I have been writing some code lately (goes with the job description) and one useful and extremely sensible piece of advice, when you do such a thing is,

Make interfaces easy to use and hard to misuse

Let’s consider an example why this advice is useful. Suppose you are doing something completely unrelated to software, such as cooking. What you expect from your favorite tool, say, a knife, is that it cuts things you want to cut (such as vegetables) and does not cut things you do not want to cut (such as your hand). Hence the knife has a handle that allows you to safely hold it and a blade which actually cuts.

In software engineering, the idea is the same. You present the user of your library an interface that allows to do what the library is good for and makes it hard to break internal assumptions. In the otherwise quite scary world of numerics and optimizers, the optimizer interface lets you describe your optimization problem and push the equivalent of a big flashy button with “SOLVE” on it. At no point you are allowed to change the internal state of the solver, play around with magic values or even change the optimization routine in any other way as the interface allows you to do.

Writing good library code is, to a non-trivial extent, designing good interfaces. Similar applies to tooling, programming languages and hardware. This is one of the reasons we have cables with either obviously asymmetrical or symmetric in design sockets, for example. This is one of the reasons USB-C and Lightning are superior connectors: they are really, really hard to connect with the socket the wrong way.

However, in the software world, tools and libraries evolve and gain more features. They start to gain flexibility, configurability and other nice shiny features until they become Turing-complete. And at this stage, it becomes very easy to misuse them. Any tool that allows custom, unbounded scripting evolves to a science on its own, stacking several of these tools on top of each others leads to new job descriptions because everything becomes so unfathomably complex.

So, maybe some features are better left unimplemented.

II

This could be your typical rant against abstraction layers (although I would not mind you joining my personal crusade against them), but there is another thought that has been nagging me. Returning to the kitchen example, let us imagine a world where all you have is a fork. Assume even you can have as many forks as you want.

Forks are a good invention. They are fine instruments, capable of many things; with enough creativity you can make a spoon out of two forks, you can even sharpen a fork so that it becomes capable of cutting, and you might even beat an egg white with a fork.

However, daily cooking besides eating pre-cooked meals would become a challenge. Cutting off a piece of cheese for your typical breakfast would be a nightmare. Dicing vegetables, eating a soup or any liquid food would be quite an exercise in applied creativity.

Naturally, kitchen operations would significantly gain in complexity. Creative solutions will have to be engineered. People would want their daily share of Geschnetzeltes, and they will receive it, at a horrendous price. Cooks and kitchen engineers would take pride in how far they are able to go to bring the desired foods to the tables of the (paying) masses. Some of them would take pride in the complexity of their solutions, in the amounts of forks used to make a good Bolognese.

“But wait”, I hear you say, “This is utter bullshit. Why should we constrain ourselves to just one instrument, this is a contrived example. Naturally people would evolve tools that are better suited for tasks like cutting, for example. You are describing a non-problem.”

Oh well.

In the software world, “make things hard to misuse” plus the usual proneness to hypes ends up in decisions to use The One And Only Tech Stack (insert your favorite here) that is Designed To Be Used By Everyone and comes with its share of opinionated assumptions of how things are meant to be done. Naturally, good design means things can, but are not meant to be done in any other way. Management and fellow engineers are no strangers to being hyped (just think of it, we were promised automated code generation over fifteen years ago and most of software jobs are still revolving around passing around JSON with the occasional seasoning of SQL) so they often tend to jump on the new technology train even if the only new thing here is just the packaging (yes, Go, I’m looking at you right here, you’re just Java 1.4 in disguise).

Suppose now, for a moment, that the requirements are extended, in such a way that the assumptions about what’s right and what’s wrong no longer hold. And then the real fun begins. Since one somehow has to solve the problem at hand, the software engineers need to explore the fun, creative ways of problem-solving including, but not limited to using a pre-processor, inventing a whole new language on top of the one that does not satisfy the needs, use code generators etc. This adds an additional layer of complexity, a source of pride for some (look how complex my problem is!) and a source of headache for the others. I don’t want to shame anyone who actually has to work down the drain and engineer knives out of forks, but in my eyes it is indefensible to normalize or glorify this practice: this is work that has to be done because there are no better tools.

Where does this leave us? I started with “Make interfaces easy to use and hard to misuse”, but now I think I have something to add to this. My version of this rule would be

Make interfaces easy to use, hard to misuse, and discourage misuse by being honest about your assumptions and offering a comprehensive interface.

Obviously there will be people who just for the sake of the argument will write Tetris in Brainfuck or Doom in Javascript. However, just because it’s possible (Turing completeness is a marvelous thing!) does not mean it should be done in a business context, where engineer time matters and is not well-spent on fighting the tech stack instead of the business problem. No tech stack is meant to be used by everyone; they are opinionated pieces of software and we should also handle them that way.

I look at the world through my portholes. The light illuminates my capsule, my command module. There is some food, picked to my taste. There are regular communication sessions with the rest of the team; sometimes my friends chime in.

It is easy to lose track of the days. Here, every day feels like the next. Sure, there are working days and days off, but other than that, weekdays are basically indistinguishable. My geostationary orbit is stable and safe; every time I look down I see the same spot. It is nice to occasionally look down, up here it is easy to forget there is actually something beyond my ship.

When I was a child, I wanted to become an astronaut. Now I fly, on a solo mission, locked in a thirty-something square metres capsule, the world behind my fourteen- and fifteen-inch portholes, at my fingertips and yet unreachable.

Ground Control, are you still there?

I want now to argue that whoever says this is committing a fallacy, and for this, I have to build some argumentative infrastructure.

Some explanations first. I was motivated to write this piece after some politician has said somwhere online that “we are all to blame for [some unfortunate situation which is not really relevant to this piece]”. This has pressed my berserk buttons (all of them), and I had to think why I am so displeased with these words coming from this person. So, enjoy the results of my thoughts.

In today’s moral consensus (and my personal view), blame (and its less offensive sibling, responsibility) is a function of power. If you can change the situation, you are to blame. If you cannot, you are not. So far, so simple, and up to now, there is no contradiction to everyone being to blame for anything. However, the statement misses several issues.

First, what is the consequence? Usually, “we are all to blame” results in “you should pay and atone”, or just a deep-sounding “we should all atone”. However, other than sounding deep, these words do not really mean something material by themselves.

Second, what is the measure? The implied connotation is that everyone is equally to blame. And in the discussed cases, this is as much true as following “real possibility” from “nonzero probability”. In our world, the share of responsibility for any outcome is not equal. A politician has more power to change enviromental policies than a nurse, and a doctor has more power over a patient than a schoolchild 50 kilometers away, even taking into account that the schoolchild has the theoretical option to study medicine. But if no measure is supplied, the implied meaning is that everyone is equally responsible, by which no one is actually responsible.

What do we have in the end? I propose a heuristic: Everyone saying “We are all to blame” implies “we are all equally responsible” and tries hereby to scatter her share of responsibility. In the best case, this is a fallacy. In the worst case, this is an insult to reason and an attempt to evade judgment.

Zeroth, most people do actually have some kind of understanding about the topics. But there is a long way from intuition towards understanding what is actually happening in the lecture and why it is happening the way it is happening. (Actually, this is a verification procedure for learning: If you know exactly what problems the lecture is solving and by what means, then you are most probably doing it right.)

First, some of the kids are pretty bad at reading and understanding. If the question is “What are the pros and cons of various methods of achieving X”, then the wrong approach is to tell me that a major downside is to implement X. Seriously? Let’s draw an analogy: A major disadvantage of owning a car is that you have to buy a car, and a major disadvantage of public transport is that you have to buy a ticket. Yeah, I’m not very impressed by this involved comparison, either.

Second, numbers and computation are a serious issue. This was evident in the networks exam, this is even more evident in the calculus exam, even if the students somehow managed to pass the initial “solve 50% of homework” filter. Integration seems to be like magic — sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, and most people seem to have no idea why. My hint “Solve 20 integrals and then you’ll know how” was not appreciated. In the networks exam, it was even worse, people failed at division of large numbers. (And it was awful to look at.)

Third, complex concepts are not easy to understand. (Captain Obvious reporting!) “This function is continuous and not continuous at the same time”, yeah, right. Sure, university lectures are not meant to be easy per se, but they are also not meant to be mandatory for everyone. And this is freshman material, not formal semantics from outer space. But this continues in the computer networks lecture, where some of the students write stuff like “Alice sends her private key to Bob”. If I were a columnist, I would write an awfully long lecture on how Facebook makes us disrespect privacy, but luckily I think that using “us” in the “us sinners” sense is a dirty rhetorical move, so I’ll just facepalm (or facedesk) one more time.

On the other hand, most people do seem to pass the exams, so it’s not all bad. But the aftertaste is pretty bitter.

I have already written something about the first part, and now I would like to revise my conclusion. I told you that Ann Leckie is an heir to Banks, and I probably will stay with that opinion. But she is also an heir to Asimov, in the sense that she likes to talk about evolution of social structures in the far future, over large distances.

Ann Leckie’s concept of the Empire is a distributed personality ruling everything; the premise is that it is possible to link a human body to a distributed mind and let it act as an agent of the said mind. As the agent is semi-autonomus and may not necessarily be always in contact with her other selves, communication delays may let parts of her personality act independently; hence, the stability of the Empire may be in question.

As far as space operas go, this particular one is pretty constrained in time and space. However, this is not a bad thing, as the questions Leckie discusses are large and require attention, even in the far future. Again, in the tradition of early sci-fi, today’s questions are asked in the setting of a possible tomorrow to look at them from a different perspective.

What I liked most, however, were the characters. Not all of them are my favorites, but at least the main character, Breq, is exactly the rational and cold-blooded person I expected to see in her position. Not all of her surroundings are, sadly, but in most cases they don’t raise disbelief (which is already very good!).

Also, I liked the ending. I don’t want to spoil it, so I just say that it is not the one you’d typically expect and also the one that makes most sense. Yes, this is not a contradiction.

1. Warning! Made by dicks!
2. Game provokes flamewars on the internet.
3. Your GM will not allow you to use this extension. Never. We have warned you.
4. Best mechanics of 1999!
5. The authors wish you luck in finding players. We would come in    person, but we live too far away.
6. The sheer number of corrections and additions to the rules to make them even remotely playable requires another rulebook to fit in.
7. The dice pool is most conveniently thrown with a portable concrete mixer.
8. The authors cannot into mathematics and probability.
9. Game may cause irritation with people with an acute allergy to idiocy.
10. On eye contact with the designer’s production, rinse with water and seek professional help immediately!
11. If you are sufficiently tempted by the cover of this book, leave the hobby immediately.
12. The authors wish you luck in the quest for their non-standard dice.
13. Not suitable as a toy.
14. A narrative game.
15. Product may cause increased sleepiness.
16. The setting in this edition contradicts the setting of the previous one.
17. AWFUL TRANSLATION.
18. Illustrations are anatomically impossible.
19. Pretends to be realistic.
20. Contains a heap of author’s most liked Mary Sues.
21. Before you stands a partially playable set of author’s wet dream fantasies.
22. Setting consists of 100% political masturbation.
23. Contains a metaplot.
24. Sales restrictions were imposed by an idiot. HEY, WE HAVE TITS!
25. An unprovoked fall of the complete rule book set may cause a local black hole.
26. Any fact from the setting is given through a prism of schizophrenia.
27. The rulebook contains an actually helpful index of terms used.
28. For having fun with the game, full frontal lobotomy is required.
29. A science fiction setting that contradicts physics, chemistry and school history lessons.
30. Art and text quality do not correlate with playability.
31. Product is 100% compatible to “edition wars” feature.
32. Creators mistake “overly complicated” for “realistic”.
33. The indy postmodern rules concept has to be slightly edited to be actually playable.
34. A pseudo-Japanese setting. Contains industrial amounts of schoolgirls, robots, and tentacles.
35. The rules use a non-Euclidean distribution curve.
36. This cyberpunk’s authors have no idea about emerging technologies in mobile communication, household devices, and computer networks.
37. More than a half of the text describes useless author’s NPCs.
38. Character creation requires a scientific calculator, a math major, and at least one full game session.
39. There was no budjit to pay the edtior.
40. Contains author’s graphomania.
41. Playtesting has been performed by the author’s imaginary friends, a mouse, and an empty energy drink bottle.
42. This is Another First <insert native language here> Role-playing Game!
43. Events from narrative interludes are not compatible with rules.
44. Rules contain holes.
45. One hour of gameplay describes ten seconds of game time.
46. Example may be completely different from actual gameplay.
47. New and improved D&D!
48. Siberian school of role-playing game systems!
49. Role-players are pathologically single!
50. Game requires internet connection.
51. Game not suitable for a sober audience.
52. Only by buying this game you can save the <insert native language here> role-playing industry!
53. Fans absolutely must recommend the game as the only truly universal one.
54. Considers moral and ethical specifics of a paladin’s world view.
55. Rulebooks consists of 80% slang. Comprehension check!
56. 80% better role-playing!
57. D&D 5th edition. May cause scandals and flamewars.
58. D&D 6th edition. May cause civil wars.
59. V:tM gift edition. May cause financial ruin.
60. Illustrated by a pose software.
61. Illustrated by photoshopped jointed puppets.
62. Rulebook is not suited to stop bullets more powerful than a pistol caliber.
63. Equipment takes more than 50% of the contents.
64. This book has been written while being high on drugs.
65. The authors are not playing by these rules.
66. Reading the rules may be not suited for people with high intracranial pressure and chronic heart diseases.
67. Precise references to the rules are not included.
68. Conflicts about the seventh edition of D&D will be played out with sticks and stones.
69. Rules contain abused and maltreated Latin.
70. For full understanding of the character sheet, a three weeks’ worth of introductory course is highly recommended.
71. Completely incompatible to previous editions. Name has been kept for market share purposes.
72. Full list of warnings is given in the XXVII extension book.
73. We PlAy wiTH foNTs!
74. Taking the setting seriously may cause fascism.
75. Butthurt and hundreds of hatred by fans of the previous edition included.
76. Yes, this is all the authors could do.
77. Caution! Tables.
78. The authors use the game as a propaganda method for fringe socio-political concepts.
79. The budget was completely spent on the copyright license!
80. We don’t recommend. No, really, we don’t.
81. Has no index and no table of contents.
82. Yet another medieval fantasy!
83. Dumb author’s in-jokes in the rules text.
84. Illustrated by Google Image Search.
85. Don’t buy this book, we will soon publish a new one, which is EVEN WORSE!
86. The book opens uncontrollably on the pages with the least safe for work graphics.
87. Caution! The author® has a very approximate© understanding of copyright©!
88. We have to defend the existence of our hobby, as well as the well-being of new players.
89. Characters described by the author are not compatible to character creation rules.
90. Printing the character sheet may use up all the color ink in your printer.
91. Rules are not suited to describe a conflict between a vampire and a couple of small girls.
92. Terms are used prior to their definition.
93. Full definition is spread across three chapters on 250 pages.
94. Abilities include “soup cooking” and “tying shoes”.
95. Game not suitable for criticism!
96. Character creation is more interesting than the game itself.
97. Caution! Furries!
98. Illustrated by the author.
99. For intended game experience, a copy of the author is required.
100. For intended game experience, a copy of D&D 2ed. rulebook is required.
101. The game requires the players to be acquainted with small units tactics.
102. Rules text contain references to terms that were redacted away in the initial proofreading phases.
103. Conflict resolution rules are close to “I have hit you!”—“No, you didn’t!”—“Yes I did!”
104. Contains a chapter “What is a role-playing game?”
105. The book will fall apart on the second day.
106. Author considers “anime” a drawing style.
107. The “anime style graphic artist” is a freshman student from deviantart.
108. Contains Japanese schoolgirls!
109. Almost playable.
110. Warning! Pretty boring stuff!
111. Made to troll the RPG community.
112. NO ELVES!
113. This game has been considered morally questionable by /b/.
114. Authors have consulted anonymous experts from /b/.
115. Warning! FATAL!

I went to sleep on Tuesday with the thought that I missed an excellent opportunity to bet on Clinton against some politically active bloggers. On Wednesday, I woke up and the first word on my phone’s display my mind has recognized was “immigration office”. I then thought that not betting was actually a wise move (and like many wise moves, this one was due to laziness). And then the Internet exploded with pain.

After observing the immediate reaction, I found out that my personal Internet was (and still is) somewhere between pain, hatred, sorrow, and some schadenfreude (some good jokes have arisen, too). I have rarely seen so many people being so upset. I have rarely seen so many people panicking. It will take a while for me to appreciate the extent of the tragedy.

Why did this happen? I am not a sociocultural thinker who has to find, to keep an image going, some non-contradicting story to fit the facts into the consumers’ brains, thus I have the freedom to say that I have very little idea how this really happened. The least inadequate explanation to me is that there was a critical mass of people to whom this election was not about progress vs. conservatism, but about Cthulhu vs. Satan and they went for the more spectacular evil; then, there was a mass of people who were sufficiently conservative to vote Republican independent of the candidate, and, there was a critical mass of political observers who critically underestimated the former two groups. These “shy Trumpkins”, as they are called, finally got their safe space in the voting cabin.

Do I have something nice to say for the Democrat followers? Maybe. Again, I am not American, hence, you should not necessarily trust me. But, for starters, let’s suppose I live in a country where a terribly intolerable guy is President and I don’t want to be overly dependent on him. The first thing to do is always to check your state as is. The nice thing in the American constitutional construction is that it gives a lot of liberties to the states, which means that your life is more defined by the state you live in than by the President. This is cool and probably you should keep it that way. This can be less cool if the President is a nice guy who wants to enforce mandatory health insurance and the states don’t want that to happen, but it’s always a tradeoff. After you know what you have, you might want to know what you want. You probably want a better President four years from now. For this, you might want to learn from people who managed to do this feat (and not from those who write books on how to start a revolution after utterly failing at the attempt). Such as… President Obama. He promised change, portrayed himself as a rational, down-to-earth yet independent candidate with a good reputation. Or President Trump (oh!). He also promised change, portrayed himself as an independent candidate… hey, there seems to be a pattern. Seemingly independent candidates have better chances. Furthermore, taking class-based concerns into account also seems to work. So, the job of you, a left-leaning person, is to find a leftish candidate with a clean image and a sensible program that actually concentrates around working-class concerns (because the working class is HUGE), organize around her, and this may actually work. The keyword is “organize”. If you don’t, you will be asking yourself which choice is the lesser evil again four years from now. This may be actually a good moment for that, as the Clinton surroundings are running around helplessly screaming and Bernie seems to keep his calm and be ready to do something different from naming scapegoats.

Concerning the fears of people who assume that after inauguration, FBI vans will start taking nonconforming people into gulags, I have very, very good news. In this rather improbable case (I bet 30 EUR on this not happening, however, my betting skills are not that good, as you could observe above), the federal government actually declares the social contract null and void. In my book, the relevant state and cooperation philosophy tells me that (a) your loyalty is not required anymore (b) since the social contract was built upon an implied threat of violencemisbehavior, you are free to misbehave. The good news is that in America, it is far easier to defend your civil rights, as you also have access to the relevant tools (not all of them, but a sufficient amount to make people think twice). In other words, you can organize and grab a gun and this is not even illegal as long as you don’t do something dumb. Seems that Second Amendment is not that bad, right?

For the rest of the world this is actually a good moment to get rid of illusions. The illusion of DC being the beacon of progress is one of them: irrelevant of the outcome, with a vote this close you can clearly see that there is sufficient support for right-wing policies in the American society. You also see that there is tension in the society, up to calls for violence. Some politicians cope with tensions like these by out-sourcing conflicts, which does not bring more happiness in this world. A further illusion is that nationalism is dead. Wherever nations are, there is nationalism, and we have not arrived at the world government phase yet. There is no shame in it, actually, there is still This Tribe and That Tribe and as resources are finite, and, most important, power is finite, most people will have an incentive to have more power, either alone, or by proxy of their tribe. Nationalism can be run in a cooperative mode, when everyone wins. Defecting from cooperation, however, results in competition (which can be more or less violent); and there seems to be evidence that some global players have defected. In Europe, the southern countries that were hit by the debt crisis were forced to submit to the will of Germany and France, which was considered more violent than was agreed upon and did not really inspire cooperation. This is a reason why euroskeptics thrive, they feed on fears that you will be the next one to lose your job as it is not too big to fail. They also feed on (not necessarily irrelevant) fears that the means of production will not be owned anymore by anyone but their producers (hi, shareconomy!) and the current owners will be degraded to tenants. There are other fears, but these two seem prominent to me, and, most important, they are something that can and has to be coped with by left movements, or else the topics will be hijacked from the right (and, as history tells us, there is little hope that right-wing movements solve these problems more efficiently).

Another illusion to get rid of is that self-identifying as progressive does put you on the right side of History. History has a dark sense of humor, and considering yourself on the right side of it is, ultimately, not very productive. Because literally everyone can do this. Everyone can put the righteous face on. Some people started to explain this as a new phenomenon, “postfactual politics”, however, it’s not new. It is the same kind of politics that has always been there, memes instead of arguments. By overstretching the possibility of free interpretation of facts (and proclaiming that everyone is entitled to her own world view, her own perception, and her own conclusions), this has been made possible—and yes, it is not only a right-wing thing. In the end, if “white male science” is a thing, why shouldn’t “left science” be a thing?

The sad thing is that the world now is already sufficiently prone to conflicts. The two-block system has fallen, a one-block system has not arisen (and, as far as I can see, will not arise), and this fuels uncertainty and competition. A transforming world order usually means conflicts, either a big one, or many small ones. We may face a US-China conflict in the next decade, including use of military force (and hey, even the rather dovish—not that much, actually—Obama administration hinted at that possibility). There is something dimly burning in Europe. The Middle East is, softly speaking, a disaster. My personal prediction is that the world is tending to a multi-polar construction, with several economic and military alliances. Independent of this prediction, there may be sufficient incentive to drop the pretense that everything is going according to the plan and start working to resolve potential conflicts.

There is still some non-trivial take-away. Looking at the medial echo of the election, and the real-life PAIN that is generated right now, it seems that for a hellish lot of people, something between the Apocalypse and an alien invasion happened, something completely, utterly, unexpected and awful. However, this is real, and facts, especially facts on society, should be less surprising. As an acquaintance said (albeit in a different context), the rose-colored glasses cannot be removed painlessly anymore, as they have already grown into the skull. This is surprisingly good news. Confronting the reality seems to be painful for everyone, not only for the people who were rooting for Clinton. And it thus also may physically force people to do something. This means that a revolution can, in fact, be televised.

The first, and foremost, requirement for responsibility is the possibility to consciously decide on an action. Not deciding is also a decision, but being unable to decide has nothing to do with responsibility. Hence, learning responsible beahvior cannot be done by passively observing other people, the actions of other people, or the results of actions of other people. This does not mean that you don’t have to observe; this means that you cannot be called a responsible person kust because you have visited a (generalized) museum, read some books, and know some more or less relevant facts.

It’s a little like math:  Responsibility is an ability. You are not a math graduate just because you can cite the Banach-Tarski result on cocktail parties. Instead, you are a math graduate because you know how to apply your knowledge to new problems. Applying the same reasoning to responsible behavior, we get that being responsible means having an idea what the results of your actions will be, making a choice that will benefit te people you care about, and not denying accountability.

One can see that in this reasoning, the group of beneficiaries is not clearly defined. Moral or economic imperatives may alter the definition of benefit. The core, however, stays the same: You have several options, you choose the Right Thing, you accept the outcome.

To sum up, “let’s look at others’ experiences to learn responsible behavior” misses the point completely.

There have been several incidents in my life that follow a pattern, and I probably should summarize them at least to think about it. It happened to me for some times that I was trying to convey to another person a thought, an idea, or a concept and was utterly failing at the task. It has taken me hours to clarify what I meant, what I wanted to say and what, for me, the logical implications were. In the end, after the task was done and the idea communicated (or so I thought), my first reaction was “Oh wow, this was hard. I think I need a drink now”.

Now one could draw a conclusion that I am simply incapable of communicating my thoughts, but this hypothesis is invalidated by contradicting observations. And the simplest assumption that matches my observation is that it is, in fact, hard to communicate complex ideas; if the person I try to communicate with has a different intuition (even for the same problem!), then the explanations that are completely clear to me may come over as confusing.

This is very, very sad. It increases the amount of communication overhead, it reduces the flow of ideas, and it makes communication sometimes rather frustrating. Furthermore, it constrains the amount of people you have fun talking to. On the other hand, this is a very good reason to appreciate these people more.

On October 9, 2006, a seismic event originating somewhere in the Korean peninsula exposed a lot of interesting facts about political, economical, and military experts. The event itself was quickly characterized as an explosion, and several explanations were proposed.

• North Korea has tested a nuclear device
• North Korea has ignited a large bomb
• North Korea has tested a nuclear device yet it failed to ignite

The second two were by far the most popular, as it seemed to be unimaginable how these hungry, backwards, Juche-hailing and ideologically incompetent people could ever design such a technical masterpiece. Ten days later, United States have confirmed that the event originated from a 0.8-kiloton nuclear explosion. Ten years later, the public perception of North Korea is by and large still where it was back in 2006, one even films epic movies about that.

Now saying “confirmation bias” would be just saying a spell and hoping that this magically explains everything. I think this effect has more components to it.

First, it seems that historic scale is not very easy to get an accurate intuition for. For example, all the cool technical advances in air and space travel are not that recent: The first flight of the Concorde is closer to Wright brothers’ plane as to 2016. The first satellite has flown 60(!) years ago. From this point of view, it is not entirely unintuitive that even with a 40-year technological handicap, one should be capable of creating rockets and nuclear weapons. (Just to remind you, 1966 corresponds to Saturn V, XB-70 and SR-73) This makes possible developments to a matter of resources and engineering capabilities.

Second, there is a question of ideology and existing stereotypes. Clearly, North Korea is not a nice place to live in. Clearly, the state exerts a lot of pressure and control on an individual, far more than anyone would deem acceptable. But even if this has an influence on the competence of North Korean engineers (it obviously does), it remains somewhat questionable to flatly deny them engineering capabilities from 1960s. People get surprisingly agnostic when it comes to weapons.

Thirdly, there arises a question about the results. So, ten years have passed, and did the perception of North Korea change? Does not seem so. One can still make funny jokes about Dear Leader, failures in their space program, yet this does not change the facts. And the facts are that the guys are pretty close to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Probably now would be a good moment to take them seriously.

My first issue with this is the problem of audience. There is obviously a difference between a guy or gal who would think that it is a good idea to join the jihad and someone who would think that “Moderate or not – Allah will find his own” is a good joke. This is actually the general problem with politics, hurting people with different world views (which is not necessarily bad in itself) is a very different objective from actually making them think what you think, for the same reasons.

My second issue is the inadequacy of means. No matter how hard you fight effects (with propaganda, water, electricity, e-mail advertisements), you only can do so much with persuading people not joining some strange guys. If the aforementioned strange guys have money and obvious, measurable success, then they will attract people in any case (because there always are some strange people who are into that kind of entertainment). So solving a problem of a large, organized group of people successfully spreading violence and attracting more people is best solved by dismantling the organization with all the nice tools the last two centuries have to offer, including, but not limited to, intelligence, investigations, and, in some cases, violence. And this is, as the last two centuries teach us, only doable with another large organizations. (Which brings me to the lack of a comprehensive theory of organizations.) The times of individuals, singular actions, and the one weird trick are not the times we live in. Even the sniper, the modern army hero guy, is a very specific tool whom a lot of people have worked hard to educate, deploy, and extract.

The core of my problem seems to be that, again, people seem to think that memes can help you in all situations, and that really existing things magically fade away when you have convinced yourself they do not matter anymore. In lots of cases, this is true, but in an equal or larger lot of cases, it isn’t. It is especially and most dramatically not true when the thing in question is a person with a gun.

I have stumbled upon several discussions and a nice word that I cannot but translate into English. The word is “rivetism” which roughly expands to “an overwhelming desire to enforce absolute correctness in the details” and stems (as I’ve heard) from discussions about literary merits of a movie measured in the correctness of the number of rivets on a tank turret. Needless to say that “rivetism” is a pejorative.

Yet there is a point, and an arising question. Suppose you watch a movie about something you know, and know well. Take, for example, cooking. And there is this guy who takes a frying pan and loudly announces he’s going to make a soup. Ridiculous, right? Or imagine a book about school, where everyone loves the gym class. This is a slightly unrealistic scenario, doesn’t it seem so? So, when your expertise on the topic is sufficient to discern unrealistic assumptions, the hitherto suspended disbelief kicks in, and you have issues with connecting to the characters. This is the reason why people from air and space engineering are not so overwhelmed when talking about Gravity or pretty much any other space fiction movie that pretends to depict reality, as technical or scientific issues that are obvious to a professional are often overlooked by the authors. What makes this interesting is that disbelief is more readily suspended if the fiction is clearly depicted as fiction without further discussion of the technical details. That’s why Warhammer 40K works for me pretty well and Ready Player One does not.

Sadly, rivetism becomes inevitable if you get more closely acquainted with not only technical issues, but also real-life social interaction as well. Working in or at least witnessing a structure of at least 100 people gives insights about human interaction, and it is often the case that the human interaction patterns observed in real life do not match those depicted in fiction… at all. It begins with all those superhero movies that are plainly unbelievable when you know how many people work in order to make a single flight of a plane possible. It goes on with secret organizations no one has ever heard of yet with unlimited budgets and so on.

Probably, one just has to accept the inevitable truth that authors rarely have an idea about the (social and technical) mechanisms they use inn their plots, relax, and try to enjoy the narrative or the action nevertheless.

How do you motivate people into doing something? I heard the opinion that fear and greed are pretty good, even more, they can be regarded as universal motivators. However, when it comes to practical issues, there is a shortcut, and this shortcut is guilt. The first step in the method is to convey the opinion that the listener is a worthless zombie who does not really live up to some expectations. Needless to say, as most people have their skeletons in the closet, you get an audience that is instantly motivated to do something to redeem itself. (If you ask yourself if this is the same mechanism as the one used by the original sin concept, welcome to the club. I suspect this, too.) And then the second step kicks in, where the author more or less discreetly asks the patient to do something to get rid of worthlessness. Like, buying the latest and greatest gadget. Or going to some raid (“Prove you’re not a slave, do what I say.”), political or not. Or donating to a cause.

If you look closely, you may find this pattern in ads, PSAs, and, least pleasantly, in clickbait pieces on society where the author tries to—yes, you guessed correctly—implant some behavioral pattern. However, the problem is that if you are the bad guy you are implied to be, you should not be prone to such manipulations, and if you are not, then the articles kinda miss the point. Then, there is the fully general aversion against manipulations; these mechanisms are on my big black list of Things Only Bad People Do. Your moral compass (or whatever navigation device you have instead) should not react to stimuli such as “Be a Morally Beautiful Person, do what I say”, since either you should know better what to do to be Morally Beautiful, or your decision rules work in a completely different fashion. In any case such advice from an unqualified author in some newspaper can be dismissed as a bad, off-limits manipulation attempt.