Classical Definition = Life, or Something Else?

A nudibranch and a sea squirt, both classically alive

More precisely, does the classical definition define all forms of life?

"The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being" (ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos anthrôpôi — ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ), said Socrates, according to Plato in The Apology. Among the many reasons to live an examined life is that the greatest revelations usually await us in the things we take for granted, the things we do not examine.

Chief among those overconfident blind spots is our habit of framing the bounds of discussion and then letting that frame go unquestioned. This discussion of whether VISTA is a living system hinges on our definition of life, so let's put the spotlight on that.

Sure, VISTA may not fully fit the classical definition of life, but does that definition actually define life? Most biologists agree it does, more or less, but what does that really mean? It means it defines something they equate with life, but that's not the same as saying it actually defines life.

Could this definition be defining something else, something other than life per se? If so, what is it? What is so close to life that biologists would nearly universally confuse it with life?

The wording of the definition - especially certain clauses - gives it away. What is made of cells, metabolizes food into energy, and reproduces? The definition even answers the question for us by using the answer as a synonym for life: an organism. This definition equates life with an organism. It cannnot conceive of non-organismic life, because it has bundled together multiple characteristics - some of which are different in kind from one another - into a single definition and then made an implicit assertion about the subject of the definition.

This definition has begged the question of what is life by offering a definition that only claims to define life. We can all see it defines an organism, and we assume a priori that an organism is the only form life can take.

Is it?

About the Photo

A nudibranch (Nembrotha lineolata, right) lays eggs in a spiral pattern on a sea squirt (Polycarpa aurata).

Nudibranchs are a kind of sea slug, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Polyceridae and class Gastropoda (which includes sea slugs, slugs, and snails). They are often spectacularly colorful, and their external gills rise from their backs like floral plumes.

Sea squirts are a kind of tunicate, immobile filter-feeding marine animals found in shallow waters throughout the world’s oceans. Tunicates preserve the original form and life-patterns of the earliest chordates; all vertebrates—including Homo sapiens—are descended from creatures much like tunicates. In their larval form, tunicates have a notochord, a stiff, spine-like rod that is the ancient predecessor of the spine. Tunicates lose their notochord by the time they reach adulthood, so we evolved from animals like them via neoteny—the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.

Photo: Nick Hobgood
Source: Wikipedia

VISTA and the Classic Definition of Life

A buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris)

[A symbiotic relationship between two living systems, each of which unambiguously satisfies the classic definition of life. Photo credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar Source: Wikipedia]

Does VISTA satisfy the classic definition of life? Let's answer this point by point.

1. Some VISTA software exhibits homeostasis (Task Manager for example), but a lot of VISTA software does not - or, at least in isolation it does not. Once you add users and programmers into the equation, VISTA's software lifecycle exhibits strong homeostasis; but as plenty of organizations have proved, it is possible to impose alternative software lifecycles on VISTA that destroy this higher-level homeostasis. Also, some systems within VISTA that started out without homeostatic mechanisms had them added later, and many more can still be added. So the answer is yes, some of it does, sometimes, under some conditions, but the answer is also no, not all of it, not even most of it, and not always. Yes and no seem entirely inadequate for this point.

2. Ah, organization! VISTA has lots of it, lots of structure built up from basic units to create many higher layers of order. To those of us who understand VISTA's architecture, its overall organization is elegant and often beautiful (though plenty of it is ugly and in need of refactoring). Unfortunately, the classic definition of life pretty much demands cells as the basic unit, and this is not true of VISTA (metaphorical cells don't count).

3. No, VISTA definitely does not have a metabolism (metaphorical metabolism does not count, either). VISTA is completely dependent on an electrical supply, which is the mechanical equivalent of an animal that is only "alive" as long as it is plugged in - we call that a machine. That's pretty much the opposite of a metabolism, so a big no on this point.

4. Yes, VISTA has growth. Oodles of it. Its data multiplies, its software extensions increase, its routines and globals, its files and options, even its extensible frameworks and documentation grow in number over time. At all its layers it grows. Some of this growth requires interaction with other living things (like people); some happens even when VISTA is left to itself. Controlling VISTA's growth is often the real challenge in managing a VISTA system.

5. In isolation, most of VISTA does not adapt, though some of it does, but with programmers and users involved much of it adapts very well indeed, both in the short term and the long. VISTA's adaptabillity is one of its core strengths. Adding heredity to the question, as this definition does, only muddies the picture. VISTA has nothing really like DNA or heredity, but neither is it limited to mechanical copying for its reproduction, as we'll discuss below. What it has instead makes it in some ways amazingly more adaptable than most biological organisms. As with homeostasis, the answer here is mixed and can improve over time, leaving us with more ambivalence.

6. Yes, VISTA is extremely responsive to stimuli, just not the kinds of stimuli or responses biological organisms are tuned to (not motion, for example). In terms of both quantity and variety of information it responds to, VISTA has all biological organisms beat many, many times over. In terms of survival-positive responses to the kinds of stimuli that might threaten its survival, VISTA flunks out with a big fat zero. It has no survival common sense at all, leaving it utterly dependent on its caretakers for its survival. Of course, it does have a strong symbiotic relationship with biological organisms that leads them to fill in this defect completely; most VISTA systems are better protected than most people.

7. Freud said it's all about the sex, so how fitting that we end with this characteristic. We've put it off long enough. Now it's time to answer the question we've all been waiting for (unless we haven't): does VISTA reproduce? The answer is: not like any biological species does. First, like many overbred domestic species, it cannot reproduce without human help - a lot of help. Second, new VISTA systems are derived from existing ones, yet are not clones; each VISTA system is unique. Third, VISTA systems do develop and adapt mainly by exchanging new features with one another to create new combinations of features; dozens of VISTA systems supply new features to each other and all other VISTA systems. It is as though animals were continuously mutating and then sharing their mutations with all the other animals, advancing their DNA while still alive - and not just a little bit, but dramatically over time. So, VISTA systems are overbred, domestic, polygamous, repeat-offender mutants that reproduce asexually from a single parent organism. VISTA has completely separated the twin goals of reproduction: increase in number of entities and genetic change. In other words, weird reproduction and weird sex, requiring the dedicated help of its biological symbionts.

So, no VISTA cannot be called alive under the classic definition of life. There were too many noes on the list above, and too many yeses are partial.

But that being said, there are also too many yeses to simply dismiss them. VISTA may not be a living organism, but it has more than a few of the characteristics of one.

And more importantly, before resting our case we need to explore these questions: Does something have to satisfy the classic definition of life for it to actually be alive? Is this definition complete? Does it actually define life?

The Classic Definition of Life

The coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)

[The coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) satisfies the classic definition of life. Photo: Nick Hobgood. Source: Wikipedia.]

My friend, student, and coworker David Wicksell has pointed out that in my writing I use terms like "alive" and "living system" without specifying what I mean. Am I using these terms metaphorically, or do I somehow mean that VISTA is actually alive?

He raised this question because in Tuesday's webinar, An Introduction to VISTA Architecture, I said it's not a metaphor, that VISTA's literally alive - but how can that be true? Software is part of a machine, so how can it be alive? I agreed with him that I'm long overdue to spend some time laying out what I mean by these loaded terms.

The problem with calling VISTA alive is that it does not appear to satisfy the classic definition of life. I quote at length here from Wikipedia, whose article Definition of Life contains pretty much the definition I was first exposed to back in high school, and that most biology textbooks use:

Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:


1. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.


2. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.


3. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.


4. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.


5. Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.


6. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.


7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

One may quibble about terms or ideas here or there, but overall most biologists would agree that this is the current working definition of a living organism, more or less.

Does VISTA satisfy this definition?

Webinar: An Introduction to VISTA Architecture

(See the version of the diagram at the webinar for a larger image.)

On Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. PDT I gave my first webinar, An Introduction to VISTA Architecture. It was in support of Fabián Lopez's webinar series for his VISTA Extensions Hub website, www.vxvista.org. It's the first in a series of webinars we'll be doing together, most of which will be about VISTA architecture, software lifecycle, and policy and planning.

This first webinar focused on a new diagram depicting the layers of VISTA's architecture. This is a great grand-child of Tom Munnecke and George Timson's original Onion Diagram, which they drew on a napkin back in 1978 when they were first planning VISTA's architecture.

Where later onion diagrams developed by VA have increasingly emphasized VISTA's architecture as being constructed of plug-in packages, Tom and George's original diagram was trying to capture the idea of a health-information space, in which a small set of carefully thought out initial conditions would provide all the organization necessary for large numbers of autonomous developers working on their own could nevertheless create a coherent organic architecture. This is the same model used to build the Internet, and it is just about the opposite of the command-and-control model VA had been using up until then to try to do software development.

As VA later slipped increasingly back into the centralized authority model, then lost sight of the organic-growth model of design and reverted to trying to pre-specify the content of the system. This specification-driven model is what VA has been trying and fail to do for the last fifteen years without notable success, and it's what they're still trying to do in the new round of VISTA replacement projects (which try to part out the development of replacement VISTA packages (for their new iEHR initiative). This model cannot work because it is incapable of organizing such a complex system full of so many unknowns. It's what all this discussion of organic growth on this blog is about, that you cannot constrain reality at these scales without overreaching. Instead, you have to forward-bind your system, to leave room for future innovation and growth that you cannot presently foresee - in fact that most of your future development is going to be things you cannot foresee organized in ways you cannot foresee. Trying to plan all this out at the beginning - when we know as little as possible about how it eventually needs to look for it all to work - is building failure into the process from the outset.

The later generations of the Onion Diagram reflect this misunderstanding of Tom and George's original ideas, paying scant heed if any to the idea of an organically evolving health-information space in favor of a Legos approach to snapping together packages.

This webinar with its new Onion Diagram tries to remedy that situation by at least presenting the alternative viewpoint that the true architecture of VISTA is not package-based, that packages are just an organizational trick we use to divide up the work, that the true architecture of VISTA arises from plug-ins into dozens of extensible frameworks and the engines that run them, all of which is built upon a Von Neumann database-management system that allows the creation of an arbitrarily growing, arbitrarily interconnected network of integrated files and routines, which in turn is built upon a simple portability and integration layer.

I welcome your feedback about this new (or perhaps I should say return to the old) Onion Diagram. I'm hoping that in the comments section below the webinar, we can explore these ideas together.

The webinar is here: https://www.vxvista.org/display/vx4Learn/Introduction+to+VISTA+Architecture

. . . Part three: Begriff

Verstand's illusion about life: make wholes from parts.

Begriff thinking is not synthesis to Verstand's analysis. Both forms of thinking are capable of analysis and synthesis, but they do it in different ways that result in different products. Here is where the nature of the two forms of thought becomes clearest.

Verstand thinking is mechanistic, abstracting, and rules-based, so it performs analysis by breaking things into parts and rules, and it performs synthesis by following the rules for assembling the parts into "wholes" that are mechanisms. Verstand thinking is motivated by the profound belief that the truth is found in the building blocks of things - that all things are built out of building blocks - and that he who can identify these blocks and the rules for putting them together acquires God-like control over the realm of things those blocks are used to build. At its core, Verstand is a form of reductionism - the belief that truth and power are found by reducing things to irreducible components. Verstand is thus a form of atomism, a kind of logic, a kind of mathematical thinking, a mindset of scalpels and puzzles.

Monsters, not people, are made of parts.

There are many things Verstand thinking is good for; it works well with things that are made of parts, like cars, molecules, equations, and logical arguments. Unfortunately, it works poorly with living systems, as Victor Frankenstein discovered to everyone's horror. Sewing together the best available parts does not result in the best person - any more than interfacing together the best individual medical software packages results in the best medical system.

Living systems are not made of parts. A living organism is not made of parts. Although our language and thinking are so deeply contaminated that we think of our arm as a part that is connected to the rest of the body, that is thoroughly, profoundly false. Our arm did not begin separate for us - we were not assembled by adding arms to an armless torso - and it would do terrible violence to us to remove it. It is not a part. Nor is it connected to us - one connects parts to create a mechanical whole. Its relationship to us cannot be explained in terms of parts and connections - yet that is how we talk and think about even our own body.

Life's true structure: integrated centers.

If we can come to grips with how terrible a job Verstand thinking does of understanding even something as familiar to us as our own body, if we can escape that mode of thought long enough to consider what really is the relationship of our arm to the rest of us, then we can begin to comprehend what it is about living systems that Verstand is so blind to. Thinking effectively, successfully, pragmatically, powerfully about that nameless quality is what Begriff does so very well.

As Christopher Alexander writes in The Nature of Order, Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life, rather than being made up of parts, living systems are made up of centers. In a living system, although these centers are distinguishable and therefore nameable, they are not truly separable from each other. They cannot be separated because they are integrated into a whole - not in the way Verstand thinking would have it, in which they would begin as separate parts and then be snapped or woven together, but rather in a way that only living systems are capable of.

Life unfolds new centers, one after another.

The process of creating life is fundamentally different from the process of creating a mechanism. As Dr. Alexander writes in The Nature of Order, Volume Two: The Process of Creating Life, instead of being constructed from parts, living systems unfold new centers from existing centers. In mechanical construction, parts are visibly present before being attached together. In living construction, centers that are not visible or present develop, grow, and unfold as new levels of order from the order that was already present.

The clearest example of this is the way an acorn grows into an oak tree. The acorn does not contain a miniature oak that merely increases in size, nor does it contain the parts of an adult oak waiting to be assembled. It contains three things instead: (1) it is itself a center, (2) it contains rules for how new centers can be unfolded around the existing center to expand the strength of this initial center, and (3) it is alive, so that it interacts with the other centers around it in ways that permit both them and itself to thrive, so it can gain strength from the presence of the other centers it needs to live. The seed weaves itself into the ecosystem around it, draws upon its resources, and uses them to develop itself into a new center within the larger center. As it increases its own strength, so at the same time it contributes to the larger center around it.

Our arms and legs form as buds, new centers unfolding.

In the same way, your arms were neither present in miniature form in your initial fertilized egg, nor did the egg contain full-sized arms waiting to be bolted onto you. The arm is a center that unfolded from earlier centers that ultimately unfolded from the egg, all following the egg's rules for developing itself through the unfolding of new centers. Each of the centers of your body - your head, your arms, your legs, your fingers, your heart, and all the rest - is both a center in its own right and also a participant in the larger center that is all of you, and most of them are participants in other centers, too (your heart contributes to your circulatory system, but also to your torso, and also to your endoderm, and so on). This quality of being both a "part" and a "whole" at the same time is something the many cascades of centers in living systems all embody naturally, effortlessly, and essentially.

Not a machine, but an ecosystem.

Yet for all its ubiquity this is a quality that Verstand thinking cannot comprehend. This is not a mechanical, zero-sum game directly answerable to Newton's Third Law of Thermodynamics; through the subtle and sophisticated process of life, when one living thing increases its own life it also increases the life around itself. To paraphrase Gary Larson, all Verstand thinking can make of a sentence like this is "blah blah blah part blah blah blah," because the concept of wholes without parts, wholes that cannot be reduced to irreducible components - wholes that are not things - is inconceivable.

So, in truth, your arm is not a part connected to the rest of you. It is a living center integrated with the whole of you. Verstand cannot comprehend this, but Begriff can. Here's why.

Where Verstand trusts in parts and the rules for manipulating them, Begriff deals in wholes, in complete living systems and their behavior. This is why Begriff only accumulates around topics we have immersed ourselves in for long periods of time, to give the subjects time to re-form our minds to fit the complex truths about them. When you have a Begriff understanding of a subject, you don't need rules or parts most of the time to figure out what the subject will do; you just know, because you have experienced it in all its details for so long. How does this work?

All the world's a stage - to us. Mimesis powers Begriff.

The name of our species, Homo sapiens, is fundamentally false. We should be called Homo mimesis, because our true gift is mimicry. We are the world's greatest mimics. We evolved to be capable of so fully immersing ourselves in the behavior of our prey that we could become the prey, could anticipate its actions, its migrations, its needs, its feelings. Art, acting, music, singing, and so many other capabilities of our species owe their existence to the power to imitate, the drive to imitate. Memes and turns of phrase spread through our culture like wildfire until they get old and worn out because we can't stop ourselves from imitating what we see and hear. Earworms get stuck in our heads, playing over and over endlessly until we are driven to distraction because our mind naturally remembers and imitates anything that captures its interest.

In his mind, Einstein role-played light.

When one of us (Homo mimesis) immerses ourself in something - anything - for years and decades at a time, we come to know that subject intimately because our brain is recording and remembering everything about it, anticipating it, lavishing our memory on the details and behavior of it, until in our minds we have grown our subject as a living, holographic representation of it. That actors' capacity, that need, that reflex, is in each of us. The longer we spend with a subject, the more we become the subject.

I'm one of the three experts in the world (along with Wally Fort and Dr. Dave Wilson) on VISTA's Task Manager module. Part of what makes me great at troubleshooting Taskman is that I anthropomorphize him. I know what he will do, how he acts, what he wants, so equally strongly I know - in my gut - when his behavior is off-kilter, because that's not what he would do. But of course, I'm not really anthropomorphizing him - I've become him. In my mind, when I'm troubleshooting Taskman, I am Taskman. I know what I would do in his shoes, which is why my intuitive response is so visceral when he's misbehaving. So it is with most great masters of any subject. Whether they're consciously aware of it or not, in their mind (both thoughts and feelings) they have memorized the role of their subject and can role-play it through all its lines and permutations. They know the role so well, they not only know what would be in character for their subject, they also know what would be out of character.

Learning through mimesis (age 2).

This Begriff thinking, this experience-driven comprehension, can easily achieve precise modeling of the behavior of highly complex, sophisticated systems - can almost trivially do what Verstand cannot - because we are hard-wired to empathize with and mimic things. It's free, built-in processing for human beings. Unlike Verstand, which must be learned, we are born with powerful Begriff capabilities.

Begriff is the basis for much of the rapid learning and maturation by which the infant mind becomes the adult mind, physiological transformations aside. As we learn through education to shift from Begriff thinking to Verstand thinking, we lose our ability to learn rapidly and become increasingly rigid and brittle in our thinking. It is because of this abstractivizing mindset that we lose the ability to see past our own prejudices, because Verstand prefers abstract theories about things over the actual, concrete experience of them. This is why a generation of scientists had to die off before the theory of continental drift - which is so obvious that any child with a globe could see it in the shapes of the continents - could overcome the abstract prejudices against it. Rationalism - an overreliance on the power of reason alone, too independent of concrete, empirical evidence - is a dangerous faculty equally at home leading us away from the truth as toward it; Verstand is the thought process most involved in the pure exercise of reason unrestrained by concrete evidence.

Verstand sees parts. Begriff sees life.

When Begriff is informed by Verstand, we can learn to decompose a living whole into the living subsystems that make it up, rather than just its hypothetical parts or role-playing behaviors. Hardly anyone is competent to do this, to combine both forms of thinking to produce accurate results. Almost no one is born knowing how to do Verstand, and the process of education teaches us to suppress our naive Begriff in favor of Verstand rather than to inform our Begriff with Verstand. Educated or not, we end up being one form or the other of half-wit rather than integrating the two forms of thought to unleash their full potential.

Complex living systems of the kind Dr. Alexander writes about can only be created through living processes. Planning for such development processes cannot be done in the mechanistic ways that dominate modern architecture and project-management theory. And the organic planning methods needed will only ever be conceived and executed by those capable of informed Begriff thinking, by those capable of seeing the world in terms of complex organic systems rather than reductionist tinkertoy machines.

Interlude: Why Am I Writing about This?

Seeing through William Blake's eyes

Isn't this "Begriff" and "Verstand" stuff unnecessarily pedantic? Aren't we lost in the weeds from the practical problem of creating great medical software? I think not, and the reason why is best expressed in one of my favorite quotes, this one from the poet, artist, and visionary William Blake in his "Letter to Revd Dr Trusler," 23 August 1799:

"To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers."

As a man is, so he sees.

This is our fundamental problem. The reason one person goes about creating a piece of architecture or software through the use of rigid, mechanistic plans that cannot succeed while yet another person goes about creating the very same thing using living processes that successfully produce organic order is that they see the world so differently that they might as well be standing on different planets - more accurately, they might as well exist in different universes that follow different laws of nature.

The dominant problem in the VISTA community for the past fifteen years has been its terrible policy and planning, which has squandered billions of dollars on foredoomed replacement projects when for just ten percent of that cost we could have had a VISTA renaissance. This doesn't just keep happening by accident, and it isn't a conspiracy. The people who keep defying the evidence to repeat over and over the expensive mistakes of the past do so because their failures are inexplicable to them given the way they see the world. The way they see the world, they had to do what they did, and they have to go on doing it over and over. They see no other choice. Their minds automatically rationalize away their own responsibility for their failures and instead scapegoat anyone and anything except the very causes of their failures, thereby leading to the belief that more of the same will yield different results.

It's not an accident, and it's not stupidity at work here in the creation of this colossal waste of taxpayer dollars, in this artificially created stagnation. It is the determined, conscientious work of intelligent people who are making the most prudent plans they can given the way they see the world. Until we understand how and why they see the world the way they do, we stand no chance of stopping the bleeding. They or people like them are going to remain in charge and they are going to go on squandering our precious resources on expensive failures unless and until we give them a new way to see the world that shows them a better way to go about improving our software.

More importantly, unless we understand how and why they keep making the mistakes they do, there's nothing to stop us from repeating their mistakes.

Seeing through Frankenstein's eyes

In other words, there's science to be explored here, an understanding of the world. After all, they're not the only ones futilely banging their heads against a seemingly intractable problem; so are we. For them, the problem is the software; for us, they are the problem - an equally intractable one. Neither of us has been able to solve our respective problem, which is bitterly ironic because we know precisely how to solve the software problems that stump them, but we simply cannot get through to them. That's not their fault; it's ours.

For the last fifteen years, the central pair of problems in the VISTA world has been that (1) the people in charge don't understand the software well enough to manage it and (2) the rest of us don't understand the people in charge well enough to communicate with them, to show them how to solve their problem.

We (the people who understand the software) have been just as bull-headed as they (the people in charge of the software) have been. Surely it's time to say "Physician, heal thyself." Isn't fifteen years a long enough string of failures to teach us the error of our ways in how we've sought to solve our two big problems?

We need a new way to communicate with the people in charge. As a man is, so he sees. We need to learn how their eye is formed, in Blake's words. We need to study them, to learn how they see and why, to learn who they are, so we can communicate with them.

Communicate, not express ourselves. Our progressive era of self-esteem and self-expression has not been an unalloyed good. Our focus on self-expression has taught an entire generation of us to be incompetent at communication, because the much extolled self-expression is the opposite of communication. Self-expression is suitable for diaries, but when we're trying to cross the gap between one worldview and another, as is the case in the VISTA world - as is the case in all true acts of communication - we must focus not on ourselves and our opinions but on those we seek to communicate with and their opinions.

True communication is an act of translation into someone else's worldview and language. There is no such thing as communication in the abstract, only communication between specific people. How we communicate an idea to one person must necessarily be different from the way we communicate that same idea to someone else. That takes work, work that mere self-expression does not require, and it takes study, understanding, and the cultivation of taste.

We have grown lazy and prefer to bludgeon each other with our self-expressions, and we have paid for that laziness with a long string of failures to communicate. Anyone who is enjoying this failure should feel free to go on misunderstanding and failing to communicate with those in charge of VISTA. For my part, I'm done with that. It's time to get to know each other real well so we can have a meeting of the minds.

Seeing through Christopher Alexander's eyes

Christopher Alexander can help us understand and explain what we are doing with VISTA that works so well, why our impoverished VISTA projects thrive and succeed while the bloated and overplanned projects of VA keep smashing into walls and careening off cliffs. That addresses the first half of the central pair of VISTA problems.

Blake and Hegel and the Greek philosophers can help us understand and explain why we have been unable to explain these things to those in charge, to the VISTA policy-makers and planners. It is not that they are ignorant or blind that they do what to us looks so foolish. They look at the same software we see, and they look at the same failures we do, but they see differently because they think differently. We see them conducting Frankensteinian experiments on living systems and then blaming their victims for dying. They see a machine made of defectively shaped legos that are warped and fused together, so they're sure that if they can just replace the bad legos with good ones they'll gain the power to improve the software. If we learn this stuff, we can address the second half of the central pair of VISTA problems by learning to translate between these two alien worldviews.

Sure, we can probably never use terms like Verstand and Begriff to help them understand that the very way they think about the software creates most of their problems, leads them unconsciously but unerringly into failures with such a complex, living system. But. We at least privately need some terms by which we can accurately comprehend what are these two very different forms of thinking that lead us to see the same software (and, indeed, everything else) in such different ways, that lead us to such very different kinds of plans and results. And. English has no such terms to clearly and unambiguously differentiate the two modes of thinking at work here that produce such alien worldviews. In the fine old tradition of the English language, a bit of vocabulary theft is in order here to get us started on the problem of being clear with ourselves about our subject, about the nature of our problem.

Seeing through DeMarco and Lister's eyes

Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister are once gain proved right. In Peopleware, they wrote that software development is not fundamentally a technical problem; it's a human-relationships problems. And so, of course, here at the center of our historic technical bottleneck with VISTA we find a human-relationships problem, as they predicted.

Because what we have here is a failure to communicate. Until we understand each other, we will continue to fail, and I for one am done with that. It's time for more clarity on the nature of that problem so we can solve it and move on to new problems.

Four Problems with Master Plans: (1 & 2) Precision & Imprecision, part two, Verstand and Begriff

Calvin on Verstand and Begriff

Two different kinds of thinking lead to two different kinds of processes for creating order, which lead to two different forms of order: (1) Verstand-thinking leads to mechanistic processes (such as master planning and hierarchical decision-making), which leads to mechanistic order; (2) Begriff-thinking leads to living processes, which lead to organic order.

In part one we introduced Verstand-thinking; let's turn now to Begriff-thinking. Begriff-thinking is easiest to introduce by its differences from Verstand-thinking. To understand what a Begriff is, you have to understand what a Verstand is, and the clearest way to explain that is to explain what a Verstand is not.

A Verstand is not the most powerful, rigorous, logical form of an idea. It only seems that way to someone who does not understand a subject. Likewise, at first, Verstand-thinking seems like a powerful process of thinking. Because it is so abstract ("All things are mechanisms; all mechanisms are made of parts; ergo, all things are made of parts.") it covers a lot of ground in just a few statements, which makes it seem more efficient and expressive. Because it is so abstract, it lends itself to logical deduction, which also makes it seem more rational and rigorous.

Ironically, though, a Verstand is the kind of idea you have about things you do not understand. The kind of person who would think "All black people are lazy and stupid" is the kind of person who does not much about black people, who may not really know any of them. The same applies to any abstract statement ("All conservatives are . . ." or "All project managers are . . ."); these are the ingredients with which ignorant people "think" about things they know little or nothing about. Lacking experience or evidence, they try to compensate with abstract ideas that feel powerful to them - but that usually lead them to false conclusions because they are so irreal.

It is not the universality ("all" or "none" or "always" or "never") that makes such ideas Verstands. It is the vague certainty of them, the empty, one-dimensional force of them. There's not much to them because they were formed in an experience vacuum, pulled together out of fancies, prejudices, and wishful thinking, but structured in the form of logical assertions to make them easy to use to deduce more Verstand-ideas. The ease with which they lend themselves to rigorous, logical processes of thinking is used to obscure the lack of rigor in the ideas themselves, as though math and logic can compensate for false and largely empty premises.

Above all, Verstand reasoning cannot make bad ideas into good ones. To understand the world you need Begriffs, not Verstands, but there is no rigorous process of deduction or analysis that can produce a Begriff from a Verstand; you only get more Verstands and remain trapped in an empty, abstract, false world.

Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895

However, there is a completely different, irrational process by which you can create Begriffs out of Verstands, by which bad ideas can lead to good ones. It's the process of gaining real-world experience. As any experienced person will tell you, the process of gaining experience does not follow a script or logical syllogism, and the conclusions you reach through experience often cannot be described to someone who has not gone through those same experiences. Until you've had a lot of your proud, beautiful Verstands beaten to pieces by reality, you simply cannot imagine how wrong you are.

"The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." -- T.H. Huxley, Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870)

Consider the job you're best at of all the things you do, the thing you actually are an expert in, the thing you've spent decades learning to be great at. You weren't always an expert. Once upon a time, you were a newbie who wanted to do that job. The kinds of ideas you had about that job before you did it were mostly Verstand-ideas. The kinds of ideas you have about it now are mostly Begriff-ideas. The endless painful lessons taught by experience beat Verstand-ideas out of their smooth but false abstract shapes into more complex and difficult-to-describe but vastly more accurate shapes until they began to match reality, until they began to become Begriff-ideas.

Verstand-thinking in action.

That's why experienced people often grin at each other when they listen to the proud boasting claims of someone inexperienced. Journeymen and masters have been initiated into the world of Begriffs, so they know just how wrong the apprentice is. They also know just how immune he is to learning from more experienced people. They know, as a result, that the arrogant newbie has decades of painful disillusionment ahead of him on the road to mastery. He will not willingly give up the seductive power of Verstand-thinking. It's going to have to be beaten out of him by his own repeated failures, until he reluctantly gives in and begins letting reality shape his ideas into Begriffs.

I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I do not like green eggs and ham. -- Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham (1960)

That's where Begriffs come from, which as you can see is very different from where Verstands come from. By now, you may be starting to see how their very different sources can lead to very different processes for creating order. Next post we'll put the spotlight squarely on Begriff-ideas and Begriff-thinking so you can better appreciate why they lead to organic order.

Four Problems with Master Plans: (1 & 2) Precision & Imprecision, part one: Verstand

On 19 August 2009, I began a series of posts on Christopher Alexander's writings about organic order from his groundbreaking and underappreciated book, The Oregon Experiment (http://vistaexpertise.blogspot.com/2009/08/book-recommendation-1-oregon-experiment.html). My series ran until 24 November 2009 (http://vistaexpertise.blogspot.com/2009/11/principle-of-organic-order-our-journey.html), when I summarized the series to date before turning to an exploration of fluxus quo.

Christopher Alexander (photo by Jerry Telfer)

In a typical rejection of the idea that old is bad and new is good, I'm turning back the clock to resume my series.

We left off in the middle of a discussion of four problems with master plans. We have discussed (1) precision and (2) imprecision. Before continuing on to (3) alienation, we need to take a closer look at why master plans are both too precise and also not precise enough.

The problem is a pressing one, because ever since the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act (1996) the main federal VISTA adopters (VA and IHS) have done most of their VISTA development through contracts awarded and administered through the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). This method of software development requires that the federal agency in question specifies at the outset the outcome for which they are contracting. Every federal VISTA-development contract begins, de facto, with a master plan.

So why do the plans that VA and IHS try to use to develop VISTA lead them to both too much precision and too little?

In The Oregon Experiment, Christopher Alexander answers thusly: because master plans reduce developers, users, planners, and project managers to prophets, to predicting the future, to trying to decide in advance how things will turn out. We suck at prophecy. Any system of organization that requires us to be prophets steers us toward our weaknesses, makes failures of us, because we rarely know at the outset how things will turn out in the end.

Alexander's right, and that's the easiest way to explain what's wrong with master plans, but there is another explanation, another way to look at the problem.

Hegel (steel engraving by Lazarus Sichling)

In Die Philosophie des Geistes [The Philosophy of the Mind/Spirit, 1816-1830], German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel makes a distinction between two different kinds of thinking that produce different results. In English we can't easily make this distinction, because we lack the words to express the difference, but in German Hegel was able to show just how different these two kinds of thinking are. One of these kinds - Verstand - is used in the production of abstract master plans; the other - Begriff - is used in concrete, user-driven development.

As Hegel defines the terms, Verstand is a left-brain process of analysis, in which the whole is analyzed into parts. Verstand sees the whole as merely the sum of its parts, attempts to comprehend it through identification of those parts, attempts to control it through the manipulation of those parts. This fragmenting perspective on wholistic, organic systems invites Verstand to try to deduce knowledge about the whole through a process of logical derivations from a priori assumptions (such as what the parts are that supposedly make up the whole). It's like trying to understand the world if your only tool for investigation is a knife, good only for chopping things into pieces and rearranging them on the table.

Toaster, made of parts (photo by Conavan Govan)

The problem is that neither life nor living systems are logical syllogisms, nor are they puzzles. Organic order cannot be understood through dissection. Living systems are not composed of components, of discrete parts; you cannot remove your arm and then put it back on without doing terrible violence to yourself. It only looks like a part, and only to the Verstand process of thinking, which sees all things as abstract, manipulable parts. A cat is not a toaster, but that's how the Verstand mode of thinking sees a cat, or a house, or a software system, or a human being.

With Verstand we cannot model living systems without doing such violence to them that we deeply miscomprehend them. The grotesque inadequacies and distortions of the clumsy, clanking mechanisms by which Verstand insists on trying to understand organic order creates false distinctions between what are only aspects of a vast, organic whole. Further, while attending to these false distinctions it also misses whole swaths of vital meaning that do not present themselves in the Verstand-friendly forms of parts or facts or axioms or deductions. From the resulting homunculus, Verstand then tries to draw logical inferences about the optimal future state, then builds plans to try to reach that false future through mechanistic means and logical deduction. Even before the plan is written, the battle has already been lost because the planners are not dealing with reality but with Verstand's blinkered, mechanistic conception of reality. It's as though the master-planning process begins by putting on one-dimensional glasses, and then drawing up plans based on the linear, cartoon  world that results.

"Keep that up and I'll bite one of your parts."

As a man is, so he sees. With Verstand, we see a logical puzzle, a mechanism, which no living system is. In other words, it isn't just that when we draw up master plans we are looking at the real world and unable to foresee its future. With the Verstand processes of thinking, we are not even looking at the real world. We are looking instead at the world of abstract ideas, which is awash with distortions and falsehood.

This is why master plans are paradoxically both too precise and not precise enough. The key to avoiding this paradox is to avoid using Verstand thought processes when dealing with complex, organic order.

Fortunately, human beings are also equipped from birth with an alternative mode of thinking, with Begriff. In part two we'll show how to distinguish the two and how to use them in their proper spheres.

Electronic Health Record VHA-Wide Medical Scheduling

Download our response to the Department of Veteran Affairs Request for Information VA118-12-I-0102 on tour new Documents page of our website.

Meaningful Use certification at Oroville Hospital

A local news piece on our friends at Oroville Hospital, with Dr. Narinder Singh.

Carol Monahan: Introducing Myself

As the new director of support at the VISTA Expertise Network, I have had the opportunity to spend the last few months learning about the VISTA community. I was delighted to meet so many dedicated people at the recent VISTA Expo & Symposium, and I want to thank everyone who participated in our session on open-source licensing.

I have a decidedly eclectic background, including a grounding in computer science, with extensive managerial experience in sales, logistics and ERP planning, while working at Wizards of the Coast. On a lighter note, my first job was as an assistant to a couple of large- and small-animal veterinarians in Ireland, and I have also worked as a Tiffany salesperson, and a "spokesmodel", meaning that I got to hand out ham samples at a trade-show. Generally speaking, I enjoy a challenge.

I'm looking forward to promoting community licensing solutions and codebase reunification, as well as getting to know more of the excellent VISTA Hardhats.

More About Us

Here is some additional information about VISTA, the VISTA Expertise Network, and our goals and approach. If you're visiting us for the first time, please also read the "About Us" tab.

Background:

The VISTA Expertise Network was set up to promote the use of open-source VISTA software. VISTA is more than just an electronic health record (EHR). It is an entire suite of fully-integrated clinical support programs, built on a powerful database engine designed from the ground up to support the practice of medicine. VISTA was created over the course of three and a half decades within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and a close cousin is in use within the Indian Health Service (IHS). An adaptation of an earlier version is also being used by the Department of Defense (DOD). It has been successfully adapted for use outside of governmental systems, using an open-source approach to build on the public-domain codebase supplied by VA, under the Freedom of Information Act.

Until fairly recently, VISTA development was driven by the direct involvement of VA clinicians, using an agile, adaptive process. Unfortunately, a drive toward homogenization and centralization has led to a severe slowdown in innovation within VA. Facilities using VISTA outside VA have been hampered by having no communication back into the VA system, meaning that VA updates and upgrades—although welcome—are developed with no consideration for non-VA users. VA has also suffered from diminished direct user feedback in their development cycle.

During the last decade, the bureaucracy’s response to this “death of innovation” has been to pursue a wholesale replacement of VISTA, which has been branded as a “legacy” system, implying that it is outdated—even though it still supports a higher quality of care than any newer system has been able to demonstrate. This has lead to a series of very expensive, failed initiatives. Fortunately, this year, VA is experimenting with a new approach—setting up a custodial agent (OSEHRA) and working to create an open-source development ecosystem where outside contributions can make their way back into VA, IHS, and DOD systems, and variations within those systems can be shared to create an even richer pool of options for all VISTA systems. On the downside, some VA and DOD managers involved with the project still seem to hope that this will result in a wholesale replacement of their systems with “plug and play”, “modular” software.

Our Goal:

The VISTA Expertise Network believes that VISTA can continue to evolve and adapt, building on its track record of proven success. To that end, we have dedicated ourselves to both promoting adoption of the software and training a new generation of programmers and users.

Our Approach:

There is a pressing need for EHR software among underfunded rural hospitals. New legislation dictates that hospitals that cannot show Meaningful Use of their EHR will begin seeing reductions in Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) reimbursements beginning in 2015. These hospitals could receive ARRA funding toward purchase of EHR software during the next few years, but many do not have sufficient capital on hand to get the process going, leaving them unable to qualify for assistance, and facing penalties all too soon.

VISTA, as open-source software, can save these hospitals the large licensing fees associated with most commercial hospital software. It does, though, still require configuration, customization, and training of both IT staff and end users. VISTA Expertise Network recruits and manages the experts necessary for both installation and training.

One criticism that is leveled at VISTA is that it is “old fashioned,” since many functions within the system still rely on text-only user interfaces. The VISTA Expertise Network has collaborated with Dr. Rob Tweed of M/Gateway in launching the development of a new generation of user interface for VISTA, using Enterprise Web Developer (EWD) software. The new interfaces are device-independent, allowing them to run on anything from a PC to an iPad to an Android phone. The underlying system is unaffected, but the user experience is brought right up to date. The VISTA Expertise Network is promoting training of programmers and adoption of the new interfaces.

The VISTA Expertise Network is committed to creating the best training materials and courses to prepare programmers and users to gain the full benefits of VISTA. With our emphasis on promoting projects at hospitals and clinics in underdeveloped rural areas, we have the opportunity to create skilled jobs (and the skilled workers to fill them) right where they are needed the most.

2012 VISTA Expo & Symposium, 11-14 September, Where?

Now that the 2011 VISTA Expo and Symposium has concluded, we are hard at work on planning the next conference. We have tentatively selected September 11-14, 2012 for the next VISTA Expo and Symposium. Our next task is to choose a location.

The Marriott in Redmond was wonderful, and we are in conversations with them about using them again. However, we are strongly considering making the VISTA Expo and Symposium a moving conference, holding it in a different place every year. To that end, we have identified two other possible cities for 2012.

One possibility is Reno/Sparks, Nevada. It has the advantage of being close to Oroville Hospital, one of VISTA’s early Meaningful Use success stories. It also provides an opportunity for a couple of days’ vacation, if people would like to come a little early or stay a little late.

Another possibility is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its principal advantage is that it would make things easier for our friends in Indian Health Services, so that more of them might be able to attend. And Albuquerque is also a lovely place for a few extra days.

We are getting opinions and feedback from a variety of sources, and we are interested to know what the hardhats think. Redmond, Reno, or Albuquerque? Which would you prefer for the 2012 expo?

24th VISTA Community Meeting

WorldVistA is holding its twenty-fourth VISTA Community Meeting Friday through Sunday, 13-15 January 2012 at the University of California, Davis, in Sacramento. Owen Hermsen, Chris Richardson, Larry Landis, David Wicksell, George Lilly, and I (and possibly another Network staff member to be named later) will all be attending. We look forward to seeing you there. We all have a lot to talk about and plans to make together.

Since the conference is just a month out, this is a good time to make your travel plans while flights are still cheap. Head on over to the WorldVistA website for details and registration.

VISTA Planning and Management Part 3: Do the Right Thing

When you aim for the wrong target, success = failure.

Most of the challenge in VISTA management and planning lies not in hitting the target but in choosing the right target.

Usually, it doesn’t matter how hard it might be to achieve our VISTA project goals, because their success or failure is irrelevant. Most failed VISTA projects were pointed at the wrong targets. Hitting the target does you no good when it’s your own foot you’re aiming at.

We try too hard to accomplish our goals, and we don’t try hard enough to choose the right goals. When we aim our organizations in the wrong direction, even vast budgets and resources cannot help us; on the contrary, the greater our progress, the worse off we are.

Successfully leading the organization in the wrong direc­tion has been the paramount problem with VISTA development efforts since about 1998. The further VISTA managers have led our community toward badly chosen technological targets, the less productive VISTA development has become. It cost billions of dollars more to inch VISTA marginally ahead during the past fifteen years than it did to achieve the miles of progress we made before that.

We are failing because we pursue the wrong goals, but we are not learning from our failures.

A recent study of human rationality discovered that when people who subscribe to mistaken ideas are confronted with irrefutable evidence that they are mistaken, instead of acknowledging their mistakes and changing their minds they tend to cling more fiercely to their now discredited ideas. This same thing happens to those of us who lead our organizations in the wrong directions. Rather than stop to reconsider our goals, we recommit ourselves and our resources further, at most revising our tactics so we can head in the wrong direction more effectively.

There is a lack of introspection about our choices of goals. We treat requests for reconsideration as indecisive, impractical, and irrelevant, as though the main danger we face were a lack of effectiveness rather than an excess of effectiveness in the wrong direction. We believe it is our job to be go-getters, proving our worth as managers by the amount of movement we can create rather than by the rightness of that movement.

We behave as though agreement about our goals corresponded in any way to whether those were the right goals. In the real world outside the Beltway of Washington D.C., neither majority agreement nor even consensus matters. The real world is not impressed by our opinions, our votes, our public relations, or our change-management strategies. Even if everyone agrees the Sun revolves around the Earth, the converse remains true.

The laws of information science are just as relentless and implacable as those of rocket science. We defy them at our peril. Nothing can save from failure a project aimed in the wrong direction unless we reconsider and correct its goals.

The search for the right targets is the first duty of a VISTA manager or planner, and learning from failure the second.

VISTA Planning and Management Part 2: The Paradox of Success

The Paradox of Success: Not Every Problem is a Nail

Past success with other projects can lead directly to failure with VISTA projects. The greater the past management success elsewhere, the greater the chance of failing to manage VISTA successfully. It is not an absolute correlation but a strong one and a major risk.

The problem is not unique to managing VISTA. It is an under-recognized problem in life generally, most famously described as Maslow's Hammer:

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance, 1966

and earlier described and explained as Kaplan's Law of the Instrument:

"The price of training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently . . ." -- Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, 1964

As with any other faculty, human beings only use part of the possible range of management strategies. The ideal manager would be expert at the complete suite of possible approaches - and no doubt in moments of pride we tell ourselves we have mastered them all, that we fluently use all the tools at our disposal, the right tool for every job - but in our more sober moments we know it is not true.

We are creatures of habit. We tend to lean on our strengths and avoid our weaknesses. Whichever strategies we use on the projects that go well, we tend to use again in future projects, and because we keep using them we tend to get better at them and lean on them further. Conversely, the strategies we did not use in the past tend to atrophy, so we avoid them in the future.

The result is that we try to hammer every problem into submission. We overuse our previously successful strategies even when they do not apply. The more successful we have been, the more likely we are to try to force new problems to fit our past strategies. The most successful managers tend to be the greatest offenders.

Where managing VISTA is concerned, this has been a big problem in the past and can only continue to be so in the future - unless the problem itself can be put on the radar, can be made a part of the strategy of managing VISTA. If VISTA managers can recognize the impact of the problem and force themselves to approach each project with an open mind, and if we can force ourselves to better develop the strategies that have not worked in the past, to create a more well-rounded suite of strategies, then we will be better able to do justice to the problems VISTA presents, better able to plan and manage VISTA projects successfully.

For example, we will be better able to accept VISTA's true complexity and shift strategies to something capable of dealing with something so vast and intricate.

VISTA Planning & Management Part 1: Complexity

Complexity: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco.

When VISTA projects fail, it is almost always for one reason - a gross underestimation of the complexity involved. VISTA is one of humanity's most complex creations. It pushes far beyond our capacity to fully comprehend it, and therefore to successfully make plans about it as a whole.

VISTA projects that might succeed are easily distinguishable from those that will fail. Right at the beginning, during the initial planning is when most VISTA disasters are wound up like a clockwork mechanism, after which they run down to their inescapable conclusion regardless of the intelligence, experience, power, funding, or passion of the project's participants. Prudent and experienced VISTA strategists can look at the initial sketches and tell promising from doomed within minutes at a better than 90% rate of accuracy. This skill can be learned by those new to VISTA planning and management, if they can come to grips with VISTA's complexity.

Part of why it is so easy for us to distinguish them is that VISTA projects doomed to fail are rarely close; they rarely almost succeed, barely fail. They almost always fail spectacularly because the plans underestimate the project's complexity not by a little, not double, not ten times, but usually over a hundred times, and sometimes by a thousand times or more.

If you feel disbelief at this claim, we understand, but we are right about this. It is measurably true. Most of the known VISTA-project failures of the last fifteen years were off by two to three scales of magnitude in their estimation of the problems they planned to solve, and their eventual failures were usually predicted at the outset by experienced VISTA engineers. If you can accept the truth of this situation, you must be asking yourself the question all of us have asked - and to become a great VISTA planner and manager, you need to understand the answer - Why is VISTA so complex?

There are two answers.

First, for forty years the software industry has suffered from The Software Crisis. At the same time hardware has grown more powerful, faster, smaller, and less expensive, software has been growing slower, larger, and more expensive. The cause of this crisis is an inevitable paradox: with software, success leads to failure. The more programs you write for your system, the more you have to take into account to write the next program. The more you write, the harder it gets. In the world of software, that is the price of success. Given time, we can create systems so complex that we cannot manage them.

Second, healthcare is staggeringly complex, and VISTA's purpose is to help support healthcare, so it too must be complex. There is no way around it. To make VISTA less complex, you must make it less useful, that is, you must sacrifice patient care or hospital-support services.

We refuse to do that, so we must accept and plan for VISTA's complexity. That means changing the planning and management strategies with which we succeeded in our careers until now. We must switch to less well-known strategies that can deal with VISTA's complexity successfully. If we do, our VISTA plans too must change so they can succeed.

Reunification

Mumpster has consumed my VISTA-blogging energies lately, but I'll be returning over the next few weeks to discuss a long-overdue topic: reunification of the VISTA dialects. I understand the factors that have prevented it until now and I have solutions for all of them. I believe that by March 1st, we will have a commitment from most of the major VISTA adopters and developers to reunify around a shared, common code base and a common license.

Watch this space for regular updates on progress toward that goal.

Mumpster

We've launched a new MUMPS Users' Group on the web. Our first project is Mumpster, an online discussion site dedicated to the MUMPS programming system.

Values Conflict

[1777 painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze of Benjamin Franklin, who exemplified both the need to choose among values and the ability to do so (Wikipedia)]

The first thing to understand about the tension between class-three and class-one software, that is, the tension between local and national development - that is, between innovation and standardization - is that there is that tension and it's neither subtle nor something you can safely ignore.

The important thing about values like innovation and standardization is not that we want them, but (a) which we are willing to sacrifice to get the other—how we prioritize them—and (b) how exactly our systems for achieving one are related to our systems for achieving the other—how we relate them.

The choices we make between values define us as individuals, organizations, cultures, because we can't have everything we want. When Benjamin Franklin wrote They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety, he was making a choice that helped define a nation. Our choices have consequences.

So do our failures to choose. They who give up essential liberty for safety almost never realize they are making a choice. They think they can strengthen one value without weakening another, if they even realize the two are related at all.

In modern, scientific culture, we like facts and theories and plans but we're pretty stupid about values, because generally we ignore their conflicts; we think we can have our cake and eat it too. Our mission statements read like Christmas wish lists, as though all our problems would be solved if we could just have all the great things on our list. We don't think we have to choose, but we do.

All good things come to those who wait, we are told, but no one tells us those good things arrive in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Values conflict. Every single value conflicts with every other value.

Heraclitus wrote "War is the father of all things." This is the war he meant: the invisible war among principles that creates reality, and the all-too-often unconscious war among values that creates us.

In this all-consuming war, no man is an island; no one stands apart, a neutral power. We all take sides, willy-nilly. Since we naively believe our values don't conflict, we take sides nilly, unconsciously, by default.

As a result, within each organization, through random, ignorant selection, for each pair of values one will tend to be exalted because its merits are better recognized, but then out of balance it will crush the other value and the organization will suffer for its loss, baffled by how the pursuit of good could have led to such an evil.

The only way to have both values in a competing pair is consciously, through a deep understanding of the nature of the conflict between them, so you can realize how to bend back the conflict into a self-reinforcing flux, a homeostasis. That rarely happens by accident in the conflicts among human values, and it never, never happens when a bold leader pushes some values at the expense of others.

With that understood, let's examine innovation and standardization and the conflict between them, so we can begin to understand how the VISTA community once achieved homeostasis between them and will again soon.