I’ve told you a googol times or more: Don’t exaggerate! And, less often, I’ve ever-so-gently urged you not to understate. 1 Why is my advice ignored? Why can’t you get IT... just right, balanced beyond dispute? Lez Joosts Mildews, as my mam was fond of sayin, 2 boxing both my ears with equal devotion. Follow the Middle Way as Tao did in his Middle Kingdom. Or “straight down the middle,” as golfer Bing Crosby used to croon. His other golf song was “The Wearing of the Green,” but such digressions run counter to my straight, plow-on-ahead advice. I’ve just smoked a cigarette branded Cleopatra, but that’s none of your beeswax neither, and strictly between me and my Egyptian placements sponsor.
So, shun deviations and avoid life’s bunkers lurking left and right. Our current presidential candidates excel in this craftiness, being both pro-Nafta and anti-Nafta as the local polls dictate. Yet, by one of those many quirks of natural language, politicians seeking “compromises” often find their reputations “compromised.”
In pondering the attributes that make for good, well-shod scientists, and in particular, good systems designers and developers, an intuitive sense of balance looms large. We work from incomplete specifications and ill-defined, oft-conflicting aims. Do you want IT now or do you want IT functional? There are few finer discussions of these challenges than Jim Waldo’s 2004 essay, “On System Design” (available via http://portal.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=1167533).
Waldo pondered anew why things were getting worse. After reviewing the “design” process, and reminding us of the term’s ambiguity (systems may exhibit design without having been designed), he traces the environmental causes for this decline, such as intellectual property constraints and poor training. There’s always some element of “ us-them” scapegoating when things go wrong: echoes of Hardy wrongly blaming Laurel, which always niggles me because “Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Stan” easily triggers my guilty self-defensive reactions. (Why are there so few Stans around, whether Stanleys or Stan-islauses?)
Waldo, unlike the whinging Hardy, suggests real reme-dies of the agile and open persuasions to reduce the mess,
YOUR BEST
but without excluding
the occasions when heavy
and closed subterfuge is
needed. Interestingly, he
stresses the need for cour-
age at the grass-roots, nonmanagerial level—for example,
in the ways masters should teach their crafts and delegate
to apprentices. At the same time, Waldo urges solutions
that don’t require impractical major revolutions in the
managerial infrastructure. You need to work around
existing organizational hazards. Thus, we return to my
opening theme of balancing between opposites. This is
not the same as cowardly (and possibly painfully) sitting
on fences. We envisage more a hidden door or two in the
fence accessible to the qualified gnostic who is free to
roam unhindered, admiring the views in many fields.
HYPOTHESIS
We face the apparent paradox that it’s possible and useful to honestly hold mutually contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The Greek dilemma for two such opposing beliefs can be extended to trilemma for three, and on to n-lemma, but we strongly recommend small positive integral values for n. We can exclude Quineans whose heads are buzzing with propositions and quoted “ propositions” that mean their opposites: that way madness lies, and a possible collapse of meaningful meanings. What I have in mind (to coin a phrase!) is hinted at by the idiom “playing both sides down the middle.” There are plausible beliefs, which we can poshly call hypotheses, of the type Karl Popper called “falsifiable.” Indeed, he used falsifiability to distinguish scientific hypotheses from those that may well be meaningful but somehow fall outside the nit-probing methods of science. Trying to ignore the sniff of circularity (which is all around us on such occasions), we seek ways of distinguishing between beliefs that require endless individual observational verifications to sustain them and beliefs that, at least conceptually, could admit to a sudden single deflating counter-example (see this column, “Some Swans are Black,” July/August 2007).
Precision in wording one’s beliefs is paramount, of course, when moving between formal and informal statements. Did Dijkstra consider all GOTOs harmful3 or,
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