Fritt Ord gir 2,5 millioner til 16 bloggere. Jeg er lunken til prosjektet, ikke så mye for og ikke så mye mot. Men utdelingen har fått meg til å tenke på hvordan jeg selv ville prioritert hvis jeg skulle dele ut slike midler.

For, ja, jeg synes document.no godt kunne fått støtte. Jeg liker ambisjonene deres. Og jeg liker raseriet deres ovenfor samfunnsdebatten forøvrig. Burn, Akersgata, burn.

Glem de konkrete meningene, de er ikke poenget.

Poenget er at med norsk medievirkelighet har du tre alternativer: Du kan spille med, (være Opplyst om Hva Som Skjer, og delta i debatten på en Saklig Måte), melde deg ut av den i avsky, (som vel jeg for det meste har gjort), eller gå til enslig frontalangrep mot det hele.

Og det er den siste gruppen av smågale, småfanatiske, og veldig veldig vrange mennesker som i blant endrer verden.  Eller iallefall er det de som har det gøy mens de gjør det.

Det er de man burde bygge opp.  Tonen kan ellers gjerne være saklig, det er ikke om å gjøre å være “kontroversiell”.  Men hvis du ikke starter med det utgangspunktet at det er noe alvorlig galt med norsk offentlighet, og hvis du ikke drives av et ønske om å rive ned ting – hva er det egentlig du har å tilføre?

Mitt kriterie ville være å finne noen som ønsker å endre spillereglene, som ikke er fornøyd med rollene andre har definert for dem. Kanskje er det noen av de på denne listen. Men én havnet iallefall utenfor.

In finance, hedging means that you split your investments so that if you lose on one of them, you’re likely to win on another.  If one investment wins when the weather is sunny, and another when it rains, then you don’t lose much either way. It’s a way of managing risk, so that there’s a limit to how far down misfortune can drag you.

I find that I’ve ordered my life by this principle as well.  Everything that is important to me, I’ve hedged in some way, so that I don’t lose, almost no matter what.

A lot of it has to do with how I choose to look at things.  I choose to see a win where others may choose not to.  For instance: I spend about two hours every day commuting by bus, and I use that time to read or listen to audiobooks and podcasts.  The hedge is that if traffic is good one day, I get home earlier.  If it’s bad, I get to spend more time reading a good book.

That may sound facetious, as if you can solve all problems by putting a smileyface on them.  But it really isn’t: The hedge genuinely makes me happy with either outcome.  It’s a real hedge.

Not everything can be hedged.  If I drove to work by car, bad traffic would have no upside at all for me. So I don’t do that.  It’s simple: I choose to see a hedge, or choose to create one – whenever possible.  And it’s often possible.

I think we need more diversity in our ignorance.  It seems that, outside what we work with, we all know and don’t know pretty much the same things.  Some know more than others, but they know more of the same things.  We’re creating huge blind spots that almost nobody pays attention to.

This is something I think a lot about.  I’m obsessed with what is happening or has happened that we’re not paying attention to, simply because it’s not part of what everyone thinks is relevant right now, is not on the Unofficial List of Relevant Things.

Part of the problem is that once something enters that list, anyone who wants to be knowledgeable feels obligated to pay attention to it.  And there’s so much on the list that you don’t have time for anything else.  So the more we try to become “knowledgeable”, the more homogenous we become.

There’s a Sherlock Holmes story where we learn that Holmes doesn’t know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because that’s not the kind of fact he wants to fill his head with.  His psychology is unsound, because the brain doesn’t really run out of storage space, but he’s basically correct, because we do run out of the time it takes us to learn these facts.

So I’m rebelling against those shared blind spots.  And I can only do it by deliberately being ignorant about different things than everyone else, things many believe that everyone should know.  There’s no other path to true diversity.

Nobody does predictions any more, they do “scenarios”, but I suspect that trying to guess anything at all about the future may be worthless.

Imagine that in the world 20 years from now, there is a new and important factor.  Perhaps a technological factor, or something cultural or political.  Anything.  And that this is a factor that doesn’t exist today.  It should be easy to think of such factors in our own world that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

What can you possibly hope to say about that future world without understanding that factor? Very little.

What we should be looking for today instead is things that already have happened, or are happening right now, that we haven’t discovered or fully understood yet.

Think of the financial crisis, back before anyone knew about it.  There was a big crisis in the future, but if enough people had discovered it earlier, there would have been a smaller crisis in the present.  A 2007 “scenario” about the future of the world economy would have been worthless.  What we needed was someone to say “there’s something going on here that we all need to pay attention to.”

Even correct statement about the future are probably more useful when rephrased as statements about the present.  “Future workers will behave like this!” vs “today’s children have such and such characteristics”.

What is happening right now that we need to be aware of, but aren’t?  Stop trying to extrapolate from your current knowledge.  Open your eyes.  Pay attention.  Tell us what you see.

To FrP’ere har skrevet kronikk om den flerkulturelle trusselen mot Norge.  Så får vi det samme gamle: VG ringer opp Vigrid, og alle later som de er sjokkerte.  Selv var jeg fullt klar over at FrP har mange innvandringsfiendtlige politikere og velgere sist jeg stemte på dem.  Og jeg tror nok også samarbeidspartnerne deres i Høyre har kjent til dette en stund.  Det er ikke en stor hemmelighet.

Hvilket politisk parti du støtter handler, som mange andre relasjoner i livet, om hva du liker vs hva du kan leve med.  Jeg har slått meg til ro med innvandringsretorikken til FrP.  Jeg liker det ikke, men jeg kan leve med det.

Andre vurderer det annerledes.  Men jeg har et spørsmål til alle som nå går gjennom avstandsmarkeringsritualet: Hvor finner jeg egentlig det innvandringsliberale partiet i Norge?  Eller, for å unngå et oppbrukt ord: Partiet med en human og fornuftig innvandringspolitikk?

Alle partiene som i dag kritiserer Tybring Gjedde & Co har nemlig selv vært innom regjeringskvartalet i løpet av de siste tiårene.  Og det de har gjennomført der er i praksis FrP-politikk.  Det er en gradsforskjell, og en retorisk forskjell, men ingenting virkelig annerledes.  Det handler bare om vi skal stenge grensene mye eller enda litt mer.

Nå vet jeg egentlig ikke hvordan en human og fornuftig innvandringspolitikk skal fungere i praksis.  Og et slikt parti ville nok slitt ved valgurnene.  Men det ville iallefall gitt de harmdirrende FrP-kritikerne litt tryggere grunn under beina, og gjort denne debatten til noe mer enn en retorisk lek.

Whenever I take the train they announce that “this is a non-smoking train”, which I find funny, because it implies that there actually is a train somewhere that you’re allowed to smoke in.  It’s like they’re teasing the smokers: Oh, we’re sorry, you just missed the train where you can smoke as much as you like.

But there aren’t any.  There are basically no indoor places outside your own home where you’re allowed to smoke any more.  I remember when it was different, but the memories are vague, and I’m not sure which of them are real.  Did I really walk into a train once where the air was full of nicotine smoke?  It’s hard to believe, but I think I did.

The smokers seem to accept their new restrictions, which I guess means we’re winning the war on this particular drug.  When we do, I’ll appreciate the result, but regret the means, and worry about the consequences.

The war on nicotine will have taught us a dangerous lesson.  It didn’t have to: It could have taught us that we should take care of our own bodies, and not fill them with things that will kill us.  Instead we have learned that when a voluntary habit carries some risk, it’s okay to harass people and control their lives until they change their behavior.

If we defeat nicotine, we did it by allying with our inner authoritarian conformist.  Will we be able to put down that which we have called up?  Will we even want to?

I once thought that the purpose of a debate was to convince the other side that you’re right.  That didn’t work out so well.  I’ve seen it happen, for instance that’s how I became an atheist, but that “oh shit, you’re absolutely right!” moment is rare.

What debates are good for, I learned, is not “winning”, but helping me to think about my views, and identify the weak spots.  I shifted from seeing debates as a battle, where you destroy the bad guys any way you know how, to more like a boxing match, where you test your strength in a controlled situation, a game.  There are rules.  There are only temporary victories.  And it’s not personal.

Many people don’t see it that way.  Sometimes I write a critical comment somewhere and the author reacts like they’ve been assaulted on the street by some crazy stranger.  Maybe they fight back, but it’s desperate and personal, or they run away, by not responding at all.

I understand why.  But here’s what I respect: I respect someone who defends themselves, and doesn’t make it personal.  Even if they’re not good at it.  It’s a sign of confidence, that they’re not just throwing bullshit around to see what sticks.  And it shows that they understand what the point of debates is: It helps us to think.

So the next time someone criticizes your views, try to think of it as a game, and keep it up for a round or two.  It’s more fun, and everyone may learn something.

I have a new essay site up, where I’ll post or link to anything I write that is longer than 256 words.  There’s an archive there of old essays that may still be worth reading, and there may a new one once in a while.  New posts will also be linked to from here, of course.

First new essay: How software is made – a tour of the sausage factor.

Did your computer ever crash on you?  That was my fault.  Not literally, of course.  You’re probably not a user of the software I’m working on.  But it was the fault of someone very much like me – another programmer.

When it happened, you may have thought: This always happens. Why can’t they get it right?  What kind of incompetent morons make software that doesn’t work?  Well, it’s incompetent morons like myself, and now I’m going to explain how we do it.  I want to explain it in a way that can be understood by non-programmers, or, as we programmers secretly refer to you: Those stupid users who crash our programs all the time.  I want you to understand what software development is actually all about, what the challenges are, why it’s a difficult and even downright ugly process. Because it’s different from what you probably imagine.

Read the rest here.

I have an agenda: I want Norwegians to use English on the internet, so we can have two-way conversations with the rest of the world.  I promote this agenda by setting a good example, (see how easy it is?), and by writing bitter blog posts every couple of years about what we miss out on by huddling together in our linguistic walled garden.

The agenda is a failure.  A colossal failure.  Like everyone else, Norwegian web users started out globally oriented, then turned in on ourselves along national lines. We have hardly a link to spare even for Swedes and Danes, who, oh horror, write words in a slightly different way from us. Mirroring the flow of news from American to Norwegian media, and of laws from Brussels, we read and link to English-language sites, but it’s all one way, creating a black hole of ideas.

My agenda goes further than the internet. I want to see English in common use for work, in culture, and in the media – not replacing Norwegian, but side by side with it.  This agenda is even more quixotic, which makes it extra fun to cling to it.  And you know I’m right.  You know our future is – or ought to be – one of close integration with other countries.  A world where we study abroad, and marry abroad, and live abroad, and where foreigners do the same to us.

The language wall will fall, then.  It has to.  But could we please start tearing it down right away?