But on the other hand:

"[The well-managed business'] workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment."

Ford theorizes that greater amounts of leisure time and better pay for workers are good for both the workers, for their enjoyment, and the employers, for having larger markets; I don't see this as evil.

On actually reading the article: this title is a bad summary. (Makes me think of Slashdot.) What the article covers is the point, which I hope is uncontroversial, that stimuli give rise to responses, and influence the course of cognition: holding a warm cup of coffee makes you think more, well, warmly of someone you're interviewing; seeing a framed picture of a library causes you to speak more quietly; the smell of cleaning agents inspires you to keep your cubicle clean; long dint of repetition encourages you to decide that yes, in fact, you are having a Big Mac attack.

None of this is controversial, unless you're thinking in terms of Descartes -- the body and mind as purely separate and the mind as purely master of the body. There's a Catholic saying that "body and soul are one" -- what the soul (or mind, if you prefer) does, affects the body, and what the body does, affects the soul.

Another thing I'd mention: like evolutionary psychology, this article's research is highly culture-bound. They don't seem to be interested in determining whether pictures of libraries mean the same thing to Indonesian hill tribes, or whether the scent of Febreeze means the same thing to Moroccans (or red mages).

Also, as the article points out, this kind of unconscious encouragement can be overcome; you have only to be aware of it.

Perceptual Control Theorists would argue that you don't understand behavior if you think that we, or other animals, respond to stimuli.

"The illusion of stimulus and response [..] What we see from outside the system is that the crosswind pushes sideways on the car and the front wheels of the car immediately cock into the wind, preventing any important change in the car's path. It looks just as if the car is being stimulated by the wind, and is responding by turning its front wheels into the wind. Of course we know that neither the car nor the driver can sense the crosswind; this appearance of stimulus and response is an illusion. The true explanation is a little more complicated than the stimulus-response explanation would be, but not much more complicated.

But we can see now how the impression that stimuli cause responses could arise, even if the system in question is really a control system that works as just described."

-- William T. Powers, A Brief Introduction to Perceptual Control Theory: http://www.benchpress.com/aboutPCT.htm

But, he can only be persuaded by the arguments that will necessarily persuade him, not necessarily those which correspond to reality. What merit is it to simply find the right button to push?

Lots of merit, because pushing that button will give an enjoyment feedback of being right.

Compare with adventure games that more or less consists of finding the right buttons to push in some order :)

You experience adventure games pretty differently from how I do.

Also note that "merit" and "enjoyment" are different things.

Of course they are. "Enjoyment" is something that can objectively defined, "merit" means whatever you want it to.

That is not really how I experience adventure games, but given the context of comparing a discussion with finding buttons to push, I thought it was apt :)

As for merit vs. enjoyment, I believe that the best merit of discussions is the enjoyment one can derive from it.

I looked at this article, but I don't think the experiment proves as much as Libet claims it does. Neither he nor subsequent researchers seem to have gone beyond toy problems (what EEG activity appears in someone writing or programming?).

Also, I find it hard to believe that free will "lives" in one or another part of the brain; neither determinism nor randomness is freedom, and a physical "organ of free will" would have to be either deterministic (from macro-scale physics) or random (from quantum-scale activity).

I agree that living without free will is probably psychologically insupportable; even Muslims and Calvinists, who believe in double predestination (and Marxists, who believe in historical determinism), live as if free will was true. (Read _The Pilgrim's Progress_ and tell me that Bunyan really believed Puritan doctrines...)

We get angry when theologians try to overstep their bounds into science, so we should also get angry when scientists overstep their bounds into philosophy with all kinds of hamfisted assumptions.

I mean just because an assumption is necessary and reasonable for exploring the mechanics of the universe does not mean you can simply extrapolate to something as mysterious as the nature of consciousness and free will.

Philosophy ceases to be philosophy when its claims can be tested empirically. The major branches of science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.) were once considered topics in philosophy, but are no longer. It appears that Philosophy of Mind is currently making this transition.

(Edit: Changed "Theory of Mind" to "Philosophy of Mind"... psychology lingo crept in there for a second)

Absolutely true, however it's a bit overzealous to jump from starting to understand how the brain works to materialistic assumptions about the nature of consciousness of free will.

See, from my perspective it's overzealous to assume that the conscious mind is not materialistic in nature.

With a question as ill-posed as the nature of consciousness, what's reasonable and what's overzealous depends entirely on your perspective.

Yes it's overzealous to assume either way. That's why it's philosophy not science.

More to the point than the Geneva Conventions: the UN Convention Against Torture, which is exactly what it sounds like.

As for whether waterboarding is torture under US law: the US executed a few Kempaitai (Japanese secret police) agents for torturing US prisoners in WWII; they had waterboarded them. Waterboarding is also covered under UNCAT.

(Note to anyone assuming a partisan motivation: I am a serious Catholic, thus not by any stretch of the imagination a US liberal.)

The pleasure of writing, and/or bragging rights -- the same way that Wikipedia came to be what it is.

On the other hand, it can take a long time for ideas to be accepted. Even Pasteur was a radical in his day; and I can't find him on Wikipedia, but there was a French doctor who introduced the idea of washing one's hands -- I think in carbolic acid? -- before delivering a child. This worked very well; but the doctors thought it was a nuisance and produced no benefit, and kicked him out.

I'm not defending homeopathy, which I'm pretty deeply suspicious of; it _might_ merit further investigation, but homeopathic medicines certainly shouldn't be sold as medicines until they start performing a whole lot better than they have so far. I just want to point out that the medical field, and most scientific fields, are resistant to adopting new ideas even when those ideas do work.

Another example of that slowness: post-traumatic stress disorder, which was only accepted by the APA in DSM-IV (1980) after a long struggle.

Alex Papadimoulis of the Daily WTF has an article on this -- it's his opinion that the simple, "bone-headed" approach is the best one for constraints like this, and homegrown business rule engines are dangerous:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Programming-Sucks!-Or-At-Lea...

However, commercial business rule engines might work out better, provided they stick to XML or known formats of I/O in general.

Thanks for the link.

IMO Alex doesn't give the best advice sometimes (not to wonder, he sees so much boneheadedness!!!), but he's quite right there... but I don't see the advice -against- business rule engines there.

I totally agree with your own advice about sticking to commercial business rule engines. In fact, I'll give Drools.net a try (any other suggestions?).

If any company -needs- a rules engine, it's the one I work for (there's a "developer" whose main reason for having work is that the business rules change a lot every freaking month)

PD: I like his linking to Yourdon's book :) - and I have a degree in "Information Systems" myself

You know, on considering, I think you're right -- he doesn't advise against rules engines, just the Greenspun's Rule version. (Greenspun's Rule is that "any sufficiently long-running project includes a slow, buggy, and ad-hoc implementation of half of Common Lisp.")

I don't have much experience with rules engines, and I don't know what your budget is like; so I can't really make recommendations. That doesn't stop me from trying, though...

You might be interested in Intersystems' Ensemble. If you're anything like Alex, you'll run screaming for the hills at this point, since it's built on MUMPS (it's an extension of Caché, "postmodern MUMPS," which comes with everything from a web server to a blindingly fast SQL frontend). If you're not -- if you realize that it all compiles down to object code anyways, and what's important is programmer skill and code maintainability, not the presence of curly braces and variable declarations -- you'll keep reading. (Actually, Caché's version of MUMPS has both curly braces and variable declarations, although both are optional.)

Ensemble was designed to translate messages between incompatible healthcare databases, applying business rules in the process. It can be used for more than that; part of the training I had in the product (see below for my full disclosure) was using it to implement a simple loan acceptance protocol.

I think that its "flowchart mode" of execution might be very well suited to frequently-changing business rules. There's a video at http://www.maddash.net/videos/intersystems/ensemble/vehr/ which demonstrates this -- look at 7:15 for the flowchart (each element in it is programmable as necessary), and at 2:15 for the related flow through processing modules when something comes in.

You may be able to get a proof-of-concept demonstration -- see http://www.intersystems.com/ensemble/pilot/index.html for details. Even if not, if this looks interesting, it wouldn't hurt to get in touch with Intersystems Sales.

Full disclosure: I work at Intersystems, but I'm not associated with Sales, and I really should be getting back to work. :)

Thanks for the suggestion. My first instinct is indeed to run for the hills :)

I'm watching the video and the first point is that you should fire the graphic designer :P (I suspect there isn't any, if a programmer did it, at least the screens are very clear - heck, maybe a graphics designer would murk it).

PD: after watching the video it's very clear that it's not what I need at all, but thanks for the suggestion.

Greenspun's rule is something I'm painfully aware of (the main enterprise app I work with has an ad-hoc implementation of... assembler :P ), but thanks for the reminder.

Thanks for the update, and for giving it a chance. I agree that the production values are pretty bad...

Good luck in your search. I've never heard of an ad-hoc implementation of assembly language before, but while we're talking about wanting to head for the hills... :)

Heh.. you don't say... it's built with Sun ONE's UDS FORTE development environment (on a language called TOOL), which stopped being supported years ago.

Fortunately I don't maintain that one very much, but yes, it's "run-for-the-hills" worthy - sadly, the current job offers job security and pays above average for my country.

I'm keeping an eye open, but I haven't found an adequate niche for me yet - my skills don't translate well to a remote environment, I'll probably try my hand at consulting.

Just to set the record straight, Caché -- which is the last man standing of MUMPS packages at the present day -- includes support for bitmaps.

It also contains support for everything else from AJAX to the kitchen sink, since it originates with several independent (and competing) OS/programming-language/database systems, originating in the late '60s before worse-is-better ate everyone's lunch. It even works as a RAD environment (plus a webserver, an SQL database, an OO programming language, and a go-between for other systems' incompatible message formats): very unusual (I expect the kitchen-sink module, or perhaps the mail reader, in the next version), but not primitive.

Its reputation is sullied by some WTF-worthy users, and by old coding conventions (now less completely abandoned than they should be) that were like Perl but hard to understand.

Full disclosure: I work for Intersystems, but not in Sales, and this post is purely on my own initiative. (One does not pay people to make unflattering comparisons with Perl.)

> It also contains support for everything else from AJAX to the kitchen sink ... It even works as a RAD environment (plus a webserver, an SQL database, an OO programming language, and a go-between for other systems' incompatible message formats.

Sorry but that sounds like a Frankenstein monster type of language/sdk/database. Now I am more scared of it than before ;-)

Two words: Poop sock.

MMORPGs have everything to do with being in the zone, nothing to do with sexuality; these two motivations are both exceptionally powerful. I remember an experiment with rats, where an electrode was hooked up directly to the center in the brain that generates the "in the zone" feeling; the rats pushed the lever to fire that electrode continually, until they died of starvation. MMORPGs, computer games in general, Wikipedia, checking e-mail, Hacker News... all operate based on the desire to zone in.

Now, the popularity of well-paid parasitic professions in the contemporary US (law, most prominently, where the marginal value of a new lawyer is negative) reveals that the desire for money is very strong as well; but is the desire for money always the same as the desire for sexual relations? I don't see Dick Cheney living it up like Bill Clinton...

Of course, multiple motivations can be present at once; but I think that good work, at least in computer areas, requires the desire to zone in as one of these motivations.

1. You don't see Dick Cheney living it up like Bill Clinton because he can afford to kill his hookers after he finishes with them, and then kill the people who dispose of the bodies. He's smart enough to avoid publicity.

2. The rewards you are referring to (email, HN, MMORPG) have to do with dopaminergic pathways, dopamine release, and the nucleus accumbens.

You're right, it was the dopamine system I was thinking of -- the phrase had escaped me.

On Cheney: I think it's possible to say when someone's having a sybaritic lifestyle and when they're not; certainly someone who's as eagerly discussed by the media as Cheney now is (while Clinton's allowed to live his rather un-Presidential post-Presidential years in media silence).

This isn't a defense of Cheney, though. I would call him less nightmarish if he had the excuse of wanting money as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It seems to be a common vice, this thinking of life as Donkey Kong, and if you die with a high enough score you get to leave your initials on the machine at the end...