NAME - The Foundational People. (noun). That subset of individuals, in every field of study, who find themselves most interested not in how systems are supposed to work, but in how those systems actually work, especially when the documented behavior of a system deviates dramatically from its behavior in reality. SYNOPSIS - This file is a specification of the intended use of the term "foundational," particularly when it preceeds the term "people" or its synonyms, within the scope of the current book, in any of its versions, provided those versions contain this specification. So sayeth the L||D. DESCRIPTION The term foundational is best defined by contrast with its complement. We will therefore begin by describing that complement. For any field of study, the majority of that field's members will be referred to as its "Real Members." ## The Real Members The Real Members of a field take pains to learn how things are done. In the field generally, and especially by the higher status members of it. Both as novices and as experts, they recognize that there exist many things about the field that they themselves do not yet know. They therefore concern themselves primarily with one source of truth: 1. Social Reality This is not to say that Real Members are mindless slaves to the social. They are no less able to understand scientific truth than the group that makes up their yet-to-be-described complement. Nor are Real Members less able to imagine how things might be improved. When engaged in science, they may disagree intensely with their colleagues, on the basis of objective truth, or propose improvements on the basis of ideals that guide them to a vision of how things might be done differently in the future. In asserting that their primary source of truth is Social Reality, we mean only that social truth is the dimension that normal members of any field gravitate to by default. They do so both in order to learn from the accumulated experience of all those who came before them, and in order to establish their findings among their peers through the accepted social methods. These individuals may be rebellious, when compared to their colleagues. Or they may be more conventional in comparison with the mean. Regardless, the primary question this group ask when learning is some question of the form: 1. How _is_ this done? This is not, in itself, an unreasonable thing to do. ## The Foundational People > _Probably the most dangerous phrase you can ever use in a computer environment is that dreadful one: "But we've always done it that way." That's a forbidden phrase in my office. To emphasize the fact I keep a clock that goes entirely counter clockwise._ > -Grace Hopper ### Of Two Minds The Foundational members (lowercase), in contrast, never fully become Members (uppercase) of the fields to which they belong. Even in fields where they achieve great prestige, the Foundational are never entirely at home in a field, nor are they made to feel at home by the Real Members. This is neither group's fault. The imperfect fit between the Foundational people and whatever ambient field they inhabit is an inevitable consequence of their difference in focus from the bulk of the field's Members. In any field, the Foundational mind gravitates simultaneously to two extremes along the spectrum of possible concepts of truth. These two extremes are: 1. Objective reality. 2. Possible reality. In a sense, these are the same thing. The questions that represent these two extremes are, respectively: 1. What _can_ I get away with, in the system _as it is_? 2. What _could_ we do better, if we recreated this system from scratch? Note the "I" in item one, and the "we" in item two. ### 1. The Objective Stance > _So I want to tell something to all the young people here. On many many many occasions you'll find it is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. You do it! Then if someone comes after ya and says "Were you supposed to do that?" you say "Aw gee I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that."_ > -Grace Hopper > _It's better to ask forgiveness than permission._ > -Programmer Proverb, origin unknown For any complex system, from a modern computing device, to the legal code of a nation, to the social norms of a culture, the Foundational mind's first interest -- the objective source of truth -- concerns what one _can_ get away with, in the system _as it currently exists._ When the Foundational look at a system through an objective lens, they put aside all aspirational or revolutionary ambitions, they pass no moral judgements on the system's failings, and do not concern themselves with changing things. In the objective stance, when the Foundational mind looks at the legal system of a nation, in all its complexity and verbosity and unreadable legalese, their first thought is not "This is too long" but rather "This is too short," by which they mean "This is vague, despite the clutter." Though one does not require a Foundational mind to recognize the obvious fact that legal codes do not simply execute step-by-step on the CPU of society, like computer code runs on a machine, the Foundational feel this fact more viscerally, more immediately, and more constantly than other minds. They cannot feel they understand a law unless they understand the unwritten truths that govern its enforcement as well. From the objective stance, legal system of a nation consists not only of its explicit laws, but of which laws are enforced with which frequencies and in response to which cues. Without documentations of the unwritten incentives and constraints that the enforcers are subject to, the Foundational mind feels the written laws are wildly incomplete, and mostly useless. For example, consider the phenomenon of "brown bagging." ![[brown-bagging-03.png]] In most of the US, it is illegal to drink alcohol in public. It is, however, common. The phenomenon of "brown bagging" refers to the act of placing a brown paper bag around alcohol consumed in public, in order to (ostensibly) "conceal" it. ![[brown-bagging-08-collage.jpg]] The police are not fooled by this. Further, the brown bag does not change the laws in any way. ![[brown-bagging-06.png]] If this was a true arms race between public drinkers attempting to conceal open containers, and police attempting to enforce this law, then the phenomenon of brown bagging would not exist. If this was a true arms race, the drinker's brown bag would be helping the police to arrest them. After all, there are countless brands of alcohol, and it is easier to identify a brown bag at a distance than to identify every brand of alcoholic drink in existence. So why advertise visibly that one is breaking a law, by a form of "concealment" that reveals more than it conceals? The answer is that the police do not actually want to enforce this law, in most cases. They generally have better things to do, and they do not appear to benefit from enforcing this law, except in cases where failing to enforce it would reflect poorly on them. As such, there arose an unwritten agreement between law enforcement and public drinkers. Keep the bottle in a bag and don't make trouble, and the police will have enough plausible deniability to look the other way. In other words, the police are willing to pretend they didn't notice, as long as the public drinker does them the favor of making this lie plausible. The brown bags are not the drinker's way of deceiving the police. Rather, they are the drinker's way of doing the police a favor. Of course, this is never stated openly, nor is it written down. There is no legal statute that codifies this fact. Further, given that the average homeless person is aware of the brown bag dynamic, it is hardly something that requires a Foundational mind to notice. The point is that the Foundational mind cannot put these examples aside, or simply view them as special cases. To the Foundational mind, the entire legal system is a continuous and undocumented form of the brown bag phenomenon. When assurances are needed, the Foundational mind prefers tools that offer more reliability and predictability, for example cryptographic signatures. As one developer so eloquently put it: > _Laws can change, and laws are kind of useless in the real world. They're not real._ > -Jeremy Soller, author of Redox OS. The Foundational mind is not concerned with how systems are _supposed_ to work. When they adopt the Objective stance, all that matters is the cause and effect relationships that govern the system in practice. Though documentation is not always useless, nothing in its nature causes it to be useful. Documentation may be useful, or it may be noise, or propaganda. Either way, it has no causal relationship to the world as it is, and the Foundational mind tends to be suspicious of it. All that matters is reality. Reality does not come with a user's manual or handbook. It is up to the scientist, the Foundational mind, to write her books for her. ### 2. The Aspirational Stance > _If anyone says "But we've always done it that way" I will immediately materialize and haunt you for 24 hours._ > -Grace Hopper The Foundational are not necessarily unaware of Social Reality. Though many of the Foundational's most famous members have been described as blissfully unaware of the social world and its expectations, others among the Foundational are known to be acutely aware of social protocols in minute detail, and known to be equally adept at navigating them. The distinction we make here is not one of ability, but of focus. Further, it would be a misunderstanding to confuse the Foundational and their concerns with the single minded desire for "rigor." Some of the least "rigorous" areas of each field are deeply "Foundational." What sets the Foundational apart is their inability to prevent themselves from winding up at the extremes. They cannot focus on "things as they conventionally are" without pain. These days, the highest density of foundational thinkers is found in the culture we call developers, though the density of foundational minds is higher than average among physicists, engineers, discontented mathematicians, and college freshmen who begin as philosophy majors before running away screaming from that department as soon as possible. However, the Foundational have been part of human cultures since the earliest days of our species. This mindset is not inherently tied to "foundations" in the sense of "foundations of mathematics," nor is it inherently tied to "computing," or "philosophy," or "irreverence" per se. The Foundational mind has an intense desire to re-create systems from scratch, returning to "the beginning the creation," as it were, and building up from first principles. In the earliest strata of human history, the individuals showing the strongest signs of Foundational mind were the nameless Authors of the books we now call bibles.[^1] [^1]: This is strictly an attribute of the Authors, and no such claim is made for the latter day Readers, religious or otherwise. In what follows, we will refer to this group as "The Authors," or equivalently "The Nameless." All of Eric S Raymond's criteria for "hacker culture" are found among the Nameless, in the collected volumes they produce. When it adopts the Aspirational stance, the foundational mind is nearly always dissatisfied with "how things are," and focuses instead on "how things could be in the future," or "how things could have been" if history had unfolded differently. To the extent that the Foundational focus on "things as they are," they focus on that which is undocumented, or that which is true, but little known, rarely discussed, or taboo. This leads to a general pattern of irreverence and playfulness among the foundational, a sort of built-in disrespect for convention and orthodoxy. In summary: Though the "1" character could not articulate why, it is not surprising for an interest in the lowest-levels of a system to co-occur with a desire that such content is expressed in a way that is (as 1 might say) "silly." In other words, it is not odd or quirky for a love of assembly to co-occur with a feeling that the best format for said content is a leather bound bible that often says "fuck." This is a natural consequence of how the Foundational mind works. In every field, the Foundational mind asks: 1. Objectively: How much can I get away with? 2. Aspirationally: How else could things be? --- We now return to our regularly scheduled [[sys/devices/punchlines/1|...]]