The world seems to be split into roughly three different types of people: Those who have a passion for nothing, those who have a passion for one thing and those who have a passion for everything. This way of categorizing is not to cast a value judgement onto any particular group. My informal observation is that aspects such as intelligence, courage, moral fibre and wisdom seem roughly evenly distributed across all three of these groups although it may initially not seem that way. It’s always difficult trying to describe a group with an insider’s perspective if you’re not an insider but I’m going to give it a try:

People with a passion with nothing are the ones who are content to lead an ordinary life. They are the ones who can grow up, go to school, get married, get a good job, buy a house in the suburbs, raise children and grandchildren and die utterly content with their lives.

People with a passion for one thing are those who have found some calling in life and live and breathe that calling. These people may have multiple “one things” for which they are passionate about but they are interested primarily in the thing itself. These are the people who have dreams about thier passion, who spend idle moments of their day thinking about it and who possess a sense of manifest destiny and purpose once they discover their calling.

People with a passion for everything are not interested in things themselves, they’re interested in interest. To them, the actual objects of study are actually incidental, what’s fascinating to them is the more abstract layers in which everything is interconnected. This is not to say that these people are equally interested in everything or even that there are large areas of human experience are completely alien and boring to them(sport gets cited as a common example). But these people are voracious and indiscriminate readers. They’ll be able to converse knowledgably about a huge range of topics and often know surprisingly huge amounts of trivia. If you’ve ever met someone who is a massive fan of TED talks, this is someone who is fascinated by everything. At the same time, for these people, their lives are constantly wracked by a guilt and longing that there is simply never enough time in the world to truly accomplish what they hope to accomplish or master what there needs to be mastered.

It’s no surprise to people who are reading my blog that I place myself firmly into the 3rd category. As a result, it’s been interesting but difficult for me to really peer into the minds of the other two groups of people. But what I’ve noticed in the process of doing so is how radical communication differences arise between members of different groups. If you’re not aware of these very different styles of thought, then you implicitly assume that other people think roughly like you with slightly tweaked parameters.

When a person who is passionate about one thing meets a person who is passionate about nothing, they feel extreme sadness that this person has not yet found their calling. To them, their life is so infused with purpose from their calling that they assume everyone else without a calling feels the same hollow emptiness inside them that they do. They are horrified with the prospect of living an utterly normal, undistinguished life.

When a person who is passionate about one thing meets a person who is passionate about everything, they just assume that this person is passionate about many “one things”. They understand how you could be passionate about two things or five things so they naturally assume the person they’re meeting must be on the far right end of the bell curve and interested in like… a dozen things or maybe twenty things. Widespread passion is mistaken for intelligence because they assume people who are passionate about everything manage their passions in the same way that people who are passionate about one thing do. What they fail to realise is that the passion is not thing-centric.

When a person who is passionate about nothing meets a person who is passionate about one thing or everything, there is a sense of otherworldliness to it, that those people possess some kind of mutant gene which compels them to action. To these people, passion is an utterly mysterious process which they can only reverse engineer from the outside. To them, it’s like thinking of love as really, really, really liking someone.

When a person who is passionate about everything meets a person who is passionate about one thing, they just assume that this is a person who has settled. Every person who is passionate about everything ultimately faces the dilemma about how to focus their attentions. In order to be successful, they need to settle on something to be “their thing”; They need to become a software engineer or a journalist or a academic. Settling one one thing can, on the surface, looking like being passionate about one thing.

But what people who are passionate about everything fail to grasp is that others could be passionate about something without being passionate about your things. It’s a grave affront to people passionate about everything that you cannot convince someone else that something is worth being passionate about. You can’t convert someone into being passionate about your things but you can at least give them a sense of why your thing is worth being passionate about. It’s an utterly alien mindset that someone could be passionate about A, B & C *only* and care not one whit about the things you’re passionate about.

When a person who is passionate about everything meets a person who is passionate about nothing, the lack of curiosity is mistaken for unintelligence or a lack of opportunity. If only they were smarter or if only they had been exposed to a brilliant teacher in school like I had, they would be infused with the same sense of wonder with the world that I have. I think this is one of the more insidious miscommunications that exists because it imposes a subtle form of prejudice and judgement.

 So much of the rancourous debates and misunderstandings I see in the world can be boiled down to a conflict between these basic personality types. Debates about education, about hope, about destiny and about ideals ultimately don’t boil down to the issues at all, they boil down to these three very radically different ways of thinking about the world. Each one is legitimate and each one is valuable and can act as a complement to each other.

The realisation that others have a system of values so shocking different that it seemed almost alien at first was one that enabled me to really connent with many people in a way which I had not previously been able to.

I’ve almost deliberately avoided pushing politics on both my blog and my everyday life. It’s pretty clear from those who know me who I supported for the presidential election and I’m happy to talk about the political race as a sort of abstract, intellectual game. Part of the reason was because of the overwhelmingly uniformity of the social group that I hang out with. Virtually everyone I knew was not only voting for Obama but considered it unthinkable to vote for McCain and I always feel slightly uneasy giving people more reasons to believe what they’re already convinced they believe. But now the elections are over, I feel more comfortable talking about why it is that I supported Barack Obama even though I was unable to cast a ballot for him.

There are two stories about Barack Obama that convinced me that not only was he the right candidate, he was one of those once in a generational figures which people are lucky to have the opportunity to vote for. The first was about how Obama left Harvard Law School with the world as his oyster and, instead of choosing a position of money, power or influence, he chose instead to work as a community organizer in Chicago. Cynicism is a lens that so pervades politics in America that a significant amount of people even had a hard time being able to interpret this for what it was. “What’s his hustle?”, “What’s he trying to do?”. The truth is there simply was no hustle, there could not have been a hustle. Barack Obama was then and is now an idealist, not a cynic. When he speaks, he means the words. When he is running for president, he is not doing it for the position of president but because he believes that he can do genuine good in the world.

That being said, unlike many, I do not believe that this is an especially rare trait and I believe it’s equally obvious looking at John McCain’s record that he is also an idealist and, indeed, I believe that much of the political machine is made up of idealists.

The commonly accepted wisdom within American politics is that the political establishment has failed because it’s made up of people who want only the best for themselves, not their country. This is certainly an attractive view to take and one that seems to explain the set of facts but I don’t think it holds water. Instead, it seems obvious to me that idealism is not enough. To merely want to do good is not a sufficient pre-condition to doing good and the path to genuine positive change is narrow and paved with good intentions.

Which is why the second, much less known story is one which played and equal role in convincing me. Very early in the primary campaign, Obama gave an interview at Google in which he was asked by the CEO Eric Schmidt how he would sort a million 32 bit integers. Obama, unsurprisingly, doesn’t know the correct answer but he does managed to give a reply which shows a remarkable amount of inside knowledge of CS culture. In other words, Barack Obama knew how the two facts and one joke. It may seem a small thing to know but in order to have been in a position to give such a reply so confidently gives us a picture of Obama’s mind and what he values.

Obama is someone who knows about two facts and a joke. He’s someone who is relentlessly intellectually curious and, what’s more, revels in seeking out experiences different from his own. Obama was a lawyer, there’s no reason why he would ever need to talk to computer scientists or deeply engage with them. And yet he did and to the level where he not only learned who they were, he learned their culture.

It’s easy for me to understand why people are virulently agains Obama. The criticisms against him: that he is vaguely uplifting and full of gloss is one that I can understand someone making. Because so much of what he says are powerful words that others have reverse engineered and pumped out as ersatz noise. In his acceptance speech tonight, he talked powerfully, not about what he had done but what still needed to be done. How humility was needed and this was merely the offer of greatness, not greatness itself. He talked of unity and the mutual desire of people regardless of party to make America great. I trust Barack Obama with those words, not because of the words themselves but because of the thinking and worldview that backs up those words.

Many people have tried to make the world a better place. Included among them some of the vilest dictators and despots in history. Merely wanting does not make it so, you have to be good at being good as well. And I believe that Obama’s intellectual fortitude and desire to not be enmeshed inside an ideology or party or world view is what will make him to be one of the greatest presidents in living memory.

When I was in my very first undergraduate programming class, they hammered into me on very important truth:

The compiler is never wrong

The compiler has no bugs in it, the libraries have no bugs. If you’re not getting the output you expect, then the bug is in your code. Nearly every week, someone would be there furiously muttering to the tutor that he just needs to LOOK at this example because the code is so OBVIOUSLY correct that it MUST be a compiler error of some kind. And every time it happened, the tutors would simply smile complacently back and remind the student that “The compiler is never wrong”. Eventually, with enough repetition, we understood this fact down deep into our bones and I think it’s made us better programmers as a result of it.

On the face of it, this is absurd. Compilers are programs just like anything else and they contain bugs like every other program. If we were talking about established, battle scarred compilers like gcc, you might be able to make a credible argument but we were working with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler which most certainly did have bugs in it.

The statement “The compiler is never wrong” has such power because it’s so patently easy to prove false. And as I grow older and think I understand more and more about the world, some of the most powerful beliefs that you can hold are the obviously wrong truths. You can never tell an obviously wrong truth to someone who is not ready to hear it because it’s so obviously wrong. You need to take a leap of faith and accept that something can be obviously wrong and still true for such things to make sense.

If this sounds supiciously like what you’ve heard religious people say, it’s because maybe this is what religion is…

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Just because we shouldn’t, doesn’t mean we won’t

It seems slightly curious to be how public debate on various technology issues fall neatly on two sides:

• This is technologically inevitable and therefore, we should embrace it as progress for mankind
• This is socially corrosive and so therefore we should fight as much as possible to combat it

These lines are relatively similar regardless of whether the debate is about music piracy, biofuels, strong encryption, ad blocking software, transhumanism or biotechnology. The obvious missing argument is: “This is technologically inevitable and also socially corrosive”.

It seems entirely reasonable to me that music piracy will be harmful to most artists, strong encryption will be used by terrorists more than “freedom fighters”, ad blocking will severely hamper the ability to monetize the internet and transhumanism will lead to humans being kept as pets of intelligent AI. Such a view is not popular because it presents no solutions, only a slow grind towards inevitability. What’s more, it’s in contrast to the standard stories about progress and the long steady march towards the future.

Bill Bishop in The Big Sort talks about how people are increasingly segregating themselves into more intelectually homogenous communities since the 70′s. What’s even more disturbing, the more educated you are, the less change you have of meeting someone who disagrees with you. The proximate causes of this are easy to explain, as our society has gotten more wealthy, “lifestyle” factors trump all else in the choice of where to live and people self-segregate into homogenous social groups.

I would consider myself as someone who actively works to meet people who disagree with me and yet even I’m no exception to the rule. On the eve of the 2008 election, I can count a total of two people within my social network who I know to be voting for McCain. Every single other person, I’m almost certain is an Obama supporter. What does this hold for the future or reasoned political discourse?

We’ve given people choice, we’ve given people liberty and diversity and the right to pursue wealth and happiness but the result is a stultifying, homogenous echo chamber. This wasn’t a bug, it’s not something that can be engineered out, it’s what people want.