They have a law against “injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children.”

I think this law is fantastic. It’s exactly the kind of law that should exist – the law that simply says, “Don’t do wrong.” This is the best law – it’s simple, it’s direct, and it upholds what is good. It’s obvious.

My first thought on seeing this law was that it was completely unenforceable. How rotten have we gotten? When someone says, “You can’t legislate morality” they’re really just stating the awful fact that our fragmented ideas of good are utterly fallen – to the point where we can’t even build a society worth living in.

The Bible sets as the vision of a great society one in which the notion of what is good and right is implanted – so deeply embedded that it doesn’t need discussion or teaching – or legislation. Law, it seems, is a testimony to brokenness. Where there is no transgression, there need be no law!

The interesting thing is, I found this law by reading a news story where a man was actually being charged with it (I can’t remember the story).

This law is enforceable – but it’s enforceable in special cases: those cases which operate on the principle, “I know it when I see it.” In some cases you can trot this law before judge and jury and they will just apply it without any discussion or controversy.

Again, this is the perfection of law – the idea that we can see something and immediately know the rightness or wrongness of it. But again, this is flawed, because we are flawed.

We live in a world where good laws are unenforceable as a very consequence of their goodness, and of our very badness.

This has a consequence for lawyers: they are dedicated to a system that is entirely a function of human evil.

I wonder what aspects of my own workplace are a function of human evil?

It’s interesting, if only because they rounded up two guys with equally cool sounding names and put them together. Here’s to you, R.J. and W.C!

It’s also interesting because it dates from 1963.

It has some gems. (Previous generations, look away!) Examining:

Chapter XIII: Build a Supply of Words – Lesson 5: Do Not Misuse Words

Intro – Don’t use slang, yada yada yada, it dates itself, etc. etc. etc, your boss won’t hire you, the peer pressure isn’t worth it…

25 common errors

3. awful: Awful means to fill with awe. Give the colloquial meaning of awful.

8. date: A date is a colloquial expression for engagement. How do you suppose date developed this meaning?

11. fix: Fix is a colloquial expression for repair. Give the correct meaning of ‘to fix’.

12.gotten: use got [How have things got so bad with the English language?]

20: mad: Mad means insane, not angry

24: terrible: Terrible means causing terror. How many of you misuse this word often? What do you really mean when you say something is terrible?

WC? RJ? I’m really sorry, but… you lost.

It turns out that if you’re clever with a webpage, you can pretend to be a visitor’s PC for the purpose of finding out the ID number of their router.

Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. A little technical, perhaps, but not so bad.

Umm… unless Google happened to drive down everyone’s street and take notes on exactly where everyone’s router was. And made that information available as a service. So if you *really* want to stalk someone (well, stalk their router, which is often good enough) now you can! Just get them to visit your tricky website and you know where they live!

Whenever a big accident of some kind happens, like a plane crash or an oil spill or something like that, people usually get frustrated because the cause takes a long time to figure out.

The truth is, there are almost always multiple causes, multiple failures which allowed the catastrophe to occur. The pilot was tired and the ground crew slipped up.  And the weather was rocky. And, and, and… Generally security for these things is so layered that multiple failures have to occur before a major disaster happens.

The problem is, that’s an accident. Unintentional.

Security is harder than accident prevention, because in security, there is an intelligent, malicious attacker who is actively trying to combine systems in the worst possible way.

The offshoot of this is that even if one system is arguably secure, it can still participate in catastrophic failure if one of the systems it interacts with is compromised.  You cannot make it secure – you have to make all the possible combinations of systems secure.

Which is why producing systems of jaw-dropping power is a bad idea, unless you can show jaw-droppingly proportionate benefit.

I guess I just wish that someone at Google had stopped saying, “This is so cool” long enough to ask, “Is this really a good idea?”

Well, I don’t remember much of her class, either

But there was one fantastic lesson in that class, and I sincerely wish that, at the time, I’d recognized what she was really saying. It went something like this:

“Everyone has a system of values, and they make decisions based off these values.”

Hmm… Now that I type it, it doesn’t seem like a big thing. Back in Grade 7 Social Studies, I sure didn’t think it was a big thing. But if you poke at it a little bit, what my teacher was saying turns out to be a very big thing indeed.

What are values? Well, they are things which are important to us. What does it mean that they are important to us? Well… we think they are better than other things. They are near and dear to us; we are fond of them.

They are the things we think are good.

Assigning values is an exercise in determining which values are better than others, which ones are good. Isn’t that nifty, that people have different opinions on which things are good and which are bad?

What my teacher did not tell me was why we have systems of values. She didn’t go into the history to explain how our systems of values came about.

Which is kind of important, because every single thing we do throughout our entire lives is determined by how we answer the question, “What is good?”.

The Bible presents an interesting history of our values system, which is, that very early on, man decided to try and answer the question “What is good?” himself, and that decision is directly responsible for every piece of human suffering present in the world today. We have tried to carve out a personal good and it is catastrophic.

My teacher never mentioned to me that choosing what to value was the most important thing I would ever do in my entire life. Because we choose our values. And there is nothing that we do which is not intimately related to what things we perceive as good.

So how do we choose?

Is Kurt Vonnegut someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (read the whole article sometime, it’s a great piece on narrative):

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”

Is James Gosling someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (about corporate behaviour):

It’s not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of “good” is really twisted:
Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse.

The reason we can’t define the word is so simple, so sad.

We really don’t know what it means.

The simple answer is that it means, “exists”. To say that something is, is to say that something exists. “Is” is a conjugation of the verb to be, meaning existence. I am, you are, he is, she is, they are.

But this is a false answer, because we haven’t defined anything, we’ve just swapped synonyms. It’s as bad an answer as “Something better than something else” when asked, “What is good?”

In order to define something, we need to put it in terms of things that are already known, and if we are really so lost as to not know what is means, we probably don’t know what exist means, either.

But it may be a little easier to tackle the question, “What is existence” (it’s the same question), because it’s a more familiar way of asking it.

But I’d like to offer two very simple definitions for the word “is”.

1)It’s the name of God. I AM WHO I AM. Go tell the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you”. God is the wellspring of existence. Something that is, is something that proceeds from God.

2)’Is’ means created by Jesus Christ.The set of things which exist is exactly the set of the things Jesus created.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  — Colossians 1:16-17 (NIV)

‘Is’ really isn’t all that tricky or flexible a word. It has quite a clear, non-recursive, unambiguous definition.

But try and define it without God and see what happens You pretty much get philosophy. The more I think about it, the more I think that Occam’s Razor really does work in favour of God’s existence, after all.

Should we believe him? It might be an easier question to answer, if it weren’t for Finnish Sauna Syndrome.

At the World Sauna Championships, a competitor died from sitting in the sauna too long (that’s the point of the competition). Why? Because if you ask a sauna competitor, “Is it too hot for you?” there’s only one answer they’ll give you.

There’s only one answer they can give you. If they thought it was too hot, they wouldn’t still be sitting in the sauna, would they?

I was discussing this with my IT colleagues – it’s the same for IT projects. You can’t ask the project team, “Will you get it done on time?” because they just can’t be objective. That doesn’t make them bad or malicious or incompetent – it just means that they are strictly constrained (whether they know it or not) in the answers they can give.

Going back to the TFC coach, my immediate question is, “If there was a rift, would he know it?” Maybe the rift is that the player thinks the coach is completely out of touch with the players and with the team situation!

But if it *does* boil over in the microwave, you have to clean it up.

Some people just don’t like authority, I guess.

I’ve got two follow-up posts due and umpteen billion links to comment on. And currently not enough time to go through them.

I guess I could try sponsorship – if people wanted to “adopt an article” I might be persuaded to write them.

What do these descriptions have in common?

1. Struck with pace inside the intersection of post and bar
2. Contains no salt
3. Deploys coherent packages of software functionality as loosely coupled, coarse-grained services

Answer?

.

.

.

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They all describe good.

1. A good penalty kick
2. A good glass of drinking water
3. A good enterprise architecture ( It delivers dramatically improved application flexibility, allowing enterprises to continuously adapt constellations of services to keep IT capabilities aligned with business goals!)

Meaning

Most of the time, we demand that our words have meaning. In fact, if something doesn’t have meaning, we tend to say, “That’s not a real word.” It’s nonsense. It’s babble, and we don’t use it (because it’s utterly useless).

So what on earth are we doing messing about with a word like, ‘good’? It can mean “right inside the post”. It can mean “salt free”. It can mean “salted” (Yay popcorn!). It can mean “loosely coupled”.

It seems it can mean anything. How could the same word possibly mean either salt-free or salted? It’s so flexible as to be self-contradictory.  It’s meaningless! This has to be the worst word in the English language! (Serious question to readers – can you think of a more flexible word?)

But…

No-one seems to have any problems using it. It’s one of the most basic words we have in English. I don’t recall ever having to look it up in a dictionary. (Go ahead. Try. Then come back and tell me how on earth the same word can mean both “not depreciated” and “amusing”. Ahahahaha! Your lack of inflation is killing me!)

It has simple, direct translations to many languages. Bon. Goed. Gut. Boen. Bueno. It’s not just easy in English.

Do we even need to explain it to little kids? I think they just pick it up from context. Even our dogs understand this word. It’s one of the most commonly used, least misunderstood words we have.

And yet we can’t come up with a decent definition for it. No one has ever told me what this word means.

It means *everything*. And yet we can still understand it and use it.

This is the greatest word in the English language.

The irony is, we don’t spend any time talking about it, because, well,  it’s that great! We don’t talk about it, we just go ahead and use it. Well, I want to talk about it!

Definitions and Synonyms

My previous post on wisdom is laboured. It rambles on forever – it’s brutal! (Same as this one).

But I think I have a better handle on wisdom now, because wisdom is a synonym for good. “Wisdom” means “good” in the same way that “salted” means good.

“Salted” means good popcorn. Wisdom means good decision making. Good choosing.

There is one enormous difference between wisdom and salt, however. Salt has a meaning beyond its context specific, popcorn limited, alternate interpretation of, “good”. Most of the time, it just means “salt.”

Wisdom, however, has little meaning beyond it’s core association with the good. Words we find flung around when defining “wisdom” and “wise” are “discern”, “sound judgement”, “good sense”, and of course, “knowledge”.

Some nice questions to ask here, like, “Discernment of what?” Could it be discernment of anything except other than the good from the bad? And isn’t “sound judgement” a nice synonym for “good judgment?” (Go ahead, look it up. And then come back and we can ask why the listed definitions of ’sound’ are simply a subset of the listed definitions of ‘good’. Even ‘legally valid’ shows up both places )

The only independent meaning of wisdom apart from good seems to have to do with ‘knowledge’.  Let’s go on and dig a little deeper into knowledge. Does any kind of knowledge bring wisdom?

Actually, the very first definition for wisdom in Merriam Webster seems to answer this for us, all nicely authoritatively and decisively:

1 a: accumulated philosophic or scientific learning

Case closed. Philosophy and science are wise, all others need not apply.  Let’s go home? Nope, hold on.

Digging under the definition for ‘wise’, we find this gem:

3 (archaic) : skilled in magic or divination

Now, don’t that just beat all? If I’m reading this right, it means that over time, the knowledge thought to be wise changed. Color me suspicious, but I just might be talked into suspecting that Merriam-Webster are allowing their definitions to be swayed by our current Western fascination with Science as the answer to all our problems.

My only point, of course, is that the knowledge which pertains to wisdom is not any knowledge but only good knowledge. At some point people thought that was Magic, now they think it’s Science. But all the while, wisdom meant stocking up on the good knowledge. At no point were people well versed on pig farming considered especially wise.

Two facts are evident:

1. Wisdom serves exclusively as a synonym for good in the context of knowledge and decision making
2. History as presented by a snap analysis of Merriam Webster indicates that people have no clue as to what “good” actually is. It’s just not pig farming.

Conclusion

By realizing that ‘wisdom’ is really just a synonym for ‘good’ in the context of decisions, choices and their underlying knowledge, we can discover a couple really shocking things. The first is that wisdom, as a word, inherits all the problems (and the greatness) of goodness. Is it wise to deploy coherent packages of software functionality?

Well… It depends if you’re building an enterprise architecture or not! Once we think in terms of knowing the good (magic? science?), and choosing the good (salt? salt free?) things click and the question of, “What is good?” begins to loom large on our radar.

That’s the second point – If we want to know what is wise, to have any sense of how to live our lives, we have to tackle that most confusing, most contradictory of all words. We have to ask,

“What is good?”