Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 50

Linus’s secret revealed!

Yeah, that whole Finland thing? It’s just a cover story.

Back in the early Seventies an otherwise unassuming professor of philosophy named John Norman had a minor succes de scandale with a series of books set on a planet called Gor, a sort of counter-Earth in the same orbit as our planet but on the exact opposite side of the sun. These were quite like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” novels and probably patterned after them – sword-and-planet swashbucklery in a miliieu that mixed tropes from Earth history with plot hooks involving aliens and exotic super-science.

What made them scandalous was Norman’s sexual ideology. On Gor, women are slaves, and like being slaves. A lot. Norman had this idea that the unacknowledged heart of female psychology is a desire to be dominated into a state of ecstatic sexual surrender. It is fair to note that this isn’t completely crazy; studies of female sex fantasies consistantly report rape and domination as the #1 most popular theme (a female friend of mine, commenting on this fact, calls these the “It’s not my fault” fantasies). But fantasy isn’t reality, and the firestorm of indignation you’d expect eventually got Norman quietly blacklisted at all of the major SF imprints.

I read the first four of the Gor books so long ago that I had almost completely forgotten them. If you’re wondering why, three reasons. First, Norman’s worldbuilding was pretty good, considering; the man knows a lot of history and ethnography and I had fun playing spot-the-references. Second, this was before the post-Star-Wars boom in SF publishing, when the total published output of SF and fantasy was so much smaller that anyone who read as fast as I did more or less had to take anything they could get. Third: while I never believed Norman’s ideology or identified much with his unintentionally funny caricatures of masculinity, it was sort of clinically interesting to watch him unfold the ideas and see how far he’d push them.

But I lost interest pretty quickly and forgot about these books for nigh-on forty years. Until last night, when I dropped a joking reference to John Norman on someone much younger than me, found myself explaining it, hopped on over to Wikipedia, and discovered a shocking fact!

Er, no, not that Norman is still cranking out Gor e-books and up to #32 (“Smugglers of Gor”). No. The Wikipedia Gor page has a map. A map, not featured in any of the paperbacks, that reminded me of a toponymic detail meaningless to me at the time, but which since 1992 must assume ominous new significance.

Like Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Norman frequently played with the fabulation that the Gor books are no fiction but an actual chronicle of a counter-Earth, and that his heroes are real people who traveled, through the instrumentality of the alien Priest-Kings, from Earth to Gor…or from Gor to Earth. Even now, Goreans may walk among us, marvelling at our decadence and pitying our unhappy, undominated women. Perhaps exhibiting strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry born of civilizations more ancient and advanced than our own.

Strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry, I say. And there, on the map of known Gor; far to the north, beyond the Sardar Mountains where the Priest-Kings have their impenetrable fastnesses; north as well of the port city of Lydias at the edge of civilization; between the vast boreal forests and the frigid arctic; there is a place where hardy Vikingoids do the hardy Vikingoid thing with the huge battleaxes and furs and drinking horns and yeah, you know the drill.

And on the map of Gor, the name of that place is writ clearly: Torvaldsland

Questioning transsexuality

In Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman, Kevin Willamson makes a case that feeling like a transsexual – that is, that one is either a man in the body of a woman or vice-versa – should be regarded as a mental illness to be treated by therapy rather than with sex-reassignment surgery.

The article surprised me by presenting a coherent case for this position that I cannot dismiss as garden-variety social-conservative chuntering. I found the parallel with what Willamson calls BIID particularly troubling. If we treat people who desire to electively amputate their own arms and legs as mentally ill, why do we judge people who want to amputate the genitals they were born with any differently? What makes one an illness and the other a lifestyle choice?

As a libertarian I’m inclined to think that people have a right to mutilate their own bodies any way they like, provided that the surgical and after-care costs aren’t forcibly extracted from anybody else. But libertarian respect for autonomy cannot entirely banish the concept of mental illness either. Some people have minds that are broken and need treatment; respecting their autonomy too much to deliver treatment condemns them to lives full of needless and avoidable pain.

In the rest of this essay I’m therefore going to ignore, on purpose, the question of how to reconcile libertarian values with a theory of mental illness. I feel justified in this by a particularly interesting feature of Willamson’s argument.

Williamson’s contribution is to show that it’s quite difficult to construct a theory of “mental illness” that includes BIID but excludes transsexuality. Given the high frequency with which post-op transsexuals commit suicide, Willamson even could have argued that people with BIID are less ill than transsexuals, evidenced by the fact that they’re less self-destructive. Tellingly, suicide rates are not significantly lower among transsexuals who cannot get reassignment surgery.

Thus: if libertarians are going to have a theory of mental illness at all, we will be required to grapple with the philosophical issues raised by transsexuality in the same way as non-libertarians for whom “mental illness” is a much less fraught and suspicious concept. And that is he last thing I will have to say about libertarianism here.

I’ve known two transsexuals well enough to believe I have some idea of what their inner life is like; I’ve met, I think, four others. I’ve felt sympathy for all of them – but Willamson reminds me that sympathy may be as easy but serious a mistake here as it would be with respect to a paranoid schizophrenic. (This is my thinking, not his; Williamson never discusses paranoid schizophrenics or whatever the DSM is calling them this week.)

How is Bradley Manning’s expressed belief that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body epistemically distinguishable from a paranoid schizophrenic’s belief that (say) he is pursued by invisible demons who compel him to burn his own flesh? I’m a predictivist and judge truth claims by how they cash out as observations of future events; what Williamson forces me to recognize is that I can’t really formulate a consequential test for either claim.

Furthermore, I can’t trust what the “transsexual” Bradley Manning tells me about his situation any more than I can trust what the demon-haunted paranoid tells me about his. In neither case are the referents of their claims located anywhere but inaccessibly within their own skulls.

Accordingly, I can’t find principled grounds to classify one as a delusional system and the other as not. Now, one might say: there are no such things as invisible demons! But: where is the evidence that there is any such thing as “women trapped inside mens’ bodies” or vice-versa?

Willamson reminds us that the concept of a psychological gender identity separate from one’s physical one actually has about the same confirmation status as invisible demons. The only warrant for it is a gallimaufry of speculation based on reports from a population that by objective measures seems to be highly disturbed and dysfunctional (and the 18-20% suicide rate is only the the most obvious indicator).

So, why do we not treat self-reported transsexuals as insane and in need of treatment for a delusional disorder? I can anticipate a lot of possible replies; the trouble is that all of them apply just as well (or just as poorly) to the case of BIID or delusional paranoia.

One of the stupidest possible counters is also probably the most common one: if you don’t accept transsexuals’ reports of their own condition, you’re being nasty and unfeeling to them. Um, OK, how does this apply to paranoids? Am I required to believe in invisible tormenting demons on pain of being considered cruel to those people?

Another, possibly even stupider argument is that if I don’t believe that physiological and physical gender identities can be opposed I am taking the side of Bad People – conservatives, phallocrats, whatever. I don’t really see this as being any different than the religious argument my ancestors might have been given for the existence of invisible demons. It’s just as obviously fallacious.

Back in more religious times, belief in invisible demons was not helpful to people we would now categorize as delusional paranoids; a hefty dose of Thorazine, while not a cure, at least manages their condition, bringing down the incidence of suicides and self-mutilation and other violence.

I don’t actually see, now that Williamson has slapped me upside the head enough so I notice the issue, that a belief in separated psychological and physiological sexual identities is any more helpful to transsexuals. The objective check is that acting on this belief doesn’t seem to reduce their suicide rates significantly.

First, do no harm. We’ll know we have a rationally and ethically sound way of handling “transsexuality” when we find one with sequelae significantly less grim that doing nothing. Right now, gender reassignment surgery doesn’t qualify – Williamson quotes a British rewarch group affiliated with NHS reporting “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.”

I think Williamson is right that it’s time to be much more critical about the theory and ideological fashions that led us to where we are now. A good place to start would be to ask how we might establish that “transsexuality” exists and what it means, after applying the same skepticism that we do to self-reports by other people who report an urge to lop off their body parts.

vms-empire 1.10 released

There’s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore/expand/exploit/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion.

Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games? It was Walter Bright’s game “Empire” from the early 1970s. You can read about it at his page on Classic Empire.

Since 1994 I’ve maintained an early Empire workalike written by Chuck Simmons in 1987 to run under the now-extinct VMS operating system; it was ported to Unix immediately, and remains to my best of knowledge the only open-source version or variant of Empire available.

Walter Bright does not acknowledge this version’s existence obn his Empire page, which is fair because he didn’t write it and probably doesn’t consider it to be “Empire” at all. But it is close in gameplay and style to the earliest of Bright’s versions, except for being able to display its crude character-cell maps in color (I added that back when color terminals were cutting-edge technology).

If you love Civ or MOO, try this out for a look at what the computer 4X game was like befor pixel graphics. The display and command interface are primitive by today’s standards, but the AI and general gameplay have held up surprisingly well. It’s instructive to see how many of the core tropes of later 4X games are already present in this one.

You can get version 1.10 of VMS-Empire here.

Summer vacation 2013

The last couple of weeks have been my vacation, and full of incident.This explains the absence of blogging.

First, World Boardgaming Championships. I did respectably, making quarter- and semi-finals in a couple of events, but failed in my goal to make the Power Grid finals again this year and place higher than fifth.

I did very well in Conflict of Heroes, though; my final game – with the tournament organizer – was a an epic slugfest that attracted the attention of Uwe Eickert (the game’s designer) who watched the last half enthralled. I lost by only 1 point and was told I’d be put on the Wall of Honor. I like my chances at the finals next year.

Then Summer Weapons Retreat. Huge fun as usual; I spent most of the week working on Florentine (two-sword) technique. with some excursions into polearm and hand-and-a-half sword. I’ve posted a few pictures on my G+ feed.

First full day I was home, a thunderstorm blew out the router in my basement. Yes I had it on a UPS, but ground surges (though rare) do happen; this one toasted the Ethernet switch. Diagnosing, replacing, and dealing with the second-order effects of that ate most of yesterday.

Now life is back to relatively normal, though it will take a few days for the muscle aches from a week of hard training to entirely subside. Blogging will resume.

Victory is sweet

Ever since the open-source rebranding in 1998, I’ve been telling people that “open source” should not be capitalized because it’s an engineering term of art, and that we would have achieved victory when the superiority of (uncapitalized) open source seeped into popular culture as a taken-for-granted background assumption.

There’s a thriller writer named Brad Thor who I never heard of until he publicly offered to buy George Zimmerman any weapon he likes as a replacement for the pistol the police impounded after the Trayvon Marin shooting. What Thor was really protesting, it seems, was the fact that Zimmerman didn’t get his pistol back when he was acquitted; instead, the federal Justice Department has impounded it while they look into trumping up civil-rights charges against Zimmerman.

This made me curious. The books are pretty routine airport-novel stuff, full of exotic locations and skulduggery and firefights. Like a lot of the genre, they have a substantial component of equipment porn – lovingly detailed descriptions of weapons and espionage devices.

Amidst all this equipment porn the characters casually use “open source” (specifically of encryption software) as a way of conveying that it’s the best available. And the author writes as though he expects his readers to understand this.

Victory is sweet.

Preventing visceral racism

I’ve been writing about race and politics a lot recently. Now I’m going to reveal the reason: in the relatively recent past I had a very disturbing, novel, and unwelcome educational experience. For the first time in the fifty-five years of my life I found out what it was like to feel racist, from the inside.

I think I now understand the pathology behind racism better than I did before, and have some ideas about what is required to prevent and cure it. And no, my prescription won’t be any of the idiotic nostrums normally peddled by self-described “anti-racists”; in fact what I have to say is likely to offend most of them – which I don’t mind a bit.

I’m going to obscure most of the details for reasons that I think will become clear as I write about this. I will say that the racial minority involved was one not commonly encountered in the U.S., and in particular not descendants of sub-Saharan Africans or any group much related to them. It is relevant that this minority X has facial features and skin tone quite unlike Europeans.

I was near surrounded by these people, for the first time in my life, at a sort of ethnic-pride gathering which I was attending for reasons not relevant to this essay. And found myself experiencing disgust. Not anger, not hatred, but a visceral feeling of revulsion similar to being exposed to sewage or rotten food.

Something in my hindbrain was pushing me hard in a direction perhaps best verbalized as “these people are greasy, filthy monkeys and I despise them and I loathe them”.

But. I’m an experimental mystic. I’ve been accustomed for decades to the knowledge that, often, thoughts and feelings that present themselves in my phenomenological field are generated by what Robert Anton Wilson called “the Robot” – eruptions of the instinct machine that underlies my consciousness. Sometimes I can notice these eruptions happening and not get caught up in them.

That happened this time. I was able to notice that, when paying attention with the top of my brain, I could not notice any rational reason for me to even dislike these people, let alone feel disgusted and revolted by them. I began to analyze my revulsion as though it were a specimen on a laboratory slide – because when you’re an experimental mystic and your exercises include killing the Buddha, that’s what you do in this kind of situation.

So let’s start eliminating hypotheses…

No member of minority X has ever individually done me any harm. Nor are they any sort of social problem in the U.S. – they’re not conspicuously prone to crime or welfare dependency, and they’ve never developed the habit of whining for privileged treatment.

Minority X does have some tendency to hang out in lower socioeconomic strata, and if forced to it I’d guess they’re at a bit of a mean-IQ disadvantage relative to the American average. But there are lots of other minority groups, of which those things could be said far more strongly, that I’ve never felt viscerally revolted by.

Now I’m going to explain my feelings about black people; bear with me, this is analytically relevant. The most important point is that black people in particular have never made me feel repelled in the way minority X does. I’ve had black girlfriends and might not implausibly have ended up married to one of them, whereas I cannot easily imagine circumstances under which I would be sexually attracted to a minority X woman; my “ick” reaction would be too strong.

Scrupulous honesty requires me to report here that there is a small subset of blacks to which I do have a twitchy hindbrain reaction something like “Animal; unsafe; avoid.” But I’ve noticed that blacks outside this subset have that reaction too. so I’m probably not reacting to “race” in this respect. It may be related that I perceive a lot more variety among blacks than I do among minority X.

Now the uncomfortable part: by any objective measure, blacks as a group are a problem of a kind minority X is not. Lower mean IQ, more crime and violence, more welfare dependency, lots of whining for privileges, etcetera etcetera. And I have had the experience of feeling like I was in physical danger when isolated with a group of black people (just once, on a night train in New Jersey, but that once was more than enough).

So, if feelings of racial revulsion are in general driven by some sort of tribal or individual threat perception (I asked myself), why didn’t I have a similar response a lot sooner with respect to blacks? Can’t have been familiarity from childhood exposure; I grew up in places, mostly outside the U.S., were there weren’t any black people. Didn’t meet one until my mid-teens.

OK, so it looks like we can discard sociological theories and rational threat responses. What else could be going on here?

To find that out, I started paying closer attention to my sensory experiences and gut reactions as I dealt with this group. Which individuals bothered me less, which more. And in what specific ways.

It only took a few minutes of this for me to identify specific sensory stimuli that were triggering my feelings of revulsion. I’m not going to describe the specific stimuli in detail because I really don’t want anybody to be able to figure out which minority is X. But I can identify three specific triggers.

One was: their skin color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion; my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies.

My forebrain, meanwhile, was all like “What is up with you, hindbrain?” Apparently my human-recognition template needed some updating.

The pressure on me eased a bit when I realized that what I was experiencing was a really severe case of Uncanny Valley reaction, and that more exposure to minority X might well stretch my template to the point where they didn’t seem so creepily repulsive any more.

One of the many, many things I learned from Robert Heinlein is encapsulated in this quite from Assignment In Eternity: “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” Most people, most of the time, construct theory to justify their gut feelings rather than actually reasoning from facts. If you do reliably reason from facts – and can continue reasoning even when you are angry, tired, upset, or feel threatened, then you are the homo novus of that story, and it is up to you to save the world for your less able human kin.

That story influenced my thinking a lot as a child and young man. And I am proud to say that this time, at least, I was homo novus. I didn’t let my Robot run me. I kept analyzing until I was able to isolate and identify the glitch in my wetware, and I coped. Thank you, RAH.

But…what if I hadn’t been so self-aware?

If I hadn’t been training myself in applied rationality and experimental mysticism so hard for so long, I might very well have rationalized. That is, unthinkingly accepted that revulsion experience against minority X as part of me and then begun to construct justifications around it. Like, reaching to invent reasons to hate minority X.

I now think this is how racism colonizes peoples’ brains (or one major way it happens, anyhow; I can’t rule out the possibility of other vectors). People fall into the Uncanny Valley reaction, don’t realize they have a wetware glitch, and then accrete layers of rationalization and hatred around that reaction. It’s much like the way primary mystical experiences make people vulnerable to capture by insane religions.

Now we get to the part where I piss off the “anti-racist” crowd.

We actually have an implicit cultural prescription for dealing with circumstances like this. It begins with feeling guilty. What you’re supposed to do, especially if you’re white, is transvaluate that revulsion into a sense of mortal sin, then expiate it with huge amounts of compensatory behavior like canonizing Trayvon Martin and hating anybody who even questions affirmative action, minority set-asides, or any other feature of our government-mandated racial spoils system.

But this is exactly backwards. The last thing you ought to do with feelings of irrational revulsion, whether directed at racial groups or anything else, is emotionally entangle yourself with them and assign extra importance to the memories that involve them. Doing that just invites additional self-damage to no good purpose. It’s what a Buddhist would call akusala, usually translated as “unskillful” or “unwholesome”.

Better to solve the problem by understanding what is really going on. Your brain is a pile of kluges messily wired together by evolutionary selection. As hard as you try to be rational, it’s going to glitch on you sometimes. When it does that, the right thing to do is notice that you are not the Robot and the glitch is not you.

I’m not saying guilt is entirely useless. It can be a valuable form of self-regulation when you make a conscious decision that causes unnecessary harm. But that’s not what we’re talking about here; you don’t decide to experience weird apparently-sourceless revulsions against some minority X, it’s just a thing that happens when the dice come up snake-eyes. You’re responsible – and guilty – only if you let the Robot run you.

For preventing visceral racism, and all the nasty things that flow from it, what we need to do is simple: be sane and be self-aware. I mentioned “akusala” for a reason; this is the kind of problem where guilt doesn’t help, but some grasp on the Buddhist psychology of non-attachment does.

Objective evidence against racism

A theme I have touched on several times in my blogging is that the best way to defeat racism and other forms of invidious discrimination is to develop and apply objective psychometric tests.

Usually I make this argument with respect to IQ. But: one of my commenters, an obnoxious racist who I refrain from banning only on free-speech principle, recently argued that drug use should be (as, in fact, it now often illegally is) treated differently by police depending on the subject’s race.

His argument (if you want to call it that) is that blacks, due to a low baseline level of self-regulation, are significantly more prone to criminality and violence than whites when intoxication further impairs that ability. Thus, the law should treat these cases differently as a matter of public safety.

As presented, this prescription is racist, repugnant, and wrong. Because even if you believe that blacks as a group have less ability on average to self-regulate, this belief tells you nothing about any individual black person. Acting on it would infringe the foundational right of individuals to be treated equally by the law.

But now let’s perform a thought experiment. Actually, a couple of related ones.

Let us suppose that scientists were able to develop a behavioral test that reliably and repeatably measures an individual’s ability to self-regulate as a number, which we’ll call RQ. In fact there have been attempts at this.

For purposes of this thought experiment, suppose that (a) we have such a test that is highly repeatable, (b) the distribution is like most psychometric scores Gaussian, and (c) there is a range of low scores on the left tail of the Gaussian that is known to correlate strongly with criminal and violent behavior.

If you don’t know much about psychometry, you might think these premises are implausible. Follow the logic anyway, because I’m really chasing a point about how we should perform ethical reasoning. Besides, they’re actually quite plausible – there are known psychometrics with these properties.

Our test divides the population into low-RQ and high-RQ contingents naturally, because if you plot both Gaussians the place where they intersect defines equal likelihood that a person with that RQ score is or is not part of the criminal population.

Now suppose that we consider drug-fueled crime a sufficiently present danger that all citizens are required to have their RQ measured and registered with the police. (I’m not advocating this, but it’s necessary for the thought experiment. If you like, assume instead that it appears on driver’s licenses along with height and weight.)

What would the ethics be of a law treating as a crime or disorderly conduct public intoxication of any person who cannot exhbit an RQ score above a specified minimum?

(Note that we can, in principle, deal with measurement uncertainty by contracting the low-RQ range. That is, if we believe with 95% confidence that an individual’s score on RQ tests won’t vary by more than N points over a series of tries, we simply reduce the defining bound of the low-RQ cohort by N below wherever the RQ distributions for our defined criminal and noncriminal populations intersect.)

Would this violate the principle of equal treatment under law? No, not any more than (for example) forbidding people with epilepsy from driving cars. In both cases, any reasonable person (including the offender himself) would know that the combination of his condition and behavior made him a danger to those around him. Legal discrimination against epileptics is therefore justified.

The epileptic-in-the-driver’s-seat case enables us to dispose of another objection. Should our attitude about the laws disqualifying epileptics from driving change if we learn that epilepsy is not evenly distributed across racial groups, however we define race?

Actually this isn’t a hypothetical; racial minorities in the U.S. do in fact have higher incidence of epilepsy than whites. But no civil-rights lawsuits on a disparate-impact theory have been filed, because that would be too insane for even the most extreme demagogues in our racial-grievance industry. The intent and effect of keeping epileptics off the roads is to avoid preventable injury and death due to a medical condition that can be unambiguously diagnosed.

By the same reasoning, temporarily jailing low-RQ people for disorderly conduct while only monitoring high-RQ people for actual crime would not be racially discriminatory even if different races turn out to have different mean RQs.

The key point in the conditions of our thought experiment is that an RQ is not assigned to a person on the basis or race or other ascriptive grouping; it is an individual measure of an individual used to make rationally justified inferences about that individual’s behavioral risks.

Having got this far, we now reach the part of the hypothetical that is likely to truly upset the tender-minded. Suppose RQ turns out to be highly heritable? Does that change the soundness of the law at all, or make it racially discriminatory?

Well, suppose epilepsy turned out to be highly heritable? Would that render our prohibition on epileptics driving instantly unsound and racist? Clearly not; it does not matter to the intent or effect of the law why they occasionally zone out or have convulsions, just that you do not want that happening behind the wheel of a car on a public road.

By the same reasoning, legal discrimination against low-RQ persons based on RQ would not become invidious if we knew RQ were heritable.

Now we come to the worst case: RQ is highly heritable, and the means differences among racial groups are large. Summing up the argument, I have shown that legal discrimination on the basis of RQ should even so not be considered racist or wrong.

Now we come back to where I began this post and consider again the difference between racist and non-racist thinking. The least prejudiced and nasty version of my commenter’s argument would read like this:

“People with poor ability to self-regulate should be arrested and jailed when they get drunk, because they’re dangerous to themselves and others. Black people have low mean ability at self-regulation. Therefore, blacks should be presumptively arrested and jailed when drunk in public.”

The point I’ve been working up to this whole essay is this. Many people think the racist part of this argument is the assertion “Black people have low mean ability at self-regulation.” In fact, I expect many of my readers type that as racism so strongly that they would consider any attempt to measure RQ automatically suspect.

But this is silly. That claim is no more racist than the following: “Black people have a higher incidence of epilepsy than white people.”

These claims may be true or false: we know the latter is true, we don’t know if the former is. But neither claim is ‘racist’; or, to put it another way if either claim is racist then both are and we have emptied the predicate “racist” of any meaning a serious person should care about.

No. The racism in the argument happens after the “therefore”, at the place where it leaps from a claim about the statistical distribution of RQ to a pre-judgment about all blacks and about whatever individual blacks we might encounter.

I have said it before, and I expect I’ll have to say it again. The individual is not the mass. The point is not the distribution. Racism is not merely hatred, it is a fundamental failure of reasoning. It is not just vicious, it is stupid.

After such knowledge…

I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this: Essay by a teacher in a black high school.

My first reaction was that I wanted to believe it was a bigot’s fabrication. I’d still like to believe that, but it was reposted by a black man who claims it is representative of “dirty laundry”: bad stuff [known among blacks] about black folk never to be said around whites.

My second reaction, afterwards, was: for those of us who insist that people ought to be judged by the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins, what emotionally compelling argument do we have against anti-black racism that reading this doesn’t blow to smithereens?

This is a question with more point now than it would have had thirty or fifty years ago, because of one thing this account makes harrowingly clear. White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves, using a debased form of the rhetoric of white “anti-racists” and multiculturalists as rationalization.

Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound; I’ve written about them pretty extensively on this blog. The mass is not the individual, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing about the ugly, barbaric rampaging of these high-schoolers predicts the behavior of the blacks of the same age or older I know from martial-arts schools, SF conventions, and other places where the lives of black individuals intersect with mine.

But if this is really where they came from – if this is what they’re right-end-of-the-bell-curve exceptions to, and that reality becomes widely known or believed – rational argument won’t be enough. How can we keep the bigots from winning?

UPDATE: I’ve replaced the link I got from the blog “Maggie’s Farm” with a link to what seems to be the original. The Maggie’s-Farm link is now behind the word “reposted”.

Keyboards are not a detail!

I’ve been thinking a lot about keyboards lately. Last Sunday I founded the Tactile Keyboards community on Google+ and watched it explode in popularity almost immediately. Spent most of the next couple of days boning up on keyboard lore so I could write a proper FAQ for the group.

On my journey of discovery I learned of geekhack.org, a site for people whose obsession with keyboard customization and modding makes my keen interest in these devices seem like the palest indifference by comparison. Created an account and announced myself in the manner they deem proper for new members. Got a reply saying, more or less, that it’s nice “ESR” attends to details like keyboards.

What? What? What? Your keyboard is not a detail, dammit!

For anybody who does programming or writing on a computer, your keyboard is your most important tangible tool. It’s the one part of your machine that you touch constantly, the most physical interface you have with the computer. Tiny details about it can have a measurable impact on your productivity. A bad one won’t just slow you down, it will hurt you – causing or aggravating RSI (repetitive strain injuries) in the hands and arms.

Given the amount of passion and pickiness hackers pour into their choices of software tools, it’s downright weird that more of us don’t pay better attention to choosing a decent keyboard. Yeah, we all grumble that the Caps-Lock is an anachronistic waste of space but for many of us that’s as far as it goes. We freaking damage ourselves using the shoddy, cheap-shit keyboards attached to most machines nowadays, too often get painful RSI as we age, and never make the connection.

OK, so here’s a pop quiz for you: what is the one, single, only kind of computing equipment that is still sought after for production use thirty years after it was made – sometimes commanding higher prices today even in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did when it was new?

If you guessed “keyboards”, you got it right. Everything else about computing has improved by dizzying orders of magnitude since the 1980s, but modern keyboards suck. Enough people already get this to create a vigorous auction and resale market in vintage keyboards. I’m here to insist that if programmers in general woke up about keyboard ergonomics that market would be much, much larger – and the few companies still making keyboards that aren’t shit wouldn’t be struggling to sell enough volume to support new-product engineering.

How we ended up in this mess is a tragedy. But before I get into that, here’s the main thing that makes a good keyboard: tactile feedback at the engagement point of the keyswitch, so you don’t have to bottom out the key and have the reaction force reflected up into your fingers and hands. Millions of those reflections over the years inflict a lot of unnecessary fatigue and are one of the ways programmers get RSI.

There are other ways that matter, too. The arms-parallel position you have to assume to touch-type on a rectangular keyboard is bad for you. So is holding your wrists so your palms are exactly horizontal. More people get this than understand about tactile keyswitches, which is why the Microsoft Natural has a larger and more visible market presence than vintage keyboards.

But. The keyswitches in the Natural are crap. They’re the commonest kind, the dome switch – actually worse than if it had no tactile feedback at all; it clicks before the engagement point, which trains you to bottom out your keys even on devices that have a bump correctly at the engagement point. I’d snort something about typical Microsoft perversity here if not for the fact that almost all modern keyboards are just this bad.

Some people get so thoroughly conditioned by years of typing on crappy keyswitches that they can’t break the habit of bottoming out when they encounter decent ones. A&D regular Jay Maynard (sometimes known as Tron Guy) is like this; he gets why tactile-feedback switches theoretically ought to improve his experience, but can’t stand them in practice. Tactile feedback doesn’t work for everybody.

But the vintage keyboards that savvy users still chase are the ones that have the tactile feedback – the bump as you engage a key – in the right place. Most revered of these is the Model M, shipped with IBM PCs beginning in 1984. It had a unique kind of keyswitch called a “buckling spring switch” that serious tactile-keyboard fans consider the best ever. The Model M is a true classic; like Algol-60 and the 1911-pattern 45ACP, it was an improvement over most of its successors.

(For completeness and to demonstrate that I’m not being cultishly attached to a single brand, I will now mention the Northgate OmniKey, a superb mechanical-switch keyboard made by an otherwise undistinguished PC manufacturer. Nearly as good as the Model M by all accounts, and having used one I don’t laugh at people who think it was better. After Northgate folded in 2005, the keyboards were for a few years sold under the “Avant” trademark. OmniKeys and Avants would command even higher resale prices than Model Ms now, because fewer were made – but good luck finding any at all, their owners are not letting go of them ever.)

Model Ms, on the other hand, are still manufactured today, by an outfit called Unicomp that bought out the factory from Lexmark after Lexmark had bought it from IBM and uses the original tooling and designs. I’m typing on a Unicomp right now. Despite some drawbacks (which I’ll get to) it’s still odds-on the best keyboard design ever shipped.

But Unicomp is struggling and in constant trouble. Doesn’t take much examination of their website and product line to see the outlines; they’re cash-strapped, unable to do a lot of new-product engineering or marketing because the volume of demand for their product is too low. The few changes they have made to the Model M – like bolting on USB support – have been kluged in on the cheap, which created problems that damage the brand. The UB404LA has interoperability problems with some USB chipsets; ours has dropped connection with the hub on my machine once and flakes out every few minutes when connected to my wife’s machine (which is why she’s using the nipple-mouse-equipped UB40PGA that’s actually mine). The buttons for the integrated trackball have never worked reliably.

Thus we return to the tragedy. Unicomp knows how to make the best computer keyboards ever shipped. Why is it struggling and letting its quality slip?

In brief, because mechanical-switch keyboards are significantly more expensive to produce than all the crappy rubber-dome-switch keyboards we’re surrounded by. Relentless cost pressure by volume buyers pushed PC manufacturers and integrators to ship the cheapest possible components; there came a day when the once-ubiquitous mechanical-switch keyboard was quietly shunted aside and became a specialty item individual users had to seek out.

That would have been sometime in the early 1990s, but I don’t remember exactly when. Because on first exposure dome-switch keyboards didn’t necessarily seem obviously bad – I might have noticed that newer keyboards seemed unpleasantly mushy but then shrugged and adapted. It usually takes change in the other direction – trying a truly tactile keyboard after years of dome-switch nastiness – to notice how good it feels.

Another problem with Model Ms is that they’re well-nigh indestructible. You’re basically only ever going to sell one to a customer, barring house fires or coffee spills. There’s little repeat business. (Other mechanical-switch keyboards don’t have this problem quite as severely; the build quality and ruggedness even on latter-day Unicomps is exceptional.) Everybody else in the PC value chain makes more money by selling you a dirt-cheap keyboard that needs to be replaced every few years.

Thus, Unicomp is stuck. Ironically, there’s now a thriving new market for tactile keyboards that Unicomp could own if it had a decent product-development budget: on-line gamers.

Yes, gamers. Some of them have noticed that they can type faster and with less fatigue on mechanical switches – perhaps shaving a few vital milliseconds off reaction time. Enough of them, in fact, to sustain a handful of boutique companies selling keyboards with mechanical switches marginally inferior to the Model M’s – but with snazzy slick black cases and LED backlights and names like “Devastator”.

And Unicomp? No backlights, nonexistent or profoundly inept marketing, a website that looks like amateur night, and case designs that look like they’re phoning it in from 1985. It’s deeply sad.

I wish I could buy the company, fire everybody but the production crew, and hire on people who actually get product marketing and how to facelift the case designs and field a website that doesn’t make me embarrassed for them every time I look at it. Unicomp’s buckling-spring keyswitches are still the best in the world (even the more clueful gamers sort of know that), and they have the kind of decades-deep goodwill and fan loyalty that most companies would kill for.

Lacking the bimpty-bump million dollars it would take to buy and fix Unicomp, all I can do is urge everybody reading this to wake the fsck up. Keyboards are not a detail! If you’re using a dome-switch keyboard you are probably in the majority who, unlike Tron Guy, would find their quality of life and work significantly improved by a tactile keyboard. You might save yourself from Richard Stallman’s fate as your tendons age; his RSI is so bad he has to hire people to type for him. The price of a Unicomp could be the best $79 you ever spent.

If you already use a Model M, show it to a friend. Hell, give one to a friend! Well, give a Unicomp, anyway – I can well understand holding on to your armor-plated old faithful if you have an original. You’ll be doing a good thing for your friend and for a product which, despite Unicomp’s minor latter-day faults, is far too good to be left to die.

If they get enough of a sales bump, maybe they’ll be able to afford to fix a few things. In the meantime, stay away from the trackball variant (which, now that I look, is marked out of stock anyway). The vanilla Classic and the nipple-mouse variant seem to be OK.

If they really get enough of a sales bump, maybe they’ll get brave enough to make the holy grail of serious keyboard connoisseurs everywhere – a buckling-spring keyboard with a new-school, well-thought-out ergonomic layout like the Truly Ergonomic or ErgoMagic. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

More tales from the tip jar

People do occasionally put money in my blog’s tip jar. To encourage this behavior, I like to explain what I’m spending it on – always, so far, test equipment or hacking tools.

A few minutes ago I spent $16.50 of those donations on one of the special thin-walled 5.5mm nut drivers you need to loosen the recessed bolts on a Unicomp Model M keyboard.

We have have two of these in our house; they’re my wife’s and my regular desktop keyboards. (If you don’t understand why, read my Tactile Keyboard FAQ).

One of them, my wife’s, is somewhat flaky. When it works it works perfectly, but it drops its connection to her host USB hub quite frequently and has to be unplugged/replugged to reinitialize the device.

There are several possible causes of this; investigating any of them is going to require that I verify some facts about the keyboard hardware that I can really only check with the case removed.

In particular, it is rumored that some variants of the Unicomp are prone to cabling problems brought on by insufficient strain relief where the USB cable is attached to the motherboard.

I intend to check for this design flaw on both keyboards, add a report on its presence or absence to the Tactile Keyboard FAQ, and broadcast that over at Tactile Keyboards so it can become part of the troubleshooting lore generally available to people interested in these devices.

This is a representative example of what you enable when you donate to my tip jar. The more you give, the more I can spend on small public benefits like this without concern about my survival budget.