Explanations

Embrace Change

Listening, testing, coding and refactoring. That’s all there is to software. Anyone who says different is selling something. – Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 1st Ed., 2000

Listening as if crossing thin ice, testing as a boat on dark water, adapting as a stranger to a far shore, simplifying as a melting snowflake … – Lao Tzu, 3,000 years before.

“XP” was a frontal assault on the 20th century Waterfall method in which hierarchies of committees planned, budgeted, and designed software by writing paper specs. Code was written in a phase afterwards by a different group of people, then a third group checked the code did what the first group had written down. No user feedback, no learning loops, no prioritization of constraints.

The results were exponentially expensive, unfit for market, and unprepared for change. Upon release the embarrassed bureaucracy generally demanded urgent fixes on arbitrary deadlines, each more costly than the last as tech-debt grew and grew. Until fixes became so expensive the bureaucrats began a new Waterfall project to replace this one, each leaving a layer of unmaintainable legacy. One on top of the other like Schliemann’s Troy.

XP turned the waterfall upside down. It began with running code that did nothing but demonstrate architecture - like tuning a guitar before playing a song. Then it added features one at a time, highest priority first. Each feature began as test code that reliably failed - so we knew the tests themselves worked. Work proceeded on the current feature until all its tests passed and we couldn’t think of any more. The growing library of tests executed continuously so technical debt would be paid off immediately, before it could earn exponential interest. Which meant there was minimal work in progress and no need for phases.

Design worked continuously too - as a discipline of simplification of the system as a whole called “refactoring”. Continuous user feedback, continuously reprioritized work to continuously improve ROI, business continuously collaborating with developers face to face in small teams. No specs, no handoffs, no deadlines … and it all just worked.

As a developer in the Waterfall trenches I was keen to embrace this brave new world. I coached the first enterprise-agile transformation, keynoted the first XP conference, invented the first agile training game, coded the first project wiki, and led change programs at organizations of all kinds on two continents over two decades.

And watched it all crash and burn.

First came the “Agile Manifesto”, which replaced Beck’s concrete practices with platitudes. Then “Scrum” turned the platitudes into certificates. “Scaling” turned the certificates into committees. Consultancies made fortunes telling the committees that this was Agile. The slime of a new bureaucracy rose to the top, as Kafka warned about all revolutions.

And then AI delivered the coup de grace. In a world where software develops itself faster, cheaper, and better than humans, biological teams are like horseshoes on a Tesla. The business of of software development today is only about what AI can’t be trained to do.

There was plentiful training data in public open source repositories for AI to learn how to code, but not how to listen or design. There are tests in there too, but nothing to explain how or why they were needed. Polished features, but nothing to show why their code evolved as it did. None of the conversations that led the humans to make the choices are left on the record.

So, when change comes, as it always must, the AI coders start over from scratch, over and over, taking a random walk in the space of systems just like the bad old Waterfall projects took. As businesses lose the humans in their learning loops or, worse, can’t tell which humans they need in there, they break their ability to embrace change. As those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, AI forgets it wholesale - quicker, cheaper, and better than humas can.

Against Bureaucracy

Here the offices do not exist to benefit the public, but the public exists to benefit the offices. – De Gournay per Von Grimm

Every organization contains those who care about its purpose, and those who don’t. Each evolves until it’s controlled by those who don’t. **– Jerry Pournelle

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. –Goodhart per Strathern

The word bureaucracy was coined by De Gournay in the 18th century as a criticism of the committee-ridden French republic. In the twentieth century a positive theory of bureaucracy derived from Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s “Scientific Management” and Max Weber’s “Economy and Society”. Taylor standardized industrial workflows while Weber did so for roles and responsibilities.

Taylor saw only the good in bureaucracy, but Weber feared it must always mature into a “steel-hard shell” to cage its participants, asking:

What can oppose this machinery to keep some portion of mankind free? – Max Weber, Verein für Sozialpolitik, 1909

Skeptics may see war, politics, and corruption as human foibles, and moralists as born in the hearts of sociopaths. Weber, however, suggests these symptoms may emerge from poorly designed organizations, and might likewise be remedied by design. His question implies they represent neither force of nature nor original sin, but a kind of technical debt.

The skeptics have data to back their view. While only one in twenty humans qualifies as clinical sociopaths, two thirds, per Stanley Milgram’s experiments, will obey the commands of a sociopath.

Milgram recruited ordinary people to serve as assistants in a Yale University memory experiment. After navigating the university’s impressive grounds and taking an official payment from Yale, a scientist in a white lab coat instructed them to administer “harmless electrical shocks” to a research subject located in an adjacent room.

The man in the white coat required each assistant to shock the research subject if they failed to repeat back a list of numbers as required. Each shock was to be higher than the previous one with the shock board graduated in 15 volt increments with labels ranging from “slight shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock XXX”.

The assistants weren’t told that the responses of the person getting shocked were actually a tape recording, and the experiment was actually designed to test their obedience to authority. Although expressing emotional stress and making strenuous objections, two thirds of these assistants continued administering shocks all the way to the end of the board.

They did so even as the “subject” begged them to stop. As they pounded on the wall. As they feigned a heart attack and then went silent. All that was necessary for obedience was that the man in the white coat repeat, “I am responsible. The experiment requires you to continue.”

Though disheartening, these results actually argue against the skeptical and moralist theories of bureaucracy, and for the Weber theory of it. It’s natural to think organizations must evolve until their most sociopathic participants come to lead them, and then amplify the sociopathy. Yet, under different circumstances, a sociopath will treat their friends and neighbors with generosity, be a loving partner and kind parents to their families, and even issue exit visas to the jewish family of an old schoolmate. Hitler himself famously enjoyed movie nights with family and friends.

xxx Von Neumann & Fermi

John Nash’s game theory, however, shows that the problem of bureaucracy is harder than this, and evolves even when doesn’t serve anyone’s interests, sociopathic or not.

XXX Nash

The defining trait of the sociopath is lack of empathy. They may make warm and gentle parents, partners and neighbors and treat their pets and friends kindly. When motivated to behave otherwise, however, they can turn on a dime.

Bureaucracy is the sociopathy of organizations. While human sociopaths tend to rise to the leadership of organizations as per Pournelle’s law, they’re not necessary for bureaucracy to gel. John Nash showed how the behaviors of organizations depend only on the rules of their games.

XXX Goodhart & Goldratt

Recalling the Past

Circa 500 BCE, when software was grain and development was domestication, in the then Chinese capital of Chou, the imperial philosopher Confucius summoned the upstart Lao Tzu for a dressing down.

Confucius promoted social perfection through hierarchies that fit the moral order of the universe, as revealed by the mandate of heaven, as interpreted by the ancient masters, as encoded in the sacred precepts and analects. Neglect of ritual, disrespect of authority, leaders performing ceremonies the wrong way at the wrong time - lead to chaos, said Confucius.

As with most religious figures, there was almost certainly no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. Kung Fu Tze - Confucius - most likely didn’t exist either. If people by these names did happen to exist, separation in time and space means they couldn’t possibly have met.

Nevertheless, Han dynasty historian Ssu Ma Chi’en tells us Confucius confronted Lao in the offices of the vast imperial library, bringing a ream of critiques and challenges compiled by his disciples. Lao Tzu heard them out patiently, and then replied that ceremony is empty, that people benefit only by meeting opportunity, that anyone calling themselves master is a fool, and that Confucius would do better to forget heaven and study nature instead.

Ssu Ma Chi’en reports a subdued Confucius returned to his disciples who were keen to hear his report of the confrontation. Confucius drew himself up to his full height and said, “I know how to catch fish, shoot birds, and trap rabbits. But what am I to do with a dragon of mist and wind?”

The Hand Of The Potter

I’m sitting with my father in his library. Floor to ceiling rows of leather-bound books, logs crackling in a marble fireplace beneath a mirrored mantle, Persian rugs, Louis Quinze chairs, Lindsay oils. It’s raining outside and he’s reading me Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat.

Larry hasn’t read to me since I began to read for myself. I’m not certain, at first, why he’s doing so now, but as his eyes tear up and his voice catches I begin to understand.

… after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

The Persian polymath Omar Khayyam revolutionized the sciences of his time. His calendar was the most accurate on Earth for nine centuries. His mathematics weren’t rediscovered until Pascal, Gauss and Riemann. If it weren’t for the assassination of his patrons by one of his school chums in the pay of the Persian theocracy, the Enlightenment might have happened five hundred years earlier than it did, and civilization’s history would be very different.

Khayyam is best remembered today for his poem, the Rubaiyat, which is best known through Fitzgerald’s translation. In later generations, a cottage industry grew up around “secret” versions with more and more verses. Later editions include thousands of them though modern Persian scholars regard fewer than forty as authentic. Among these stands the question Fitzgerald translated and my father asked.

Whether you see Khayyam’s potter as a god or a man doesn’t matter. Humanity possesses all the technology and resources needed to make our world a garden. We have done since before Max got on his train.

In my lifetime we have landed on the moon, interconnected all knowledge and commerce, and built machines that are, in many ways, smarter than ourselves. We have everything we could need to live in peace, plenty and harmony with nature, but still our civilization is strangled by the same force that stopped the enlightenment in Khayyam’s Persia.

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, and each new dynasty burns the libraries of the old. The first known editions of Lao Tzu pre-date the first Chinese dictionaries by three centuries and explain terms of trade, not abstruse philosophy. So the meaning of Lao Tzu’s book morphed invisibly for centuries while latter day priests shuffled its words to fit the numerology sacred to them.

Nine was the ideal number to the Han dynasty numerologists, and its square the ideal number of chapters. The handful of editions surviving from earlier times have 77 chapters (Beida), 72 chapters (Yan Zun), or no chapters at all (Guodian, Mawangdui). Medieval editions refactored these into 68 chapters (Wu Cheng) and 64 chapters (Zhu Dezhi).

So Lao Tzu is called “the book of riddles” in China today because no one can say with any authority what it originally meant, nor cleanly separate one interpretation from others it acquired from century to century. As a result, modern translations wildly disagree; it’s an irresistible puzzle-box, the most translated book in history.

As an Australian with no Chinese heritage, I stumbled upon it in 1989 when I got mixed up with a community of sinology professors on the Australian National University’s taoism-studies-l mailing list. At the dawn of the Internet, I proposed a “GNL” translation - named after Stallman’s GNU acronym - to short circuit the Gordian knot by translating English to English. Distilling the most authoritative modern English translations into a consensus that an amateur like me could understand but the academics couldn’t refute.

My professors were broadly skeptical, but entertained enough by the project to take time to school me as I struggled with it. Eternal gratitude to Prof. Dan Lusthaus for his patience. Over the next three years the GNL succeeded at least to the extent that chinapage.org, then the highest ranking English-language Chinese website, adopted it as their official translation.

So then the going got weird. In 1998 the Coen brothers produced their masterpiece The Big Lebowski, fusing Bogart’s noir thriller The Big Sleep with a Hunter Thompson take on a 4th century Japanese Zen koan, The Vinegar Tasters.

In the koan, the avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of spoiled wine.

“The wine is spoiled.” says Confucius, “We should tip it out.”

“It is bitter,” agrees Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should drink it.”

Lao Tzu laughs, saying “this stuff would work great on a salad. Or with dumplings!”

The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie was coffee, but the avatars - Walter as Confucius, Donnie as Buddha, The Dude as Lao Tzu - represent similar sentiments. Most fans don’t notice. But I should have done when a Californian uber-slacker Oliver Benjamin reached out in 2004 asking me if he could use the GNL as the bible of Dudeism in his inspired “Church of he Latter Day Dude”.

I pointed out the open content license but Ollie happily agreed to give the book away free. Meanwhile selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates authorizing their bearers to perform weddings and funerals. At ten dollars each, High Dudely Lama Benjamin could live like a king in Chiang Mai.

I dug the Dude’s story and admired the enterprise of the Lama, but Dudeism wasn’t what this book really meant to me. I have nothing against bowling, bathrobes and white russians, but it wasn’t about “take it easy” so much as “make it easy to take it easy”. Not slacking, engineering.

There’s a zen koan attributed to Linji Yixuan, “when you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Zen Buddhists don’t worship the name, story or likeness of Buddha. When those turn up they become an obstacle to overcome. Likewise the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong; the Sage in the GNL and almost all English translations sure sounds like the Dude. If I was going up against them, I needed to translate the original Chinese to English from scratch.

The Translation Game

Except I couldn’t. My expertise was architecting software, coaching development, and focusing corporations on throughput. I could bring nothing to a Chinese translation that thousands of years of scholars and native speakers hadn’t already. I’d be silly to try. But then two new Chinese to English translations changed the game.

The first was by Sanskrit Professor Victor Mair. He’s best known for his archaeology of the cryptid mummies of China’s Tarim basin, red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats who might to have introduced domesticated horses to China around 2000 BCE.

In 1990, Mair published an English translation of the then newly discovered silk-scroll edition of Lao Tzu from Ma Wang Dui. I liked the translation fine but what grabbed my attention was Mair’s discovery of deep philological connections between Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita, a root text of culture at the other end of the ancient silk road. Reading the two side by side, Mair found that either the one was a bad translation of the other, or both derived from some lost common ancestor, perhaps dating from before the invention of writing.

Just as Mair’s translation was published, however, an even earlier edition of Lao Tzu was discovered at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, it was carved into bamboo slips tied together with string. Guo Dian lacked half the length of Ma Wang Dui and came with unrelated fragments, perhaps a list of popular sayings some noble had had a scribe jot down.

Was this abbreviation just the work of some ancient grave-robber? Or was it all there was to Lao Tzu back then - with the rest coming from other times and places? Maybe the Tao rode into China with Mair’s giant witches. Maybe it was a song inspired by the Gita. Maybe some common ancestor ping-ponged between India and China more than we’ll ever know. In any case, it became clear to me that I’d been barking up the wrong tree. Or a tree that wasn’t there.

I had thought I’d been leveraging the insights of the world’s experts on the ancient Chinese in this ancient Chinese book to reveal the intents of its ancient Chinese author. I’d worried that my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s take on it, had perverted that original meaning. If this book wasn’t originally Chinese, however, then those experts knew no more than I did. If it didn’t begin with just one author, there was no original to pervert. So I hadn’t taken too many liberties with it. I’d taken too few.

We translators, east and west, collaborate on a great big jigsaw puzzle. We know the book’s a jumble, but we reverently pick up piece after piece and polish them by choosing words we intuitively believe best reveal their true meaning to modern readers in an ancient context. And then we carefully replace each piece right back in the pile where we got it. Over and over for thousands of years, like trying to solve a jigsaw without ever assembling the pieces into a picture.

Nevertheless, becoming an expert in Chinese, much less in its lost etymology, was more than I could hope to achieve before dying of old age. I was stuck. Until, in 2009, Bradford Hatcher published the book’s first complete English transliteration, Laozi Word by Word.

Hatcher built a translation of his own on top of the transliteration. I frankly don’t much care for his choices there. But the great benefit of his work for me was its lists of all the traditional dictionary meanings for every Chinese pictogram across all ancient editions of the book - including Ma Wang Dui and Guo Dian. In English. I was back in the translating English to English business.

Even better, I finally saw that I was not the least likely person to translate this book. Because “the sage” and “the superior man” - the two most conventional English translations of sheng ren - are as much Western orientalism as yellow-face pantomime villains. Ren means person or people or polity, and sheng is perceptive, responsive, or, in a rhyme from the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, responsive, harmonious, lively … agile. Of all this book’s thousands of years of translators, I’m the only one with multiple decades experience coaching agile people. So … “Who you gonna call?”

The Tea-Master and the Samurai

As with most religious figures, there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. But there are countless stories about him. In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote of him as a Chou dynasty librarian riding to the West on a buffalo to escape civil war. He met a border guard on the trail, Yin Hsi, who wouldn’t let him ride to the West until he recorded his wisdom for posterity.

The journey to the West took took a while. Maybe a thousand years later, glossed by Bodhidharma, another likely fictional religious figure, Lao Tzu combined with Buddhism to form Ch’an, better known by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese struggles in translating Lao Tzu likely inspired the Zen practice of insoluble riddles called koans, whose frustrated contemplation yields a path to enlightenment.

And then Zen turned into Tea.

In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s used Lao Tzu’s ideas to end two centuries of civil war.

He invented the Japanese Teahouse with its principle of Mu Hin Shu - Japanese for “no host, no guest”. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku, replaced Mu Hin Shu with Shu Ha Ri, a bureaucratic certification system that spread through the martial arts and eventually infected the agile software development community too.

It took millennia for the him to actually arrive. The earliest Western edition of Lao Tzu is The Monadology by 18th century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Inspired by translations sent by the Jesuit mission to China and seldom recognized as Lao Tzu by modern scholars, The Monadology was the basis for Leibniz’s inventions from calculus to the binary numbers and the first mechanical computer.

Leibniz’s work found its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged after Newton’s accusation of plagiarism ended Leibniz’s career. This curriculum underpinned the famous cold-war Russian facility with mathematics, and, according to logician Kurt Goedel, a Russian conspiracy to keep Leibniz’s “Characteristica Universalis” a state secret to this day.

Leibniz’s work led to Babbage and Lovelace’s stored-program computer, then to Turing and Von Neumann’s 20th century electroni computers, the information revolution, the Internet, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development too.

The Seven Samurai

Taoism, Zenism, Teaism and martial systems rendered through the lens of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa made their way to the West again in Randall’s Doctor Lao, Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and the Coens’ Dude. And in Beatles lyrics and Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple … and on and on. Lao Tzu arrived eventually.