I made a point of raising something that’s worth expanding on now. Every time you believe a CEO of an A.I. company saying that “A.I. is going to replace people” or “AGI is knocking at our door” or “AGI is going to be catastrophic”, you’re believing a drug dealer telling you cocaine is good for your health.

Let’s get to the new information. Sundar Pichai is Google’s CEO, and one of the people who said “30% of Google’s code” is already written by A.I. (without explaining, of course, “which 30%” or showing anything).

Check out the same Sundar Pichai today, 06/18/2025, on “Business Insider”

Interesting how the tone got more “down to earth” now. And he wasn’t the first. Back in February 2025, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said the following in articles like this one:

And why this shift in tone, given that at the end of 2024 everyone was pumped up shouting “AGI”, “AGI”?

There’s a clause in Microsoft’s investment deal with OpenAI (they invested USD 14 billion) stating that OpenAI would stop sharing technology with Microsoft once “AGI” was reached. Defined as a “highly autonomous system that surpasses humans in the most economically valuable work”. That’s the definition.

The problem is that this also takes Microsoft out as an investor. On top of that, Microsoft itself recently started declaring itself a competitor to OpenAI instead of a partner, positioning itself alongside a Google or Claude. Read the details in this analysis:

Get this straight: every “it’s AGI, it’s not AGI” discussion has more to do with under-the-table negotiations between the various Big Tech players involved and their investors. It has nothing to do with real technology. You’re just another audience monkey in a show you can’t even watch. So you’re cheering blindly, as usual.

Geoffrey Hinton and the Expert Problem

Yet another interview with this Geoffrey Hinton guy came out, more fatalism, more “it’s over”, and more people screaming around every corner thinking Armageddon is showing up tomorrow.

The media considers Geoffrey Hinton the “Godfather of A.I.”

Because of this, many people believe everything he says - “Of course the guy who invented A.I. knows what’s going to happen”. It turned into a cult.

I myself said on Flow that he invented Backpropagation - the backbone of A.I. training -, but that’s a simplification. Hinton himself has clarified several times that he did not invent it. The bulk of the work was published by Paul Werbos and Shun-Ichi Amari. But it’s true that Hinton was the one who popularized that work.

Hinton, as a professor, had the luck of supervising students who would go on to become brilliant. On AlexNet - I told the story on Flow - it was Ilya Sutskever who came up with the idea of using GPUs to train deep neural networks. Ilya, who would later co-found OpenAI - alongside Andrej Karpathy, another brilliant Hinton student, and who these days I despise because he’s the one who coined that “Vibe Coding” thing. Karpathy has been following in his mentor Hinton’s footsteps, spreading bullshit.

Still on the computer vision revolution, besides using GPUs, the big architectural step was Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), from Yann LeCun - another Hinton student.

The problem: the media gives more credit to the supervisor than to the student. It lumps everything together and it ends up as if Hinton - alone - invented BackPropagation, CNNs, and the entire AlexNet. Even the Alan Turing Award he received, again the merit belonged to the team, but the name “Hinton” is stronger, so it came out as if “he” was the one most responsible. Obviously, that way anyone looks like a demigod.

I’m not saying he’s dumb or anything like that. But he’s not all that, he’s not infallible, and he’s certainly a normal human being who makes mistakes. There’s no correlation between his previous work and speculations about the future.

On another end of the spectrum, there’s a Nobel laureate, Roger Penrose, who has been postulating since the 80s or 90s that “consciousness is NOT computable”, for example, in his book “The Emperor’s New Mind”. A Nobel laureate at the level of someone who proved Einstein’s hypotheses and worked with Hawking.

On top of that, Yann LeCun himself belongs to the camp that doesn’t believe current A.I.s will get anywhere near AGI either. As I ALWAYS repeat: some new discovery - that we don’t yet know about - needs to happen for that to occur. LeCun has his theories and is at Meta, working on a project called V-JEPA to see if he can make that discovery.

Instead of listening to Hinton, listen to a bit of LeCun:

Well then, if “authority” is your only yardstick, you should then blindly believe Penrose and LeCun as well. And now, how does that work out?

This game is more complicated than your naive blind-follower mind can see. Don’t be just an audience monkey, and understand how the pieces fit together.

“You Can’t Prove AGI Won’t Exist”

It’s true, nobody can. Nobody can prove God doesn’t exist. Nobody can prove Unicorns don’t exist. This means absolutely nothing, it’s a logical fallacy.

People outside of tech who never studied computer science can only see what the newspapers publish or the nonsense some influencer says on a podcast.

Let’s clear this up: yes, all of us - programmers trained in computer science - know that with the current LLM architecture, there’s no way to reach AGI. That is a certainty.

The problem is that you folks think that not even we know everything about A.I., that there’s some mysterious layer inside the model that works without us knowing how it works.

Or worse, you folks think that only a few names considered important, like Geoffrey Hinton or Ilya Sutskever, are the ones who can understand it. Understand an important truth: yes, to arrive at a General Theory of Relativity, it took giant geniuses like Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, etc. One of them would get there, not every physicist could.

But, once the Theory is described and understood, it’s easily taught to first-year college students. It’s no mystical secret that needs decades of training to understand.

Same thing: perceptrons, neural networks, backpropagation, gradient descent, RNNs, CNNs, Transformers, etc. Each of these stages counted on people considered geniuses, like Geoffrey Hinton (whom many will say just took the credit, while the actual work was done by the Sutskevers or LeCuns). But once understood, all of this is undergraduate material in computer science. You don’t even need to be a PhD to understand most of it.

Trained models work because we know how to tune them to work. An important part of the training phase is feeding the neural networks millions of PRE-MADE questions and answers. That’s the INSTRUCTION phase, and EVERY LLM goes through it. It answers exactly the way each company behind it told it to answer, nothing more than that.

Ah, but there are so many parameters that you can’t possibly know everything about it. Yes we can, any good programmer can load up Tensorflow, PyTorch, load the model, and explore every dimension. We can start from the answer and look at the steps backward and see why it formed the way it did. We can re-tune, we can tweak as much as we want. I showed part of this in previous posts.

Every stage of training, inference, optimization, alignment methodologies, deployment strategies, it’s all documented, and all of us in the sciences know exactly how everything works.

That’s why it’s scary that someone like a Hinton or Sutskever keeps going around fearmongering without demonstrating anything. It shows how out of the loop they are about what’s actually happening. Yann LeCun is right: he has his hands dirty and he knows the current architecture has already hit the ceiling and there isn’t much further to go from here. That’s why he started other projects to try to figure out what a NEW architecture that leads to the next stage might look like. That’s Meta’s V-JEPA 2 project.

Just because YOU don’t know how things work, don’t think there’s room for science fiction stuff. It’s the same as watching a movie like “The Ring” where evil spirits live inside a VHS tape and come out of the TV, associating that TV-wave-spirit as if it could be real and telling me “You can’t prove it’s not possible”. It’s a level of childishness and lack of knowledge that I don’t even know how to start explaining.

Always, the BURDEN OF PROOF is on whoever is SELLING the claim. Every AI company CEO and every renowned academic - without publishing anything - is making this claim. I’m not the one who has to prove anything: they are. No one should try to prove a negative, it makes no sense.

As a bonus, going back to Yann LeCun. I didn’t follow him before, I only went to see what he says today. I found it interesting how he argues exactly the same things I’ve been saying for over a year now. I don’t want to claim for a second that I’m even a fraction of his intelligence. It’s just that, starting from the same principles, you inevitably arrive at the same conclusions. It’s pure inference from first principles. It’s not speculation. If you write “2 + 2”, both he and I will arrive at “4”. Everyone is saying “but if you have enough computing power, one day it’ll get to 10”. It won’t. Watch this other interview of his, it’s very enlightening:

What LeCun and others - like DeepMind - have already said is that LLMs don’t have the capacity to reach AGI. That’s known, and DeepMind has already proven it mathematically. This other video has more details. But in summary, an LLM is good as an “information retriever”. Beyond what I call a “glorified text completer”, which means it’s only capable of completing with information it has already seen in training (and random combinations that sometimes make it seem like it’s new information, but it isn’t). The only way for it to solve ANY problem is to have a CAUSAL MODEL of ALL PROBLEMS. In other words, it would already need to know the answer to every question beforehand. Obviously we don’t have that, therefore it’s impossible for an LLM - being a machine for retrieving information - to give us solutions that don’t exist, like “what’s the new discovery that will enable AGI?”. It’s an undecidable and non-computable problem. Mathematically proven to be unfeasible.

AGI, under the current architecture, is not going to happen. Some new discovery needs to happen. That could be 2 years from now, it could be 20 years from now. But there is no possible path from what we know today.

People from Wisecrack always manage to put a smile on my face. They give me hope that there are still people of reason in this world. This essay is inspired by that video and the gathering of complementary thoughts.

As an engineer, I stay amazed at what we’re able to create. No one would have guessed that one of humankind’s most fabulous inventions, the internet, along with its biggest hits, could turn into a weapon of mass destruction. I mean ubiquitous mobile access and social networks that gather absurd numbers of people at the same time.

This case is far from the only one, but it works as an example. A few days ago, I was caught off guard by a seemingly small piece of news. James Gunn, the beloved director of two of the MCU’s biggest hits with his Guardians of the Galaxy, was fired over tweets he wrote ten years earlier.

I am not here to judge the merits of the tweets or if his apologies are good enough.

Actually, by just stating neutrality, I am automatically judged as being in favor. This is the problem here.

These days, we’ve seen right-wing pages and accounts deleted from Facebook. It’s part of the platform’s ongoing effort to fight “fake news,” which really is a problem of modern times. News outlets have turned into click-bait factories, exactly as Wisecrack’s video describes.

Who decides what “fake news” is? It “offends” a demographic that is loud and generates clicks. Therefore, we must ban the other side.

It reminds me of a cliche phrase from The Lord of the Rings that always resonated with me. When the fellowship is trying to go through Moria, Frodo laments to Gandalf:

‘What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

To which Gandalf replies:

‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’

And then concludes:

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many — yours not least.’

Back to Gunn, what surprised me was not that those tweets were republished or the public outcry (and of course, no sane person supports the specific contents literally). What really surprised me was the incredible velocity with which a mega-corporation the size of Disney responded with a swift beheading, literally terminating a great career in less than a few hours.

It reminds me of equally quick public sentences without trials or due process. Again, I’m not advocating for these people, but James Damore vs. Google, Brendan Eich vs. Mozilla, and James Watson vs. Nobel.

And most of you or your friends would say, “of course they were ousted, they are bad people, we must police ourselves to remove these villains from our midst.”

Should we?

Can you give back their future if you were wrong? What makes you entitled to be a jury and judge?

Careful. When antagonized, an average, reasonable person should dialogue in private, as any civilized society learned to do. But social networks motivate people to do the worst: call out in public.

This is Mob Formation. This is plain old bullying. I suffered bullying my whole life, being a Japanese minority in a Western country, and I know exactly how much it hurts. That’s why I never bully back.

If you call out someone in public, you’re not practicing “justice.” You are a mere bully. No matter the subject at hand.

Have you ever read the image header of my Facebook and Twitter profiles? It reads:

“I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It.” - Evelyn Beatrice Hall.

And I believe that.

I shall never shame someone in public. Only cowards do that. Shaming someone in the open has the sole purpose of mobbing people, transforming the herd into a maneuvering mass to swiftly perform a public execution, and thus, make your point without having to defend it.

“But I have the right not to be offended.”

No, you don’t.

Another movie I talked about years ago, and cropped a segment to upload on my blog, is Miloš Forman’s masterpiece The People vs. Larry Flynt, produced by Oliver Stone.

It tells the story of the founder of the pornography magazine Hustler. By all means, a despicable person.

But this is precisely the point. Larry did things most of you would condemn. Not just publishing porn, but making satire out of public figures with bad-taste jokes. Jokes nonetheless. The part that really hit me was the idea that people have no right not to be offended. It’s a subjective matter, with no place in court, because we can’t legally define taste.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard a lot today, and I’m not gonna go back over it, but you have to go into that room and make some decisions. But before you do, there’s something you need to know. I am not trying to suggest that you should like what Larry Flynt does. I don’t like what Larry Flynt does, but I do like that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. I like that I live in a country where I can pick up Hustler magazine and read it, or throw it in the garbage can if that’s where I think it belongs.”

Anyone has the right to do and say whatever he or she wants as long as it doesn’t harm the other person. This is a delicate matter because my rights should end where your rights start.

“If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.” - Larry Flynt.

But because it can’t be decided in court, radical people take matters with their own hands, using the most powerful weapon ever devised: social networks. They can quickly gather a large jury and determine the public execution. It’s like handing a loaded gun to a toddler.

This is Inquisition territory. Galileo was judged and sentenced because he offended Catholic society by stating that the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun, and not the other way around. It seems stupidly trivial today, but it was a monumental scandal back then. People would rather die than accept that offensive statement. It would be trending on the Twitter of the 1600s, and public execution would be demanded within minutes.

This “I’m offended” justification is what ultimately led to assassinations such as Luther King, JFK, Lennon, the arrest of Gandhi, and the genocide of the Jews. Intolerance.

If not being offended is the ultimate goal, intolerance is the only path, and the murder of Freedom is the worst consequence.

Every atrocity in humankind starts with mob behavior around the “I shouldn’t feel offended.”

That’s the story behind Fahrenheit 451, which Wisecrack explains well. At some point, people just started building echo chambers. Every Twitter feed and every Facebook timeline is, by definition, an echo chamber. You only get content meticulously curated by machine learning, configured to spit out posts that won’t offend you and won’t ever challenge your points of view.

You create and live in a bubble, and you immediately get outraged when your reality is challenged by any thought-provoking idea. You limit yourself to your personalized and narrow status quo.

It’s a lie when you say “I’m open-minded” but keep calling people out and whining about how offended you are. You are not open-minded. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. At least admit the truth: you’re narrow-minded and intolerant.

Contrary to what many of us believe, the internet was supposed to set us free from governments, authoritarian institutions, and big media channels that supposedly controlled the masses’ points of view.

We were supposed to have access to a broader range of knowledge, without borders, without prejudice, and that would help us advance faster into the future, into more innovation.

Innovation, by definition, is a challenge against the status quo. You can’t innovate and please everybody at the same time. That’s impossible. Otherwise, it’s just more of the same.

The invention of fire challenged nature, the invention of heliocentrism questioned God, and the design of natural selection challenged humankind’s soul.

Social networks took a free, decentralized internet and put it on a very tight leash, controlled by “Influencers.” People of pure charisma, with no righteousness and much less wisdom. Charisma is what pulls in huge numbers of followers. The network effect is vicious.

We were supposed to be all together collaborating for the betterment of humankind, regardless of race, geography, and political inclinations.

Be warned, you are all falling for the Eight stages of Genocide. Behold:

1. Classification: People are divided into “them and us”.
2. Symbolization: “When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups…”
3. Dehumanization: “One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.”
4. Organization: “Genocide is always organized… Special army units or militias are often trained and armed…”
5. Polarization: “Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda…”
6. Preparation: “Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity…”
7. Extermination: “It is ’extermination’ to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human”.
8. Denial: “The perpetrators… deny that they committed any crimes…”

This is the original Nazi modus operandi, and you are perpetuating those steps. I’m not a Jew, but I deeply admire and respect their history and resilience. I’ve been to the official Holocaust Institute at Yad Vashem, in Israel, and to the one in Washington D.C., because I respect the lessons they left behind. It was supposed to be our duty not to let history repeat itself.

But, such is the power of blind ideology and the leadership of charismatic celebrities.

We had charismatic leaders doing good things and bad things, charismatic nonetheless. For every Lincoln or Churchill, we had a Stalin or a Castro.

What’s more difficult is that we can only really know that something went horrendously bad in hindsight, from History. There is no such thing as a black-and-white “good” vs. “evil.” You always think that you are doing an excellent job by following charismatic people who seem to be only promoting the well-being of a minority group.

Ask yourself: are you following a selfless person, one who can treat another with more humanity than they got? Or does it sound more like selfish revenge and payback? Hate is always the stuff of evil. A righteous person does not mimic what they claim to fight against. Anyone advocating “let’s do to them what they did to us” is most probably Evil. You cite people like Gandhi. Did you learn nothing from what he taught all his life?

Every Fidel, every Mussolini, every Hitler, they all really believed that they were fighting for the well-being of their people. Every Nazi acted thinking they were doing the right thing for the future of their sons and daughters, that the sacrifices would pay off. That they were being Noble for killing people.

There has never been a better platform to mob people into irrational herds than now. There are YouTubers out there that have millions of more followers than any Hitler ever had.

And to add injury to misery, we’ve formed the online consensus that people have a magical, inherent right to “never be offended.” They shall not be offended by 200-character tweets. That’s a capital sin, and the perpetrator must die. Apologies are not enough. The thought police have reached the point where one out-of-context tweet is enough to judge and execute a person’s life, without recourse, without parole.

It’s fascinating to see how a series of technologies and innovations supposed to broaden the freedom of everybody would turn to become the most potent weapon of mass destruction ever devised. And it didn’t need a newborn Hitler.

The end of the world doesn’t have to be a catastrophic physical event like a nuclear blast. I think the destruction of the fabric of society itself is even worse. It’s not a big evil dictator that will kill Freedom, it’s the people who don’t deserve it. It’s far more nefarious and can be even more damning.

That’s the lesson: no Omar Bashir, Bashar Al-Assad, or Nicolás Maduro will, alone, be responsible for destroying society.

Every evildoer in history did what they did “in the name of the people.”

And it all starts with “I shouldn’t be offended.”

My language is “faster”. My framework is “more elegant”. My tool is “more productive”. My community is “more friendly”. All bullshitty reasons to choose something because those reasons don’t really matter.

Although DHH did a good job describing the reality of developers’ choices, he didn’t go as far as to explain why we all do it this way. Including himself. Including myself.

The religion framework theory does explain some of the behaviors, I’d go farther still.

Most developers are more akin to sports fans (or fanatics, as is the root of the word “fan”).

Check out some items from the article “Why Sports Fans are Sports Fans”:

• There’s high drama.
• It’s fun to watch greatness.
• It taps into our creepy side that wants to sit in the ancient Roman Coliseum and watch people fight to the death.
• It’s aesthetically pleasing.
• The sports world includes a lot of gossip.
• Sports provides an escape from life.
• It’s a perfect tool for your crippling procrastination tendencies.
• Sometimes I think we might even use sports as a way to attach ourselves to something immortal.
• In a time when heroic triumphs aren’t part of most people’s lives, sports allows us to capture a little sliver of the feeling of glory.

Developer niches feel more like sports teams in competition. There must be “winners” and “losers”. And people cheer over every small victory (like useless synthetic benchmarks or pseudo-statistical and meaningless indexes such as the TIOBE).

Fans of losing teams feel like they need to have increased loyalty to get the utmost reward.

Testosterone levels rise when discussing nonsense over Hacker News. Threads get really deep, each person shooting bullshitty “evidence” to “prove” their point. And every argument has an easy counter-argument, and the threads go on and on indefinitely. And every person writing will never agree to the contrary. And no one will ever switch sides based on the arguments laid out on those threads. Yet, they still waste lots of time writing anyway. Madness.

People - especially young people - like to have a sense of belonging, a sense of deindividuation, dissolved responsibilities. Which is some of what I wrote a couple years ago on the current nonsense trend on functional languages.

As Mike Perry describes in this post the most passionate fans tend to identify themselves as an integral part of the team they are supporting, with some of them – clearly – feeling less responsible for their individual behaviour. When disinhibition is combined with deindividuation – a loss of self-awareness and a sense of diffused responsibility – fans simply don’t care anymore about what anyone else might think or feel. Deindividuation weakens normal restraints without which, fans are more easily influenced by their surroundings; this is when fans start acting – really – weird, in either a pleasant or less pleasant way.

Groups of fans may mob, insult, threat or even riot. Groups provide fans with a sense of anonymity. Being part of a group removes individual accountability and diffuses responsibility. Unfortunately this behaviour appears online just as often as it does in the stadium.

Sports Networker - Read more

Tech conferences are like the weekend sports games. People like to feel validated being in the middle of equal-minded groups.

Same as with sports, developers feel that their “teams” (technologies, companies) are extensions of themselves. Worse, they feel like they describe their personalities. Which is why developers respond so passionately to contrary arguments: it feels like an aggression to their own selves.

“When we look at motivation for following a sport team, group affiliation is one of the top ones,” says Wann. “Identifying strongly with a salient local team where other fans are in the environment — that’s a benefit to social-psychological well-being.”

“The whole idea behind identification is that it’s really part of how we see ourselves and that doesn’t change easily,” says Robert J. Fisher, professor of marketing at The University of Western Ontario, whose research emphasizes the effects of social expectations on managerial and consumer decision making. “If you see yourself as a member of a family, that role doesn’t change. Those types of connections are very long-lasting and very strong.”

Psychological Science - Read More

It’s all a big show, you’re the audience. Just don’t fool yourself thinking that you’ve been “scientific” in your choices.

We are all victims of heavy Cognitive Bias, which blinds us to the truth:

Here’s a great post by Sam McNerney (@WhyWeReason) explaining cognitive bias. This is the phenomenon where all of us only look for what confirms their intuitions and ignore what contradicts their intuitions, what psychologists call confirmation bias. Confirmation bias helps explain why some fans will boo every single referee call against their team and English soccer fans will – still – argue with Germans about whether the ball did or did not pass the line in 1966(!). Fans automatically see the world as they want to, not how it is.

Sports Networker - Read more

More interestingly, the same way with sports fans of losing teams, people find ways to cope. And superstition is one of them.

Superstitions are an integral part of sports, and they may also be yet another way fans cope with their team’s performance.

In ongoing research, Wann and his colleagues are exploring the role of fan superstition. Over half of his 1,000 participants can readily define a superstition or ritual they believe in. Moreover, some are truly convinced that their participation in ritual superstition impacts the outcome, says Wann. The more highly identified with a team the fans are, the more likely they are to believe that superstitions matter.

“It’s a real struggle that sports fans experience,” says Wann. “They so much care about the outcome of the event they have absolutely zilch control over. How do we gain control? We may develop superstitions.”

Psychological Science - Read More

What I always have to say of all the nonsense is:

• If being the “fastest” was really a real concern, we would all be programming in C, as close to the bare metal as possible.

• If being the “most secure” was really a real concern, we would never ever fetch libraries created by unknown, uncertified, untrained people. We would build everything from scratch, by ourselves, every time, and wait through months of heavy testing before ever delivering to production. You know, like the military used to do.

• If being the “most elegant” was really a real concern, we would not be concerned about being the fastest or the most secure, as they usually go in opposite directions.

The craft of an engineer, or any professional for that matter, is being able to choose between different compromises, and keep balancing out. Never blindly committing loyalty to a specific group or way of thinking. Amateurs commit loyalty to someone else. Professionals hold themselves responsible for their own choices, and they compromise.

Scalability, Maintainability, Reliability, every “-ability” we add to the list is a compromise. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You want more, you pay for more. Because every technology is a combination of compromises, you can’t have a clear single winner or loser. Everything will win in some aspects and lose in others.

As Neo realizes in The Matrix: the problem is choice. The problem is always about choice. People don’t like to choose, because that makes them accountable. It’s far easier to make someone else make the choice and just follow, creating the delusion that you made a “rational” choice because “the group” validates it.

After all, “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.”

The reality that you will eventually realize is that you are not required to make “the” choice.

Clear “good guys” and “bad guys” only exist in fairy tales and bed-time stories for children. The world of Adults is defined by shades of grey.

At the end of the day, DHH is right. It doesn’t matter the tech specs of PS4 Pro vs Xbox One S vs Nintendo Switch. It doesn’t matter the amount of teraflops. It doesn’t matter the bandwidth. It doesn’t matter native 4K or checkerboarding 4K. If I like Zelda, I will play in the Switch. If I like Forza I will play an XBox. If I like Uncharted I will play a PS4. And if I can afford it, I will have all of them. If I can’t afford it, I will choose whatever I want to play right now knowing that I can switch to another platform without having to justify myself through tech specs.

Either I subscribe to the Rails Doctrine or to The Zen of Python. It doesn’t matter. Can I play Zelda on it? Otherwise, any “evidence” you think you have to counter argue my choice is utter bullshit. Don’t even try.

But of course, you should use Ruby if you’re a rational developer ;-)

“But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” - Don Draper

One of the great myths of modern society, perpetuated by a torturous daily repetition on social media, is the false “goal” of the “pursuit of happiness.”

On top of that comes the myth of “motivation”. TL;DR: motivation is overrated, far more than it actually deserves.

“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.” - Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Then comes the repeated mantra of “do what you love.” As I discussed back in 2014, that idea is a petty way of devaluing other people’s work.

“…, the big problem with the ’love what you do’ narrative is that it’s tied to a discourse of happiness that means ‘being on top of the rollercoaster all the time.’ As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn’t be a life of satisfaction. All of that makes this scenario worrying.” - Bárbara Castro - “5 Reasons why ‘do what you love’ isn’t the solution”

In our small big world of tech, this leads many people to conclude: “I’m going to work at a startup or start my own.” The decision by itself has nothing wrong with it. The problem is reaching it driven by the previous myths, which turns into a huge source of unnecessary frustration, as I already explained in 2013.

“I won’t mince words: I am deeply skeptical of this system. I’m skeptical of this system’s slavery, self-congratulatory fetishization of “disruption,” while at the same time becoming so obviously the kind of impassive institution it wants to replace. I’m skeptical of the short-term vision of the startup community. And I’m particularly skeptical of its disregard for the lives of the people who participate in it and the lives of those who live in the world that startups seek to reshape. Let’s not even start to discuss the collusion, cartelization, and other market corruption activities that are so common in the VC world. The point being: it’s a bad game, and a fraudulent game.” - Alex Payne

Add to that the social media “consensus” that the world never stops getting worse. Everything today is supposedly worse. People, worse. Jobs, worse. The environment, destroyed. Everything offends everyone all the time, and nobody can stop judging others.

I disagree, as I’ve explained back in 2013 and repeat every year: the world is better, constantly improving, and the future will be even better. I’d like to take this chance to honor one of the men who helped change my perspective on the world, the recently deceased Dr. Hans Rosling.

The Perpetuation of the Myths

There’s no shortage of books, talks, TV shows, movies, and everything else built around the idea that everyone “must” be happy, all the time. And that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something very wrong. The relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness” has become one of the most unhealthy and cruel obsessions of the past two centuries, right next to the excessive consumption of sugar. That’s another subject, though sugar and happiness do tend to be correlated.

There are 2 concepts everyone needs to understand:

1. You probably don’t have depression. These days everyone “is depressed,” of course, because “figuring out what you love to do” takes a lot of work and brings a lot of “suffering”…

No, you’re just bored, momentarily.

Saying “I’m depressed” instead of “I’m bored” has become so common that the real clinical condition needed another name to set itself apart, “Major Depressive Disorder”. That one is a medical condition, far too serious to be treated with such carelessness.

2. Normally, even after going through events we consider very bad, or very good, we tend to return to the same level of “happiness” (or boredom) we were at before them. This is called the “Hedonic Treadmill”. It’s the main reason the “pursuit of happiness” is such a cruel journey: whoever doesn’t grasp this mechanism lives frustrated all the time.

“When enough is not enough, a Hedonist is born.” - Sukant Ratnakar

Have you ever thought “I’ll finally be happy when I get married.” Or “if I get this job, I’ll feel completely satisfied.” Or maybe you relate more to the other side of the coin: “I’ll never be happy now that I got this medical diagnosis.” Or “I can’t be happy while I have to pay these debts.” Psychological research has revealed two important findings when it comes to these beliefs: The things we think will make us happy never make us happy for as long as we imagine. At the same time, negative life events and challenges don’t have a lasting impact on our happiness either, as we believe they would. - Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D - The Myths of Happiness

“We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.” - Jennifer Hecht - The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today

Because of Hedonic Adaptation, any change seems to supply fresh “motivation,” the feeling that “we’ve finally locked onto the right path.” Unless it brings a new purpose, it’s just more of the same. We soon get used to the “new normal” and drift back to boredom.

Without understanding this, you stay stuck in the endless, unsatisfying cycle of “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The most twisted effect of these myths shows up when a person starts blaming others for their own problems. “I can’t because my husband…”, “I can’t because my family…”, “I can’t because my coworkers…”, “I can’t because my boss…”, “I can’t because society…”

At this point you’re lost. You want changes, but you want everything around you to change, except yourself. That’s the best definition of a coward: living on superficial justifications and excuses to avoid effort, to avoid pain, to maximize short-term pleasure. It’s the behavior of an addict, and judging everything and everyone is the drug.

Only you are destined for great things, but something or someone is holding you back. Only you are special. Only you deserve special treatment. In the old days we’d politely call this “immaturity” or “childishness.” Today I’d say most people actually fit into “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.

“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism … (this) causes problems in many areas of life, such as relationships, work, school or financial affairs. You may be generally unhappy and disappointed when you’re not given the special favors or admiration you believe you deserve. Others may not enjoy being around you, and you may find your relationships unfulfilling.” - Mayo Clinic

In the modern world, I’d reduce this to the “Like Culture.” Sad.

Conclusion

This relentless pursuit of “ideal happiness,” this “doing only what you love,” and this certainty that “the world is going to end” make people very weak. Low self-esteem, low empathy, sky-high narcissism, and a sense of “depression” that ends up paralyzing them. In the end, the person just lashes out in every direction, for lack of “purpose” and out of constant frustration with everything and everyone.

Fortunately, I never had this problem. I’ve known people who do, and this article is dedicated to them, as a “wake up call.” That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my unhappy moments and personal crises. I’ve lost a lot, financially and personally. Businesses, friends, relationships. I’m not exaggerating. But I accept my losses and I pay for them, as part of life: No Pain, No Gain.

A “fancy” work environment was never a concern. I once worked under a tarp (!) when they were painting the small office where I was an intern, in summer, with no air conditioning, because they were going to throw a party and the work couldn’t stop. I worked inside a logistics warehouse, with a zinc roof, only a fan, and trucks coming in and out right next to me.

I slept on the office floor dozens of times. I carried furniture down the middle of the street to move offices. I pulled many unpaid all-nighters. I got chewed out for things that weren’t even my responsibility (I was an intern). I did all kinds of things unrelated to my real job, fought with managers, with “coworkers,” with vendors.

I never treated any of this as “the end of the world.” It was just the inevitable. The famous “accept it, it hurts less.”

It’s no accident that I’m an Engineer. An engineer solves problems, and our obsession is always finding a more efficient way to do the same thing. No engineer ever solved anything just by whining.

There’s also no such thing as “work that devalues me.” If I have to crop a Photoshop, I won’t treat it as useless manual labor. There’s no useless work. There’s bad will. Any ordinary, underestimated task, done with your head engaged, can lead to great accidental discoveries.

“The inventor of the Coca-Cola wasn’t a shrewd businessman, a seller of sweets, or a dreamer looking to strike it rich in the beverage business. John Pemberton just wanted to cure headaches. A pharmacist by profession, Pemberton used two main ingredients in his hopeful headache cure: coca leaves and cola nuts. When his lab assistant accidentally mixed the two with carbonated water, the world’s first Coke was the result.” - 10 Awesome Accidental Discoveries

Many of these narcissists, in their aura of self-importance, believe they need the perfect environment, that someone must give them the conditions to achieve great things (emphasis on “give” because they refuse to earn what they need on their own). That’s a load of nonsense. I’ve yet to see anyone who thinks that way achieve anything relevant to anyone.

In my experience, all the great discoveries were born in humble conditions, with people who had a real interest in what they were doing. Only that. Professionals, “craftsmen,” interested in perfecting their own knowledge, who as a consequence came out with great things that benefited more people. You don’t plan something revolutionary. It happens by accident, given the ideal conditions of temperature and pressure at that moment.

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” - by Akita.

I am not a programmer with the goal of one day surpassing Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds. You can do good work without being blindly arrogant. 30 years in, I still have fun with trivial things: a new piece of code that compiles, a configuration that optimizes my GPU, setting up a Raspberry Pi, testing a new language, tweaking my text editor, researching, learning, evolving, and so on. “Doing what you love” is doing these small things well. And “being happy” is a process of trial and error, always in motion, something you win little by little rather than reach as a final destination.

Whoever enjoys the present, what exists around them and within their reach right now, instead of wasting time on “what if in the future…”, is the one with the best chance of doing what others can’t, blinded by the journey of impossible happiness. Constraints lead to Innovation, as I’ve been repeating for years.

“carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” - “Make the most of the (limited) time you have”.

“Whoever lives in the past is a museum. And whoever suffers over the distant future is mentally ill.” - Unknown.

Coincidentally, while I was researching for this post, the Hipsters Ponto Tech podcast came out where I made a small appearance precisely to talk about the topic of Careers in tech.

And reread my old posts mentioned above, related to these topics:

• The World Today Is Very Good! Happy 2013!
• Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup
• Constraints are liberating: less is more
• Don’t Do What You (“THINK”) You Love

TL;DR: Learn how to learn, and make better use of your life.

I might not understand Portuguese, but I'm fluent in Douglas Adams. Congrats @AkitaOnRails and thank you! #RubyConfBR pic.twitter.com/hfOA2wMKot

— Kären Engelbrecht (@scriberty) September 24, 2016

To be crystal clear, this is not one of those “leaving Ruby” dramas. Because I don’t believe in BS like that.

I am a Rubyist and I will always be a Rubyist. For the foreseeable future Ruby will remain my primary, favorite language.

And there is no other drama involved, by the way. Rubyconf Brazil is primarily sponsored and organized by Locaweb, and I have nothing but gratitude for their relentless support through all these years. I even owe them an apology, as I made the announcement without anyone knowing. I don’t know if they will want to continue with the brand or not, we still didn’t talk about it.

The Conference Principles

About the event, some things people may not know:

I don’t own the conference.

I don’t have any contract with any sponsor. I don’t have a salary, profit-sharing (the conference was always non-profit, Locaweb itself paid premium and always spared no expense, which is why quality was always top-notch), or any other kind of financial arrangement. I’ve been organizing the conference in my own time.

That was by design, a principle.

I tried to guarantee as much fair game as possible. Which is also why I always limited my own speaking at my own event. The only times I did speak were to fill in a gap (a speaker who couldn’t make it at the last minute) or at very specific moments (at the 1st Rails Summits, or the 10th anniversary of Ruby on Rails in 2014).

My main concern with the conference has always been the program curation. I handpicked talks by technical merit, as much as I could. They always reflected what I personally think is worth watching. That’s why I always avoided public voting (as it unbalances towards celebrities), never a committee (as it forces politics), no blind choosing (as I believe a conference program is like storytelling and I wanted coherency).

As we were not profit-oriented, I never worried about lame things such as choosing topics just for the sake of increasing audience. It doesn’t mean I always chose right, mistakes happen, but they were the exception. For the most part I believe I did the best I could.

It was always what I personally believed made sense for the audience. I am very proud of the speakers we were able to foster, and equally proud of the audience that followed them. If you look at Rubyconf Brazil’s registered attendees, most of them don’t attend any of the other big events in the country. It’s an exclusive group of people that meet once a year.

More than that: every year, in the last 10 years, half of the attendees were new to the conference, and more than half come from all over the country (not just from Sao Paulo City).

RejectConf 2007

My very first “official” event was called RejectConf SP, in 2007. It had around 150 registrations and less than 100 people actually attended. Almost all of the speakers are still around and doing very well.

It was named like that because in 2007, Ruby was the ugly duckling, especially in Brazil. No one in their right minds would ever think how big this community would become. So it was the rejected language.

The ugly duckling ended up being a Black Swan.

The next 2 years I didn’t try to make a “Ruby"Conf, because most people didn’t even know what “Ruby” was, but everybody was aware of “Rails” as there was a period of “Rails-bashing” in all the other communities. So I called my next events “Rails Summit”.

Once we were able to make the Ruby name sink in and be better appreciated, that’s when I made the switch to “Rubyconf Brazil” in 2010.

So 2016 was the 7th Rubyconf Brazil, but the 10th Ruby-related event in a row.

Then, Ruby on Rails reached the milestone of 10 years, in 2014. I made the closing keynote explaining why it still matters.

Most importantly I made the following important point:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” ― Steven Weinberg

The False Dilemma of Language Religions

If you’ve been paying attention to everything I do, you will know that I am not an extremist language/platform evangelist. I don’t believe in language religions. I believe in freedom. Freedom to do and say whatever I want (to the limit of not harming others, of course), and most importantly: without prejudice.

But this is increasingly difficult, as it automatically sounds “weird” when a “rubyist” wants to talk about Go, Clojure, or other languages. It always feels like “hey, this rubyist is talking about Clojure, he is switching, therefore Ruby is losing ground”. And for that matter it always sounded strange when someone heard about an evangelist of one language speaking about another.

This is the bullshit of this generation. I witnessed my freedom being restrained, year after year. Everybody else’s, for that matter. Everybody must be under some flag nowadays, having an extreme, black-and-white position.

This is just stupid.

Most extreme positions, meant to feel like a solid choice, end up being a very ambiguous and demagogic position.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ― Carl Sagan

I’ve been writing about Critical Thinking, the Scientific Method and related topics for many years on my blog and social media.

I’ve been putting non-Ruby topics in a “Ruby"Conf for many years. We had Node.js in 2010, iOS in 2011, Elixir was introduced by José Valim in 2012’s RubyConf. And in 2015 I did yet another big change by introducing 3 parallel tracks (out of 5) dedicated to non-Ruby topics.

This year we put all language logos (Elixir, Crystal, Go, Javascript, Clojure) in the Rubyconf Brazil materials.

No rubyist felt that was strange, and this is what I am most proud of in the audience we built: Rubyists in Brazil already find it super natural to talk and use other languages and platforms without feeling like they are “betraying” a cause or without feeling the need to “abandon” Ruby because they started enjoying something else such as Elixir or Clojure.

Rubyists, in Brazil at least, are less prone to fall for the mistake of vanity metrics such as choosing a language because of the TIOBE ranking.

There was one last thing I had to do: set the final example.

For most people Fabio Akita (a.k.a. AkitaOnRails) is synonymous with Ruby. Even though I write a lot about other things and have done so for many years, most people will still associate me with RubyConf Brazil. And even though the conference changed its direction years ago, “Ruby"Conf is mostly associated with “just Ruby”.

It was just too comfortable to keep going with Rubyconf Brazil as it was. I know how to do it. People like it. It’s still pretty much growing without signs of slowing down (we started having to close registration a couple of weeks before because of overbooking).

When things start to get too comfortable you know it’s possibly not entirely right.

I am not my favorite language.

This was the final message, the story I wanted to tell, and it was 10 years in the making.

I spent 10 years building a healthy audience that is unlike any other in the technology world: a highly agnostic, rational, critical-thinking-aware, results-oriented crowd. We really believe in “best-of-breed” and “best-tools-for-the-job”.

But it couldn’t be just small talk, demagogic speech. And the most uncomfortable thing I could do was to let it go.

The message was loud and clear: I am not my language, and you shouldn’t let yourself be either.

Akita"OnRails”

Many people asked if I will change my username.

Nope, it will still be “AkitaOnRails”.

Since the very beginning, “On Rails” is not about the web framework “Ruby on Rails”. It means exactly what it says: “On Rails”, “Over a Line”, “Embracing Constraints”.

“Constraints are Liberating”

• DHH

Ruby on Rails is a web framework. But it is also a statement, an opinionated point of view.

It means:

• Making efforts to write Beautiful Code
• Making efforts to write Enjoyable Code
• Making efforts to write Maintainable Code

It means using the best techniques and practices to achieve that. Test-Driven Development (Test-First, or Test-After, it doesn’t matter). Continuous Integration. YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It). SOLID (as Bob Martin evangelizes). Continuous Delivery. Etc.

The Ruby Community didn’t invent Git, but we made it work through Github.

The Ruby Community was the very first software development crowd to adopt Agile techniques as a whole, and not as a dissident faction of another mainstream group.

Now every new community aspires to be “On Rails”, without naming it like that. And not by just copying the web framework. Just by the desire and discipline of writing “Good Code”, and never “Quick and Dirty” Code.

And these values will keep on going, with or without a Rubyconf or the Ruby language.

I know, for most people it will still feel like I am tied to the web framework, but it’s not. Maybe someday I will change it, but not now.

We will not always agree on what the right techniques are, but we will always make efforts toward the same goals: writing beautiful code that yields valuable results.

The Next 10 Years

With all that said, I hope to have helped a bit in spreading the word:

Stop being extremists.

Exercise critical thinking. Do what feels right, not what pleases random influential groups. Never force your point of view upon others. Stop blindly following false prophets.

I do everything by this idea:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

“I am a software engineer. I know what is to come from the principle on which it is built.”

I explained this in detail in my article "_Why, Ruby Dramas, and Dynamiting Courtlandt”. In a small way, I want to think that I honored this principle.

I write software (and about software) because I enjoy software. I am very fond of Ruby and will keep doing the best Ruby I can for many years. And I will also write good Elixir, and good Crystal, and perhaps good Javascript, etc.

But I will do it my way, not anyone else’s.

And so should you.

“The foundation of that is the open source world: the biggest capitalist experiment in software and a living example of what a Laissez-faire Free Market looks like. The best place to maintain and improve technology commodities.”

The confusion comes from the word “free”. Because of the freedom principles of Free Software, a lot of people associate open source with one big “socialist” experiment. My thesis is the opposite: free software is the most capitalist thing in software. No government regulates it, no agency protects bad projects, every exchange is voluntary, and competition decides who survives. No sector of the real economy works like that; the closest historical period was late 19th century America, before the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax.

Matt Asay wrote on CNET, in “Open source: It’s about capitalism, not freebies”:

“The secret is to use open source as a means to an end, not the end itself. Open source is a means to cheap distribution, a way to get software into the hands of would-be buyers at little to no cost. It’s a way to make the software experience social and less risky, because users can try before they buy and because they can tailor (or pay someone else to tailor) software to their needs for a lower cost than proprietary software affords.”

And he was even more blunt in “Sorry, socialists: Open source is a capitalist’s game”:

“[Sarah] Grey writes that ’there are alternatives to capitalism’. She’s right. Unfortunately, open source isn’t one of them. Open source is the essence of Free Market Capitalism.”

Definitions, so nobody fights a strawman

First, the terms I’m using. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, with voluntary exchanges between the owners of that property. A Free Market is those exchanges carried out with no coercion and no regulator: supply, demand, and prices stay in the hands of the participants.

Socialism, in the classical sense, is state or collective ownership of the means of production. Public healthcare and free education in a market economy are welfare policies, not socialism. The target of this text is the model where the State owns production.

With these definitions, defending classical socialism and defending individual liberty are opposite positions: the first requires subordinating everyone’s property and choices to a central authority.

Free software is private property under a license

Open source code has an owner, always. Copyright belongs to the authors, and using, copying, or modifying that code is only possible because the owner granted a license. Without a license, nobody has any right over someone else’s code, as Jeff Atwood pointed out in “Pick a License, Any License”:

“Because I did not explicitly indicate a license, I declared an implicit copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically assert copyright at any time and demand that people stop using my code. Experienced developers won’t touch unlicensed code because they have no legal right to use it.”

There’s a practical test for this property: the owner can pull the code out of circulation whenever they want. In March 2016, Azer Koçulu unpublished his packages from npm, including the tiny left-pad, after a name dispute with the Kik app. Thousands of builds broke that same day, as Ars Technica reported. The source code stayed on GitHub; what he removed was the distribution from the registry.

Agreeing with Koçulu or not is irrelevant. The package was his property, and the decision to remove it was his. The interesting part came after: nobody got arrested, no regulator stepped in. npm restored the broken package and changed its unpublish policy. The market absorbed the shock and grew antibodies, without taking away anyone’s right to walk out.

The Ruby community lived through a smaller version of this in 2009, when _why deleted his projects and vanished, as I wrote here.

When the disagreement is internal, the exit mechanism is the fork: whoever disagrees clones the project and competes with the original. That’s what happened with io.js, born as a fork of Node.js in 2014 and merged back in 2015 under the newly created Node.js Foundation, once negotiation made sense. History has plenty of thriving forks: WebKit from KHTML, LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org, MariaDB from MySQL, X.Org from XFree86. And there are derivatives that outgrew their origins, like Ubuntu from Debian.

A fork is voting with your feet. It’s expensive, because it means maintaining an entire project, and that’s exactly why it only thrives when the motivation is real.

Competition implies the right to fail

In a market with no regulator, nobody keeps a bad project artificially alive. For every PostgreSQL out there, dozens of databases tried and died. For every relevant Linux distro, hundreds became footnotes. That’s a sign of health: selection is working.

The justice of this process is blind. Code doesn’t carry its author’s biography, and the market hands out no medals for good intentions. A project survives if it convinces users and contributors of its technical merit, and dies if it doesn’t.

Opening the code, by the way, saves no one. Nokia finished open-sourcing Symbian in 2010, when the platform was already losing ground to the iPhone and Android. The gesture changed nothing: too little, too late.

I compared this process to natural selection in an old screencast (in Portuguese). The software that adapts best to the demands of its environment is the one that reproduces the most, as users and contributors. The graveyard of dead projects proves selection exists and works.

And the landscape shifts all the time. Apache HTTP ceded ground to NGINX. Firefox lost a huge slice to Chrome. Perl ceded to Python and to newer languages like Go. MySQL lost prestige among developers to PostgreSQL, faced the NoSQL wave, and still gained a competing fork, MariaDB, after the Oracle acquisition. None of these projects had squatters’ rights to the throne.

The programmer pays to participate

The free software market has a curious inversion of values. At a company, the programmer gets paid money to write proprietary code. In a well-known free project, it’s the programmer who “pays”, with their time and skill, to get code accepted. In return they get reputation, learning, portfolio, and yes, a bit of vanity. It’s a voluntary exchange that benefits both sides, like any other.

“Price” here isn’t measured only in money. Value is anything with supply and demand, and competition sets the price. The currency of this market is technical competence demonstrated in public.

That has a hard consequence: convincing others is part of the game. If your idea has value and still nobody adopts it, the most likely explanation is the idea or how you presented it, not the audience’s stupidity. Blaming the audience is the fastest way to devalue your own cause.

The paradox of “socialist” free software

Picture the opposite model: the software world under classical socialism, with production controlled by a central authority.

Without individual ownership of projects, competition ends. A bad project that serves the controllers’ agenda stays alive, even when a technically superior alternative exists. Choice leaves the hands of the users and moves to the hands of the controllers. There would be no left-pad accidents, and the price of that would be a huge catalog of derelict software nobody wants to use.

Without the individual benefit of exchange, volunteering ends. No competent programmer would donate their best hours without reputation, learning, or freedom in return. And if contribution becomes a mandatory quota decreed in the name of the “social good”, everyone will do the bare minimum to fill the quota. Soviet production worked exactly like that in pretty much every sector, with the results we all know.

Without competition, innovation ends. Innovation is born from an individual’s will to solve their own problem their own way. Eric Raymond opened “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” with that idea:

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”

Innovation is also transgressive, because it makes entire professions obsolete. Travel agencies nearly vanished once buying tickets online became trivial. Video rental stores died with streaming. Uber squeezed cab drivers, Airbnb squeezed hotels. Whoever stayed stuck in the old model suffered, and the world moved on.

Software was the same. The GNU Hurd folks didn’t celebrate when Linux exploded. Nokia found no humor in Android. MySQL doesn’t root for PostgreSQL. Whoever resists the market’s dynamics gets left behind. Harsh, and absolutely fair.

The dystopia of the protected monopoly

Proprietary software can be good or bad; the problem shows up when it becomes a protected monopoly. 1990s Microsoft was a de facto monopoly. We can argue forever about whether the Department of Justice ruling was fair, but the decisive blow to the monopoly came from the market: free software, with GNU and Linux, and then the commercial internet, which took the platform monopoly away from Windows.

Imagine an alternate future where Microsoft convinces the US government that Windows is essential to national security and deserves permanent protection. Everything would have stopped. To this day we’d be using a 100 MHz Pentium running some Windows 98 derivative, on dial-up, because “nobody needs more than that”.

That’s the logic of handing the market’s decisions to a central authority: don’t invent email, it will hurt the mail carriers; don’t build websites, it will hurt the printing plants; don’t create free software, it will hurt the government’s programmers. Every dictator uses the same speech, “for the good of the people”, and every speech of “for the good of the people, whatever the means” ends in the same place.

Tyranny and the end of free software

The worst possible case for a free project starts like this. A developer builds a piece of software to solve a problem and opens the code. For twenty years, hundreds of people use it and contribute.

Then a cause comes along, any cause, and someone appoints themselves its representative. Through social pressure and propaganda, the maintainers become pariahs. The trade press amplifies it, because controversy attracts readers. The code stops being the subject: what counts now is each contributor’s personal opinions, appearance, and past.

From that point on, participating in the project becomes a risk. Contributing pays no value anymore; all it pays is exposure. One by one, the people who actually wrote code walk away, and the project withers. It’s a perverse way of seizing a property and destroying its value without formally confiscating anything.

Ayn Rand dramatized exactly this mechanism in Howard Roark’s trial in “The Fountainhead”, and I wrote about it in 2011:

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim!”

That’s the warning. A political layer on top of a free project destroys the market that sustained it.

Conclusion

None of this condemns anyone who contributes out of social motivation. Whoever trades their code for the feeling of helping is making a voluntary exchange like any other, and outside software that has a name: donation and volunteer work. The trouble starts when someone decides that other people’s property must serve the cause they picked.

Solving the world’s problems is much harder than arguing about them. Bill Gates delivered that message in 2000, pushing back on the hype that PCs would end poverty:

“Fine, go to those Bangalore Infosys centers, but just go and try those guys three miles outside, and look at the people who are living without a toilet, without running water… The world is not flat and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.”

Programmers, from any social class, have internet and resources to spare, enough to spend the day on social media debating how to save the world. The people actually working on those problems are outside that circuit, doing instead of talking.

I’ll close with a real story someone told me, names removed:

A: Man, nobody gives my [minority] a chance.

B: Why don’t you help me fix these issues in this open source project? Then you can give talks about it.

(A vanishes. B waits, gets tired, and calls C, who fixes the issues and gets the speaking slot.)

A: See, B? You’re one of the oppressors who won’t give people like me a shot, and you’d rather hand the opportunity to C.

And a personal note to wrap up. People label me an “Ayn Rand follower”, and they’re wrong: Rand merely put in writing, before me, what I already thought and practiced. Same goes for Bastiat, Friedman, Hayek, or Menger. They’re references, and references are not owners. Judging an idea by its author instead of judging the argument on its merits is the definition of ad hominem, and I don’t respond well to fallacies.

In times when everyone seems to have an active opinion on certain subjects, I prefer not to actively voice any, neither for nor against. Both sides are absolutely sure they’re right, it’s a zero-sum game, and I hate zero-sum games.

If I have an opinion and force it on people, many will agree and buy my point of view. Plenty of others will hatefully disagree and try to discredit the idea or its author. And the main thing: we all only stand to lose if we enter this kind of Manichean view.

Does this mean staying “on the fence”? Not that either. One thing I’ve had for years on my Quora profile is this:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

So, before continuing, I sincerely ask that you think for yourself, not for others, much less for me, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

That said, I want to start with a small example, of microscopic magnitude next to today’s big questions.

“Welcome”

On July 7, 2016, at 1:52:39, it will be 10 years since I started publishing posts dedicated to the tech community, particularly to Ruby on Rails. I chose my words carefully and said the following:

Let’s see how far this community can go.

Ruby on Rails could be a lot or nothing, it’ll all depend on how the market faces this novelty. But a lot can be done now. To start with, by learning about the subject.

I’ll post the main topics about the platform here and I hope everyone collaborates with ideas and suggestions or even criticism and opinions.

Unfortunately there are still many challenges to overcome. To start, Rails materials in Portuguese are virtually nonexistent. Brazilian sites likewise. So when I say “starting from zero,” I mean it.

The biggest challenge will be convincing the market. And that doesn’t happen overnight. It means it still won’t be possible to set the Java legacy entirely aside. Let’s start a transition period in which we’ll try both things in parallel.

Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.

My Principles

If you’ve never read my Off-Topic posts, let’s make it clear: I’m not altruistic, in the literal sense of the word, not in the wrong way it usually gets interpreted. Nothing I’ve done up to today was purely for some kind of “greater good” ideology.

My objective is simple: I just want the right to produce, on my own terms.

Along the way, what I do leaves side effects, and one of them is helping others. Today I have a small company called Codeminer 42 that employs more than 60 people. People with families, who find there their livelihood and their own self-improvement, through the results my friends and I seek and achieve together. That’s a direct side effect.

I organize Rubyconf Brazil, and have for 9 years alongside Locaweb. Speakers, sponsors, Locaweb, and me have an annual meeting point where companies meet new people to hire, professionals find their next job, and entrepreneurs come together to test ideas. It’s over 1,200 attendees every year with a chance to produce something. That’s an indirect side effect.

A group like Ruby on Rails Brazil on Facebook, which I didn’t create, has more than 8,500 participants exchanging ideas, learnings, and experiences.

The foundation of all this is the open source world: the biggest capitalist experiment in software and a living example of what a Laissez-faire Free Market is. It’s the best place to maintain and improve technology commodities.

Companies invest time and money hiring programmers to maintain open projects. Not because they’re “nice,” whatever they say, but because these technologies bring direct and indirect benefits to their businesses.

On their own, they’d have to invest far more than by dividing the problem among dozens of other companies so everyone profits together. It’s the ideal platform for an individual to demonstrate their abilities to the world, sharpen them, and look for new opportunities. And it’s one of the most brutal and aggressive environments there is, which is exactly what makes it good, for learning to deal with pressure, communication, and creative technical solutions, precisely because resources are finite.

Everyone profits, and not always in money: some with new learning, others with new opportunities. Even the person whose profit is the pure satisfaction of helping is making a fair trade, of what they know how to produce for the reward of a clearer conscience. After all, nobody helps people they dislike, and that would be real altruism.

What I Did NOT Do, and Do NOT Do

When I started this journey, and remember I wasn’t the first, I always sought to do things for my own benefit, knowing it could benefit other people too. With mutual benefits, everyone moves faster and better. My proposition was never a promise of material or moral reward, only the promise of working on what you love.

If it had been purely for morality or ideology, it would never have worked. And if it somehow had, it would be fragile, because it would sit on the wrong foundation.

If I had truly believed that “Ruby on Rails is the only best technology,” I would have forced that view on others. Many would have believed it. Worse: we’d have to assume the other technologies are bad and fight them, ignoring the evidence. The result would have been disastrous.

I always knew Rails is good in certain cases, particularly in the startup market that was growing from 2004 onward. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service. A lot of people thought like me, independently, and from there gems like Github were born, the largest free software market ever created.

If I had assumed my way was right and everyone else’s automatically wrong, I would have gotten frustrated and failed bitterly. My natural thought would have been:

“Why don’t these people follow me if my path is certainly the right one?”

I never tried to convince anyone that my point of view is correct “for the good” of something, or “because it’s free software,” or “because it serves some political vision.” I always evangelized by teaching how to profit.

In a niche with the characteristics of Rails, professionals of rare quality accumulated. Every new programmer had those pioneers as “role models.” Every Rubyist aimed for quality first. And the new generation of startups showed how to make profitable products without the open faucet of insane investors like in 2000. That was 37signals’ pitch in 2005: everyone wanted to build the next Basecamp. And they did, from Engine Yard to Heroku, Github, Pivotal Labs, Living Social, Shopify, Twitter, Groupon, Zendesk, Hulu, Square, Airbnb, and Soundcloud.

Does it matter that they aren’t 100% pure Ruby? Of course not. Nobody is defending an extremist, religious view, this isn’t the “Cult of Ruby.” Rails is a means to an end, never the end. Whoever adopted Rails wanted to filter the best programmers, because you had to really love the craft of programming to learn Rails in 2006. They also wanted quality of life in the daily routine, because the principles behind the design of Ruby and Rails created a unique view of how to make software. Nobody chose Rails the way you pick a soccer team or a political party. Everyone who chose it was after some gain for themselves and, thinking that way, built a gigantic ecosystem that ended up benefiting many more people.

What I didn’t do? I made no promises, gave no certificates, guaranteed no positions, promised no “bright future,” and put no political vision into the community. Maybe the only promise was a lot of work ahead and opportunities to produce. Reread the last paragraph of my first post:

“Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.”

That’s the spirit of an entrepreneur: risking what they own, not what others have.

It’s intentional: from the beginning I rarely speak at the events I organize myself. And from the beginning there are other technologies on display at a Ruby event (we had Node.js talks back in 2009, before JavaScript events existed). That’s why “Ruby"conf has tracks for several other rising technologies: because we only stand to profit from it.

It’s my way of producing on my own terms, with what I love.

The “Ruby way” doesn’t convince others that using Ruby is the only path. It shows that walking the harder path, the one of quality and of caring about what you do, probably brings better results. It’s what an entrepreneur does: takes calculated risks and works brutally for themselves. It’s what an artist does, always different from the common.

The path of an entrepreneur, an artist, someone who produces, is necessarily individualistic. Because it goes against the status quo, against what’s considered “right” today, against what’s “commonly accepted” by a “majority.”

“Insanity is wanting different results doing the same thing over and over.” - Albert Einstein

We’ll always be stoned for it. But it’s precisely the people who choose the different path that everyone tries to stop, and it’s they who brought us the great achievements of humanity. One of the things that made me see this right away came from the creator of Rails, the still controversial David Heinemeier Hansson, someone I agree and disagree with on several fronts, when he cited early in the community:

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.” - Mahatma Gandhi

It’s a sin to even imagine that it isn’t the Sun that revolves around the Earth. It took the individualistic and absolutely “selfish” vision of a “Galileo vs Inquisition” to open the way to today, when we’ve not only already gone to the Moon but are getting exceptionally good at sending machinery into space.

A Nazi Nation

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi

There’s a term for those who think in absolutes in the real world: extremist terrorists. Being extremist, by itself, does no harm. The problem is forcing the extreme view on others, the terrorist’s turf, and that’s what leads to the dark side of the Force.

A terrorist is dangerous because they believe, absolutely, that they’re right.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” - Alfred, The Dark Knight

That’s why you don’t negotiate with a terrorist. It’s impossible, you’ll always lose.

And the worst part is that the dark side of the Force seduces, because it easily disguises itself as something “good”:

“Don’t lecture me, Obi-Wan! I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security … to my new Empire!” - Anakin Skywalker, Episode III

It isn’t hard to understand how people emerged who are so unequivocally recognized as “evil.” Collectivists and extremists like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring.

But they’re just a few people. The main question is much harder: how do you convince an entire Nation, like the German people, to accept and act in favor of the ideology of a party like the National Socialist one, to the point of the genocide of 11 million people in the Holocaust!?

There are many theories for what happened during World War II, and it’s a delicate topic to this day. I have a small personal theory, with no support in evidence, hence this ‘disclaimer’:

Many must have committed those acts with purely evil intent. Even so, it’s hard to believe that in a short span of time, thousands of Germans automatically turned into agents of Evil.

At that time, Germany carried the post-WWI humiliation and an economy in tatters after the Great Depression of 1929. In that context, a populist political ideology, in the name of the social good of the nation, gained strength through the National Socialist Party. The idea of the “Third Reich” seduced by bringing back the hope of a bright future, that of a “New Germany.”

And they found someone to really hate, in this case the Jews. The anti-Semitic idea gained traction in the populist speech.

In the name of the “bright future of the New Germany,” the path could reach all the way to the extreme of the Holocaust. And even so, how is that justified?

If you don’t know Stanley Milgram’s psychological theories, I recommend watching the film The Experimenter (2015) to understand.

In short, Milgram’s Authority Experiment, repeated countless times over the years, shows it isn’t as hard as common sense imagines to make a group of people do the wrong thing, even while aware of it, in the name of a “greater good.”

I’m being simplistic in the explanation, of course, but it’s worth keeping this in mind: most people react with herd behavior.

It’s close to the Law of Least Effort: after all, why spend time researching whether something is “right” or “wrong” when it’s much easier to follow what the “majority” thinks is right?

“A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing”

The most dangerous thing of all is rarely complete ignorance. It’s “a little knowledge,” as the great poet Alexander Pope warned us.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.” - Alexander Pope

One of the things I like to write about is precisely this warning: we don’t know everything, we’ll never know everything, and everything we know may be wrong. If you live with this always in mind, you’ll be safe.

The Root of All Evil, the Enemies of Reason, is what I’ve been pointing at for a long time: “religious” thinking.

And I don’t say that to attack others’ religions. The “religion” I refer to isn’t only Christianity, Judaism, Shintoism. It’s worse, it’s the Religion of Little Knowledge.

We see examples of this every day, just read the news:

• Classic Paulista football matches will have a single fan group after fights and an elderly man’s death
• Chinese man sentenced to death for selling more than 150,000 secret documents
• Criminalization of abortion exposes women to death across all social classes, study shows
• To vaccinate or not to vaccinate children, that is the question
• Daughters of Australian scientists who took their own lives reflect on their parents’ plan

Just search for “death” in the news and a good part of it is the result of ignorance or, worse, of people’s “little knowledge.” This won’t solve itself, but we’ve already solved thousands of these problems. The 20th century onward was a great advance in eliminating prejudices, outdated knowledge, and the general ignorance of the global population.

The problem is that none of these people have any doubt. They’re all sure they’re right and that they’re doing the morally correct thing, given the little they know.

The consequence is dogmatization. And a dogma is unquestionable. Do you follow an unquestionable script? Then you’ve probably already been dogmatized. Nobody likes being proven wrong, even less after believing a lie with great dedication for a long time, because it becomes part of their identity. And who wants to see their own identity broken?

Black Swans and the Antidote of Little Knowledge

Finally we get to the point. How do you solve the world’s problems?

With “scientific philosophy.” And you don’t need to be a scientist to think this way.

The world is unfair, that’s a fact. It’s impossible to solve everyone’s problem all at once. But you can solve one problem at a time, over time. Sorry to the impatient.

I think it starts with something simple: critical reasoning that doesn’t lean on simple induction.

For me, Karl Popper taught me one of the most valuable things in my way of thinking. I don’t look for false-gurus, false-experts, false-leaders, false-heroes, or false-icons.

I don’t need anyone with “authority” to tell me what’s right. And I don’t need the consensus of some “majority” to validate my actions either.

When someone advocates an “inviolable affirmation,” “the” right way, whether by tradition, by scriptures, by the will of an abstract and amorphous entity like “society” or “the people,” or worse, by “inviolable proofs,” I know I’m looking at a false prophet.

The explanation for becoming incorruptible is simple. Let me use the classic example:

“Imagine that all the swans in the world are white.”

Let’s say your statement comes from the fact that in the 40 years you’ve lived, you, your family, and your friends only saw white swans with your own eyes. Your natural and “logical” conclusion, by “induction,” is to extrapolate to a general, absolute law: “all the swans in the world are white.”

That comes from your little knowledge. It doesn’t matter if it’s been 40 years. It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen 1,000 swans in your life, all white.

You clearly never traveled to Australia or New Zealand, where you’d find the black variety.

By your “little knowledge,” you reached a wrong conclusion. And, worse, you extrapolated and uttered that statement to others, who now think like you. The responsibility is yours.

“I know vaccines are bad because I heard cases of several children who were vaccinated and died, so I’ll never vaccinate my children.”

“I know medicines don’t work but homeopathy works, because my aunts have been using it for years and never had health problems, so I’ll never use medicines.”

“I know capitalism is something for evil people, because I knew businessmen in my city who exploited my friends and neighbors, so the capitalist system has to fall.”

“I know socialism works, because my friends who visited Cuba were very impressed with what they heard about the hospitals there, and so I think it should be used everywhere.”

You do this every day: you see news with a catchy headline, see dozens of “Likes,” agree that it’s right, and still share it with more people, spreading lies.

“A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.” - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

The problem is the “search for the truth.” Apart from mathematical theorems, you can rarely show the correct proof of anything. Often we resort to the reverse, showing something is incorrect. No amount of evidence proves a theory as absolute truth. The most we can do is “disprove” a theory, and for that a single piece of evidence that refutes it is enough.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And I’ll add: not even with extraordinary evidence can we claim the discovery of an “absolute truth.” We can only say we have knowledge solid enough to use, and that can be disproven at any moment.

It’s worth keeping this concept in mind, because it makes us stronger against rumors, pseudo-science, superstitions, “common sayings,” outdated tradition, and every kind of false “truth.”

Any theory that offers no clear ways to disprove it is a weak theory and certainly isn’t scientific. Any statement that depends on a divinity impossible to prove, on an inviolable “morality,” or on an “unquestionable” authority is pseudo-science and is wrong.

The Gray Morality of “Social Justice Warriors”

This is a topic I avoid getting involved in as much as possible, because this generation of so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) is particularly perverse. Not all of them! Just a small, very influential minority. True wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Disclaimer: do I consider those who fight for social causes perverse? NO. There are several legitimate social initiatives, with excellent results and with people genuinely committed to solving a legitimate problem. I wish only good things for them. Here I’m talking only about those who devalue them. The objective of this section is to separate the real from the illegitimate.

I’m not against social causes, and most civilized people aren’t either. There’s a lot to do to keep improving the world. And in the last century we improved it in extraordinary ways, even more so compared to the centuries before the 20th.

Contrary to what many say, and something I’ve been repeating since 2013: “The World Today Is Better”. Believe the world is getting worse and you’ll start justifying perverse acts as morally correct.

The credit goes to the continuous progress of people who “produce,” not to specific events and movements. And stealing goes beyond taking a material good from someone. You can steal much more than that: a person’s time, morality, mind, and freedom.

Theft of freedom is Slavery.

Until the 19th century everyone had to work hard just to secure their basic livelihood. Today we have a huge surplus, because we discovered more efficient ways and applied them for individual purposes. That ended up helping far beyond the individual who created them. The steam engine, electricity, agriculture, medicine, all creations of selfish people whose only objective is to produce, made the world orders of magnitude better. No social revolution in history can claim the same results.

Do you care about reducing poverty? Milton Friedman already explained why the Free Market is better for the poor.

There are only 3 basic freedoms that really matter:

1. the right to freedom of expression;
2. the right to produce and keep for oneself what one produces via voluntary trades, without theft or slavery;
3. the right to seek and achieve one’s own goals, without obligation to serve the will of others.

A “selfish” productive individual has a single objective, to produce, to create. Never to steal.

No one has the right to restrict the freedom of another person by forcing their own gray morality, their own agenda, and their own objectives, except by the means of “voluntary trades.” No gray morality has the right to justify the immorality of enslaving an individual, for any objective whatsoever.

And here’s the problem: the false social justice warrior has a single objective, to be a social justice warrior, to have the acceptance and validation of others. For that, they need someone else’s suffering to exist, anyone’s, to justify their existence and their identity. Ending the suffering is not their objective. If one form of suffering ends, soon another will be needed to raise a cause, and that’s the vicious cycle. Their objective is to feed off others’ suffering, to enslave that suffering to the validation of their own identity.

A producer, a creator, isn’t always interested in “causes,” and that’s certainly no rule. Whatever their motives, they want to create, and that’s enough. For the false warrior, that isn’t enough: they need to take from those who produce for the benefit of some “cause.” The warrior wants to take what you have, and not what they themselves have, because they don’t produce, in the name of some gray morality. And only for the causes that interest them. It’s the old and eternal fight between those who produce and those who take, the gray morality of Robin Hood.

It’s a shame, because it devalues those who genuinely dedicate their lives to social causes. Doctors, firefighters, police, soldiers, and the many anonymous people who don’t spend their time posting on social media, judging others and stirring up discord, but who work silently, expecting no public recognition.

Want to tell a real social warrior from the social parasites? Look for the absence of any pursuit of recognition.

Conclusion

The objective of this long article? Just to lay out universal concepts and my personal principles, which are inviolable and incorruptible. The main points:

• The only really moral thing is voluntary trades. Never forcing the slavery, physical or moral, of any individual.
• There is no “truth” decreed by a group or a majority. There are ideas, some valid, others invalid. But if they aren’t falsifiable, refutable, they’re probably false by premise, no matter the apparent morality they represent or the amount of “evidence” they gather.
• There is no “moral authority,” that’s the realm of charlatans. Doubt anyone who forces your property (your action is your property, your freedom is your property) in the name of any “cause,” no matter how just it seems. Don’t look for heroes.
• The only thing that took us out of the Middle Ages and launched us into modernity was the minds that produced for their own benefit, without unilaterally demanding the taking of anyone’s property, material or mental.

Look at the 20th century and compare it to the 19th and earlier. No one explained this better than Hans Rosling, of Gapminder:

Don’t become a victim of the minority of false social justice warriors. Learn more about this dangerous Orwellian group, nothing less than the “Thought Police” prophesied in the despotic universe of 1984. This kind of thinking is nothing new, it existed throughout the 20th century, but the advent of the Internet and above all Social Networks created a wild environment where rumors, fake news, and pseudo-science in general reign. It’s where Critical Rationalism can save you.

Inviolable and incorruptible principles are simple. In the axiomatic world of mathematics, 2 + 2 is 4, and there’s no “majority” or group that, by clamor or vote, can change that result to 5 or 6, no matter the morality or authority of whoever makes the clamor. You don’t need validation! You do need to take responsibility for your own actions and stop justifying your mistakes as the result of following someone else’s gray morality.

Repeating:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

And with this principle we’ll keep evolving the 21st century as we did the 20th, no matter who tries to steal from us, whether you agree with this exposition or not.

We’re already doing it.

Start simple with the article that lends its title to this compilation, Processes and Methodologies Won’t Help You, which I published on Abril’s blogs in 2011. It’s the starting point for understanding what processes, methodologies, and procedures are.

Next, go straight to the more recent Agile: the Truth Behind the Method and understand once and for all: no methodology or magic recipe will save incompetent or bad-character members of any team. After trying to improve attitude and training without success, you only rid the team of these elements one way: by replacing the members. Nothing saves a Net Negative Producing Programmer.

Many are left with that feeling of “waste”, like “man, but we’ve invested so much in him, what if we invest a little more?”. That comes from failing to understand that Sunk Cost is better than increasing your Opportunity Cost.

On the same “Agile is Dead” theme, or, more explicitly, “Agile-by-bikeshedding-consultants is Dead”, it’s worth recalling the old theme of The Problem of Credentials and Argumentation through Intimidation. The credential guy has the easiest job in the world: he shows up at your company to implement “practices” he doesn’t really practice. And trying to implement it at one or half a dozen places is ridiculously the same as nothing.

When it “seems” to work, he puts the case on his portfolio list as a “success.” When it goes wrong, he says “you didn’t do it right.” Terrible.

Forget pompous names and different schools of methodologies. Everything starts from exactly the same principle: Scientific Method vs Cargo Cult, where it’s clear no one understands the main thing about the method: it doesn’t pick sides or root for any team.

The phrase “it’s proven to work because I’ve seen it working in 100 places” doesn’t exist.

Anyone who uses a phrase similar to this is clearly an amateur. By Karl Popper’s principle of “Falsifiability”, instead of trying to prove something works, it’s better to try to disprove that it works. Because it doesn’t matter how many tons of evidence we manage to accumulate that something is true, a single piece of evidence that makes it false is enough to destroy any hypothesis. That’s why the scientific body is robust, not because we have mountains of evidence in its favor, but because what we’ve accumulated so far hasn’t been proven false.

But human beings are fallible. Our non-rational brain, a leftover of our long evolution, is still exceptional at seeing patterns where none exist, as I describe in We Are Mathematically Ignorant and Processes, Methodologies and the Human Brain.

The most accepted hypothesis is that we tend to confuse correlation with causation. Because “A” came before “B”, we tend to think that “A” caused “B”, and most of the time this isn’t true. The world is more random than we’d like to accept. Shit just happens.

This leads to the pseudo-intellectuals who want to push their “Southbeach Diet” of the day and become mere trolls or haters, as I describe in Math, Trolls, Haters and Internet Discussions. They create more and more diets, as I talk about in #noEstimates Debunked, Demystifying the Kanban method, and Watch Out for Kanban-butt.

And all of that I linked above is just the introduction to the most important thing of all: be skeptical all the time, nothing is automatically true, no matter who’s saying it. And as Carl Sagan would say: “extraordinary claims DEMAND extraordinary evidence.” In the end, we always come back to the theme of Enemies of Reason.

The problem is: if none of this works, what do you do? It’s much easier to say what’s wrong than to say what to do. The problem was never the recipe. Everything comes down to the decisions you make.

Each decision brings consequences, which lead to new dilemmas, which require more decisions. As Neo would say in The Matrix Reloaded: “The problem is choices.” There simply is no magic recipe, diet, or methodology that will make you make better decisions all the time.

There’s a desire to seek an external tool, an external source of “validation,” one of the worst words invented in recent times. The catch is that decisions carry consequences, and most people simply wish they didn’t have to bear them. That’s the root of the problem. This is the comfort zone: everyone complains and wants things, but no one wants to make decisions, much less face their consequences.

The only way to make better decisions is to study and train, as much as possible, all the time, continuously. Experience isn’t doing the same thing for 10 years straight, but becoming very good at 10 different things over those 10 years. Following the trend won’t help you, just like following magic diets. They leave you a bit thinner at the beginning, and soon the rebound comes and leaves you heavier than you were before. That’s why Processes and Methodologies Won’t Help You.

"Do what you love"/"Follow your passion" is dangerous advice and can destroy your career.

Another recognized celebrity in the US is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who, in 2012, said the same thing:

"Don't follow your passion, follow your effort."

Apparently, the famous Confucius was the first to say the phrase that would become one of the biggest clichés for young people coming out of adolescence and having to face adult life with real responsibilities:

"Do what you love and the money will follow."

By the way, Confucius is kind of a generic for everything: don’t know who said it? Say it’s from Confucius. (And the usual disclaimer: just because I quoted people doesn’t mean I agree with them or with everything they say; they’re mere references!)

Besides Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, several others have raised the subject before, and I recommend you read “Don’t do what you love.” by cartoonist Rachel Nabors, where she concludes with a new phrase:

"Just don't do what you hate."

On the renowned site Slate, Miya Tokumitsu also wrote “In the Name of Love” where she begins with the excellent subtitle to the article:

Elites embrace the "do what you love" mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.

I have to say I was even a little surprised that this subject is also in Brazil. In March 2014, Daniela Carasco wrote the article “5 reasons why ‘do what you love’ is not the solution,” published by EXAME.com, talking about Bárbara Castro, a sociologist specialized in work issues and professor of the sociopsychology course at the Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo (FESPSP). And she also already identified the obvious that many still remain blind to:

According to her, the big problem with the "love what you do" narrative is that it's tied to a discourse of happiness that means "being at the top of the rollercoaster all the time." As if a normal, day-to-day, routine life couldn't be a life of satisfaction. All of this makes this scenario worrying.

Finally, blogger Dani Arrais analyzed the subject in February 2014 in her post “THE TRAP OF ‘DO WHAT YOU LOVE’”, who coincidentally is also a friend of the same sociologist Bárbara Castro (something tells me I should try to meet her), and she says:

Do we need to be happy all the time with the work we do? Even if we love what we do? Can't we suffer with the contradictions that this work imposes on us? Why can't we admit that it doesn't make sense? Who does this interest?

You may be confused reading all this. I imagine the vast majority of my readers have always identified with the “Do what you love” mantra. After all, if you’re on a blog that talks about Ruby and, with less emphasis, technology in general and Entrepreneurship, it’s probably because you “love” the subjects of Ruby, Technology or Entrepreneurship.

And you probably read what I post because you assume that I’m “passionate” about these subjects. And here comes the important part:

• I don’t love Ruby or programming
• I don’t love entrepreneuring or owning a company
• I don’t love technology or the equipment I buy
• I don’t love writing or the time I spend on it

And to be honest, over the years, because of this so-often-repeated mantra, so many brainwashing attempts, a few times I almost succumbed and believed in this idea, but fortunately I always managed to bring myself back. And I have no problem saying that I don’t love any of these things.

But if that’s the case, you might want to ask me:

• Why so much effort writing so much about these subjects? (1000 posts!)
• Why so much effort working in programming? (almost 20 years!)
• Why so much effort organizing events? (7 Rubyconf Brazil!)
• Why so much effort traveling the country to evangelize these subjects? (more than 100 talks!)
• Why so much effort creating a company? (6 years in consulting, 3 years in my own!)

I’ll try to answer at the end. And there’s nothing wrong with what you think you like, love, or are passionate about. The idea of the article isn’t to say why that’s “wrong”; it’s just the way the phrase is used that I want to explore within my own personal context.

First of all, don’t follow advice blindly. The first time I understood this concept consciously was watching the famous viral video from the beginning of the century, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen, where one of the parts says:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth.

That said, I don’t want to advise you on what to do, but I want to explain a few points that may go unnoticed.

First, the Obvious.

First of all, if you think “Do what you love,” you’re actually thinking “Do ONLY what you love.”

• “I don’t love waking up early”
• “I don’t love obeying orders”
• “I don’t love sitting in traffic”

And this list will grow, because there are millions of things we need to do but obviously don’t “love.” Deep down, the most generic would be: “I don’t like doing anything (working).” I just don’t know how that derives into the other great cliché of our times:

"I'll become my own boss to follow my own passions and not someone else's dream."

The irony is that if someone believes this, they’re already following the dream of whoever made that phrase for the first time. You’re already living someone else’s dream, whether you want to or not. Think about it.

Phrases like that naturally lead to other self-help fallacies. One of the most famous would certainly be the dreadful and dangerous “The Secret”, whose definition is as follows (according to Wikipedia):

The Secret states that the law of attraction is a natural law that determines the complete order of the universe and our personal lives through the process of “like attracts like.” The author claims that the way we think and feel, a matching frequency is sent to the universe and that attracts back events and circumstances of the same frequency. (…) and if you think positively, you’ll attract positive events and circumstances. The proponents claim that desirable results like health, wealth, and happiness can be attracted by changing your thoughts and feelings.

The idea of “doing what you love” is unequivocally linked with “thinking positive to attract positive,” even though, rationally, trying things like “dropping everything to pursue what you love” has the same odds of working out as winning the lottery. And whoever thinks this way should look at the child in the photo below and tell them:

"You certainly aren't thinking positive enough."

Exaggeration? Not so much, it’s the same result: you believed an idea blindly, without thinking about it. We do this every day, and I know it takes a conscious, big effort not to be a victim of it. I myself almost believed these ideas before.

Hold what you want to troll in the comments right now: I’m not saying that thinking positive is wrong, that pursuing your dreams is wrong, or that doing what you like is wrong! Follow to the end.

Second, What Do You Love?

What’s the difference between Passion and Love? And what is Passion? And what is Love?

These are questions humanity has already spent millennia exploring and will have to explore for more millennia. How many poems, literature, songs, paintings, sculptures, speeches, revolutions have already happened because of Passion and Love? This post on a mere blog will not be where you find an answer, and this author doesn’t even presume to imagine he knows the answer.

But for the sake of continuing this text, I like this brief summary:

• Love is a state of way of life, while passion is a state of being.
• Passion lasts for a short time, but Love lasts longer.
• In Love, deep understanding is the essence, while passion doesn’t require it.

Reread the phrase “Do what you Love,” or similar ones like “Follow your passion.”

You are passionate about or love many things at the same time. And this changes over time. You rarely find something or someone you’ll love forever (and you’ll only know it close to your death).

ONLY following something that changes all the time is a race without purpose. And the only guaranteed result is that you’ll get frustrated in a worse way.

But does that mean we should ignore our passions? Of course not. I’m just saying that thinking your life should be filled only with what you’re passionate about, ignoring the rest of the world, is an absolutely childish stance.

It’s like any child excited about the Nintendo 64, who goes days without bathing, without sleeping, without talking to anyone, without wanting to go to school, because they’re deeply passionate about it. And, as we all know, most get bored in a few days. Weeks later, the so-passionate object of desire is in a corner of the closet gathering dust, and the child is already looking for what to love next, every children’s day, birthday, and Christmas.

Doing “ONLY” what you “THINK” you “LOVE” (note the emphases in this phrase) means simply ignoring the real world. Ignoring brushing your teeth, ignoring going to school, ignoring working, ignoring responsibilities, which is what every adult would call “still being a child.”

Third, What Do I Love?

Talking this way sounds like another cliché: that an adult is a child who has set their passions aside. That’s perhaps where the later evolution comes from, with 30-year-old “adults” still trying to be the same children they once were.

This usually means being irresponsible, egocentric, and anti-social, since the so-called “adult world” demands responsibility, collaboration, interaction, and commitments. No one “loves” that kind of thing, no one loves “negotiating middle ground.” Every child wants all or nothing.

If you’re a reader who has followed me for the last 8 years, up to this post 1001 (which my friends have affectionately pre-nicknamed as the “Bombril post, of 1,001 uses”), maybe you have an idea of what I want to say now.

And here comes a disclaimer: don’t quote me as saying this is the solution or the answer. What I’m about to say is absolutely personal.

I do indeed pursue some of my “passions.” Like every human being, I get passionate very easily about a lot of things. It means I also get frustrated a lot, all the time. I’m human: cut me and I bleed. And much of what I like is superfluous, and the difference is perhaps that I’ve long understood that they’re superfluous. That is, I make mistakes, trip, fall, all the time, and I learn how to get up every time.

I’m passionate about technology, programming, methods, processes. And at the same time they frustrate me, upset me, leave me frustrated, leave me irritated and wanting to throw it all away. As every passion always is.

I’m passionate about communication, sociology, people, sharing knowledge, whether writing or speaking. And again, this leaves me tired, stressed, frustrated when I’m not understood, upset when people assume things without asking, but again, it’s how a passion should be.

But as I said at the beginning, I don’t Love any of these things. They aren’t my “life goals” or definitions of my identity or any philosophical thing of that kind. They are things I like, that I pursue, that bring me both pleasure and suffering at the same time, and that are means to another end, which isn’t to make me “happy” (in the sense of being comfortable in the short term, as it is for everyone).

Being happy all the time is the realm of LSD addicts. Have you ever seen someone who is honestly happy 100% of the time? That’s impossible. And thinking your work should be your greatest passion will only bring as a result a state of misery and frustration that’s the realm of psychologists and psychiatrists, the realm of tranquilizers and antidepressants.

(By the way, if I were neurotic, I’d almost conclude that self-help phrases like the one discussed here are a Psychiatrists’ Conspiracy to generate more Depressives. #troll)

No one should ever be “comfortable” or “happy” 100% of the time. Passions, Love, Happiness are always a dynamic balance between things that satisfy you and things that don’t satisfy you. You can’t have Light without Darkness existing. You can’t have satiety without hunger existing. You can’t have warmth without cold existing.

Another derived phrase is “Love what you do,” but that’s an exaggeration. I think of it another way that I think my mother told me for the first time and that is true:

"It doesn't matter what you're doing, but since you're doing it, do the best you can."

Confucius didn’t only say the phrase that gives origin to this post. Perhaps you remember Confucianism and that the ancient Easterners may have already defined this better: Yin and Yang, the concept of how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how one gives rise to the other. Yin and Yang can be seen as complementary rather than opposite, interacting in a dynamic system where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Without ever having suffered, how is it possible to know what happiness is?

My Conclusion

In the end, Ruby, programming, technology, projects, entrepreneurship, talks, blog, and all of this are just means that don’t define what I really like and always liked: learning and improving myself, purely.

If you’ve at least once heard of Agile, Lean, Kanban, Toyota (recurring themes on this blog), you’ll remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen (改善) or “continuous improvement.” For me it’s something conscious. I remember as a kid seeing a very simple thing in an allegory: how does a ninja jump so high and even over a tree (in cartoons)? Simple: he starts by jumping a little bush on the ground, then a small shrub, and so on.

Perfection isn’t an achievable goal; continuous improvement is the infinite process for an unreachable goal. And what I love is the challenge of improving one aspect at a time in each of the capabilities I have today (programming, communicating, teaching, producing).

My foundation is that I’m passionate about producing, and everything I produce is nothing more than a draft of the knowledge I have today, and always worse than I can produce tomorrow. My only, true “passion” is the certainty that I will never really be “good” and that I am today a little better than I was yesterday. That’s all. It doesn’t matter now whether I’m doing a programming project or writing this post or if tomorrow I decide to paint paintings.

Learning means I don’t like easy things. Anything that everyone says is hard, boring, that they would never do, or that they can’t do, naturally attracts me. Because I like to solve problems, which is one of the best ways to test what I know. Doing what everyone already knows gives me no pleasure.

In particular I like producing something that is useful to someone. Whether it’s a post or a talk that helped someone learn something, or a work opportunity someone can use for their own goals, or a project a client can use to reach their goals.

Deep down, I have the impression that if I could summarize it, I love and am passionate not about the “what” I do but the “how” I do it. Especially when there are obstacles in what would be the “ideal how” and how I can solve that problem to reach the “what.” The “what” isn’t the part that interests me most.

The phrase “Do what you love” is always taken as “Do ‘only’ what you love,” and what I wanted to summarize was: “Don’t do ‘only’ what you ’think’ you love.” That’s all.

My only inviolable principle is to live through voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit. That’s why nothing I say is absolute and inviolable truth, but rather teachings on how to think, how to counter-argue, how to be conscious, how to be an individual who doesn’t live by others’ clichés. I don’t want blind followers in the same way that I don’t want and don’t need charismatic idols to follow.

I hope this can be my legacy.

If you’re an experienced programmer, you don’t need me to tell you this. But if the recent news rattled you, maybe what I have to say will give you some perspective.

First, I want to share a few other articles I read over the last few days:

• My Next Chapter: the statement by Mike Perham, one of the best-known Rubyists of this generation and creator of the ubiquitous, excellent Sidekiq. He’s not abandoning the project; he’s building a new product, and that product doesn’t involve Ruby.

• Saying Goodbye To Python: here it was the Pythonista Ian Bicking, announcing he was trading Python for JavaScript, riding the current wave. Worth understanding that today’s JavaScript bubble doesn’t “require” you to “leave” anything for it. You can quietly stay a Pythonista and use JavaScript at the same time, no conflict.

• Why I Left the .Net Framework: a developer named Jonathan Oliver also decided to lay out why he’s leaving his day-to-day technology, weighing the pros and cons of the Microsoft stack. No troll here; it’s actually a pretty interesting read.

• Java Again: anyone from the first generations of the Java community remembers James Duncan Davidson, creator of nothing less than the first Tomcat and Ant. He left Java, spent a while in the Ruby community, and threw himself into photography (go look for photos of the RubyConfs from eight years ago and you’ll see the official ones are all his). Now he’s announced he’s going back to Java.

• Why Go Is Not Good: as the title says, it’s a critique arguing that a freshly launched language should have been thought through better to cover cases other languages already handle.

• Rust vs Go: again with a whiff of sour grapes. Rust really does look like a technically superior language to Go in design and features, and the piece shows the frustration of watching Go stay more popular anyway.

• Why Perl Didn’t Win: mandatory reading on the fortunes of one of the most popular languages from the late 80s to the late 90s, which fell into obscurity and disuse. Even Swift, released by Apple weeks ago, already has more active users than Perl 6. One of the takeaways: anything new has to aim at the problems of the future, not the ones from the past.

Anyone from the first generations of the Ruby and Rails communities will remember the “traumas” we went through:

• Zed is Not Dead: from 2008, when one of our most prolific developers, Zed Shaw, creator of Mongrel and one of the first to take on the challenge of measuring and optimizing Ruby’s performance, announced he was leaving the community and moving to Python.

• Bomb: Merb and Rails Merge!: also from 2008, when the Merb team was on a collision course with Rails Core. The solution, happy for many and unhappy for a stubborn few, was to fold Merb into Rails 3, and it left dead and wounded behind. In retrospect, it’s worth reading “Learning from Rails’ failures” by Matt Aimonetti (who also moved to Go) and who counts among the wounded of that insurgency, and “The Rails/Merb Merge In Retrospect” by Giles Bowkett (still a Rubyist), who breaks down the results with a very critical eye.

• Twitter switches from Ruby to Java: from 2011, when Twitter announced it was replacing the messaging-infrastructure parts written in Ruby with a proprietary solution in Scala. What the original news said and what people chose to remember are two different things, but the fact is it turned into a good Public Relations headache for us. Thankfully that one’s behind us.

And these are just the links I’ve read and can recall off the top of my head. There are dozens more.

Anyone still young or inexperienced in software communities, especially newcomers to Node.js, must be asking themselves: “Now what? If someone important like TJ says he’s leaving, shouldn’t I leave too?” Do your homework and you’ll see this isn’t the first time. In 2012 the creator of Node.js, Ryan Dahl announced he’d keep an eye on his project but would step out of the day-to-day coding. “Man, the world is ending!”

This Isn’t Bad News. This Is an Excellent Opportunity! (Seriously!)

In 2006, right as I was starting my run as an activist in the Ruby and Rails world, I already knew what was coming. We were the newcomers, immature, with unfinished technology and a pile of expectations, so naturally the road would be as hard as it gets. That’s why I wrote the article Evolution through Competition.

A lot of people imagine the best of all worlds is the one where nobody questions what you’re doing, everyone leaves you alone, and they take your promises on faith, promises you fully intend to keep, someday. (yeah, right…)

I disagree. Any promise or expectation worth having has to be questioned, pushed, scrutinized. If it’s so fragile it can’t take criticism, direct and indirect attacks, and sabotage, then the promise was weak to begin with and didn’t deserve to move forward. The sooner it falls, the better, because that’s less time wasted.

That’s why I always welcome the attacks: I expect to be ready to hit back twice as hard or die trying. And I’d expect nothing less from the Rails community. Everyone still believes constraints are bad, but I’ve said before that constraints matter, because they’re the only place innovation comes from.

Anyone who has to reach for the old trick of trashing others, the classic “I don’t feel like getting better, so I’ll drag the other guy down to look bigger” (I wrote about this back in 2007 too, “For me to win, the other has to lose…”), is declaring himself weak all on his own. Stop and think back to articles, talks, and interviews where you heard someone you admire trashing another community. “Ah, Ruby, that girly thing. Because we men use JavaScript.” It makes me laugh and feel a little sorry, because to me it’s clear that person will always be weak.

All the statements above, and others like them (“I’m leaving Node”, “I’m leaving .NET”, “I’m leaving Ruby”, “I’m leaving X”), I honestly believe came with no bad intent or bad faith, at least not consciously. But I have a theory. Everyone who makes statements like that wants validation from their peers, or worse, wants their peers to follow them, which is also validation of their own position. “I don’t like my old toy anymore, but I don’t want anyone else playing with it either.” It’s a pretty childish stance.

Take the Ruby community as an example. Plenty of names sort of “left” their main activities without slamming the door or acting childish about it. Chad Fowler is in Germany running Wunderlist, focused on mobile and back-end development, and we don’t hear him talk Ruby anymore. Ilya Grigorik had his startup bought by Google and eventually dropped off too. Matt Aimonetti, after the Merb vs Rails episode, quietly stepped back and now works with Go.

Ryan Bates, one of the most beloved in the community for his tireless years of work on RailsCasts, stopped publishing months ago and said nothing about it. David Chelimsky, maintainer of RSpec, handed off the baton and stepped away without any fuss. José Valim, one of the key people behind Rails 3, is over in Elixir and Erlang land now and rarely says a word about Ruby.

“O.M.G! You mean it’s all over!? It went up in flames!?”

No. In the meantime, hundreds of new Rubyists showed up and carried the work forward. The most immediate example is Carlos Antonio and Rafael França, who sort of picked up José Valim’s mantle in Rails Core. Evan Phoenix picked up Chad Fowler’s mantle at Ruby Central. Avdi Grimm sort of picked up Ryan Bates’ mantle with his excellent RubyTapas, and on it goes.

A community is made of individuals, and each individual performs best when acting to maximize their own benefit. The side effect is that they end up naturally influencing and pulling others up alongside them. It’s always voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. Nobody acts with zero benefit to themselves; some believe they do, and those are exactly the ones who hit “burnout” fastest, because the question quickly becomes:

"Why do I wear myself out collaborating in this community, stress myself out, and even so not everyone appreciates what I do? I do it all for them!"

That’s the wrong question, and the wrong question leads to the wrong answer. Some start to believe others owe them something, since they poured so much of their free time (especially in the open source world) into “helping others”. And “the others” figure they owe nothing, since nobody asked for that effort in the first place. In practice, “the others” are right.

If you take part in a community, you do it for yourself. Maybe because you understand that helping others is part of your own reward. Maybe because it gives you peace of mind or a clear conscience. Or because you’re a good strategist and know certain contributions will open doors for you down the line. The reason doesn’t matter, as long as there’s a reward you don’t force others to hand over. Demanding respect, demanding manners, demanding compassion, none of it makes sense without a counterpart. Nobody asked you to do what you’re doing; if you are, understand it’s for yourself. That’s the definition of voluntary work.

And to be crystal clear: voluntary work means work without financial pay, and not work without benefit or purely altruistic. If your work is paid, that’s a different conversation, and the best advice there comes from Don Draper:

Back to the topic, I imagine the names I mentioned above, the ones who stepped back partially or quietly, get this. They went looking for personal satisfaction elsewhere. They owe nothing to anyone, and nobody owes anything to them.

The ones who leave with bombastic declarations are, consciously or not, throwing it in everyone’s face: “you didn’t value me, now you’ve lost your chance, and I know you’ll miss me!” It isn’t written that way, but that’s what it adds up to. Otherwise, why throw it into the fan and turn it into a public controversy? Any written argument is only part of the reason, never “the” reason.

You, the Individual

The flip side is whoever follows, admires, and idolizes one of these people who walked away from where you are. Depending on how deep the admiration runs, you feel the floor drop out, stunned, not knowing which way to run. One of two things happens: you either go hunting for another idol and start the classic “he wasn’t even that good”, or you sink into depression and the panic of “I don’t know what happens now”.

My advice: "don't have idols, have references."

Stop thinking you owe others something and, by extension, stop dumping on others the job of helping still more people. That’s what’s going on: you don’t understand your purpose and figure others should do what you yourself won’t. Worse, you let others decide which road you take. If you’re that insecure, stop for a second and think about what you “are” before anything else.

Your only purpose in life is to take care of yourself and produce, without getting in anyone else’s way. When you do that, the natural effect is that spontaneous collaborations spring up, communities evolve, and everyone comes out ahead. A community where everyone makes demands on everyone grows without any purpose.

On technology, opinions, proposals, and promises, remember this too: you want to be under constant “attack” and constraint. Nothing is worse than being ignored. I wrote another article, a translation from someone far wiser than me, Kathy Sierra, called Dilbert and the Zone of Mediocrity, where I quote:

How brave are you? How far will you (or your employer) go to avoid the Zone of Mediocrity? Until or unless you're willing to risk passionate hate, you may never feel the love. Scott Adams agrees. In a recent post on the Dilbert blog, he wrote: "If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed... The reason that a product 'everyone likes' will fail is because no one 'loves' it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it."

So what if someone left your community? Is it so fragile that one blow, no matter the size of the impact, brings the whole thing down? If you believe your community is only resistant, you’re right: past a certain point, it collapses. But if it’s resilient, malleable and adaptive, it survives. That’s what guarantees the survival of species, the Law of the Most Adaptable (not the “strongest”! Keep the difference between resistant and resilient in mind, you want to be the second one).

Are you adaptable? Or are you just fishing for other people’s validation, letting them decide for you? One thing I’ll say for sure: if I ever give up what I do, nobody will find out from a written statement. I settled that the day I started.

I’m guilty too, addicted to arguing about serious subjects and irrelevant ones alike. It’s part of the entertainment, I guess, but I’ll admit that sometimes I just run out of patience. Anyone who watched my more recent talks will remember the part where I say this: people look for “validation” of their ideas and arguments. It seems that the more people agree, the more valid the idea supposedly is, the so-called “democratic” process where 50% + 1 guarantees victory.

There are several problems with this, and I already discussed part of the topic in Mea Culpa: Democratic Organizations Don’t Work. Although I’m not a formal, working mathematician, my foundation is mathematics. One of the good things I remember from my time at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at USP was precisely the heavy mathematical foundation I was put through. To this day I bring what I learned into my daily life.

Laws Are Laws

The first big thing I learned is this: given a set of axioms, and given that a certain theorem is proven, I can use that tool with the guarantee that it will always work within the stipulated premises.

So, given that natural numbers exist, given x belonging to the naturals and given the algebraic properties of the naturals, I know that y = x + x and that y will be in the naturals. With that, I can say with full certainty that 2 + 2 is 4 and will always be 4.

That matters because I don’t need a majority’s “validation” to know it. It doesn’t matter if someone proposes a vote and 1 million people say 2 + 2 is 5. Quantity of opinions doesn’t undo Algebra. Certain areas of scientific knowledge have been fully proven, and they don’t depend on the consensus of “opinions.”

Majority and authority mean nothing within that context.

This gives me several certainties. There’s an entire body of scientific knowledge across the most different areas, from mathematics to physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and medicine, that is trustworthy and at our disposal. And using it doesn’t depend on consensus, on voting, or on the “validation” of any group.

It also gives me the certainty that just because I don’t know something, that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t already know it, and it raises my esteem for proper research into that body of knowledge. The error is being too lazy to do that research and assuming that because some majority said something, or because someone with apparent authority said something, it “must be true.”

To me, by definition, everything is wrong until it’s rigorously proven to be true, by the same methods that guaranteed that body of scientific knowledge.

First World Problems

In the self-help world there are thousands of “formulas,” or “recipes.” Recipes to lose weight, for success, to be happy, and so on. It’s an enormous industry that, at least by 2010, was moving around USD 11 billion. It won’t stop and should grow.

We move along Maslow’s pyramid. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation still had to worry about the most basic survival: food, health. In this new generation, a huge portion of the population lives much better, and that base is no longer the biggest priority.

But human beings will always look for problems to worry about, the famous “first world problems”. Sometimes it seems we’re a species built to find problems even where they don’t exist.

That’s why the self-help market grows so much, and why problems that seemed not to exist a few centuries ago now seem so much bigger: depression, stress. Medications that were never so needed 2 or 3 centuries ago are now manufactured by the ton: Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa.

For the record, I’m not belittling these problems. A huge portion is quite real, and thankfully modern medicine has the instruments to treat it. Still, it’s undeniable that a lot of people make bad use of that circumstance, since unlike a broken leg, there’s no physical evidence of this kind of problem.

I bring it up because it’s already part of our culture to assume this kind of pathology is a common thing. With each new generation, it seems everyone is made of crystal and any small disruption already breaks them. The impression is that if this generation were magically transported to the 17th century or earlier, no one would survive.

The Effect of Self-Help

All that said, here comes the part that bothers me most: the magic formulas, the silver bullets. Within the self-help market, I don’t mind that much. After all, what harm is there in someone reading “Who Moved My Cheese” to entertain themselves?

The problem is when pseudo-science gets taken as real science.

It’s what I call “because it worked for X it must work for Y,” or what plenty of people have heard me repeat ad nauseam: “correlation is not causation”.

All self-help is one or more formulas, duly wrapped in heavy marketing and sold as universal solutions.

“Just think positive.”

On their own, statements like that are harmless, but they quickly unfold into biblical proportions.

What’s the problem with formulas? Again I go back to my mathematical foundation. A mathematical formula, on its own, is useless: it’s undefined, incomplete. To be completely defined, it needs at least two more elements, a Domain and an Image. For example, look at the formula:

f(x) = 1/x

Immediately someone could say “but this formula is wrong, because if x is zero the calculation doesn’t work.” It’s a good observation, but it starts from a premise: that x can be any number that exists.

But if I define it correctly and say:

given x belonging to the domain of real numbers, and given x different from zero, f(x) = 1/x, will result in the image of real numbers

Now this formula, in the field of Algebra, is well defined and undisputable. Notice what I did with this simple example: I gave an incomplete formula and immediately generated a discussion about it. That’s exactly what happens in every social media discussion and every self-help topic.

To repeat: all self-help is one or more formulas that don’t define the domain or the image. Each person who reads that incomplete formula tries to complete it with their own domain, “for me it works” or “for me it doesn’t work,” and we’ve just found the simplest origin of every flame war, every hater, and every internet troll.

On the other hand, we also find the first way to distinguish an invalid formula from a “possibly” valid one. With the invalid one, you’ll have enormous difficulty defining the domain. We always start from the largest domain, the one that would work for everyone in every scenario. The formula breaks on the spot, so we start reducing that domain and, invariably, it shrinks until it reaches a single case that once worked.

Complex Systems, Biographies, and the Fallacy of “Evidence”

And normally the formulas really do reduce to a single individual. That’s the case with every biography: the sequence of events a certain individual went through, only they went through, and it doesn’t repeat.

I’ve been talking about complex systems for a long time, since at least 2009 the subject has caught my attention. I’ve fallen into the trap of deriving theories about the concept, but I’ll admit that so far I haven’t succeeded. In fact, the whole field of sociology and network studies is still in its infancy in this kind of knowledge, with little in the way of postulates and laws. So handle this kind of subject with far more care than usual.

Quantum physics has also been unduly exploited in the self-help world. Look at calamities like “What the Bleep Do We Know” to understand how to turn a serious subject into a joke (that plenty of people think is serious).

At the risk of being superficial, I’ll summarize the relevant part like this: in the real world, we’re all part of a complex adaptive system. An action I take can trigger several others, which in turn trigger several more, and many of them interact with each other, creating a network of incalculable nodes and connections.

It’s practically impossible to determine the end of a chain of events in a network with countless variables. I say “practically” because we still don’t know how to determine all the variables of the equation, and for all practical purposes that makes any prediction impossible.

Of course, given certain limits of space, time, and error margins, we can predict plenty, enough to send rockets to Jupiter with precision. On the other hand, there are many cases whose error margins are still hard to control, and meteorology itself is an example.

That’s where the idea comes from that a butterfly flaps its wings in China and a tsunami hits Rio de Janeiro. The butterfly didn’t cause the tsunami. It was only an initial condition of an intricate chain of events that happened to result in it.

Now, given a certain result, in many cases we can look backward and trace the chain of events back to the initial conditions. Anyone who watched CSI or some detective show knows we can collect evidence and use deduction to connect events back to a point of origin.

That’s how all “formulas” are created. The chain of events has already happened and won’t change anymore, because within our Universe the past is immutable and time only has one direction.

George Santayana once said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we take what I’ve said so far literally, we’ll conclude that History rarely repeats itself. Just because the initial conditions and the result resemble those of another event, the chain in between is rarely the same. Reading it as “History repeating itself” is coincidence and a series of tricks our brain plays all the time, including confirmation bias.

I know this stretch can get complex, but the point is this: just because something happened once, that doesn’t mean the same chain will happen again.

The initial conditions and the chain of events are that restricted “domain” of the “formula” I mentioned above. And as Duncan Watts would say, everyone fools themselves all the time with the concept of “obvious.” Today it seems obvious to say Facebook is a success. But in 2002 no one could have predicted that in 2012 there would be this Facebook thing and that its IPO would open with a valuation of USD 104 billion. After the fact, we can try to trace the events backward and find the initial conditions and the chain that made it possible. Never before.

Empirically, out of everything I’ve seen offered as a silver bullet, the “best formula” looks very good, until you start to question it: “it looks like a Formula that leads to a good result (Image), but what are the necessary initial conditions? What is the Domain of this formula?”

And when you start to question that, the theory doesn’t hold up for 1 second. Take Lean Startup, the tech world’s fashion. Look at Eric Ries’ initial conditions: you’ll find examples of Groupon, Intuit, and HP, companies that are anything but “small startups,” but the book is evangelized to every small entrepreneur. There’s a clear contradiction of initial conditions, and the scientific method is very different from what the book suggests.

“But there are several good examples of small startups that followed Lean Startup and did well.” And here’s another lesson anyone who watched CSI knows how to spot: a contaminated crime scene is useless. In none of those cases can you say the “cause” of success was using Lean Startup. There may be a “correlation,” and a small one, because we’re talking about a complex adaptive system.

Did the butterfly “cause” the tsunami? The probability is very small. But then marketing comes in. As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, would say, “the bigger the lie, the more they’ll believe it,” or the derivative of that, “repeat a lie enough times and people will believe it’s true.”

As Carl Sagan would say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And that depends on exhaustive work of testing to break the hypothesis. A medication, made seriously, takes years, sometimes decades, to reach pharmacies, but silver bullets go viral in a matter of hours or days. Depending on who speaks and how, it gains the status of “unquestionable truth” very fast. Any prosperity-gospel preacher can tell you that.

Just because it “seems” to have worked for 1, 2, 10 cases, that isn’t enough to make something true. Charles Darwin’s “Theory” of Evolution of species has tons of concrete, solid evidence, has been questioned, attacked, and meticulously torn apart for more than 150 years, and for all practical purposes is already close to an absolute truth. Even so, it still hasn’t earned the status of “Law.” If it hasn’t, why would something far less tested deserve it?

Conclusion

In practice, unless it’s part of the body of scientific knowledge already recognized and exhaustively documented, everything else is questionable, should be questioned, and should never earn the dogmatic status of “truth,” by definition.

Self-help is pseudo-science, by definition.

Formulas that guarantee a certain “result” (Image) without a Domain are incomplete and undefined, and that will necessarily split opinions, because each person has their own domain. And just because a group is bigger than whoever is questioning it, the formula doesn’t become true. The opposite would be following Goebbels’ doctrine.

And what actually is proven science needs no quorum, majority, or “validation.” 2 + 2 will always be 4, no matter who wants to argue otherwise.

A tip: for any subject that crosses your path, use Google. Put the term next to the word “debunked” or “skeptic,” “fake,” or “scam,” and you’ll find the answer. For example, search for “The Secret Debunked” and see how much has already been published taking down the so-called “Law of Attraction”. I do this all the time. Nothing is unquestionable, no matter who’s saying it.

Since childhood I’ve been a strong defender of destroying pseudo-science, because it causes more harm than almost anything else. Remember that coincidences happen, and they aren’t so rare.

I decided to kick off 2013 with an article I hope reads as a positive message for the year. The message is simple:

The world today is good, very good, and it's getting better and better.

I get frustrated every time I see theoretically “educated” people who prefer to believe the world is getting worse, that we’re worse off today than yesterday. Today we’re “impersonal,” we don’t play in the street anymore, we lost solidarity, we burn our forests, every corporation is a villain, people suffer more.

Respectfully, I disagree with all those ideas that we’re getting worse. One symbolic reason to write this today is that we made it through 2012, one of the last known “End Times” prophecies, as if it were nothing (which, by the way, it always was).

Anyone who reads the news knows we have increasingly overcrowded metropolises, violence flaring up all the time in various parts of the world, wars in the Middle East, religious intolerance and terrorism, natural disasters that “seem” to be the result of the infamous “Global Warming.”

All of that is true. And none of it is a symptom that the world is getting worse.

The World Is Better

Despite all the cataclysmic prophecies, let me sum it up fast: the world is better today than it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or millennia ago. Fortunately there are people in science, doing serious research and work, who piled up data year after year, and today we can compare it item by item. One of these organizations is Gapminder, which puts all of this data out there so you can see it with your own eyes.

I recommend watching the TED talks by Hans Rosling reading that data. He shows how over recent decades we raised life expectancy for most of the world, improved quality of life, and sharply cut poverty, malnutrition, and inequality. The vast majority of people today live better, with more comfort, and for longer.

Violence is dropping too, as this TED talk by Steven Pinker shows. The book Abundance, by Peter H. Diamandis, gives you even more data on this era of abundance we’re in.

And even the dreaded Global Warming gets constantly questioned. Plenty of scientists aren’t convinced by the data we have. And it hardly matters whether Global Warming is “real”: there are clearly people raking in money and fame off the “fear” of this possible natural phenomenon. Watch the documentary Cool It, where researcher Bjorn Lomborg debunks, one by one, the things you, a reader of this blog, probably never stopped to think about.

Example: if the Kyoto Protocol had succeeded the way the lobbyists wanted, it would have lowered the world’s temperature by all of 0.008 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. And the European Union’s climate policy would drop the temperature by a mere 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit, at the ridiculous cost of USD 250 billion a year for the next century. With half that money you could wipe out poverty, hunger, and disease worldwide.

If everyone in the United States switched to a Prius, it wouldn’t cover even 0.5% of the carbon that technically should be cut by mid-century. And if everyone in the United States used nothing but energy-saving lightbulbs, it wouldn’t cover even 0.2% of the carbon to be cut.

Comedian George Carlin explained this in the clearest way I’ve ever seen:

Getting it?

Who Does This Benefit?

No “small act,” like recycling an aluminum can, makes much difference on its own today (don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt by itself either). What really makes a difference are the steady advances of science. Disciplined experimentation and the buildup of knowledge one day led us to agriculture, keeping famine at bay even with the world’s overpopulation.

That achievement has been sliding back thanks to fads like “organic food”, which ignores years of progress in agronomic technology, the same progress that made sure our generation exists at all.

The reason for this article is to question the obvious: who does all this benefit? The easy answer is the big corporations that know how to cash in on it. But they aren’t the problem. The problem is the people who make it easy for the corporations, turning every discussion into a moral judgment.

Today, if I say I don’t help any “social” cause, I somehow become guilty of someone’s misfortune. A story that bugs me to this day came from a friend I respect a lot. He’s a successful businessman, and he feels a little guilty for having more than others. So when he can, he offers alms and that sort of thing. One day, if I remember right, one of those beggars snubbed the alms, and my friend didn’t know if he was even allowed to feel as frustrated as he was.

That’s my long discussion about the Rights of Man. And to be crystal clear, I’ll spell it out: I have no obligation to help anyone, just as nobody has any obligation to help me.

The key word here is “obligation.” I always have the choice to help or not, but never the obligation. Exercising that choice is an individual call that nobody gets to judge.

The world is simple: everything I produced, by my own effort, is mine and no one else’s. If I want to donate it, that’s my choice. If I want to throw it away, that’s another perfectly valid choice of mine. Nobody has a right to something of mine, and nobody gets to judge what I do with it. The reverse holds too: I’ll never have a right to anything of anyone’s for free, and I should never judge what others do with their own possessions. It’s simple.

Alms and donations are the same thing. I’ll give to whomever I want, when I want, and if I want. And I don’t judge anyone who donates or who doesn’t. Now, it really gets to me when someone has the nerve to think they can judge me for what I do with something entirely mine.

Go back to my story: why does that friend of mine need to feel “guilty” for something he’s not guilty of? Everything he earned came from his own effort and sweat, so it’s his. On top of that, his work made lots of jobs possible, and even let other companies exist, spreading indirect wealth to plenty of people. Why should he feel guilty for not giving away for free something that’s his?

This is the prostitution of the mind that working people suffer daily. The more they work, the harder they push, the more they earn, the more guilt they feel and the more judged they feel. And who are these “others”?

This is the real target of my article. I want to expose the people who benefit from this orgy of fake altruism and ignorance. Charismatic types who talk pretty, with inspiring speeches (especially the ones who invoke justice, inspiration, and motivation), who pile on the hyperbole and present almost no data from a credible source.

They all run the same speeches, the same pompous, contentless routine. They show videos of the world falling apart, apathetic people, little kids, repeating the same old “We must…”, “We need to…”:

"We need to unite," "We need to be more supportive," "We need to care more," "We need to think about our neighbor," "We need to put down the phone and really connect," blah, blah.

BULLSHIT!

Anyone who says a lot of “We need to,” always in the first person plural “we,” clearly wants to be the dictator of a group. Someone who on his own has little to offer, so he rallies more people to borrow the credibility of the masses. And past a certain headcount, whatever he says starts to seem valid.

This is only possible because we let it happen. Because we don’t look at the data, we don’t dig for the facts, we get moved by any slickly edited video with animals, landscapes, and children, especially children in some miserable stretch of the African interior. We applaud every one of these demagogues.

And you know what demagogues like that do once they have masses behind them? They make everyone who is actually working, creating, and producing wealth in the world feel guilty. They point the crowd at these people and pressure them to “share” their property, making them feel lousy if they don’t. And they do it in a “cheerful,” almost festive way: they park the property-owner in the middle of the crowd and say things like “guys, wouldn’t this guy be super cool if he donated what he has to our cause?”, clapping and smiling sarcastically while they shame and corner the producer, leaving no way out.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called fraud. It’s a fraudulent, criminal, and plainly offensive act. Let’s be clear: I won’t put myself through the abuse of criminal acts. And neither should you.

The lesson here is simple. If someone comes to talk to you about another person or group, ask: “who does this benefit?” If someone tells you “such-and-such company must be going bankrupt, since it doesn’t even have money to donate to this very important social cause,” why does the person passing that along care? Who does it benefit? Then flip the question: why would a company not donating necessarily mean it’s in bad financial shape? The most obvious answer, “the company has no interest in donations,” seems “morally too ugly” to consider. And that’s exactly the likeliest one. Except we’ve reached such a degrading point in our morality that this choice is almost treated as a crime.

Don’t Fall for the Talk

So pay attention: the world today is better than yesterday. Don’t doubt it. Donating and taking part in social causes are valid things. But judging others for not taking part is a crime.

Any company, any worker runs one very simple operation: trades. A worker trades the value of what they produced for money. A company trades a product for money. And someone who takes part in social causes trades their own work capacity for another kind of currency: conscience. Every donation is a transaction of your money or possessions for “you feeling good about yourself.” It’s a commercial exchange like any other. After all, have you ever seen anyone donate with the goal of feeling bad about it afterward?

This gets more obvious when you run into the infamous weekend do-gooders. People who want to buy positive karma because they’re frustrated, depressed, unhappy with themselves. So they jump into “save the world” movements, donate money, donate time, donate work. But the moment they get bored, they’re back at the beach, at a barbecue playing soccer, out by the pool. Except now they’re “morally in the black” and put themselves in a spot to judge everyone else with an “I helped and you didn’t.”

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about everyone who’s charitable. Plenty take it dead seriously and, in most cases, stay anonymous, because they’re not in it for attention, they’re in it to help. But the type I’m talking about is in the business of “feeling good,” and that needs an audience, needs telling everyone what good people they are, how everyone should copy them to feel good the same way. Like addicts pushing drugs because the drugs make them feel good.

And they’re worried about the little children? See the trauma they’re putting them through by telling false stories of the end of the world:

The very existence of people like this is one more piece of evidence of how much better our times are. At the start of the 20th century, no one would spare a thought for “social causes” like today: many didn’t even have enough to eat, had no clothes, died from common diseases.

Except this crowd keeps getting more irritating and more tiresome. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m fully in favor of serious social causes, and I can’t stand the weekend do-gooder hipsters. There are serious movements that deserve respect being stained by these groups. Want to really give yourself to a cause? Join organizations like the Red Cross, work on it full-time, and never force anyone, physically or morally, to make the same choice you did.

This goes for social causes and for any kind of “cause.” Be sharp for once: there are plenty of clever people who want you doing the dirty work for them. Be suspicious of anyone who speaks for “us,” for the “good of all,” or any cheap demagoguery of that sort.

The world today is better, check the data, and it keeps getting better. All we have to do is work and produce more and more wealth. Producing is how the world got here, and producing is how it keeps improving. Taking wealth from others, what plenty of people euphemistically call “sharing,” was never the way.

I recently wrote an article named _Why Documentary at Rubyconf 2012, Denver reminding people about this person that called himself “_Why”, who decided to vanish in August of 2009, taking all his work with him, essentially committing virtual suicide.

It has attracted lots of trolls and haters at the comments section, more discussion than I anticipated, questioning why we praise someone that was crazy enough to destroy all his work, that is obviously not a good role model, and that compared to other titans of programming has done little and with less quality?

Then, today I heard about this website about Ruby Dramas - that I’m not linking. I don’t know the author and I even think this is just for fun, but the reactions from the trolls and haters aren’t. Essentially it links a few of what we call “Ruby Dramas”, the discussions that trolls and haters call a waste of time, a demonstration of the immaturity and childish behavior of Ruby programmers.

In 2006, Kathy Sierra wrote an article called Dilbert and the zone of mediocrity where she asserts that if you want to be successful, then you don’t want to just please everybody in order to make all of them just like you. You do things in a way that people will love you, but knowing that the consequence is that many others will certainly hate you in the process. It’s an all or nothing proposition, if you just make efforts for everybody to like you, you are just being mediocre.

There’s a catch. It’s not that you make things in order to make people love you. It’s just that you should do things in a way that You Love It.

What are trolls and haters? In essence, they come back to you every time because they care about some of the same things that you do. But they are not producers, they are looters, plunderers. What they are actually saying is: “You’re so good, please me, I want the successful ones to please me, because I can’t do what you do, as the weaker one, I deserve to be pleased.”

Such is the mentality of altruism and collectivism: people that have less, that can achieve less, deserve what successful people produced, and the successful people must feel guilt for being so much better. The horrible Robin Hood philosophy.

I will allow myself for some philosophical liberty and the use of metaphors to illustrate my point. I have never talked to other Rubyists that knew _Why personally, so I hope they don’t get offended if my personal view differs, but again, this is just my personal opinion.

I learned recently that coincidentally the name “Why, the Lucky Stiff” is mentioned in Ayn Rand’s famous masterpiece The Fountainhead. – by the way, as a non-native English speaker, I was just told that this was a very common expression back in the day. But I couldn’t resist leaving this coincidence noted anyway :-)

This novel illustrates the ideal vision of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy. It tells the story of the ideal man: Howard Roark, a talented architect that lives for the passion of his creative skills. He bows to no one, even if it means his own destruction. He lives by his moral principles of voluntary trade and individual achievement.

Objectivism is the foundation of a more pure version of Capitalism (not the version we currently live in), where individual men make voluntary agreements only.

So, the trolls and haters, in The Fountainhead, are personified by the looters such as the Peter Keatings and Ellsworth Tooheys of the world.

Spoiler Alert!! (do not go forward if you prefer to read the book)

Summarizing, in the book Roark ends up in a project called Courtlandt, a huge complex for the poor and destitute, where no other architect was able to design a complex that would be within requirements and budget. Only Roark was able to solve the puzzle and he agrees to deliver if, and only if, his work is not modified by any means.

When he does deliver, the other architects think they have a say in his designs and they modify it according to a committee that thinks they know better for “the greater good”. When Roark knows about it, and sees his creation being built in a way that he did not want, he decides to dynamite and bring it down.

He goes to court and this is his defense:

Read the full novel version of this remarkable defense speech.

Again, as a metaphor, I can’t help picturing _Why in Howard’s shoes, talking to his detractors, the trolls and haters, the ones naming the so called “Ruby Dramas”, the looters, the ones that think they know about “the greater good”.

Some people question why “_Why” evokes such “irrational worship” when at the end of the day he didn’t even do so much coding, and his coding was not exactly good enough (according to their own views, of course).

My personal pet theory is exactly because _Why embodies Howard Roark’s ideals. He is an artist, just like Roark. He did things in ways that surprised people. He created, he produced, he remained an independent mind. But some contract was breached. I don’t know what it is, maybe the agreement was exactly that: “leave me alone”, “do not come after my personal identity”, “do not tell me how I should do my work”.

So when the Tooheys ran over him, he literally dynamited Courtlandt. It was his work, his terms, his choice. And his individual choice was to do what Roark defended:

“I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.

“Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt.

“I designed Cortlandt. I gave it to you. I destroyed it.

“I destroyed it because I did not choose to let it exist. It was a double monster. In form and in implication. I had to blast both. The form was mutilated by two second-handers who assumed the right to improve upon that which they had not made and could not equal. They were permitted to do it by the general implication that the altruistic purpose of the building superseded all rights and that I had no claim to stand against it.

“I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid.

So Kathy Sierra was right: if you do something remarkable, that you love, some will also love it, and others will denounce and hate it. Trolls are like leeches, they come crawling fast pursuing other people’s success in order to feed from it. They do it not by producing, but by evoking the altruistic principles, all against the individual. And this is the evil in our society: we should be able to understand that individual achievement is not to be shared. An individual that achieved success by his own merits deserves every penny of it without the need to feel guilty.

Trolls and Haters name things such as “Ruby Dramas” because they want your attention. They want the people they quote to be available to please them. And they can’t be pleased, so it’s an impossible proposition. Trolls exist just for the sake of trolling. That’s what Kathy may not have realized when she first wrote her essay: yes, success will attract the haters, but not because they care about what was achieved and want to protect it, but because - like leeches - they want to benefit without producing, on the principle that successful people must please those who cannot achieve.

Roark said: “We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live”, and so _Why deleted his work, even though many others contributed to it. Again, there was a breach of contract and again I quote Roark:

“I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

“It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them the right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

“I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.

“I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.

And the point of this article is not to idealize _Why, just to state what it means to value individual achievement.

So, many people see value in _Why, enough to forgive him for destroying his Courtlandt and praise him as an inspiration. The trolls and haters are furious, of course, just like Ellsworth Toohey was. It doesn’t matter the volume or even the quality of his work. It could’ve been 6 lines of code, but if those 6 lines have meant plenty to a lot of people, he would still be remembered. Such is the nature of creation.

We can’t get rid of the trolls and haters. I myself know that for everything I do that people love, I know some of the haters by name and address. They are there, sneaking, crawling. But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t do what I do for their sake, I do for my own. And if you’re a person that produces, you should too.

And if anything, to me personally, that’s what _Why symbolizes. I don’t think we are praising just his person, but what he represented: being a creative individual producing for his own sake.

Several within the community have tried to define what “Beautiful Ruby Code” is. Most of them managed to show us really beautiful code, but I still haven’t seen anyone actually communicate the concept of “Beauty”.

Enter TED. If you know me, you know I’ve been completely addicted to it for years now, every theme inspires me. And tonight, while having dinner, I watched the great Richard Seymour (no, he is not a programmer) talking about this very subject and I was blown away.

Find the video below, but let me add a few words of my own. In our small world of programmers and technologists, we have lots of discussions around “Form” vs “Function”, as if we should choose one over the other, or balance one against the other.

I’m of the same opinion as Richard: it is not a matter of “Form” VS “Function”. The correct way of thinking is “Form” IS “Function”. And beauty is something you feel, before any analysis or rationalization.

Your reaction to beauty is directly tied to what you know and what you’ve experienced. Without living and without learning, you won’t find beauty. Back to programming, it’s impossible for someone that just started to write software, or even someone that already did a few small projects, to grasp the concept of “beauty”.

It’s only after some time, some experience, and some learning that they’ll start to grasp what beauty possibly feels like.

With that comment, please watch Richard Seymour (if you want subtitles for your native language, go to the original site so you can choose subtitles):

Knowledge and Experience are everything. Ignorance doesn’t know beauty.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”

It reaches us through Steve Jobs, in the context of the graphical interface being copied first by Apple from Xerox and then by Microsoft from Apple.

The phrase became something of a cult after the famous TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. And for a lot of people it ended up wrongly tied to “plagiarism” and “piracy.” For a long time I never stopped to think about it myself, I just tossed it into that same bucket.

The phrase is usually credited to the great artist Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, or simply Pablo Picasso :-). One aside, though: that attribution is shaky. The earliest documented version of the idea comes from T.S. Eliot, in 1920 (“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”), and it was Steve Jobs himself who started pinning Picasso’s name on the saying back in the 1980s. Either way, it’s the Picasso version that stuck, and that’s the one I’m starting from here.

Those who’ve followed me for a while and attend my talks know I spend a lot of time trying to explain the term “artist” applied to “software developer,” to “software craftsmanship,” and more specifically to the “practice of programming.”

Programming isn’t something where you read a book, do an exercise once, and “boom,” you already know how to program. Like any art, whether painting, music, or dance, it takes discipline and a lot of practice. And anyone who devotes themselves to an art knows that repetition is a technique, but repeating the same thing gets you nowhere.

The “practice” process starts with mastering a technique, repeating it many times, figuring out where you’re going wrong, and refining it. Once it’s mastered, you move quickly to new and harder techniques. It’s continuous, with no “end.” There’s no “arrival point” for anyone who practices an art. Even martial artists know a black belt doesn’t mean “the end.”

If I had to sum all of that up, it would be with Picasso’s phrase:

“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal Take For Themselves”

I swapped “steal” for the more literal “take for themselves.” That’s the gotcha that changes the meaning for me.

Everything we have today, knowledge, culture, technique, technology, comes from centuries of meticulous accumulation and careful refinement by hundreds of great men and women. Literally, we are small elves standing on the shoulders of giants.

A material property, something physical, when taken from someone, is theft: for you to have it, someone had to go without. Copying that property is plagiarism. With knowledge and ideas, though, “copying” or “stealing” takes on several more abstract meanings, and I want to lay out one of them here.

Any artist has to start somewhere. A contemporary painter already starts light-years ahead of colleagues from a few centuries back. Back then, access to paint wasn’t obvious.

From what material in nature do you extract yellow? Maybe from egg yolk. And ultramarine blue? Things get complicated. Years of accumulated knowledge today hand us every possible shade without our having to think about it.

The same goes for pointillism, watercolor, oil paint. Today we don’t need to “discover” these techniques, they’re already exhaustively documented. In other words:

“To become ‘good’ artists, we must ‘copy’ the hundreds of techniques the giants created before us, until we master them.”

And let’s be honest: a painter who copies the techniques well enough to be indistinguishable from the masters who created them is already an excellent artist.

Every practice starts by copying what has already been done. Repeating, learning the nuances, understanding why the techniques ended up the way they are today. Whoever follows this philosophy, copying to master and pushing forward until they cover the whole field, is walking in the footsteps of the giants of the past.

Then comes an extra step. We geeks know the cliché of when “the disciple becomes the master.” In the movies it looks much easier, but that step is the moment the artist stops merely copying what they mastered:

“To become ‘great’ artists, after mastering what we copied, we can adapt it, refine it, and who knows, improve it or innovate on it. That’s when we stop just copying and start literally ‘stealing,’ making that property effectively our own, taking it for ourselves.”

That’s when an Einstein succeeds a Newton, or a Plato succeeds a Socrates. Here “steal” carries the sense of “making the property effectively your own,” far from the common use of “undeservedly taking what belongs to someone else.”

Every good painter or visual artist has dozens of giants and centuries of material to “copy” and “practice”: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso.

Wall Painter vs Painting Painter

Another thing I’ve been repeating ad nauseam is that there are programmer-coders and programmer-developers. Wall painters and painting painters.

Coders don’t understand their role in this story. They learn to copy a few techniques, maybe master some of them, and quickly call themselves “masters.” It’s mediocre thinking, the kind that would embarrass the giants of earlier eras: Babbage, Von Neumann, Bob Noyce. They’re mere wall painters.

Developers, as I like to call them, understand their role in history better. They recognize the richness of the material that already exists, practice without limit and without believing in an end, and master technique after technique, always aiming a level above what exists now. But they’d never put themselves in the position of painting a Mona Lisa without first perfecting the sfumato. Those are painting painters.

It embarrasses me to see programmers who read little, practiced miserably little, and think themselves in a master’s position. The same way it would embarrass a painter to hear someone claim they can paint a fresco without even knowing how to thin a plaster base.

To sum up my personal version:

“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Take For Themselves, Terrible Artists Are Full of Themselves.”

This was a long year. Personally, one of the worst and one of the best all at once. One consequence was that I blogged very little, but 2012 should be the year of the comeback.

To close the year on a good note, here’s a thought. It was a year of many new startups and plenty of people willing to chase the opportunities of building a business. Anyone stepping into that world needs to take seriously the philosophy behind any capitalist venture, real capitalism, not this mediocre mixed-capitalism that most people practice. Without a proper philosophy, the business world doesn’t go very far.

I draw my source from articles by Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. As a light entry, let’s look at An Answer for Businessmen, published on May 15, 1962, in an unidentified news magazine found among Ayn Rand’s papers.

To wrap up the introduction, here’s the main read: Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, written by Leonard Peikoff, an excerpt from the book of the same name that anyone interested in entrepreneurship should read.

An Answer for Businessmen

If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.

The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American revolution. We must fight for capitalism, not as a practical issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.

I should like to suggest that you begin by applying to the realm of ideas the same objective, logical, rational criteria of judgment that you apply to the realm of business. You do not judge business issues by emotional standards—do not do it in regard to ideological issues. You do not build factories by the guidance of your feelings—do not let your feelings guide your political convictions.

Don’t Try to Cheat People in Business

You do not count on men’s stupidity in business, you do not put out an inferior product “because people are too dumb to appreciate the best”—do not do it in political philosophy; do not endorse or propagate ideas which you know to be false, in the hope of appealing to people’s fears, prejudices or ignorance. You do not cheat people in business—do not try to do it in philosophy: the so-called common man is uncommonly perceptive.

You do not doubt your own judgment in business—do not doubt it in the realm of ideology; do not let the unintelligible gibberish of the “liberal” intellectuals intimidate you or discourage you; do not conclude: “It must be deep, because I don’t understand it” or “If this is what intellectual stuff is like, then all ideas are impractical nonsense.” Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

You do not hire men as heads of your business departments, without firsthand knowledge of the nature of their jobs and of how to judge their performance—do not do it in regard to your public relations department; learn to judge whether the stuff they are selling you is poison or not. You do not hire witch-doctors as mechanics or engineers—do not hire them as P.R.’s.

Know Your Friends and Your Enemies

Know how to tell your friends from your enemies. Know whom to support in philosophical and political issues. If you are unable to speak freely, if you are bound and gagged by the disgraceful injustice of such evils as the antitrust laws—at least, do not praise, spread or support the philosophy of your own destroyers; do not grant them the sanction of the victim. Give some thought to the possibility of establishing a civil liberties union—for businessmen.

And if you still wish to have a “social” mission or purpose—there is no greater service that you can render mankind than by fighting for your own rights and property.

The biggest problem everyone has is believing that “democracy” is the only and best way to govern, or to decide anything, because “the majority,” “the people,” “the masses” are supposedly always right, and whatever was decided collectively must prevail. That’s the greatest mistake of all time.

To recap what I said before: liberty is important, defending liberty is important, and the most important liberty to defend is the individual’s. The majority must never tyrannize the minority. And the smallest minority is always the individual. If an individual is deprived of his liberty, there is no liberty for anyone.

In a state of liberty, everyone has the right to form and express their opinions. The confusion starts when an opinion is uttered by a “majority.” Democratically speaking, that “opinion” seems to gain a lot of weight. And there’s another great mistake.

Let’s define:

• Opinion: a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

• True: according to fact or reality. Accurate, exact. Real.

Opinion is not fact nor truth.

The opinion of a majority will never automatically be a truth. Any opinion of a majority will never be worth more than the proven truth uttered by a single individual, no matter how large that majority is.

This matters. That’s exactly why I said the best way to think about organizations stays far from the “purely” democratic model. In our niche of software development, many assume that agilists and agile methods are “democratic.” If you read the Wikipedia entry on Scrum, you’ll find this definition of a “team”:

The Team is responsible for delivering the product. A Team is typically made up of 5–9 people with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (analyse, design, develop, test, technical communication, document, etc.). It is recommended that the Team be self-organizing and self-led, but often work with some form of project or team management.

Nowhere does it say the Team can be anarchic. But people read the concept of self-organization wrong, as “we do as we please.” And that’s completely wrong.

It’s the same problem as a purely democratic system of government. The majority can decide among themselves the implementation of a law, a principle, or a truth. One inviolable and indisputable principle, for example, is that an individual must be able to keep for himself the products of his own work. The community can decide, democratically, whether the implementation will be a police force whose cost is split equally among everyone.

That’s the point missing when we talk about agile organizations or teams. Teams can decide democratically how to carry out the implementation, but everyone needs to understand that inviolable principles limit which decisions this “democracy” gets to make.

Ignorant voting in large volume, to me, just means a large volume of ignorance. Want to define what’s true? Study, research, demonstrate, prove. It takes a single individual with the correct demonstration to shatter the opinion of any majority. The reverse never happens.

Take a company: its goal is to obtain as much profit as possible. A job has no other goal than to turn a profit. So it does you no good to build the best-made software (in your personal opinion, by the way, which doesn’t make it a fact) if it generates loss instead of profit.

Profit is a premise, but not the only one. Remember the definition of “Team.” A team must be “accountable,” meaning it has to commit to delivering a project the way the client expects, including managing that expectation (something I’ll detail in another article).

A project commissioned to a team belongs to whoever pays for it. A so-called agile team, when it takes on a project, takes on the client’s expectations along with it, from start to finish, far beyond simply coding the requested product.

More than that: the goal of a project is to achieve a result for the client. The client doesn’t care whether the software uses technique X or Y to raise its quality, because quality is a trivial trait already expected by whoever orders it. The client’s value comes from the result the software produces.

Think about an e-commerce project. What matters is the sales it generates, far more than the software itself. If you build the most advanced system in the world, with the best architectures and technologies, but it never sold a single product, it’s worth nothing. Meanwhile an e-commerce built with the worst technologies, full of every documented hack, but that helped generate a million direct sales for the client, is infinitely superior, no argument.

A developer should value their technical work. That’s great and should continue. A systems architect values their analysis and architecture, no problem at all. An agilist values their processes and rituals. Every professional should always try to do their best at what they do.

The thing is, none of these activities is more important than the others, and none of them is an end in itself. A developer worried only and exclusively about their own code, at any cost, is a terrible professional.

And here’s the difference between a professional and an amateur: professional ethics.

The professional carries additional moral responsibilities to those held by the population in general and in society. This is because professionals are capable of making and acting on informed decisions in situations that the general public cannot, because they have not received the relevant training. For example, a lay member of the public could not be held responsible for failing to act to save a car crash victim because they could not give an emergency tracheotomy. This is because they do not have the relevant knowledge. In contrast, a fully trained doctor (with the correct equipment) would be capable of making the correct diagnosis and carrying out the procedure and we would think it wrong if they stood by and failed to help in this situation. You cannot be held accountable for failing to do something that you do not have the ability to do. Ethics are rules and values used in a professional setting.

The tradition of medicine, for example, inherits the Hippocratic Oath, updated over millennia. This is the modern version:

• I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
• I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
• I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
• I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
• I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
• I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
• I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
• I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
• I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
• If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

It’s far from a “definitive” version, but I’ll take the chance to adapt, closely following the Hippocratic Oath, what a draft oath for programmers might look like. Just to make clear the idea that every professional carries responsibilities greater than their general work activity:

• I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, this covenant:
• I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those programmers in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
• I will apply, for the benefit of the client, all measures which are required, avoiding the two-edged swords of overapplying technologies or prejudice against brands or technologies I don’t know.
• I will remember that there is art to software development as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the programmer’s code or the analyst’s diagram.
• I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for the benefit of the client’s project.
• I will respect the privacy of my clients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I treat with care the projects of my company or my clients. If I am given the task of delivering a project, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to recover a failing project; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not mess around on the job.
• I will remember that I do not deal with a code file or an editing tool, but a project, whose result may affect the client’s economic stability, the client company’s employees, and their families. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to develop the project adequately.
• I will prevent bugs and technical problems whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to correction.
• I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all kinds of projects, those I can start from scratch my own way, or those I inherit in someone else’s style.
• If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of developing projects for those who seek my help.

My point with this text is to remind you of the following:

• stop using “democracy” with populist connotations. What needs to be protected and benefited is the client’s result and their projects, way ahead of the “team.” Never forget that.
• certain principles are inviolable and not open to a vote: business objectives on one end, professional ethics on the other.
• everyone has the right to hold and express personal opinions, but an opinion is just that: an opinion. And no vote turns an opinion into a truth. 2 + 2 will be 4 no matter how many people vote that it’s 5.
• show a little respect and dignity for your profession. You work for your own benefit, sure, but without causing harm to others. I’ll repeat this ad nauseam: you only have work because there’s someone willing to pay for it. Be ethical, be professional.

Honestly, it bothers me to imagine a world where an ignorant majority can decide, by vote, that the Earth is flat, that folk charms work, that an employee “deserves” a salary higher than the company can afford, that a “professional’s” fun ranks above their responsibilities. Swear to yourselves, not to me or some third party, that you’ll be professionals. Or give up working in the same field we do, so you stop embarrassing those of us who take this seriously.

Maybe anyone who entered the tech market this decade never followed the 90s saga that ended in the antitrust case against Microsoft. The “fear” of “monopolist” Microsoft got replaced by disdain and ridicule. I know, I use that image myself now and then. It’s almost a universal joke: Microsoft is the eternal evil, and everyone else, the Canonicals, the Apples, the Googles, are the good guys.

Or almost, because now it’s Apple growing too big, and Google too, which already has thousands of detractors instead of fans. Soon we may see a new antitrust case: against Apple’s iTunes Store, for its “unfair” and “anti-competitive” practices. If that happens, it’s because people really don’t learn, and we’re doomed to go backward instead of forward.

In terms of personal taste, guaranteed by individual freedom of expression, I dislike most Microsoft products and like most Apple products. That doesn’t stop me from understanding, respecting, and admiring the ability of both to go from a garage to the top of the world. It’s what a capitalist free market makes possible.

And it bothers me when success starts getting seen through the disdain and envy of the incompetent, who in the end think they have a “right” to something without having the same ability.

Whether I consider a product “technically” better or not is beside the point. “Better” and “worse” are matters of taste, and the best thermometer in the market is demand. If demand is high, the product can be “good” even if it’s “technically bad.”

Nobody has a “right” to anything beyond what they produce themselves, let alone to something of others for free. But plenty of people think nobody is allowed to grow too big, or else what happens to the smaller competitors? That kind of statist thinking led to the Great Depression of 1929, the World Wars, and the Financial Crisis of 2008.

I find it disoriented to lump the fact that a piece of software is “open,” or that a company backs “free software,” together with social and populist movements. Technology shouldn’t be dragged into failed socialist ideologies. In another article I’ll explain why Open Source has everything to do with Capitalism and nothing to do with politicized social movements.

The text below is old, translated from Onkar Ghate’s original article (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 17, 2002), and it should convince you of what I mean. Drop the prejudices (“Microsoft = Evil”) and read with reasoning, because the arguments are logical. The context is 2002; Microsoft has shrunk a lot since then, and its qualities have changed.

[TRANSLATION] Drop the antitrust case against Microsoft

The historic antitrust case against Microsoft is now entering its final phase: the determination of Microsoft’s punishment. The presiding judge, U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, should be as lenient as legally permissible. (If possible, she should impose only a nominal punishment like a one-dollar fine or, better still, throw the case out entirely.)

To understand why, one needs to understand two points, one general and one particular. First, antitrust laws are nonobjective and unjust. Second, Microsoft is guilty of no actual crime. Let us begin with the first point.

The “actions” that antitrust laws prohibit are vague, contradictory, undefined. For instance, antitrust laws prohibit companies from engaging in “restraint of trade.” But what specific actions constitute “restraint of trade”? If, as is done repeatedly in the business world, a company signs an exclusive distribution agreement with another company, is that “restraint of trade” because now other potential competitors are excluded from that area of the market? Or if a company sells a computer to individual X, is that “restraint of trade” because competing computer companies can no longer sell X a computer since he has need for only one? No — the courts have declared to businessmen — only those “restraints” that are “unreasonable” are illegal. But which specific “restraints” are “unreasonable”? No definition is to be found in the law, so no company can know before it acts which actions are in law legal and which are not.

Consider another example. The antitrust laws prohibit “unfair” trade practices. But again, what counts as an “unfair” practice? Is it any business practice that, for instance, causes bankruptcies among some of a firm’s competitors, because they cannot find a way to compete with the firm’s low prices and/or superior products? Or is it simply any practice that the administration in power disapproves of? Again, no answer is to be found in the law, so it is impossible for a company to determine beforehand which specific actions the law prohibits.

Take one last example. Under antitrust laws, a company can be charged with “predatory pricing” if it sets prices below those of its competitors, because the competitors might as a result go bankrupt. It can be charged with “monopoly pricing” if it sets prices that are deemed too high, because then it is supposedly bilking consumers of their hard-earned income. But if it therefore decides to set prices at the level of those of its competitors — it can be charged with “collusion” or “conspiracy,” because now it is said to be no longer “competing.”

In the nightmarish world of antitrust law, any and no action can be pronounced illegal. There are and can be no definite, objective principles specified in the law — and as a result a businessman has no way to determine, before he acts, whether his action is legal or not. In practice, this means that businessmen are at the mercy of the government. Any moment the government wants to cripple a particular company, it can unleash the antitrust laws against the company. In logic, a business has no possible defense against a charge of “restraint of trade” or “unfair” trade policies or “predatory pricing” because the charge itself has no objective meaning. The antitrust laws, therefore, vest the government with arbitrary power.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that when, say, a bureaucrat is disgruntled with a successful company because it has failed to share (i.e., give away) its wealth or support the government’s particular programs — or when a government official thinks that destroying a powerful company will win him votes with misguided citizens who believe that Big Business is their enemy — or when resentful, envious competitors (like Netscape and Oracle and AOL in the Microsoft case) can persuade their government representatives to cripple a superior competitor — the brunt of the antitrust laws descends upon that company.

It is no accident that it is America’s most successful, most productive, most admired companies — Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Wal-Mart, American Airlines, Standard Oil, etc. — that are subjected to antitrust lawsuits.

As a form of granting arbitrary power to the government, antitrust laws are unconstitutional and un-American. As a means of penalizing the successful for being successful, antitrust laws are a perversion of justice.

Let us therefore now leave to one side antitrust law, under which any action of a company could be considered a crime, and ask whether in actual fact Microsoft is guilty of any crime.

What are the principal accusations against Microsoft?

Microsoft is accused of “unfair” competition. But competition refers to the process by which companies utilize their assets and personnel to build better and/or cheaper products. They thereby seek to earn, through voluntary trade, even greater profits. In a free market, there is no such thing as “unfair” competition. There are only better and worse competitors. In other words, some companies are better than others at research and development, at structuring long-term, mutually beneficial business agreements, at marketing products, at keeping good employees happy yet challenged. Microsoft, for example, excels at all these processes — and many more. (The charge that Microsoft is not innovative is particularly disingenuous given its continual upgrades and improvements to its major products; even Judge Jackson had to concede this point.) The fact that Microsoft is one of the greatest competitors the business world has seen is, in a free nation, not a crime but a virtue.

The only “unfair competition” that exists is in fact not competition. If, say, the Mafia threatens to blow up a shopkeeper’s store unless he gives it a percentage of his sales, the Mafia is not engaged in competition, albeit unfair. It is engaged in coercion — precisely to prevent voluntary trade and the free market from operating. When Netscape loses sales to Microsoft because Microsoft’s browser is better and/or cheaper, Netscape’s loss of sales bears no similarity to a shopkeeper’s “loss” of sales to the Mafia. One must never equate the voluntary (people choose to buy Microsoft’s products) with the coerced (if he had a choice, the shopkeeper would not “deal” with the Mafia).

Second, Microsoft is accused of “predatory pricing.” Translated into reality, this means that Microsoft is able to charge prices below those of its competitors, such as Netscape. Some of these competitors, who cannot match Microsoft’s low prices, lose market share or go bankrupt. But it is Microsoft’s incredible efficiency and productiveness that allows it to undersell its competition yet still make large profits. Again, this represents not criminal behavior but real virtue.

Finally, Microsoft is accused of wielding “monopoly power.” This accusation as well is based on equating the voluntary with the coerced.

It is true that Microsoft has a dominant market position in some segments of the software industry and that some of its competitors have gone out of business. But this is because Microsoft has out-competed them: it is more innovative, more efficient, a better marketer, and/or a better employer than other software firms. Microsoft, in other words, has earned its dominant position.

And it continues to earn it: it faces constant competition, even if there are no actual competitors presently in its market. For whenever another entrepreneur can figure out a way to produce similar software at a cheaper price or better software at an attractive price (or some undreamt of product that makes current software obsolete), he is free to enter Microsoft’s market. And if he has a sound business plan, he will be able to raise the necessary capital even if he himself has none: there are thousands of venture capitalists looking for the next Bill Gates. Microsoft’s dominant position in the software industry, in other words, must be earned anew each day.

So once again, Microsoft is being attacked for its success: in reality it has no monopoly power — just brilliant management.

The only monopolies that can in fact exist are government-created ones. Only a government can prevent someone from entering a market and thus eliminate competition. The Post Office, for instance, is a monopoly. There is little doubt that Federal Express could provide better service, more cheaply, and still earn a profit. But the government forcibly prevents it from entering the Post Office’s market. The Post Office’s dominant market position is unearned: it offers sub-par service but because of government coercion faces no competition. Microsoft’s dominant market position, by contrast, is earned: it faces constant competition, which it continues to win. Again, do not equate the voluntary with the coerced.

Microsoft is the epitome of American business success: it produces enormous wealth through intelligence and hard work. Imagine the wealth that would exist — for every firm, for every employee, for every shareholder, for every customer — if all companies in America were run by a Bill Gates. The fact that they are not should not lead us to destroy Bill Gates’s creation but, all the more, to admire and champion it.

Why should Microsoft’s punishment be as lenient as possible (assuming the case cannot be thrown out at this stage in the proceedings)? Because antitrust laws are arbitrary laws that penalize virtue for being virtue — as the specific accusations against Microsoft clearly reveal.

Dr. Onkar Ghate, PhD in philosophy, is a senior researcher at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Disclaimer

To be clear, the intention isn’t to say Microsoft is innocent of everything. That’s what the judicial system is for, and any company that feels illegally harmed has every right to sue, as has happened countless times. See this list of lawsuits.

And this holds for any company. One of a government’s functions is to make sure contracts are honored.

What interests me in the episode above is the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in essence gives the government carte blanche to sue any company for any reason. This wasn’t the only lawsuit against Microsoft, but it was one of the most widely publicized. Antitrust law itself is an evil, like any regulation that hands out privileges nobody could earn in the market.

And for anyone who wants to dig deeper, I recommend reading the full Findings of Fact on the case in the U.S. justice archive. To understand why antitrust law is a serious problem, start with this article, but mostly the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The final scene has a defense speech by the main character, and that’s where Rand distills her idea of individualism. I thought it was so good I decided to publish the subtitled excerpt in Portuguese.

The full text of the book is much longer, and you can read the whole thing in English on this site. Just to give a taste, here’s an excerpt:

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality—the man who lives to serve others—is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism.

Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the sufferings of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer—in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

Watch the full thing, it’s worth it:

Two Ayn Rand posts back to back is bordering on an overdose, but it had been a while since I stopped to read, listen to, and watch so many inspiring pieces. I hope you enjoy.

• [Off-Topic] The Cult of Gray Morality
• [Off-Topic] Man’s Rights
• [Off-Topic] The Argument from Intimidation

Only this year did I finally sit down to tackle this doorstop of a novel. I’m about halfway through, loving the story and the ideas. Objectivism is the philosophy that best describes the way I like to think. If you’re curious, I recommend Rational Egoism: The Individual from Ayn Rand by the Brazilian Rodrigo Constantino, one of the few local writers I read regularly.

As it happens, the first part of the film version directed by Paul Johansson is supposed to premiere this year. I liked the casting of Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart and Grant Bowler as Henry Rearden. To me, Bowler has a touch of Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the 1949 film that adapts Rand’s novel of the same name:

I was right at the passage that reaches James Taggart’s wedding, where Francisco D’Anconia, a filthy-rich industrialist known to the press as a playboy, gets cornered by a guest at the party:

• Senor d’Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?
• Just exactly what it deserves.
• Oh, how cruel!
• Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame? Francisco asked gravely. I do.

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation:

• Don’t let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil, and he’s the typical product of money.

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

And then comes one of the best speeches I’ve ever read. Francisco holds forth on Money. We rarely stop to think about the trivial stuff of daily life, and money is one of those things: we all have it, use it, earn it, and lose it, yet understand very little about it. The speech is almost an ode to money, and I figured I’d share it to whet your appetite for the whole novel.

Here is Francisco D’Anconia’s speech. First, a language note: in Portuguese we talk about “winning” money (ganhar dinheiro), while Americans say “make money.” We earn, they make. The difference matters more than it looks, and the speech circles back to it at the end.

Remember that old chestnut, “Does money buy happiness?” The speech answers that in part, along with the other one, “Is money the root of all evil?” Read on:

The Money Speech

Jsu Garcia as Francisco D’Anconia

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor — your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made — before it can be looted or mooched — made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced. To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders.

Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss — the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery — that you must offer them values, not wounds — that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade — with reason, not force, as their final arbiter — it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability — and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality — the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind. Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil? Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth — the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune.

Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil? Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money? Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil?

To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun. But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it.

Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich — will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt — and of his life, as he deserves. Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard — the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money — the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law — men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims — then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot. Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’ When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask: ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are. You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization, and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood — money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves — slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries.

So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers — as industrialists. To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist. If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ’to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ’to make money’ hold the essence of human morality. Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents.

Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide — as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out.

The Critique

I’m sure plenty of people feel uneasy reading this. The argument is solid, but the idea sounds “wrong” at first blush. In the book, right after the speech, comes this scene:

There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, “It’s horrible!”, “It’s not true!”, “How vicious and selfish!”, saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.

• Senor d’Anconia, declared the woman with the earrings, I don’t agree with you!
• If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully.
• Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.
• How do you know it?
• I feel it. I don’t go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you’re heartless.
• Madame, when we’ll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won’t be of any earthly use to save them. And I’m heartless enough to say that when you’ll scream, “But I didn’t know it!”, you will not be forgiven.

You could imagine that a character who talks like this puts “money” above everything else. The story shows the opposite, and what comes next is even more surprising. That’s why I recommend reading the novel to the end ;-)

And this speech isn’t the whole story. To see where all of it lands, the companion piece is John Galt’s speech.

Bonus

The thing that probably best sums up what Rand meant with Atlas Shrugged is John Galt’s speech. It’s worth reading on its own, out of the novel’s context, and there’s a Portuguese transcription.

There’s another take on the same idea in the novel The Fountainhead. My next post carries Howard Roark’s speech, which makes the same case as John Galt.