The last few months I keep making the same observation over and over again
in various different contexts: that whenever you are confronted with a
very strong opinion about a topic, reasonable discussions about the topic
often involve arguments that have long become outdated or are no longer
strictly relevant to the conversation.
What I mean by that is that given a controversial topic, a valid argument
for one side of the other is being repeated by a crowd of people that once
heard it, even after that argument stops being valid. This happens because
often the general situation changed and the argument references a reality
that no longer exists in the same form. Instead of reevaluating the
environment however, goalposts are moved to restore the general sentiment
of the opinion.
To give you a practical example of this problem I can just go by a topic I
have a very strong opinion about: Python 3. When Python 3 was not a huge
thing yet I started having conversations with people in the community
about the problems I see with splitting the community and complexity of
porting. Not just that, I also kept bringing up general questions about
some of the text and byte decisions. I started doing talks about the
topic and write blog articles that kept being shared. Nowadays when I go
to a conference I very quickly end up in conversations where other
developers come to me and see me as the “Does not like Python 3 guy”.
While I still am not a friend of some of the decisions in Python 3 I am
very much aware that Python 3 in 2016 is a very different Python 3 than 6
years ago or earlier.
In fact, I myself campaigned for some changes to Python 3 that made it
possible to achieve better ports (like the reintroduction of the u
prefix on Unicode string literals) and the bulk of my libraries work on
Python 3 for many years now. It’s a fact that in 2016 the problems that
people have with Python 3 are different than they used to have before.
This leads to very interesting conversations where I can have a highly
technical conversation about a very specific issue with Python 3 and
thoughts about how to do it differently or deal with it (like some of the
less obvious consequences of the new text storage model) and another
person joins into the conversation with an argument against Python 3 that
has long stropped being valid. Why? Because there is a cost towards
porting to Python 3 and a chance is not seen. This means that a person
with a general negativity towards Python 3 would seek me out and try to
reaffirm their opposition to a port to it.
Same thing is happening with JavaScript where there is a general negative
sentiment about programming in it but not everybody is having good
arguments for it. There are some that actually program a lot in it and
dislike specific things about the current state of the ecosystem, but
generally acknowledge that the language is evolving, and then there are
those that take advantage of unhappiness and bring their heavily outdated
opposition against JavaScript into a conversation just to reaffirm their
own opinion.
This is hardly confined to the programming world. I made the same
discovery about CETA. CETA is a free trade agreement between the European
Union and Canada and it had the misfortune of being negotiated at the same
time as the more controversial TTIP with the US. The story goes roughly
like this: TTIP was negotiated in secrecy (as all trade agreements are)
and there were strong disagreements between what the EU and what the US
thought trade should look like. Those differences were about food safety
standards and other highly sensitive topics. Various organizations on
both the left and right extremes of the political scale started to grab
any remotely controversial information that leaked out to shift the public
opinion towards negativity to TTIP. Then the entire thing spiraled out of
control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition
and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade
agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The
subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP
were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of
the critics failed to realize that CETA fundamentally was a different
beast. Not only was it already a much improved agreement from the start,
but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the
one that was finally sent to national parliaments.
However despite what I would have expected: that critics go in and
acknowledge that their criticism was being heard instead slowly moved the
goalposts. At this point there is so much emotion and misinformation in
the general community that the goalpost moved all the way to not
supporting further free trade at all. In the general conversation about
ISDS and standards many people brought introduced their own opinions about
free trade and their dislike towards corporations and multinationals.
This I assume is human behavior. Admitting that you might be wrong is
hard enough, but it’s even harder when you had validation that you were
right in the past. In particular that an argument against something might
no longer be valid because that something has changed in the meantime is
hard. I’m not sure what the solution to this is but I definitely realized
in the few years on my own behavior that one needs to be more careful
about stating strong opinions in public. At the same time however I think
we should all be more careful dispelling misinformation in conversations
even if the general mood supports your opinion. As an example while
emotionally I like hearing stories about how JavaScript’s packaging causes
pain to developers since I experienced it first hand, I know from a
rational point of view that the ecosystem is improving a tremendous
speeds. Yes I have been burned by npm but it’s not like this is not
tremendously improving.
Something that has been put to paper once is hard to remove from people’s
minds. In particular in the technological context technology moves so
fast that very likely something you read once might no longer be up to
date as little as six months later.
So I suppose my proposal to readers is not to fall into that trap and to
assume that the environment around oneself keeps on changing.