Technical Irrationality at the Millennium

by John Martellaro

August 25th, 1999

"It is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions."

-- Thomas Jefferson (to James Madison) 1786

I'm going to talk about technical irrationality, the Macintosh, Microsoft and ... the Kansas State Board of Education. Believe it or not, it all fits together.

A Tornado in Kansas

The Denver Rocky Mountain News, Aug 24, 1999, page 2A wrote: "The Kansas Board of Education's decision to remove evolution from the state's science curriculum underscores that the evolution vs. creation debate has not abated and may eventually be intensifying."

Go back and read that again. I'll wait...

So now it's dawning on you. It's not a school district. It's not the city of Wichita. It's the entire state of Kansas that has banned the theory of evolution from their science books and teachings. After you calm down, and you may never calm down about this, you can quietly ask me: "What does this have to do with the Macintosh?"

You knew it was coming. The answer is, of course, everything.

Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, one a scientist and the other an engineer, both wrote science fiction for decades. One of their enduring themes was that science and technology would go so far beyond the average person that anti-science and anti-intellectualism would sweep through our society in the near future. Well, the future has arrived, and it came a lot sooner than we thought.

It isn't enough that we have lunatics taking all their money out of the bank and buying a year's supply of food in anticipation of a Y2K global crisis. Nope. Now we have the Kansas Board of Education simply ignoring 200 years of Western science on the basis of what? Another "alternative" theory that has no foundation at all, that's what.

I cannot speak nearly as eloquently as Stephen Jay Gould, professor of Geology at Harvard, in this week's Time Magazine, Aug 23, page 59. You should just go read his column about the situation because he has laid out a most eloquent and rational argument for teaching evolution.

What I'm going to do here is fill in some of the blanks and put it in a different perspective for all of us Macintosh enthusiasts. (You will note that I never say Macintosh fan, for fan is the shortened version of fanatic. Nope. We are enthusiasts.)

The Citizen's Responsibility

When I talk to colleagues, like I did at a recent Pro Session at Mac World New York, about interacting with IT managers who are trying to expunge all the Macintoshes, I tell them they have basically three choices.

1. Seek employment at smaller company that is a genuine learning organization.

2. Seek power and get enough control to stall the process.

3. Focus on the diversity issue. Different tasks need different tools. It is the IT department's responsibility to integrate, not segregate.

In the context of Kansas and science education, your choice now may very well be to move to another state where the state's education officials are better educated. If you think I am grasping at straws regarding the education of these people, here is a quote from the Rocky Mountain News article (that I quoted above) regarding a statement by Alabama Board of Education member Stephanie Bell:

"If you essentially tell children that they are evolved from monkeys, then you shouldn't be surprised when they act like monkeys."

I suspect that 99% of you out there will recognize that 1) Homo sapiens did not descend from monkeys and 2) it requires an astounding amount of arrogance plus ignorance to make such a statement.

Analogous to the world of IT managers, the second option is to seek power. I know this is, in many cases, something that technical people are loathe to do. But when Fred Giuffrida at Paladin Software saw his own school board frittering away his daughter's education, he stopped writing for MacKido and sought election on his own local school board.

For those of you who have spent a lifetime observing the perils of power corrupted, you may find it within yourself to seek the just use of power to protect what you care about.

Finally, regarding the focus on diversity, it seems particularly odd that school board members, of all people, would ban a respected view regarding the arrival of human beings on this planet. What's even more odd is that the anti-evolution proponents claim that since no one was present to observe the creation of humans, evolution theory can't be proven. But they don't seem to be able to either prove their own theory or disprove the scientific evidence -- if only they understood enough of either to even try.

In the IT arena, we find similar astounding feats of intellectual achievement.

"We don't buy Macintoshes because they have too low a market share."

"Supporting a single system will save us money."

I predict that in the case of Kansas, many well known universities will soon announce that they will no longer accept applications from Kansas high school seniors. You can bet that I will certainly let my Alma Mater, Indiana University, know my feelings.

The New Millennium...Ahem

It certainly appears that we have worked ourselves into a situation where, in several diverse fields, technical people have abrogated their responsibility to either seize and exercise the just use of power -- or throw the bastards out. In the case of Kansas, if residents of that state do not relieve the State School Board members of their duties, then educated citizens will flee the state, leaving it to become one giant corn field. (Some of you might suspect it is already essentially that. Of course, I would never say it.)

In the case of the IT managers, they are overwhelmed by the technology level. and rate of change. They can't possibly keep up, and they have sought the eternal dream of simplicity and control -- a pipe dream today. To that end, they try to destroy diversity and universality in the hopes that they can eventually get a grip. In the meantime, those whom they pretend to serve are in fact enslaved.

The Rocky Mountain News article closed with this quote from a group investigating the constitutionality of the Kansas decision. "Here we are at the turn of the new millennium* and we are fighting an issue we thought we had settled in the Scopes Monkey Trial."

I'll leave you with this thought. Microsoft has roughly 90% market share. But Unix and Macintosh systems do not generally have the Y2K compliance problems that Windows systems have. Hence, we are virtually guaranteed that, aside from the COBOL/Mainframe systems, nearly 100% of the Y2K problems that affect us will be the responsibility of ... the Microsoft Corporation.

In a calm, rational, scientifically oriented management environment, the tendency would be to understand the Herculean efforts and billions of dollars that were poured into averting Y2K problems, roll with the punches, and make fixes ASAP. But we have gotten ourselves into a climate where decision makers in business and education are both overwhelmed and under educated. With possibly thousands of small businesses and schools finding their viability threatened, how do you think their decision makers will react? Will they all just shrug and claim that Microsoft did the best they could? Will they just kick back and sigh, claiming that Microsoft, creator of the non-Y2K-compliant Windows 95, published a mere five years before the drop-dead day, is innocent?

In America, these days, when there is a big problem, we look for The Big Bad Cause. It may well be that our over indulgence in technical irrationality will light up a big ugly bonfire -- one hungry for a witch -- and Microsoft will feel the heat in ways they never imagined. None of us is going like that.

And if you live in Kansas and find yourself with your children's science education threatened and your Macintoshes at work forcibly replaced with NT systems, then you might want to think about making some time to exercise some just and disciplined adult authority.

Before it's too late.