Technological Conservatism | Hacker News Reader

Technological Conservatism

hypercritical.co

53 pointsczr8022 comments

What Siracusa describes as Technological Conservatism is probably more of a status-quo preference. I think this is because there are two opposing forces are work.

1. Innovation is often little more than a sequence of small incremental improvements. Improvements that -- when viewed individually -- don't really seem to matter much but when they accumulate you get a completely superior product.

2. Keeping up to date on the newest developments can be a chore. Things change, but for no apparent reason. APIs get refactored and break. Your favorite buttons in your favorite OS get removed. What was idomatic code last year is considered crummy today. This can be frustrating, because you just want to get your work done and not worry about all this stuff on the margins. Every hour you spend reading release notes and upgrading to the newest version of jQuery, Node or Go is time that would otherwise go into your product. And yet, by standing still you go backwards.

So this is where the comparison to politics breaks down a bit. In the short term being "conservative" and just sticking to whatever tools you know is optimal. It will get your product out the door the quickest and it can still be high quality and mostly bug free. From a short term business perspective it's often the right choice. In the medium term you run into bugs of frameworks that have already been fixed 6 months ago and the quality of your code base is slowly going to degrade as hacks pile on top of one another. The more out of date your technology stack is the more you lose out on great libraries and best practices. So for t → ∞ sticking to whatever you know today is clearly a poor strategy.

So what you're saying is modular technology and modular politics would be the most optimal situation.

If one part of a system is outdated it makes more sense to replace that the broken part rather than an entire system.

Unfortunately both political and computer systems want us to be 'all in' on whatever current version is out.

The problem is that interfaces will typically change over time. So really you are talking about maintaining backwards compatibility which means maintaining a bunch of old stuff riddled with technical debt.

If you are designing a new product to a tight deadline, it seems very attractive to leveridge all the features of "the new hotness".

This illustrates the core argument for conservatism (in the burkean sense.. as commented below). You have to move slow to make sure you don't break things that were working (as in.. if it ain't broke). There is no such thing as tight deadlines in conservatism. As with all things, I disagree with applying a rule to unforeseen situations. Sometimes you need to adjust your rule and sometimes you just have to break stuff.

Isn't a conservative outlook literally a status-quo preference, you wish to conserve what was instead of risking what might be?

> The more out of date your technology stack is the more you lose out on great libraries and best practices.

Peculiarly, I don't feel this with Common Lisp (30 years old and counting). I think part of that is the fact that CL has been a standard: there are no out of date libraries due to age and drift, only libraries that are not useful for current problems or libraries that have been neglected.

I think that when you focus on technologies that have become stable and build your platform on them, you have a much more solid system than building on shifting technologies.

We are so far gone, it is depressing: http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg

Never mind opening the discourse on broader implications and consequences of technology to the 'real' world.

Article gives first world problem examples of interfaces, hardware performance, iphone 5 heft, WebKit growth (Blink Blink), and Netflix discs.

To be sure, many will be squealing like giddy schoolgirls when iOS7 UI gets deskeuomorphed, but how does any of this contribute to, uh, say... uh energy discovery, cancer cures, controlling world population, feeding the masses, stabilizing peace, et al

Trapped in a bubble, a narrow prison of perspective, so far gone, this article is what amounts for technological criticism.

Siracusa, lemme know when the world moves away from qwerty or get out of the way.

Didn't knew about Neil Postman, thanks for posting the video.

The problem with media and economic pressures - specially in today's "Like" or "Upvote" web - is that we have asymmetric exposure of different viewpoints.

The author seems to basically be describing a lack of vision as "technological conservatism". What's ideological about that? Why inject political language into that phenomenon?

There are ideological battles in technology, of course. But it doesn't have much to do with a lack of vision. If someone lacks vision, and then you make something amazing, they will generally acknowledge it (though perhaps slowly) and everyone moves on. Sure, there are a few people still using DOS, but not very many.

I'm not sure that they ever acknowledge it..? Not publicly anyway, they attempt to ignore it.

Using words like "they" is one reason I don't like to apply labels for no real reason. Rather than seeing a lack of vision as room for improvement (which could apply to almost anyone); now you see it as a group of other people that are somehow inferior.

Good point. I was specifically thinking of of Ballmer and the iPhone, then extrapolated it - unhelpful.

I think the shoe fits here.

Political conservatism often draws inspiration from the works of Edmund Burke. "Burkean conservatism" is a philosophy that accepts that society will inevitably grow and evolve, but is skeptical of the ability of human beings to understand and intelligently guide society as it changes.

A Burkean is therefore reluctant to embrace new social policies, new norms, and new ways of living. Burkean conservatives argue that things should stay as they are now, or at least that they should change slowly.

Conservatism means a lot of things. It's a loaded word, and I don't think applying it here adds any value.

From the OED

    conservative, adjective.
     1. adverse to change or innovation and holding traditional values: [...]

The primary meaning of conservatism is more to do with being risk averse and disliking change than the political movement it (sadly) shares its name with. In this regard, the author's usage of the word makes sense. He wished to conserve what was there previously without regard of what it may have made way for.

The author clearly injected the political meaning into the discussion:

"In politics, the spectrum of belief is right on the surface: conservative/liberal, right/left. In tech, that same spectrum exists, but it’s rarely discussed."

He may have the OED definition in mind more than the political one, but that's irrelevant. As soon as you invoke it as a label, it twists the discussion into an ideological one.

And there's no real reason to do so. He could have just said something like: "Don't be too conservative or set in your ways when it comes to technology. When something new comes along and makes to uncomfortable, rather than try to revert, see if there's a new perspective that shows a better way of doing things." The difference is that is simply a suggestion about how everyone can improve personally, rather than an ideological battle.

He doesn't touch on the arguments that technological progress is a bad thing, in and of itself. Two extreme examples of that would be that agriculture has led to a massive rise in population density (compared to hunter-gatherer societies), and that advances in military technology have created a world where we live on the brink of Mutually-Assured Destruction.

While that's not my personal view, it is an argument that gets raised at times...

Quoting from the article: "Not all new ideas represent progress. (Do I really need to spell this out? It seems so.) But ideas should not be rejected based merely on a lifetime of having lived without them."

Personally, I have always found myself shockingly distant from the rest of the tech community on technology issues like transhumanism. I would never support consumer mind computer interfaces for casual applications like video games or communication or intelligence augmentation. I even think our current smart phones go too far and have a net negative impact on society in their current form; don't even get me started on Google glasses.

Honestly, I am fairly sure that the society of the future will look back on current technological use and trends much in the same way we look back on the industrial revolution; a time of great progress which eventually led to a better society, but while first being implemented it had zero regard for investigating social, human, and environmental impact.

Siracusa taking a broad view is new to me! I'm sure he has before but what I like about him is his laser-like focus on some detail that has previously never been noticed by me. And he knows the 17 iterations of the feature that went before and likely place its going.

An interesting contrast to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219866

What a thread! And its closed. The discussion of old phone is fascinating - I can't get my wife to bin her Nokia 3310 - it's rock solid reliable. It's been to hell and back over 10ish years and still holds a charge for a week or so. Some things have got a lot worse in the cell phone world.

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