I am not the world’s most loyal listener of the Glenn and Helen show, but I always like what I do catch. This week’s episode is well worth your time.

What caught my eye was the surname of the guests. The episode is an interview with brother and sister Claire and Mischa Berlinski, who are promoting two novels they’ve just published contemporaneously. I’ve read a few essays and one book by their father, and judging from the interview, the apples clearly have not fallen far from the tree. These people may very well be Platonically ideal dinner company: well-rounded, well-spoken, spirited, even-handed, and just the most fundamentally interesting people you could hope to know. It doesn’t hurt the interview that these two are clearly a very loving brother and sister who enjoy each other quite a bit and are accustomed to thinking and working together on worthy things.

Mischa’s book is called Fieldwork. It’s about the epic struggle between two powerful enemies of the natural world: missionaries and anthropologists. It is discussed between 8:14 and 15:30 in the podcast. Go listen now, then we’ll talk about it.

I’ll wait.

…

No, for real, listen to it.

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Okay, welcome back.

Being somewhat familiar with the elder Berlinski, I can’t say I was surprised to find Mischa being sympathetic toward Christian missionaries and turning a bit of a jaundiced eye toward anthropologists as they are normally found in the wild. The Berlinksi father, though a self-described agnostic Jew, has some philosophical commitments which are otherwise strongly correlated with Christianity, most notably metaphysical realism and a comfort with the broad idea of Intelligent Design. Claire and Mischa are quick to point out that they are no evangelicals, and they and their hosts do indulge a near-chuckle at the expense of the evangelical worldview that comports with that of the indigenous animists who provide the setting for the novel. (Although the missionaries may assign a slightly different ontological pedigree to the spirits that torment the tribal people, they believe just as fervently that evil spirits are quite real, and quite able to be defeated by the Gospel. This seemed slightly bemusing to everybody on the podcast, but their bemusement was subtle, brief and really not all that disrespectful.)

Anthropologists, Mischa said, are almost more religious than missionaries. They see a kind of spiritual deliverance in their field work, claiming that you can never truly know yourself until you’ve left your culture of origin and immersed yourself in the life of the Other. Only then can you learn your true identity, learning what belongs uniquely to you and what is what is cultural accident. What struck me about that statement is that I’ve heard very similar things from missionaries whose work has been deeply and incarnationally cross-cultural. Immersion in another culture for years does make indelible changes in a person, and it does reveal some deeply held beliefs to be contingent and culturally conditioned. Of course, an evangelical missionary would stop short of making this a religious experience: the soul is not redeemed by learning to eat weird foods, speak hard languages, and criticize the Bush Doctrine. The soul just gets to know itself a little better.

Still, the podcast is a good listen. Never have I been disappointed by the show, but the most recent installment is particularly delightful. Enjoy.

Recently the topic of contemporary worship has come up in real-life conversation a few times, so I thought I’d compile these posts I wrote a year and a half ago into one, easy-to-find place. After, why talk to friends when you can just give them a URL? Wait, don’t answer that.

Upon re-reading the posts I find some of the prose to be a bit overwrought at times, but then I have a tendency to do that when I’m excited. Apologies in advance.

People Seem To Like It: a facetious suggestion to use an online auction system to decide what kind of music to play in church. But hey, if we’re just trying to find out what people want, why not do it right?

Music Doesn’t Matter Much: except it does. This is a brief response to people who would defuse the music discussion debate by calling it unimportant.

Defining Some Terms: the terms “contemporary” and “traditional” are problematic, but we might as well stick with them for now.

Form, Not Content: a foundational argument in the music debate. If the kind of music matters as much as the words being sung, then contemporary worship music starts to look like a pretty bad idea.

The Defense of Contemporary Music: a critical look at a few arguments typically advanced in defense of contemporary worship music.

P.S. If the title of this post seems inflammatory, it’s not mean to be. It’s a play on a tradition in computer science literature.

Brains and digital computers go about computation in very different ways—so different, in fact, that it’s less than clear to me that “computation” (in the Turing machine sense) is what brains are really doing. This probably accounts for why trivial brain tasks like detecting speech, understanding natural language, and recognizing faces are at present next to impossible to do well in software, as anyone who has tried to use their mobile phone’s voice activated dialing can attest.

Researchers at Stanford are onto this:

Now Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex.

Substance dualists should be happy about this kind of research for two reasons. First, if it works, it is likely to yield new tools of heretofore unheard-of levels of aweXomeness. For instance, right now Google image search offers up pictures of trees based on the close association of a web image with text that talks about generally arboreal things. With massively scalable brain-like image recognition, maybe we’ll be able to do web-scale searches for pictures of, say, tire swings with foreboding skies in the background. But then physicalists get jazzed about this kind of thing too.

The real payoff for substance dualists is in the utterly faithful simulation of the human brain. That this will be done someday is a certainty. And theories of quantum consciousness notwithstanding, the brain is a machine—an elaborate configuration of matter scrupulously obeying the laws of physics. If substance dualism is true, then the silicon brain should be qualitatively different from the human one. It might be able to associate visual images with one another, find subtle patterns in search spaces, and carry on a spoken conversation with a person, but we would predict that its soulless-ness will in some way be obvious. Kind of like when Dr. Kurnow asked SAL in 2010 how she felt about being powered down: the question made no sense to her. Enfleshed souls tend to be a bit touchier about that one.

I have long thought it a key aspect of the Classical school that we always have our apologetic money on the table. Hence if the brain is the organ of the mind, then as technology allows, let’s build a replica brain and have a talk with it. If it’s indistinguishable from a person, I lose a line of evidence. If, the better and better we get at making silicon brains, the more and more obvious it is that these things are not human, then we need to have a nice, long talk about just how silly it is for me to believe that I have an immaterial component that is essential to my identity.

The metaphysics of the human person notwithstanding, it just wouldn’t fun if they didn’t create some nice, new bioethical dilemmas while they were at it:

Engineers ultimately hope to use the information generated by the silicon cortex in a variety of ways–to build better neural prosthesis, for example. “The real-time aspect of this technology allows us in principle to interface the silicon cortex with the real cortex or brain,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a neuroengineer at the University of California, San Diego. “There is the promise, at least in the future, to build a prosthesis to replace some lost motor function or sensory function.”

And I’m sure it will stop there. William Gibson, call your office.

h/t Slashdot

To the barricades! InfoWorld is calling for action to recruit and retain more women in information technology jobs. The piece is not as bad as it might have been, but it contains some assumptions that are as odd as they are unexamined. To begin with, data:

It may not be surprising that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women filled only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions in 2006. What’s troubling is that this percentage has been declining for some time. And the descent has been nearly universal across all IT job categories. For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000. At the management level, the imbalance persists. Among computer and IS managers, for example, 27.2 percent were women in 2006. By contrast, women held 66 percent of all social and community service management jobs last year.

An optimist might at least observe that women seem to be better-represented in management ranks than among network and system administrators. However, the data are very spotty, and there are many peer categories to sysadmins that might dilute the outlook. Still, what is “troubling” about the numbers? Whence the assumption that the sexes ought to be equally represented in a given occupation? Can anyone adduce evidence of real oppression keeping women out of IT? I don’t deny that glass ceilings used to exist in full force and are surely present residually in the world today, but the burden is on the author to show that they are to blame in this case, or explain why anyone should care what little girls want to do when they grow up. The article’s strengths notwithstanding, these burdens are not borne.

An obvious explanation for any gender imbalance in any profession is that younger women make career sacrifices in order to raise children. Pinnacle Entertainment CIO Carol Pride comments:

In order to get to the top of the food chain, you have to own something big and ugly — an ERP implementation, for example, or a slot machine implementation at a casino….Often, the first big-and-ugly project coincides with the time one is trying to raise young children. Women often realize, rationally, that children are more important than companies, but if you don’t do the big and ugly, then it ends up hindering you later.

I’d hate to think I’m giving Carol an uncharitable reading, but I hear her saying that women need to be ready to sacrifice their children in favor of their careers. To dispel some of the gender-political confusion that might cloud our judgment, let’s reverse the roles and see how well the statement plays. Now, nobody knocks dads for being away from the children for 40 or 50 hours a week; it’s not just culturally normative, but necessary to keep food on the table. But suppose we were talking about men who have young families and still want to pursue very competitive careers in which 70 or 80 hours a week are needed to get anywhere. Suppose some executive was mentoring these young men, and he told them that sure, their kids might miss them and their wives might wilt under the stress of running the family substantially alone, and they might know what they’re doing is somehow wrong, but if they wuss out now, it will “hinder them later.”

I mean, with hypothetical mentors like this, who needs no-fault divorce laws?

Clearly I am locked into patriarchal, male-as-breadwinner thinking. This article, written for respectable company, can’t be expected to deal with troglodytes like me, can it? Apparently not:

According to a recent joint study by Catalyst, the Families and Work Institute, and the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 74 percent of women executives have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time. By contrast, 75 percent of male executives have a spouse/partner who stays home full-time — strong evidence that, despite progress in attitudes toward domestic workloads, women still predominantly bear the brunt of striking a balance between career and home.

The paternalism of that paragraph is jarring. The point is well-taken that most women executives are the “second income” in the household, and most male executives are the only income. But to turn this into “strong evidence” that women are bearing the “brunt” of anything requires us to assume that all women want and ought to pursue a career path that leads to executive management. Could the data not as easily tell us that women from wealthy households frequently make the decision to be homemakers? It’s not like these wealthy families couldn’t break loose a few bucks for a maid and an au pair. If these numbers suggest anything, it is that the women most able to decide how to structure their lives, decide in large numbers to stay home and raise families. They need not be scolded for making what is in the final analysis a much freer choice than most are able to make.

And as for a bad attitude toward housework, my wife would need to comment here to acquit me finally of that charge. However, I am confident that in the end I will be found innocent.

Eventually the article drops complaints about strict gender inequities and instead attempts to give an account of why it matters. Here we find a mixed bag of silliness and sobriety:

“Because most companies are based on a male model and have been for many decades, the men don’t get the kinds of business contribution women can give,” [Women in Technology International Carolyn] Leighton says. “They often [institute diversity metrics] just to meet requirement codes.”

But, Leighton adds, the current nature of IT actually calls for what are considered stereotypical female characteristics. No longer an island within the company, IT is integral to other departments and requires employees who communicate well. “Now IT goes across all departments globally,” she says. “And women by nature are collaborative consensus builders.”

It’s too bad Leighton didn’t elaborate on what a “male model” might be. I mean, I saw a picture of my company’s president from when he was in high school, and he honestly looked a lot like Fabio—no, for real, he did—but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.

Given that, imagine my honest relief that strict gender equivalence is not being assumed here. One might construct a species of feminism around the proposition that the classes “male” and “female” are functionally identical as they relate to the institutions of commerce and family, but the author avoids that path. If we’re talking about corporations based on a “male model” which might be improved by the presence of naturally collaborative and consensus-building women, then we are obviously all comfortable with the fact that men and women differ in important ways which might actually matter in the real world. Continuing along these lines is IBM V.P. of SOA and WebSphere strategy Sandy Carter, who says that “Women are good at accepting change and creating change, which is important in the marketplace,” and “The skills that [women] have — being able to juggle things, multitasking — reflect the [business] environment we’re in now.”

And these are valid points. It seems fairly uncontroversial that collaboration, consensus-building, and “multitasking” are typically more natural for women than men. (Take me, for example. The “consensus” I like best is when everybody agrees that my way is the right one.) But let us not overstate our case: saying that women are more natural consensus-builders is a little bit like saying men are more natural sysadmins because they have the upper-body strength needed to lift the occasional server into the rack. No one will deny that men do, in fact, have this physical advantage, but it’s not like women are all so weak that asking them to heft a 1U box 40″ off the ground is going to make them wilt like delicate garden flowers in the sun. The difference is real and important, but somehow each sex learns to develop some aptitudes that come naturally for the other—even outside of a diverse environment like a 50/50 workplace or a family.

Ultimately we can agree that no man or woman should be hindered from making free vocational choices within the scope of the knowledge professions. Far from this modest goal, though, the InfoWorld piece agitates for strictly proportional representation of women in IT. Even if all the resulting collaboration and consensus and multitasking would make IT departments hum, it seems unlikely that it’s actually good for women to set this goal, or even to care much how many of them choose technology professions at all. Let it be enough to present free choices to women and allow them to structure their lives as they see fit.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have a place in my heart for the career choice of homemaker and homeschooler, and I am not shy about extolling the benefits of that path. Nor, more to the point, is my wife. But I would only want a woman to make a free and informed choice of this lifestyle—never a coerced or a manipulated one. If many women choose otherwise, I will not assume they are either enslaved or unfeminine or unconcerned about their families. The reciprocal charity would be most welcomed.

I know a woman who left IT a couple of years ago. (This is of course anecdotal, but not much more so than the comments of the of ten prominent women in IT interviewed in the InfoWorld piece.) She was a Java developer, and is now a homeschooler and stay-at-home mother of three. She was a single mother of one for most of her career, and while her problem wasn’t precisely one of balancing work and motherhood, she has admitted that her heart was just never really in her work. Her desire was simply more for her son than for Enterprise Java. Maybe she could have championed a massive ERP implementation (if massive ERP implementations were not already passé by the time her career would have allowed her the risk), but she never wanted to. Now she stays at home with an infant and a special-needs preschooler and an eleven-year-old. She tells me she loves it. If we want to carp about women leaving IT, why not tell her story too?

P.S. Certain other women technologists might take the trouble to weigh in on this. Am I completely off base here?