Many years ago, when I was a child, most treats were denominated in quarters, and a pack of gum cost only one. Then, a few years later, it cost 30 cents. This was when the world changed, when buying a treat became more expensive and more complicated. More fishing for loose change in the pockets, more adding and subtracting. It was the early 21st century and, despite avoiding Y2K, many things were going wrong, like Enron, 9/11, the dot-com bubble, Robert Hanson, Afghanistan, Iraq, and gum costing a nickel more.

The first quarter of this century is over, and the next five years are shaping up to be very eventful. This newsletter, to my chagrin, has not been very eventful, and I aim to change that. There is no deficit of material and drafts and ideas, but there is a surplus of caution and self-criticism.

On average, I write 10.23 paragraphs per day, and that average used to hover at 16. It is no surprise that all the pieces on this site range from 5 to 17 paragraphs — with the exception of the very first one, which weighs nearly 60. I could have published one piece every single day if I wanted to.

Know this, my hypothetical reader, I am silent because I care, and I care with the depth and conviction of a Japanese swordsmith or an Ottoman kilim weaver. You see, the Japanese warriors believed that their swords housed their souls. The Ottomans believed that their rugs were conduits between their souls and their god. I believe that my words — published and unpublished — contain fragments of my soul, but only the published ones can help our souls meet.

Time, it drips away, and with it so do we. As we drip away, so too do we drift apart. And the writing, it will not slow or reverse the drift — nothing can reverse the drip-drip of time. Each paragraph, each sentence, each word, it accelerates the drip, it accelerates the beating of the heart. The words do not bring us closer, they simply reveal how far apart we are, and, perhaps, the greater the distance the greater the beauty.

I look at some of my older writing, from years ago, and I feel like I am walking through a dusty attic or a rusty junkyard, stopping to look at abandoned once-loved toys and dead machines that once rumbled and breathed fire. Time does its part and the imperfection of my words spreads like vines — a different person wrote them and salvage seems futile. Potsherds and fossils are the unit of currency of the archeologist and paleontologist — detritus and residue are the most perfect things they will see in their practice. I wonder if we write now for the junkyard, for the archeologist, for the odd people who dive through dumpsters.

Even the moon has some of our long-discarded junk still on it, and it still fascinates and inspires people. The words we write will only become less perfect over time, and so, endlessly polishing a piece is a dishonesty against the past.

In fact, the most admired kilims are featured in a book by Christopher Alexander called Foreshadowing a 21st Century Art — they are hundreds of years old, torn, faded, ragged, frayed. Upon a glance, most of us would have mistaken them for junk. Maybe the true test of perfection, is when the inner harmony of something can be seen, in spite of the loose threads and tattered edges.

Plus 1%

This next year, we are going to go for a long meandering walk through the junkyard, because, I suspect, where I see failure or fault, others will see curiosity and inspiration. And even if the junk really is junk, the junkyard is the closest thing we have to a time-machine, and I have always wanted to write a time-travel story.

La esperantigo de mia antaŭa verko .

La fajro brulas, kaj el materio fluas energio. La verkisto skribas, kaj el homa naturo fluas reflektado kaj pensado. La muzikisto ludas, kaj el silento fluas arto. La artisto kreas, kaj el malbela vero fluas belo. Ĉiuj akvoj enfluas la maron.

Benzajten estas la diino de ĉio kio fluas: akvo, lingvo, muziko, arto, amo, saĝeco, lukro, bonŝanco. Ĉiuj fluoj malmergiĝas el tensio inter du aferoj, kaj kompreni la fluon estas kompreni la tension.

Kompreni biologion estas kompreni la tension inter estetika selektado kaj transvivebla selektado. En naturo, du filtriloj filtras populacion, interna estetika (mensa) filtrilo, kaj eksterna transviva (monda) filtrilo. Ĉe tiuj du filtriloj ofte intertensas — certe transvivebla kaj kaŝita besto estas pli bona ol egale transvivebla pava besto. La pavaĵo, tamen, povas plirapidigi disvastigo de taŭgecaj trajtoj — en la pluvarbaro, koloraj plantoj kaj bestoj estas la plej danĝeraj ĉar ili nehavas naturajn predantojn.

Kompreni arton estas kompreni la tension inter la pseŭda kaj la sincera. Konsideru: arto, artisto, aŭtoro, aŭtoritateco, aŭtenteco, artifiko. Estas nehazarda ke la vorto estas artifikisto . Artistoj — tre kiel magiistoj montras kredeblajn ruzojn (aŭ eble verojn, sed arte rearanĝitajn), kaj rekompence ni laŭdas ilin. Ni estis trompitaj kaj ni antaŭe scias, ke ni estos trompitaj kaj ni ĝojegas ankoraŭ. Ni ĝojegas ĉar ĉi tio konsenta trompo, ĝi mistifikas nin. Arto povas neniam esti kruda, aŭ sincera, aŭ aŭtenta — sed ni scias sinceran arton kiam ni vidas ĝin. Ni scias ke arto implicas ŝajnigon sed tio neestas ĉio kio enhavas — alie kial havi apartan vorton por tio. La ŝajnigo devas esti sincera . Arto estas la krudbruliĝa kontraŭdiro inter la pseŭda kaj la sincera. Kio estas arto se ne mensogo kiu provas veraĉon beliĝi?

Kompreni lingvon estas kompreni la tension inter la laŭvorta ^[1] kaj la metafora. Lingvo estas kiel ni komunikas niajn sonĝojn, sed ĝi neestas kiel ni sonĝas. Por sonĝoj, ni bezonas memorojn kaj konceptojn. Ĉiu vorto kaj frazo parolita vokas, de la memorio de la aŭdanto, la laŭvortan signifon de la vorto, kaj la metaforan signifon de la vorto. La luno estas ciela korpo kiu orbitas ĉirkaŭ la tero, sed vidi ĝin per niaj okuloj, estas vidi transformiĝo kaj homlupoj kaj — plej lastatempe — homara pliatingopoviĝo. Ĉiu vorto estas la tensio de la laŭvorta kaj la metafora, la tero kaj la luno, la lando kaj la mapo, la vera daŭo kaj la parolita daŭo. De ĉi tio tensio fluas imago, kaj de imago fluas tutaj homaraj potencialoj.

Kompreni homaron estas kompreni influon kaj kompreni influo estas kompreni la tension inter la subjektiva, abstrakta, estetika kaj la objektiva, konkreta, utila. Same kiel lingvo estas difinita per la tensio inter la metafora kaj la laŭvorta influo estas difinita per la tensio inter la abstrakta kaj la konkreta — en granda parto ĉar la lingvo estas fundamento de kulturo. La kora tensio, estas ke niaj imagoj estas senlime potencialaj, sed realigi tio kio ni imagas estas malfacila (en la plej bona kazo) kaj malebla (en la malplej bona kazo). Sonĝi pri la koloniado de Marso, aŭ la esplorado de la profundmaro estas nur la komenco de la lukto por vivigi la sonĝon . influo estas ĉio kio povas devigi homon lukti por sonĝo. Influo estas potenciala energio, kaj homara lukto estas kineta energio.

Benzajten estas la diino de la influo. Muziko estas la studado de la influo kiu fluas de muzikilo. Literaturo estas la studado de la influo kiu fluas de vortoj. Arto estas la studado de la influo kiu fluas de beleco. Ekonomio estas la studado de la influo kiu fluas de mono.

Vidi la lunon estas vidi la futuron kaj la aliformiĝon. Vidi la sunon estas vidi la fonton de tuta vivo kaj la gutadon de la tempo. Vidi serpenton estas vidi danĝeron kaj renovigadon kaj defenditajn trezorojn kaj malbenitajn donacojn. Vidi arton estas vidi ĉion kio eblas signifi. Vidi brilon de trezoro estas vidi ĉiujn sonĝojn ke povas ĝi realigi.

Realigi sonĝon estas oferi la aliajn.

1. En la Angla, parolantoj kutime ne uzas rektan vorton por signifi "senmetafora", do ili uzas vorton kiu similas "laŭvorta" aŭ "laŭlitera" por metafore signifi la ideon de la "senmetafora"; aliavorte, ili indikas senmetaforajn esprimojn per metafora esprimo! ↩︎

An Esperanto version of this post is now available.

The fire burns, and from matter flows energy. The author writes, and from human nature flows reflection and contemplation. The musician plays, and from silence flows art. The artist creates, and from an ugly truth flows beauty. All waters flow into the ocean.

Benzaiten is the goddess of all that flows: water, language, music, arts, love, wisdom, wealth, fortune. All flows emerge from a tension between two things, and to understand the flow is to understand the tension.

To understand biology is to understand the tension between sexual selection and natural selection. In nature, two filters are applied to a population, an intrinsic aesthetic filter (mate attractiveness), and an extrinsic objective filter (mate survivability). These two filters are often in tension — surely a fit and camouflaged animal is better than an equally fit ostentatious one. The ostentatiousness, however, can accelerate propagation of adaptive traits — in the rain forest, colorful plants and animals are the most dangerous because they have no natural predators.

To understand art is to understand the tension between the fake and the genuine. Confident. Author. Authority. Authentic. It is no coincidence that we call them confidence artists . Artists — much like magicians — show believable lies (or perhaps truth, but artfully rearranged), and in return we praise them. We were deceived, and we know going into it that we are going to be deceived, and we are delighted anyway. We are delighted because this consensual deception, it mystifies us. Art can never be raw, or genuine, or authentic — yet we know genuine art when we see it. We know that art involves pretense, but that is not all there is — otherwise, why have a separate word for it. The pretense must be genuine . Art is the combustible contradiction between the fake and the genuine. What is art, if not a lie, that tries to make ugly truths beautiful?

To understand language is to understand the tension between the literal and the metaphorical. Language is how we communicate our dreams, but it is not how we dream. For dreams, we need memory and concepts. Each word and phrase spoken evokes, from the memory of the listener, the literal meaning of the word, and the metaphorical meaning of the word. The moon is a celestial body that orbits the Earth, yet to see it with our eyes, is to see transformation and werewolves and — most recently — human achievement. Every word is the tension of the literal and the metaphorical, the certain and the uncertain, the earth and the moon, the territory and the map, the true Dao and the spoken Dao. From this tension flows imagination, and from imagination flows all of human potential.

To understand humanity is to understand influence, and to understand influence is to understand the tension between the subjective, abstract, aesthetic and the objective, concrete, utilitarian. Just as language is defined by the tension between the metaphorical and the literal, influence is defined by the tension between the abstract and the concrete — in large part because language is the foundation of culture. The core tension, is that our imaginations are infinitely powerful, but manifesting what we imagine is difficult at best and impossible at worst. To dream of the colonization of mars, or the exploration of the deep sea, is only the beginning of the struggle to bring the dream to life. Influence is anything that can make a human struggle in the service of a dream. Influence is potential energy, and human struggle is kinetic energy.

Benzaiten is the goddess of influence . Music is the study of the influence that flows from an instrument. Literature is the study of influence that flows from words. Art is the study of influence that flows from beauty. Economics is the study of the influence that flows from money.

To see the moon is to see the future and transformation. To see the sun is to see the fountain of all life and all light and the passage of time. To see a serpent is to see danger and renewal and guarded treasures and cursed gifts. To see art is to see everything it can mean. To see the glow of treasure is to see all the dreams it can make real.

To realize a dream is to sacrifice the others.

As asserted in part 1, Esperanto is a transparently thin layer of ice over the ocean of our dreams. The implication, is that other languages are not as thin, and one has to strain more to clearly see the creatures beneath. The truth is, the thickness varies with topography, and the most masterful writers take their readers to where the ice is thinnest. This means that translation between two topographically divergent languages will preserve the meaning of the original but lose the form — a skeleton with the wrong flesh. While we saw a brief example in the previous post, of how the combinatorics of Esperanto give us the flexibility to express almost any thought, I would like to now give you an example of how that flexibility allows one to translate a poem in a very faithful way, preserving both meaning and form — something that translators into English have struggled with for generations.

Ni asertis en la parto 1a, ke Esperanto estas travideble maldika tavolo el glacio sur la maro el niaj sonĝoj. Ni implicis, ke aliaj lingvoj estas pli dikaj ol Esperanton, kaj oni bezonas pli labori pro klare vidi la bestojn sub la glacio. La vero estas, ke la dikeco ŝanĝas kun la topografio, kaj la plej estraj verkistoj gvidas iliajn legistojn al lokoj kie la glacio estas plej maldika. Ĉi tio signifas ke tradukaĵo inter duaj topografiej diverĝaj lingvoj konservos la signifo de la origina verko sed perdos ĝia formo — ostaro kun malĝusta karno. Kvankam ni vidis mallongan ekzemplon en la antaǔa parto, kiel la vorteta kombinaĵo de Esperanto donas al nin la flekseblo por esprimi preskaǔ ia ajna penso, mi volas nun doni al vin ekzemplo pri kiel ĉi tio flekseblo permesas oni ke traduki poemo fidele, konservi kaj signifo kaj formo — tradukistoj en la Angla baraktis por atingi generacie.

We will look at the Finnish national epic , the Kalevala . It is notable because it is written in a language that is not Indo-European (but rather Uralic ), and it is written in an alliterative verse — meaning that it is meant to be sung and that it uses alliteration as a rhyme. Furthermore, this is an epic that influenced the literature of an entire nation (Finland), and inspired an entire genre (Tolkien drew a lot of inspiration from the Kalevala — his constructed language Quenya was inspired by Finnish (which has a dialect named Kven), and his legendarium has analogous dieties, characters, and artifacts). This should discredit the — incorrect and foolish — notion that Esperanto is too Euro-centric to be universal, while also demonstrating that it is flexible enough to express art and precise enough to express meaning.

Ni rigardos la Finna popola eposo , la Kalevala . Ĝi estas rimarkinda ĉar ĝi estas skribanta en lingvo kiu ne estas Hindeǔropa (sed anstataǔ estas Urala ), kaj estas skribanta kun aliteracia verso — kiu signifas ke ĝi estas kreita por kanti kaj ke ĝi uzas aliteracio kiel rimskemo. Plue, ĉi tio eposo influis la literaturo de la Finna popolo, kaj plifervorigis tutan ĝenron (Tolkino ĉerpis multajn ideojn el la Kalevala — lia konstrua lingvo Quenya inspirigis de la Finna lingvo (kiu havas dialekton nomita Kven), kaj lia legendaro havas analogaj dioj, roluloj, kaj artefaktoj). Ĉi tio devus renversi la — malĝusta kaj malsaĝa — ideo ke Esperanto estas tro Eǔrocentra por esti universala lingvo, kaj ankaǔ montri ke ĝi estas fleksebla sufiĉe por esprimi arto kaj precisa sufiĉe por esprimi signifo.

We will look at the Kalevala being sung, at 3 English translations of the first 2 sentences of the kalevala, and at 1 Esperanto translation. The English translations are the 1888 by Crawford, the 1988 by Friberg, and the 1989 by Bosley. The Esperanto translation is the 1985 by Leppakoski.

Ni rigardos la kantadon de la Kalevala, kaj 3 anglan tradukojn de unuaj 2 frazoj de la Kalevala, kaj 1 Esperantan tradukon. La anglaj tradukoj estas la 1888 de Crawford, la 1988 de Friberg, kaj la 1989 de Bosley. La Esperanta traduko estas la 1985 de Leppakoski.

Look at this video of the Kalevala being sung, and keep the rhythm in mind.

Rigardu ĉi tiu video de kantado de la Kalevala, kaj parkeru la ritmo de la versoj.

The first 2 sentences by Friberg.

La unuaj 2 frazoj de Friberg.

I am wanting, I am thinking, to arise and go forth singing, sing my songs and say my sayings, hymns ancestral harmonizing, lore of kindred lyricking. In my mouth, the words are melting, utterances overflowing, to my tongue are hurrying, even against my teeth they burst.

The first 2 sentences by Bosley.

La unuaj 2 frazoj de Bosley.

I have a good mind, take into my head, to start off singing, begin reciting, reeling off a tale of kin, and singing a tale of kind. The words unfreeze in my mouth, and the phrases are tumbling, upon my tongue they scramble, along my teeth they scatter.

The first 2 sentences by Crawford.

La unuaj 2 frazoj de Crawford.

Mastered by desire impulsive, by a mighty inward urging, I am ready now for singing, ready to begin the chanting, of our nation's ancient folk-song, handed down from by-gone ages. In my mouth the words are melting, from my lips the tones are gliding, from my tongue they wish to hasten, when my willing teeth are parted, when my ready mouth is opened, songs of ancient wit and wisdom, hasten from me not unwilling.

The first 2 sentences by Leppakoski.

La unuaj 2 frazoj de Leppakoski.

Menso mia estas ema, cerbo mia certe celas kanti nun, komenci ruli tiujn riĉajn rasajn runojn, kiujn la prapatroj pensis, kreis nia nobla gento. Vortoj en la buŝo bolas, versoj laǔ la lango svarmas, ritmoj interdente rajdas, melodioj moduliĝas.

You will notice that the Esperanto translation makes use of alliterations or near-alliterations. You will also notice that the translator made some inspired choices that enabled alliterations (i.e. vortoj en la buŝo bolas means words in my mouth boil, instead of the more literal and faithful melt or unfreeze). The use of moduliĝas instead of modulas is a bit of a puzzle — both words mean the same thing and alliteration is no better with one instead of the other. It all becomes clear when we try to sing the words (really go try it) according to the video above — the extra syllable "iĝ" is needed to maintain the rhythm. In other words, the Esperanto translator managed to produce a faithful translation of a completely non-Indo-European work, while conserving both the meaning and the form of the original. Far from a skeleton with the wrong flesh — it is a reincarnated body with the right soul.

Vi rimarkos ke la Esperanta traduko uzas aliteracioj kaj preskaǔaj aliteracioj. Vi ankaǔ rimarkos ke la tradukisto sprite elektis vortoj kiuj ebligis aliteraciojn (ekz. vortoj en la buŝo bolas, anstataǔ la pli rekta vortoj en la buŝo fandas). La uzo de vorto "moduliĝas" anstataǔ "modulas" estas enigmeto — ambaǔ vortoj havas saman signifon kaj neniu vortoj pliigas la aliteracion. Ĉio klariĝas kiam ni provas kanti la vortojn (vere provu) laǔ la prealudita video — la plua silabo "iĝ" estas bezona por konservi la ritmo. Aliavorte, la Esperanta tradukisto sukcesigis tre fidela tradukaĵo de tute ne-Hindeǔropa verko, kaj konservis kaj la signifo kaj la formo de la originalo. Malproksime ol ostaro kun malĝusta karno — ĝi estas reenkarniĝa korpo kun la ĝusta animo.

Postlude / Postludo

A helpful redditor has pointed out a mistake. Moduliĝas and modulas are not synonyms — though moduligas and modulas may be (I will investigate) — the former is intrasitive (i.e. to become modulated) and the latter is transitive (i.e. to modulate). Another helpful redditor has directed me to a fascinating analysis of the history of the meter of Esperanto translations of the Kalevala — there has been more than one attempt, contrary to my claim above — and specifically an analysis of the Leppakoski translation.

Helpa redditulo indikis eraro en ĉi tio skribaĵo. Moduliĝi kaj moduli ne samsignifas — kvankam moduligi kaj moduli eble samsignifas (mi esploros) — moduliĝi estas netransitiva (i.e. iĝi modulita) kaj moduli estas transitiva. Alia helpa redditulo direktis min al interesega analizo de la historio de la metro en la Esperantaj tradukoj de la Kalevala — estis pli ol unu provo, kontraǔ mia aserto — kaj specife analizo de la Leppakoski traduko.

Imagination is the ability of the mind's eye to see things that have never been, and that perhaps can never be. It is the ability to dream while awake. Language is the magic by which humanity becomes conscious of itself and becomes one with itself. It is the bridge between people's dreams.

To dream is to stare at the stars, and see our gods and heroes stare back at us. It is to gaze at the moon and see the future. Our dreams and their meaning survive in our mythology, our poetry, our art. And so do our fears and nightmares.

We mythologize the things that transform our lives: earthquakes and hurricanes, volcanoes and conflagrations, storms and oceans, rivers and floods, famine and disease, war and love, birth and death, fire and language. Language is no less a Promethean gift than fire — perhaps more so.

Be amused that the secret of fire was stolen from the gods and shared with humanity by a thief — through the use of language .

Most of our language-myths see our six thousand languages as a curse inflicted upon humanity for some transgression, or as a consequence of a deluge visited upon us in the oldest Babylonian poems because the gods thought us too noisy . But, there is one myth that stands apart. The Kunwinju people believe that a goddess from dreamtime gave each of her children a distinct language to play with. As far as we know, this is the only myth that sees language not as a human invention, and that sees diversity of language not as a divine punishment, but as gifts from the realm of dreams.

Children are meant to dream and to play, eventually they learn to play with fire. Adults are children that have lost their vitality, their inner fire — children that have slowly become overburdened by the relentless gravity of life.

Esperanto is a young language — barely out of infanthood — a growing linguistic fire. The language , not yet caught in the gravitational field of its own history, is light, nearly weightless. Easy to learn, but not simplistic. Regular, but not inflexible.

Like life on this planet, national languages are organisms that have evolved — slowly and haphazardly — in the ecosystem of the collective national mind. And like all life on this planet, their only requirement for existence is to survive and to propagate — they need have neither beauty nor elegance.

Through the single-minded lense of evolution there is no difference between a city of tens of millions of thoughtful, curious, artful human beings, and an ant-hill with hundreds of millions of mindless ants. And just like any species, a national language is as it is — it changes slowly with the death of old generations and the birth of new ones, it moves slowly with waves of history and culture, and any advantages over other languages are the results of lucky draws from the evolutionary deck of cards.

National languages are complex by accident rather than by design, and this makes them difficult to learn and nearly impossible to master, for those unlucky enough to be born outside the community of speakers. All literature is crafted from the linguistic materials that are on hand — all literature is a struggle in translating image and thought into symbol and sound.

Esperanto is crafted from the same fluid substance that we use to make our stories and our math and our poetry. Like any other magnum opus, Esperanto — as an aesthetic work of artful fabrication and imaginative invention — can provoke thought and self reflection, and invigorate the human spirit. Esperanto is a transparently thin layer of ice over the ocean of our dreams.

Let us close with a concrete example. Most thought is metaphor, and good metaphors exhibit symmetry. Some metaphors cannot be expressed directly in a national language like English — they must be translated into a phrase that is consistent with the rules and idioms of English. When writing the previous paragraphs, I had in mind the rootedness and heaviness of national languages, and the weightlessness and freedom of Esperanto. It would not be wrong to compare national languages to great trees, and Esperanto to a soaring bird. Trees are nourished by the earth and shackled to it by their roots, while birds fly using their wings.

To express this difference in character using a short phrase — rather than the three previous sentences — we would say the following in Esperanto: naciaj lingvoj radikas, sed Esperanto flugilas. Because any part of speech can be turned into any other part of speech (i.e. nouns can become verbs can become adjectives can become adverbs etc), we — very directly and effortlessly — translate what is in our mind into a coherent sentence by verbing the essential anatomical aspects of trees and birds. The "root" is radiko, and its present-tense verb-form is radikas (i.e. to-root or to-do-as-roots-do). The "wing" is flugilo, and its present-tense verb-form is flugilas (i.e. to-wing or to-do-as-wings-do). You will notice that in American English "winging" and "rooting" have nothing to do with the gliding of wings or burrowing of roots — things get even more awkward when you realize that the latter means something else in Australian English.

To properly translate this into English you might at first say: national languages have roots, but Esperanto has wings. After a little bit of thought, you might refine the English version into: national languages take root, but Esperanto takes flight.

Postlude

This post is the first part in a series on why someone should learn Esperanto — and this series is also the first series in a set of series about various aspects of Esperanto. If you want to get these in your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter.

Check out second part in the series here .

Recent explorations have taken us to metaphorical lands that we have not seen in fifteen years — maybe longer. The fifteen-year journey began with simple programming (Haskell if such details interest you), which then took a turn into systems programming (C and POSIX) — this was an era before Rust, where the compiler never held your hand and occasionally threw a tantrum — which was followed by a leap into distributed systems (implementing a datacenter control-plane and durable storage using microservices), and we have — in the last year or so — ventured into complex, dynamic systems.

Almost every segment of that journey, you will notice, involved some kind of system . A system is any set of discrete components, whose operation influences the operation of at least one other component, making the system greater than the sum of its parts. The interesting pattern in this journey, hypothetical comrade, is that each successive journey-segment required that less time be spent modifying the system, and more time be spent thinking about the system. This is because modifying the system is either impossible or is otherwise counter-productive — modifying the system under inspection often times changes its behavior, resulting in confusion instead of clarity.

In the first segment, the Haskell programs were largely computationally pure, and perfectly serial — any source of noise or randomness would have to be introduced by the programmer deliberately. In the second segment, there was a great deal more complexity involving memory allocation, and book-keeping around pointers, but the complexity (and headaches) could increase by a significant factor as soon as multiple threads of execution were thrown into the mix — this is where careful thinking and planning began to pay bigger dividends than staring at the output of a debugger. The third segment required a completely new way of thinking, with much more effort being put into understanding the "laws" of distributed systems — the CAP Theorem, monotonicity, set theory, and semi-formal methods like TLA+.

The latest segment has, in a way, taken us full circle. The systems under inspection are — on the one hand — distributed, but are — on the other hand — extremely sensitive to the incentives and actions of masses of anonymous people on the internet. The only way to understand their behavior over longer periods of time, or at larger levels of adoption, is to model them in a purely simulated environment. We are using a system — namely cadCAD from BlockScience — with the neatness and computational purity found in segment one, to understand and reason about the large and messy systems of this latest segment. Put differently, we are using music to understand and reason about noise .

One Red and One Blue

To illustrate how the metaphorical music can help us reason about the metaphorical noise, we are going to use a very simple model representing the acceptance and adoption of two competing sets of technologies — or practices, languages, customs, and so on — by a pool of users. We symbolically designate each of these sets of technologies as "Red" and "Blue". These sets represent a distinct technological continuity . It could represent an entire line of technological products, the technological outputs of two companies, or of two technological traditions. An example of the first continuity would be the ongoing competition between Android and iPhone, an example of the second continuity would be the decade-to-decade outputs of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, and an example of the third continuity would be the transition of Japan Steel Works from samurai-swords, to WW2-era, 46-cm gun-barrels, to modern-era unitary nuclear containment vessels. Lets take a look at a graphical representation of the model.

This is a simple model, with only 9 variables and 12 relationships — variables are shapes and relationships are lines. A square is a stock that represents a finite quantity of any countable entity. A triangle is a flow-rate that regulates the flow of quantities from one stock to another. A circle is an abstract number that can represent any abstract notion numerically. Red arrows and blue arrows represent correlation and anti-correlation, respectively. The correlation-arrows can only point to circles and triangles, but can emanate from any shape.

The first thing to notice about this model, is that there are 2 flows leading from potential-users to blue-users and red-users . This implies that the user-pools can only fill, but can never deplete. This is done for the sake of simplicity. We can think of it as the equivalent of product lock-in — easy to acquire new users, almost impossible to convert existing users. Which is not too far from reality — many people keep their old console or gramaphone around to play the media that only still work on those systems.

The second thing to notice is that each technology-set has a price-performance variable and an attractiveness variable. The price-performance variable represents the perceived performance per unit-price. It is computed via a simple dice-roll, and can have any value from 1 to 16. If you think about it, a lot of things have to go right, in the real world, for favorable price-performance perception — engineering has to be top-notch, marketing and sales have to be persuasive, customer service has to calm angry customers, and so on. The attractiveness variable represents a composition of price-performance and the installed-base of the technology — in many cases, having more users may be more important to future users, than the raw price-performance of the product (i.e. people that choose to speak English, instead of, say, Hungarian or Esperanto, usually make this choice because of who speaks English, rather than how expressive or precise or poetic the language is, in comparison to the others).

What If?

Most of us are familiar with statistical models — models that quantify a sample of observed events, and try to assign probabilities to the future occurrence of events. These models are like black boxes — we understand their behavior only by relating their input-values to their output-values. Black-Box-Models are useful, but they are not as interesting as causal models — models that directly represent causal relations between various internal values. A causal model is like a transparent box — in addition to inputs and outputs we can observe and manipulate the internal mechanisms that translate inputs into outputs. This allows us to ask a wide range of what-if-questions that are only possible at small-scales in a black-box-model (i.e. you cannot empirically ask how much thrust you would need to reach outer space if gravity was five times stronger, because we cannot change the gavitational force of our planet).

The technology-acceptance model has a few knobs — called parameters — that we can turn, in order to ask what-if-questions. These parameters are not visible in the previous graph, but they involve:, adoption-threshold , adoption-sensitivity , skill-multipliers . The adoption-threshold represents the minimum number of users needed for network-effects to start working their magic. The adoption-sensitivity represents how strong the network effects are. The skill-multipliers represent the each team's ability to amplify the value of a dice-roll (i.e. a skill-multiplier of 20% can turn a rolled 5 into a 6).

We want to know, how does the model behave with zero network-effects and with zero skill multipliers, as a base-line, and then we want to see how changes in the parameters change the behavior of the model. Here is a run of this base-line-model.

This run — which does not have network-effects or skill-advantages — is based entirely on the dynamics of how dice-rolls affect flow-rates. If Red rolls a 2 and Blue rolls a 1, then the flow of users in into the red pool, is multiplied by 2, while flow of users into the blue pool is multiplied by 0.5. The best case outcome for a player is to roll a 16, while the opponent rolls a 1 — inflow grows by 16 times for the winning player, while inflow shrinks by the same proportion for the losing player. These sharp changes in adoption-rate are not necessarily unrealistic — consider the likelihood that backwater European nations would adopt and perfect the gunpowder artillery technologies before the East Asian civilizations that had a half-millenium head-start with the technology (the Europeans had walls that were much more vulnerable to cannons than the East Asians, who had perfected the building of walls with rammed-earth construction techniques, making early cannons an expensive and ineffective technology — the European cannon-makers got a good roll).

The practical effect of this is that changes in adoption-rate are usually mild — resulting in stagnation — but sometimes quite dramatic — resulting in temporary exponential growth. This gives the system both momentum and inertia .

What If Talent?

Now lets ask what happens if we allow for skill-multiplication — the ability to turn your luck into slightly better luck. Here is a run that includes skill-multipliers of 1.03 and 1.1 for each of the teams — along with our neutral run in the bottom-right corner.

What we see here is that even a slight, durable advantage of 3% can skew the results in the favor of one team. What effectively happens in the model, is that the team with a 3% or 10% edge, can widen a favorable delta, narrow an unfavorable delta, and turn a tie into a favorable delta. When we reduce the advantage to 2% or less, the results are not so clear-cut — on some runs, some of the graphs looks similar to the neutral bottom-right graph.

All of the runs, by the way, use the same random seed, which means that the only thing that is different from run to run, is the skill-multiplier — all the dice-rolls are the same, roll to roll. The lesson for the players of this kind of game, without network effects, is to invest in and accumulate small advantages, and to beware an opponent that already has an advantage.

What If Network Effects?

Let us take a look at what a run with network-effects (but without skill-multipliers) looks like. Just like last time, the base-line run is in the bottom right corner.

We can see that in every run that involves network effects, the run ends (by empying out the initial pool of one billion potential users) in a fraction of the time that the base-run takes. In half the network-effect-runs, Blue wins, and in the other half Red wins. In the runs with a blue winner, we have a lower adoption-threshold — namely 1000 — and in the runs with a red winner we have a higher one — namely 1000000. The reaching (and crossing) of the threshold is not a binary event — getting closer to the threshold continuously improves your advantage, because we use the following formula as a multiplier: compat-sensitivity^(users/threshold) . If the threshold is 1000 and the sensitivity is 2, a user-base of 600 will give you a multiplier of 1.5. A threshold of 1000000 will give your user-base of 600 a multiplier of 1.0004.

Let us zoom into the first 50 time-steps, to get a better look at those early user numbers. In the base-run Red reaches 1000 before blue, so we would expect Red to win the runs with a threshold of 1000 — but the continuous multiplication helped give Blue the edge and Blue got to 1000 first. In case you are wondering the higher sensitivity value (3 compared to 2), helped Blue reach 1000 users a single timestep before it otherwise would have.

If we zoom in to see how Red won the million-threshold run, we see the following. We can tell the the first run has a higher sensitivity, because Red reached a million users in that run well before it did so in the third run. We also see that, despite not reaching a million users in run three, Red has 3.3 times the number of users than it would have had without network effects, by timestep 87.

The lesson here is that even if you have not attained critical mass, in a system or market with network effects, even a small number of initial users can nudge you towards that tipping-point.

What If Everything?

If we run every possible simulation — of which there are 25 — we see a few interesting things. First of all, network-effects can offset a small skill-advantage of 3% — run 6 is an example where Red had no advantage over Blue. The larger advantage of 10%, however, helps the advantaged player reach critical mass more quickly. Run 11 is like run 6, but Red has a 10% advantage over Blue. One can tell which plots lack network effects by looking at the pink and grey lines — if there are no network effects, the value-range of the lines is the same (i.e. they overlap).

A Dialectical Engine

The dialectical method of reasoning, understanding, and learning has been with us since — at least — the time of Plato. A dialectical engine is any kind of method — be it linguistic or symbolic or anything else — that allows us to expand the scope, and deepen the precision, of the dialectic. In the context of the dialectic, computer-assisted modeling is an engine that allows us to ask questions about our mental models of the external world , and to extract answers — which invariably lead to more questions. Perhaps most importantly, the dialectical mindset allows us to discover contradictions between the model and the reality — which in turn help us understand the limits of the model, and the depth of reality.

Questions of Network Effects

The first question has to do with the runs involving network-effects: is it realistic that the "harnessing" of a network effect by Red or Blue will cause a decisive defeat for the opposite side, and effectively end the game?

We can come up with various examples and counter-examples. We can point out that, even though Netscape got to the Web first, Microsoft's Internet Explorer eventually displaced it, only to lose one third of its market share to Firefox before eventually losing the remaining 66% to Chrome. This seems to contradict the permanent victory that the model predicts.

However, we should point out that in the first phase, Microsoft was able to leverage the existing Windows user-base to achieve critical mass — in effect, the network effect being leveraged was that of the PC .

This also helps explain how Chrome displaced the two dominant browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer. As can be seen in the plot below, the adoption of Chrome closely follows the adoption of Android smartphones.

The only remaining contradiction here is why Firefox was able to take — or regain, if you view Mozilla as a continuation of Netscape — 33% of the market-share from Internet Explorer. We can only speculate that, while Microsoft may have tried to embrace, extend, and extinguish the Web, the existing websites were compatible enough — due to open standards — to allow users to use Firefox with less headaches than would otherwise be possible (i.e. Microsoft had less control over core features and legibility of the HTML format, than it did over the Word Document format). Furthermore, web-page developers and creators are also very influential users, and their presence may have changed the dynamics. In fact, extending the model such that it can approximate the dynamics between writers, readers, and publishers could be more appropriate (Red and Blue are the "publishers" while users would be partitioned into 2 pools of readers and writers).

Since we mentioned Android and iPhone, does the model help explain why Apple — in spite of release the iPhone two years before Android came out — only commands between 14% and 19% of the marketshare between 2012 and 2022?

This is basically a Betamax and VHS scenario. Android consumed 80% of the market for the same reason VHS did — they were both open standards, that allowed any manufacturer with enough interest and money to enter the market. In fact, this model is a better reflection of the rivalry between iPhone and Android, than Betamax and VHS — Betamax was ignored by the consumer market because almost nobody wanted to publish video tapes in that format, whereas Android and iPhone have co-existed for more than a decade. This is due to the model not simulating the loss of existing users. This would suggest that there is some intertia in the real-world smartphone user-base — perhaps Betamax would have survived if they pre-emptively made a large collection of existing popular works available at launch, and if they offered an incrementally more ergonomic user experience.

Questions of Dice Rolls

While network effects may seem self-evident, the use of dice to simulate relative performance may seem questionable. Can we come up with examples that confirm and contradict the dice-roll model?

Even though the histories that we read — even the most recent histories of Silicon Valley — present the events through the lens of individual visions, dreams, plans, and ideas, this does not seem to be an undistorted reflection of what actually happened. Consider, for example, the first Apple computers. While both of the Steves were very clever and motivated people — in their own ways — they were also exceptionally lucky: firstly, they had complementary worldviews and skillsets, and secondly, Wozniak's employer (HP) chose not to claim ownership over the personal-computer concept (even though they had the legal right to do so).

Consider how lucky Microsoft was that they even had the opportunity to trick IBM into an asymmetrically beneficial contract. Consider how unlucky Microsoft was to draw the scrutiny of the federal government, and the resentment of an entire industry. Consider how unlucky both Microsoft and Yahoo were when they chose to arrogantly pass on a bargain-level acquisition of Google.

Most of the industry, in the 1990s, predicted that Apple would never recover and would eventually close its doors — yet here we are. For a more dramatic example, subject-matter experts (and non-experts), predicted — in the 1970s and 1980s — that the Soviet Union was the most stable political entity on the planet, and would last at least another hundred years — they would be proven wrong in a few short decades.

These companies and institutions employ some of the most intelligent people at a very high cost-per-employee — yet no amount of planning prepared them for the most dramatic future developments. It would seem that on a long enough timeline, everything is a dice-roll, and all you can really do is hope for a good roll, and prepare to make the best out of a bad roll.

Consider the Industrial Revolution . Somewhat similar to the gunpowder-artillery example, just as gunpowder was known to the Chinese for half a millenium before it became weaponized, the principle of steam-power was understood by Greeks and Romans for 1.7 millenia before the people of the British Isles started using it to generate motion. And just as the first gunpowder-artillery was very good against the unsophisticated fortifications of Europe, so too did the steam engine prove its utility for pumping water out of coal-mines, creating a demand for it and an incentive to improve it. The luck aspect in both of these circumstances is that the inventions, when enhanced and refined, had unforseeable utility well beyond their initial domains. The people of the British Isles got a very good roll.

The dice-rolls are most beneficial to a team when they roll high, and their opponent rolls low. This suggests that — by the logic of the model — in a competitive situation, it is not enough to be lucky, your opponent also has to be unlucky . In such a narrow, zero-sum game, that 3% or 10% edge could be due to a Team's virtue, or due to a Team's willingeness and ability to sabotage the opponent — the math is the same. If the model only simulated dice (and not network-effects) the following occurrences would be apparent contradictions: open source software, open standards, international academic cooperation, the absence of non-competes in Silicon Valley, and so on. It seems that network-effects — at least partially — explain cooperation.

Strategic Implications

If we take the model at face-value — not that anyone should, it was put together very hastily — what are some strategic lessons that we can derive from it?

If the game has no network-effects, each player should try to give themselves an edge that can soften the blow of a bad roll, and amplify the benefits of a good roll. Even small advantages tend to add up, and can change the result of the game.

If the game has network-effects, try to gain enough users to reach critical mass — this is the trickiest prescription, since we have no clue a-priori what the critical mass threshold even is — if it is extremely high, good luck staying solvent.

If the team fails to harness the network effects, resulting in an irreversable loss of market-share, then the team should probably pivot into a complementary market that can still take advantage of the ongoing exponential growth — instead fighting for a lost cause. Alternatively, the team can try to play a different — but adjacent — game, like Apple did with MP3 players and music in the early 2000s, and smartphones in the late 2000s. This raises an interesting question: what lessons would we draw from an extended model with the same players, playing multiple concurrent (or iterated) games, where success in one game can have cross-over effects in the other games?

Postlude

Just as a sudden burst of intense light can cause blindness in the observer, so too can an explosion of noise cause deafness in the listener. The world is an extremely noisy place, but in that noise, there is a faint, chaotic music, and the players — whether they know it or not — dance to that music. Simulated systems may help us amplify aspects of that tenuously echoing music.

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