting or curing. Without a basic remediation in these skills, I might wander the wilderness of Missouri and Montana for a decade, and never find anything, even with an explicit charter.
 Hendrickson's example in the text, is a simple security exploration, in which she even includes specific details about what strings to insert into fields for a SQL injection. So, she seems at least partly aware of the need for this kind of out-of-band expertise, but didn't address it explicitly.
 This is a bit off my point, however. The reason I am raising this issue, is because this (as well as the segment on experimentation) raises a new essential question, closely related to what is a test. Namely, what is a tester? What is her skillset? What should he be expected to know? Whatever that is, it is beyond the scope of this article, and given how long I've gone on already, I think I'll make that my topic for next time.
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/An
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/An
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 Date: 17 Aug 2014 22:25
 Topic: An Anarchist Reads - Series Introduction
 Modified: 26 Jan 2015 23:25
 Hello, and welcome to “An Anarchist Reads...”, the show were an arm-chair philosopher takes on the heavy-hitters one chapter at a time, and tries not to get too bruised in the process! 
 Throughout my life I’ve had many layman discussions with the people around me about ethical questions, politics, American history, and many other things philosophical. Often, these people would name drop, or mention famous written works, in support of their own contentions. Names like John Locke, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, and works like Rousseau’s Social Contract, Jefferson’s Notes On Virginia, and of course the de facto Bible of American Constitutionalism: The Federalist Papers. 
 Funny thing is, though, when I pressed most of these people to tell me more about what they’d read, what I found was -- just like the Bible -- most of them hadn’t read any of the works they were citing. They just used them as tokens of authority. 
 And I was always left wondering, myself: What *is* actually in them? So, I started reading them myself. And, of course -- just like the Bible -- I found that people often falsely attributed many ideas, arguments, and quotes to those documents that were never there to begin with. What’s worse -- just like the Bible -- I often found things while reading those documents that absolutely shocked and appalled me. Things we’d instantly recognize as dissembling, or dishonesty, or obviously factually false even in the time it was written. I also noticed lots of things that were taken simply for granted. Concepts like “self evident truths” and “general will”, and “inalienable rights”, and “common defense” and so forth. I didn’t know what these phrases meant. And everyone I asked seemed to be certain about what they meant, but couldn’t really explain them it a way that made any sense. Why is this? 
 It reminded me of Catholic Catechism. Everyone could rattle off the phrases: “trinity”, “immaculate conception”, “vicarious redemption”, and so forth. Some could offer simple definitions, but none could really explain what they were or how they could work, other than to offer that “god is mysterious”. 
 So I began reading other works. Dostoevsky, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato, Chomsky, Rawls, and on and on. And I found many of the same problems there, that I did with the ideology sustaining the American political system. 
 Which put me in a place that is much the same as the religious seeker who reads his bible honestly. 
 I am a political atheist. 
 Which is to say... an anarchist. 
 At least, tentatively. 
 And that is what this playlist is about. These books are not easy to read. They’re often written in historical vernaculars that are difficult to understand today, or they’re written in highly technical philosophical terms (for example Rawls), that laymen aren’t expected to consume. So, most people don’t bother. They just take the unqualified pronouncements of their friends, relatives, and public speakers, as matter of fact. 
 What I want to do, is to provide an accessible resource for the intellectually curious. Something I didn’t have when I started on this journey. Something that can act as a discussion platform for the inquisitive, and most importantly as an outlet for my own compulsion to “get to the bottom of it all”.
 Since this is the introduction, now might be a good time for the disclaimer: As I mentioned before, I am not a ‘professional philosopher’. I’m merely an enthusiastic amateur, and the work I am about to undertake is entirely a labor of love. As such, none of this should be considered an authoritative or official opinion. 
 I just want to help others who wonder now, as I did then, what really *is* in those books?
 That said, I do try to live by a few formal rules of good form, in an attempt to lend at least some credibility to my effort, and to improve the quality of the work: 
 	1.  The Principle Of Charity: This is a basic rule of philosophical debates in which you assume the best of your opponent. In the context of these reviews, I don’t necessarily have an ‘opponent’. However, the rule still has some value, in that it keeps me from assuming the worst of a writer, when more charitable possible explanations are available to me.
 	2.  Steelmaning: This is basically an approach where you attempt to make a better argument for your opponent’s position than he appears to have made himself. The idea here is to be able to understand the opposing view with as much nuance and sophistication as your own, with the goal being confidence in your position as true. In the context of these read-throughs, the idea is to provide as much in favor of what’s written as possible. Even if that means going beyond what’s written. 
 	3.  Respect The Listener’s Intelligence: I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a point of view, or that I’m some sort of superhuman ‘objective’ assessor of anyone’s philosophical works. Hell, some of it I can barely understand. I respect you, the viewer enough to let you sift out what is my prejudice from what is genuine insight. And, for that matter, I’d really appreciate it if you could point out where I might have made a mistake.
 The methodology for my reviews will be pretty straightforward. I don’t have a lot of experience with literary analysis or critical philosophical analysis for that matter. But I do have a working knowledge of the various forms of logic (deductive, inductive, abductive), and know the difference between scientific standards of evidence, and other standards. So that’s basically going to be my approach:
 	• First, for internal consistency: and for correct use of contemporaneous supporting materials. Any good theory (Scientific or otherwise), requires internal logical consistency to be properly defined and understood. Where there are contradictions, a proper understanding is not possible, and predictions from that theory cannot be made with confidence. I will point out where I find obvious contradictions, logical fallacies, and other problems with consistency.
 	• Second, in retrospect: its is impossible and frankly, disingenuous to ignore our modern scientific understanding of terms like ‘human nature’, ‘primitive societies’, and so forth, as they relate to classical works of philosophy. Particularly where they are central to the thesis. So, while any author might be excused for the time in which he found himself trapped, his ideas must be subjectable to the scrutiny of progress. Otherwise, what is the point of philosophy at all? We should just go with what Aristotle and Epicurus asserted, and be done with it. No? Then retrospection is valid.
 With all that out of  the way, I think I’m done here! I hope you enjoy my critiques, and I especially hope you find them useful in your own exploration of philosophy and search for the truth. 
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Nonarchist
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Nonarchist
@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
 	Date: 18 Aug 2014 21:25
 	Topic: Nonarchist Skeptic - Channel Introduction
 	Modified: 25 Dec 2014 14:00
 Hello and welcome to the Nonarchist Skeptic. The Nonarchist Skeptic is a channel devoted mainly to the exploration of moral and political philosophy. 
 You might say it is a little presumptuous to begin at the end, as it were, by focusing mainly on ethics and politics. But I take this approach, because I find discussing metaphysics and epistemology without context to be opaque and somewhat boring. I think this is primarily because of how my mental faculties are trained. I’m much better at taking things apart, than putting them together. So, I work backward. Peeling away layers of assumptions and presuppositions in a particular conclusion to discover its fundamental roots, or its festering falsehoods.
 How is this different from political science? Well, as with all sciences, political science take as a given the fundamentals offered by philosophy, and attempts to use those fundamentals as a means of understanding the real world. In other words, political scientists accept inherited notions of political right, justice, equality, and liberty, and use them to attempt to explain, evaluate, and inform political society, as applied. 
 As a philosopher - albeit an armchair amateur - I take nothing as assumed knowledge. All bets are off. I question all of these notions, and the accepted wisdom around them. Are they really true? How do we know? How much of it is not true? Why? This is the engine that drives me, it is the acid that has dissolved much of what I used to believe was true, and it is the reason for The Nonarchist Skeptic.
 ## Nonarchist Skepticism?
 The seed for the concept was planted a few years ago, actually, as an article I wrote for an anarchist online publication ([http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/11/21/whos-your-daddy/][1]). The idea of that article was that, if questioning authority was so great, why is it we never seemed to do so when it came to the nation’s vaunted “Founders”.  
 But it has since sprouted into so much more than that. For if we can show, by reason and evidence, that the central intellectual underpinnings of what is widely accepted as the “most rational” form of government are in fact just as irrational and untenable as the worst despotism, then on what grounds, exactly, could we possibly insist on the establishment of any such institution, no matter what its particular form? 
 While I do sometimes label myself a nominal anarchist, I do not subscribe to any of the forms it takes in thought and advocacy today. Every form, from Kropotkin to Goldman to Rothbard to Chomsky, is rife with intellectual inconsistencies, philosophical problems, and outright factual mistakes. And as such, any intellectually honest thinker will eschew them all. However, as I pointed out above, every conception political organization suffers from  many of the exact same problems, often in degrees far beyond the problems of the anarcho-flavors. 
 So, as any good skeptic will tell you, where it is clear we don’t have any good answers, the only honest answer is “I don’t know”. And as I’ve discovered, the question of how best to organize whole groups of people for their own good certainly deserves a resounding “_**I don’t know**_”, at least for the moment.
 That is what this channel is dedicated to. From epistemology to physics, from morality to social psychology, from politics to personal development, and from metaphysics to hard science, I will be diving deep into this and many other questions in the hope that, eventually we can find answers that are actually correct.
 [1]:	http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/11/21/whos-your-daddy/
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Philosopher
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Philosopher
@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
 # Philosopher Kings And SmartPhones
 > ”When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater will be his confusion"  Herbert Spencer
 Today, I attended a lecture hosted by the Conway Hall Ethical Society, in London. I call it a lecture perhaps too generously. You'll see why in a moment. The event was billed as one man's attempt to provide a reasoned defense for the efficacy of a more direct democracy, and to propose a technological solution to the logistical problems inherent within it:
 > Derek Bates will argue that we should be able to properly engage with our elected representatives using modern communication and internet technology, have a “live” influence on our futures and express our opinions – effectively crowd-sourcing innovative policy and direction... A million brains could just be a whole lot better than one!
 Given the nature of this topic, I am always immediately somewhat skeptical. Futurists have been falling all over themselves since the 1980's, to explain how computers and networks would ultimately dissolve all of the logistical barriers of having large, diverse, geographically dispersed populations weigh in on a steady diet of public policy matters from the small (like when to repave the street in front of my house), to the large (such as whether or not to allow Iran's government to engage in nuclear research). But a very rare few of them have been willing to address the founding principles behind such changes, even at a basic level like the problem of two wolves and a sheep.
 So, eager to engage, I packed up my intellectual suitcase with every scrap of skepticism and critical thought on the subject I've ever collected, and I headed off to the hall expecting to be schooled by someone far older and far wiser than myself. I could not possibly have been more misinformed, or more disabused of my mismatched expectations, than by Derek himself.
 ## It’s Not About What It’s About
 Originally, I wanted this post to be about the problems of direct democracy, and about our continuing love affair with it, as a concept. I wanted to engage the content of Derek's arguments as an example of this phenomenon. But I can't do that, now, in good conscience.
 You see, Derek didn't actually have any arguments. What he did have, was a long list of banal, pedestrian complaints, and demands for more "training" of elected officials (whatever that means). His entire presentation had quite literally all intellectual depth and sophistication of a bad pub rant. And sadly, due to Derek's unfortunate lack of podium presence, it was devoid any of the redeeming entertainment value usually found in such rants. The whole of the argument over the first hour literally boiled down to: “Politicians are ignorant and corrupt; someone needs to train them.” I honestly felt embarrassed for the man, alongside my own disgust and anger at having wasted two hours on a gorgeously sunny Sunday morning.
 Derek did inspire me, however. I realized something, watching this train wreck of a slide deck: Derek is the problem. Allow me to explain.
 ## The Hubris Of Politics
 In his professional life, Derek has the scientific method on his side. He's clearly used that to good effect, as a welding engineer and a materials scientist, in the petrochemicals industry and elsewhere. It's highly likely that he's actually solved quite a few very complex and very difficult problems with this training. I certainly wouldn't dare attempt to challenge him in that realm.
 Somewhere along the line, Derek has decided that his mastery of materials engineering, and the good it has brought the world, somehow now qualifies him as an expert in any number of other disciplines, including Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Ecology, and Agriculture. Derek has become so enamored by the voluptuous beauty of his own intellect that he's enthusiastically unshackled it from the ugly, sweaty rigors of any actual research, reading, or formal argumentation. Worse, he's replaced those uncomfortable constraints with nothing but fantasy and a will to power.
 In short, Derek is becoming a politician. But lacking the professional discipline and manipulative cunning of a career politician (or technological bureaucrat, or public policy "expert") he's relegated to making his one-man pitch to local ethical societies on Sunday mornings.
 ## The War Of All Against All
 But this isn't just about Derek. It's about all of us, and about the nature of democracy itself. Derek just happens to be a really good example of how dysfunctional we all are. Every time we step into a voting booth, or answer a political survey taker, or listen to a political speech, we're thinking about ourselves: what gets me what I want; who do I like; how do I want to live; what makes me happy; what can someone else do for me.
 This is the true nature of the pub rant. It is an expression of a broken psychology; one crying out in despair at the lack of something essential to itself, and bemoaning the inability to achieve enough mastery over the physical world to attain that desire. It rarely has anything at all to do with the external target of the verbal diarrhea, except that the target may fit some emotional template for the ranter. In a nutshell: I am owed something, and justice demands that someone be obligated to give it to me.
 This is an angry child crying out for a parent. And, really, the state itself is nothing more than a collective expression of this dysfunction. Only, as adults, we have real power to do real harm in the process. Democracies of all forms and styles - in fact, monolithic institutions of power of all kinds - are fundamentally two things: Firstly, a weapon. But more importantly: the implicit social approval to use that weapon to threaten or harm others to get what you want. Political philosophers of all stripes have recognized this fact for eons, actually.
 They've also identified another fundamental problem with the State as a form of social organization: How do you decide who gets what they want? Developmental psychologists will also point out that this is a common subterranean struggle within families, as well. Children are constantly vying for their parents' attentions. And it's not uncommon for siblings to attempt to manipulate parents to gain advantage over each other. Thus, it is with the State as well.
 ## Knowing When To Quit
 I don't have an answer to this problem. How could I be expected to? I'm a 25 year veteran of the I.T. and software industries, not a political philosopher. But, then again, I don't go around offering lectures claiming that I do have that answer.
 And this is where I come back to Derek. It's not impossible for a scientist to have something useful to say about political philosophy, just as it's not impossible for a political philosopher to have something useful to say about science. After all, Herbert Spencer (for example) was able to bring both to heel fairly effectively, during his own lifetime.
 But if you're going to make this kind of professional leap, you really need to do it from a position of humility and curiosity — that is, if you're not simply trying to get what you want at others’ expense. And, really, when was the last time you exhibited a politician behaving with the humility and curiosity of a scientist? Yet, this is precisely what Derek is expecting, in his demands for "better training" of politicians.
 Which, it seems to me, marks Derek as a pretty typical politician, himself: naive, untrained, and driven by egotistical fantasies about philosopher kings and smartphone apps.
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Religion
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Religion
@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
 Date: 28 Jan 2014 23:17
 Topic: Religion And Sex
 Modified: 23 Aug 2015 18:10
 The religious preoccupation with sexuality isn't simply a banal superficial perversion. It is a horrifyingly twisted psychological pathology rooted, fundamentally, in a form of self-hatred so deep and so pernicious and so destructive, that it cuts to the very core of a person's motivation for existence itself.
 Sex (also feeding, which is another fascination of religion) is an activity that, when exercised, fundamentally affirms an emotional confidence in the value of your own independent existence as a human being. Nature built in extreme measures to insure we would seek these activities out, whenever possible, through the strategic deployment of chemical hormones, oxytocin, vasopressin, and various other endorphins.
 Cut away the pleasure in these things (feeding, fucking, and social congress), and you cut off the legs of a three-legged stool (if you will). The child you are crushing will be left without a will to live, and in its place, you can pour in the molten concoction of obsequiousness, shame, and self-loathing that, when combined, will keep that child a slave to your disapproval for the rest of his life -- no matter how intelligent he is.
 And that is ultimately, the grotesque and frigid beauty of the religious scheme. As long as they can fuck you up emotionally, it doesn't matter how smart you are. You'll never have the strength to escape, no matter how loud the "dusty in your head" is yelling at you.
 I am aware of this, partly through research, and partly through experience. I have been an atheist since at least the age of 8 or 9 (though, at the time, I would not have had the words to express it, and never ever told anyone, for fear of my life). Still, because of the Catholic indoctrination I endured through the age of 17, I was almost 40 years old, before I was able to fully come to terms with my own sexuality, despite being openly agnostic, hostile toward organized religion, and not having set foot in a single church from the age of 17. Nearly 23 years. Suffering intense bouts of depression, self-isolation, and social anxiety along the way. 
 Religion is child abuse, not simply because parents tell lies to their children. But more centrally, because they smash up the very identity of their children, in order to replace it with a crazy-quilt semblance of their own smashed up selves. 
 We have generations of escape and recovery left to do, before we'll ever be able to call ourselves a healthy society.
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Rousseau's
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Rousseau's
@ -0,0 +1,207 @@
 	Date: 14 Aug 2014 00:43
 	Topic: Rousseau's Social Contract - Book 1
 	Modified: 26 Jan 2015 23:21
 Hello, and welcome to the inaugural episode of “An Amateur Reads...”, the show were an arm-chair philosopher takes on the heavy-hitters one chapter at a time, for your edification and amusement. 
 The book we’ll be exploring in this - the very first episode ever, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract”. You can find public domain copies of it everywhere, if you’d like to follow along with me. The total work is comprised of four sections (or ‘books’ as Rousseau called them), and each new episode in this series of shows will cover one of these sections. I’ll then do one final episode on the Social Contract as a whole, offering some closing thoughts and conclusions, before moving on to another author. 
 This episode, then, will focus on the first of the four “books”. In it, Rousseau describes the problem he’s trying to solve, and lays down the central tenets of the theory he believes is the solution to that problem. 
 So, let us begin:
 ---- ----
 ## Introduction: 
 > “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
 This famous opening line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s equally famous essay, appears, to our modern minds, to point clearly toward an obvious question: ‘Why?’ But this is not the question Rousseau has in mind. Instead, what he asks is, ‘Why not?’ 
 What I intend to show during this read-through, is that far from providing mankind with a blueprint for his own freedom, what Rousseau managed to forge with this document was nothing less than a new-fangled set of chains with which to shackle a mind slowly awakening from centuries of ancient bondage. But what makes this document especially brilliant, is the fact that Rousseau realized that the modern mind was no longer capable of being commanded to wear its chains; it needed to be flattered into  them, instead. The Social Contract, then, is one of history’s most magnificent seductions. 
 ## Book 1:
 In the introduction to Book 1, Rousseau is very kind enough to give us a clear and concise statement of his goal:
 > “I mean to inquire if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be. In this inquiry I shall endeavor always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided.”
 Considering the aforementioned chains of his opening line to Chapter 1, he asks, “_What can make it legitimate?_”, and he asserts confidently that he has the answer. 
 Jumping a little ahead for a moment, in Chapter 6, he restates his problem very specifically in this way:
 > ”The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." 
 And finally he proudly announces:
 > “This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.”
 But has Rousseau defined a real problem? What is that problem, exactly? And if so, is his confidence in his own solution to that problem really as justifiable as he makes it seem? Let’s continue, to see how he lays out the actual problem in more detail.
 ## Chapter 2: Early Societies and the Social Order
 > “ the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and so must therefore be founded on conventions [covenants]...“
 What does Rousseau mean by ‘social order’ and ‘sacred right’? There are hints in his stated goals. For Rousseau, civil order is a form of perfection of the human being. To be part of an organized social body raises man above the state of ‘state of nature’. But for him, it is not enough for this order to be a tool of progress. He assumes it to be an obligation, since it does appear to him better than his state of nature. What’s more, the only way to maintain this social order, is by imposing it, and the only way to justify the imposition, as he puts it, is by justifying the ‘conventions’ or ‘covenants’ that constitute it. 
 But he begins the argument, first, by explaining what he believes is the origin of social order, and freedom. 
 > “…The most ancient of all social orders, and the only one that is natural is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention… This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master...”
 So, in a natural state, children are ‘obligated’ to their parents by necessity of dependence. The voluntary association of adulthood admittedly entails no natural obligation; therefore, the obligation is a mere ‘convention’. What he’s implying thus far, is that absent that moral obligation, the association would have no stability. That children would turn on their fathers, if they thought it expedient, and chaos would reign. 
 In essence, then, social order is a ‘sacred right’, because stability and order is better than chaos and arbitrary violence. He’s constructed an incredibly dangerous straw man, and then argued for a moral obligation on the basis of frightening consequences where none exists. The straw man doesn’t really even have anything to do with the actual anthropology. It’s one he could have falsified for himself, if he’d taken the time to look around. Capriciousness is not a commonly observed trait in humans. Even in the 18th century. 
 But let’s assume his premise is true, for the moment: Men are arbitrary, self-centered, capricious, and incapable of moral calculations involving mutual benefit, beyond the short term. Well, then, even IF social order were a ’sacred right’, how could it ever even be possible? Beings capable of it apparently don’t exist in such a world.
 Rousseau goes on to draw a direct parallel between the family and the state. I’m not clear on why he did this. At first, it looked to me like an argument from analogy. But this is really the only place he does this, and later, as we’ll see, he says things that apparently contradict it.
 Also, As we saw at first, he declares that all men are born free. But in this chapter, he argues that we are born into a natural obligation, and only earn our freedom by means of natural independence from our parents. Later, we’ll see that he recasts this as no freedom at all, but a kind of slavery to appetite. This chapter, then, is the first of a long series of contradictions and equivocations on the nature of freedom, and on what obligations individuals owe to each other. 
 The last thing I want to point out, is that a century of work on the actual anthropology of early societies renders his atomistic and chaotic view of early humanity mostly naive and irrelevant. This by itself is not enough to invalidate the theory, but as we’ve seen, even granting him this, his statement of the problem is at best unclear, and at worst, a straw man erected for the sake of a rationalization.
 ## Chapter 3 & 4: Dealing with Contemporary Competitors
 Moving on, Rousseau then tries to tackle a couple common counter-arguments to the notion of rights. Both are essentially non-issues in the modern age, but what is interesting about them in context, is that Rousseau appears inconsistent about them.
 The first is that might makes right. He rightly rejects this, and provides an excellent refutation, arguing that the subjugated obey out of necessity rather than obligation, and to call that necessity an obligation is to simply misapply the term. 
 What is fascinating about the inclusion of this rejoinder, however, is that later on, Rousseau will himself attempt to make the converse argument for might from right, and argues that subjugation under such a regime is perfectly moral, and even relabels it as ‘freedom’. But more on this later, in Chapter 6.
 The second counter claim he takes on is the right of the conquerer to enslave the conquered. Clearly, we take this to be an antique notion. But I want to address a number of things he says in this chapter, that are both highly illustrative of the confusion in his own mind about his own theory, and fascinatingly supportive of the notion of pure voluntarism.
 The first thing he has to say in this chapter, is this:
 > “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions [i.e. ‘covenants’] form the basis of all legitimate authority among men.”
 Recall that “natural” for Rousseau means some form of dependency imposed by the nature of the individual (as in a child to his parent). Given this passage then, the book is basically done, yes? All human relations must be formed by voluntary agreements. End of story. But that’s not enough for him. If he were to stop here, he’d essentially invalidate all violent authority, and that’s exactly the opposite of his own stated goal. 
 Next, Rousseau introduces the idea of ‘alienation’, succinctly defining it as ‘to give or to sell’, and attempts to invalidate the notion of slavery on the grounds that a slave does not give himself, but sells himself, and the agreement involved in that sale makes no sense to him. This, to me, seems an unnecessarily complicated argument for what was already a perfectly simple moral objection: might does not make right, and the conquered are laboring under the yolk of might.
 But Rousseau needs this simple (perhaps naive) bifurcated definition of ‘alienation’ in order to make a palatable claim in the next chapter, as we shall see. But the very next passage is perhaps the most breathtaking of the chapter:
 > “…Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them, irrevocably and without conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimize an arbitrary government, that in every generation the people should be in a position to accept or reject it;...”
 What Rousseau is clearly stating here, without equivocation, is that under no circumstances, is a government legitimate upon which subsequent generations cannot pass their judgment. As we’ll see later, this seems to run counter to his own theory. But it also has other deeper implications. For example, if the framers of the Constitution (e.g. Madison and Hamilton) took this passage from Rousseau seriously, they would not have been making all those proclamations about posterity in the preamble. Yet, at the same time, Jefferson must have been aware of these concepts when he wrote in the Declaration those passages about the right of the people to dissolve the state (though this may also have been derived from Locke’s theory, which we’ll get to in a later series). 
 ## Chapter VI: The Social Compact
 This is the climax chapter, in which Rousseau finally feels confident enough to lay out the central thesis for us. Once again, he conveniently and succinctly formulates his problem for us:
 > “…I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
 > But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert...”
 As I’ve pointed out earlier, his view of early societies is purely speculative (as he admits himself, in an earlier essay called ‘Discourses On Inequality’), and grounded in any number of naive misconceptions about primitive peoples, and the way they lived. But even if this were not the case, even if there were some truly independent state in which individual humans had absolutely no need of each other, and even if only that need were sufficient justification for obligations, it still doesn’t follow that the human race would perish in the absence of a central authority that “maintained” it in some ideal order. In addition to a straw man, then, Rousseau has also constructed an obvious false dichotomy: surrender to a central authority, or perish alone in a hostile wilderness. This kind of caricature thinking should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s debated anarchy before. 
 So there are really no grounds on which to accept his claim that there is a problem that needs solving. But let’s grant him this, and see where he goes with it. Let’s grant that all he means is that humans are social animals, and that for their survival they require a social order. What does Rousseau offer as the correct form for this social order, and why? Famously, he asserts the following:
 > “…The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the _Social Contract_ provides the solution...”
 There are three basic complaints I have with this: First, why must this association be something other than a purely voluntary association? In the chapter on slavery he strongly suggests that such a form of association is entirely possible. Second, why would such an association need to be monolithic (i.e. why couldn’t a collection of voluntary associations confederate for their own mutual benefit?), and thirdly, Why does Rousseau seem to think he has the perfect knowledge to answer this question for all time, and in all places? 
 On the first question, Rousseau himself seems to be aware of the problem. Which is why he frames this as a conundrum. He seems to be confounded by the notion that an individual might be making a free choice, and yet choosing to subordinate some preferences to others, in order to remain in a group. Here we begin to see that Rousseau may have a straw man view of freedom, in which all desires and preferences necessarily have the same weight and priority.
 On the second question, Rousseau never full explains this necessity, but does touch on a few potential problems, such as associations with competing interests. However, he does this in the context of defending his monolith, not in defending disparate associations. So it doesn’t really answer the objection.
 On the third question, I don’t think any of the enlightenment thinkers can provide a sufficient explanation. Each has simply assumed his speculations about human nature to be a fact, and driven forward from there. With the single exception of morality itself, this problem is a spike in the heart of all social contractarians. And, we’ll see in a moment, that Rousseau is clearly consciously anxious about it.
 Nevertheless, he proudly describes the “contract”, as such:
 > “…The clauses of this contract... although they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized..., [and] properly understood, may be reduced to one--the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
 > Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
 > Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has....”
 How do we get from the basic problem of a group of individuals desiring common defense of their group, to a situation in which an individual is required to alienate himself but to not alienate himself? In which he loses his freedom but doesn’t lose his freedom? Rousseau offers no explanation. It just is. What’s more, these are bald face contradictions. We’ve entered the realm of the imaginary, now. Where words suddenly mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean. In my view, this is a crude form of verbal gymnastics. 
 At this point, I would normally stop reading, and no longer treat a theory seriously. Clever philosophers will call the words in these passages an entertaining “paradox”. I am not clever. I can only see contradictions, and any theory grounded at its root on a contradiction, cannot, by force of the laws of logic, be true.
 But let us be charitable, and proceed as if Rousseau were simply being clever and paradoxical. His burden, then, is to unwind these paradoxes, and show me how his conception of social organization is not wholly Orwellian. As we move forward, though, you’ll see things only get worse.
 Before we do move forward, though, there are a few additional objections I want to unpack at this point: The notion of ‘total alienation’ is the claim that a person can give himself, as if he were an item of value, in exchange for an equal value. But this notion is patently absurd. Let’s just assume the validity of self-ownership, for the moment. Even in such a situation, one cannot surrender ownership of oneself, even if one wanted to. This would be the equivalent of surrendering control of your eyeballs to someone else’s consciousness. Clearly, this initial act isn’t even a material possibility. So how it could be the basis for a voluntary contract, I am entirely unclear.
 Second, the claim about competing rights. Again, let us simply assume the validity of ‘rights’ for the sake of his argument. This claim is very important to keep in mind for later, when we get to his discussion of property and other rights (in the subsequent books). He is unequivocal here. No individual can retain any rights whatsoever, because no superior could exist within this contract that could provide an objective adjudication of which rights should remain with the individual, and which with the group. This is also interesting to think about in the context of the modern era. Many totalitarian states have taken their inspiration from philosophers who took their inspiration from Rousseau. 
 Moving on: at last, from the dirt of this collective act of ‘total alienation’, Rousseau conjures up the homunculus he names “General Will”: 
 > “…If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms-- ‘Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.’
 > At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons...”
 In this final flourish of fantastical imagination, Rousseau gives birth to a “moral body” and a “public person”, composed of the individuals who ‘alienated’ themselves, and are now bound to remain as ‘indivisible parts’ in perpetuity, or until this imaginary person decides to incise the part. 
 He never shows by example or argument that this emergent will actually exists. He simply asserts it. He doesn’t explain why it’s moral, except to insist that it must be, since the individual members of it are moral - a sort of compositional fallacy - and as we shall see later, has trouble actually explaining the difference between it, and mere mob rule. 
 This macabre beast, concocted out of one part excusable ignorance, one part inexcusable sloppy thinking, one part fantastical imagination, and one part classical European hubris, is far from being a proof of any kind. What this is, is a fictional invention. One who’s characteristics Rousseau devotes enormous energy describing in the next chapter. Where he has observed these characteristics in reality, I do not know.
 ## CHAPTER VII: THE SOVEREIGN, OR: HOW FAST CAN THE URUKAI RUN?
 In chapter VII, Rousseau relabels his ‘general will’, or ‘body politic’, as ‘The Sovereign’. In essence, giving a name to his imaginary “moral person”. And he asserts of this person, “_The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, it is always what it should be... drawing its being wholly from the sanctity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to an outsider, to do anything derogatory to the original act, for instance, to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another Sovereign. Violation of the act by which it exists would be self-annihilation; and that which is itself nothing can create nothing…_”
 In other words, no matter how the whole group acts, or what rules are to be imposed upon the members of the group, or what the group expresses, it will always express it, act it, or obey it, as a whole, and cannot do otherwise. What is he talking about? No groups in all of human history have ever behaved this way. This is pure utopianism. He’s simply ascribing characteristics to his invention. Like, how fast can the Urukai run? 
 Rousseau recognizes this obvious inconsistency, and so, decides to simply acknowledge it openly. How nice of him:
 > “In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding the moral person which constitutes the State as a _persona ficta,_ because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfill the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.”
 So, any particular will that is in conflict with the general will is by definition not part of the general will and by its very existence, a threat to the general will. Well, that’s accommodating. How does he deal with this conflict? Let’s see:
 > “In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. **This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free;** for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.”
 Wow. Seriously? :|  
 I think at this point, Rousseau must have just said “fuck it, if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll accept anything!” He’s clearly engaged in a moment of unreserved projection. He asserts that any individual who refuses to submit to the group will be forced to obey, and brazenly relabels this ‘freedom’. Then, he just flatly asserts that to do the opposite would be ’tyrannical’. 
 I think my head is going to explode. As much as I trumpet the Principle of Charity, this is the point at which I can no longer withhold my incredulity. There are only so many times a philosopher can insist that black is white, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, before I get suspicious. 
 But wait, my friends. It gets worse. Yes, my friends. Much worse.
 ## CHAPTER VIII - THE CIVIL STATE : OR, ONCE MORE WITH FEELING!
 In this chapter, Rousseau decides to revisit both of his straw men one last time, and to add more vivid and contrasting colors to them. Now, in addition to the creation of the imaginary friend the “Sovereign”, the Social Contract also magically produces a moral and personal transformation in each human being, which is in contrast to the dismal and wretched beasts we were, before we freely, and joyously gave of ourselves to this new body:
 > “…The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does _man_, who so far had considered only himself, finds that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man...”
 Well, hot dog! Where do I sign! Utopia is the place for me! The degree to which these hyperbolic fugues have escalated since the beginning of the essay should be a clear sign to the reader that poor Jean-Jacques was the least convinced of his own scheme.
 Lastly, as an aside, in his final depiction of the core theory, Rousseau decides to further clarify his definition of ‘natural’ liberty, ‘civil’ liberty, and again insists that the state of nature is worse than the latter. This time, however, he uses the occasion to introduce us to yet another dichotomy. That of the difference between “possession” and “proprietorship”. The idea of property, that is:
 > “…Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.”
 This then, is his lead-in to the final chapter of this book, and the next major fissure in the idea, as we shall see.
 Finally, he briefly glosses over what, in my mind, is the missing lynch-pin in all of the various theories of “civil society”: the origin of moral authority. 
 > “…We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty. But I have already said too much on this head, and the philosophical meaning of the word liberty does not now concern us.”
 Really? The philosophical meaning of liberty doesn’t concern us? You’ve been on about it since the beginning of the essay. Couldn’t you at least take a little time to explain why you get to use it in so many clearly contorted ways, here (‘moral’ liberty, ‘civil’ liberty, ‘natural’ liberty)? Sure, I’ve read Discourses on Equality. But nothing in this essay suggests that he still holds to the concepts and definitions he used there. In fact, much of it suggests that he’s moved on to much different views, in many ways. So... how about a little help here, Rousseau? I guess not.
 ## CHAPTER IX - REAL PROPERTY : OR, FORGET EVERYTHING I SAID BEFORE
 This chapter is one of the worst of the entire set of 4 books. Thankfully, it is the last chapter we have to deal with, in this video. In this chapter, Rousseau contradicts his assertion that no individual rights are possible in the Social Contract, contradicts his assertion in the previous chapter that first occupancy is not enough to establish ownership, and further entrenches the problem of the hereditary state. 
 > “…Each member of the community gives himself to it, at the moment of its foundation, just as he is, with all the resources at his command, including the goods he possesses...”
 This is fine for those who enter into the compact voluntarily at the outset, for example, the signers of the Magna Carta, or the Mayflower Compact, or the Declaration of Independence. But what about those who don’t wish to join your little club, and what about successive generations? What choice do they have? Since they have not made the choice to give of themselves voluntarily, will they still be “forced to be free”? No answers to these questions are forthcoming.
 Following on that, he then attempts to restate what he said in chapter VIII, only with exceptions:
 > “…This act does not make possession, in changing hands, change its nature, to become property in the hands of the Sovereign; but, as the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession is also, in fact, stronger and more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate...”
 So, he concedes that it is mere possession, and then insists that because the state is really, really powerful, it might as well just be considered property. In fact, he goes one step further, and simply asserts that all property is now the property of the state, and that it is the only “person” that can own property. Somehow, now, the Sovereign now has properties that the members do not have.
 > “…For the State, in relation to its members, is master of all their goods by the social contract, which, within the State, is the basis of all rights; but, in relation to other powers, it is so only by the right of the first occupier, which it holds from its members...”
 And then, not more than one paragraph later, he reverses himself, and asserts, well, yes, individuals do have the right of first occupier, but only if they do certain things. It’s like some kind of magic ritual of “labor and cultivation”, in which the right is transferred from the state to the individual:
 > “…In general, to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of ground, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others, in default of a legal title....”
 CONCLUSION TO BOOK 1:
 So, after rising to orgasmic heights in chapters 6, 7 and 8, we’re left with a pack of smokes and a bag full of contradictions in chapter 9. 
 In reading this particular book, I just couldn’t help but see the parallels to George Orwell’s 1984. Perhaps this is just a prejudice of my individualistic upbringing. But I don’t think so. Time and again, Rousseau obfuscates definitions, reverses them, and even consciously contradicts them. And yet, the reader is expected to hold his tongue, bind it in the Principle Of Charity, and treat Rousseau as something more than the grifting con-man that he was. 
 At the outset of this book, Rousseau set forth one challenge for himself: to justify the presence of a centrally coercive authority within society. So far, all he’s given us is an imaginary boogie-man of which we are supposed to be terrified, and as a solution, he’s offered the grandiose vision of exalted souls bound into one mystical body, gladly giving of themselves for ‘the greater good’. 
 I’m certain we’ve all heard this particular story before. We are, all of us, sinners before god, and the only salvation is to give of ourselves to mother church, who will deliver us, through Jesus Christ, to heaven, and away from our nasty, brutish, fate in hell.
 Books two and three will be next. I will be skimming these for the most part, since they are primarily concerned with the structural details of his ideal state, as compared to existing forms. I have no interest in nit-picking the biology of the Urukai. However, we will be diving deep again, in Book 4, where Rousseau vacillates on the basic definition of the ‘general will’, and contradicts himself about it’s destructibility. 
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Scrap
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Scrap
@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
 Date: 14 Aug 2014 22:37
 Topic: Scrap Notes on Rousseau
 Modified: 26 Jan 2015 23:26
 in my examination of this work, is three things:
 	* First, that Rousseau fails at his own stated goals, which are as follows:
 		* To prove “if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and 
 			legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and 
 			laws as they might be.”
 		* “to find a form of association which will defend and 
 			protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, 
 			and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, 
 			and remain as free as before."
 	* Second, that he could not possibly have succeeded, because of:
 		* the internal inconsistencies in his own thinking, and
 		* the excusable ignorance of his day. 
 	* Third, that the any attempt at such a project (a “social contract”) is doomed to failure, because:
 		* It is superfluous
 		* It presumes, and requires, perfect knowledge
 		* It is undefinable (Rousseau’s own construction points to what is actually present in his day,
 			and asserts “This is a form of social contract” no matter what the constitution, 
 			and then self-servingly asserts “They’re doin’ it wrong”, in order to invalidate it in favor
 			of his ideal. He can’t have it both ways.)
 ----
--- a/skeptarchist-essays/Why
+++ b/skeptarchist-essays/Why
@ -0,0 +1,156 @@
 # Why The UBI Is A Really Bad Idea
 ## Free Money For Everyone
 Over the last year or so, I've seen a number of [fresh videos]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okx60F3eHpo) [popping up]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) in places like [TED]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0), enthusiastically championing a resuscitated old leftist public policy idea called the ["Universal/Unconditional Basic Income"]()(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income), or "UBI". This summer, Switzerland is [scheduled to hold a referendum]()(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-will-be-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vote-on-having-a-national-wage-of-1700-a-month-a6843666.html) on one such proposal. And, earlier this month, I attended a [lecture here in London]()(http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/), in which [Barb Jacobson]()(http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/) made a vigorous pitch for the idea. Since this has suddenly become a hobby horse for the left again, I think it's time to have a good hard look at it. To start, I'm going to let the proponents of the concept define and describe it for us:
 > "*A lump sum of income, that is distributed unconditionally -- without any strings attached -- to every person in a country, every month... What is the goal?... Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate to the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services [UDHR #25]()(http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)...*"  Federico Pistono(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4#t=8m40s)
 So, according to Federico, it's a payment equal to the amount of resources necessary to satisfy the standard set by the UN Declaration Of Human Rights. And while Rutger Bregman doesn't mention the UNDHR explicitly, he seems to agree with this conception in principle:
 > "*A monthly grant; enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. That's it... in the first place, it's universal. Everyone would get it. Whether you're a billionaire, or a beggar... The basic income is a right. A right, as a citizen of your country.*"  Rutger Bregman(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aILY9g7Tg0#t=2m56s)
 But there are [those here in the UK]()(http://citizensincome.org/) who argue for a much more circumspect version of this idea. One that looks a lot more like traditional welfare. While it is "unconditional", in the sense that the payments would be issued without rules for usage, they're certainly not universal, and they're most decidedly not intended to provide you with enough money for "your basic needs":
 > "*Essentially... giving every adult £3,700 per year unconditionally, with up to £4,300 per year for each child in 2012 prices. A family of three with a child under the age of 5, would receive in the range of £11,000 per year. Universal payment. Unconditional. This replaces all tax credits, child benefits, and tax allowances. however, it would not replace the National Living Wage*"  Anthony Painter, RSA(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkO2CwLWRvg)
 [This article in The Independent]()(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/replace-the-benefits-system-with-a-universal-basic-income-paid-to-all-citizens-think-tank-recommends-a6777101.html) also clarifies that the payment would be taxed back from you once you earned more than £75,000. Barb Jacobson described something similar in an interview, and referenced the RSA plan in her talk at Conway:
 > "*A regular payment, made to everybody, unconditionally. And that's it. ([Source: Youtube]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi-WtoTWjho))... Basic Income - that is to say, a payment to every individual regardless of worth or means... in this country, there are several models. Most of them have been done by Citizens Income Trust. They're based on the income tax system... The RSA has just come out with a model which is about 80 pounds a week...*"  Barb Jacobson(http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/)
 ## Monorail, Monorail, Monorail
 While proponents of UBI struggle to produce consistent or detailed plans that realize [the core principles of a UBI]()(http://www.usbig.net/pdf/manyfacesofubi.pdf), they do not hesitate to make many enthusiastic claims of the amazing beneficial effects it will have on society, regardless of those details. It's going [eliminate income inequality]()(https://medium.com/basic-income/inequality-and-the-basic-income-guarantee-c8f84d936640#.eppq18c1v). It's going to ["create social cohesion"]()(http://citizensincome.org/citizens-income/how-does-it-work/). It's going to [drastically reduce poverty]()(http://www.parncutt.org/BIFT1.html). It's going to [eliminate waste, fraud, and corruption]()(http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/) in government. It's going to ["strengthen democracy"]()(https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/). It's going to [improve the health of the population]()(http://basicincome.org.uk/2013/08/health-forget-mincome-poverty/). It's going to [encourage entrepreneurship and technological innovation]()(https://www.crunch.co.uk/blog/small-business-advice/2016/01/11/will-a-basic-income-turn-us-all-into-entrepreneurs/). It's going to [stimulate the economy]()(https://thebigpoliticalparty.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/unconditional-basic-income-is-an-economic-stimulus-everybody-wins/). It's going to ["liberate" everyone]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi2tnbtpEvA). It's going to [reduce unemployment]()(http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004WattsMitchell.pdf). It's going to [rescue us from environmental catastrophe]()(http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-save-earth-and-human-life-guaranteed-income). It's going to [promote gender equality]()(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/payback-time-for-women.html?_r=0). It's going to [improve education levels]()(http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/basic-income-9781472583116/), [protect us against the robots]()(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9758f1a-e9c0-11e5-888e-2eadd5fbc4a4.html#axzz45zJfS1vw) and on, and on.
 Given how spectacularly effective this social medicine sounds, how could anyone in his right mind be opposed to it? Even if there are potential risks or unknown costs, surely they can't be that bad when weighed against all these amazing benefits. So, of course, I'm on board with this, right?
 Well, not quite. Having read all these articles and listened to the lectures, I'm struck by the fact that nobody is really offering any actual evidence in support of these amazing claims. And, at the risk of overusing a cliché, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of *course* I would be in favor of something that simultaneously eliminated poverty, protected the environment, increased entrepreneurship, and brought justice and fairness to the entire world. But this is like saying I'm in favor of Superman. In case you weren't sure: *Superman is imaginary*.
 Numerous obvious (and somewhat naive) objections have been thrown at this idea. Most of them are actually hoisted up and shot down handily by the proponents themselves, in an attempt to lend some superficial credibility to it. Objections like, "[Wouldn't this produce a generation of work-shy couch potatoes?]()(http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/matt-zwolinski/pragmatic-libertarian-case-basic-income-guarantee)", or "[Isn't this just Communism?]()(http://gaurarader.com/2014/07/14/basic-income-is-a-viable-path-to-realizing-the-goals-of-communism-a-form-of-common-ownership-a-classless-society-and-an-end-to-the-dominance-relationships-and-alienation-produced-by-capitalism/)" These are not really objections, so much as they're just conditioned reactions. The impulses people respond with, when confronted by ideas they find strange and threatening. But there are serious problems with the idea that remain almost entirely unanswered. I am going to focus on the three I find most significant: Morality, Cost, and Economics 101.
 ## We're All Consequentialists Now...
 The first of my objections is a moral one (there are actually several moral objections, but I am going to focus on the one I view as the most significant). This is typically waved away as "storytelling" or "ideology". [Federico Pistono]()(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) does this, for example, and asserts that it doesn't matter what your *a priori* moral objection is, if the idea actually accomplishes a goal that is particularly noble in his estimation (e.g., satisfying article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, the only good is the good of a particular set of outcomes he and his supporters prefer.
 What Federico may not realize consciously (I am trying to be charitable) is that he's smuggled in his own moral argument in an attempt to refute another moral argument, by asserting that certain desirable outcomes are more important than mere morality. He chastises his cloud of unnamed acquaintences for their archaic devotion such silliness, but then proudly argues for a form of moral Consequentialism. For those who aren't quite sure what that means: *The Ends Justify The Means*. For the more astute viewer, you may have picked up on the muddled blend of [Mohism]()(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism), [Utilitarianism]()(http://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/), and [Motive Consequentialism]()(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism#Motive_consequentialism) embedded in Federico's impassioned plea. To Federico's credit, he admitted that he was unsure whether the goal was actually achievable by means of the UBI. But this only makes his argument much worse. It utterly defangs his excuse for a deplorable and utterly unecessary double-standard.
 But, let's set aside the explicit problems with *his* moral position in particular for a moment, because what's really at issue here is whether or not we can determine the moral implications of an idea like UBI, at all. In other words, what *is* immoral about a universal basic income, if (and that's a big if) the outcome is something desirable?
 To address that question, we need to go back to basics. Morality is a particular kind of *judgment of human actions* that categorizes them according to normative standards. In other words, it judges behaviors that are "good" or "bad", or tells us what "should" or "shouldn't" be acted out. Moral philosophy, or ethics, is the study and systematization of these judgments. One intellectual product of the discipline of ethics is the notion of political "rights". A right is something akin to a "principle" encapsulating a rule governing how agents of the state ought to behave with respect to the citizens they rule over. Federico made an appeal to just such a rule, when he referenced article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (ironically, yet another attempt to smuggle morality into a discussion he claimed was not about morality).
 Even if we stipulate to the validity of "rights" as a logical concept, and to the legal relevance (jurisdiction) of the UNDHR (Federico's standard for ideal consequences), and to the validity of article 25 in particular (those of us who were schooled in the American legal tradition will probably not do this easily), there is still a major problem for Federico. You see, we have been granted other rights in that UN Declaration. Rights that stand in direct contradiction to any attempt at enacting the principle of article 25. Article three grants me the "right to _life, liberty, and security of person_". Article four grants me the right not to be "held in _slavery or servitude_". Article seven grants me "_equal protection_ under the law". And, finally, article 17 explicitly grants me "the _right to own property_ alone as well as in association with others..." and further asserts that I shall not "be arbitrarily _deprived of [my]() property_".
 One could argue that since these all come in the top 20, and they all come well before article 25, surely they hold a higher precedence than article 25. But even if we were to accept that every article is of absolutely equal weight and importance, all it leaves us with is an irreconcilable contradiction. The state must both confiscate my property, and not confiscate it. The state must enslave me to fulfil its duty, and must not enslave me to fulfil its duty. The state must violate my security of person, but must not violate it.
 At the center of all of these swirling contradictions, of course, is the widely ignored fact that the state does not produce wealth. It appropriates wealth. And it does so by the active application of force and the threat of force. It has many excuses for doing so, among them "redistribution", a euphemism for the forcible taking of property from one person, in order to give it to another. There are three ways in which the state can act out its power to take property: taxation, borrowing, or the printing of fiat currency. In all three cases, fundamentally, it is the forcible taking of property. The subject of borrowing and printing I'll address in my next objection, but the true nature of taxation should be fairly obvious even to anyone new to the workforce.
 This is the moral argument that folks like Federico are really trying to make. Not that, "it is morally good to give everyone some amount of property, whether they are justified in receiving it or not", but rather, "it is morally good to *take* some amount of property from everyone, whether the state is morally justified in taking it or not". For Federico, this is where the Utilitarianism comes in handy. Because once we get down to the bare facts of the relationship, idealists like Federico are left with nothing but a bald-faced *ex post facto* rationalization for their desire to take stuff that doesn't belong to them: they think they can dispose of it better, more wisely, more justly, and more compassionately, than you can. And, if he can wrap that rationalization in fantastical tales of a utopian future, and obfuscating language like "*[the greatest good for the greatest number]()(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham)*", why, he can even make his theft sound like a profoundly noble act. He can become his generation's social justice Superman.
 But, ironically, he's already openly admitted that he's not even certain whether the consequences he desires are possible, let alone reasonably achievable (I concur with this assessment, as we'll see in my subsequent objections). But what this means, in effect, is that he's willing to wield the gun of the state to act out a theft that he's *not even certain will result in a desirable outcome*. What utter madness. Federico chides us constantly to avoid moral storytelling, and to rely on empirical data, and yet cannot see the moral story he is telling himself. Federico's boyish smile and youthful enthusiasm are little comfort when all he can offer is riches in the progressive afterlife for a present-day of almost certain Utilitarian suffering.
 > "*God save us from people who mean well.*"  Vikram Seth
 ## Just A Few Easy Installments...
 "Yes but," you might say, "the moral argument is moot, because after all, we're already taxing and borrowing for loads of other reasons. So, why not simply accept it, and resign yourself to trying to improve the efficiency of the system we have?" Libertarians seem to [like asking this question a lot]()(http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income) these days (I think they've given up).
 How do we know this would actually "increase the efficiency" of the system (whatever that even means)? Sure, it would nominally eliminate agencies and jobs devoted to vetting and means testing, where certain benefits are eliminated -- *if* they actually got eliminated. But if you actually look at the proposals in the pipeline now, none of them are unconditional or universal. All of them put limits on the funding that would require data collection for the purpose of filtering out those who do not qualify, and some would even include a back-handed means test that would put the burden of reclaiming distributions on tax collection agencies. So, it's not at all clear to me that this would eliminate bureaucracy or improve "efficiency".
 But let's think about what it would take to implement an *actual* UBI; one that satisfies all the criteria: universal, unconditional, uniform, individual, and sufficient for "basic needs". That last criteria is an especially tough one to define. What are "basic needs"? The list can be as sparse as [nothing but emergency essentials]()(http://canatx.org/basicneeds/backup/documents/1999Assessment/basicneeds99whatarebasicneeds.html): temporary food, shelter, and clothing. Or, they can [include all of the social services provided by the state today]()(http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/basic-human-needs-what-are-they-really): education, healthcare, transportation, and many other goods and services. Again, there's no clear picture of what the proponents of UBI are talking about. Which should be a huge warning signal.
 Since the purpose of the payment is intentionally unspecified, and the disbursment is unconditional, I'm not sure why the proponents of this idea feel compelled to casually enumerate its "basic need" uses for us. Perhaps they think it makes us feel better to think of the money being used for those things, instead of on prostitutes, drugs, video games, amusement park tickets, or comic books? They often make a concerted effort in their lectures to argue that nobody would spend the money on those other things. But why? If I can spend the money in any way I wish, who cares if I spend it on a sack of staple rice, or a trip to Disneyland?
 In any case, if we stick with the phrase "basic needs", then we do have a universal rubrik we could use as a real-world mechanism for determining the size of this payment: The state's official "poverty line", below which it argues, "basic needs" are not achievable. In the UK, there is actually something heavily promoted (though, not yet officially adopted), called a "minimum income standard". This number is supposed to represent the minimum income necessary for the satisfaction of "basic needs".
 So, let's do some math. The [JRF]()(https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/minimum-income-standard-uk-2015) and [minimumincome.org]()(http://www.minimumincome.org.uk/results) both place this number at somewhere around £17,000 per year for an individual. Since the [median income across all of Britain]()(https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours) is roughly £25,000, I'm willing to accept the MIS at face value. But we should be aware that this sort of generalization will make some folks appear extremely comfortable, and others appear nearly destitute by comparison, [depending on exactly where they live in the UK]()(http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc126/). Still, for the sake of the general argument, let's just go with the £17,000.
 According to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK]()(https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates), the total population in the UK is about 64.5 million. This includes adults, children, and legal foreign national residents. If we take the UBI at its word, and take it seriously, it should be simply a matter of multiplying this number by the minimum income standard, to get a figure for the whole country. That would come to just a shave over 1.095 trillion pounds. That should give Brits some pause. The current total [national budget for the entire UK]()(http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/government_expenditure.html) is £759 Billion. So, a proper UBI would balloon total government expenditures to nearly £2 trillion.
 So, what would it take to collect 1.095 trillion in taxes from the working population of Britain? Well, let's do some more math. Again, according to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK]()(http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/march2016) the number of employed adults in the UK is roughly 31.4 million. if we divide our earlier number by this one, we get a figure of £33,917 in taxes, per working adult.
 That's right. In order for the entire population of the UK to take home £327 per week (the unofficial minimum basic income), those of us who work for a living would need to be taxed at a rate of £657 per week. Welcome to Cloud-Cuckoo Land, my friends.
 However, he RSA claims [its proposal]()(https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) would only come to £30 billion. This is nowhere near the naive figures we've been working with above. How is this possible? Well, to begin with, despite what they strenuously claim, [the RSA proposal]()(https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) isn't really universal or unconditional. It's also not "basic". For starters, it only comes to £71 per week (£3,692 per year). Which is nowhere near the commonly accepted definition of a "basic income". Worse yet, even at this rather meager sum, the total cost still comes to roughly £238 billion. So, what else is going on here? Surprise, surprise, the "unconditional income" comes with LOADS of conditions:
 * You must be between the age of 25 and 65. Apparently, they want to let the public pension system bureaucrats know that the RSA won't be a threat. This also means 18-25 year olds are not considered legal adults by the RSA.
 * However, if you are 18-25, you could sign what is essentially an indentured servitude contract, whereby you would "contribute" to your "community" as a *condition* of your payment. Paradoxically, the RSA insists that the state would do no monitoring or enforcement of these contracts. So I'm not sure at all how they'd stop you from taking your payment if you simply lied about "contributing".
 * You have to enroll in the electoral political system here (i.e., you have to be a registered voter), in order to qualify for a payment.
 * If you are an EU citizen, you would have to "pay in" to the system for a number of years, before you could begin collecting.
 * If you are a legal resident but a non-EU citizen (e.g., a US Citizen), you are ineligible for a payment.
 * If you earn more than £75,000, your benefit would be refused or taxed back away from you, in graduated steps.
 This effectively reduces the population of "qualified recipients" to about 8 or 9 million people (less than one-fifth of the 45 million legally registered UK Citizens). Which, of course, comes out to about £30 billion in new expenditures.
 In otherwords, what we see being promoted heavily in the UK is not a "universal basic income" at all, but something else entirely. First and foremost, it is tool for social engineering, and for artificially constructing a new welfare constituency for the power elite. It is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating young people into participating in a political system they instinctively recognize as corrupt and opposed to their best interests (and who express that instinct by refusing to particpate).
 It is also yet another attempt at fomenting class resentment for the sake of income redistribution. I've avoided covering anything in [Ms. Jacobson's lecture]()(http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/) up to this point, precisely because it was nothing more than a lazy, old-world Marxist anti-wealth screed. Rather than actually making an argument *in favor* of UBI, she spent the entire 25 minute lecture railing against the abuses of "wealthy property holders", the deriding the idea of the Protestent Work Ethic -- something nobody has been seriously defending for decades. But Jacobson did this, because she knew her audience: Elderly, old-world Marxist pseudo-intellectuals. People easily manipulated by class resentment. And this is the real core of the purpose of a UBI, at least as defined here in the UK (and I'd suspect pretty much everywhere).
 The RSA Proposal is an attempt to convert the new, young tech economy into the same kind of easily manipulated political constituency that the public sector and the unionized working-class represented in the 20th century. When political elites have direct control over your income, you're going to become very conscious of who those elites are. You're going to suddenly have a stake in politics, because you're going to be more or less controlled by it. And, given the choice, you're going to use that involvement to choose the gentle master over the harsh one, again and again. The RSA wants to position itself as the new "good cop", in our "good cop, bad cop" representative democracy.
 I could repeat the analysis above with any number of other proposals from different countries and different organizations, but it would be redundant and boring. The basic tactic is always the same: a constant evasive oscillation between class resentment and lowered expectations, in an attempt to gain political power.
 > "*There's no such thing as a free lunch*"  Milton Friedman (nominally)
 ## The Physics Of Trade
 This brings me to my last objection to the concept of a UBI. Continuing my theme of grade school levels of finance, it comes in the form of a basic tutorial in economics. One of the things I find most astonishing about the proponents of UBI, is just how ignorant they are of what an "**income**" really is. To illustrate this, I think it's time I told a story:
 Let's imagine a world in which the idea of currency -- either as a physical commodity, or as a fiat paper means of exchange -- hasn't even been thought of yet. It's essentially a barter society: everyone trades goods and labor in kind with each other. Let's further imagine a town square in this world, in which there are four shops: Bob's Bakery, Sean's Shoes, Sally's Sewing, and Mike's Meats.
 One morning, Bob walks into Sean's shop and asks, "Hey Sean, my shoes are getting pretty beat up. Can I get a new pair by Friday?"
 "Sure Bob," Sean replied, "problem is, I don't really need bread right now. I've still got at least a week's worth in my larder."
 Bob thought a moment, then pulled out a slip of paper and pen, and wrote on the paper: "Bob owes Sean 5 loaves and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime." Bob handed the paper to Sean, with an eager smile.
 "I see," Sean said taking the paper from Bob, "I think that'll work. I know you're good for it!"
 "Thanks, Sean! I'll be back at the end of the week for the shoes", Bob responded as he exited Seans shop.
 The next day, Sally walked into Bob's bakery, and handed Bob the familiar slip of paper. Only, Sean's name had been scratched out, and Sally's had been written in above it.
 "I don't understand?", Bob said, confused and a little startled.
 "Oh, sorry," Sally explained, "Sean needed his shirt mended, but I didn't need any shoes. So, he gave me your IOU instead."
 Bob hesitated a moment, then said, "Hmm... I guess this is ok. I'll go have chat with Sean later today.", and gave Sally her weekly bread order.
 An hour later, Mike the butcher entered Bob's shop.
 "What's up, Mike?", Bob asked.
 "Oh, hi Bob! Here!", Mike extended his hand, and passed Bob a slip of paper. It read, in Sean's handwriting, "Bob owes Mike 5 loaves of bread and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime."
 "Hey! What? I don't owe you anything!", Bob exclaimed.
 "That's not what Sean says", Mike snickered.
 Bob stormed out of his shop, marched quick-step down the street, and pushed his way through Sean's front door.
 "What the hell is going on here, Sean? What's the meaning of this?", Bob yelled as he tossed Mike's note at Sean.
 "But Bob," Sean slowly began, "EVERYBODY needs bread, yes?"....
 The point of this story, for those of you a little slow on the uptake, is to highlight exactly what is happening when we give each other money -- and what happens, when that money loses its meaning. I can't believe this is something that needs to be explained to full grown adults, but apparently, nobody understands it anymore.
 Dollars and pounds are not little magic scrolls with arcane incantations written on them that make goods and services just suddenly appear out of the Cloud-Cuckoo dimension. They represent a finite and well-defined exchange of value between individuals. When I give you a dollar, I am giving you a dollar's worth of some labor I've done for someone else, or a dollars worth of some real good that I've given to someone else. To complete the interaction, you give me a dollar's worth of some labor or good. That is called a transaction. Like value exchanged for like, the value of which is negotiated between two individuals.
 And this gets us back to the beginning of this essay. When you ask the state to give you money for no other reason than that you are breathing, you are essentially asking it to take something of value from someone else, and give it to you. As I said before, the state does not create value, it can only appropriate it.
 So, when [Rutger Bregman][54] proudly announces that he wants "Free Money For Everyone", what he's really saying, is that he wants to take property from someone somewhere, in order to give it to someone else, somewhere else. He wants to be Sean, handing out forged IOU's from Bob's shop, because he's compassionate like that.
 There are three ways a state can appropriate value from its citizens:
 _The state can print it:_ One cannot multiply the amount of value in an economy simply by multiplying the number of slips of paper representing value. So, when the state does this, the *real thing* that the slips of paper represent gets smaller in comparison. The slip of paper represents less and less of the actual product or labor it was meant to represent. This is called inflation. The real amount of value in the world now, goes down. The only way to fix this, is to increase the amount of actual *valued* products and labor being exchanged in an economy.
 _The state can borrow it:_ This is essentially the appropriation of value from other economies, or from the future, in order to use it in the present in the local economy. But what happens if the lender (or the future) is never repaid? The real amount of value in the world goes down again, only we don't notice it right away. It is a sort of invisible inflation. One in which empty promises replace currencies that have already replaced real goods and services. Eventually someone's descendants are rendered utterly impoverished. The Dickensian horror that the left loves to scare us with is something they are creating, with the very schemes they claim are designed to prevent such a thing.
 _The state can tax it directly:_. As I've already discussed at length in the previous objection, taxation is the most visible form of appropriation. The RSA plan actually goes further than just income taxes (it proposes a restructured "progressive" tax rate scheme), including various forms of property taxation as well. While this would shrink the size of that £657 per week income tax bill, it is still extracting value out of real goods: If you take my spare bedroom away from me, I cannot use it as an art studio. If you tax my business equipment, I won't have enough to buy additional equipment or hire new employees. And so forth. The fewer resources at my disposal, the less creative I will be. The real amount of value in the world not only goes down, it *can never be fully realized*.
 This is essentially a human physical limitation of economy. A "law of economic physics", if you will. And, the more we crawl up our own asses and refuse to accept the reality of what we're doing to ourselves, the worse it will get. The harder and harder you work at taking other peoples' things, without negotiating a genuine exchange of real value, the less and less real value there will be for *anyone*.
 Fundamentally, if you look hard enough at ideas like Universal Basic Income, you realize what they really are. Far from creating a society of "universal economic suffrage", we are enslaving ourselves to a world "universal economic servitude".
 > “*The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.*” Frédéric Bastiat
 [54]:	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0#t=2m56s
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 # An Open Letter To The Conway Ethical Society
 Whenever my wife and I move to a new place in which we're planning to stay for a long time, we work hard to make ourselves an active part of the community. We're fairly introverted people, but we do care about the places we live in. We study both the local pop and the high culture, we get involved in social and professional activities, and we especially like finding opportunities to grow intellectually and emotionally, so that we can offer something back to the community in return for our stay. 
 So, when we moved to north London in December, one of the first things we committed ourselves to, was attending the Sunday morning lectures at Conway Hall. Our first, was the Peter Cresswell presentation on February 7. Given the credentials and career of the speaker, and having some awareness of the difficulty of the subject matter, I expected this to be challenging enough that I even took some time to brush up on my layman's knowledge of biblical textual criticism, before attending. Turns out, I didn't need to.
 Cresswell did a decent enough job of providing an overview of the thesis of his latest book. But that's basically where the challenge ended. During question time, any query that actually pressed him to defend his theory was met with nothing more than verbal shrugs. The remainder of the time was spend giving audience members extended opportunities to bloviate on their own views of religion. This left me quite baffled and a little frustrated. But, I thought, maybe this was just a one-off. They're having a bad week. I should reserve judgment until more data is collected.
 So, after a short pause, we returned in March. This time, to see Derek Bates speak. Derek's performance was quite shocking, actually - both in terms of the quality of his "argument", and in the quality of his presentation of that argument. He had almost nothing of substance to say, and didn't know how to say it. I won't go on anymore about it now, because I've already had a lot to say [here][1]. I'll just point out that question time - yet again - turned into nothing more than a time-sharing platform for regulars to pontificate on matters with which they had little to no expertise. But still, I thought to myself, maybe it's just the speaker. Maybe the group is struggling with focus issues right now. Maybe things will improve in the spring. As the weather warms, perhaps the meetings will as well.
 But it didn't get better. In fact, it's getting much, much worse. With each successive visit, the "lectures" continue to drift between the banal and the self-congratulatory (often, with misleading and "baiting" titles that have nothing to do with the actual lecture content), and attempts by myself and my wife to actually engage the speakers intellectually with challenging questions, are beginning to be met with openly escalating hostility within the room (for example, one of the elderly women has taken it upon herself to hiss and grumble at us). 
 And, there's one more thing I've noticed: All of the speakers have some sort of ongoing relationship with Conway. Like some sort of alumni association meeting, every lecture is an opportunity for a former executive member of this group to impress his/her former society members with all the amazing things they're doing.
 To be fair, I'm not one to begrudge a local community of octogenarian pensioners their Sunday morning social club. And, if that is what Conway's Ethical Society is, so be it. I'll gladly dust off my sandals and move along. But, it would be great of you folks could change the name of your group, so as to not confuse those of us looking for something a little more enriching than that. How about "The Conway Hall Pensioners Sunday Chat Society", or something like that? If you called it that, it would have saved us both a lot of headaches and wasted time.
 But if you actually are an "[Ethical Society][2]", driven by a desire to see positive change in the wider world around you, committed to widening and advancing better understandings of morality within society, and guided by the basic tenets of Humanist philosophy (like a commitment to reason and empiricism), then I must plead with you to have a good hard look at yourselves. You are aged and insular. You are utterly uninterested in any actual intellectual growth. You are utterly self-absorbed and openly hostile to divergence from an orthodoxy shared amongst a few aggressive regulars. You are talking and listening only to yourselves, and in the process you are driving away the very people over which you may actually have had some positive influence.
 As it currently stands, I don't see this group surviving after the last of your core group joins the choir invisible. And that's pretty sad. Because we live in a world *starving* for guidance on ethical questions today. We are surrounded by politicians, and other charlatans, brazenly dismissing morality as archaic 19th century nonsense, as they march us off to war, after war, after war and drag us through one financial bungle after another. Meanwhile, the median age of your group is so high, it would probably surpass the life-expectancy of the surrounding population. And not only is nothing being done to bring in new blood, it is most decidedly *not welcome*. 
 Today's lecture, ironically enough, asked the question 'is Humanism dead?' If one were to take the Conway Hall Ethical Society as an article of evidence in pursuit of this question, the answer would be unequivocally obvious: not only is Humanism dead, but it was murdered -- and it is Humanists themselves that have strangled it to death. 
 [1]:	https://medium.com/@gmgauthier/philosopher-kings-and-smartphones-a91f51a276a7#.qj55i7kxd
 [2]:	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_movement
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 # Are We Owed A Living?
 Today, I attended [another lecture hosted by the Conway Hall Ethical Society](http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/). The lecture was titled "*Are we owed a living?*", and the guest speaker, [Barb Jacobson](http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/), was slated ostensibly to argue the positive case for the proposition. 
 Instead, the audience and I were accosted with what amounted to a political stump speech advocating for a social welfare policy called "[Unconditional Universal Basic Income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)." Ms. Jacobson disingenuously book-ended her speech with the title of the meetup, but none of the actual body of her talk addressed the proposition, even indirectly. Jacobson chose instead to catalogue a litany of grievances she has with various British government welfare policies, and entreated us to adopt the UBI as an implicit remedy for these grievances. 
 I'm eager to address this speech (and the question of the UBI in general) as there is much about the topic that strikes me as pure nonsense, and in dire need of debunking. However, that will have to wait. Because the main frustration I have today, is the fact that the original proposition got completely lost in all the *Sturm Und Drang* of today's completely irrelevant political debate. As the saying goes, "If you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself". So, to sate my frustration, today I am going to vigorously argue both a pro and con case for the proposition "**Are we owed a living?**", and hopefully also provide a rousingly persuasive conclusion. 
 To begin with, I am a rather simple fellow. More sophisticated philosophical types are likely to scoff at my naive, sophomoric approach to philosophical questions, but as a simple fellow, I really do need to know exactly what it is we're actually talking about here. So, we need to define our terms. Otherwise, I'm just going to get lost trying to keep the debate straight in my head. As such, there are three questions that need answering:
 1. Who are "We"? 
 2. What do we mean by "owe", and who is doing the "owing"? 
 3. What is a "Living", and how do I know when I've got it?
 The question of who "we" are is really more psychological than it is philosophical. The "we" is really just a way of saying "I", in such a way as to deflect any suspicion of self-interest, while constructing a moral narrative to rationalize your demand.
 Listening intently to Jacobson's screed this morning, I was struck by the amount of bitter resentment it contained, and how much she expected her audience to share those feelings. A steady stream of mustache-twirling bad-guys were depicted during her 20 Minutes Hate, and on cue, the audience energetically nodded along in agreement with her moral outrage. The sins these men visited upon their benighted victims were sins visited upon everyone in the room, according to Jacobson. There was no difference between the incorrigibly impoverished, and them. In otherwords, "we" are literally, every single "I" in that room.
 So the debate question, really, is more accurately stated as "*Am __I__ Owed A Living?*", and the answer -- at least, in Jacobson's mind (and many minds present) -- is decidedly yes. What's more, who owes that living are the various Emmanuel Goldsteins she trotted out to act as targets for our disdain, who've all committed so many horrible evils (dastardly things, like: owning rentable properties). But Jacobson's argument is such a poor one. It's so bad that even I cannot in good conscience stand that up as my positive case. It would be too easy to dismantle (and hundreds before me have handily defeated similar empty demands for so-called "justice").
 So, what if we took a more universal approach to, and more charitable understanding of these terms?  What would that look like? Let's say the "we" is every human being, between the moments after birth to the moments just before death. Even this raises a number of metaphysical and ethical questions, itself. But, just for the sake of brevity, let's assume we mean all living humans. 
 Let's also take the most charitable understanding of "owed a living". To be owed something, is to hold a claim to some good 
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 Today, I mistakenly believed I was going to have a meaty philosophical topic for you. Given the title of today's Conway Hall Ethical Society meetup ("Are we owed a living?"), I was under the false impression that I'd finally have a chance to really dig deep and wide, on the hairy metaphysical and ethical questions of Value, Duty, Justice, Equality, and Freedom. Alas, I was sorely mistaken.
 Instead today, I learned all about Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Let me tell you about Cloud-Cuckoo Land. In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, currencies like dollars and pounds are not a basic, finite unit of measure for the negotiated exchange of value between two individuals. No, not at all. 
 In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, dollars and pounds are tiny magic scrolls with special incantations written on them, that grant the reader of the incantation anything his heart desires. When you read the incantation, the scroll flashes out of existence in a puff of smoke, and in its place, you see the very thing you were wishing for, right there in front of you. 
 In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, everyone gets as many of these magic scrolls as they want, whenever they want, because the air in Cloud-Cuckoo Land is hazy and gray with mystical properties that cause the scrolls to grow thick and plentiful on the trees there, ready to be plucked whenever necessary. 
 In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, these magic scrolls are used to "inspire creativity", and to encourage "growth" and "productivity". Though, nobody in Cloud-Cuckoo Land would dare suggest that you think of these things as necessarily good. Indeed, many in Cloud-Cuckoo Land use these scrolls to play video games and eat Doritos -- which is also totally fine, unless it's compared to volunteering, which is the best thing ever, in Cloud-Cuckoo Land. 
 In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, these magical scrolls make everyone "equal", just by being available. You don't even have to read the incantations for that. In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, these scrolls also grant everyone special powers of "innovation" and "bargaining clout". These powers make everyone in Cloud-Cuckoo Land capable of all manner and variety of new inventions and creations and ideas. In Cloud-Cuckoo Land, the magic scrolls give you special insights into yourself that help you discover the 
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 # White Noise
 The political environment today requires those of us who engage in discussions regarding contemporary social questions to include a lot of ceremonial genuflecting at the alter of a very vague notion of "equality" that has almost no meaning whatsoever, and serves no other purpose than to signal to participants that yes, you too are "safe" because you have fully embibed in the same intellectual Kool-Aid consumption that they have. 
 Nobody can explain to me in terms I can easily understand what it is they mean, when they say they think people "are all the same" or "should be equal". Few are even capable of sensing the categorical or context switches when they toss out these terms, and even fewer have the emotional backbone to entertain the possibility that the latter may not be a good idea, or even a realistically feasible goal. 
 There is so much intellectual compression surrounding this term, that it is hard to know where to even begin. The list of assumptions and implicit premises is so long, I could write an entire book on the fundamentals of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and still not unpack it all. Attempting to pick apart the hidden implications and unspoken assumptions of various examples I might find on the internet will only serve to muddy up the discussion with disputes over exactly what this person or that actually means, and whether making *those* assumptions is fair or not. Still, the preponderance of ignorance and misunderstanding around this concept is just too much for me to ignore anymore. So, I have to at least try. 
 So, let me start by outlining the basic terms, in an order that seems to follow intuitively -- at least, for me. 
 ## Essential distinctions
 First, let's start by clarifying the term itself, and distinguishing it from related terms that seem to get conflated and incorporated into what a lot of people think "equality is". 
 So what is equality? Let's start with what it is not, to narrow our scope. 
 The first thing equality is not, is "sameness" (in the sense of 'one in the same'). That is to say, in order for there to be a qualitative judgment of "equality", there must be two objects we are comparing. If there are two objects, they are not entirely the same, because they differ in one respect: their geospacial location (one ball here, another ball there). This is sometimes also referred to as "absolute equality" or "quantitatve equality", or "identity" (as in Aristotle's "Law Of Identity": A=A). A thing is identical to (the same as) itself. This works in mathematics, as well, in the form of an equation, e.g.: 2+2=4
 Equality is also not general similarity. Poodles and Labradors are not 
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 # Free Money For Everybody!
 ### Or: An Adventure Into The Dark Heart Of Cloud-Cuckoo Land
 Over the last year or so, I've seen a number of [fresh videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okx60F3eHpo) [popping up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) in places like [TED](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0), enthusiastically championing a resuscitated old leftist public policy idea called the ["Universal/Unconditional Basic Income"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income), or "UBI". This summer, Switzerland is [scheduled to hold a referendum](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-will-be-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vote-on-having-a-national-wage-of-1700-a-month-a6843666.html) on one such proposal. And, earlier this month, I attended a [lecture here in London](http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/), in which [Barb Jacobson](http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/) made a vigorous pitch for the idea. Since this has suddenly become a hobby horse for the left again, I think it's time to have a good hard look at it. To start, I'm going to let the proponents of the concept define and describe it for us:
 > "*A lump sum of income, that is distributed unconditionally -- without any strings attached -- to every person in a country, every month... What is the goal?... Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate to the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services [UDHR #25](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)...*" ~ [Federico Pistono](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4#t=8m40s)
 So, according to Federico, it's a payment equal to the amount of resources necessary to satisfy the standard set by the UN Declaration Of Human Rights. And while Rutger Bregman doesn't mention the UNDHR explicitly, he seems to agree with this conception in principle:
 > "*A monthly grant; enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. That's it... in the first place, it's universal. Everyone would get it. Whether you're a billionaire, or a beggar... The basic income is a right. A right, as a citizen of your country.*" ~ [Rutger Bregman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0#t=2m56s)
 But there are [those here in the UK](http://citizensincome.org/) who argue for a much more circumspect version of this idea. One that looks a lot more like traditional welfare. While it is "unconditional", in the sense that the payments would be issued without rules for usage, they're certainly not universal, and they're most decidedly not intended to provide you with enough money for "your basic needs":
 > "*Essentially... giving every adult ~£3,700 per year unconditionally, with up to £4,300 per year for each child [in] 2012 prices. A family of three with a child under the age of 5, would receive in the range of £11,000 per year. Universal payment. Unconditional. This replaces all tax credits, child benefits, and tax allowances. [however, it would not replace the National Living Wage]*" ~ [Anthony Painter, RSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkO2CwLWRvg)
 [This article in The Independent](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/replace-the-benefits-system-with-a-universal-basic-income-paid-to-all-citizens-think-tank-recommends-a6777101.html) also clarifies that the payment would be taxed back from you once you earned more than £75,000. Barb Jacobson described something similar in an interview, and referenced the RSA plan in her talk at Conway:
 > "*A regular payment, made to everybody, unconditionally. And that's it. ([Source: Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi-WtoTWjho))... Basic Income - that is to say, a payment to every individual regardless of worth or means... in this country, there are several models. Most of them have been done by Citizens Income Trust. They're based on the income tax system... The RSA has just come out with a model which is about 80 pounds a week...*" ~ [Barb Jacobson](http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/)
 ### Monorail, Monorail, Monorail
 While proponents of UBI struggle to produce consistent or detailed plans that realize [the core principles of a UBI](http://www.usbig.net/pdf/manyfacesofubi.pdf), they do not hesitate to make many enthusiastic claims of the amazing beneficial effects it will have on society, regardless of those details. It's going [eliminate income inequality](https://medium.com/basic-income/inequality-and-the-basic-income-guarantee-c8f84d936640#.eppq18c1v). It's going to ["create social cohesion"](http://citizensincome.org/citizens-income/how-does-it-work/). It's going to [drastically reduce poverty](http://www.parncutt.org/BIFT1.html). It's going to [eliminate waste, fraud, and corruption](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/) in government. It's going to ["strengthen democracy"](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/). It's going to [improve the health of the population](http://basicincome.org.uk/2013/08/health-forget-mincome-poverty/). It's going to [encourage entrepreneurship and technological innovation](https://www.crunch.co.uk/blog/small-business-advice/2016/01/11/will-a-basic-income-turn-us-all-into-entrepreneurs/). It's going to [stimulate the economy](https://thebigpoliticalparty.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/unconditional-basic-income-is-an-economic-stimulus-everybody-wins/). It's going to ["liberate" everyone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi2tnbtpEvA). It's going to [reduce unemployment](http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004WattsMitchell.pdf). It's going to [rescue us from environmental catastrophe](http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-save-earth-and-human-life-guaranteed-income). It's going to [promote gender equality](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/payback-time-for-women.html?_r=0). It's going to [improve education levels](http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/basic-income-9781472583116/), [protect us against the robots](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9758f1a-e9c0-11e5-888e-2eadd5fbc4a4.html#axzz45zJfS1vw) and on, and on. 
 Given how spectacularly effective this social medicine sounds, how could anyone in his right mind be opposed to it? Even if there are potential risks or unknown costs, surely they can't be that bad when weighed against all these amazing benefits. So, of course, I'm on board with this, right? 
 Well, not quite. Having read all these articles and listened to the lectures, I'm struck by the fact that nobody is really offering any actual evidence in support of these amazing claims. And, at the risk of overusing a cliché, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of *course* I would be in favor of something that simultaneously eliminated poverty, protected the environment, increased entrepreneurship, and brought justice and fairness to the entire world. But this is like saying I'm in favor of Superman. In case you weren't sure: *Superman is imaginary*. 
 Numerous obvious (and somewhat naive) objections have been thrown at this idea. Most of them are actually hoisted up and shot down handily by the proponents themselves, in an attempt to lend some superficial credibility to it. Objections like, "[Wouldn't this produce a generation of work-shy couch potatoes?](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/matt-zwolinski/pragmatic-libertarian-case-basic-income-guarantee)", or "[Isn't this just Communism?](http://gaurarader.com/2014/07/14/basic-income-is-a-viable-path-to-realizing-the-goals-of-communism-a-form-of-common-ownership-a-classless-society-and-an-end-to-the-dominance-relationships-and-alienation-produced-by-capitalism/)" These are not really objections, so much as they're just conditioned reactions. The impulses people respond with, when confronted by ideas they find strange and threatening. But there are serious problems with the idea that remain almost entirely unanswered. I am going to focus on the three I find most significant: Morality, Cost, and Economics 101.
 ### We're All Consequentialists Now...
 The first of my objections is a moral one (there are actually several moral objections, but I am going to focus on the one I view as the most significant). This is typically waved away as "storytelling" or "ideology". [Federico Pistono](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) does this, for example, and asserts that it doesn't matter what your *a priori* moral objection is, if the idea actually accomplishes a goal that is particularly noble in his estimation (e.g., satisfying article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, the only good is the good of a particular set of outcomes he and his supporters prefer. 
 What Federico may not realize consciously (I am trying to be charitable) is that he's smuggled in his own moral argument in an attempt to refute another moral argument, by asserting that certain desirable outcomes are more important than mere morality. He chastises his cloud of unnamed acquaintences for their archaic devotion such silliness, but then proudly argues for a form of moral Consequentialism. For those who aren't quite sure what that means: *The Ends Justify The Means*. For the more astute viewer, you may have picked up on the muddled blend of [Mohism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism), [Utilitarianism](http://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/), and [Motive Consequentialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism#Motive_consequentialism) embedded in Federico's impassioned plea. To Federico's credit, he admitted that he was unsure whether the goal was actually achievable by means of the UBI. But this only makes his argument much worse. It utterly defangs his excuse for a deplorable and utterly unecessary double-standard. 
 But, let's set aside the explicit problems with *his* moral position in particular for a moment, because what's really at issue here is whether or not we can determine the moral implications of an idea like UBI, at all. In other words, what *is* immoral about a universal basic income, if (and that's a big if) the outcome is something desirable?
 To address that question, we need to go back to basics. Morality is a particular kind of *judgment of human actions* that categorizes them according to normative standards. In other words, it judges behaviors that are "good" or "bad", or tells us what "should" or "shouldn't" be acted out. Moral philosophy, or ethics, is the study and systematization of these judgments. One intellectual product of the discipline of ethics is the notion of political "rights". A right is something akin to a "principle" encapsulating a rule governing how agents of the state ought to behave with respect to the citizens they rule over. Federico made an appeal to just such a rule, when he referenced article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (ironically, yet another attempt to smuggle morality into a discussion he claimed was not about morality). 
 Even if we stipulate to the validity of "rights" as a logical concept, and to the legal relevance (jurisdiction) of the UNDHR (Federico's standard for ideal consequences), and to the validity of article 25 in particular (those of us who were schooled in the American legal tradition will probably not do this easily), there is still a major problem for Federico. You see, we have been granted other rights in that UN Declaration. Rights that stand in direct contradiction to any attempt at enacting the principle of article 25. Article three grants me the "right to _life, liberty, and security of person_". Article four grants me the right not to be "held in _slavery or servitude_". Article seven grants me "_equal protection_ under the law". And, finally, article 17 explicitly grants me "the _right to own property_ alone as well as in association with others..." and further asserts that I shall not "be arbitrarily _deprived of [my] property_". 
 One could argue that since these all come in the top 20, and they all come well before article 25, surely they hold a higher precedence than article 25. But even if we were to accept that every article is of absolutely equal weight and importance, all it leaves us with is an irreconcilable contradiction. The state must both confiscate my property, and not confiscate it. The state must enslave me to fulfil its duty, and must not enslave me to fulfil its duty. The state must violate my security of person, but must not violate it. 
 At the center of all of these swirling contradictions, of course, is the widely ignored fact that the state does not produce wealth. It appropriates wealth. And it does so by the active application of force and the threat of force. It has many excuses for doing so, among them "redistribution", a euphemism for the forcible taking of property from one person, in order to give it to another. There are three ways in which the state can act out its power to take property: taxation, borrowing, or the printing of fiat currency. In all three cases, fundamentally, it is the forcible taking of property. The subject of borrowing and printing I'll address in my next objection, but the true nature of taxation should be fairly obvious even to anyone new to the workforce.
 This is the moral argument that folks like Federico are really trying to make. Not that, "it is morally good to give everyone some amount of property, whether they are justified in receiving it or not", but rather, "it is morally good to *take* some amount of property from everyone, whether the state is morally justified in taking it or not". For Federico, this is where the Utilitarianism comes in handy. Because once we get down to the bare facts of the relationship, idealists like Federico are left with nothing but a bald-faced *ex post facto* rationalization for their desire to take stuff that doesn't belong to them: they think they can dispose of it better, more wisely, more justly, and more compassionately, than you can. And, if he can wrap that rationalization in fantastical tales of a utopian future, and obfuscating language like "*[the greatest good for the greatest number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham)*", why, he can even make his theft sound like a profoundly noble act. He can become his generation's social justice Superman. 
 But, ironically, he's already openly admitted that he's not even certain whether the consequences he desires are possible, let alone reasonably achievable (I concur with this assessment, as we'll see in my subsequent objections). But what this means, in effect, is that he's willing to wield the gun of the state to act out a theft that he's *not even certain will result in a desirable outcome*. What utter madness. Federico chides us constantly to avoid moral storytelling, and to rely on empirical data, and yet cannot see the moral story he is telling himself. Federico's boyish smile and youthful enthusiasm are little comfort when all he can offer is riches in the progressive afterlife for a present-day of almost certain Utilitarian suffering.
 > "*God save us from people who mean well.*" ~ Vikram Seth
 ### Just A Few Easy Installments...
 "Yes but," you might say, "the moral argument is moot, because after all, we're already taxing and borrowing for loads of other reasons. So, why not simply accept it, and resign yourself to trying to improve the efficiency of the system we have?" Libertarians seem to [like asking this question a lot](http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income) these days (I think they've given up). 
 How do we know this would actually "increase the efficiency" of the system (whatever that even means)? Sure, it would nominally eliminate agencies and jobs devoted to vetting and means testing, where certain benefits are eliminated -- *if* they actually got eliminated. But if you actually look at the proposals in the pipeline now, none of them are unconditional or universal. All of them put limits on the funding that would require data collection for the purpose of filtering out those who do not qualify, and some would even include a back-handed means test that would put the burden of reclaiming distributions on tax collection agencies. So, it's not at all clear to me that this would eliminate bureaucracy or improve "efficiency". 
 But let's think about what it would take to implement an *actual* UBI; one that satisfies all the criteria: universal, unconditional, uniform, individual, and sufficient for "basic needs". That last criteria is an especially tough one to define. What are "basic needs"? The list can be as sparse as [nothing but emergency essentials](http://canatx.org/basicneeds/backup/documents/1999Assessment/basicneeds99whatarebasicneeds.html): temporary food, shelter, and clothing. Or, they can [include all of the social services provided by the state today](http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/basic-human-needs-what-are-they-really): education, healthcare, transportation, and many other goods and services. Again, there's no clear picture of what the proponents of UBI are talking about. Which should be a huge warning signal.
 Since the purpose of the payment is intentionally unspecified, and the disbursment is unconditional, I'm not sure why the proponents of this idea feel compelled to casually enumerate its "basic need" uses for us. Perhaps they think it makes us feel better to think of the money being used for those things, instead of on prostitutes, drugs, video games, amusement park tickets, or comic books? They often make a concerted effort in their lectures to argue that nobody would spend the money on those other things. But why? If I can spend the money in any way I wish, who cares if I spend it on a sack of staple rice, or a trip to Disneyland? 
 In any case, if we stick with the phrase "basic needs", then we do have a universal rubrik we could use as a real-world mechanism for determining the size of this payment: The state's official "poverty line", below which it argues, "basic needs" are not achievable. In the UK, there is actually something heavily promoted (though, not yet officially adopted), called a "minimum income standard". This number is supposed to represent the minimum income necessary for the satisfaction of "basic needs". 
 So, let's do some math. The [JRF](https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/minimum-income-standard-uk-2015) and [minimumincome.org](http://www.minimumincome.org.uk/results) both place this number at somewhere around £17,000 per year for an individual. Since the [median income across all of Britain](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours) is roughly £25,000, I'm willing to accept the MIS at face value. But we should be aware that this sort of generalization will make some folks appear extremely comfortable, and others appear nearly destitute by comparison, [depending on exactly where they live in the UK](http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc126/). Still, for the sake of the general argument, let's just go with the £17,000. 
 According to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates), the total population in the UK is about 64.5 million. This includes adults, children, and legal foreign national residents. If we take the UBI at its word, and take it seriously, it should be simply a matter of multiplying this number by the minimum income standard, to get a figure for the whole country. That would come to just a shave over 1.095 trillion pounds. That should give Brits some pause. The current total [national budget for the entire UK](http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/government_expenditure.html) is ~£759 Billion. So, a proper UBI would balloon total government expenditures to nearly £2 trillion. 
 So, what would it take to collect 1.095 trillion in taxes from the working population of Britain? Well, let's do some more math. Again, according to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK](http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/march2016) the number of employed adults in the UK is roughly 31.4 million. if we divide our earlier number by this one, we get a figure of £33,917 in taxes, per working adult. 
 That's right. In order for the entire population of the UK to take home £327 per week (the unofficial minimum basic income), those of us who work for a living would need to be taxed at a rate of £657 per week. Welcome to Cloud-Cuckoo Land, my friends. 
 However, he RSA claims [its proposal](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) would only come to £30 billion. This is nowhere near the naive figures we've been working with above. How is this possible? Well, to begin with, despite what they strenuously claim, [the RSA proposal](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) isn't really universal or unconditional. It's also not "basic". For starters, it only comes to £71 per week (£3,692 per year). Which is nowhere near the commonly accepted definition of a "basic income". Worse yet, even at this rather meager sum, the total cost still comes to roughly £238 billion. So, what else is going on here? Surprise, surprise, the "unconditional income" comes with LOADS of conditions:
 * You must be between the age of 25 and 65. Apparently, they want to let the public pension system bureaucrats know that the RSA won't be a threat. This also means 18-25 year olds are not considered legal adults by the RSA.
 * However, if you are 18-25, you could sign what is essentially an indentured servitude contract, whereby you would "contribute" to your "community" as a *condition* of your payment. Paradoxically, the RSA insists that the state would do no monitoring or enforcement of these contracts. So I'm not sure at all how they'd stop you from taking your payment if you simply lied about "contributing". 
 * You have to enroll in the electoral political system here (i.e., you have to be a registered voter), in order to qualify for a payment.
 * If you are an EU citizen, you would have to "pay in" to the system for a number of years, before you could begin collecting. 
 * If you are a legal resident but a non-EU citizen (e.g., a US Citizen), you are ineligible for a payment. 
 * If you earn more than £75,000, your benefit would be refused or taxed back away from you, in graduated steps. 
 This effectively reduces the population of "qualified recipients" to about 8 or 9 million people (less than one-fifth of the 45 million legally registered UK Citizens). Which, of course, comes out to about £30 billion in new expenditures. 
 In otherwords, what we see being promoted heavily in the UK is not a "universal basic income" at all, but something else entirely. First and foremost, it is tool for social engineering, and for artificially constructing a new welfare constituency for the power elite. It is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating young people into participating in a political system they instinctively recognize as corrupt and opposed to their best interests (and who express that instinct by refusing to particpate). 
 It is also yet another attempt at fomenting class resentment for the sake of income redistribution. I've avoided covering anything in [Ms. Jacobson's lecture](http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/) up to this point, precisely because it was nothing more than a lazy, old-world Marxist anti-wealth screed. Rather than actually making an argument *in favor* of UBI, she spent the entire 25 minute lecture railing against the abuses of "wealthy property holders", the deriding the idea of the Protestent Work Ethic -- something nobody has been seriously defending for decades. But Jacobson did this, because she knew her audience: Elderly, old-world Marxist pseudo-intellectuals. People easily manipulated by class resentment. And this is the real core of the purpose of a UBI, at least as defined here in the UK (and I'd suspect pretty much everywhere).
 The RSA Proposal is an attempt to convert the new, young tech economy into the same kind of easily manipulated political constituency that the public sector and the unionized working-class represented in the 20th century. When political elites have direct control over your income, you're going to become very conscious of who those elites are. You're going to suddenly have a stake in politics, because you're going to be more or less controlled by it. And, given the choice, you're going to use that involvement to choose the gentle master over the harsh one, again and again. The RSA wants to position itself as the new "good cop", in our "good cop, bad cop" representative democracy. 
 I could repeat the analysis above with any number of other proposals from different countries and different organizations, but it would be redundant and boring. The basic tactic is always the same: a constant evasive oscillation between class resentment and lowered expectations, in an attempt to gain political power.
 > "*There's no such thing as a free lunch*" ~ Milton Friedman (nominally)
 ### The Physics Of Trade
 This brings me to my last objection to the concept of a UBI. Continuing my theme of grade school levels of finance, it comes in the form of a basic tutorial in economics. One of the things I find most astonishing about the proponents of UBI, is just how ignorant they are of what an "**income**" really is. To illustrate this, I think it's time I told a story:
 Let's imagine a world in which the idea of currency -- either as a physical commodity, or as a fiat paper means of exchange -- hasn't even been thought of yet. It's essentially a barter society: everyone trades goods and labor in kind with each other. Let's further imagine a town square in this world, in which there are four shops: Bob's Bakery, Sean's Shoes, Sally's Sewing, and Mike's Meats.
 One morning, Bob walks into Sean's shop and asks, "Hey Sean, my shoes are getting pretty beat up. Can I get a new pair by Friday?" 
 "Sure Bob," Sean replied, "problem is, I don't really need bread right now. I've still got at least a week's worth in my larder."
 Bob thought a moment, then pulled out a slip of paper and pen, and wrote on the paper: "Bob owes Sean 5 loaves and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime." Bob handed the paper to Sean, with an eager smile. 
 "I see," Sean said taking the paper from Bob, "I think that'll work. I know you're good for it!"
 "Thanks, Sean! I'll be back at the end of the week for the shoes", Bob responded as he exited Seans shop.
 The next day, Sally walked into Bob's bakery, and handed Bob the familiar slip of paper. Only, Sean's name had been scratched out, and Sally's had been written in above it.
 "I don't understand?", Bob said, confused and a little startled.
 "Oh, sorry," Sally explained, "Sean needed his shirt mended, but I didn't need any shoes. So, he gave me your IOU instead."
 Bob hesitated a moment, then said, "Hmm... I guess this is ok. I'll go have chat with Sean later today.", and gave Sally her weekly bread order. 
 An hour later, Mike the butcher entered Bob's shop. 
 "What's up, Mike?", Bob asked.
 "Oh, hi Bob! Here!", Mike extended his hand, and passed Bob a slip of paper. It read, in Sean's handwriting, "Bob owes Mike 5 loaves of bread and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime."
 "Hey! What? I don't owe you anything!", Bob exclaimed.
 "That's not what Sean says", Mike snickered.
 Bob stormed out of his shop, marched quick-step down the street, and pushed his way through Sean's front door. 
 "What the hell is going on here, Sean? What's the meaning of this?", Bob yelled as he tossed Mike's note at Sean.
 "But Bob," Sean slowly began, "EVERYBODY needs bread, yes?"....
 The point of this story, for those of you a little slow on the uptake, is to highlight exactly what is happening when we give each other money -- and what happens, when that money loses its meaning. I can't believe this is something that needs to be explained to full grown adults, but apparently, nobody understands it anymore. 
 Dollars and pounds are not little magic scrolls with arcane incantations written on them that make goods and services just suddenly appear out of the Cloud-Cuckoo dimension. They represent a finite and well-defined exchange of value between individuals. When I give you a dollar, I am giving you a dollar's worth of some labor I've done for someone else, or a dollars worth of some real good that I've given to someone else. To complete the interaction, you give me a dollar's worth of some labor or good. That is called a transaction. Like value exchanged for like, the value of which is negotiated between two individuals.  
 And this gets us back to the beginning of this essay. When you ask the state to give you money for no other reason than that you are breathing, you are essentially asking it to take something of value from someone else, and give it to you. As I said before, the state does not create value, it can only appropriate it.
 So, when [Rutger Bregman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0#t=2m56s) proudly announces that he wants "Free Money For Everyone", what he's really saying, is that he wants to take property from someone somewhere, in order to give it to someone else, somewhere else. He wants to be Sean, handing out forged IOU's from Bob's shop, because he's compassionate like that.
 There are three ways a state can appropriate value from its citizens:
 1. _The state can print it:_ One cannot multiply the amount of value in an economy simply by multiplying the number of slips of paper representing value. So, when the state does this, the *real thing* that the slips of paper represent gets smaller in comparison. The slip of paper represents less and less of the actual product or labor it was meant to represent. This is called inflation. The real amount of value in the world now, goes down. The only way to fix this, is to increase the amount of actual *valued* products and labor being exchaged in an economy.
 2. _The state can borrow it:_ This is essentially the appropriation of value from other economies, or from the future, in order to use it in the present in the local economy. But what happens if the lender (or the future) is never repaid? The real amount of value in the world goes down again, only we don't notice it right away. It is a sort of invisible inflation. One in which empty promises replace currencies that have already replaced real goods and services. Eventually someone's descendants are rendered utterly impoverished. The Dickensian horror that the left loves to scare us with is something they are creating, with the very schemes they claim are designed to prevent such a thing. 
 3. _The state can tax it directly:_. As I've already discussed at length in the previous objection, taxation is the most visible form of appropriation. The RSA plan actually goes further than just income taxes (it proposes a restructured "progressive" tax rate scheme), including various forms of property taxation as well. While this would shrink the size of that £657 per week income tax bill, it is still extracting value out of real goods: If you take my spare bedroom away from me, I cannot use it as an art studio. If you tax my business equipment, I won't have enough to buy additional equipment or hire new employees. And so forth. The fewer resources at my disposal, the less creative I will be. The real amount of value in the world not only goes down, it *can never be fully realized*.
 This is essentially a human physical limitation of economy. A "law of economic physics", if you will. And, the more we crawl up our own asses and refuse to accept the reality of what we're doing to ourselves, the worse it will get. The harder and harder you work at taking other peoples' things, without negotiating a genuine exchange of real value, the less and less real value there will be for *anyone*. 
 Fundamentally, if you look hard enough at ideas like Universal Basic Income, you realize what they really are. Far from creating a society of "universal economic suffrage", we are enslaving ourselves to a world "universal economic servitude". 
 > “*The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.*” ~Frédéric Bastiat
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 ### To Know What You Don't Know
 > "When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater will be his confusion" \~ Herbert Spencer* 
 Today, I attended a lecture hosted by the Conway Hall Ethical Society, in London. I call it a lecture, perhaps too generously. You'll see why in a moment. [The event][1] was billed as one man's attempt to provide a reasoned defense for the efficacy of a more direct democracy, and to propose a technological solution to the logical problems inherent within it:
 > Derek Bates will argue that we should be able to properly engage with our elected representatives using modern communication and internet technology, have a “live” influence on our futures and express our opinions – effectively crowd-sourcing innovative policy and direction... A million brains could just be a whole lot better than one!
 Given the nature of this topic, I am always immediately somewhat skeptical. Futurists have been falling all over themselves since the 1980's, to explain how computers and networks would ultimately dissolve all of the logistical barriers of having large, diverse, geographically dispersed populations weigh in on a steady diet of public policy matters from the small (like when to repave the street in front of my house), to the large (such as whether or not to allow Iran's government to engage in nuclear research). But a very rare few of them have been willing to address the founding principles behind such changes, even at a basic level like the problem of two wolves and a sheep.
 So, eager to engage, I packed up my intellectual suitcase with every scrap of skepticism and critical thought on the subject I've ever collected, and I headed off to the hall expecting to be schooled by someone far older and far wiser than myself. I could not possibly have been more misinformed, or more disabused of my mismatched expectations, than by Derek himself.
 ### It's Not About What It's About
 Originally, I wanted this post to be about the problems of direct democracy, and about our continuing love affair with it, as a concept. I wanted to engage the content of Derek's arguments as an example of this phenomenon. But I can't do that, now, in good conscience. 
 You see, Derek didn't actually have any arguments. What he did have, was a long list of banal, pedestrian complaints, and demands for more "training" of elected officials (whatever that means). His entire presentation had quite literally all intellectual depth and sophistication of a bad pub rant. And sadly, due to Derek's unfortunate lack of podium presence, it was devoid any of the redeeming entertainment value usually found in such rants. The whole of the argument over the first hour literally boiled down to: "Politicians are ignorant and corrupt, and we need to train them". I honestly felt embarrassed for the man, alongside my own disgust and anger at having wasted two hours on a gorgeously sunny Sunday morning.
 Derek did inspire me, however. I realized something, watching this train wreck of a slide deck: Derek is the problem. Allow me to explain.
 ### The Hubris Of Politics; The Politics of Hubris
 In his professional life, Derek has the scientific method on his side. He's clearly used that to good effect, as a welding engineer and a materials scientist, in the petrochemicals industry and elsewhere. It's highly likely that he's actually solved quite a few very complex and very difficult problems with this training. I certainly wouldn't dare attempt to challenge him in that realm.
 Somewhere along the line, Derek has decided that his mastery of materials engineering, and the good it has brought the world, somehow now qualifies him as an expert in any number of other disciplines, including Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Ecology, and Agriculture. Derek has become so enamored by the voluptuous beauty of his own intellect that he's enthusiastically unshackled it from the ugly, sweaty rigors of any actual research, reading, or formal argumentation. Worse, he's replaced those uncomfortable constraints with nothing but fantasy and a will to power.
 In short, Derek is becoming a politician. But lacking the professional discipline and manipulative cunning of a career politician (or technological bureaucrat, or public policy "expert") he's relegated to making his one-man pitch to local ethical societies on Sunday mornings.
 ### The War Of All Against All
 But this isn't just about Derek. It's about all of us, and about the nature of democracy itself. Derek just happens to be a really good example of how dysfunctional we all are. Every time we step into a voting booth, or answer a political survey taker, or listen to a political speech, we're thinking about ourselves: what gets me what *I* want; who do *I* like; how do *I* want to live; what makes *me* happy; what can *someone else* do *for me*. 
 This is the true nature of the pub rant. It is an expression of a broken psychology; one crying out in despair at the lack of something essential to itself, and bemoaning the inability to achieve enough mastery over the physical world to attain that desire. It rarely has anything at all to do with the external target of the verbal diarrhea, except that the target may fit some emotional template for the ranter. In a nutshell: I am owed something, and justice demands that someone be obligated to give it to me.
 This is an angry child crying out for a parent. And, really, the state itself is nothing more than a collective expression of this dysfunction. Only, as adults, we have real power to do real harm in the process. Democracies of all forms and styles - in fact, monolithic institutions of power of all kinds - are fundamentally two things: Firstly, a weapon. But more importantly: *the implicit social approval* to use that weapon to threaten or harm others to get what you want. Political philosophers of all stripes have recognized this fact for eons, actually.
 But they've also recognized another fundamental problem with the State as a form of social organization: How do you decide who gets what they want? Developmental psychologists will also point out that this is a common subterranean struggle within families, as well. Children are constantly vying for their parents' attentions. And it's not uncommon for siblings to attempt to manipulate parents to gain advantage over each other. Thus, it is with the State as well.
 ### Knowing When To Quit
 I don't have an answer to this problem. How could I be expected to? I'm a 25 year veteran of the I.T. and software industries, not a political philosopher. But, then again, I don't go around offering lectures claiming that I do have that answer. 
 And this is where I come back to Derek. It's not impossible for a scientist to have something useful to say about political philosophy, just as it's not impossible for a political philosopher to have something useful to say about science. After all, Herbert Spencer (for example) was able to bring both to heel fairly effectively, during his own lifetime.
 But if you're going to make this kind of professional leap, you really need to do it from a position of humility and curiosity, if you're not simply trying to get what you want at others expense. And, really, when was the last time you exhibited a politician behaving with the humility and curiosity of a scientist? Yet, this is precisely what Derek is expecting, in his demands for "better training" of politicians.
 Which, from my observation, marks Derek as a pretty typical politician, himself: naive, untrained, and driven by egotistical fantasies about philosopher kings and cell phone apps.
 [1]:	http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/228775537/
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 # Metastasized Identity
 When I was a boy in middle and high school, there were lots of other kids who, during one year were stoners, and the next, were computer nerds. One year were jocks, and the next, were stoners. One year were D&D geeks, and the next, were into cars. 
 There was also no internet, and no social media. The only place one could "broadcast" an "identity", was within one's own circle of friends, and at most, earn a reputation throughout the school. Changing schools was basically akin to the witness protection program. Nobody knew who you were, and you could become anyone you wanted to be.
 Your tween/teen years should be fluid. They should be a point in time in your life, when you experiment and play with different ways of being. They should be an opportunity to determine what kind of person you want to be when you're done with your teens. 
 This girl is (as she admits in the video) seventeen. What's going to happen when, in her senior year of high school, she decides she's "not into trans anymore"? In effect, she cannot do this. The internet will see to that. She will be forced to face the passing nonsense of her changing juvenile attitudes about life pretty much for the rest of her life. The choice she has made to select this particular set of prejudices as the ones she puts on the internet, means this is the set of
 prejudices she will have to either apologize for, or double down on, for the rest of her life.
 I am, in this way, profoundly grateful that the internet did not exist when I was a tween/teen. It afforded me the freedom to fuck up, without the need to apologize to the entirety of western society for it. It suffered me the patience and tolerance to pass through periods of prejudice and rage without having to worry about the real human damage my naive and ill-conceived ideas and attitudes might have on the entire fucking planet. 
 I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle. I don't even think we should, necessarily, try to. But I have to admit a lack of optimism (and perhaps a lack of imagination), when it comes to thinking about what this means for human social evolution.
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 It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths we will go to as a species, to convince ourselves that reality doesn't actually work the way it does. Today, I attended another Conway Hall Ethical Society lecture entitled, "Are we owed a living?", and once again, I was amazed.
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							`The psychological and social significance of the open source movement, or my love/hate relationship with computer “science”, or the mathematics of music, or the personal flaws of Guido van Rossum, or a movie review of something like “The Imitation Game” (when it finally comes out), or a flaming response to the wave of Luddite anti-internet videos I see popping up on YouTube lately`
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							`It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths we will go to as a species, to convince ourselves that reality doesn't actually work the way it does. Today, I attended another Conway Hall Ethical Society lecture entitled, "Are we owed a living?", and once again, I was amazed.`