openpolitics.com

What prompted me to publish it now – at least the first, relatively finished part – is Steve Yegge’s post, an analogy between the “liberals vs conservatives” debate in politics and some dichotomies in the professional worldviews of software developers. The core of his analogy is risk aversion: conservatives are more risk averse than liberals, both in politics and in software.

I want to draw a similar type of analogy, but from a somewhat different angle. My angle is, in politics, one thing that people view rather differently is the role of markets and competition. Some view them as mostly good and others as mostly evil. This is loosely aligned with the “right” and the “left” (with the caveat that the political right and left are very overloaded terms).

.. I’ll claim that the view of economic evolution is what underlies the Worse Is Better vs The Right Thing opposition – and not the trade-off between design simplicity and other considerations as the essay states.

.. So the essay says one thing, and I’ll show you it really says something else. Seriously, I will.

And then I’ll tell you why it’s important to me, and why – in Yegge’s words – “this conceptual framework became one of the most important tools in my toolkit” (though of course each of us is talking about his own analogy).

Specifically, I came to think that you can be for evolution or against it, and I’m naturally inclined to be against it, and once I got that, I’ve been trying hard to not overdo it.

.. Linus Torvalds thus views competition as a source of progress more important than anyone’s ability to come up with bright ideas. Alan Kay, on the contrary, perceives market constraints as a stumbling blockinsurmountable for the brightest idea.