indirect thoughts

[calimac]

wild_irises wrote a moving obituary for her brother here. I didn't know him, but he sounds like a charming and wise man - as others have noted, a mensch - and, knowing his sister, I can believe it.

A couple matters in it struck strong personal notes, of different kinds, for me. One is that he became fascinated with computers early on, probably when he was still in high school, and he eventually became a renowned software engineer with a professorship. I suspect the consequent of that arose almost inevitably from the antecedent. Because in those days, computers couldn't really do anything yet. There was no word processing or spreadsheets, there were no games to speak of, there was no internet besides a few universities sharing files with cover letters. If you were fascinated by computers then, it wasn't because of what you could do with computers, but because of computers themselves, and of their future potential. I think anybody who was really fascinated by computers at that time must have had that special gift.

Because I didn't, and this is what has kept me from regret that I didn't get into that nascent booming field on the ground floor, though I could have. I just wasn't interested in computers per se, and I only got interested in them later on, when they could do things, for the things that they could do. For me, computers are just the tool with which I do them, as vehicles are just the tools that transport me to places, and any interest in their functioning is purely practical. "What good is a newborn baby?" Ben Franklin asked rhetorically of those inclined to dismiss a crude new invention, and a fair reply by those who don't care for babies would be, "Bring it back when it's grown up, then." That was my attitude towards computers. I wouldn't have had the drive to make computers grow up, because I didn't have the fascination that motivated those who did that work, and thus I would not have done well in their field.

The other is that "on his own [he] was a complete rule-follower, the kid born in 1955 who never tried marijuana, almost never got drunk, didn't drink coffee (or tea) until long after he moved to Seattle. He didn't date much either." Now this interests me, because it's relieving to find that I'm not the only member of my cohort who's never tried marijuana, who's never been drunk (the closest I came was on my first trip to England; having discovered English cider, still the only alcoholic drink I really like, I had two pints without lunch one day, and wandered around a little woozily for a while), doesn't drink coffee, rarely has tea, and never dated much. (I hated it, and considered the first, though not the foremost, advantage of a secure attachment with B. was that I wouldn't have to go out on speculative dates any more.)

But does that make me a "rule-follower"? I don't think so. I do what I do, and don't do what I don't do, because I feel no compulsion to do things that do not appeal to me, regardless of how many of my peers do them. Were I a rule-follower in the sense of a trend-follower, I'd follow the crowd. Were I a rule-follower in the sense of being conservatively conventional, I wouldn't have grown a beard; all that fashion did there was enable me to do so without being thought of as too eccentric. I grew it so that I wouldn't have to waste my mornings shaving. David N. grew a beard too, and he grew his long. I keep mine fairly closely trimmed for the same reason I grew it at all: it's less trouble that way.

Buried deep in the links to material about him is this talk about diversity, which I found linked to from this newspaper obit. The obit summarizes it: "Notkin said in that talk that when he started teaching, his students all looked and talked and thought like him. They were mini-mes, he said. He recalled joining a Pilates class and realizing that unlike his classes, no one there looked like him. He was in the minority and had to be conscious of how he was being seen and how his actions were interpreted. He told the audience they should all participate in something, particularly a learning experience in which they were the minority, to get a sense of how that feels." In general, he speaks of having been raised in a homogeneous subculture, in which everyone was pretty much like him.

The lesson I learned from childhood and even adulthood was entirely different from this. It was that similarities like a shared race, or a shared class, or even a shared sex are superficial. Interacting with people has taught me that they are profoundly different from each other, as soon as you strip away the social veneer, and they keep on being profoundly different until you get down to a level so basic (everyone needs food and shelter) that discussion of it is meaningless. I know I'm different - I've never met more than a couple people who remind me of myself, and have no idea what having a roomful of mini-mes would feel like - and my biggest challenge in life has been finding milieus where I would at least fit in, even if I was still different. Consequently, if a roomful of young women of color, for instance, would feel alien to me, and if I wouldn't know much about them, I wouldn't feel these things much more than with a roomful of just about anybody else. Maybe this contributes to my belief that everybody should be allowed to go their own way in personal habits and not bother anybody else; I don't know.

Comments

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

I can definitely relate to this last observation. It's why I don't expect other people to share my tastes, views, lifestyle choices -- they never have before, so why should they start now? I stopped being threatened by that a long time ago. But I think there are a lot of people in the world who still are threatened by that.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that you say that computers couldn't really do anything in the 70s when David Notkin got hooked on them. I knew people in my high school in the early 70s who were learning Basic and Fortran and writing both practical and game programs. These ran either on the IBM 1130 we had in the h.s. computer room or on a distant machine, via teletype. In the business world, computers did the same kinds of things they do today: accumulate usage information and produce customer bills, track company finances, etc. Scientists used computers to run analyses of interesting problems (see this Times obit for Kenneth Appel (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/technology/kenneth-i-appel-mathematician-who-harnessed-computer-power-dies-at-80.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0), if you haven't read it already).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I had direct exposure to computers in the early 70s - we had one at my high school, and future software stars swarmed around it, while I stared at it in bafflement at its inability to do anything. There were also computers at NASA-Ames, where I worked part-time around then. In the late 70s, I took programming classes in college, and again, it wasn't about having the computer do something for you, but purely about how to make it do it.

By "couldn't do anything," I don't mean unable to execute programs. I mean that they didn't come with anything that a user who wanted to do anything other than "tinker with the computer" could work with, and that the focus of computer work was entirely on the tinkering. The end product was usually a printout saying something like "Hello, I'm Eddie your friendly shipboard computer." You didn't really need that. The sole point was to figure out how to make the computer do it.

True, advanced users could get real work out of the computer. But that was really, really advanced, and it required an epic training period of making the computer do useless things in order to learn how to make it do anything. It was the beginning of that training period that I was facing, as if it was a brick wall. And even that real work required more effort at making the computer do it than you got out of it. Look at the NASA moon program. It was more work getting the computer to calculate your orbit than you got from it in information about what your orbit was.

Computers were at the stage that automobiles were when Step One of "drive to the city" consisted of "Build the car out of the kit sent you from Dearborn or South Bend," or when Step One of "eat a sandwich" consisted of "Sow the wheat field." My point stands: you have to really, really love the process itself in order to embrace that eagerly.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I was going to answer you in my journal, but here you are in your own journal, where more of your people will see the response.

I don't have much to say about point 1.

About point 2, I never asked (my) David why he didn't do those things, so now I will never know. My sister-in-law did get a direct answer to a question about him from beyond the grave this week, but I don't expect that to happen on this topic. I can totally see your reasoning and how it's different from mine; I think I'm drawing my conclusion from a certain (polite, subtle) smugness that always came up when these issues came up. But (for one example), it's entirely possible that he started where you are and then found that he enjoyed that level of being different. Most likely, if I could ask, the answer would be orthogonal to any of our suppositions.

About the diversity talk, I'm glad you linked to it. I'm writing a post about David for <a href="geekfeminism.org>Geek Feminism</a>, so I've been to some extent studying it. I would agree, and I suspect my brother would also, that <I>some of</i> the similarities of groups are superficial, but there's a huge difference between one-on-one comparisons (two people of the same class/age/gender comparing themselves) and group-to-one comparisons. So if I am the only woman in a roomful of men, then the similarities often cease to become superficial and become controlling (or maybe they stay superficial and <I>still</i> become controlling). Similarly, if I am the only white kid on a playground completely full of African-American children. Etc., etc. Whether we are more alike than we are different, or more different than we are alike depends in significant part on where the person doing the measurement is standing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I more than suspect you're right that your David's, or anybody's, reasons for doing what they do are orthogonal to anybody else's. That's part of what I mean when saying that everybody is different.

I am less struck my his experiences being the only middle-aged white man in a room full of women, mostly of color, than in the fact that it took this experience to make him feel sufficiently alienated from his surroundings to notice it. I've always felt alienated in this way. I don't deny that a room full of, say, black women would look more different from me than a room full of, say, libertarian men, most of whom would probably look just like me, but I'd be more disconcerted by the latter, if only because if I hadn't known better I wouldn't be expecting it. In fact my political views would be likely to be much closer to those of the black women, so to that extent I'd feel more at home there.

The similarities become controlling if the man in the roomful of women (or vice versa) is either seen as Exhibit 1 of Species of Man, or if, under the pressure of the situation, he starts to act like it. I prefer situations where everyone is an individual, because I've learned the hard way that nobody speaks for the whole of group X of which they're a member.