[OT] Leverage Points

[Joakim]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 12:26:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 11:55:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> "So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the 
>>>> seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has 
>>>> a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at 
>>>> the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep 
>>>> coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new 
>>>> one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of 
>>>> public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with 
>>>> reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and 
>>>> with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded."
>
> (Quoting from the article I think).
>
> Kuhn and Lakatos.  Paradigm shifts don't take place when the 
> dominant paradigm is defeated by logical or empirical means.  
> Paradigm shifts take place when for some reason people say "how 
> about we stop talking about that, and start talking about this 
> instead".

Not sure why you'd call that anything other than defeat. :)

> I think he described certain political changes in the Western 
> World beginning in the mid to late 60s rather well.  I don't 
> think it describes how changes in the sphere of voluntary 
> (non-political ie market and genuine civil society) activity 
> unfold.  Supposing it were a good idea (which it isn't), how 
> would one be able to to insert people in places of public 
> visibility and power who put forward a point of view that is 
> very different from the prevailing one?  Only via a program of 
> entryism, and I don't think that in the end much good will come 
> of that.

By convincing those with power/visibility that the contrary view 
is worth integrating? Look at Microsoft's about-face on open 
source over a couple decades, going from denigrating it to buying 
open-source producing or supporting companies like Xamarin and 
Github and open-sourcing several of their own projects, as an 
example.

> So I think the original author has cause and effect the wrong 
> way around (not too surprisingly because he is talking about 
> things that relate to politics and activism).  [NB one 
> shouldn't mention the Club of Rome without mentioning what a 
> failure their work was, and it was predictably and indeed 
> predicted to be a failure for the exact same reasons it failed].
>
> It isn't that you insert people representing the new paradigm 
> in positions of influence and power.
>
> It is that people from the emerging new paradigm - which is 
> nothing, a bunch of no-hopers, misfits and losers viewed from a 
> conventional perspective - by virtue of the fact that it has 
> something useful to say and has drawn highly talented people 
> who recognise that start ever so slowly to begin things and 
> eventually to accomplish things - still on the fringes - and 
> over time this snowballs.  After a while turns out that they 
> are no longer on the fringes but right at the centre of things, 
> in part because the centre has moved.
>
> The best illustration of this phenomenon was I think in a work 
> of fiction - Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.  I never expected 
> someone to write a novel based on a mailing list - the 
> cypherpunks.  It was about as surprising to me then as it would 
> be to see Dlang - the movie - today.  And of course that itself 
> was an early indication that the ideas and ways of thinking 
> represented by what was originally quite a small community were 
> on the ascent.

I agree that she's looking at it from the point of view of 
governmental change for her environmental agenda, whereas the 
market is more likely to have entirely new institutions- it used 
be new _companies_, but with the internet it's now increasily 
decentralized operations like the community behind bitcoin or bit 
torrent... or D- form that become much more important than the 
old ones: creative destruction. So, significantly open-source 
Android replaces mostly closed Windows as the dominant OS used by 
most consumers for personal computing, rather than Microsoft 
really getting the new religion much.

>>>> This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about 
>>>> finding principals who can make their own decisions about 
>>>> using D. "Places of public visibility and power" for D are 
>>>> commercial or open-source projects that attract attention 
>>>> for being well done or at least popular.
>
> Well - I understand what you mean, but I don't recognise this 
> as being my point.  Principals who can make their own decisions 
> probably aren't today highly visible and visibly powerful.  The 
> latter comes much later on in the development of a project, 
> movement or scene and if you're visible it's a tax that takes 
> time away from doing real work.  By the time you're on the 
> front cover of Time or The Economist, it's as often as not the 
> beginning of the end - at least for anything vital.

You're misreading what she wrote: she only said that you place 
new people in positions where they have some visibility or power, 
again because of her emphasis on government change, not that you 
convince the already _highly_ visible/powerful to go your way. 
Since the former can be almost anything depending on the context, 
I gave examples of who that might be for D.

>> We're doing both: most of the material on the D blog and my 
>> own D interviews are not with corporate representatives. We 
>> could stand for more of the latter though, especially the big 
>> successes, because people are more influenced by them.
>
> I'm not saying it's a bad thing to go for big stories.  But 
> it's a mistake to place the attention people today naturally 
> tend to.  It doesn't matter what influences most people - it 
> matters what influences the person who is poised on the edge of 
> adopting D more widely, adopting D as a beginning, or would be 
> if they knew of the language.  The latter is quite a different 
> sort, I think.

To know about D in the first place, you might have the sort or 
programmer who's not going to actually use it become aware of it 
and mention it to the guy who would use it but never heard of it. 
In other words, there are different ways of getting to the people 
who would use D: I think this is one of the better ones, but we 
need to use several ways.

One of the best is a track record of successful projects using 
the language.

> Liran at Weka picked up D because he saw Kent Beck post on 
> Twitter about Facebook's Warp written in D (or maybe it was a 
> linter) and it seemed like an answer to a particular problem he 
> had (if I am remembering correctly).  It wasn't because of a 
> grand thing - it was because of a little thing that seemed like 
> it might be a creative solution to a real problem.
>
> Signal:noise is much higher away from the limelight too.  By 
> far better to have a high share of attention in some specific 
> domains or interest groups than to have a low share of 
> attention of some enormous market.

Sure, we need to try several ways to attract attention.

>> Many devs use large corporate deployments as a litmus test of 
>> whether they should explore a new tech. To the extent that 
>> we've never published a blog post about Weka, only offhand 
>> mentions like when Andrei visited Israel, that is a big 
>> marketing failure for D.
>>
>> I know the Weka guys are very busy, but the further success of 
>> D will only help them too, so they're undercutting themselves 
>> by not making sure that blog post gets done.
>
> Well, someone could just take the key insights and experiences 
> from their talks, write them up, check with them and post.  The 
> latter are a considerable commitment already for a startup 
> that's hitting a revenue growth phase.  There are lots of 
> things for them to be busy with beyond just the technology.

Yeah, that could work.

>>>> Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile 
>>>> has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but 
>>>> nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, 
>>>> other than me.
>>>
>>> I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app 
>>> in D, even on Android.  It would be great if there were some 
>>> way to automatically wrap the APIs.
>>
>> Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some 
>> performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android 
>> app. The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with 
>> early adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges.
>
> If we had autowrap for JNI and could dump the types and method 
> prototypes as part of the pre-build process, what would the 
> next stage be to be able to just call Android APIs from D and 
> have them work?  JNI isn't that bad (I know it's deprecated) 
> and I used it already from D in a semi-wrapped way.  So I 
> wonder how much more work it would be to have autowrap for JNI.
>  I didn't use reflection on the Java side because I wasn't 
> wrapping that much code.  Are there XML descriptions of Android 
> APIs you could use to generate wrappers?

No idea, not something I've looked at nor plan to, as I mentioned 
to you in over email recently. I'd like to use mostly D with not 
much Java on Android, so I'm not too worried about the interface 
right now.