A Rational Christianity

This was an essay I wrote for a class I took this semester. Posted here for posterity.

Case Study: Is It Possible To Reconcile Faith and Rationality?

I am a Christian, and that makes me weird.

My circle of friends consists primarily of rationalists. I am the only one amongst them who believes in any sort of God, and amongst them I am also the only one who is religious. Religion is not particularly fashionable amongst rational people.

If I claim to be a rational person (which is how I found myself
with this group of friends in the first place), then how am I to justify my
belief in the God of my religion?

This essay attempts to use some of the tools taught over the course of this semester, in GEM1902G, to answer this question.

Proof and God

Let's tackle the first problem with any rational approach to theism: i.e. the fact that — despite the best attempts of many of my fellow Christians — the existence of God is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Since God is supposed to exist outside of nature (and its trappings of space and time), one cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God using methods known to science.

That is not to say that there haven't been such attempts. Historically, Christians have deployed all sorts of arguments for the existence of God. Take creation, for example. Christians have argued for centuries that the complexity of life justifies the existence of an intelligent designer. This was all well and good until Darwin came along and demonstrated that the explanation for this complexity was a lot simpler: that evolution, as a biological mechanism, enabled life to evolve incrementally towards what the biologist Richard Dawkins calls 'adaptive perfection'^[1]. Dawkins and his ilk thus argue that Christians have no claim to the idea that God exists.

But there is a problem with this train of thought. It is not true that the complexity of life justifies the existence of God, as the Christians have argued. Conversely, the existence of evolution does not, as Dawkins would argue, preclude the existence of God. It strikes me that the debate surrounding evolution is only strong enough to deal with the mechanics of creation, not on the presence of creation itself.

What do I mean by this? Well, if science says that evolution was the mechanism with which we came to be, who, then, can stop us from arguing that God used evolution to create life? And if science says that the universe was created via the Big Bang, then what is to stop the Christians from saying that God created the universe via that exact phenomenon?

Science is silent on things that exist outside of nature. It is muted when dealing with non-observable, non-falsifiable hypotheses. Because the existence of God is not falsifiable, science is of no help to us here. It cannot say anything strong on the existence of God.

God and Correspondence

The correspondence theory of truth is thus of limited value when it comes to God. Even if we do attribute certain phenomena to him, we can never really know for sure.

This attribution problem plagues all the other arguments that may fall into the correspondence theory of truth. For instance, some theists argue that our sense of right and wrong comes from God. (This is known as the moral argument for God.) This, too, is subject to the attribution problem — even if a scientific explanation is found for our moral senses (and there is good reason to believe that one will eventually be found — see recent advances in evolutionary psychology), theists may still attribute this mechanism to God.

This problem of attribution is applicable to any discovery in science. So we're left with where we began: if attribution is a problem, how else might we be able to reason about God?

God and Coherence

The coherence theory of truth gives us a possible alternative: we might reason about God by treating the belief in God as an axiom. When seen in this light, it becomes possible for us to build an internally-consistent system of beliefs that include the existence of God.

A friend of mine, an agnostic, told me that she grew to understand her religious friends as people who started with a different set of base beliefs. This finally gave her the ability to understand where they were coming from (and, though this was left unsaid, in turn saved them from being seen by her as completely irrational creatures).

Perhaps this is a good rationalist justification for God. If science is silent on God, then one way of reconciling God with reason is to say that you simply choose to believe in Him. After accepting the axiom of God into your system of rationality, you may then proceed to weed out beliefs that are inconsistent with both belief in God and belief in Science. This makes things simpler for the thinking Christian.

God and Consensus

If enough people believed in these axioms, we might perhaps reach a consensus that God exists, and that it is not an intellectual 'crime' to believe in His existence.

I, am, of course, being glib. Consensus is a very shallow way of validating the belief in God — just because everyone believes in something does not necessarily mean that the thing is true.

But the consensus theory of truth leads us to an interesting idea: if people all across the world, for most of history have agreed to cling to God, then perhaps we should not discount it so quickly in pursuit of pure rationality.

There are two ways of looking at the prevalence of religion: the first is that men are largely irrational creatures. This is — unkind as it is — probably true. The second way of looking at this is to conclude that there must be something to religiousity that appeals to basic human nature.

There is some evidence to support this claim. Anthropologist Richard Sosis, for instance, examined the history of 200 communes in the United States in the 19th century^[2] and found that just 6 percent of secular communes were still functioning 20 years after their funding, as opposed to 39 percent of the religious communes.

The difference? Religious communes could demand more sacrifice from its members. The number of sacrifices demanded, such as giving up alcohol, or fasting, or cutting ties from outsiders, was linearly correlated with how long the communes lasted. But for secular communes, Sosis found that there was no relationship between sacrifice and longevity. Most of them failed within eight years.

Sosis then argued that the rituals and laws necessary for the health of a group work best when they are sacratized. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, especially if this sacredness binds people together. But secular settings fail to mask the arbitrariness of social conventions, making it harder for the group to cohere.

Interestingly enough, anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich showed in a 2010 paper^[3] that the development of religion has been driven largely by competition amongst groups. They argued that groups that managed to put their gods to good use had an advantage over groups that didn't, and the groups that didn't soon began to adapt these religious ideas for their own use.

This is in line with Sosis's findings. If gods help groups outcompete other groups, then it makes sense for competing groups to adapt these ideas
for the benefit of their own group. Gods can be helpful as a form of social glue.

The idea that consensus on a religion is beneficial for the group is not without merit.

God and Pragmatism

But if there is a rational argument for God at the group level, then what of the individual? Perhaps the most rational, personal argument for God is that of pragmatism: it benefits me, therefore it is good enough for me that God is real.

Religion does have its benefits, after all. For all the claimed injustices and horrors that intellectuals have attributed to religion, religion on a personal level is a pretty useful thing to have.

Christianity, for instance, has provided me with a clear moral code. It has also provided me with a social support system — that at its best is tolerant, and kind, and accepting (although it is very often not). Most importantly, however, Christianity gives me a mental framework with which to make sense of the world. It compels me to forgive those who have done nasty things to me, because of the belief that I am no better a person, at my core, than those who have wronged me. (The Christian terminology for this being 'everyone is a sinner, but God loves you anyway').

If Christianity makes it easier for me to be a better person, who can fault me for my belief in it?

The problem with rationality

There is one problem with this entire essay, though.

In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks of a study he conducted in 1993^[4], where he examined the moral judgments that people make when exposed to a series of moral conundrums.

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it okay for them to make love?

Under interrogation, most subjects in the experiment agree that these things are wrong. But, with no demonstrable harm in these situations, they found it difficult to explain why.

Haidt argues that this difficulty did not stem from a lack of reasoning. He argues that people do reason. But like psychologist Daniel Kahneman^[5], Haidt argues that human reason works like a 'press secretary': justifying our acts and snap judgments to others. (He calls this 'post-hoc rationalizations'). In the example of the incest question, for instance, subjects relentlessly marshal arguments against the act, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes their arguments, simply because they believe it to be wrong.

Haidt then explains this phenomenon in terms of evolution. Reason, he posits, evolved to help us exert influence over others, not to help us find truth. Or, as he puts it eloquently, 'reason evolved to help us spin, not learn'. People make judgments first, then come up with rational arguments to support their views.

Similarly, this entire essay can be seen as my attempt to do a post-hoc rationalization of my belief in Christianity. I believe Christianity to be true, and I believe, as a rational person, that there are rational reasons for thinking so. Naturally, I attempt to justify my beliefs.

Perhaps, then, the logical conclusion here is to say that reason is not the perfect ideal that my friends and I make it out to be. In this cynical view, what GEM1902G has provided me is simply a set of tools that — if I am so willing — I may employ to justify myself.

I have shown here the existence of a rational, truth-based argument for God. But I have also, you might say, engaged in an indulgent post-hoc rationalization of my Christianess.

I am slightly troubled by this. But as I have (rather competently) demonstrated rational reasons for believing in God, I think my irrational use of rationality can be set aside for the purpose of this essay, to be picked up on and brooded upon at a latter date. I am, after all, only human.

References

[1] - Time: God vs Science
[2] - Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239.
[3] - Atran, S., & Henrich, J. (2010). The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory, 5(1), 18-30.
[4] - Haidt, J., Koller, S. H., & Dias, M. G. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 613.
[5] - Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Perspective

Here's an interesting thought experiment:

If you're human, like I am, you will work to improve your lot in life. Mostly this means that you will toil for success, some recognition, and for the ability to look yourself in the mirror every day and say that you're doing something of meaning. (This is sometimes — but not always — tied to your net worth - the society around you will unconsciously judge you based on how rich you are, even if it's not explicitly stated).

So say that you've spent the first few years of your working life going at it. You leverage your university education, hunt down opportunities, fight for promotions and then — after 10 years of hard work, get to a cushy middle management position.

You're not rich or successful, mind, but you're not that far off from it. Give yourself another 10 years and it's almost certain that you'll be at the top of your firm.

We know how a young, single, working professional looks like. Say you live a comfortable life: you have a nicely furnished apartment, a fiancé, and nice things to show off to your friends. At family gatherings your aunts ask how you're doing and you tell them and they chalk you up as one of the family's successes. Your parents are proud of you.

All is well. You keep working hard because you want to 'succeed in life'.

One afternoon, right after a very ordinary lunch break, a shadow passes over your desk. You look out of your office windows, and then you look up — you see the underbelly of a vast spaceship.

As you watch, the ship moves to the industrial area of your city, and then a beam of light lances down towards the ground.

You fly off your feet and hit the office wall in the resulting concussive roar.

In the next few years the human economy collapses as Earth goes to war; your firm cannot find any business as it makes no sense to do so. You are fired.

So here's the question: in such a scenario, does ambition matter? You have spent a good 30 years of your life getting a good education to get a good job to be able to show your aunts that you've Gotten Somewhere In Life.

And one alien attack takes it all away from you.

***

This is a rather contrived example, of course, but it's also a reminder that what we consider a normal life (i.e.: good school -> good university -> good job -> kids -> success) is not in any way ordinary.

After all, while an alien attack is unlikely, a global depression is not. Yuppies in the 1930s never saw it coming. Nor did they expect a World War. (Incidentally, it strikes me that growing up in the 1920s must have been a bloody interesting time.)

So what point am I making here? That's simple: don't take things for granted, even as you work your ass off. Life is too random and too weird to assume you have a God-given right to chase success.

(Oh, and, erm: keep an eye on the skies - you never know when a mothership will land and destroy everything you've worked for.)

A Lonely Chinese New Year

I'm having a lonely little Chinese New Year in Singapore - where the only highlight was an awesome dinner with cousins Aaron and Karen and their family.

A couple of quick, loosely connected thoughts: productivity is at an all-time high again, in proportion to the loneliness. This is one of those times where I'm absurdly thankful I'm not on Facebook; my friends tell me that it's depressing to see all their friends celebrating Chinese New Year back home. Sometimes ignorance really can be bliss.



I had a fascinating conversation a few days ago with Dr Connor Graham, the House Fellow for my floor. I was into my 5th glass of wine by that point (a dry white, a medium white, two glasses of Shiraz, and two flutes of sparkling wine), and was slightly wobbly, and so more prone to talk to Random Professors about Life, the Universe and Everything. In this case, what I found interesting was how his wife (who's from China) came to Singapore and discovered so many Chinese festivals that the mainland Chinese never celebrate, due in part to the PRC government's crackdown on culture over the past 50 years.

It's rather amazing to think that Chinese culture is preserved in immigrant communities such as in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, perhaps to a larger degree, than it ever was in Mainland China.

And so anyway, I'm going to leave you with that thought, as I go back to do my Operating Systems homework. Till we meet again, Gong Xi Fa Cai!

The Most Productive Month Of My Life

I can't believe how productive I was in December:

• I build the Unofficial CORS API, a programmer's interface to get data from NUS's course catalog. [4 days]
• I built Treehouse - a project dashboard and community news site, again for NUS Hackers. [6 days]
• I redesigned the NUS Hackers site, and got speakers from Google and RIM to sponsor and speak at our events. [7 hours]
• I wrote a 4000 word essay for an O'Reilly book on publishing, due to be published in the middle of 2012. [4 days]
• I wrote an article for NUS's The Ridge, on NUS Hackers. [2 hours]
• Finished reading 5 books, including the entire Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. [God knows how long - but I loved every second of it.]

Part of the reason for this productivity, I think, was because most of my friends were either busy or away from Kuching. Ida and Sam were in London; Paul was preparing for his internship in Intel Penang, Garrick was too busy working on his Sugar Bun restaurant.

I spent most days at home, programming and thinking and reading and writing, and I will admit that I felt a little lonely when my sisters went out more than I did.

But: I'm amazed at all the work I've done, and I wonder if a little loneliness is good for all of us.

Problems I'm Interested In

I'm supposed to put this up on my personal site, but till I get Hyde set up and deployed I'm posting a list of problems I'm interested in (or thinking about) here.

The networked book. The recent industry-wide shift to ebooks is really no different from its physical analogue: you go to a store, you buy a book, you read the book. End of story. The networked book posits a radical idea: what happens if we could have a canonical representation of each book on the web?

Well, you can do cool things with that, of course. The obvious benefits are quick to present themselves: books in browsers means books are readable in the widest spectrum of devices possible (think: phones, OLPCs for kids in poor countries); you can aggregate reader-created comments and annotations into a central version of the book; you can link to specific paragraphs or sentences when referencing works on the web.

But the other benefits are not as clear - for instance, books can be updated if they're on the web. We can build versioning systems for books, and push versions down to ebooks as corrections are made available. Networked books can also be edited, and reading communities may (will?) spring up around them.

But also, the long-standing question: how do we get there?

Social software for small groups. The forum has proven — over the last couple of years — to be detrimental to the building and maintenance of healthy digital communities. Large social sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, Hacker News and Reddit have shown us that large online groups need tools to save themselves from themselves (and even smaller communities do better with self-enforcing controls built into the software). How would social software (e.g. a forum) would look like with these elements adapted for the small, digital community? The challenge is likely three-fold: a) how to promote good behaviour in online communities b) how to apply elements of gamification in the best possible way for maximum community engagement and c) the market problem - how to disrupt and replace existing bulletin board solutions.

Marginalia of the future. NISO (the National Information Standards Organization) has just started an effort to create a universal annotation format. There are multiple interesting challenges to this: i) how do you map annotations to specific paragraphs, given the fluidity of the text in most ebook readers ii) how would such a format be implemented, in order to be as cross-platform as is feasibly possible? (And what of PDFs? Scanned PDFs almost certainly cannot be annotated, as there's no text to latch on to.)

Note: there may be a good algorithmic approach to the first problem - e.g. using the Levenshtein distance to compare hashes of paragraphs, and this seems to be largely a reader implementation problem.

Open textbooks. The textbook industry is one of the worst industries to have blighted education for the past two decades (I'm not kidding about this, Feynmann has complained about it in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann!, but the reality today is much worse).

I suspect that it's possible to disrupt this industry: provide free software for professors to write their textbooks in, on the agreement that so long as they keep a version of their textbook free and open (perhaps under the Creative Commons license), which we can then print and deploy to kids in poor nations.

Two quick things: 1) such initiatives already exist, such as in the state of California; but the software largely sucks; 2) Room for Reading seems like a good partner here, my friend Callie Miller is a big believer in what they're doing.

Can there be a better Wikipedia? Idle thinking; but I'd like to know if it's possible to build a better Wikipedia from both the software and the community perspective. The case for better software quickly presents itself: Mediawiki is rather obtuse to learn and to use (and is of course rather old). Also, are there better processes for topic review and deletion? I'm not so sure about that - the processes that exist today sprung up organically, and may very well be the best way to police Wikipedia.

A solution for the filter bubble problem. Eli Pariser has talked about this in his TED talk (see below); my question: is it possible to headfake a site — perhaps a news site, like Reddit — to solve the filter problem by purposefully throwing users up against people of different and opposing viewpoints? Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures has suggested an opposite view reader, which sounds like an incredibly cool site to build.



Concurrent programming. I've not thought much about this problem, nor have I looked very deeply into it (will probably have to start reading papers, should I want to experiment in the field). But everyone in Computer Science knows that concurrent programming is the challenge in Programming Languages, at least for the next few decades. Liskov suggests that we need a new model of thinking about concurrent programming, the same way that Google's map-reduce approach turned out to be the right way to think about distributed computing. What might this mental model be?

My Dog Has A Mid Life Crisis, And Other Things

The problem with Kuching houses are that they're so much bigger than Singaporean ones. I felt every square foot of this truth — and I know the square feet well! — because 30 minutes after getting back from the airport I found myself vacuuming the entire bottom floor of my house, like any good little Kuching boy would.

My sister played Blackbird on the guitar right before I wrote this post. It's raining, but it still feels oddly hot in my room.

My bedsheets are pink. The floor is wood underfoot and slightly warm. I have a high-quality secondary monitor again.

I'm reminded of a sentence written by Meng Wong (who's a Singaporean VC, and a mentor):

Being human is funny strange. You begin. Then you go away from where you began. You hold hands for a while. Then you let go. When you go back to where you began, it all looks different but still smells the same.

It's true. With the possible exception of the front of the house (which smells of dead rat, believe it or not - some rodent went and killed himself in the ceiling) the rest of Kuching feels the same sort of different that you get for being away for awhile. There's a cooler in the dining room, where before there was a standing fan. And a cute little robot brush is hanging from the kitchen sink. But for all the changes, it all still smells the same.

(Note: my sister did some calculations earlier tonight and we found out that my dog is 49 years old in dog years — just 2 years younger than my dad. She's still as smelly as ever, though. Dad's asked me to bathe her tomorrow.)

All this to say: I'm back home, folks. I'll spend most of this break with family and programming, but if you want me for debate or you want me to teach you programming or you're a friend and you have a computer problem ... (which are all the things my friends find me for, by the way, bless them) ... you know where to find me.

It's good to be back.

Honey To Bees

In case you missed it, O'Reilly Media recorded the entirety of the conference and uploaded it to Youtube. This is my talk.

Paradox

This morning I had a Skype call with the founders of Hyperink, a publishing startup based in San Francisco. They recently raised $1.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and SV Angel, making them at least 4 million in valuation.

We met — as many in the valley do — via a mutual friend. I had helped a guy named Derrick Kho set up an internship program called Startup Roots earlier this year, when he contacted the NUS Hackers for publicity and introductions to good student programmers. When I went to the valley I stayed with a bunch of NUS students, one of which turned out to be his girlfriend.

"Have you heard of Hyperink?" he asked on my first night there, propped up in the cold on the doorstep outside.

I had, but I didn't really knew what they did. Derrick told me. "Maybe I can set up an email introduction — I think you guys should really meet."

We did, and I spent Saturday morning talking to Kevin, one of the co-founders, and then programming at the Hyperink offices.

When I got back to Singapore, Kevin set up a Skype call because (it turned out) they wanted my advice on setting up a digital publishing workflow. (By chance, I'd spent most of my time at Pandamian doing something similar). I obliged by pointing them to half-a-dozen tools, including an EPUB generator I adapted for Pandamian and then maintained, as free and open source software. In exchange, they were willing to give us access to their authors to test out a marketing tool we were planning to build.

"Thanks for your help," said Matt, the other co-founder, shortly before we concluded. "When Kevin first told me about you, he said 'holy shit I met this guy and he knows so much about ebooks.' And that turned out to be totally true, and then some!"

I felt pleased at that, but then the Skype call ended and I was faced with an incomplete assignment, and I felt bad again.

Here's my problem: I find it hard to reconcile my status as a student with my status as an ebook 'person'.

I am a terrible student: right now I'm doing level 2 modules in NUS when I'm third year, and my classmates look at me a little funny when I tell them, slightly embarrassed, what mods I'm currently studying for. Sometimes I change the subject, because I don't want to see the looks on their faces when they find out.

On the other hand, they're not sure how to react when I tell them what I do on the side. I also don't tell many of them about my extra-curricular activities.

I'm not sure how to judge my self-worth. My pride at my ebook work (and my obsession with some of the problems in the field) are mostly buried under my insecurities as a student. I'm not disciplined in studying, I get distracted, I fail subjects. I'm at least half a year behind on my peers, and I'm likely to repeat a semester, delaying graduation for half a year.

And on the side, I'm giving advice (and code) to a million-dollar company.

How do I reconcile this? I know I should feel proud, but right now I'm struggling with constructing a processor out of logic gates, and doing badly at it. I suppose there's only so many Cs and Ds one can take before thinking badly of oneself (okay, I know I'm not an idiot, but there's psychological wear and tear, just try it for a year or two).

(And, yes, some people would say this immunization to failure is necessary for an entrepreneur).

I suppose my insecurities about my academics has tempered with my obsession (and pride) with doing good work in digital publishing. Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe not.

On the bright side, at least I know if I fail I can always get a job as an ebook consultant.

Haha, now wouldn't that be a laugh?

Towers

I'm sitting in the plane, back from Incheon, Korea (it was a one hour transit on the way back from San Francisco) and I'm thinking of her.

I miss her.

I don't miss her all day, every day. It depends on the environment. Right now the plane's quiet and sleepy and the blanket drawn up around me's comfortable, so I want her in a seat besides me. In San Francisco I didn't want her there - it didn't feel safe, especially when I was making my way back at night. (My friends say they'd heard gunshots one night out in SF, and got so bloody scared they drove back home to Mountain View and didn't return for a few weeks.)

American cities are strange. San Francisco is ugly and large, and while I got rather good at navigating the city, I never understood the way the poor, homeless people could coexist next to the yuppies walking down the street. I got out at the Civic Centre BART station, and stood there, mouth agape, at one of the most beautiful parks I'd ever seen in SF. I was about to take out a camera when a well-dressed old woman saw my open mouth and asked if I needed help — she gave me directions and then warned me to 'watch my wallet'.

On Saturday, after a meeting with another publishing startup in the city, I took a CalTrain down to Mountain View. Angad picked me up in a VW convertible.

Mountain View is beautiful. It's nearer to winter now, and so there are wild splashes of pink and reds in the underbrush. The streets are clean. The shops look sleepy and small, and Castro Street is chockful of quaint food shops (all healthy, in typical Californian fashion).

Angad took the roof down and we drove to Palo Alto, where Stanford is. The whole area leading out of SF is beautiful. It was then, driving in the cool ocean breeze, with the roof down and music blaring, did I wish that I could bring her down with me to see what I saw.

I'm sure London is as beautiful as California is. One day, we'd go together to explore the whole city. But we explore everything, anyway. It's only a matter of time.

Steve

I was very sad when I heard of Steve's death. It was the first thing I woke up to, thanks to BBM:

Sam: OMG STEVE JOBS IS DEAD

Followed by, a few seconds later:

Idasu: Steve Jobs is dead?!

(Ida then drew a fantastic cartoon of my (real!) reaction to Steve's death on her blog, you should go read it).

But in the hours after his death I couldn't help but think back to Steve's commencement address, in the summer of 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I choked a little when I read that.

The most important lesson I've learnt, I think, from Steve's life (and really, from Barbara Liskov's talk, or Brewster Kahle's life, or any great person's life) is the importance of doing great work.

You and I will only be remembered for what we leave behind. Liskov will leave behind her the creation of Object Oriented Programming. Kahle will leave behind him a digital archive of humanity. Jobs will leave behind too many things to count.

It is true that we will all leave something behind — for most of us, it would be the effect we have had on our families and friends. But as youngsters, it would do to remind ourselves: if we are to be ambitious, we have to create value for more than the people around us.

We have to do great work. Everything else follows.

This begs the uncomfortable question: what are you working on today that is great work? Getting good grades is — economically speaking — a null value. Nobody says "he was a great man, he got straight As in all his exams." It is a means to an end — the end being a place from which you may do great work (medical doctors, here, come to mind).

Turing Award winner Richard Hamming used to go around the University cafeteria and hound the other scientists: "What are the most important problems in your field?" and "Why aren't you working on them?". After a few weeks, Richard Hamming was banned from eating with most of the other scientists.

(The few who did listen did rise in stature in the scientific community).

But asking this question helps, I think, in other areas. Even in smaller spheres there is opportunity to do great work. You can start clubs, or revamp existing ones (to make them more valuable for the existing members). You can volunteer at NGOs, and then think hard about ways to make that work more efficient.

We are remembered by how much value we have created for those around us. Steve created whole industries around his work. I am writing this on a Macbook, and I work in a field he helped pioneered. He will be remembered for a long time.

Go with grace, Steve. May you rest in peace.

Some Quick Lessons From Barbara Liskov's Talk

I don't have much time to write this, but I think I should get everything down before I forget it.

I attended a talk by Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov last Thursday. The Turing Award is Computer Science's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. She won it because she invented Object Oriented Programming (gross oversimplification, but I'm just writing to provide some context).

A number of things struck me about her talk. The first was that she said that ideas had their time — not a new observation, but one worth remembering (see this Gladwell essay on just that). She discovered OOP because i) it seemed like its time had come — she could see hints of the idea in all the papers of the time. And that ii) she thought really, really hard about the problem.

The next thing to strike me was how important Programming Languages research is. Her view of the current languages in vogue (Python, for instance) was that "you can see the attraction, but it does so many things wrong" and that "it's sad that the academic community dropped the ball on creating a language ... (that meets the requirements of) industry. The kind of language that's easy enough to teach programming to a student, but also good for industry. Instead we've been so hung up on the theoretical bits. So we've had languages created by people outside the field, and they get so many things wrong."

Which is an interesting observation - and pretty true, no? Ruby was created by Matz; and Python by Guido, and they weren't doing PL work at the time. Nor, for that matter, was Ritchie, who did the bulk of the work on C.

And lastly, I'm struck by how Programming Methodology is really a study on human thinking. Before Liskov invented OOP, programming languages were flying spaghetti spitballs. What OOP did was to introduce a level of abstraction that made it easier to think about programs (and more importantly — made it easier to reason about correctness).

I had never considered this. I'd always wondered at research done in the field of programming languages - weren't languages these dinky little things you used on a daily basis? What discoveries could possibly be made in the field?!

But of course that view was wrong. There are good ways of doing PLs, and also bad ways. Liskov said that we haven't yet found the right kind of abstractions for concurrent programming (and I asked her about Go, which proposes to create an abstraction for exactly that, but she professed to have not heard of it. Sigh. I wished she did; her opinion would undoubtedly be very interesting!). She also argued that we didn't yet know the right way to think about massively distributed computing systems, though Google's MapReduce algorithm was a big step in the right direction.

At any rate, that is what I've learnt, and I'd do well to remember some of it.

Honesty

I think the biggest lesson I've taken away from 2011 has been that of honesty. Self-honesty, that is - the kind of honesty that happens when you look yourself in the mirror.

Most of this year has been terrible. Not absolutely terrible, as in the kind of terrible you'd expect going through a concentration camp, say, but terrible enough to look back and know that I've made a mess of things, and that I'm now standing in a roomful of broken glass. The only way forward is to sweep it all up and throw it away, and fill the room (again) with crystal statues and polished mirrors and ice-glazed pieces. It's hard work, and I'm still sweeping.

I have learnt this year that I have exactly the kind of personality-type that's good at deluding him/herself. I shy away from brutal honesty. Not doing well in math? Don't worry, I tell myself, you can always catch up later. Co-founder not contributing code? Don't worry, I say, he's busy now, maybe he'll do so in the near future. Relationship not going well? Don't worry, I'm busy, I can always make it up to her later.

Except that I can't. You can't reverse things like ignoring your girlfriend and ignoring your math (and, no, I'm not comparing the two; though if I were the former would trump the latter in both joy and complexity). But these are things that I've lost last semester, that I'm now trying to win back.

Life is comfortable when you don't have to face up to the hard truths of your life. And I'm sure that we all can be very good at self-delusion — the couple in a relationship that's going nowhere; the person who's self-deluded about his or her body weight; the girl who can't sing but wants to be a superstar.

The truth is often called brutal for a reason. Facing up to it forces one to be a little uncomfortable with oneself, at least for a little while. But I'm beginning to see that such discomfort is necessary to grow in life, and running away from hard truths isn't going to get me anywhere.

(There is a caveat, of course - too much discomfort and you go into panic mode, which then spirals into a destructive cycle of self-loathing, and so I suppose there's an upper limit on all this introspection).

At any rate: no more self-delusion. It's time for some proper life.

Stress and Happiness

Sam:
What's going on these days?

Me:
Hrmm?
Some stress over going to SF
Lots of stress over Pandamian
Lots of stress over academics
Some stress adapting to girlfriend in uk
That's about it. :)

Sam:
Lol what about happiness?
Why all stress only
And when is SF?

Me:
End of October
You don't get it - to a person loving what he does, stress is happiness :)
There can be no joy without pain! No elation without victory hard won! No love without effort! :)

Sam:
Lol you sound like Nietzsche

That's pretty much everything in a nutshell. For the moment, at least. Now back to work.

The Death Of Advice

Two years ago, if you'd asked me advice on what to do after college, or how to succeed in life, I'd have given you a set of straight answers I believed to be true. "Find your passion." I'd say. "Study what you love in Uni." "Learn to take the initiative." "Work hard."

All of them obvious things we've been told, as kids, at one point in time or another. But the funny thing is that — with experience — I'm now no longer as certain as I was back then. A couple of juniors asked me a year back, during the summer holidays: "What do you think I should do in university?" And my answer was "It depends ..." with a guilty shrug appended at the end.

Consider the four bits of advice I've listed above:

"Find your passion." sounds simple enough — if you do what you're passionate about, you'll be good at it, and you'll be set for the rest of your life. Right? No, not really. The problem with this is that it's really hard to find out what you're a) good at and b) passionate about plus c) it being a field that's lucrative enough for you to live your life the way you want to (notice that I said enough — how much you live by is really up to you). Whether you find all three is a matter of randomness. If you're lucky you'd discover what you love to do at a relatively early age. Or you may take 40 years. Or you give up on one of the three. There's no good way to tell.

(Worse, history is littered by people who found their passion early and failed miserably.)

"Study what you love in Uni", too, sounds nice, until you realize that many of the same objections that applied to the first nugget apply to this bit of 'wisdom' too. I love what I'm studying in University — but how I stumbled into my field is more luck than anything else. And so what do you tell the hundreds of students who aren't studying what they love? To shove off? That's not true, now, is it? There are hundreds of people who leveraged a course they hated and changed to happy careers later in their lives. Whether you hate what you're studying in University doesn't seem to matter — unless you want it to.

"Learn to take the initiative." used to be a general principle you'd assume to some degree of certainty would lead to success. But the world doesn't like certainty. I can think of a half dozen people who never took the initiative and yet have had awesome things happen to them; they were at the right place at the right time. Others do so but aren't rewarded with much worldly success. So initiative and drive aren't guaranteed metrics of success, either.

"Work hard" is a lie. You don't necessarily have to work hard to succeed. This is because there are different kinds of work, and therefore different kinds of returns. A builder hammering nails into the wooden structure of a house earns as much money as he hammers nails; a computer programmer writes software once and lives off its revenues for ten years afterwards.

I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that: for every bit of advice that someone gives you, there is always a counter-example to disprove the rule. Work hard ... except when you don't need to. Find your passion ... except for when you become successful on something you hate. Study something you love, except when studying a field you dislike leads you to an opportunity you've never dreamed of.

My mind clogs up with edge cases when someone asks me for advice, today. I realize now that there are no simple rules in life. The only one that's served me well isn't really advice — and so I hesitate to give it to other people:

Make the best out of what you're given.

Or, put another way: always choose the local maxima.

What I mean by this is that, when at a crossroads — don't think too far ahead. Just pick what gives you more opportunities. For instance, when faced with a choice to study Economics or Math in university, pick Math, because Math gives you more opportunities (you can study Economics at graduate level with a Math degree, but not vice versa). When faced with the spectre of Matriculation vs Form 6, pick Form 6. When faced with the opportunity to go to San Francisco to speak to a private gathering of influential technologists or stay in Singapore and study for exams ... choose to fight for San Francisco.

'Choose the local maxima' isn't exactly life advice, because you're making things up as you go along.

Much of my life (so far) has been like this, I think. I started debating because I thought it would be useful to be persuasive. I then thought to put those argumentative skills to use when I started writing a blog on digital fiction, because I thought it was an interesting, unexplored field. This blog then led me to think about some unsolvable problems in digital publishing, and act on them in 2008, with the creation of the Web Fiction Guide. My frustration at my inability to program led me to choose Computer Science for university, a field which I now love. My work with Novelr got me into NUS despite my bad grades. Novelr's community — now 600-700 strong, led me to create a company to solve some of the more annoying problems I'd been struggling with for the good part of four years. The creation of that company (and the clarity of ideas behind it) led me to an invitation to a private gathering of ebook technologists in San Francisco. I am now committed to solving some intractably difficult problems in publishing — problems that very well may take 30, 40 years of my life to see through. In short: I know what I want to do for the future. And it's all luck. That, and following the local maxima.

Of course, I'm not saying that my life if guaranteed to turn out well. Life is random, after all. But the principle still applies: if you fail an exam, or flunk college, or drop out, or find yourself in a bad place, choosing the local maxima is almost always the best thing to do. There is, after all, this saying about life and lemons ...

I'm tired now, and chronically sleep-deprived, and am writing this only to relax after a solid 24 hours of assignment hell. I'm not even sure if I make sense. But I do think this is true, and I hope you've found it interesting. Thanks for reading.

(Note: I'm Christian, and so what I really mean by 'luck' is God's grace, and what I mean by success I mean worldly success — something that isn't as important to a Christian as fellowship with God. But if you're secular, or from another religion, ignore this. Just understand that I'm actually thinking about different things.)

A Letter I Wish I'd Sent

Dear Diana,

I've always struggled to put the (often dark) joy of reading your books into words. You aren't as easy to describe as some of the other authors: "Do you read Diana Wynn Jones?" I'd ask my friends, in my childhood, and they'd shake their heads. "Well go read her. Go read the Chrestomanci series." But they wouldn't.

Your books, I realize, aren't the teenage wildfires that the Hunger Games or the Twilight books are. They're ... different. Darker. Witty. More realistic, I feel. More difficult, too.

Tor.com had a call for letters late last year, when the editors found out that you stopped chemo. I considered sending a letter. I never did, and I regret that now.

I realize - in the wake of your passing - that I loved your books more fiercely than I did any other writer; if Stephanie Mayer or Rowling died I wouldn't have felt as terrible as when Gaiman reported your death.

I found my first Chrestomanci book when I was 11; in the children's section of the Sarawak Club library. It was on a bottom shelf by the large picture-windows facing the hallway, all of them HarperCollins reprints of your catalog. I didn't borrow any other writer for quite a bit after my discovery. My sister and I fought over the only copy of Howl's Moving Castle.

When the Sarawak Club burned down my mind leapt, almost immediately, to their collection of your books.

In my first semester in NUS, shortly after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, I took a chance and searched for your name in the NUS library's cataloging system. There were only three books of yours in the catalog that I'd not read. I finished all three in three days, during the reading week, procrastinating when I should've been studying for my theatre exam.

I gave my youngest sister a copy of Wilkin's Tooth as a 12th birthday present. It's lost now, and I feel a little bad about that.

I don't really know how to talk about your writing. I suppose I should, but I can't. Too many layers. Cruel protagonists and unbelieving parents. Sulky dragons and self-absorbed enchanters. Broken marriages and young, vain lovers. I feel a bit better knowing that bits of you live on in writers like Neil Gaiman (whom you dedicated Hexwood to, how dare he!), John Scalzi, and Rowling (though she has not admitted it!).

I miss you already.

Rest in peace, Diana Wynn Jones. I promise you - when I have kids, your books will be amongst the first they read. Thank you for such a wonderful childhood.

Diana Wynn Jones, 19 August 1934 - 26 March 2011

PS: More tributes here, here and here. In particular, I loved this bit by Emma Bull:

She was passionate about what children want and deserve from their literature. Adults would approach her at signings, wanting to know why she wrote such difficult books. In one case, when a woman protested, the woman’s young son spoke up and assured Diana, “Don’t worry. I understood it.”

She had such faith in us.

The Variance

Every time I go back to Kuching I can't help but think of my friends, and how different we're all growing up to be.

I have a friend who is taking the bar exam in half a year's time. I was there when his plan was to be: "a lawyer! I never want to be a politician la!" and then in the last election, when his father was dropped in favour of another party representative, he got so hopping mad that he changed his mind. He's now working towards being a representative - and he probably would be, in due time.

I have another friend who won a Petronas scholarship to France. He spends most of the year in Lyon, lives in a studio apartment, and thinks the French are an unfriendly bunch. I think he has a bright future ahead of him.

Another friend has graduated with a technical diploma, and is working as an air-cond repairman. When we were in St Thomas's he was one of those who got consistently good results.

Another is the frontman of his own band.

Yet another took out a PTPL loan to cover his college tuition, and then dropped out of the aforementioned college, degree-less and in debt. He currently works at a paint shop, paying back his loans, biding time before he can go to school again. A mutual friend reports that he seems 'angry at the rest of the world'.

I hesitate to say that my friends are in a better or worse state that I am, because life is long, and all kinds of things may happen in between. The 'ones-with-a-future' may stumble and make mistakes; the 'ones-who-are-down' may come to be at the right place at the right time. Two of my friends in St Thomas's, whom we once knew as rich, are no longer so. Their families have experienced a reversal in fortune. And it's humbling when you hear of such things.

I mean: when we were young, we all thought we were equals, didn't we? We all looked the same. We were placed in this artificial environment, where our choices didn't affect us nearly as badly as they would outside. And in the Malaysian public education system, at least, we're put in an environment that consists of kids from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds, and then we're led to believe that we are all equal.

When we leave school, our paths diverge. We fly apart like agitated atoms released from a magnetic field (ooh, nerdy analogy, that). But it's true, isn't it? Where before we were held together - just barely - by the institution, now there are large gaps between former friends. A doctor cannot so easily mix with a mechanic; or perhaps a hardworking mechanic cannot so easily mix with a drunk doctor (you never know!) and this is how we grow up. Nothing to it, I suppose.

I know that I'm probably talking about obvious, dumb things, but it's never really struck me till I got back late last year. The variances between me and my friends are starting to be large enough for me to notice, every single holiday I have, I go back and something has changed. And it's scary. Inevitable, but still frightening in its own way.

When I was in San Francisco I met up with and talked to Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute for the Future of The Book. We both gave talks on very similar things - the need for a usable, open system for publishing; the huge importance of having such a system before the current models of traditional publishing collapsed. He was arguing for it; I was among those building it. The difference was that he was 63 years old, and I but 20.

My grandfather is only a couple of years older than Bob Stein. I don't think he knows of the things I currently do. Truth be told, I never considered the idea that there were people of his generation who were living on the bleeding edge. And yet there we were - two people from two completely different generations, talking and thinking about the same things. I was struck by how different contemporaries can be - notwithstanding that they come from different places, and were involved in different things. And I thought: this is probably how it's going to be like for my friends and I, and even more so for the people I meet in uni, when we are 60 years old and retired and looking back on life.

The variance is here, and it is large, and it is growing wider still.

Why I'm Not On Facebook

I'm on my way back to Kuching and I'm stuck in a queue at the Tiger Airways check-in desk. There's a woman behind me talking very loudly on the phone.

"Hello!" she says, in Mandarin, "Yes hello Mr Wong I'm going back to Kuching now. Oh no the last person said that he wants to buy the unit for four fifty. Oh wait you're from Kuching too? Ahh! I didn't know that! You need ... oh you need the office number? I tell you what, I can't go online right now - but if you send me a message on Facebook I'll get back home tonight and send you a message with all the contact information. Yes, just find me on Facebook - you're my friend, right?"

I turn around, balancing the trio of bags I'm lugging around with me. The woman is in her late 20s, or early 30s, I can't be sure. She has laugh lines around her eyes. I look down, and I realize she's in office attire.

People making business transactions through Facebook, I thought, Waddya know?

*

Almost everyone I know has the same reaction when I tell them that I don't have a Facebook account. "What?!" they say, incredulous, "Why?". This has happened enough times that I'm sick of it, and I think it'd do to explain - just once - why I'm not on Facebook. Hopefully I won't ever need to explain my stand again. (Also: most people - after learning that I'm not on Facebook, try to convince me that I should sign up, and it'll only take a couple of seconds, and that it's free, and you know - why not?. Hopefully this post gives them pause).

I have a couple of reasons. I'll begin with the most mundane.

1.
I come to Facebook from Friendster. Friendster was bad. I spent two years of my life tweaking my profile and uploading awesome pictures of myself and writing testimonials for other people (and zealously watching my testimonial count) and then Friendster died. So I was really lazy to do that all over again, on a new social network I wasn't sure would last. My sister Charlene was lazy too. She's not on Facebook because she thinks "it's a waste of time".

But I'll admit - I was wrong about the first bit. I was wrong on Facebook not lasting. Facebook is cool, smart, and growing strong.

2.
I'm in computer science, and that means that I spend most of my time on a computer. I work on my computer, I study at my computer, and I relax doing stuff on my computer (though not always - I like taking long walks, lately).

I probably won't be as productive if I had a Facebook account. Facebook is incredibly addictive. And so it's weird - people say "you're in computing but you're not on Facebook?!" as if it's a crime - but of the people I know without Facebook accounts, almost all of them are CompSci majors. There's a simple reason for that: we can't turn our computers off to study, and so we value the ways in which we spend our computer time more than most other people do.

3.
In actual practice, staying out of Facebook isn't as bad as one may imagine. You don't know everything your friends are up to, but that's alright - if the experience was awesome they'd tell you it was awesome, and you'd be able to judge from the light in their eyes and tone of voice the degree of truth to what they're saying. And if it wasn't awesome, then they just won't tell you.

Being outside Facebook does another weird thing to you: it forces you to really listen to your friends when you meet up. Because you're not on the network, you can't tell yourself: 'oh I know what you think of so and so' based on a 200-word status update; instead you ask 'what do you think of so and so?' and then you really listen because you can't pretend to know. Sometimes this is annoying, because you're missing out on a readily available stream of information on the people you care most about. But most of the time it works out: you don't need so much information; you only need to know about your closest friends. And nobody has more than a handful of close friends. (By extension, updates from the rest are more noise than anything else.)

The other objection that my friends have with me is "but how are we going to stay connected?!" And my answer to that is: email me. I check my email on a daily basis, and I respond, archive, or delete email within 12 hours of reception. It's the only way I can handle school, work, and membership in four separate mailing lists.

4.
I keep two separate identities on the web. Most of my work with eBook and format spec groups happen under the name Eli James. I run Pandamian under Eli James, because the name carries some influence now in eBook circles. Facebook forces me to consolidate my two identities. I can't really do that.

5.
There's this thing Facebook does when you're about to delete your account. They say: x, y and z won't be able to connect with you if you quit Facebook! Are you really really sure?

I think that's morally despicable. Facebook's using my friends to ransom me to stay with the site. I understand why they're doing it, but it's a little like inviting me to a party and threatening me with my pals to get me to stick around.

6.
Facebook makes you lonely.

I'm not the first one to make this observation: Daniel Chong tweeted recently that teenagers, today, are the most connected in the history of mankind, and yet also the most lonely. I've thought about what he said for a bit, and I think he has a point. It's probably not a coincidence.

There's a simple reason for this, I think: when you're surfing Facebook you're looking at photos of beautiful people having fun. Because that's what people upload to Facebook, right? You see people posing in exotic places, or traipsing down cornfields, or partying their heads out at clubs and bars and other glamorous places. And because you're alone when you're surfing your social network, you feel left out. You feel as if there's a perpetual party going on, with somebody you know in it, and it's happening somewhere in the city but you're not invited.

Except that this isn't true. You just feel that way because all you see on Facebook are event pictures. And it's a warped view of the world. The true things that matter in life happen far away from event photos, and by extension, from the bluster of your social network. They happen in the private space between two lovers, or in the silent zone of the solitary builder. (Zuckerberg himself wrote the first version of Facebook in a month). Nobody changed the world by hanging out on Facebook all day long. And if you do so, you'll end up feeling rather lonely. For little marginal benefit.

7.
I'm not as connected because I'm not on Facebook. But I'm also not as lonely; I don't feel an urge to go hang out and take pictures to stave off a growing boredom (or to keep up with the perpetual party going on in the network). I take pleasure in spending long hours with a small group of friends, building things that matter to the world. Partly because that's cool, but mostly because it's fun.

I think that's a fairly good trade. Probably not for everyone, but good enough for me.

Pandamian: A Publishing Support Layer

This is the full text of a speech I gave at Books in Browsers, a technical meeting for people currently changing the future of books. The meeting was between the 21st and the 22nd of October, and was organized and held at the Internet Archive.

Hi, my name is Eli and I’m here to talk to you about what we’re doing at Pandamian. More importantly, I want to give you an idea - or some intuition, perhaps, about the problem space in which Pandamian exists.

But before that, two things:

First, there was quite a bit of talk at BiB yesterday about how young people don’t care about their privacy. Well, I am a young person - possibly the youngest person in this room - and I care so much about my privacy that I’m speaking to you under a pseudonym. So … make of that what you will.

Second, I promised my folks back home that I’d thank the people who made it possible for me to be here. I am a second year Computer Science student at the National University of Singapore, and that means that I am on a student budget. The only reason I can be here is because of the kindness of a couple of people. So I’d like to thank Brewster Kahle, who kindly subsidized part of my flight. And my school, the School of Computing. And last, but not least, the awesome, awesome people over at the Singaporean Hackerspace, who donated to my trip - you can see their logo behind me - I promised that I’d wear their shirt and do this before my talk.

Anyway, back to what I want to speak to you about. I don’t have much time to do this, so I’m going to split my talk into three bits. First, I want to talk about the problem space to which Pandamian is a solution. Then I’ll spend 2-3 minutes on Pandamian - just a little while; I promise you that it won’t be a plug. Last, I want to talk about why I think it’s important to do what Pandamian is currently doing. And why I think more people should do it.

Web Fiction
So here’s the context: I’m coming from this place called web fiction. What web fiction is is that it’s this simple idea - not a particularly new idea, because I know a group of writers who’ve been doing this since 1997. Also not a particularly original idea. But it is a simple idea, and that idea is that you take some fiction - a novel, for instance, and you put that online. You post one chapter a week, there are reader comments, and all this happens on a blog-like website, or a blog-powered website, or - if the writer is not a particularly good programmer or designer, which is very often - sometimes on an actual blog. Which can be bad.

Where I come from in this space is that I wrote a web fiction thing 5 years ago. And at the end of that year I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody knew what they were doing. There were no ‘best practices’.

And there are several interesting problems there. For instance: what’s the best way to design fiction in the browser, when the browser is an inherently distractive container? Also: where do you find readers? How should you talk to readers? How long should your chapters be? How many times a week should you update your story? These are all interesting questions, and nobody knew how to solve them.

So what I did was I started this blog called Novelr, and what Novelr does is that it collates and kind of collects the best ideas as solutions to these problems. And we’ve got four years worth of experience now on how to do this - we know, more or less, what works or doesn’t work when you’re presenting fiction on a webpage, in this interactive web format.

And it’s not just me. I sometimes do experiments myself, but these ideas aren’t just from me. Sometime over the last four years of Novelr’s existence a community of writers condensed around the blog. So now I approach these writers whenever they discover a new technique, or hack, or trick to write better web fiction, and I ask them to share it with the rest of the community. Or they come to me and say: ‘I’ve discovered this, I want to share it with everyone, may I do a guest post?’ Which is cool.

But now we come to an interesting question we must ask, don’t we? Why do these people do web fiction?

You have to remember that when I said web fiction a minute ago, most of you were probably thinking about fan fiction. Which is a stigma, and is possibly the standard of rubbish in the publishing industry. And there’s also the fact that - for the longest time - publishers would not publish anything that’s available for free on the Internet. Dominique tells me this is no longer true, but for the longest time this was the policy, and the conventional wisdom was that if you were serious about your work you wouldn’t put anything, at all, online.

So there must be some compelling reason to have these writers do web fiction. Because it would seem as if doing web fiction was equivalent to shooting their career in the proverbial foot. And the web fiction community has been growing in the past four years. And the rate of that growth has been increasing. So ... why?

It turns out that a member of the community did a survey two or three months ago, and it confirmed several suspicions I had about why these writers were doing what they were doing.

There are two primary reasons to do web fiction.

The first reason is that these writers are … well, writers. They love writing. They’re already writing anyway. And it’s likely that they have paper manuscripts in their drawers, or cupboards, gathering dust, as they do what they love. What putting their fiction on the Internet does for them is that it gives them an external motivation to keep writing. I’m not sure about you, but I find that when I blog, I write more consistently and more often than if I were to write an essay on paper to figure things out. And as it is true for me, and for bloggers, so it is true for these writers.

The second reason is the more important one. What these writers experience - well I want you to imagine this. Imagine that you’re a writer, and you’ve just finished writing a chapter and you put that online. Now what happens is that a couple of hours after this - if your web fiction is good; or if it’s one of the more established ones - you get readers arguing in your comments. And they say things like: “Oh, I don’t like this character!” or “Oh, I don’t like that character” or “Oh I think this character is going to backstab that character!” and so on so forth.

Now this is incredibly fulfilling for a writer to have. Powerfully fulfilling. I’ve had traditionally published writers come to me for advice on how to do this, and I point them to multiple sources, and they tell me: “Oh no, I’m just doing this for a hobby.” And then, a couple of months later, I go to their blogs or they email me, saying “Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t imagine doing this any other way now. Why didn’t I do this earlier?!”

And I’ve also had writers - and there are many in the web fiction community - who started this web fiction thing because they wanted to get published; they were aspiring authors. And now they no longer want to get published. Because they’re having these amazing, joyous, fulfilling writing experiences.

Now this is an indicator that writers don’t really want to get published. What they really want is these amazing, fulfilling reader interactions. The kind of interaction that’s similar to: you’re a writer, and you’re walking down a street, and a reader comes up to you and says: “Oh my God, I just read your book yesterday, it was amazing! It changed my life! Thank you!” - that’s what writers really want. And for the longest time getting published - traditionally - was a means to that end. If you give writers an alternative to this that is less painful, simpler, instantly gratifying - by gum, they will jump on it.

This is also, perhaps, a signal that web fiction - or whatever it’s going to be called - will be a significant part of the book future.

Now there’s another question to ask. If the reasons for doing web fiction are so compelling, why aren’t more writers doing it, as opposed to eBooks and such?

I have two suspicions as to why. No data here - just suspicions. The first is that eBooks are big today because of what Apple’s doing and what Amazon’s doing. So there’s a lot of attention there and that’s where writers are turning to. That’s just good PR.

But the second reason is: this technology is hard. It’s hard! Most writers are terrible programmers, terrible designers. And over the past two years, as the community’s rate of growth has increased, I began to grow sick of writers contacting me to complain, or to ask for technical help to design their blogs, their sites, to make them readable and ready for web fiction and such. I began to grow tired of being tech support.

So that’s how Pandamian got started. I’m doing it with two friends - Joash and Yipeng, and we’ve been doing it for half a year now, though we wrote code for maybe the last three months.

Pandamian
What Pandamian is is that it’s a Wordpress.com for writers. It’s a CMS, just a CMS, but the design is done; the backend interface is simple. Essentially everything we’ve learnt over the past four years on how to make fiction readable in the browser will be incorporated into the design.

And the eventual aim for what we want is to have one-click ebook conversion to any ebook format you want; one-click ‘create an ebook store to sell books on your site’; one-click push to ebook distribution channels like the Kindle store or Smashwords, or whatever.

We really want to make this simple. And by simple I mean that not only can some 16 year old kid can use this, but also my 60 year old grandfather, if he so decides to write his memoir.

That means a couple of things. Plugins? … no. Wordpress? … no. My grandfather is not going to understand Wordpress’s interface. There are too many elements. Most of them aren’t needed, and it’s incredibly confusing. When you log into Pandamian the first thing you see is this:



And that’s it. It’s WRITE, REVISE, RESPOND, CUSTOMIZE (and SETTINGS) and as we add features we’re going to slot it all into this. I’m sorry I can’t show you the software right now; I don’t have enough time.

So that’s Pandamian. But now I want to go into the last bit of my talk.

Make Technology Boring
Why are we so interested in making things simple? Why are we so passionate about making things simple? That’s an important question to ask.

What I believe in - and this is the crux of my talk; this is the idea that I really want to push here - what I believe is that you can only change the world if the technology is boring.

Take blogging, for instance. Blogging has changed the way we read news, it has changed the way we share ideas and opinions. But blogging the social phenomenon only happened when blogging the technology became boring, and trivial.

It is trivial today to create a blog - you go to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you can get a blog up and running in a couple of seconds. It is equally trivial to subscribe to a blog, or to create an RSS feed from a set of blog posts. This wasn’t always true. In the early days of the Internet you had to be able to program - to write CGI scripts - if you wanted to create a dynamic website. And the permutations of blogs that exist today only happened when blogging - the technology - became boring.

And so it is with publishing. It is not easy to publish a book, online, today. It is not easy to do up an ePub. We've had lots of talk about new standards and such at BiB over the past day or so. But that's useless to a 60 year old grandpa. He can't use it because it's too hard to use, even if it's easy and boring for us programmers to do. But if we can make the technology to publish boring enough that anyone can write digitally, cool things will happen. Which is kind of what we’re doing at Pandamian: on one level we’re working to solve these pain points that Novelr’s community currently has. But on another level we’re trying to make the technology boring.

The end goal, of course, is to make writing online the first option for writers looking to get published. No longer is it: write, push to agent, look for publishers. No. This shouldn’t be the way to do things. It should be: write online, get a reader base around your fiction, experience this amazing, fulfilling writing experience, and then look for agent, look for publisher.

Because if that happens, and writing online becomes the norm; the first step to getting published, then all sorts of cool things can and will happen. Really I think two things will happen.

First, we’d enable the creation of newer, cooler publishing startups. Think about Twitter. Twitter as we know it today was only possible when blogging became widespread. Without blogging we wouldn’t have that model of thinking about updates that Twitter currently has; that Twitter has borrowed. And now imagine the kinds of publishing startups that will be possible if and when writing online becomes a norm.

Second, if you have writers opting to move online as a first choice, rather than as an alternative - you will enable publishers to do cool things. And by that I mean you’ll force publishers to do cool things. And I plan to do this. In fact I was probably invited to speak here on the basis of an essay I wrote, with the weird title: ‘To Change Publishing, Make Publishers Obsolete.’

What I mean by that is - when what you’re doing becomes a threat to their model, publishers would be forced to innovate in this space. To their eventual benefit, I think.

So what are some of the things publishers can do? I have several ideas. Maybe publishers may now choose which authors to publish from online filters. Either they build the filters or some third party builds the filters, but if the majority of writing is online - that’s just data, right? You can now figure out which are the most popular series, what geographical locations are certain kinds of content popular, which market segment of your audience and so on - and use that to decide which author to publish. Which is better than the arbitrary process of publishing writers from agent submissions and old boy networks.

Maybe - just maybe - you can have aggregated notes, or shared reading experiences. Because all this is in HTML, right? And it’s networked, and open. And that makes these kinds of things possible.

And maybe citations in the future will be possible - and you can link not only to an actual page, but also to actual paragraphs. Because this is a website, and it’s just HTML and anchor text.

And these are not just my ideas, by the way. These are originally Craig Mod’s ideas - and he’s sitting over there. And that thing about filters? Richard Nash is doing a filter; Cursor is essentially a filter.

Of course, some of these ideas are all pie-in-the-sky. But my point isn’t that these ideas will happen, it is that it’s only possible if we make the technology boring.

So where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where this leaves me. For the longest time we were thinking about what is it exactly that we do at Pandamian. We called ourselves a ‘Digital Publishing House.’ I realized on the way here that we’re not a digital publishing house. We’re not publishing anyone, per se. And if you’ve read the title of this talk, or if you have my card (and the tagline there - ‘Writers are The New Publishers’) you’ll see that this is true. We’re not a digital publishing house. We’re a publishing support layer. We make the technology boring, so that writers - and maybe publishers, if they want it - can take part in this shift to the web.

I should close now. And I’ll close by saying that: I am young. My two co-founders, Yipeng - from Computer Science, and Joash, our Business guy: they’re 2, 3 years older than I am. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Am I scared? Yes, I am. I’ve seen the statistics, I know that 9 out of 10 startups will fail. But I’m sick and tired of waiting for a big company to come and change this, to come and solve these pain points. I’ve been waiting for a very long time.

And so this is probably what I'm going to do for the next couple of years. We'll have to work hard on it for quite a bit. I want to make the technology boring, and to perhaps - in this manner - change the world. Thank you very much.

San Francisco Thoughts Day 1 & 2

Just a couple of quick, disconnected thoughts about SF:

1) Am bunking with four NUS students in the city. Two girls and two guys. They have a small apartment along Ocean Avenue - good location, great sofa, not too far from food. No ocean, though.

2) Suburban America is ugly. Butt ugly. I kid you not ugly. Houses are wooden and old-looking and built higgly-piggly over the hills. So where I'm staying is this grid-network of streets that are filled with houses, in clashing colours and the neighbourhood is a wee bit dodgy - Xiao Chen says that once she saw a random guy handing out pot on the street.

3) That picture I took above is not representative of the city; I just thought it was funny. (Though, yeah it's kinda representative of the neighborhood). My friends tell me there are nicer places in SF - Palo Alto, for instance, and the central areas itself nearer to Fisherman's Wharf. I agree - I've been to Montgomery Street to buy my American number, and the place was beautiful. More pictures when I can get back to my camera cable.

4) It's chilly. Lowest temperature is at 12 degrees celsius. Am wearing hoodies and beanies and jackets. Not all together, of course.

5) I'm surprised at the extent I've been spoiled by Singapore - the first train station I got off at SF I saw a black guy leap over the turnstile and run (the station operator didn't see him) and my first thought was: 'God, that'll never happen in SG!' And then a couple of minutes later two guys in civilian clothes walked through an emergency exit and waved a badge to the station operator, and nobody else stared because police were normal, and this was normal.

Badge was probably FBI though, but I couldn't be sure.

6) American food portions are huge. Jonathan tells me it's normal for people to pack the leftovers and bring them in for their next meal.

7) Also, American coins are weird. They come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 and a dollar. AND THEY DON'T SAY 25 THEY SAY A QUARTER wtfiwasscanningfornumbersdammit!

7) Americans don't understand Asian names - I got called Mr Wang by the guy at the AT&T store, after he registered me under the very last word in my name. Go figure. I am now registered under a slang word for penis. I am so Hung about it. Like what a Dick, right?

8) I need to sleep now. Event's tomorrow and I need to be alert. Goodnight, all.

San Francisco

A couple of things:

1) I'll be speaking at a conference in San Francisco next week. It's called Books in Browsers, organized by the Internet Archive, and is essentially a technical meeting for people currently working on the future of the book. Am subsidized by Brewster Kahle (founder of Alexa Internet and the IA), the NUS School of Computing, and the awesome people over at Hackerspace.sg.

I'll be talking about Pandamian, this little startup thing I'm doing. The underlying agenda for BiB is to consolidate efforts in the web-based publishing sphere. I suspect, too, that the IA is going to be pushing its standard for distributing book-catalog metadata: it's called OPDS, is open-source, and will be a fairly important first-step in standardizing the way books are consumed in the future.

In simple terms: what happens there is likely to change the future of reading, and so I'm rather excited to be a part of it.

2) Yes, I'm doing a startup; have been working on it for 6 months now. I'm still debating for/against writing about it on Mochaspot, because I've always kept work separate from this blog. But then again Pandamian is beginning to define my life. So we'll have to see.

3) And I'm swamped with schoolwork. Am a little worried about my math at the moment, will probably be bringing some assignments/homework to do on the plane along with me. Hope I'll survive the rest of the semester, there're only 4 weeks left!

PS: Thank God funding was possible! And I suppose I should talk a little about the journey, in a bit. But yes: I am thankful, and yes, I am in debt to so many kind people who made this possible. Thank you all.

PPS: Woohoo Paul, who's Yayasan Sarawak Champion!