The Jolly Contrarian Life

The Jolly Contrarian
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JC and his hobby horses, bonnet bees, bêtes noire and miscellaneous passing fixations. This is a sister podcast to the Jolly Contrarian on ISDA, which you can access here: https://open.spotify.com/show/5TRKFSdwBy3LsV8OYi3kxq jollycontrarian.substack.com

  1. Jul 24

    Shithousery, OODA loops and the craziest guy in the room

    Shithousery/ˈʃɪthaʊsəri/ (n.) Poor, but not unambiguously illegal, behaviour, especially in competitive sports. Disruptive or underhand tactics intended to gain an unfair advantage. Aboyne/əˈbɔɪn/ (v.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him. —Douglas Adams & John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff Prelude: the final Against all expectations, not least of which yours, you are in the grand final. Things broke lucky: you had a good draw, your opponent in the quarter-final tore a hamstring and in the semi-finalist had an off-day, you got the bounce of the ball and somehow prevailed, and here you are. They’re singing the anthems, but you know you’re up against it. Your opponent is the reigning champ: younger, taller, faster, fitter, and more skilful, in every facet of the game. Just hands-down better. In a straight shootout, you don’t stand a chance. There’s one arrow in your quiver, but even that’s bent: you’re crafty. Streetwise. You’ve got game. So what are you going to do? Just sit there and take a pounding? Now, where would be the fun in that? The 2026 FIFA World Cup Final There was an extraordinary moment towards the end of the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final between Spain and Argentina. It was missed by the television cameras, VAR, and all of the little accelerometers embedded in the $1200 ball. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It was captured, accidentally, on an iPhone by a fan standing high in the stands behind and to the left of Argentina’s goal in the second half, as he filmed down the ground toward the Spanish end. Regulation time was over. We were three minutes into an alloted four minutes of stoppage time. It was nil-all and extra time was beckoning. Having just lost an aerial challenge, Argentina’s Enzo Fernández sprints to recover the ball as Spanish defender Pau Cubarsi comes out to compete for it. Cubarsi gets there first, on the halfway. So late, and so poor, is Fernández’ challenge that Cubarsi is catapulted spectacularly into the air. Referee Slavko Vinčić immediately shows Fernández a yellow card — really, it should have been a straight red — but since Fernández has already been booked, he is sent off anyway. But this is not the interesting incident. Twenty-five metres behind the tackle, the iPhone catches Argentine left back Nicolás Tagliafico watching, unengaged in the action, a good ten metres from any other player. Closest, in fact, is referee Vinčić, but he, like everyone else has his back to Tagliafico, mesmerised by Cubarsi’s dramatic rear somersault. Within an instant — literally, before Cubarsi has even hit the ground, which he does in a tremendous heap — Tagliafico collapses, waving his legs in the air and clutching his knee, for all the world like he has been felled by a huntsman’s axe. No Spaniard is near enough by to even bother protesting innocence. No-one touched him. There is no-one within cooey of him, who even could have touched him. Tagliafico — a painted ship upon a painted ocean — writhes and gurgles, as if his Earthly struggles are at an end. It is perfectly absurd. At first, with all the other commotion on the pitch, no-one even notices. Like everyone else, the iPhone zooms in as the referee strides towards Fernández — already vainly protesting that is all some ghastly misunderstanding — and brandishes the succession of cards. Indignantly, Fernández refuses to quit the field. The prone Tagliafico is now out of shot, but enter Argentina’s captain Lionel Messi. He marches from the Spanish half toward the referee — the farthest and fastest he moved all day — motioning towards Tagliafico. Even now, only 13 seconds has elapsed since Fernández’s foul. Messi remonstrates with the referee, repeatedly gesturing towards Tagliafico, for another fourteen seconds. To his credit, Vinčić does not buy it for an instant. We cannot see what happened to Tagliafico in the meantime and no other cameras appear to have captured it, but the BBC’s interactive 3D match experience does capture it. You can highlight Tagliafico, zoom in on him, and watch him roll around until, apparently, being told to stop by the linesman. Though it failed, this is still shithousery of the highest order. To apprehend a scenario and so quickly react to it requires not just presence of mind but instinct. You cannot learn this. Likewise, from Messi: to even notice Tagliafico, some fifty metres away the other side of an explosion of action is a testament to the maestro’s unparalleled vision and game awareness. To read and comprehend his signal as astutely as he does suggests spooky entanglement. It speaks to a deep, innate feel for the game, and all the means of prevailing, fair and foul. For deep shithousery. Some have this, some don’t. Argentina has it. English teams, by and large, don’t. “Shithousery”? Shithousery is gamesmanship: to play just within the rules—or in the unspoken voids where there are none, or even against the rules—but in the certain knowledge you will get away with it. To “shithouse” is to infringe morally, but not legally. You most often see it in sports but is just as common in politics and business. To shithouse is to sledge. To dive. To run down the clock by taking the ball to the corner flag. But also to grandstand. To take credit for someone else’s work. To brown-nose the boss. To impugn. To ask, “have you stopped beating your wife?” It can go wrong. Following media reports of child abuse linked to an unidentified Tory official, plainly thinking it an excellent piece of shithousery, Sally Bercow tweeted to her 50,000 followers: Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face* This impugned the conservative peer with the ostensibly plausible deniability of an open question that was only loaded for those plugged into British political minutiae — but when it proved unfounded, Lord McAlpine successfully sued. In any case, shithousery is inevitable, whenever we fix rules in advance with arbitrary limits that do not carve nature at its joints. Rules that presume all actions are witnessed, and all players have honourable intent. But referees are unsighted. Touchlines are arbitrary. Less gifted players do what they can to win: they do not always play fair. If you’re facing an overwhelming opponent, sometimes you have no choice. Preconfigured rules of the game are blind to this “underdog’s dilemma”. They presume each team will continue to press for goal until the final whistle, but sometimes keeping the ball from the opponent, however you can, is all you need to win. In a sense, going a goal up and parking the bus is a form of shithousery. Each year governing bodies — of sport and in life — realign the rules to shut down newly discovered routes to the shithouse, but the scope for imaginative gamesmanship passeth all understanding. It is, in any case a forlorn task: to shithouse is, in a sense to exploited misconceived rules. No rules have more misconceptions than new ones. We may not, therefore, like shithousery, but we are stuck with it. This article makes the case that, instead of righteously disdaining it, when confronted with it, we should return the favour. Shithousery as tactic in a finite game By taking their shithousery to a different level, Argentina demonstrate how finite games — competitive, bounded, zero-sum games like football — are most comfortably won at the margin of legality. Argentina may not have won the World Cup this time, but they have before, and they got a good deal closer here than, by rights, they ever should have. They did this not by being good, but bad. This is not a criticism. It is a fact of life, and “good” teams need strategies to cope with it. One strategy is to reply in kind. As in business and life, there are “formal” and “informal” modes of play. Formal ones we can see, and track, and record: goals scored, tackles made, possession and territory held, passing accuracy and so on. But they can paint misleading pictures. “The data” absolutely fail to explain why Spain could not wrap up the game in the first 20 minutes. Spain plays beautiful, elegant, rational, orderly football. Their players are settled, stable, calm, and efficient. They don’t panic. They press high, tackle cleanly, and make good shapes. Argentina did little of any of this. They were awkward, disorderly, disruptive, destabilising and chaotic. They were pugilistic from the first whistle. They left in elbows and studs and risked bookings — and until the 93rd minute got away with it. Spain were good. Argentina were bad. Here is what I mean by “good” and “bad”: The same goes for England in their semi-final. By this measure of good and bad, England were at least as good as Argentina — but the South Americans were on a different level when it came to being wilfully bad. Argentina never really looked like losing, even when a goal behind, and even though they never led until deep stoppage time. For, despite the obvious chasm in formal quality between the teams — you did not need to be Franz Beckenbauer to see it — still Argentina got within 14 minutes of a penalty shoot-out for the title. And penalty shootouts, we know, are bad. They are chaotic, capricious, random, cruel, awkward, and disruptive. Be in no doubt: Argentina backed themselves to win on penalties. Argentina’s supreme, functional, effective badness almost won them a fourth World Cup. Teams who can be good and bad are most likely to succeed. You cannot indulge the light if you do not exploit the dark. As we will see, this concept of effective bad has a more general application. Good and bad in politics Warning: this section touches on contemporary politics, a subject JC tries to steer well clear of. No opinion is advanced here abo

  2. Jul 3

    Voice recognition, local and distant networks

    We have hit the crazy summer season where JC will be bouncing around a bit more randomly than normal, and newsletters might become somewhat intermittent. Rest assured, much is going on behind the scenes at the Jolly Contrarian. Including the rollout of a new consulting arm! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Wither voice recognition? I’m trying something new for this post, and that is using the Wispr Flow voice recognition application for dictating rather than writing. This does the useful but unglamorous job of voice recognition (a technology that is well developed) and overlaying some AI pattern matching to fix up and properly punctuate dictation. JC’s nasal mumbling comes out looking more presentable. For those who never learned to touch type or who regularly input significant data on a mobile device, voice recognition should be a real productivity opportunity. It is odd it has not caught on more quickly to date. Using AI to overcome some of the obvious limitations of dictation (that includes making errors, ums, ahs, and contradicting yourself: that is to say, applying a small amount of limited editorial control) is an ideal application for AI. It saves a good deal of incremental time. It is obviously testable and correctable at the time, so little or no risk of hallucination. Wispr Flow works pretty well. You can train it to correct my annoying verbal and linguistic tics. As do all lawyers, I tend to overcomplicate my sentences. It would be great to train AI Assistant to take my turgid rambling output and rectify it by reference to specific rules I specify. For example, “convert all nominalisations into direct verbal constructions”. “Replace all weak verbs with strong ones and avoid equivocal language like I think that — and this seems to be —”. These features help me eliminate awkward aspects of my natural speech. Getting the rules just right is important, but you can overdo it. Sometimes the output is nothing like what I said and feels generic and “sloppy”. It includes a handy feature: you can select your output text, and it will polish it according to your preferred rules. This will directly challenge Grammarly and other spell‑checking applications. All this does prompt the question: why isn’t voice recognition more prevalent? Accurate voice recognition is hardly new. Maybe these tools will send it over the top. But the ongoing deprecation of office workspaces has something to do with it too. After all, forty years ago, voice recognition was the norm. We didn’t call it that: we called it “dictation”. We didn’t use tech—beyond cassette recorders. The intelligence was real: a human typist. In hindsight, having one employee dictating and another typing, and the inevitable iterative process between them to finalise a document, looks highly labour-intensive. Collapsing that down to a single employee composing and typing was less so—once the office manager [for younger readers, that’s the chief operating officer—Ed] got over the idea that “we don’t pay lawyers to type”. But dictating without having to type is surely quickest of all. So where is it? Why isn’t Wispr Flow eating the world? One factor may be the concurrent changes in the physical workplace that came with new technology: dedicated offices gave way to shared offices, then cubicles, then open‑plan spaces, and finally hot‑desking. Over that time we became quieter and more timid. Noise is distracting, though on a busy trading floor it is a fairly pleasant, comforting hubbub. Speaking aloud can feel slightly embarrassing. At the same time, dictation — indeed, all oral communication — has deprecated sharply. Desk phones have disappeared, replaced by Teams and Zoom. Phone calls — once ad-hoc, bilateral, analogue affairs — have given way to prearranged online meetings. Calling someone out of the blue, without arranging it in advance, is now the height of rudeness. This, incidentally, is one advantage—probably the only advantage, beyond the saved ground rental—of our post-COVID generational shift towards remote working: suddenly we all have our private spaces back, and voice recognition is a realistic prospect. Local and distant networks The above touches on the crux of the digital divide: since digital networks arrived in our working lives — the world-wide web broke its academic borders in the early 90s — the nature of our networks has changed. Networks in the pre-digital era The pre-digital era was based upon small, rich, accretive local networks. These networks were multilateral: they involved people interacting, in person, in the workplace, or in physical meetings. The longer such a network lasted the better it got, as relationships formed, ways of working evolved and “institutional capital” accumulated. Hence these were rich, accumulative networks. They were augmented by a thin layer of what I will call remote networks, which only got used were the local ones weren’t suitable. These these could be electronic — phone, fax, telex or telephone — or physical — snail mail or courier — but in any case were mainly bilateral in nature, and didn’t have the quite same “capital accumulating” nature. Building relationships was central to business in the pre-digital era. Local networks in the pre-digital era Local physical networks had distinct advantages over remote ones. They were immediate and multilateral — people who were on hand could convene quickly —the communications were rich — not just “text” but “speech”: imbued with relationships, institutional knowledge, body language and context — multilateral — as many people as you needed could attend — and instant — but at the same time informal: dialogue was not systematically captured, logged, audited, or recorded, allowing candour, correction and the safe removal of faux pas, irrelevance and error before creating any formal minute or record of the meeting — and free — in the sense that there was no incremental internal cost to having already-engaged employees meet together. (Employee cost attribution even today is minimal; in 1990 it was non-existent) since the employees were already on the payroll. Only where a physical meeting was not possible, would you opt for a remote communication. These were comparatively poor — usually bilateral, and at best (phone communication) conveying a fraction of the information of an in-person meeting; telex and fax even less so — or significantly delayed — telex and fax might take hours, mail correspondence days — and in any case incrementally expensive. Telephone and fax costs, postage and courier were meaningful costs per communication. Unlike labour costs, these were not baked in, and could be specifically accounted for. Therefore before the world wide web every business — rightly — would prefer the local rich, free networks available to it — over remote, poor, expensive bilateral networks. We organised ourselves accordingly. Firms organised into offices and branches, where people with a need to quickly interact could do so. Offices organised into compact districts where one could easily meet customers, counterparties, advisors and competitors. We built complex, rich, local, interlocking networks. We built relationships, reputations and trust. Much of the strength of the network was implicit — the shared history, knowledge, and common interests. By contrast, it was hard to build reputation and trust over a telephone line, and impossible by fax. So, these were the critical features of a local network: immediacy, speed, convencience, informality, memory, trust, and subtlety. These features are hard — impossible, really — to quantify. But before 1990, not everything in business needed to be quantified. There was a costs to doing business, and that was that. The wealth of local networks is “illegible”. You can’t see it in the financial accounts. It may was well not be there. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, however. So: Local, physical, rich, fast, cheap, invisible networks good. Remote, electronic, impoverished, slow, expensive, visible networks: bad. Networks in the post digital era When the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness in around 1993 — I remember attending a seminar about it — everything changed, but nothing did. Local networks didn’t change at all. Everything changed about remote ones. Digital, not analogue Remote networks became now digital, not analogue. Whereas analogue communications occupied physical space and took time, and where they could be copied at all, quickly lost fidelity, digital communications occupied no space, could be copied, recorded or moved over any distance instantly and at zero marginal cost. Whereas analogue communications had to be embedded in a “substrate” — paper, mainly — digital data needs no substrate. It travels unaccompanied. Infinite audit While digital solved the problem of incremental cost and created an “opportunity”: infinite audit. As we will see, where there is “infinite audit” you no longer need “trust”: you have all the receipts. But trust turns out to be quite important. Everything, always, being on the record has a chilling effect on candid communication. Things you might once have said are no longer said. This can be a boon and a bane. There is one fork of the information revolution still cantering towards a fully trustless network: crypto. High bandwidth As the physical network has built out and chips have grown faster, bandwidth has exploded. In 1990 it took ten minutes over a 56k dial-up modem to download a day’s worth of email. In 2026 we can stream virtual reality to a mobile device in the scottish highlands. Multilateral In a distributed digital network, everyone is online — connected, and able to send and rec

  3. Mar 13

    Computation, free will and the big bang

    So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure—How amazingly unlikely is your birth.And pray that there’s intelligent lifeSomewhere up in space, becauseThere’s bugger all down here on Earth. — Galaxy Song, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, 1983 This piece started out as a book review, of Professor Brian Klaas’ recent book Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. It quickly would up as a rumination on a much, much bigger topic for which Fluke, is really only the occasion, not the subject, for it sets off one of the many bees in the JC bonnet. The bee in question is the presently fashionable world-view among tech-bros and people who spend too much time online that everything can be computed. This “computationalist” outlook, and its best practical example, the omnipresent Turing machine, has wormed its way into contemporary intellectual life and is at risk of getting stuck there. This, I think, would be a tremendous pity. The computationalist view runs more or less as follows: * Turing machines are, by design, deterministic. * You can model the human brain as a Turing machine. * Therefore, the brain is a Turing machine. * Therefore, the human brain is deterministic. * Therefore, human agency is an illusion. Professor Klaas himself is a good case study, because much of his book is wise and — excuse the pun — enlightening, but he still winds up mistaking the map for the territory and concluding that since we can be made to seem like machines, we are machines, and are therefore constrained as machines. This seems like a typically dusty academic debate, but it has real-world implications for not just the hypothetical freedoms of metaphysical will, but the real-world freedoms of thought and action. Where you stand on this question makes a political and cultural difference to how you feel about where other people should be allowed to stand on it. We will turn to that at the end. My readers keep me going. For more posts like this — and even better ones — consider supporting the JC. Only half a pint a week and you get to feel like a Florentine arch-duke in 1470, and I get to feel like Sandro Botticelli. Plus, you get access to Premium JC and all kinds of neat stuff. A big “but” I have been grappling for some time with what is so troubling about the modern techno synthesis — End of History millenarianism, truth, data modernism, determinism and the oddly illiberal fix these logical ideas put us in — but have struggled to put my finger on it. In Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters, “disillusioned social scientist” Brian Klaas helps. But not as he means to. This is a silly book. It makes a great show of being interesting, but then steers off a cliff in its final chapter, which presents as a big “but”. As G.R.R. Martin puts it, “Everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.” You might think I am being unfair or uninformed in my opinion, and so I might — it would hardly be the first or last time — but even Professor Klaas would have to admit it is not my fault: I can hardly do otherwise. It is written in the stars. So, you shouldn’t blame me, but if you do that’s not your fault, either: that too, is written in the stars. Indeed, Professor Klaas would oblige himself to concede, as he asks us to, that all of creation — all its galaxies and nebulae, all its tragedy and comedy, its infinite majesty and infinitesimal frippery exactly as it appears, right down to this silly article about that silly book — has been coming, unerringly and ineluctably, since the dawn of cosmic time itself. Which means I have an excuse — nay, a compulsion — to talk about metaphysics. God, mind and free will “And if we are to prevent the lights going out on our lives once more, we should ask ourselves crucial questions. Where are we? How did we get here? Why did we come? Where do we want to go? How do we want to get to where we want to go? How far do we have to go before we get to where we want to be? How would we know where we were when we got there? Have we got a map?” —Rowan Atkinson & Richard Curtis, Marcus Browning MP, 1980 Anyone with a tertiary education who didn’t take at least one philosophy course missed the point of the exercise. The sine qua non of the university experience is, surely, stage one metaphysics. Its three great questions — how did we get here, how does consciousness work, and do we have free will? — are not a million miles away from those posed by the hon. Marcus Browning. “God” and “mind” really collapse into “free will”, and that boils down to how you feel about the causal principle: has every action in the cosmos a complete and identifiable set of reliable mechanical causes, or is the universe some how unpredictable, biddable and capricious? Those who embrace the causal principle are broadly classed as “determinist”. Since, given enough information, one can precisely calculate the outcome of any interaction between any objects in the universe, the interaction of composite objects must be a function of their components. Since classical mechanics assumes that, besides elementary particles, all objects are composites it follows that the behaviour of everything can be reduced to the behaviour its components. It is not quite turtles all the way down, though: it stops at these subatomic particles. Their behaviour, theoretically, can be traced back to the singularity whence we, and the whole of creation, came. There is, therefore, nothing new under the sun. All was inevitable, Q.E.D. If this is right, certain popular beliefs about the cosmos cannot be true. There cannot be a non-material interventionist God: if there were, some events would not have a material cause. Humans cannot have free will: all human actions are the product of traceable electrochemical impulses in the brain. While much of the West has acclimatised to the first idea, the second one is taking some getting used to. If this all seems a bit desolate, there are a broad range of non-determinist philosophies that might suit you better. Beyond “non-determinist,” these philosophies have no catch-all label. If it would not lead to confusion you might call them “casual” as opposed to “causal”. They include most types of mysticism and religion and any belief in magic or the occult. They also take in the widely traduced “continental” philosophies of relativism and postmodernism, but also some “rationalist” parts of the intellectual landscape: classical economics, much of behavioural and social science, systems theory, chaos theory and — though it might horrify Professor Dawkins to acknowledge it — evolutionary biology. These are all pragmatic, “emergent” philosophies that take the world as they find it. While they might find their explanations in granularities, they tend not to extrapolate actual predictions from them. Science’s insistence on analytical rigour in inferring causal principles from observed regularities, seems an incontestably good and valuable thing: it has vouchsafed flight, sanitation, aqueducts, viticulture and so on. But if we say, as Professor Dawkins does: “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite”. We throw quite a lot of baby out with the mystical bathwater. Like the idea we can have free will. So we are at a bit of an impasse. To enlightened liberals — often the same people as the modern rationalists — free will is also a generally good and valuable thing. All modern polities — not to mention all the ancient ones — depend on it for their basic coherence as social structures. There is no room for any immaterial agency inside a human that can override the eternal logic of cause and effect. To act a propos nothing but “animal spirit” must, at some synaptic level, violate Newton’s laws about conservation of energy. This is a great paradox: if we have free will, science is falsified. If we do not, the entire premise of civilisation is. Thus, the “free will versus determinism” debate presents a dilemma that has animated stage one philosophy classes as long as anyone can remember. Every now and then, someone comes along and tries to sort it out for once and all — the late Daniel Dennett spent the last thirty years of his life trying to do so, for the determinists, but — in my mind at any rate — fell a long way short. Contending that freedom of thought and expression is an illusion is a hard sell. Nor is it one that, in the final analysis, makes a great deal of difference. Either the causal principle is true, or it isn’t, and we could have free will, or none, and it would not make any difference to how we must interact with the universe. Plato had this much right: we have only shadows on the wall of the cave to go by. It doesn’t much matter what causes them. That is why “God, mind and free will” is only a stage one course: it illustrates philosophy’s gift for paradox and at the same time, its deeply-rooted irrelevance. The debate is titillating but, at the same time, stale: causal principles seem to hold, and we seem to have moral agency, and humankind has managed the theoretical conflict ever since we first looked up at the stars. The transparently silly answers the paradox throws up suggest it is a silly question. So, for the longest time the scientists and humanities have kept out of each other’s way. But developments on our ways of being occasionally reopen the debate. The alarming advances in “compute” are doing that now: there is a generation of technologists who are once again yearning to solve the universe. Professor Klaas is here to help them. The great divide In modern academic discourse, there are two strands of thought: the icy rationalism of the STEM disciplines and the post-modernist mumbo jumbo of the humanities. This is, of course, an outrageous generalisation, but it also, kind of, isn’t. Occasionally,

  4. Feb 27

    The end-to-end principle

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com “I once got all the way from Glasgow to Edinburgh without a ticket. I walked.” — Sid Snot, The Kenny Everett Video Show. “There are more network use-cases in heav’n and earth, Horatio, than are dream’t of in your philosophy.” — Shakespeare, Spamlet I, vi An iron-fisted Romanian “The Bickerings,” ancestral home of the Contrarian clan, is freezing old pile in Squatney Green. It is cold enough, but made worse on account of the JC’s missus, the Contesă Birgită von Sachsen Rämmerstein, who controls the central heating with an iron fist. The Contesă grew up in a stone castle in the high Transfăgărășan, her father was a tyrant and she has therefore grown accustomed to a chilly ambience. The family was grand but impecunious, and she habitually regards any attempt to put temperatures into double figures as evidence of immutable moral decay. “Eef you are cold,” she is fond of saying, “you should put on a hat.” I am, by these standards, weak. I am often tempted into defiance when she is not looking. Until now my meagre resistance has been mainly useless: the Contesă is gimlet-eyed, and immeasurably helped by our central heating system which was designed about the time they built the computers for the Apollo programme, and it has similar functionality. While it can, I am told, schedule and regulate temperatures this requires an advanced facility with algebra that I, alas, do not have. Nor will the Contesă countenance my occasional suggestions that we upgrade to a modern central heating system with an intuitive user interface. That would involve massive expenditure and, besides, capitulate to my lack of Transylvanian fibre. But recently things have changed. I have identified a way of fitting inexpensive replacement valves on our radiators. They are wifi-enabled and fitted with a smart thermostat. They can be programmed, controlled and adjusted from an app. I used the meagre allowance the Contesă grants me and bought a set of smart valves. As the northern hemisphere winter grinds its saturated way to a squelchy close, retailers are trying to shift their inventory before the spring arrives, the world warms up and it is too late. The valves are currently on sale. I bought seven and I got a bargain: they were half price. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. The problem with central heating systems Until there was the internet, the problem with upgrading a traditional central heating system was exactly that: it is a centralised system. It has a heavy structure. There is a single central brain, a designed-in “nervous system” and it is integrated and not articulated: if you want to upgrade any part, you need to upgrade the lot. The brain controls two systems: a water system, that sends hot water from the boiler out to spur radiators around the house, and an electrical system that measures temperatures around the house with remote thermostats and sends that information back to brain. The brain has a “preferred setting” from which it controls how much water it should send out to the radiators. If the thermostats say, “it is too hot” the central system shuts off. If they say, “it is too cold” the central system opens up. There is no great intelligence in the system: it has some kind of a time scheduling function and a temperature gauge, and that is it. More sophisticated systems divided the house into temperature zones, each controlled by a single thermostat. But beyond that, to micro-manage their local environment, users would have to manually adjust the radiators. Each has its own analog thermostatic valve connected to a switch that gates the pipes running into the heater. If it opens, water flows in. If it closes, water stops. But the manual valves are not connected to the central brain: if a radiator’s local valve is fully off, the radiator will not come on, whatever the central system tells it. The electronic thermostats that talk to the central system’s brain are overriden by the manual ones that do not. On the other hand, if the central system thinks the zone is too hot, it won’t send any water to the radiators, so it won’t matter how the local radiator valves are set. The system is, therefore, something like a binary logic gate: a radiator heats only if both the electronic and the manual valves open. It is what lawyers, and grammarians, would call conjunctive: an “and,” not an “or”. It all takes quite a lot of — well — plumbing and wiring to install such a system, and therefore quite a lot of disruption if you want to replace it. The electronic thermostats are hardware-controlled and connected by cable, chased into the walls of the house. God forbid should I suggest we move a thermostat and upset the Contesă’s Farrar & Ball™ elephant spunk™ skim coat wall finish. Since our control panels were designed in the late 60s, they have little of the functionality we are used to these days. They were not designed to be upgraded. They are not modular. Their programming is hard-coded into ugly little devices dotted around the house. Not just ugly, but dysfunctional: they hail from a time before “user experience” was any kind design criteria. There are four buttons, embossed with hieroglyphics I don’t understand, and a small liquid crystal display panel that displays different hieroglyphics that I don’t understand either. It isn’t clear what any of them do. How we originally programmed them is now lost to posterity, and for some years now we have just tolerated the meagre assistance they provide in the depths of winter. For the Contesă, this is business as usual. Over the years I have invested in knitwear. The heating comes on when it deigns to come on, goes off when it deigns to go off and that is that. The Contesă and I shuffle around our frigid house, wrapped up in mittens and scarves. The problem is solvable because of the ingenious design of the valves. They accord with a principle of network design called the “end-to-end principle”. It is quite unintuitive but, when you get your head around it, utterly brilliant. The design of the internet is fastidiously based on the end-to-end principle. But — and this is the beautiful thing about design — the internet’s construction in the 1960s long preceded theory that made it viable. The end-to-end principle explaining why the internet works was not identified or formalised until 1984. How to design networks When creating a network of dispersed “users” — call them “endpoints” and the system a “distributed network” — you have design choices to make. Different network designs have different pros and cons and different consequences for scaling, efficiency and task management. It is all rather mathematical. Direct point-to-point networks The simplest, in theory, is to link every endpoint in the network directly. We can see this rapidly gets complicated. With a two endpoint network there is one link. Adding a third endpoint, requires two new links. Adding a fourth requires three. The problem grows arithmetically as you add new users. Given a total userbase of N, the number of new connections needed to add a single user is N - 1. The more endpoints, the more links required to add a single new user. The application for which the network is used is important. If all users will be interacting with all other users all the time, this may be the maximally efficient design. An example of this kind of network is a high-performance computing GPU cluster used for AI training: here the point is parallel processing, where every node exchange data directly with every other node on the “network” (a series of gates on a graphics processor) at maximum speed with minimal latency. But it is a pretty unique case. There aren’t many cases where a point-to-point network is a great design choice. Most human networks are not like that. We only have a certain amount of personal bandwidth. We can only read one book at a time, or watch one film at a time. Our interaction with a given network is highly selective, and in fact unique: how I experience and interact with London is unique: I go to the Cherry Tree in Ost Finkelstein for my apples. The Contesă goes to an odd little Russian shop to get ingredients for her borscht. She does not need a link to my greengrocer. I don’t need a link to her cabbage purveyor. In this case a fully-connected network becomes progressively harder to scale and less efficient. The more endpoints in the network, the less likely user is to communicate along a given link. A directly linked network, therefore, contains a great deal of redundancy. Hub and spoke Another way of designing networks is a hub and spoke model where local users are connected to a single large hub which has a much greater bandwidth connection to other hubs, to which other local users are connected. This is how, for example, railway networks work: There are a small number of “nodes” — stations — and these have limited set of very-high bandwidth connections between them. Endpoints — passengers — must make their own way to a node. But “adding new users” is therefore, from a “hub and spoke” network’s perspective, a low-cost, low complexity activity. It carries a predictable, low marginal cost. building additional hubs and connectors between them — that is, rails and tunnels — is obviously more expensive, but it is a one-time expenditure that happens infrequently and supports a greater capacity to handle users on the network. It is much, much less wasteful than a point-to-point network. But hub-and-spoke models have some odd inefficiencies of their own. For one thing, connection routes on the network may be much longer and more complicated than is needed to cross the physical distance between user endpoints in real space. The London Underground is famou

  5. Feb 20

    Traitors, prejudice & how to get promoted

    Reality TV competitions like the BBC’s Traitors offer valuable insights into group dynamics and decision making under situations of uncertainty. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. For those bewitched by the unravelling convictions of postmasters, LIBOR rate setters and antenatal nurses Traitors is a superb, but unsettling model. It shows how easily we — be we contestants, viewers, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, juries or poundshop Poirots — can be mistaken, even about very obvious things. How inevitably, where the facts and social dynamics before us are inchoate or contrived, or calculated to mislead, we will be misled. The same cognitive habits and heuristics, that serve us well as we navigate our ordinary worlds of straightforward surfaces and familiar social relationships, lead us astray when we are asked to play strange games of misdirection with unfamiliar participants. These are “games” not in the senses of parlour games like bridge or chess or even poker, but language games: hermeneutic constructs built from artificial conditions and contradictory and only partially disclosed rules. Where players can reach their objectives only obliquely, while appearing to head in the opposite direction. There are some parlour games like this: Secret Hitler — great fun as long as you don’t mind being accused of fascism — has a similar dynamic. There are other common situations like this in our lives. The workplace — often a nest of sharp-elbowed misdirections — is one. So is any political organisation: the clue is in the name. The criminal justice system is another. Traitors is a fully-designed exercise in the wilful perpetration of injustice. Of the twenty-two initial contestants, three — according to the canonical rules — “deserve” to be banished. The others are pure in heart, if not in deed. But even that is a misdirection: all players in the game have the same object— to win it — and that, whether you are traitor or faithful, involves eliminating all the other players. The trick is to to be seen to do as little of the eliminating as possible. The winner is the best at misdirection. How to play For those living under a rock, the comatose and the deeply uninterested in popular culture, here are the principles of the game. Calling them “rules” is a bit of a stretch. Twenty-two contestants convene at a neo-gothic castle near Inverness, hosted by Claudia Winkelman. Having bonded briefly, the players are sat around a round-table and blindfolded whereupon, theatrically, Winkelman assigns 3 of them the secret role of “traitor”. The remainder are the “faithful“. The traitors will shortly meet in private, so have certain knowledge know who each other are and therefore, who are faithful. The faithful know neither. They only know their own status and, about that, to other faithful they are unreliable witnesses. This is a key information asymmetry. It gives traitors an enormous advantage. For the faithful, their putative objective — we will come to why it isn’t their actual objective — is to identify and eliminate traitors. They have one opportunity each day to do that, during a banishment session convened at the round table where players debate who seems suspicious. At the conclusion of the roundtable debate players vote to eject one of their number, based on whatever meagre information presented to the table that best persuaded the congregation. But all participants, including the unknown traitors, participate in the roundtable. The odds are therefore somewhat stacked against faithfuls even in the use of their own most powerful weapon. Each person who pleads her own case, or casts aspersions about another’s, is an unreliable witness. The roundtable is like a jury in every respect but one: “jurors” are players, guilty and innocent, and therefore also participants in, or witnesses to, the crimes alleged. Each has a stake in the outcome in a way a juror does not. Given the paucity of information, players’ pet theories are inevitably bunk. This is obvious. Everyone can see it. I’ve lost count of the numbers of times I’ve heard people say, “it’s mad they all get het up because the elimination process is basically random.” When, occasionally, they do stumble on the truth — an inspired aspect of the show is the confessional segments wherein individual players disclose their innermost suspicions to the audience —contestants usually trip over it. Being no surer of themselves than any other players, those who are onto something are usually talked out of action. There is another elimination mechanism. The traitors, most days, confer in a secret conclave to agree upon the “murder” of a faithful. Murders take place unwitnessed and off-stage: the traitors leave no direct evidence: If the faithful want to catch a traitor, they must use their powers of deduction and inference on the strength of whatever weak circumstantial evidence they can find that give the traitors give away: tics, oral slips, guilty looks, conspiratorial behaviour — that kind of thing. In the meantime the characters participate in “missions” where they must cooperate to add money to the prize pool. Here, traitors’ and faithfuls’ interests are aligned. This is in some ways clever, but in others, a weakness in the show’s format: it would be better if the traitors stood to benefit by jeopardising the faithfuls’ prize pool somehow. It might give faithful more concrete material to go on at the roundtable. As it is, there is precious little: before and after the mission contestants have time to interact, air their suspicions and eke out information about each other but only from an inert “data set” that does not really contain any useful information. The game is carefully constructed to avoid traitors ever leaving unambiguous evidence of their identities, except by accident. As long as the traitors have been circumspect, there will no meaningful clues from which anyone could draw a sound conclusion. In any case, at least one of the traitors is certain to survive to the “final five”— the rules are, literally, rigged as the game progresses to ensure this: television schedules, and not game dynamics, require it. But players should nonetheless factor it in: there will be traitors at the death. There must be. The game would not work without them. A game of chance What is fascinating is how players approach a situation in which they must make important decisions with almost no reliable information. Traitors is a show about deception, and it perpetrates its own deceptions on the players, in plain sight, from the outset. It tells them their objective is to identify and eject traitors. But it is not: traitors will in any case “respawn” if their numbers dwindle. Each player’s objective — traitor and faithful alike — is simply, and only, to survive. They should do nothing that jeopardises that objective, including displaying skill at identifying traitors, and thereby presenting an apparent threat. The best strategy is to keep your head down, keep your opinions to yourself, and say nothing unless spoken to. Be the zebra in the middle of the herd. For Traitors is a game of ostensible, but not actual, strategy. It is, by contrast, a game of pure chance. At the outset there is maximum uncertainty: players have nothing to go on but resting probabilities. These are easy enough to calculate: once their roles are nominated, each faithful should know there is a 3 in 21 chance — that’s 1 in 7, for the hard of mathematics — of any other player being a traitor. And then the game commences. Of the 19 original innocenti, at least 15 must, by the rules of the game, be thrown under the bus. They will not all be murdered: more than half will be ejected by the faithful at the roundtable. Murder victims are necessarily faithful — the traitors cannot murder each other — but it is a necessary consequence of the game that most round-table ejectees will also be faithful. They are “murdered” too, only by a council comprising a large majority of faithful. All that really differs between traitors and faithful, therefore, is their means of killing other players: traitors by murder, faithful by banishment. Presuming they don’t cheat, “traitors” are no less “deserving” of success than “faithful”. For the thing is: as far as players have any control over outcomes, the elimination process isn’t just basically random: it’s completely random. Players, like viewers, must know this, yet they persist in believing they can anticipate and even influence outcomes — and, for the sake of watchability, just as well: if they did not, the show would not work. The game obliges players to willingly suspend their own disbelief. For all the good their uninformed machinations do them they would be better, and happier, were they to leave things to chance. If faithful players can discipline themselves into thinking in terms of probabilities, they will note some reliable posterior information does emerge as the game goes on: as the roles of eliminated players are evealed — all murdered are ipso facto faithful, the banished declare their allegiance as they depart — so remaining faithful can update their “priors” somewhat, though, again, their information is incomplete. Faithful players’ odds systematically shorten — get worse — as the game progresses and contestants are whittled down. Elimination overweights the faithful, so as players disappear, the higher the probability that remaining competitors are traitors. By the time of the final five, at least one and probably two of the players must be traitors — that can be deduced from the fact of ongoing nightly murders. This means, for a given faithful, the “traitor ratio” amongst the remaining players increases over the game from about 14% to between 25% and 50%. That is an inevitable consequen

  6. 12/06/2025

    Satellite of Love: Live Aid, Bad, Bono and the tragic triumph of irony

    Welcome to a new experiment in gratuitous discursion about music, culture and modernity. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a little different that the usual JC fare, and in lieu of any strengths plays to my weaknesses, which is the ability to get utterly sidetracked by the simplest questions. On a train up to see my daughter Antagonista I happened across U2’s album The Unforgettable Fire. A guilty, embarrassing pleasure, but halfway though the six-minute, two-chord epic Bad it struck me what a magnificently great song, and performance it is, and that called to mind U2’s legendary, notorious performance of Bad — all ten minutes of it — at Live Aid. I have a theory that Live Aid was a fundamental cultural touchpoint for people of my generation — that it changed the world in ways we do not often acknowledge – and this pulls on a few JC strings, and I started writing it up as a sort of appreciation of rock bands, guitar rock, digital delays, ambient music, plonkers, irony one of the great vocal performances — and and realised it would work much better as full audio surround sound experience. So here it is. Hope you enjoy! If this goes well I might do a bit more of this sort of thing. The original text — though it isn’t half as much fun — is here. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. There is a Spotify playlist of the forty seven — FORTY SEVEN FOLKS — songs name-checked and sampled in this podcast! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe

  7. 10/31/2025

    A fatal typo

    Sightseeing trips to the ice In the 1970s New Zealand’s national carrier Air New Zealand began operating “sightseeing” flights to Antarctica. The flights would depart from Auckland, fly south over the remote Balleny Islands and onto the ice continent, passing over Capes Hallett and Adare and from there, down McMurdo Sound to the ice continent. There they would circle for an hour or so, to give passsengers a good look at Antarctica, before turning around. They returned to Auckland via Christchurch in the South Island for a refuelling stop: the airline’s fleet of DC-10 wide-bodied jets did not quite have the range to make it back to Auckland comfortably in one go. The round trip took about 12 hours. At 8 am on 28 November 1979 flight TE-901, the final flight for the season, left Auckland with two hundred and thirty-seven passengers and twenty crew. At the controls was an Air New Zealand veteran, captain Jim Collins. All was well, though visibility was not great. As he approached Antarctica shortly after midday, Collins reported cloud cover at 5,000 metres, and requested permission from local air traffic control at the McMurdo Sound naval base to drop below the cloudbase to give passengers a better view. McMurdo granted it. Soon after that exchange, McMurdo Base lost contact with the DC-10. When it had not reappeared on New Zealand air traffic control systems a couple of hours later, officials began to fear the worst. Over the afternoon, planes were scrambled from McMurdo Base. They traced TE-901’s last known position. They followed its scheduled flightpath. They found nothing. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Hours passed. News of the missing plane began to spread. As the Auckland evening drew in, relatives began to reconcile themselves to the idea of disaster. Air New Zealand issued a grim deduction: the plane could not possibly still be in the air: it would long since have run out of fuel. Then, at about midnight — the sun does not set in Antarctica in late November — the crew of a US Navy Hercules spotted a dark smear on Ross Island, some forty-five kilometres east of the plane’s scheduled flight path. They investigated. They quickly realised it was the remains of an air crash. The aeroplane’s tail section, but little else, was intact. It bore Air New Zealand’s distinctive koru. Wreckage stretched for hundreds of metres up the lower slopes of Mt. Erebus, a 3,900 metre volcano. The Hercules radioed back to base. They had found TE-901. There would be no survivors. A commercial airliner with two-hundred and fifty seven souls on board had flown at an altitude of 400 metres into a mountain the size of the Eiger. At the time it was the fourth worst crash in the history of powered flight. It remains New Zealand’s worst single peacetime loss of life. The crash recovery, at such an inhospitable location, was harrowing. Many on the rescue teams were permanently traumatised. The New Zealand Government created a special civilian award for gallantry for those who went down to the ice. The government initiated an investigation. The cause of the crash remained baffling. The plane’s captain, Jim Collins, was an experienced and conscientious pilot. He had reported no trouble. The plane’s telemetry indicated it was functioning perfectly. The flight recorders indicated the cockpit seemed harmonious, though there was some discussion about visibility. But photographs recovered from passenger cameras indicated good visibility below the plane, and it had been the basis on which Collins’ was granted permission to descend below the plane’s minimum safe altitude of just under 5,000 metres. That altitude had been set a good kilometre above the highest point of the surrounding terrain, which was the crater of the active volcano Mt.Erebus, on Ross Island to the east of the Sound. Yet, despite all this, the airliner had been nearly fifty kilometres off course and was flying lower than 500 metres above sea level. Someone, or something, had plainly gone very wrong. Quickly — the consensus, after 45 years, is far too quickly — the question turned to who. As is so often the case in “human error” investigations, the first person in the frame was the operator: Jim Collins. Captain Collins, as is also so often the case, was in no position to argue. Whether or not Collins was at fault, there is a deeper point. It ought to be a well-understood operating risk in any complex operation that people make mistakes. Human error is not an exception to the operation of a system but an inevitability. Yet, when failure happens, our instinctive response to find the wrongdoer. It need not be that way. Moonshot When President Kennedy fired the starting gun on the space race in 1962 — at which point the Reds had a lap head start — the Apollo Programme was on an absurdly tight schedule. The farthest it had then got was Alan Shepard’s suborbital Mercury flight in May, 1961. That lasted fifteen minutes and reached an altitude of less than two hundred kilometres from Earth. It wasn’t even, truly, in space. Now Kennedy promised that NASA would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The moon is nearly four hundred thousand kilometres from Earth. The mission would take ten days. The challenge NASA faced was, literally, an order of magnitude greater than its greatest achievement to date. Then, in January 1967, disaster struck. A terrible fire during a launchpad test killed three astronauts in NASA’s Apollo programme. The immediate cause of the accident was a stray spark from exposed electrical wiring, which ignited in the pure oxygen environment of the sealed capsule. The crew did not stand a chance. They were bolted in: it would have taken them a minute and a half to open the door. Programme director Gene Kranz shut down the blame game before it could get started with his famous “tough and competent” speech. Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung-ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. [...] Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. [...] From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Here are two divergent responses to disaster. The first, and often instinctive, is to find a single root cause in an individual—to isolate a “bad apple”. The second is exemplified by Kranz. He shifted the focus immediately from who to blame to what to fix: How can we redesign the system—the spacecraft, the procedures, the culture—to ensure this never happens again? The Erebus disaster would, unfortunately, take the first path. Investigation Within a few months of the crash New Zealand’s chief air accidents investigator Ron Chippindale issued a preliminary report. It was thorough — something like 90 pages — and pulled few punches. Chippindale attributed the crash to pilot error, more or less upon the legal principle res ipsa loquitur — “sometimes, things speak for themselves”: The probable cause of this accident was the decision of the captain to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition when the crew was not certain of their position and the subsequent inability to detect the rising terrain which intercepted the aircraft’s flight path. If you can’t see a mountain in front of you and you fly into it, that’s on you. But Jim Collins was a fastidious pilot. He had been briefed on the route. He had studied it diligently. His family had watched him, the night before departure, marking up the route on his own personal atlas, which he took with him on the plane. And besides: it made no sense. Why would an experienced pilot drop through the published minimum safe altitude if he didn’t know where he was and couldn’t see where he was going? One of Mr. Chippindale’s other observations — made in passing and of little consequence — caught the attention of the pilot’s association: The flight planned route entered in the company’s base computer was varied after the crew’s briefing in that the position for McMurdo on the computer printout used at the briefing was incorrect by over 2 degrees of longitude and was subsequently corrected prior to this flight. [...] Some diagrams and maps issued at the route qualification briefing could have been misleading in that they depicted a track which passed to the true west of Ross Island over a sea level ice shelf, whereas the flight planned track passed to the east over high ground reaching to 12450 feet [about 3,800 metres] above mean sea-level. That “high ground” was Mt. Erebus. But even at McMurdo Sound’s extreme southern latitude, “two degrees of longitude” is no small difference: it is about 50 kilometres. The route Jim Collins had been briefed on would take him well to the west of Mt. Erebus: if he was going by his maps, he would have been over McMurdo Sound. But still: even from 50 kilometres, mountains the size of Erebus are hard to miss. If visibility was poor, the plane should not have been at a

  8. 10/03/2025

    Better, stronger, faster

    Sorry for the lack of news recently — I’ve been tinkering around with a spanner in the underbelly of the great steampunk machine which is the JC. The website’s performance — how quickly it serves pages — had fallen off a cliff. It had even started refusing to serve pages at all. The more I looked into it the more I realised I had to do something. The problem turned out to be twofold: Bots Firstly, bots. There are a lot of random webscraping devices roaming the dark netherworlds of the Grid that just incessantly hit unsuspecting websites. They have always done this, but it is getting worse. There are good webscrapers — Google does this so that its search engines work — sort of bad ones — all the AI engines just harvest text for training material, which is kind of annoying — IP fundamentalists get very wounded about it — but it is also nice to think my bloviations might form part of the forthcoming memeplex forging a contingent path to our future in the digital simulacrum — and baaaaad ones — these come from China, mostly, and Russia, and God knows what they want with the JC but, until recently, they were making up about 90% of all traffic and slowing down everything for everyone else. No more. Good webhosts can help with this, and JC now has measures in place to throttle these bots. One is just blocking traffic from China altogether. Sorry Chinese ISDA fans! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Moi Secondly, to put not too fine a point on it, me. I have designed and built the JC in a decidedly evolutionary way. I got stuck with certain design decisions I made — or didn’t make — early on and that was that. It is like the famous XKCD cartoon: This is a common feature of all big organisations of any longevity. At the heart of every investment bank, be assured there will be some Wang server kicking out ASCII code on an orange screen that is absolutely fundamental to the risk management systems, and which no-one dares remove for fear of unintended consequences. In smaller ways it is true of the JC. As I’ve gone along I have configured things in certain ways that seemed sensible at the time, but in hindsight not so much. The nature of evolutionary adaptation is that ostensibly good decisions get sedimented into the architecture, overlaid with more and more stuff, and it gets harder and harder to go back and fix them because of all the knock-on consequences. Usually, it is not until much later that ostensibly good decisions reveal themselves to have been bad decisions. Some were good decisions, once: whether a decision is good or bad is situational — we tend to forget this: hindsight conquers all. But unintended knock-on effects aren’t always obvious. They depend on how the future unfurls. (That figure of speech is wrong, by the way: it implies the future is already there waiting for is, like a rolled-up flag, and just needs to be revealed. But the future is not like that: it needs to be invented). I have a piece upcoming about non-catastrophic failure modes in complex systems — “systems glitches” — that can lie latent in a system for a long time, and the longer they lie, the more they are normalised and start to look like normal functioning. The Post Office Horizon debacle is a good example. So, I think, is the Healthcare Serial Murder phenomenon. But there was one right under my nose. This is also what happens when non-experts dabble. I am, first and foremost, a windbag: I am no web developer. And I made the choice a long time ago to use the MediaWiki platform, which is really good at being a knowhow wiki, but not very good at user rights management, founded as it is on the premise that information should be free, and the assumption that lots of people would be contributing and not just one. I “solved” the problem of rights management by creating two wikis, and having them talk to each other. The premium wiki pulls all the free content from the main one, and then overlays it with extra juicy stuff. (This is mainly of interest to people involved in legal negotiation — especially ISDA — so if you are here for the Otto Büchstein’s cod Shakespearean melodrama fear not, you are not missing much. But if you want even more about Indemnifiable Taxes then, boy oh boy, is the Premium subscription for you!) Anyway this two-wiki approach — which as far as I can tell, I invented by myself — has created some performance issues. Because requests to view one page creates all kinds of demands to load content from the other wiki. Because of the complex interplay of transcluded templates. This is much more interesting than it sounds. Templating The thing that first sold me on Mediawiki is its really cool templating feature. Over my life parents, siblings, teachers, lecturers, bosses, children and most long-sufferingly, my spouse have railed and bemoaned my impulsiveness, lack of attention to detail, goldfish-like attention span, general slapdashery and a tendency to get easily carried away. (Also fecklessness and verbosity but they’re not important right now). I tend to be all over the place, as anyone who has tried to arrange a meeting with me more than ten minutes into the future will know. Apparently, by the way, this is a classic trait of ENTPs. We also tend to build self-organising systems around ourselves and get into set routines, because force of habit is a great way of remembering to do things. THERE I GO GETTING DISTRACTED AGAIN. Mediawiki has this system of dynamic templating that is brilliant for building self-organising systems. I got really into them. They are what makes the site so apparently organised and so content-rich, but if you get too carried away with them they can become quite an albatross. I got quite carried away. Templates are essentially reusable gobbets of text. There is a different area on the wiki called the Template namespace where you can create little slugs of text, name them, save them down and then “call” them in the main pages of the wiki by writing their names inside {{double curly brackets}}. At first blush this is just a time and labour saver: if I create a template called “QBF” with the text string, “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, then I can “call” that text string on any page in the wiki by typing “{{QBF}}” and saving the page. So if I type: “my mother called me yesterday to tell me {{QBF}}.” That would render as: “my mother called me yesterday to tell me the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This is called “transcluding”. The term was coined by Ted Nelson in his 1982 book Literary Machines to describe the idea of a document including portions of another document by reference, rather than by copying the text. Transcluding probably seems unremarkable. But it does two things: it saves keystrokes and it ensures consistency. Every time you get the same words, the same capitalisation, the same form: you can be confident it will always be “jumps” and not “jumped”. It saves you having to think about it. It compensates for a lack of attention to detail. It dramatically reduces faff. I have a template {{otto}}, for example, that returns the text “Otto Büchstein” because it is a pain in the arse remembering how to put the umlaut over the ü. And as all metal fans know, umlauts are a matter of, um, grave importance. But there is more. Templates can have variables in them. Variables are designated by triple curly brackets. So I could set my {{QBF}} template up as follows: “the quick brown {{{1}}} jumps over the lazy {{{2}}}” Now if I “call” {{QBF|orang-utan|moon}} it will render as: the quick brown orang-utan jumps over the lazy moon I can quickly create a magical universe of all kinds of wonderful quick brown things jumping over lazy things. I can add more variables for the adjectives! There is a world of possibilities! I could rewrite the template as The {{{1}}} {{{2}}} {{{3}}} {{{4}}} over the {{{5}}} {{{6}}} But of course, at some point you might as well just not use a template. But as you can see, Mediawiki here is functioning as a symbol processor. It is a sort of Turing Machine. Now, I dare say even that seems unremarkable. Get your kicks, JC! But here is the thing: you can put templates within templates: you can have templates calling templates calling templates. So there is multilayered dimension here. And you can put those variables inside template calls. This means you can use variables to tell the outer template which inner template to call. So if my outer template calls a template (with double curly brackets) and I put a variable (triple curly brackets) in that inner template’s name then I can specify which inner template I call by the variable I put in the outer template call. This is conditional logic. We really are talking about Turing Machine style processing here. Let’s say my template “{{clause}}” calls the text “{{isda {{{1}}}}}”. If I type {{clause|1}}, the template will assemble {{isda 1}} — let’s say, that is the text of Clause 1 of the ISDA Master Agreement — and will return the text of that template. If I type {{clause|2}} it will assemble {{isda 2}} — Clause 2 of the ISDA — and will render that clause. If I have set up templates for all the clauses in the ISDA Master Agreement — and I have — then I have created a very easy way of pulling any clause I want on any page. The variables in the “outermost” template control which templates I want to render on the page. This is very, very powerful. It means you can, basically, programme the wiki. There is essentially no limit to how complicated you could make this. This is what I did. For example, the “owners manual” template, {{nman}} has only three variables (agreement, edition, clause) but calls twenty-two different inner templates, and some of those are dynamic

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About

JC and his hobby horses, bonnet bees, bêtes noire and miscellaneous passing fixations. This is a sister podcast to the Jolly Contrarian on ISDA, which you can access here: https://open.spotify.com/show/5TRKFSdwBy3LsV8OYi3kxq jollycontrarian.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    The Jolly Contrarian
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Olly Buxton
  • Show Website
    The Jolly Contrarian Life