Sunday, 21 February 2010

Global Warming, IT and Christianity - the Law of Infallibility


On Twitter, I do talk a lot. About anything. My monthly tweets have exponentially grown to currently over 1,200 a month, and that now is my baseline it seems.
I talk a bit with fundamental Christians at times, but that's at night time usually, somehow.
I talk mostly with IT people during the day, as I work in IT and usually operate as an Enterprise Architect who started off writing BASIC at age 11 and COBOL at career start - been there, done that.
And every now and then I do read and / or say something about Global Warming as that has become part of our everyday life

When having conversation with Christians, I usually run into strict believers who have a good share of quotes and take the Bible literally or at least believe it contains absolute Truth. I challenge them on the crucifixion and say that the Bible should be taken figuratively, not literally, that Jesus' death is just a spiritual death (I believe Jesus' true words, meanings and life are according to the Gospel of Thomas) which is met with fierce resistance that it is all the Word of God, and True, and that it should be taken literally. The Bible is infallible, they say.
Then I ask them what they think of Luke 17:21, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that "the Kingdom of God is inside you". The answers always are alike "Jesus didn't mean that when he said such", "You have to place it into the context", "No that needs to be translated among, not inside or within" - much like this lengthy commentary
And before you know it, the True Word of God is being bent and interpreted right in front of you - by Christians themselves

On Global Warming I read this post on Shlashdot.org titled A Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow.
Sometimes life is just too easy: I can suffice with quoting this excellent comment from J Morris (emphasis all mine, left the typo in place too)
One question for the warmers reading. Can the theory of AGW be falsified?
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming.
If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming.
But if we get a blizzard it is because of Global Climate Change.
If it floods it is bacause of Global Warming/Climate Change.
If the North polar ice shrinks it is Global Warming.
Yet when the Antarctic ice grows it is Climate Change.
(...)
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
Yes, Global Warming has become a religion - which is awkward as it is 100% pure science that led to it... and above all Global Warming seems to have become infallible indeed

In IT, we have our prophets from all sides as well. Doomsday preachers telling us we should all get ERP, CRM, SOA, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design or die.Yes, again, it's Yin and Yang misunderstood: Black and White are the colours, but there's a whole area of greyscale in between.
People are now saying that SOA was good, but the implementation was bad - and are having a go at SOA 2.0. CRM is now getting a second chance as SocialCRM, ERP as ERP+. Social media? Forrester has forbidden private blogs for their employees, Rupert Murdoch wants to hide his sites from Google, IBM has such a long Social Computing Guidelines that it's no wonder that IBM on Twitter doesn't exist.
It seems like the status quo's protecting their assets in an attempt to not put their presumed infallibility to the test

Infallibility? It's everywhere, or ubiquitous as people prefer to say nowadays. It's everywhere, and nowhere to be put to the test. 3-4 years from now people will agree that Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media were great ideas, but wrongly implemented. And to a certain extent they won't be wrong. But to the biggest extent they'll just be covering their own or their company's behinds. And they'll invent Social Media 2.0 or 3.0 which is exactly the same as Social Media now, but just adapted to the time's spirit - leaving the old definition untouched and infallible.
I witness that in enterprises a lot. When the point-of-no-return has been surpassed (architecture helping here to move that forward) there is no discussion possible: there's no stopping the roadtrain. Pretty much anything on the enterprise level is deemed infallible, and because it's on such a huge money- and time-scale, enough tweaking and tuning can be done on the way to keep up the myth of infallibility

Listen. When we take humans out of the equation, this planet is in peace. There would be no right or wrong, no good or bad. No Utopia nor infallibility. All that stuff is made up by us. Your name, your immediate future, your belief system, your family, it was all there before you were even born, and you didn't get to decide about it. You might think you're on top of it, but all you're doing is within the preset bandwidths other people decided about for you.

It's okay to be wrong. It's human to be wrong. It's social too now. Be wrong, please. Admit that you're wrong, you don't even have to apologise for that. We're all wrong, almost all of the time. Yes that might mean that you've been wrong half a lifetime or more, but it's better to admit that and start anew than try to lie and hide the obvious facts into invisibility.
You might not lose face towards the customer or lose sleep overnight, but you will lose credibility and honesty towards yourself. And you yourself are your most precious possession in this life, so cherish it

Break the Law of Infallibility. It's among the biggest Lies in our lives and preventing dialogue, honesty, happiness and harmony. It causes us to focus on the differences rather than the similarities or commonalities
We learn by failing. Walking, talking, we couldn't have achieved it without utterly  failing big time over and over again. Taking exams, tests, graduating, getting a driver's license, passing a mortgage check: if no one would fail, no one else could succeed
PLEASE #FAIL!

[The picture is showing the 'Christian percentage by country' - although that just is counting quantity of course, not measuring quality]