Donald Trump and Rob Ford: Diagnosis and Prescription

I live in a city that was briefly famous around the world for having a clueless, egotistical, crack-smoking mayor. 

Like many Torontonians (and most Downtowners), I was embarrassed and frequently mystified that Rob Ford had been elected in the first place. Who were these bozos who had voted for him? Couldn't they see how incompetent and ridiculous he is? But his "Ford Nation" fans couldn't seem to get enough, never censuring his antics, and eating up his "shock the bourgeoisie" pronouncements.

More recently, in the US, Donald Trump has been making headlines with his own shocking pronouncements.  The more shocking they are, the more enthusiastically received they are by supporters, and the more establishment voices are appalled and dismayed, with frequent astonishment that anyone can succeed with such buffoonery and demagoguery.

Part of what these two men have in common is reasonably obvious: both on the right, both appealing to a working class constituency.  On the surface, both seem to appeal to white, native-born voters, but interestingly, in the case of Rob Ford, many of his supporters are actually from visible minorities.

Another thing they share: their antics make the urban, globalized establishment crazy.

And I think this is the essence of their appeal, rather than the literal content of their policies. In both cases, a disaffected group takes pleasure in seeing the winners in the current economic order tweaked and horrified. 

In Rob Ford's case it was the suburban poor forced out of downtown by gentrification, and in Donald Trump's it is working class or small town men whose economic prospects have been off-shored by globalization.

Democracy works best when all constituencies feel that they have a voice. Perhaps rather than reacting with outrage at crazy policy suggestions, we should listen to the underlying concerns that fuel them. Not only will we reduce our own risk of apoplexy, we might strengthen our democracy and our society. 

If that doesn't move you, think of it this way: if you listen to the concerns of the constituency, you will stop encouraging the creation of the maddening showboat politicians needed to give them a voice.

Some Thoughts on Malcolm X

I've been a fan of Spike Lee's movies for a long time, and I still remember seeing his "Malcolm X" in the theater.

Though it may seem like an odd thing for a white guy, I left that theater an admirer of the icon of Black Power who would later choose the name Malik El-Shabazz, and earn the honorific El-Hajj.  

And it wasn't just the universalist El-Shabazz I admired, the one who had given up his anger and hatred against me and my kind, but, in part thanks to the brilliance of Lee's movie-making, I also learned to admire, and appreciate the necessity for, his time as "Malcolm X", when he would have been perfectly happy to call me a "white devil" to my face.

When you believe passionately that diversity is a strength and an enhancement to the quality of your life, when you feel that you are "one of the good guys" reaching out in friendship, the venomous rejection that X and the Nation of Islam were spewing out is very hard to take, even if you recognize the justice of the grievances that inspired it.  It isn't easy being told "We don't want you here" when you feel you are on the same side.

But I learned through Spike Lee and Malcolm X that the "white devil" message was not about me, and not for me.  In a way, it was none of my business.

It was about purging the internalized sense of inferiority, shame, and envy that had been instilled by centuries of domination and abuse. The truth is that equality is not conferred by others: it needs to grow and become firmly established within first.  Once it is there, others can accept it or not, but then that is THEIR problem.

Centuries of collective, and decades of personal, anger and hurt had to be vented, processed, and transcended before El-Shabazz could emerge, equal not because someone else (or some document) told him he was, but because he just was, and knew it as surely as he knew his own freely-chosen name.

Another important thing I admired about Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam, were the discipline and focus they brought to their activities, and while the message may have sounded vitriolic, they stopped short of actual violence.  This is not a trivial accomplishment, and it makes all the difference.

Recently, it has come to my attention that I need to relearn the lesson that Mr. Lee and El-Hajj El-Shabazz were kind enough to teach me over twenty years ago.

In my larger professional community of software developers, there are new groups with real historic grievances, and they are getting to the point where they too want to sit at the table without having to apologize for who they are. I've been fortunate to work in environments with a lot of diversity, and I welcome more of it enthusiastically. 

But some of these aggrieved groups are working through the anger and hate built up from their long suppression, from the mistreatment they have received from our industry and society at large. And sometimes what they say and do makes me uncomfortable, seems to target me or seems to contravene the values of diversity as I understand them.

As I said, this can be hard to take.  But maybe I have to remember the lesson of Malcolm X: it's not about me, and it is not for me. In a way, it's not even my business.

Rather than taking offense, or speaking up, maybe the best thing I can do is LET them hate my male, white, hetero, cis, middle-aged ass. 

If it gets too much, I can look away, ignore it, bite my tongue, live my values in some other way.  Short of actual violence, or the genuine threat of it, maybe I need to let them express themselves, however they like, until they've worked it through.

Diversity is one of MY most deeply-held values, and no one said that living your values was going to be easy (actually, I'm pretty sure that it being hard and doing it anyway is how you know it really is a value). I will continue living that value, even if sometimes it is rejected by those I'm reaching out to.

Perhaps the best I can do is to continue to be a SILENT ally, and to be ready, when they have worked through all that anger, when they are healed, to welcome them as the friends, colleagues and siblings in the universal family that I already know them to be.

De Morgan’s Laws are (Mostly) Constructive!

Most programmers and anybody with a basic knowledge of logic will have heard of De Morgan’s Laws. They provide an easy way to switch back and forth between “or” and “and” in Boolean logic, which is very handy.

When I was first introduced to intuitionistic logic,  I remember being somewhat scared off it by the statement that De Morgan’s Laws don’t hold in it.  This will make any programmer nervous!

So, it came as a surprise to me to learn that in fact three quarters of the propositions that make up De Morgan’s Laws still hold for intuitionistic logic!

It is interesting to examine why.  De Morgan’s Laws can be broken up into four implications:

1)      (¬ P) ∧ (¬ Q) → ¬ (P ∨ Q)

2)      ¬ (P ∨ Q) → (¬ P) ∧  (¬ Q)

3)      (¬ P) ∨ (¬ Q) → ¬ (P ∧ Q)

4)      ¬ (P ∧ Q) → (¬ P) ∨  (¬ Q)

Of these four implications, only the fourth one fails for intuitionistic logic!

Let’s check.

Case 1) If I have a proof that P is false, and a proof that Q is false than I can’t possibly find a proof that either P or Q is true, by the basic definition of ∨.

Case 2) If I have a proof that P ∨ Q can’t be true, then clearly there is no proof for either of P or Q, by the basic definition of ∨.

Case 3) If I have a proof that P is false, or a proof that Q is false, there can’t possibly be a proof that both P and Q are true, again by the basic definition of ∧.

So far so good.  But here is where things go awry.

Case 4) If I have a proof that both P and Q can’t be true at the same time, that doesn’t tell me for sure that I have proof that either one in particular is false.  They just can’t both be true.   So case 4) isn't guaranteed to always be true, and therefore isn't a law after all.


However, if I find a definite proof that one of P or Q is true, I can still conclude that the other is false.  This can be formalized as:

      4')      ¬ (P ∧ Q) → P → ¬ Q

So even this fourth case, with a small caveat, still contains a lot of useful information. Maybe we can say that De Morgan’s Laws are more than three quarters constructive!

The moral of the story is not to be scared away by constructive (i.e. intuitionistic) mathematics: more of the familiar rules still work than you might think, even if you have to be a bit more careful around the edges.

The Intuitive Minority

Many people are skeptical about personality typing systems. Some complain about their over-generality.  Others simply dislike being categorized.  Personally, I have found them very useful for thinking about my own patterns of behaviour. They also help me to understand a person whose style is different from mine, and might otherwise be mystifying.

One of the most commonly used personality typing systems is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) .  It has four parameters with two settings for each: Extraversion vs Introversion (E vs I), Sensing vs Intuition (S vs N), Thinking vs Feeling (T vs F), and Judging vs Perceiving (J vs P).  Each personality type is composed of four letters, one from each pair.  For example, I am an ENTJ (Extraversion-Intuition-Thinking-Judging).

I want to focus in on one of these pairs, Sensing vs Intuition (S vs N).  If you take a look at MBTI type statistics, you will notice that most of the pairings are pretty close to 50-50, with a little bit of skew for T vs F and J vs P, but that there is a very noticeable bias in the S vs N category: 75% of the population are Sensing (S).

With a majority that big on the other side of the divide, it is pretty much guaranteed that anyone in the N camp is going to be perceived as slightly odd relative to the personality norms of society.  If you add N and T together, you get the NT temperament (sometimes known as “Rationals” ), which make up less than 10% of the population.  It is not surprising that some members of this group (especially the introverts) have sometimes been stigmatized as “nerds” by the majority.

The summary explanation of N vs S characteristics is this: the N is more oriented toward abstract ideas, the big picture, the past, the future and general theories of things.  If you need proof that I’m an N, this blog is proof enough: it is characteristic for an N to lump together superficially disparate areas such as, for example, philosophy, software development, and personality system, while presenting them as a coherent subject matter.

The S is a more concrete thinker, deeply rooted in their own direct experience, present circumstances, the nitty-gritty.  They tend to characterize particular things by visible attributes.   They tend not to like the kind of vague categorizations that Ns prefer.  My experience is that S types don’t think that much of personality type systems, except as a kind of game or as handy stereotypes, since they don’t really think in terms of systems and tend to be annoyed by generalization that goes beyond their experience.

Steve Jobs, whose recent passing has caused such a vast cultural effect, was almost certainly an N.  He saw beyond the current situation, persisted through some difficult times (such as the early days when Macs had a very small market share and his NeXT years) by focusing on what could be.  Ironically, he also now appeals to Ss since his vision has become concrete and present in their lives in an obvious way: an S does not argue with clear and present success.

In some ways, I think it makes sense that most people are S.  Paying attention to the here and now pays off more regularly, even though it has less potential to pay off big the way truly original and disruptive vision can.  Intuition is a high risk/high reward proposition. The conditions that make it pay off are more remote and less certain, but the advantage of being ahead of the game when change comes can be enormous.  A society without N would never progress, but a society with too much N might change too fast or fly off in too many directions.

As an N, I have found that understanding that most people don’t think like I do makes me a more effective communicator in practical situations.  For example, when I detect the tell-tale signs of scepticism or confusion when I’m explaining an idea or plan to someone, I find that giving concrete examples with illustrative detail is often a good place to start. (This can help communicate with Ns as well, since another N might want to detect the patterns for themselves in your data.)  When talking to an S, the trick is to choose examples that aren’t too different, to add in “irrelevant” detail for each, and then point out what the shared relevant details are that make the pattern.

To give an example, let’s say you want to make a point about luxury sports cars.  This is a simple enough abstract category that it likely won’t cause much communicative difficulty, but it would nonetheless be more effective to give a specific example, such as mentioning a Porsche, or even a better, a specific model, such as Porsche 911.  The extra detail, which can seem arbitrary to an N, helps to anchor the idea more concretely for an S.  An N’s instinct is to leave the question open, since the particular model doesn’t matter to the point, but for the S choosing an appropriate example with the right specifics does matter.

The flip side of this technique can be used in rapport building or social conversations when you find that the person you are speaking with is giving a lot of specific detail.  Instead of getting bored and tuning out, it can be helpful to pick out a particular detail that sounds interesting to you and ask for more context about it.  To pick up on our previous example, suppose an S is discussing sports cars, most likely mentioning a specific make, the Porsche 911.  You can ask the S what makes that particular make better/worse/special, depending on the context.  To make this more meaningful, you could provide a different specific make as a comparison example.  This helps to make the detail relevant to the N, while also engaging the S in a mode of conversation that is comfortable.

Careful observation of such interactions will lead to better results and more techniques.  Armed with knowledge of this phenomenon, I hope all Ns will learn to better cope in a world in which they are a minority.