Buzz Andersen

Guest Buzz Andersen is an interesting builder on the internet (and has been for some time, with stints at Apple, Square, Tumblr, and more) but has also emerged as an important and moral voice in technology’s evolution. He’s an incredible twitter follow and I always feel smarter for having interacted with him. This one gets deep and it is worth it. Here goes 6 AM team! - Colin (CJN)Buzz here. If I told you one of the best books I’ve read in years begins with an extended discussion of 18th century European forestry, you would be forgiven for thinking that didn’t sound like a very promising endorsement. I felt the same way when a friend recommended James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State to me, but I’m glad I stuck with it because I now consider the book a personal touchstone.Scott is a political science professor at Yale, but his work is deeply informed by anthropological research (he has done ethnographic field work in Southeast Asia) and a keen interest in the history of agriculture (he and his wife raise sheep in rural Connecticut). He opens Seeing Like A State not with a heady review of Hobbes, Locke, or Kant, but rather with scholarly disquisitions on scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and cadastral mapping in 17th Century France. While the approach feels academic initially, the outlines of a compelling thesis soon emerge from the profusion of detail. In order to manage resources, run large bureaucracies, and effectively tax their citizens, states must develop ways of making their domains “legible” to central managers. This inevitably involves creating simplified models from which to operate, lest state administrators end up like Borges’s fabled geographers, whose obsession with exactitude led them to create maps the size of whole territories. Such abstractions, however, not only inevitably fail to convey the complex nuances of reality on the ground, they actually tend to reshape the very social processes they intend to model. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” if you will.Thus, Prussian foresters seeking to maximize wood yield and ease bureaucratic accounting planted neatly ordered row after neatly ordered row of uniform tree species—a technique that produced banner results for one generation, and then devastation later as the unexpectedly complex forest ecosystem collapsed. Similarly, 17th Century French surveyors, seeking to simplify the process of royal taxation, disrupted complex local customs and created entirely new classes of winners and losers by forcing land usage into a mapping scheme that ignored nuances of place and failed to accurately reflect agricultural practice. In making society more “legible” to centralized managers, Scott asserts in example after example, the state frequently obliterates local knowledge and practice, ignores critical context, and imposes harmful monocultures.Why is this interesting?It is when this tendency is coupled with modern scientific hubris that it reaches its most dangerous form. At its core, Seeing Like A State is an assault on “authoritarian high modernism”—a faith whose patron saints, as identified by Scott, include “Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walter Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.” The German foresters and French surveyors were, at the end of the day, simply looking for ways to make the chores of bureaucracy easier. Their 20th Century counterparts, by contrast, tended to be of a less pragmatic cast—rationalist ideologues driven by a messianic desire to remake society from first principles, and to impose upon it an aesthetic order. In this respect, it’s easy to draw parallels to the sort of Silicon Valley utopianism exemplified by deeply flawed CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, whose unquestioning belief in the technopoly has produced powerful products that are reshaping the world in decidedly un-utopian ways.I would argue that Seeing Like A State belongs to a tradition of modern political philosophy that emphasizes pragmatism, pluralism, and real world observation over ivory tower ideology—“the political, not the metaphysical,” to paraphrase philosopher John Rawls. Another notable exponent of this approach is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, whose thinking, as described in a recent New Yorker profile, holds that:...we shouldn’t commit ourselves to an ideal system of any sort, whether socialist or libertarian, because a model set in motion like a Swiss watch will become a trap as soon as circumstances change. Instead, we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.In a similar vein, Scott concludes Seeing Like A State with an argument for what he calls “métis”—a mode of knowledge that respects intuition, experience, local practice, and case-by-case reasoning in contrast to the scientific imperiousness of high modernism. As a counterpoint to Prussian forestry, for example, Scott offers the Japanese approach to erosion management—a complex ongoing dialog between forester and forest in which “no more is attempted than Nature has already done in the region.” Japanese forestry, Scott explains, is always about “the art of one valley”—about engaging with the specifics and changing dynamics of individual situations rather than dealing in broad generalizations based on reductionist models, grand theories, or ideological visions. Such humility may not be the stuff of stirring manifestos, but lasting progress, as Scott shows, requires us to confront the world as it is—not merely as we wish it to be. (BA)Cartoon of the Day:Thought Colin might appreciate this cartoon from the latest New Yorker. (NRB)Quick Links:One of my favorite articles on the competing utopian/dystopian vision in technology is a book review by Adam Gopnik from 2011. In it he offers up three categories of tech thinkers: “The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others–that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.” Since reading that I’ve proudly considered myself an “ever-waser”. (NRB)Another companion link: I recently read Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. While I have found other Postman writing a bit overly moralized and alarmist, this felt like a pretty balanced case for an “ever-waser” approach to technology. “... we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.” (NRB)In case you want to get mad about the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis, here’s Patrick Radden Keene on the New Yorker Politics and More podcast telling the story again. (As always, a suggestion to read Radden Keefe’s original 2017 New Yorker piece on the Sackler clan.) (NRB)When it comes to modern espionage Bogota is the new Vienna. (CJN) Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Buzz (BA)

Why is this interesting? - Friday, April 25

Buzz Andersen (BA) is an interesting builder on the internet (and has been for some time, with stints at Apple, Square, Tumblr, and more) but has also emerged as an important and moral voice in technology’s evolution. He’s an incredible twitter follow and I always feel smarter for having interacted with him. - Colin (CJN)Buzz here. On March 10, 2021, many Russian Internet users suddenly found they were having trouble accessing parts of the web. Kentik, a US-based network analysis company, reported that network traffic to Rostelecom, the Russian state telecom, was down as much as 24%, and cybersecurity Twitter was abuzz with speculation about the causes. Eventually, a Russian artist and Twitter user named Gregory Khodyrev realized what was going on: someone at Russia’s state Internet censor, Roscomnadzor, had attempted to block the Internet domain “t.co” (used by Twitter’s URL shortener), but had instead managed to cut off access to any domain containing the text pattern “t.co.” This meant that sites such as “microsoft.com,” “reddit.com,” and even Russia’s own state media outlet “rt.com” were rendered suddenly inaccessible.Readers with a modicum of technical knowledge may already have an inkling of what likely happened here: some hapless censor, attempting to curb Twitter’s political influence, installed a URL pattern matching rule on Russia’s national firewall that turned out to have been just a tad overzealous. The rule in question was almost certainly expressed using a notoriously abstruse notation called a “regular expression.”There is an old programmer joke (generally attributed to Jamie Zawinski) that goes: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” In accidentally cutting off access to a large part of the Internet for an entire country (and in the process drawing embarrassing attention to Russia’s censorship efforts), our anonymous bureaucrat seems to have proven that old chestnut quite handily.Why is this interesting?A regular expression, or “regex,” is a kind of algebraic shorthand for specifying text patterns. Here, for example, is a regular expression that will match will match the words “sink,” “sank,” or “sunk.”s[aiu]nkThe brackets indicate that either “a,” “i,” or “u” are acceptable matches for the second character in the series. Now, to make things slightly more interesting, we can add an optional element:st?[aiu]nkThe question mark makes “t” optional in the pattern, and means our expression can now match not only “sink,” “sank,” and “sunk,” but also “stink,” “stank,” and “stunk.” Finally, to dramatically expand the number of text “strings” our expression can match, we can add a period (meaning “any character”) followed by an asterisk (meaning “as many as possible”).s.*nkNow our regex can match “stonk,” “slink,” or indeed any other word starting with “s” and ending with “nk.”Most regular expression implementations also support a feature called “anchors,” which specify that the match must appear at the start or end of a text string. For example:^t.co$The above expression matches the pattern “t.co”—but only if the “t” is the first character in the string and the “o” is the last. Without the “^” and “$,” by contrast, the expression would, as our anonymous Russian censor learned, match the pattern no matter where it appears in the string.The concept of a regular expression has a surprisingly interesting history that dates back to the optimistic, mid-20th Century heyday of artificial intelligence research. The term itself originated with mathematician Stephen Kleene. In 1943, neuroscientist Warren McCulloch and logician Walter Pitts had just described the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron, and Kleene, who specialized in theories of computation, wanted to investigate what networks of these artificial neurons could, well, theoretically compute. In a 1951 paper for the RAND Corporation, Kleene reasoned about the types of patterns neural networks were able to detect by applying them to very simple toy languages—so-called “regular languages.” For example: given a language whose “grammar” allows only the letters “A” and “B”, is there a neural network that can detect whether an arbitrary string of letters is valid within the “A/B” grammar or not? Kleene developed an algebraic notation for encapsulating these “regular grammars” (for example, a*b* in the case of our “A/B” language), and the regular expression was born.Kleene’s work was later expanded upon by such luminaries as linguist Noam Chomsky and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, who formally established the relationship between regular expressions, neural networks, and a class of theoretical computing abstraction called “finite state machines.”These discoveries made early AI pioneers feel as if they were unlocking the fundamental mysteries of the mind, and for a while it seemed as if true machine intelligence might be just around the corner. Unfortunately, this heady early enthusiasm for this work was soon to hit a brick wall. In 1969, Minksy published his controversial book Perceptrons, which explored some important limitations of early neural networks—with devastating consequences for the emerging science and its pioneers. As Brian Christian writes in his book The Alignment Problem:It is as if a dark cloud has settled over the field, and everything falls apart: the research, the money, the people. Pitts, McCulloch, and Lettvin, who have all three moved to MIT, are sharply exiled after a misunderstanding with MIT’s Norbert Wiener, who had been like a second father figure to Pitts and now won’t speak to him. Pitts, alcoholic and depressed, throws all of his notes and papers into a fire, including an unpublished dissertation about three-dimensional neural networks that MIT tries desperately to salvage. Pitts dies from cirrhosis in May 1969, at the age of 46.”The study of neural networks soon settled into a long fallow period as many researchers shifted their efforts away from “connectionist” theories (in which intelligence emerges from massively parallel networks) and toward a more paradigmatically familiar “symbolist” approach (which sought to develop intelligence by loading machines up with databases of facts and trying to teach them the rules of logic). The repudiation of neural nets was so thorough that it seems unlikely regular expressions would be so widely known outside of esoteric computer science today if it wasn’t for the efforts of Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs.Thompson started applying regexes to more mundane tasks by integrating them into the advanced search feature of his QED text editor in 1968. From there, regular expressions became a mainstay of UNIX, used to provide “wildcard” matching pretty much anywhere in the operating system that text search is required. In the 1980s, Larry Wall gave regexes another boost by making them a core feature of his text-oriented programming language, Perl, which went on to become the indispensable “duct tape” of 1990s web development. This secured regular expressions a permanent place in the workaday webmonkey toolbox—and a key role in the kind of back-office sysadmin work Russia’s firewall administrators are tasked with.As for McCulloch, Pitts, Kleene, et. al, they eventually got their vindication. The early 2010s saw a resurgence of interest in neural networks, which in turn led to the advent of “deep learning” and massive advances in problems like facial recognition, machine translation, and autonomous vehicle navigation. So next time you’re puzzling through the inscrutable syntax for advanced search in your text editor, Internet search engine, or nationwide firewall, spare a thought for the once discredited AI pioneers who ended up making everything from wildcard matching to self-driving cars a reality. (BA)Comic of the Day:After yesterday’s Fastly outage, this XKCD seems appropriate. (NRB)Quick Links:What is the 'magic' brake setting cost Hamilton in Baku – and why do Mercedes struggle at low-grip tracks? (NRB)The Design History of Athens Iconic Apartments (NRB)[Sponsored Link] If you’re at a SaaS company, check out Variance. It’s a tool to help grow customers (some people are calling it a PLG CRM). If you have questions or want to try it, get in touch. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Buzz (BA)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Regular Expression Edition

Buzz Andersen (BA) is an interesting builder on the internet (and has been for some time, with stints at Apple, Square, Tumblr, and more) but has also emerged as an important and moral voice in technology’s evolution. He’s an incredible twitter follow and I always feel smarter for having interacted with him. - Colin (CJN)Buzz here. If I told you one of the best books I’ve read in years begins with an extended discussion of 18th-century European forestry, you would be forgiven for thinking that didn’t sound like a very promising endorsement. I felt the same way when a friend recommended James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State to me, but I’m glad I stuck with it because I now consider the book a personal touchstone.Scott is a political science professor at Yale, but his work is deeply informed by anthropological research (he has done ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia) and a keen interest in the history of agriculture (he and his wife raise sheep in rural Connecticut). He opens Seeing Like A State not with a heady review of Hobbes, Locke, or Kant, but rather with scholarly disquisitions on scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and cadastral mapping in 17th Century France. While the approach feels academic initially, the outlines of a compelling thesis soon emerge from the profusion of detail. In order to manage resources, run large bureaucracies, and effectively tax their citizens, states must develop ways of making their domains “legible” to central managers. This inevitably involves creating simplified models from which to operate—lest state administrators end up like Borges’s fabled geographers, whose obsession with exactitude led them to create maps the size of whole territories. Such abstractions, however, not only inevitably fail to convey the complex nuances of reality on the ground, they actually tend to reshape the very social processes they intend to model. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” if you will.Thus, Prussian foresters seeking to maximize wood yield and ease bureaucratic accounting planted neatly ordered row after neatly ordered row of uniform tree species—a technique that produced banner results for one generation, and then devastation later as the unexpectedly complex forest ecosystem collapsed. Similarly, 17th Century French surveyors, seeking to simplify the process of royal taxation, disrupted complex local customs and created entirely new classes of winners and losers by forcing land usage into a mapping scheme that ignored nuances of place and failed to accurately reflect agricultural practice. In making society more “legible” to centralized managers, Scott asserts in example after example, the state frequently obliterates local knowledge and practice, ignores critical context, and imposes harmful monocultures.Why is this interesting?It is when this tendency is coupled with modern scientific hubris that it reaches its most dangerous form. At its core, Seeing Like A State is an assault on “authoritarian high modernism”—a faith whose patron saints, as identified by Scott, include “Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walter Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.” The German foresters and French surveyors were, at the end of the day, simply looking for ways to make the chores of bureaucracy easier. Their 20th Century counterparts, by contrast, tended to be of a less pragmatic cast—rationalist ideologues driven by a messianic desire to remake society from first principles and to impose upon it an aesthetic order. In this respect, it’s easy to draw parallels to the sort of Silicon Valley utopianism exemplified by deeply flawed CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, whose unquestioning belief in the technopoly has produced powerful products that are reshaping the world in decidedly un-utopian ways.I would argue that Seeing Like A State belongs to a tradition of modern political philosophy that emphasizes pragmatism, pluralism, and real-world observation over ivory tower ideology—“the political, not the metaphysical,” to paraphrase philosopher, John Rawls. Another notable exponent of this approach is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, whose thinking, as described in a recent New Yorker profile, holds that:...we shouldn’t commit ourselves to an ideal system of any sort, whether socialist or libertarian, because a model set in motion like a Swiss watch will become a trap as soon as circumstances change. Instead, we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.In a similar vein, Scott concludes Seeing Like A State with an argument for what he calls “métis”—a mode of knowledge that respects intuition, experience, local practice, and case-by-case reasoning in contrast to the scientific imperiousness of high modernism. As a counterpoint to Prussian forestry, for example, Scott offers the Japanese approach to erosion management—a complex ongoing dialog between forester and forest in which “no more is attempted than Nature has already done in the region.” Japanese forestry, Scott explains, is always about “the art of one valley”—about engaging with the specifics and changing dynamics of individual situations rather than dealing in broad generalizations based on reductionist models, grand theories, or ideological visions. Such humility may not be the stuff of stirring manifestos, but lasting progress, as Scott shows, requires us to confront the world as it is—not merely as we wish it to be. (BA)Quick Links:The new silent majority: People who don't tweet (NRB)Ukraine authorities say seized Russian tanks don’t need to be declared on tax form (NRB)Nice follow-up to the recent Media Probe Edition from WITI contributor Matt Locke: The New Patterns of Culture: Slow, Fast & Spiky (NRB)[Sponsored Link] Over at Variance we are building a Customer Growth Platform: the easiest way to integrate data into your sales process. Whether it’s Miller Heiman or MEDDIC, Hubspot or Salesforce, Variance helps revenue organizations of all shapes and sizes practice data-driven sales.--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Three keys to the postpandemic recovery. Amid disruption, adaptability and decisiveness are crucial to building resilience. But how can leaders shift from a defensive posture and an emphasis on short-term goals to embrace a sustainable, inclusive growth agenda? A new article dives deeper on what it takes to build resilience now.—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Buzz (BA)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).