I'm a big fan of Prisoner's Dilemma. Actually, I'm a fan of picking out when it's being applied to a situation, not of the dilemma itself, which is inherently bad. You can read the details yourself but essentially, it's a fancy way of saying, "every man for himself". (I'd apologize for the male slantedness but I doubt female readers would want to be grouped into that bit of analogy anyway.)

It's a little more complicated than that though once you dive into the philosophy of the idea. Basically, it says that you should act in your own best interest even if it conflicts with the interests of the larger group. That's because everyone else in the group is thinking the same thing. If everyone cooperated, they'd all be better off as a group but as soon as one acts against the group, the whole thing falls apart.

If you generalize the concept, it applies to pretty much every major problem facing the world today: global warming (we should all take mass transit), world hunger (featuring the parental mainstay: "There are starving people in Africa and you want to throw that away!"), the election of George Bush (actually, I can't explain that one). In short, we should all act for the betterment of the group but we rarely do.

Except for a large section of the software industry. What do I, as a supposedly rational person, gain from taking time away from my family, friends, and clients to elucidate you people on a regular basis? I don't have Google ads and even if I did, they aren't going to pay for my extravagant lifestyle of cutting code and skinnin' rodents. In fact, this thing is actually costing me money in the form of hosting fees.

One could argue that I do have ulterior motives in that presumably, my reputation would be enhanced and I would reap all the rewards that rock stars enjoy. And that is probably a factor for most bloggers to varying degrees, depending on the author's degree of optimism.

But I don't think it's the driving factor for most, at least not for the ones in my blog roll. A common characteristic to the ones I know is modesty, almost to the point of self-deprecation. Any praise heaped on one is usually deflected and distributed among at least two or three others. The general vibe I get is that people are genuinely interested in helping others.

Of course, there's often more than a hint of pride involved (who doesn't want to tell the world when they figure out a really tough problem?). And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as pride doesn't give way to ego which it rarely does.

Open source projects are another anomaly with respect to the Prisoner's Dilemma and it's one that's even mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Another example of people working for the good of the group more so than for personal gain.

It's an interesting phenomenon, as is the original dilemma. Maybe it's that the group and the individual both have similar goals. Or maybe the industry attracts people of this nature. I suppose one explanation is as valid as the next and I should stop questioning a good thing.

Kyle the Philosophical

Despite my online nom de guerre, I am what you might call grammatically anal. I don't like ending sentences with prepositions, avoid misplaced modifiers and shy away from run-on sentences. Before y'all go proofreading my previous posts, I will also fight my instincts pretty often to avoid sounding too much like my high school English teacher. Gotta keep this har intry-net blog thingy conversashunal, after all. And besides, if you start speaking strict Queen's English, you kinda sound like the kind of dork that would receive regular beatings in high school. Still, I hate trolling through old entries and finding glaring errors because I think I'm also a little obsessive compulsive and I don't like receiving the same post twice in my RSS aggregator.

So what does this have to do with coding? (Oh man, and I HATE reading posts/essays/whatever that ask questions then proceed to answer them.) I was looking through what is essentially a string table for Livelink listing all the error messages and pieces of text for a particular module. Nothing, repeat NOTHING, screams "I am too &*#$ lazy to check my work" than seeing spelling mistakes or obvious grammatical errors in a resource file. I won't single out anything in Livelink because it's not the only culprit by any stretch.

Seriously, how hard is it to scan a line of text before you press Enter? Especially one embedded in a piece of software that companies may pay tens of thousands of dollars for (ummm...I mean, for which companies may pay tens of thousands of dollars). I've seen my share of misspelled variable names in code which I cringe at a little but let pass because very few people will see them. Having a label's text set to "You will definately get an answer today" (to use one of my "favorite" pet peeves) just makes me lose any confidence in the vendor altogether.

The same applies to obvious grammatical errors. And to overuse of capitalization which is more subtle. e.g. "Enter a New Code if you wish to update an Old Code". Yes, it's cute to see "All your base are belong to us" in a twenty-year-old video game from Japan because the average user is twelve years old and is skipping over that screen without reading it anyway. But not in a content management application. Not in a commercial word processor. Not even in a piece of freeware if you expect to be taken seriously.

So the moral of the story is: Check EVERY piece of text that a user might potentially see. That doesn't mean running it through a spell-checker. That means reading it, ya lazy ass. Word will not pick up a problem with "What moth were you born in?" whereas I see at least two mistakes there, possibly three.

Incidentally, this is also coming on the heels of my just watching East on the Compass, a movie from Spain whose subtitles could have used another round through the spell-checker. Very good movie, though, and if I have my way, you can see it between December 7 and 10 in Nassau.