I'm here at the Berkman Thursday meeting listening to Urs Gasser speak about what he calls "information quality". He started out talking about a few cases where the implicit meaning of quality with respect to information meant accuracy. While this made sense for some fairly straightforward issues (e.g. fake herbal medicines or lies in the news), I found it a pretty simple and obvious definition.

Then he talked about information as being relational between communicating entities. That makes more sense, because different individuals will have different goals for a piece of information. And now he's pulling in transnational legal issues that arise when stuff published on the internet gets delivered in a place that has different libel or hate speech laws.

At this point, the definition of information quality seems so broad that we couldn't possibly conclude anything about it in general. And Urs pauses for questions; I ask this (bluntly). First answer: yes, there are many aspects. Second answer: there are some internet-specific issues in information quality, like Wikipedia edit wars (I don't quite believe this). Thirdly, these issues are not just theoretical but also relevant in practice.

I am still not convinced, but I am listening.

Urs thinks there are three approaches worth considering:

1. Laissez-faire. We don't want to even think about internet info quality regulation; no one has the power to regulate quality. The problem with this argument, in my opinion, is that information quality is fundamentally dependent on social exchanges and there is a power balance in those which will always serve to regulate it in the context of that social structure. Good and bad fight it out over time and the good lives (J.S. Mill).
   I asked about why this is even possible. Mal asks a similar question: info quality is transactional, so just producing more information without adding more informed transactions implies a vacuous definition of information. As if you want produce information by adding speakers. Bah.
2. Information order model. An authority, like China but also possible a democratic society, making choices about information quality regulation. Also consider the BBC and internet forums with a moderator.
3. A decentralized model. Starts with the assumption "information quality is imporant" but admits it's hard to define and there are fundamental reasons we cannot produce a valuable shared normative definition of information quality.

Now we go off on a tangent and talk about markets for a while. Google seems like a sort of information market in the sense that it values each website. There are different approaches (reputation systems, etc.) and they have different advantages and disadvantages. I think this is what Urs' paper is about, so I'm hoping that means this will get more specific.

I want to ask: what problems are you trying to solve?

I don't really think there is such a thing as information quality. There are such things as trust, lies, information availability, listening, speaking, publishing, believing, regulation, communication, relationships, and censorship. But is there some meaningful common ground?

On blogs, Urs notes, that we don't have laws to establish social contracts for information-related transactions. Some bloggers explicitly state poilicies. On top of this, I think that all bloggers take part in implicit social contracts, unwritten assumptions that underlie communities and cultures and help people communicate.

Urs has to leave… which I think is kinda lame, but quite forgivable. I'm still not sure he's talked about anything specific enough to be meaningful.

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According to this Earth Day Network quiz, if everyone lived like me we would need 4.2 Earths. Apparently I'm even below average for America. I've heard similar assertions from my friends, usually wealthy, well-educated Americans, that we are living beyond the resources available to us on Earth.

It's a shocking statistic, but so what? Wouldn't you expect the wealthiest, most prosperous fraction of the Earth's population to consume more than their fair share of the resources? As long as the whole population of Earth isn't living like I am, it's not a problem, is it?

Of course, there is still plenty to object to in a world where the wealthy have so much and the poor have no peace, no food, no clean water, and no medical care. As living standards improve for the world's poor, we'll have to take care not to place too heavy a burden on our Earth. I'd be really worried if I didn't think the incentives to keep growth in check weren't there—but they are. For example, it's going to be extremely rewarding to develop more energy-efficient vehicles if when gasoline becomes 50 times more expensive.

But really, I'm more curious about a different issue. Why do so many people believe that by not eating meat, and buying organic citrus fruits at Whole Foods for twice the price of conventional fruits at Stop-n-Shop, that they are making a meaningful difference to the planet? Isn't the extra $0.30 per orange just going to fund some executive's yacht, or a longer commute for your cashier? Isn't a lot of the environmentalist rhetoric just a way of buying the false hope that you can make a difference in a world we're eager to make sense of, but truly can't understand?

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Gregor writes in his weblog about a conversation he had with Prof. Eberhard Hilf:

hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.

good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.

Hilf may have misunderstood what leaky abstractions are really about. Had he understood, he probably would have seen that physics and other natural sciences have the exact same problem, and that the mathematical rigor he claims is at best equivalent to the formal definition of computer programs and therefore not even relevant to the problem of leaky abstractions.

First, let me explain the problem of leaky abstractions. As originally explained by Joel Spolsky, leaky abstractions are a challenge to software engineers. Much like mathematics and theoretical science, new achievements in software development build on the foundations already in place. These foundations are abstractions that package up the complexity of other tasks. For example, if you are building a program to download a file over a network, you can use the web protocol, HTTP. Then you can choose a program to serve the file from a number of existing applications, and instead of writing the code to connect to the server, follow the rules of the protocol, and write the file to disk yourself, you can simply invoke an existing piece of software that does this. In highbrow engineering circles, this is called reuse and is highly desirable because it saves development time and avoids creating new code that must be debugged and maintained. It also helps to cement existing standards so that software makers can compete on the basis of innovative features rather than "we crash less".

An abstraction becomes leaky when some of the details it claims to handle leak through and become your problem. Continuing the file-fetching example, what happens if the network is down? You depend on some piece of fetch software to get files, which depends on a network protocol to ensure that two computers can communicate reliably, which depends on a network to allow computers to fling bits at each other. If the network can't handle that job right now, it can tell the network protocol. But the protocol can't do anything about a network that's physically disconnected, so it shrugs. The fetch software you invoked can't do anything about a protocol that won't let it connect, so it shrugs. Your program depends entirely on this piece of software, so you shrug. A leak in the bottommost layer of abstractions has sprung through every other layer, and has to be dealt with outside the realm of the automatic. "Plug in your network cable," your computer says. Do you ever get that message when your cable is still plugged in, but your cat has stepped on a power strip and turned off your network hub? Another leak!

You may already see that leaky abstractions can show up outside of computer science. Do business transactions always go as they should? Have you ever come to a restaurant expecting to get a meal, only to find that they couldn't seat your group? Have you tried to drive home from work in the usual 30 minutes only to find that weather or a car crash dragged that out to 2 hours?

Of course, these are all informal abstractions. In Physics, the abstractions are all mathematically defined. A more rigorous abstraction of driving home from work wouldn't leave any room for leaks. Right?

Well—not exactly wrong nor right. It depends how you look at it. If you're developing the theory alone, you're not going to find that suddenly F = m*a doesn't hold up because e.g. it isn't defined for a = 3 m/s/s; the requirement that definitions be rigorous prevents that. But if you're trying to develop a theory that accurately describes the interaction of actual physical objects, the classical Newtonian abstraction above breaks down at certain points, like when mass is really really small or you're moving really really fast. (More knowledgable readers are welcome to correct/improve my Physics.)

What we see here are two ways to judge the rigor of an abstraction, which I'll call theoretical rigor and applicative rigor. The mathematical foundations of physics ensure its theoretical rigor, but when applied to the description of nature, we can find failures in applicative rigor. Newton's models, though we call them laws, do not accurately describe everything they were once claimed to describe. And applying these laws to real life situations requires accounting for a number of other factors—wind resistance and its ilk. We could qualify the law by describing the highly idealized world it assumes, but that would take too long. We'll settle for expecting the laws of physics to describe limited, idealized versions of what actually happens in real life.

Now back to computing. Most programming languages require that you write well-defined programs—you can't leave out a step and expect the computer to ask you what to do when it gets there. The language usually provides a sensible default, like doing nothing, but this is a way to compress the notation, not to escape rigorous definition. So programming languages, at least those that have an actual deterministic implementation on a computer, actually enforce the constraints of theoretical rigor at least as well as the Physics research community.

But when we take those theoretical tools and apply them to solve problems, we find many leaky abstractions: broken networks flummox our web browsers; buggy data compression libraries leave security holes open in our servers. Each of these bugs is like a wind resistance we hadn't thought of. We hackers had been assuming a simpler world, and so the model of the world we coded for doesn't exactly correspond with the world we're selling software too.

But that's OK: it happens to Physicists too.

• The Curry-Howard Isomorphism describes a relationship between logical proofs/proof systems and computer programs/programming languages. It is described in this Wikipedia entry and at length in this online book.
• I also made a comment in a nerdy discussion on programming language design and the isomorphism at the About Kim weblog.
• Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking teaches you how to think scientifically, including how to respect the limitations of abstraction.
• Joel Spolsky's original essay, The Law of Leaky Abstractions, is a good read and isn't too long.

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Here are a couple of really amazing blog posts. The blog they come from, Iraq the Model, is written by three brothers, dentists and a doctor by occupation, living in Baghdad.

This single page of their writing is a million times more unique and informative than anything CNN or the New York Times would ever put out.

Why? Because it's a primary source. It's someone not unlike me in age, ambitions, and ways of thinking. It's someone who, because he's lived it, doesn't reduce the situation to an absurdity like "Americans are pillaging the country to extend their empire" or "Iraq would be best served if Americans just left" or "Iraqis are a treacherous violent people who will never function in a democracy".

If you're purely pro-war or anti-war, please realize that you have taken a reductionist position: Iraq under Sadaam was a horrible place to live, the potential of its people was stifled, and it was near-perfect primordial soup for terrorists. At the same time, the American invasion is a huge disruption with many casualties and costs, and its ultimate success depends much more precariously on our long-term success helping the Iraqis convert their nation into a functioning, open society. Iraqis have a tremendous role in this process, and it's extremely encouraging to see some of them stand up and call Al-Jazeera on its violence-mongering.

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At first, reductionism was healthy. As top-down redesigns became too large for one person, or even one team, managers broke large projects into smaller projects and assigned teams to tackle specific tasks. Initially, team members resisted any separation from the whole. They insisted on understanding how their work fit into the bigger picture. They insisted on interdisciplinary collaboration, and so we had teams of specialists working toward shared goals.

But sites keep growing and reductionism is a slippery slope. Increasingly, people are simply giving up on the big picture. They act locally but don't think globally. These individuals now design their parts in utter ignorance of the whole.