[Off-Topic] If You Need "Validation," You're Probably Wrong

April 20, 2016 · 💬 Join the Discussion

If you're lazy, click here for the TL;DR

TL;DR: this is one of my famous Off-Topic posts, so it’s long! Skip straight to the conclusion to see where I’m going. But please don’t criticize before reading the whole thing, it’ll be more productive.

In times when everyone seems to have an active opinion on certain subjects, I prefer not to actively voice any, neither for nor against. Both sides are absolutely sure they’re right, it’s a zero-sum game, and I hate zero-sum games.

If I have an opinion and force it on people, many will agree and buy my point of view. Plenty of others will hatefully disagree and try to discredit the idea or its author. And the main thing: we all only stand to lose if we enter this kind of Manichean view.

Does this mean staying “on the fence”? Not that either. One thing I’ve had for years on my Quora profile is this:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

So, before continuing, I sincerely ask that you think for yourself, not for others, much less for me, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

That said, I want to start with a small example, of microscopic magnitude next to today’s big questions.

“Welcome”

On July 7, 2016, at 1:52:39, it will be 10 years since I started publishing posts dedicated to the tech community, particularly to Ruby on Rails. I chose my words carefully and said the following:

Let’s see how far this community can go.

Ruby on Rails could be a lot or nothing, it’ll all depend on how the market faces this novelty. But a lot can be done now. To start with, by learning about the subject.

I’ll post the main topics about the platform here and I hope everyone collaborates with ideas and suggestions or even criticism and opinions.

Unfortunately there are still many challenges to overcome. To start, Rails materials in Portuguese are virtually nonexistent. Brazilian sites likewise. So when I say “starting from zero,” I mean it.

The biggest challenge will be convincing the market. And that doesn’t happen overnight. It means it still won’t be possible to set the Java legacy entirely aside. Let’s start a transition period in which we’ll try both things in parallel.

Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.

My Principles

If you’ve never read my Off-Topic posts, let’s make it clear: I’m not altruistic, in the literal sense of the word, not in the wrong way it usually gets interpreted. Nothing I’ve done up to today was purely for some kind of “greater good” ideology.

My objective is simple: I just want the right to produce, on my own terms.

Along the way, what I do leaves side effects, and one of them is helping others. Today I have a small company called Codeminer 42 that employs more than 60 people. People with families, who find there their livelihood and their own self-improvement, through the results my friends and I seek and achieve together. That’s a direct side effect.

I organize Rubyconf Brazil, and have for 9 years alongside Locaweb. Speakers, sponsors, Locaweb, and me have an annual meeting point where companies meet new people to hire, professionals find their next job, and entrepreneurs come together to test ideas. It’s over 1,200 attendees every year with a chance to produce something. That’s an indirect side effect.

A group like Ruby on Rails Brazil on Facebook, which I didn’t create, has more than 8,500 participants exchanging ideas, learnings, and experiences.

The foundation of all this is the open source world: the biggest capitalist experiment in software and a living example of what a Laissez-faire Free Market is. It’s the best place to maintain and improve technology commodities.

Companies invest time and money hiring programmers to maintain open projects. Not because they’re “nice,” whatever they say, but because these technologies bring direct and indirect benefits to their businesses.

On their own, they’d have to invest far more than by dividing the problem among dozens of other companies so everyone profits together. It’s the ideal platform for an individual to demonstrate their abilities to the world, sharpen them, and look for new opportunities. And it’s one of the most brutal and aggressive environments there is, which is exactly what makes it good, for learning to deal with pressure, communication, and creative technical solutions, precisely because resources are finite.

Everyone profits, and not always in money: some with new learning, others with new opportunities. Even the person whose profit is the pure satisfaction of helping is making a fair trade, of what they know how to produce for the reward of a clearer conscience. After all, nobody helps people they dislike, and that would be real altruism.

What I Did NOT Do, and Do NOT Do

When I started this journey, and remember I wasn’t the first, I always sought to do things for my own benefit, knowing it could benefit other people too. With mutual benefits, everyone moves faster and better. My proposition was never a promise of material or moral reward, only the promise of working on what you love.

If it had been purely for morality or ideology, it would never have worked. And if it somehow had, it would be fragile, because it would sit on the wrong foundation.

If I had truly believed that “Ruby on Rails is the only best technology,” I would have forced that view on others. Many would have believed it. Worse: we’d have to assume the other technologies are bad and fight them, ignoring the evidence. The result would have been disastrous.

I always knew Rails is good in certain cases, particularly in the startup market that was growing from 2004 onward. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service. A lot of people thought like me, independently, and from there gems like Github were born, the largest free software market ever created.

If I had assumed my way was right and everyone else’s automatically wrong, I would have gotten frustrated and failed bitterly. My natural thought would have been:

“Why don’t these people follow me if my path is certainly the right one?”

I never tried to convince anyone that my point of view is correct “for the good” of something, or “because it’s free software,” or “because it serves some political vision.” I always evangelized by teaching how to profit.

In a niche with the characteristics of Rails, professionals of rare quality accumulated. Every new programmer had those pioneers as “role models.” Every Rubyist aimed for quality first. And the new generation of startups showed how to make profitable products without the open faucet of insane investors like in 2000. That was 37signals’ pitch in 2005: everyone wanted to build the next Basecamp. And they did, from Engine Yard to Heroku, Github, Pivotal Labs, Living Social, Shopify, Twitter, Groupon, Zendesk, Hulu, Square, Airbnb, and Soundcloud.

Does it matter that they aren’t 100% pure Ruby? Of course not. Nobody is defending an extremist, religious view, this isn’t the “Cult of Ruby.” Rails is a means to an end, never the end. Whoever adopted Rails wanted to filter the best programmers, because you had to really love the craft of programming to learn Rails in 2006. They also wanted quality of life in the daily routine, because the principles behind the design of Ruby and Rails created a unique view of how to make software. Nobody chose Rails the way you pick a soccer team or a political party. Everyone who chose it was after some gain for themselves and, thinking that way, built a gigantic ecosystem that ended up benefiting many more people.

What I didn’t do? I made no promises, gave no certificates, guaranteed no positions, promised no “bright future,” and put no political vision into the community. Maybe the only promise was a lot of work ahead and opportunities to produce. Reread the last paragraph of my first post:

“Pioneers always walk through arduous territory, but the reward for the first ones is also always greater. That’s the meaning of investment.”

That’s the spirit of an entrepreneur: risking what they own, not what others have.

It’s intentional: from the beginning I rarely speak at the events I organize myself. And from the beginning there are other technologies on display at a Ruby event (we had Node.js talks back in 2009, before JavaScript events existed). That’s why “Ruby"conf has tracks for several other rising technologies: because we only stand to profit from it.

It’s my way of producing on my own terms, with what I love.

The “Ruby way” doesn’t convince others that using Ruby is the only path. It shows that walking the harder path, the one of quality and of caring about what you do, probably brings better results. It’s what an entrepreneur does: takes calculated risks and works brutally for themselves. It’s what an artist does, always different from the common.

The path of an entrepreneur, an artist, someone who produces, is necessarily individualistic. Because it goes against the status quo, against what’s considered “right” today, against what’s “commonly accepted” by a “majority.”

“Insanity is wanting different results doing the same thing over and over.” - Albert Einstein

We’ll always be stoned for it. But it’s precisely the people who choose the different path that everyone tries to stop, and it’s they who brought us the great achievements of humanity. One of the things that made me see this right away came from the creator of Rails, the still controversial David Heinemeier Hansson, someone I agree and disagree with on several fronts, when he cited early in the community:

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.” - Mahatma Gandhi

It’s a sin to even imagine that it isn’t the Sun that revolves around the Earth. It took the individualistic and absolutely “selfish” vision of a “Galileo vs Inquisition” to open the way to today, when we’ve not only already gone to the Moon but are getting exceptionally good at sending machinery into space.

A Nazi Nation

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi

There’s a term for those who think in absolutes in the real world: extremist terrorists. Being extremist, by itself, does no harm. The problem is forcing the extreme view on others, the terrorist’s turf, and that’s what leads to the dark side of the Force.

A terrorist is dangerous because they believe, absolutely, that they’re right.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” - Alfred, The Dark Knight

That’s why you don’t negotiate with a terrorist. It’s impossible, you’ll always lose.

And the worst part is that the dark side of the Force seduces, because it easily disguises itself as something “good”:

“Don’t lecture me, Obi-Wan! I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security … to my new Empire!” - Anakin Skywalker, Episode III

It isn’t hard to understand how people emerged who are so unequivocally recognized as “evil.” Collectivists and extremists like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring.

But they’re just a few people. The main question is much harder: how do you convince an entire Nation, like the German people, to accept and act in favor of the ideology of a party like the National Socialist one, to the point of the genocide of 11 million people in the Holocaust!?

There are many theories for what happened during World War II, and it’s a delicate topic to this day. I have a small personal theory, with no support in evidence, hence this ‘disclaimer’:

Many must have committed those acts with purely evil intent. Even so, it’s hard to believe that in a short span of time, thousands of Germans automatically turned into agents of Evil.

At that time, Germany carried the post-WWI humiliation and an economy in tatters after the Great Depression of 1929. In that context, a populist political ideology, in the name of the social good of the nation, gained strength through the National Socialist Party. The idea of the “Third Reich” seduced by bringing back the hope of a bright future, that of a “New Germany.”

And they found someone to really hate, in this case the Jews. The anti-Semitic idea gained traction in the populist speech.

In the name of the “bright future of the New Germany,” the path could reach all the way to the extreme of the Holocaust. And even so, how is that justified?

If you don’t know Stanley Milgram’s psychological theories, I recommend watching the film The Experimenter (2015) to understand.

In short, Milgram’s Authority Experiment, repeated countless times over the years, shows it isn’t as hard as common sense imagines to make a group of people do the wrong thing, even while aware of it, in the name of a “greater good.”

I’m being simplistic in the explanation, of course, but it’s worth keeping this in mind: most people react with herd behavior.

It’s close to the Law of Least Effort: after all, why spend time researching whether something is “right” or “wrong” when it’s much easier to follow what the “majority” thinks is right?

“A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing”

The most dangerous thing of all is rarely complete ignorance. It’s “a little knowledge,” as the great poet Alexander Pope warned us.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.” - Alexander Pope

One of the things I like to write about is precisely this warning: we don’t know everything, we’ll never know everything, and everything we know may be wrong. If you live with this always in mind, you’ll be safe.

The Root of All Evil, the Enemies of Reason, is what I’ve been pointing at for a long time: “religious” thinking.

And I don’t say that to attack others’ religions. The “religion” I refer to isn’t only Christianity, Judaism, Shintoism. It’s worse, it’s the Religion of Little Knowledge.

We see examples of this every day, just read the news:

Just search for “death” in the news and a good part of it is the result of ignorance or, worse, of people’s “little knowledge.” This won’t solve itself, but we’ve already solved thousands of these problems. The 20th century onward was a great advance in eliminating prejudices, outdated knowledge, and the general ignorance of the global population.

The problem is that none of these people have any doubt. They’re all sure they’re right and that they’re doing the morally correct thing, given the little they know.

The consequence is dogmatization. And a dogma is unquestionable. Do you follow an unquestionable script? Then you’ve probably already been dogmatized. Nobody likes being proven wrong, even less after believing a lie with great dedication for a long time, because it becomes part of their identity. And who wants to see their own identity broken?

Black Swans and the Antidote of Little Knowledge

Finally we get to the point. How do you solve the world’s problems?

With “scientific philosophy.” And you don’t need to be a scientist to think this way.

The world is unfair, that’s a fact. It’s impossible to solve everyone’s problem all at once. But you can solve one problem at a time, over time. Sorry to the impatient.

I think it starts with something simple: critical reasoning that doesn’t lean on simple induction.

For me, Karl Popper taught me one of the most valuable things in my way of thinking. I don’t look for false-gurus, false-experts, false-leaders, false-heroes, or false-icons.

I don’t need anyone with “authority” to tell me what’s right. And I don’t need the consensus of some “majority” to validate my actions either.

When someone advocates an “inviolable affirmation,” “the” right way, whether by tradition, by scriptures, by the will of an abstract and amorphous entity like “society” or “the people,” or worse, by “inviolable proofs,” I know I’m looking at a false prophet.

The explanation for becoming incorruptible is simple. Let me use the classic example:

“Imagine that all the swans in the world are white.”

Let’s say your statement comes from the fact that in the 40 years you’ve lived, you, your family, and your friends only saw white swans with your own eyes. Your natural and “logical” conclusion, by “induction,” is to extrapolate to a general, absolute law: “all the swans in the world are white.”

That comes from your little knowledge. It doesn’t matter if it’s been 40 years. It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen 1,000 swans in your life, all white.

You clearly never traveled to Australia or New Zealand, where you’d find the black variety.

By your “little knowledge,” you reached a wrong conclusion. And, worse, you extrapolated and uttered that statement to others, who now think like you. The responsibility is yours.

“I know vaccines are bad because I heard cases of several children who were vaccinated and died, so I’ll never vaccinate my children.”

“I know medicines don’t work but homeopathy works, because my aunts have been using it for years and never had health problems, so I’ll never use medicines.”

“I know capitalism is something for evil people, because I knew businessmen in my city who exploited my friends and neighbors, so the capitalist system has to fall.”

“I know socialism works, because my friends who visited Cuba were very impressed with what they heard about the hospitals there, and so I think it should be used everywhere.”

You do this every day: you see news with a catchy headline, see dozens of “Likes,” agree that it’s right, and still share it with more people, spreading lies.

“A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.” - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

The problem is the “search for the truth.” Apart from mathematical theorems, you can rarely show the correct proof of anything. Often we resort to the reverse, showing something is incorrect. No amount of evidence proves a theory as absolute truth. The most we can do is “disprove” a theory, and for that a single piece of evidence that refutes it is enough.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And I’ll add: not even with extraordinary evidence can we claim the discovery of an “absolute truth.” We can only say we have knowledge solid enough to use, and that can be disproven at any moment.

It’s worth keeping this concept in mind, because it makes us stronger against rumors, pseudo-science, superstitions, “common sayings,” outdated tradition, and every kind of false “truth.”

Any theory that offers no clear ways to disprove it is a weak theory and certainly isn’t scientific. Any statement that depends on a divinity impossible to prove, on an inviolable “morality,” or on an “unquestionable” authority is pseudo-science and is wrong.

The Gray Morality of “Social Justice Warriors”

This is a topic I avoid getting involved in as much as possible, because this generation of so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) is particularly perverse. Not all of them! Just a small, very influential minority. True wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Disclaimer: do I consider those who fight for social causes perverse? NO. There are several legitimate social initiatives, with excellent results and with people genuinely committed to solving a legitimate problem. I wish only good things for them. Here I’m talking only about those who devalue them. The objective of this section is to separate the real from the illegitimate.

I’m not against social causes, and most civilized people aren’t either. There’s a lot to do to keep improving the world. And in the last century we improved it in extraordinary ways, even more so compared to the centuries before the 20th.

Contrary to what many say, and something I’ve been repeating since 2013: “The World Today Is Better”. Believe the world is getting worse and you’ll start justifying perverse acts as morally correct.

The credit goes to the continuous progress of people who “produce,” not to specific events and movements. And stealing goes beyond taking a material good from someone. You can steal much more than that: a person’s time, morality, mind, and freedom.

Theft of freedom is Slavery.

Until the 19th century everyone had to work hard just to secure their basic livelihood. Today we have a huge surplus, because we discovered more efficient ways and applied them for individual purposes. That ended up helping far beyond the individual who created them. The steam engine, electricity, agriculture, medicine, all creations of selfish people whose only objective is to produce, made the world orders of magnitude better. No social revolution in history can claim the same results.

Do you care about reducing poverty? Milton Friedman already explained why the Free Market is better for the poor.

There are only 3 basic freedoms that really matter:

the right to freedom of expression;
the right to produce and keep for oneself what one produces via voluntary trades, without theft or slavery;
the right to seek and achieve one’s own goals, without obligation to serve the will of others.

A “selfish” productive individual has a single objective, to produce, to create. Never to steal.

No one has the right to restrict the freedom of another person by forcing their own gray morality, their own agenda, and their own objectives, except by the means of “voluntary trades.” No gray morality has the right to justify the immorality of enslaving an individual, for any objective whatsoever.

And here’s the problem: the false social justice warrior has a single objective, to be a social justice warrior, to have the acceptance and validation of others. For that, they need someone else’s suffering to exist, anyone’s, to justify their existence and their identity. Ending the suffering is not their objective. If one form of suffering ends, soon another will be needed to raise a cause, and that’s the vicious cycle. Their objective is to feed off others’ suffering, to enslave that suffering to the validation of their own identity.

A producer, a creator, isn’t always interested in “causes,” and that’s certainly no rule. Whatever their motives, they want to create, and that’s enough. For the false warrior, that isn’t enough: they need to take from those who produce for the benefit of some “cause.” The warrior wants to take what you have, and not what they themselves have, because they don’t produce, in the name of some gray morality. And only for the causes that interest them. It’s the old and eternal fight between those who produce and those who take, the gray morality of Robin Hood.

It’s a shame, because it devalues those who genuinely dedicate their lives to social causes. Doctors, firefighters, police, soldiers, and the many anonymous people who don’t spend their time posting on social media, judging others and stirring up discord, but who work silently, expecting no public recognition.

Want to tell a real social warrior from the social parasites? Look for the absence of any pursuit of recognition.

Conclusion

The objective of this long article? Just to lay out universal concepts and my personal principles, which are inviolable and incorruptible. The main points:

The only really moral thing is voluntary trades. Never forcing the slavery, physical or moral, of any individual.
There is no “truth” decreed by a group or a majority. There are ideas, some valid, others invalid. But if they aren’t falsifiable, refutable, they’re probably false by premise, no matter the apparent morality they represent or the amount of “evidence” they gather.
There is no “moral authority,” that’s the realm of charlatans. Doubt anyone who forces your property (your action is your property, your freedom is your property) in the name of any “cause,” no matter how just it seems. Don’t look for heroes.
The only thing that took us out of the Middle Ages and launched us into modernity was the minds that produced for their own benefit, without unilaterally demanding the taking of anyone’s property, material or mental.

Look at the 20th century and compare it to the 19th and earlier. No one explained this better than Hans Rosling, of Gapminder:

Don’t become a victim of the minority of false social justice warriors. Learn more about this dangerous Orwellian group, nothing less than the “Thought Police” prophesied in the despotic universe of 1984. This kind of thinking is nothing new, it existed throughout the 20th century, but the advent of the Internet and above all Social Networks created a wild environment where rumors, fake news, and pseudo-science in general reign. It’s where Critical Rationalism can save you.

Inviolable and incorruptible principles are simple. In the axiomatic world of mathematics, 2 + 2 is 4, and there’s no “majority” or group that, by clamor or vote, can change that result to 5 or 6, no matter the morality or authority of whoever makes the clamor. You don’t need validation! You do need to take responsibility for your own actions and stop justifying your mistakes as the result of following someone else’s gray morality.

Repeating:

“I never live for the sake of another person and I never ask anyone to live for the sake of mine. I only accept voluntary trade for mutual benefit.”

And with this principle we’ll keep evolving the 21st century as we did the 20th, no matter who tries to steal from us, whether you agree with this exposition or not.

We’re already doing it.