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The first in an occasional series discussing ideas and concepts that (in my totally unhumble opinion) everyone should know. We'll kick off with an idea from the world of historical wargaming, an idea from 19th Century German philosophy, an idea that comes from varnish manufacture via programming language design, and an idea from a touring Cornish children's play of the mid-1980s.
I'll let Greg Kostikyan, who invented the term, explain it:
Grognard capture explains why legal systems are so stupidly dense and incomprehensible to the uninitiated - they were captured by the legal grognards (in most cases centuries ago) and evolved away from comprehensibility. It explains why category theorists use language that's so different from most working mathematicians - categorical grognards have quite different motivations from the majority of mathematicians, and they've captured the subject and moved it in their direction. Incidentally, these two cases are in some sense dual to each other - legal minds (at least according to the law students I've asked) distrust generalities and try to make everything detailed and complex, and mathematicians (particularly categorists) try to make everything general and abstract to the point of emptiness.
Otherwise known as the "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad". On reading Wikipedia, I discover that this wasn't invented by Hegel, and doesn't describe his writings very well, but the hell with it, it's associated with him now. This, again, is an idea that works on many scales: as above, so below.
In its simplest form, an idea (the thesis) is advanced, which has flaws. In order to deal with these flaws, an almost diametrically opposed idea (the antithesis) is advanced. This too has flaws, so the two supposedly opposed ideas are reconciled in a final idea (the synthesis) which combines the good points of both. Transcending the duality of thesis and antithesis in order to reconcile them is often the hard bit, as it frequently involves understanding the problem in a new, deeper way.
Hegel (according to some commentators: I haven't actually read his books) used this format constantly in his writings to avoid the limitations of traditional reasoning that Kant had pointed out. However his real contention was that the TAS triad (as I'll henceforth call it) could be used to understand History. He apparently used this to "explain" the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but his main example was the French Revolution: the Revolution (thesis) gave way to the Reign of Terror (antithesis), which was in turn replaced by the Constitutional state of free citizens.
Now, I have only a nodding acquaintance with French history, but this sounds like bollocks to me. One wonders, for a start, why he didn't take thesis = ancien régime, antithesis = Revolution + Reign of Terror, synthesis = Republic. And once you do that, you remember all the other revolutions and republics that came after, and realise that the synthesis of one triad becomes the thesis of the next, and the number three becomes arbitrary. It might be better to think of an oscillating function, (hopefully) dying away to some ultimate limit. But the TAS triad is still a useful zeroth approximation to a historical trend. For example, we had Communism, which turned out to suck, so now we have Libertarianism, which is also pretty daft, and some day we will have a sensible middle ground, based on a scientific understanding of what states and markets do well and badly. Or we had centuries of historical and literary scholarship which ignored women almost completely (thesis), so now we have Women's History, Women's Literature, etc, which go to the opposite extreme (antithesis): I remain confident that there will come a useful synthesis which will use ideas from both groups. This has probably already happened. More generally, we had Modernism (one objective truth, etc), and then Postmodernism (often derided for being "cultural relativism", though of course it's more complex than that). Postmodernism (which I don't, tbh, know much about) has several serious problems, on the lines of "to what extent do you tolerate intolerance? When is it OK to make an ethical judgement about someone else's culture?". The solution to these isn't to go back to Modernism: that would just lead us back to the mistakes that kicked off Postmodernism in the first place. The solution is to find a synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism that combines their best points.
After the thin ice of that last section, I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground here. An onion in the varnish is something that you used to need, which has been rendered obsolete by advances in techniques or technology, but which you keep because that's how you've always done things. I came across this idea in the writings of Paul Graham: I'll let him explain it:
This one's even simpler: to Sidney one's buttons is to make an off-by-one error when doing them up, leaving you with an extra button at one end and an extra hole at the other. Taken from the name of a character in a children's play I saw when I was about five. One would have thought that such a common occurrence would have a standard name, but "Sidneying" is the only name I know for it.
My justification for this post is the one the Design Patterns guys use: by giving names to fairly common things, you make it easier to recognize them and to discuss them. Grognard capture, in particular, can be a Bad Thing (though it isn't always), and recognizing it is the first step to dealing with it.
Grognard capture
I'll let Greg Kostikyan, who invented the term, explain it:
All game styles run the risk of what I term "grognard capture."Of course, if it only applied to wargames, I wouldn't be mentioning it. Grognard capture explains a lot: for instance, it explains the way the Open Source movement can produce such excellent programming tools and web browsers, but sucks at producing word processors and the such. The grognards (programmers) want certain things, and the software evolves to meet their needs, and to hell with everyone else. On a smaller level, Grognard capture explains why a lot of individual pieces of software are the way they are: they have evolved to meet the requirements of their most hard-core users.
"Grognard" was a slang term for members of Napoleon's Old Guard. Hardcore board wargamers adopted it as a term for themselves. By extention, grognard capture means capture of a game style by the hardest-core and most experienced players--to the ultimate exclusion of others.
The most extreme example I can think of is what happened to the Squad Leader series. Originally a relatively simple, accessible game of infantry combat in World War II, the publishers released supplement after supplement, each with new rules adding to the complexity of the game. Finally, they revamped it as "Advanced Squad Leader," publishing it in a loose-leaf binder so you could insert new rules as they were published, with systems as obscure and silly as the "Sewer Emergence Table" and the "Kindling Availability Table."
The original Squad Leader sold more than 200,000 copies, an astonishing figure for a board wargame at the time. Advanced Squad Leader sold a few tens of thousands of copies. Advanced Squad Leader is, I believe, still in print--Churt Schilling, a baseball player, bought the rights from Avalon Hill when they went out of business, and keeps it around. It has a fanatical following--tiny, but fanatical.
Grognard capture explains why legal systems are so stupidly dense and incomprehensible to the uninitiated - they were captured by the legal grognards (in most cases centuries ago) and evolved away from comprehensibility. It explains why category theorists use language that's so different from most working mathematicians - categorical grognards have quite different motivations from the majority of mathematicians, and they've captured the subject and moved it in their direction. Incidentally, these two cases are in some sense dual to each other - legal minds (at least according to the law students I've asked) distrust generalities and try to make everything detailed and complex, and mathematicians (particularly categorists) try to make everything general and abstract to the point of emptiness.
Hegelian dialectic
Otherwise known as the "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad". On reading Wikipedia, I discover that this wasn't invented by Hegel, and doesn't describe his writings very well, but the hell with it, it's associated with him now. This, again, is an idea that works on many scales: as above, so below.
In its simplest form, an idea (the thesis) is advanced, which has flaws. In order to deal with these flaws, an almost diametrically opposed idea (the antithesis) is advanced. This too has flaws, so the two supposedly opposed ideas are reconciled in a final idea (the synthesis) which combines the good points of both. Transcending the duality of thesis and antithesis in order to reconcile them is often the hard bit, as it frequently involves understanding the problem in a new, deeper way.
Hegel (according to some commentators: I haven't actually read his books) used this format constantly in his writings to avoid the limitations of traditional reasoning that Kant had pointed out. However his real contention was that the TAS triad (as I'll henceforth call it) could be used to understand History. He apparently used this to "explain" the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but his main example was the French Revolution: the Revolution (thesis) gave way to the Reign of Terror (antithesis), which was in turn replaced by the Constitutional state of free citizens.
Now, I have only a nodding acquaintance with French history, but this sounds like bollocks to me. One wonders, for a start, why he didn't take thesis = ancien régime, antithesis = Revolution + Reign of Terror, synthesis = Republic. And once you do that, you remember all the other revolutions and republics that came after, and realise that the synthesis of one triad becomes the thesis of the next, and the number three becomes arbitrary. It might be better to think of an oscillating function, (hopefully) dying away to some ultimate limit. But the TAS triad is still a useful zeroth approximation to a historical trend. For example, we had Communism, which turned out to suck, so now we have Libertarianism, which is also pretty daft, and some day we will have a sensible middle ground, based on a scientific understanding of what states and markets do well and badly. Or we had centuries of historical and literary scholarship which ignored women almost completely (thesis), so now we have Women's History, Women's Literature, etc, which go to the opposite extreme (antithesis): I remain confident that there will come a useful synthesis which will use ideas from both groups. This has probably already happened. More generally, we had Modernism (one objective truth, etc), and then Postmodernism (often derided for being "cultural relativism", though of course it's more complex than that). Postmodernism (which I don't, tbh, know much about) has several serious problems, on the lines of "to what extent do you tolerate intolerance? When is it OK to make an ethical judgement about someone else's culture?". The solution to these isn't to go back to Modernism: that would just lead us back to the mistakes that kicked off Postmodernism in the first place. The solution is to find a synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism that combines their best points.
Onions in the varnish
After the thin ice of that last section, I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground here. An onion in the varnish is something that you used to need, which has been rendered obsolete by advances in techniques or technology, but which you keep because that's how you've always done things. I came across this idea in the writings of Paul Graham: I'll let him explain it:
In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.The architectural term skeuomorph is similar: it means an object which is made to look as if it were made in a way that is no longer used. You know those potato peelers with plastic casts of string wound round them? Skeuomorphs. Philip Steadman (Lily's dad) is apparently writing a book about Skeuomorphs. By the way, read the article: it summarises his proof that Vermeer used a camera obscura to do his perspective. Seriously clever stuff.
We're going to try not to include any onions in Arc. Everything is open to question. For example, in Arc, lambda is called fn. This idea appalled me at first, but it seemed like fn would be shorter and at least as expressive. What if I was just used to lambda? So, with a queasy sense of duty, I decided to try it. And after a few days I actually liked fn better. Now it seems clear to me that lambda is an onion: Alonzo Church himself wouldn't have used it if he had to write out the word lambda each time.
Sidneying
This one's even simpler: to Sidney one's buttons is to make an off-by-one error when doing them up, leaving you with an extra button at one end and an extra hole at the other. Taken from the name of a character in a children's play I saw when I was about five. One would have thought that such a common occurrence would have a standard name, but "Sidneying" is the only name I know for it.
My justification for this post is the one the Design Patterns guys use: by giving names to fairly common things, you make it easier to recognize them and to discuss them. Grognard capture, in particular, can be a Bad Thing (though it isn't always), and recognizing it is the first step to dealing with it.
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*Am I using that word right, it's been ages since I did that sort of maths?
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Fantastic... I thought it was the right word. That A-Level in further maths obviously paid off!
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I don't know how many of these I'll do, or how often they'll come - when I next think of a phrase to do it with, probably...
PS I love the idea of a Hegelian dialect. I have the vision of an old Yorkshireman talking about recognising t'State as t'moral Whole, and mine's a Landlord if you're buying.
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Thinking about the Grognard capture, I've just finished reading Joel Spolsky's book on User Interface design, where he discusses usability issues, and the fact that things which seem obvious to a programmer may not seem so obvious to a person who's new to computers. I can see his (and your) point, but on the flipside I think that software development benefits from the "we eat our own dogfood" principle, where the programmers actually use it themselves; that way, they can take out the really annoying stuff.
The "Onion in the varnish" idea reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story I heard about the monkeys and the hose.
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Eating your own dogfood: yes, I totally agree. At $company, if we'd been writing software for ourselves to use, the interface (and probably the whole system) would have been far, far less painful. As it was for users we'd never have to meet, we could get away with all kinds of user interface horrors. I guess dogfood-eating knocks the rough corners off, but grognard capture can push the software (or whatever) in a different (and perhaps wrong) direction.
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