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Underground eXperts United File 607
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Underground eXperts United
Presents...
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[ Altruism And The Open Source Movement ] [ By Freon ]
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ALTRUISM AND THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT
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- 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)
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uXu #607 Underground eXperts United 2002 uXu #607
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