Skeptology

The Ex-Ex, running your career in reverse

I have to admit that if I was someone else applying  my own skeptical standards to these posts I'd have to ask 'interesting analysis, but what's this based on and why don't I find these views expressed elsewhere?"  Well I don't fully know the answer to the second question, but it might lie partly in the answer to the first one.  And that is that the second half of my 20 year career in IT has effectively been 'in reverse' - from IT management back to desktop support. 

Many IT managers 'started at the bottom'  (myself included), but by the time they have an 'Executive' perspective their front line experience is just a 'distant recollection'.  For me, however, front line experience is an immediate experience.  It might be said that my management experience is the fading memory, but frankly cunning once aquired stays with you, and some of the other aspects (such as being an utter bastard at times) are best let 'slip away'.\

So am I driven to report my insights in order to fight for the status of (and better working conditions for) the frontline IS staff, or for the poorly served IT consumers?  Not really.  Partly its amends for being that bastard-IT manager for too many years, and partly its recognition of the value that the advice of others has been to me over the years - and a small repayment of that debt.  But the real value of it is in this:  if you doubt what I say, or argue against what I say, we might be able to progress the debate on the real issue in IT, and that is how to get it to 'serve' us, rather than have us serve it.

Incidentally,  with the tendency to people staying in the workforce longer, but at the same time wishing to spend more time 'living a life outside work'  we might find more managers ready (after several years at the top) to 'down-shift' and take up less demanding (well that's a point of view !) positions on the front line.  It will be an interesting challenge for organisations to encourage that (because otherwise career paths become blocked for anyone under the age of 70) - both in the sense of offering sufficiently attractive 'down-shifted' careers, and in still leveraging the 'value' of older employees corporate knowledge and wisdom.  The subtle power plays and manouvering  (and the gross prejudices) that arise need to be managed by the employee, and the organisation, but it can be done (who better equiped to find a way than an ex-Executive (it has a ring to it...))  All this is worth a much bigger post - and I'll get around to writing it.

Mini Concept - the 'faith' aspect of scientific belief

The preamble makes the claim that 'faith' underlies much of what we regard as scientific fact.  I'll suggest how that is the case, but in doing so point out the difference between a 'faith approach' and a scientific approach'.  And somewhere come to the point of how 'skepticism' is not something sitting on the sidelines chucking bricks at mainstream progress, but in fact something that is central to that progress.

A very normal  fellow who'd attended theological college, and eventually moved to Nepal (with his family) to work on education programs there, had an argument one day with me about the nature of 'truth' and 'faith'.  I can't remember how it started, but I remember being surprised that he won that argument, and that I'd learned something from an unexpected quarter about something that seemed fairly obscure at the time.

The argument goes like this.  A person with faith simply 'believes'.  They have made a decision 'to believe' of their own free will.  On the other hand, a person who takes 'scientific approach to getting at the truth' goes out and 'checks the facts'.  They might check the references, they might go further and 'observe' the evidence, they might go further and devise experiments to check the evidence in new ways.  But at a certain point they decide to 'stop' checking, and reach a conclusion on the basis of all that checking and evidence.

Now the question is, at what point does the person know (for certain) that they can stop checking?  No matter how you twist it, the point at which they stop checking is arbitrary.   The decision to stop is based on a belief, what they might call a 'reasonable' belief, that there's no further evidence out there which will fundamentally change their view about the 'factuality' of that fact.  And so, underlying every 'accepted scientific fact' is an act of belief' which is of course nothing more than an act of faith.  And have 'accepted scientific facts' ever subsequently been proven wrong?   Of course, try this example (which was good enough to win the Nobel Prize): http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/2005/press.html

The difference between science and faith approaches is, however, that the scientific approach should (but admittedly often doesn't) encourage every person who encounters a 'scientific fact' to question it, to see if the checking and questioning that had gone before had been rigorous enough.  When science is presented without this proviso it differs very little from 'blind faith'.  Skepticism, a philosophy which suggests we should constantly re-check the basis of our beliefs, and look behind 'accepted facts and wisdom' is then, essentially, a 'scientific approach' that benefits science, as much as it does technology, or organisation management or public administration.

So what does this say about the faith approach?  Nothing.  This story is about the faith aspect of the scientific approach, because this Blog is about skepticism and technology.   But am I saying the faith approach is truer because it underlies everything , or the scientific approach because it has the capacity to move our understanding of everything forward?  Well I'd only observe that to proclaim one over the other would be a bit like saying that one of my (two healthy) legs is more useful for walking than the other.  The question of where we are heading, and whether we should 'simply sit' rather than 'simply walk (to borrow a Zen concept) is a question (or in Zen not a question but simply a noise) that I'll leave others to ponder.

Skeptology

To be sceptical about the capacity of computer technology to meet the needs of individuals and communities, and to be sceptical about the capability of individuals and communities to take up the benefits (and responsibilities) of technology kinda takes the shine off one's view of this (technology) world.

Every bright young man or woman who ever sat down in front of a computer for the first time and imagined that they could change the world, and then goes on to administer some ramshackle network in the service of some rudderless organisation gets here sooner or later.  Some live down in the 'bitter and hateful' corner, quite a few other's spend most of their time here gazing out the window, and others just walk out the door (ah, there is always a door you see..).  Others of course just pop their heads in from time to time, on a bad day when threads strip and code just don't want to crunch the way we want it to.

Years ago I arrived here, spent my time in the bitter corner, and then found the door and walked out into a considerably happier wider greener life.  But maybe I missed the crowds, the stories, and maybe I had (have) some fool-notion of coming back to 'have another shot at it' - that 'improving the world through technology' thing.  So I sit on the bench here, tell some stories, listen to others, and watch, and wait, to see if some of those ripples we set up here might find their way out into the technology world that nurtured us, and - if we can forgive it enough to recognize it - made us what we are.  And maybe I'm trying to recapture that first moment of finding something useful to do with a computer..

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