Digital Underground - uXu - Underground eXperts United #uxu-607

### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ####### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ## [ Altruism And The Open Source Movement ] [ By Freon ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------- ALTRUISM AND THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT ------------------------------------- - Introduction - This document is an attempt by the author (that would be me) to mix three things. First, my hobby - writing text files. Second, and indeed also third, the stuff I've been doing at University lately - Computing Science (which doubles as a makeshift religion of sorts, for me and countless others) and Psychology. Now, why would a sensible (if weird) text file author like myself be doing this? Well, I'm trying to prove, to myself if to nobody else, that there's nothing wrong with doing joint honours Computing Science and Psychology. Having said that, I do think this should make an entertaining ramble for anyone who's charting the progress of the Open Source Revolution to read and ponder about. Anyway, enough rambling; on with the document proper! - When is a penguin like a ground squirrel? - The answer is of course, never. Never in a month of Sundays is a penguin even remotely like a ground squirrel. It's just that I needed an entertaining title, penguins happen to be closely associated with GNU/Linux and the Open Source rebellion in general, and I'm about to go off on an otherwise apparently unconnected tangent about Ground Squirrels. Yes, you can barely /say/ the word 'altruism' in the presence of a psychologist (or, in my case, a first year psychology student - but don't let the low status of your humble scribe devalue the extremely important - nay, critically important - things I'm going to beat around the edges of without actually managing to express) without conjuring up in his/her* mind at least one or two images of these furry little creatures. You may well ask why that might be - why are these sweet little toothy burrowing rodents so intimately entangled with this concept of rewardless self-sacrifice? Well, actually they're not. The idea is this. If a ground squirrel sees a predator nearby, a 'smart' thing to do - and in a capitalist society, of course, by 'smart' I mean 'selfish' - would seem to be to make a run for the nearest hole in the ground and quietly get out of the way, leaving friends and acquaintances in the dark - or rather, in the jaws of the aforementioned ground squirrel devouring beastie. Instead of taking this perfectly sensible attitude, these silly little critters will rear up spectacularly, drawing attention from all around, and test their (somewhat unprofessional sounding) singing voices when such an occasion should face them. This we silly unscientific non-behaviourists (yes, I'm stuck in the late nineteenth century, and proud of it. None of this cognitive what-you-may-call-it and Freudian philosophy-dressed-as-science for me, thank you very much) have termed an 'alarm call.' Now I don't have a problem with this term really, except that it implies that either the creature is using this call because it's alarmed - that is to say, frightened - or that it's using it to raise the alarm. In fact, neither is the case and I must insist as a behaviourist that the only scientific explanation we can venture as to why it does this, as far as /it/ can tell, in its little heart of hearts, is "Just because!" Anyway, wandering off the tracks there. So, the little furry volunteer risks becoming the little furry martyr for the sake of its little furry chums. Very nice, very sweet, very altruistic. Except of course that it isn't. The diminutive fluffy sentry is not putting itself at risk to save its friends - it's putting its personal self at risk to protect its genes. This sounds silly of course - what does a ground squirrel know about evolution? Well, the answer is pretty simple really. Like the rest of us, it doesn't really understand as such (as far as we know) but it's getting pretty good at it after millions of years of practice. You don't have to be /smart/ to make the right decision in the /real/ world - just well designed. And of course, millions of years of trial and error do tend to encourage good designs. The squirrel does this simply because the squirrels near it are likely to have similar genes to its. A bunch of ground squirrels with this natural tendency to 'altruistic' behaviour of this sort is more likely to survive and produce offspring /between them/ than a group that doesn't do this trick - so although the individual is putting himself at risk, he's working quite nicely for the future of his genes. The thing that you have to bear in mind is that instinctive behaviour comes pretty directly from evolution, and evolution doesn't care about individuals as such. To return to the point; altruism is supposed to be behaviour which appears not to bring reward to the individual exhibiting that behaviour. In fact, unlike many cynical bastards of my ilk, I must say that I do believe in the existence of altruism. The catch is that it's completely selfish. If you keep your definitions carefully strict, that isn't a contradiction. As long as you can be selfishly successful without personal gain to the individual, altruism does exist. - OK; so what about complete strangers helping each other? - Where? No, seriously, where? Even among ground squirrels (no I'm /not/ obsessed!) complete strangers will not help each other. For example, females, in ground squirrel society, are more likely to live near others that are genetically close to them (for example, their offspring) while the males are more likely to wander around and live near strangers. Females also much more likely to make alarm calls than males. So the females, who are more closely related, on average, to more of the nearby other ground squirrels, are more likely to help them. An interesting aside. Females of /our/ species have quite a reputation for being more likely to make alarm calls, too. That is to say, if you go to a scary movie, you're more likely to hear a girl yelp right the way through it (usually at the bits that /aren't/ that scary) than a bloke. Hey, don't look at me like that! It's the truth. Even more interesting is our /attitudes/ to alarm calls in humans, and how they vary according to the sexes. Across cultures, it's true to say that when a male makes an alarm call (i.e. screams) it's got to be a pretty damn serious situation, or he'll be frowned upon by his contemporaries and lose the respect of men and women alike. When a woman makes an alarm call, we say it's perfectly normal, perfectly natural, it was a scary situation (no matter how perfectly mundane that experience was). In other words, for humans, just like ground squirrels, both sexes think it makes good sense for a female to make an alarm call, but neither thinks much of the male that makes one, except in particularly dire circumstances (and we might let 'em off with that just because we don't want to look heartless and take the piss while they look around for the crocodile who was last seen swimming off with one or other of their appendages). Perhaps closer to home is an example I can actually footnote! Humans tend to help people they're closely related to more readily than those they aren't. I'm not a good scholar so I'm not going to footnote this properly, but I will give credit where it's due since I have the names and dates handy; a study of American women by Essock-Vitale and McGuire in 1985 showed that they were much more likely to be helped by close relatives (like parents or children) than relatively distant ones (like aunts and uncles). You could turn this into a fun and profitable all- in-the-family money begging experiment if you like (and are morally and/or financially bankrupt enough to have the brass to do it). Edward O. Wilson (A biologist, not a psychologist as such**) also agreed that closeness of family relationships - or, in other words, genetic similarity - between individuals influenced helping. He pointed out that all over the world, across cultures, there is a lot of emphasis in human societies on the importance of family and kinship (E. O. Wilson, 1975) - and there's likely to be a lot more 'altruism' within family groups than between them, with most helping going on between family members that share the most genes. This, if you ask me, is a lot like the way female ground squirrels (and, if the ladies will forgive me, humans also) are more likely to selflessly warn others of what they perceive as dangerous situations with a shrill*** wailing cry. - What the /hell/ has this got to do with Open Source?! - I'll get to that. - Real and perceived kinship - So far, when I've talked about genetic similarity, what I've really been talking about is kinship. I've mentioned the word a couple of times, pretty much interchangeably with the phrase 'genetic similarity' - but actually there's an important difference. The thing is, real kinship - genetic similarity - alone can't explain all apparently 'selfless' behaviour. A couple of popular examples are religious martyrs (who in a way I suppose give the ultimate 'alarm call'!) and people who join the armed forces - particularly those who volunteer for suicide missions. Now, it's very easy to say, "Yeah, they must be some pretty f_cked up people!" That isn't necessarily the case though. It's also possible to say "Yeah, well that's real altruism - that fairly blows your silly kinship theory out of the water doesn't it? Your faith in human nature restored now, freon, ya cynical bastard? Ah, isn't the Human Being a Wonderful Thing. You don't get /that/ kind of behaviour in your silly /ground squirrels/ do you? Eh? Eh?" To which I reply, "Piss off." No, you see - they're not f_cked up, but I must insist that there's nothing that's 'real' about this altruism that's any 'realer' than the ground squirrel (or human being, for that matter)'s altruism when it yells to its comrades when startled****. You see, us animals don't operate on the basis of facts. Our thoughts, our plans, our insights, and indeed also our instincts and just plain reflexes (yes, even the knee jerk, but I can't be bothered explaining. It's trivial(TM) and will be left as an exercise for the reader(R)) are actually always based on our /perception/ of the facts - which is rarely precisely in line with the facts themselves. You don't sit down on a chair, you perform an action that you think is sitting on what you believe to be a chair - it might well be an alligator, if you happen to be on LSD and you live in a place where there are frequently alligators around. Right, so you don't display altruistic behaviour towards someone based on your actual genetic closeness - your /real/ kinship, if you will - to them, but based on the kinship you /perceive/. And perceived kinship can be a complicated thing. Here's a simple example. There is a society (unfortunately my books go into little detail) somewhere where it is customary for the bride to move in with the groom after marriage - but not just with the groom, but his entire family. The children have little contact with their maternal aunts and uncles, but a lot of contact with their paternal aunts and uncles, who will live in the same hut or one nearby. When asked which uncle or aunt they'd be most likely to go to for help, or receive help from, they reliably answer immediately that they would go to the paternal uncle first, although they are equally closely related to the uncles on both sides of the family. The uncles agree with the nephews on this one - the maternal uncles are much less likely to help than the paternal ones (Sahlins, 1976). So, this extends to soldiers who volunteer for suicide missions because these soldiers feel that they are a member of some kind of family which includes their fellow soldiers, and often others, including such bizarre abstracts as their 'home country' or state, or perhaps the people they think they're protecting. Religious martyrs feel a strong sense of kinship with the other followers of their religion, and possibly also with their religions' fictional characters, such as gods or other such mythical creatures. This, it could be argued, ties up the last knot in the altruism argument and explains basically everything in terms of genetic selfishness; an evolved predisposition toward helping those that you consider to be your family, whether or not they actually are. - And finally, Open Source - I think this explains Open Source quite nicely. You see, people (like myself, and many better programmers as well) are happy to spend hours working on a project (hey, much like this text file) without expecting any kind of return. I program, and others program, and release their software Open Source so that it can be of the most possible use to everyone. If asked, that's the reason we'll all give - just to be helpful, you know? I write text files, and others write text files, just because we love to write and we want to entertain and possibly even inform people. That's the excuse we give. The real reason is that the vast majority of people who run our programs and mess around with our programs and really appreciate their internal workings are people like us - the people of the Open Source community - the people of the Open Source family, if you will. We perceive a strong kinship with the other members of this community, and that's why we'll keep doing it - for the good of our genes, or so we imagine. And that's why we'll win the war of software - and possibly why the textfile will never die, to boot. Because we're writing files and putting together programs for the good of our enormously extended worldwide family. - But of course, it's all a misunderstanding! Isn't it? - Do we write because we're deluding ourselves, or because we're mistaken? Has evolution unwittingly created a failure by giving us big brains that are so easily confused about just who is family and who isn't? Is the Open Source community, or the Computer Underground (whatever that /means/ in this day and age), or the 'text file scene' (that's got to mean even less than CU nowadays!) our invading cuckoo? Are these synthetic tribes just eating up our creative time, when we should be using our brains to go out there and win in this capitalist world? I mean, sure. I've seen a lot of damn fine programs given away for free. Apache. Linux, of course. Thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of hours of work - for /no/ return! I've seen text files all over the place that were 'real publisher quality' - people could be selling a lot of the things I've seen in ezines in my time, but they're not. I know people who could be making a real personal success story out of things, financially speaking, who aren't - because of these perceived kinships and artificial families. This is the Ultimate Altruism - creative people creating, only to give the fruits of their labour away. But is the Ultimate Altruism, when shrouded in inaccurate perceptions of the boundary of the family, just the Ultimate Folly? Won't it all fall apart when someday the penny just drops? - Hell no! Go to it, and good luck! - Of course not. Because our perceived kinship /is/ based on a real kinship. It's just that we've /outgrown/ this basic gene-for-gene comparison idea. We're sharing thoughts. Ultimately, we're sharing /software/. And in the end, isn't that what life's all about? (Think Software EXchange...) There is no cuckoo*****! Nothing is falling apart! It's just moving on. Celebrate! This is progress, and for a change it looks like there's some chance it /won't/ actually kill us all! This is, finally, a real revolutionary struggle with some chance of beating the international capitalists; computers and networks have given us the chance to fight international selfishness with international altruism within the international family. We're right not to use our skills to try to win the capitalist world. The real mission that all Open Source Software and textfile authors are happily taking on in the name of the common good is the fight to win /against/ the capitalist world. I for one am looking forward to seeing one or two more hi-tech hippies... Anyone know where I can download some grass? :-) --- Reference: Here I'll do my best to give a little more detail about where the credit is due, since I feel guilty about just breezing past names like McGuire and Essock-Vitale and Sahlins in the above text: Essock-Vitale, S. M., and McGuire, M. T. 1985. Women's lives viewed from an evolutionary perspective: II. Patterns of Helping. /Ethology and Sociobiology/ 6:155-73 Sahlins, M. 1976. The use and abuse of biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Wilson, E. O. 1975. Sociobiology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Miscellaneous recommended further reading: http://www.uXu.org/ http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.tuxedo.org/ "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert Pirsig) "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" (Neal Stephenson) "Messiah" (Gore Vidal) "Ring Around the Sun" (Clifford D. Simak) --- * Normally, when writing in English, a random theoretical invented person of undefined sex is referred to as 'he'. So if I do that from this point on, it's /normal/, not just that I'm sexist. ** ...but we won't hold that against him... *** Actually, the learned (and arguably /old/) amongst you might get a small chortle out of the fact that the pitch of a human scream is, on average, dead on 2.6KHz. Nice one, eh? Who needs blue boxes? I have a random punter off the street and a photo of Margaret Thatcher! Pheer! I wonder if I can get a few useful tones out of a ground squirrel...? **** Of course, it's not /really/ yelling to its comrades. Interesting thought, isn't it? That the human scream is equivalent to the alarm call in blackbirds, robins, ground squirrels (OK, OK, I'll shut up about the damn ground squirrels!) etc. It's interesting because when you get an enormous fright and yelp, are you screaming /to/ anyone? The answer is of course NO! You're doing it 'involuntarily'. A nice little ancient instinct that we share with the ground squirrels (sorry) and the birds and so on. Which kind of knocks all the glory out of ground squirrel - sorry, avian - altruism in a way. <sigh>. Well, can't have everything, can you? (Oh dear God...I've just realised that I just devalued all my arguments in the space of one footnote. Still, gotta leave it in now. With any luck nobody'll read it anyway.) ***** No, I just wanted to have a ridiculous number of asterisks after the word 'cuckoo'. There's nothing to see here. Go away. - freon (http://www.nkpwhq.com/~freon/ ... freon@kmfms.com) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #607 Underground eXperts United 2002 uXu #607 http://www.textfiles.com/ | http://scene.textfiles.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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