Howard Reed | Software engineering is the new theology

The contest for the most arcane discipline is not likely to be resolved anytime soon but the one that is merely avoiding the title by sheer number of adherents – software engineering¹ – is indirectly pursuing a more consequential contest.

This here is to argue that the parallels between programmers and the priesthood² are becoming increasingly obvious. Let us review in order of trivialness:

• ‘Computer says no’ is now a cliche³ but the seeming arbitrary nature of how to negotiate some user interfaces requires levels of knowledge as meandering as Leviticus
• Hackers know – like all good Jesuits – that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission
• Filling out a web form increasingly demands enough information to seem like confession, and then submitting requires one to recite the incantation “I am not a robot”⁴
• There is a very thin ray of light between dogma and data validation – but the latter can be enforced far more effectively. No need for an inquisition when your expression will never be accepted in the first place
• Production and adherence to voguish concepts and terms of art at a rate that would make an economist blush – often to the detriment of the end user who has no understanding of Latin statelessness
• A class whose status has confirmed on them the ability to get away with far more than the parishioners would, and then be canonised for it – be it Uber willfully ignoring the law in the quest for growth or a profusion of AI startups with complete disdain for copyright⁵ – just call it a crusade disruption

Finally however – software engineering may do in practice what theology could only every do in theory. With the internet connecting a ubiquitous array of sensors bordering on omniscience, whose data is fed into a great intelligence that may with time become all powerful. The new priesthood will bring forth a new God.

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Critique accepted until responses are longer than 10 words (see the ReadMe).

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1. Welcome to the footnotes; here there will be a number of trite asides. Is it truly an engineering discipline? Especially the way in which Margaret Hamilton may have defined it? The AGC presented a far more challenging optimisation problem as it imposed many technical constraints on its designers, far more than the average modern programmer has to suffer. ↩︎
2. Always alliterate. ↩︎
3. It has been two decades in fact. ↩︎
4. One erroneously selected ‘not motorbike’ square away from being denied entry – your soul considered unworthy ↩︎
5. Something something glass houses ↩︎

Howard Reed | How to elect a President

It has been near to twenty-four years since the closest Presidential election in American history – one eventually decided by someone called Chad from memory – and in the meantime no particular tending to the clunking machine of American democracy has been attempted. At least however their system lends some air of stability. In the same intervening period in Australia our governing parties have managed to replace more Prime Ministers and their cabinets in the party room than the electorate at large has at elections.

The system for selection of an executive for the governing of the country is as varied as the countries themselves and fraught with peculiarities that lead to occasional incompetence. To simplify this variance into a simple spectrum for the purposes of a short and ill-informed essay, at one end the American model with a ‘popularly elected’ leader with the power to appoint a cabinet solely at their discretion or the Westminster model with an unelected leader forced to appoint a cabinet from a relatively shallow pool of candidates. Only a cursory review of the executives produced on both sides of the Pacific in the last two decades will prompt one to consider the effectiveness of either selection mechanism.

Ignoring that electoral systems are not ‘designed’ so much as ‘evolved’, I propose a novel system that in this example I will apply to the problem of selecting a President but can be readily adapted to any situation where a large group of people need to select one person – from local parliamentary representatives to the poor technician who has to enter the damaged reactor to shut it down. It combines the inherent strength of the American system in forming a competent cabinet but adapts the electoral college to be more representative and presenting different barriers through which the eventual winner must pass.

The selection process proceeds along these basic lines:

1. 5 eligible voters attend a meeting and nominate a representative form amongst their number
2. That representative attends the next meeting with 4 other representatives nominated at similar meetings, and they nominate a representative at that round in a similar fashion
3. The process iterates until there is less than ten people. At this point, the whole group nominates a leader

For a voting population of in America’s case of 250 million would require approximately 12 rounds to arrive at a result (if my memory of logarithms is correct). Each round being scheduled at a leisurely once a week would still mean the process is over and done in less than a third of the time of the current Presidential primary calendar.

Some caveats:

• Voting by all eligible citizens in the initial round is compulsory – this isn’t a stretch for Australians, five people is enough for a barbecue anyway so still good chance of democracy sausage and if your interest in politics doesn’t exceed this low threshold just ensure that you don’t get nominated
• The selected candidate selects their cabinet in the fashion that is done in the US – this is just a better system of selecting an executive for a country
• You cannot vote for yourself in any round – in the event that two people have the ambition to go forward to the next round the other three decide who it is. When there is three, one will be eliminated in the first vote and then will have the casting vote in the second.

As for the technical process, I believe that the collection of tokens from the other attendees by the nominated candidates at each round would suffice to ensure the validity of each stage. These could be mailed out to each eligible citizen by the electoral commission, even just a QR code that combines the electoral details of the citizen, a passcode known only to them and a ‘salt’ string known to the electoral commission combined as a hash. The winning candidate would then register these tokens with the commission.

In the event that a particular meeting of 5 people were unable to come to a conclusion, they could disband their group and reform groups using other members from meetings in a similar situation. In the event that a group of five cannot be formed as the number of electors in that round is not divisible by 5 then a smaller group would be permitted.

By providing multiple separate stages for the candidate to demonstrate their suitability for the job often to those antagonistic to their case particularly in later rounds, the eventual President would have had to demonstrate many qualities of leadership – adept negotiator, effective communicator and competent manager. By having 12 rounds, the average citizen can also modulate their direct involvement in the electoral process rather than being forced to choose between donkey voting, reluctant numbering or joining a political party.

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As responses to date have all been on the abbreviated end of the spectrum, critique on this post will be left open until there’s actually some site traffic.