Heap big comment by friend of Stone author (Score 2)

Hello everybody,

First - apologies for the extreme length of this mail - I'm not really acquainted with what is acceptable by Slashdot norms, and I have no webspace to put this rant on to link to, so please bear with me.

This mail has several purpose. One, to point to further material that Alan produced, because many new ideas evolved, and were written down. If you liked the Stone, you might like the rest as well. Second, to answer a few of the criticisms, comments etc. that popped up in the thread.

I'll introduce myself first. I have been acquainted with Alan Carter, half of the duo that produced the Programmers' Stone (I'm pretty sure he wrote the entire thing), for more than a year now (although I only recently met him 'live'. When introduced to his writings by a mutual friend, I fully experienced the a-ha erlebnis some of you will have experienced as well. The phenomenological side of the mapper description fit my situation extremely well, and solved quite a few conundrums that had been puzzling me.

I immediately resolved to contact him, and we started to collaborate. One of the immediate results was an e-mail discussion group, consisting of some of his friends (amongst whom figured Bill Allsopp, the guy who works a lot with ADHD children - he was mentioned in one of the thread messages), and some of mine. Most people were generally quite like-minded (they could all be categorised as mappers in various degrees), but still there were some differences. Differences, mainly in attitude and drive, that later caused the group to break up, but not before having produced tons of reflections, ideas etc. The most important idea to come out of this resulted in the M0 paper.

Building on the M0 idea, Alan produced a series of 6 papers, delving further and further into life, the universe and everything. The M0 paper and some other stuff is available on the Web (http://www.melloworld.com/Reciprocality - watch out, the URL is case sensitive ! - and they're sometimes unreachable anyway), but I can mail you the six central, current papers on demand (//mailto:[e-mail]).

All of this is experimental stuff - some newer ideas I discussed with Alan when meeting him have not been incorporated, and the whole thing is an outline, and would need quite some work - you have been warned.

OK, now for some comments on what has been said in this thread.

* Packers/mappers : a continuum ?

Yes. It always is easier to just go ahead and state everything in black and white. That is indeed what Alan has done in the Programmer's Stone. The text itself does need refining on that point. At one point Alan drew up the 'Matrix of Doom' which was already a much more elaborate categorisation. It never got discussed much further, and probably could do with more refining.

Personally I very much believe there's a continuity. I also don't think they're necessarily a good categorisation of the universe. Essentially, the human psyche is not linearly separable (my opinion). If one could classify or describe the mind as a multi-dimensional space (say n dimensions) (like MBTI does - they have four dimensions n=4) with each two values, at the simplest level), linear separability would mean you could categorise different classes by drawing a set of n-1 dimensional structures (hyperplane I think the correct term is) that separate the different classes.

To simplify the math-speak, picture a two-dimensional space. In this space, a hyperplane is one-dimensional - a straight line. Linear separability of a set of points means you can draw a line or a set of lines in a way that you get different delimited areas each containing one category. In a one-dimensional space it's even easier : linear separability means you can mark a number of delimiting points, and each category should entirely be between two delimiters, and between each set of two points there should be at most one category.

Placing all human psyches on one single line, and saying you can divide them up with one marking point, is to my mind pure folly (although many people tried over and over again). It amounts to ignoring the complexity of reality (but people are extremely good at ignoring reality, not in the least those who call themselves philosophers).

Still, some approximations can be made succesfully. I believe Alan and Colston at the very least succesfully identified and described some subgroups of humans. The members of the 'mapper' cluster identified all experience the a-ha erlebnis when reading the paper (I'll get to the relation with MBTI in another paragraph).

Packing is a very real phenomenon as well. Only, one should not jump to conclusions and say "one is good, one is bad". Both clusters differ mainly by having adopted through the ages a different cognitive strategy (or by having a genetical preference for one strategy - I'm not committing myself here, and I actually believe the truth is in the middle somewhere). The strategy is partly communicated from generation to generation by culture - I believe this could be demonstrated.

These cognitive strategies could be viewed as different evolutionary strains (whether sociological/psychological or genetical again I do not presume to decide upon). And much as elephants, giraffes, tapeworms, rattlesnakes etc. have evolved from the same beginnings, several strains could have evolved in humankind, of which mapping and packing could be major strains (with lots of subspecies maybe). Is an elephant better or worse than a giraffe ? Or than a rattlesnake ? This probably mainly depends on where you are in the foodchain - but you seen the point : a priori there's no reason to believe one is 'better' than the other. The same mindset should be adopted when approaching the packer/mapper categorisation.

Alan firmly believes however packers have done very bad things. He has ample reason to think so, partly because of his personal background. One of the things packers I think have brought into the world is the ubiquitous guilt and blame mechanism, which is a rudimentary form of social control, and which has grown into a cancer. People working at big corporations know what I'm talking about : blame is almost ritually shifted around until it hits a victim that cannot defend itself.

This is done because nobody wants to take responsibility : if I see a problem coming up in somebody else's project, will I tell them ? Nope, because if I tell them I will become the problem to them. Compare this to Feynmanns account in 'Surely you're joking mr Feynmann' about the safes at Los Alamos. To demonstrate security was inadequate, he started figuring out how the safes could be cracked - an it turned out that it was relatively easy. Even before he could do this, he was telling everybody security was inadequate. When word got round he could crack the safes, people started keeping him (and nobody else!) out of their offices - he had become the problem. This superficial kind of reaction is typical of packers - they have problems seeing the 'deep structure', the 'real problem', and only detect the superficial symptomatic problem - Feynmann could get into their safes (whey they exhibit this peculiar problem - more on that later).

These are bad problems, ubiquitous in society as we know it. Mappers probably suffer from other problems, but being a minority (more on that later), they never pervaded society. And nobody knows what a mapper-dominated society is like, because it doesn't exist now. It might have existed (Alan thinks it was the original state) but I don't think so. I think an evolutionary picture, with different strains springing up real soon, is probably more accurate. And it is great for avoiding the moral crudader-trap of dividing everything up into good and bad (I've been working on a theory of social-psychological fundamentals myself, shameless plug, and I think I'm on to something, but it has yet to be linked into Reciprocality. It does give a basis for a new morality, not founded on any funny dogmas... ask me about it if you're intrigued...).

So - packers aren't any badder than mappers - but there's a lot more of them, and mappers tend to suffer badly from some of the mechanisms they brough into being, which leads me nicely into my next topic...

* The invisible persecution of mappers

I'll dig up the bible here. I'm not at all religious, but I'm going to demonstrate even the old Jews knew about packers and mappers. I specifically refer to the person of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his parents, because he was always daydreaming - a typical mapper symptom. In Egypt, whilst in prison, he interpreted a few of the pharaoh's dreams, thus predicting a few things succesfully. He was released, and eventually made it to Pharaoh himself if I remember correctly, and saving Egypt from a bad famine in the process.

I would like to advance the hypothesis that Joseph was an archetypical mapper, cast out by his family because they were a bunch of farmers, for whom the packer cognitive strategy was more than adequate. By accident, Joseph had the chance to prove himself to the Pharaoh of Egypt by doing a bit of highly intuitive pattern-recognition, and did a lot of good, in a management position.

Go read the story, this is only a rough outline. The important bit I wanted to discuss here is the casting out bit. I put it to you that in our society, there is an invisible minority of dreamers that is being persecuted. Worst thing is : they don't even know it themselves (one, that there are others like them around, and two, that they're being persecuted). Only a few days ago, I got to know a girl described by her co-workers as being from another planet. I have talked to her a lot, and she definitely is mapper material. For the first time in her life, by talking to me, she realised she is not alone.

Think of it : in the archetypical classrooms (I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but y'all get the point), daydreamers are positively persecuted by teachers. Learning by rote is thrust upon many pupils as *the* way to do it, the system often even doesn't allow any other approaches (never had to learn a poem by rote ? what's more nonsensical than learning a poem by rote ? would anyone of you teach computer science by having pupils learning actual source code by rote ? I didn't think so... (algorithms is different - they're 'meaning' rather than form, just as the poem is 'form' and the meaning behind it is the meaning...)).

And socially, mappers have a hard time as well. Mappers tend to be interested in a lot of things, and have the automatic reflex of trying to find out the deep structure of *anything*. In many cases, whenever they hear a new, fundamental insight, be it about bee-keeping, writing a web-server, why the Germans lost WWII or just about whatever, their attention will focus on it (a new pattern or bit of deep structure to discover!) and they will delve into it. Packers will often find these non-useful things incredibly boring. And mappers being a minority, they get isolated. In some cases they become 'jesters' - discovering that putting the truth into a humoristic form (irony & sarcasm) makes a huge difference - it becomes digestible. Packers don't *have* to think about the sarcastic comments - they laugh and continue on. And as laughing is fun, they accept the mapper a little bit. So this is a typical social niche for mappers.

And so on and so on. Fellow mappers will definitely recognise the persecution problem. The most flexible ones might have solved it, but I wonder if any mapper had a really happy childhood - my guess is that many either spend it in isolation, or have to fight for recognition and harden up - I know a few cases like that; I'm one of the soft cases. When hardening up, these mappers I think learn ad play the packer game. They migh become very succesful, but I think they turn into high-end packers themselves after a while, losing the Child inside (mappers often have a strong child in them - time to bring up a Zen motto 'always keep the mind of a beginner', and "conventional" wisdom : learn and see the world through child's eyes : I think the trick is not to forget...

* MBTI

I was quite amused at one response in the thread, which stated that mappers are simply the INTP category in MBTI. The amusement stemmed from the fact that during the MBTI course I did the test and came out... INTP. I have given the matter a lot of thought, and although there probably is a correlation, it isn't strong enough.

I'm reasonably sure N (iNtuition) is a very strong mapper factor. It has a lot to do with the unconscious pattern detecting abilities almost anybody has. Mappers probably have high amounts of intuition in general - and it's essential to their cognitive strategy. The cognitive strategy of a mapper consists of detecting the 'deep structure' of the contemplated problem (a job for which you need advanced pattern detection), extracting and storing that structure, in a more or less object-oriented way (by creating classes in the mind, having properties attached, and having relationships between them). I think mappers are highly apt at manipulating and exploiting these mental structures. Packers on the other hand rely much more on learning by rote : storing packets of information, storing procedures, and not trying to figure out how it all fits together. Mind you, I think packers are people who get things done - basically because they spend little overhead on all the issues that aren't immediately relevant. Mappers have a lot of cognitive overhead, but are able to build more elegant, economic end-products.

Anyway, that's the N-mapper correlation. the opposite for N is S (sensing) and has to do (I think) with seeing reality directly as it is. I think the MBTI goofed on this one - packers don't see reality as it is (deep structure isan integral part of reality, dammit !) but they absorb reality in 'literal unlinked bits' - of course they don't make associations as easily as N people in that case !

The I (Introvert) correlation I think is probably mainly an environmental product, due to the packer dominance. Mappers are a minority, are repressed, and are forced into their 'own world' (often a fantasy world - hackers might start to see the deep-structure/hacker/science-fiction/fantasy/imag ination/daydreaming pattern emerging here, one of the reasons in the past I sometimes thought of posting to slashdot about the mapper/packer documents). So they rate introvert. I myself used to be very introverted - I had few or no friends, I spent all my time in my room, I never went out; at school I was hunted by other kids, who had no end of fun laughing at the fact that later I wanted to become an astronaut - in contrast, after through circumstances I 'blossomed', at work I was estimated as being very extrovert (can't shut up - this mail is a good example) and people were surprised I scored as introvert on the test.

Actually, I was almost right in the middle between introvert and extravert. These experiences have led me to believe that introvert/extravert is not a relevant dimension for mappers/packers a priori, only circumstances created the introversion preference.

As for the T - although I personally have quite a rational slant (I've got a bloody university degree in Math for chrissakes) I'm very emotional as well (very strong empathy - another trait which I think strong mappers have - the hard ones lose it because it's a very bad trait in a packer-dominated society - it subverts many procedures), and I scored about evenly on T (I forget wath it stands for, but I though it had to do using rational thought when making decisions) and F (which stands for Feeling - meaning those people make decisions based on emotions). I don't think there's any correlation - T and F people are equally likely to be mappers. Only F people might be less likely to be diagnosed as one, because many emotional reactions are socially programmed (think of how you would at first react to seeing a topless person walking by in the street - the reaction is socially programmed, in several tribes the clothing standard is a loincloth, and I guess there must have been tribes where nothing was worn frequently), and when you react to an event, emotional processing is neurologically faster than rational processing, so neurological response happens first. And since the social/emotional programming is mainly packer-made due to their superiority in numbers, F people will first react the packer way... QED (ok this is just a theory I just made up, but it makes some sense to me).

And finally, P or J : I think J means 'Judging'. Extreme J's are very well-planned people, not liking unexpected things, and planning everything, and adhering as much as possible to the rules. P (forget what it stands for) are fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants types. I think there's no natural preference here, but I think packer society trains people to be as J as possible, thus there could be a slant for typical packers to be J.

What I'm basically saying is that when analysed, mappers and packers would be all over the place in the 4 by 4 MBTI matrix, with maybe a preference for mappers to be N (although mappers trained into packers might score as N whilst getting diagnosed as packers). I fully expect however that manifest mappers would be more strongly clustered (I would expect them to score higher on N and P) because I think certain types might be more resistent to social programming.

* Wrapping it up

There is more, much much more to be said. Anybody should feel free to contact me if you want any of the other written materials (which admittedly need to be worked on, but we could do that together ?). For reference : e-mail : [e-mail] Alan and I have often played with the idea of making the whole thing an open-source project, by setting up some kind of organic website. We're not out to win any Nobel Prizes by cooking up a theory in secret then publishing it, or something like that. We just want to make the world a better place :-) And I'm not a blind idealist either (although it's hard to avoid the trap of putting everything in a black-white way, and putting in the nuances would take ages).

We're also incredibly interested in validating the whole thing scientifically (the M0 paper actually adresses a neurological/biological phenomenon that might lie at the base of packer dominance - we'd so like to test it, any neuro-chemists in the crowd ?) so we try and be rigid. After all : anything I have said is true in one sense, false in another sense, and completely meaningless in another sense (I'm not a total relativist - think again if that was your conclusion, or read some RA Wilson).

I'm also prepared to erect a second, new mailing list (the archives of the first one contain some very personal material, and are only accessible to those who were there - I know it's dangerous saying this in a roomful of hackers, but if you're a real hacker you know the meaning of respect and responsibility).

So, fire away any comments, and anybody is welcome (especially critics, since their comments are the ones that show us our errors - much like in physics you test any theory by attacking it on all sides all the time).

Take Care All !

Philip Arickx - //mailto:[e-mail]