Gongol.com Archives: February 2025
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February 1, 2025
Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility
Facebook's computer-engineering mantra for a long time was Mark Zuckerberg's rallying cry to "Move fast and break things". It's catchy, and it sounds like the kind of attitude that gets results. But even at Facebook, the motto quickly outlived its usefulness, and it gave way (in 2014) to the much less mellifluous "Move fast with stable infrastructure". Zuckerberg himself may not have matured much, but his product had to. ■ "Move fast and break things" may have impressed the sort of minds that are impressed by mere pithiness, but it was bad practice even when Zuckerberg initially made it his slogan. Complex systems are always to be handled with care: Is there a backup plan in place? Have critical processes, settings, and data been archived safely in case a reversion is needed? Are there checkpoints and validation steps along the way to make sure that dependencies aren't inadvertently broken? Does everyone on the team have an understanding of what results will indicate success or failure? Has security been designed into the process and into the final product? ■ All are vital questions to ask in the process of making significant changes -- not only in computing, but in any other process involving more than a handful of people. Speed can be a virtue -- "Speed equals success", in the words of Jim Mattis -- but successful tactical speed is virtually always the result of strategic prudence. An army (or a Marine division) can punch quickly into enemy territory, but it had better not do so without planning and forethought around matters like the supply lines that ensure food, fuel, and bullets make their way to the front line. ■ A bias in favor of impulsive speed isn't a virtue. "Move fast and break things" is a battle cry of emotional immaturity, combining an overconfidence in one's own raw intelligence, an underappreciation of unforeseen consequences, and a potentially devastating lack of intellectual humility. Computer systems can be both powerful and amazingly responsive, so it's no surprise that people who spend lots of time around them can fall into a sort of God complex. But they also need to know better. ■ The things we can create with our massive human brains can quickly become even more complex than any one of us can fully understand. People who prioritize speed above all and disregard the fragility of the innumerable complex systems around us put themselves and others at great risk. To those minds that only respond to simple turns of phrase, consider this: Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility.
February 2, 2025
Technology rules don't always make sense, but the United States Copyright Office has done the world a favor by issuing guidance that quite rationally concludes, "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements". It's a good conclusion on both of the most important levels. ■ First, it is a rational conclusion on the merits and appeals to existing law (instead of staking out new ground unnecessarily). Copyright law -- which in America is as old as the Constitution itself (Article I, Section 8) -- is for the protection of people, not automation. Thus the guidance is harmonious with the very point of having protections for intellectual property; machines don't need our help. ■ The decision also makes sense on a practical level. If any content generated by unsupervised artificial intelligence can be granted copyright protection, then the incentive structure for content mills to carpet-bomb society with rent-seeking content would go wild. AI-generated slop is already gumming up the works of the Internet, with bad or hallucinated information now appearing in places where it contaminates the training material for further generations of AI, adding an apparent (but utterly misleading) paper trail to bad information. ■ Some of that may get sorted out. But it also might not. And if it's bad for junk content to clutter the Internet, it may be even worse for it to begin cluttering the shelves of libraries and other curated repositories of information. It's one thing if Tom Clancy is still employing an army of human ghostwriters from beyond the grave; it's quite another if human names can start getting copyright credit for junk content published into books by the thousands. ■ With so much worthwhile and timely content already available in the marketplace, we should hope to see quality take precedence over a firehose of often false mediocrity. Much of that content will still make its way into the world, but denying it the protections of copyright is a good first step.
February 3, 2025
Every organization, from the smallest mom-and-pop cafe to the world's most sophisticated military, depends heavily upon institutional memory: The knowledge held by the people who make up the institution. Most of that institutional memory in most organizations is retained informally, passed along through stories, apprentice-like relationships, and hard-won experience. In other cases, it's formally documented -- in training manuals, after-action reports, yearbooks, and corporate archives. ■ Well-run institutions treat this form of memory as a living resource. They study, document, and use their institutional knowledge, refining it and incorporating it into ongoing decision-making. Documentation is a sort of superpower: When it's done regularly and kept current as evolutionary progress is made, it allows the organization to become better and entrench those gains, even as old members leave and new ones are brought in. ■ Documentation is also vital to ensuring that people don't get out over their skis. Every generation and every line of human endeavor brings about a fresh crop of people who think they know better than everyone else because some seemingly new idea has occurred to them. It's an especially common trait of the young and intellectually gifted. (Who hasn't encountered an insufferable teenager who won't shut up after their first reading of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx?) ■ Clubs, private firms, government agencies and departments, charities, and NGOs with what we might call "living" programs for institutional memory can help to protect themselves from the damage these neophytes can do. Calvin Coolidge put it succinctly: "It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new." And he said it more than a century ago, in 1919. ■ Very few ideas are really ever entirely new, and those who loudly and overconfidently represent themselves as the first to "discover" things are often merely novices who don't know how much they don't know. A living program of institutional memory won't always tone down the confidence of the zealous convert, but no organization should think itself immune to risk without making a deliberate effort to approach knowledge-keeping -- not just "what" and "how", but crucially "why" -- as an intrinsically important function.
February 5, 2025
A 10-year-old boy was one of the people injured by flying debris when a medevac airplane crashed in Philadelphia. He was in a car with his father and siblings, and as his father attempted to steer the vehicle to safety, the boy shielded his little sister. Despite taking a fragment of metal to the skull, he has regained consciousness and is on a path to recovery. ■ In the hospital, the boy asked his father, "Daddy, did I save my sister?" (The 4-year-old was OK.) Those words, though, are enough to arrest the full attention of any sensible adult. ■ A lot of people profit, either directly or indirectly, from trying to convince other people of the bad in the world: Conspiracies, criminality, and countless forms of malevolence. And it is true that there are evil people among us (a few), as well as people who really aren't motivated by evil but who may succumb to evil temptations (a few more). ■ But most people -- a supermajority, really -- are out to do the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. If we were truly drowning in evil spirits, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. Most people are like the heroic 10-year-old, who sense a responsibility to protect those more vulnerable than themselves. We express this sense in different ways and with different levels of self-sacrifice, but it's a thread that comes within human nature for most of us. ■ It's a thread worth remembering. There's no way for all of the imagined evils to be real, even if a few of them really are true. Our species is cooperative and social by nature -- anyone who violates those conditions through stealing, selfishness, or antisocial behavior is a threat to us in our natural state. If we expect that most others are trying to do right, even if in flawed or incomplete ways, then we can sustain hope. ■ A 10-year-old trying to save his sister is a hero, for certain -- but he's also an exemplar of what's most normal in all of us, rather than some strange outlier. If his story seems well outside the norm because we're consuming too much media that makes the deviants among us seem like the normal ones, then it's time to recalibrate our information diets.
February 7, 2025
UNI to tear down Campbell Hall
The University of Northern Iowa has announced its intentions to tear down Campbell Hall, a residence hall that has stood for seven decades. The dormitory "has $27 million worth of deferred maintenance" and only housed about 600 students. $45,000 per bed seems like a fairly high price to pay for a renovation, especially when compared with a median price of $148,000 per room to construct a brand-new hotel. There are probably some important differences in cost between the two types of construction, but assuming that each room could house two students, the cost to renovate clearly ran into the same zone as the cost of new construction. ■ For further comparison, the university built an entirely new apartment-style residence hall in 2011-12 for around $20 million, for about $100,000 a room. Construction costs have inflated quite a lot since that time, but certainly not by double -- perhaps by 60% to 70%. And at the end of the day, even a renovated building is still old. ■ Deferred maintenance remains the elephant in the room that America just doesn't want to address. College buildings are sometimes generously funded by benefactors at the time of construction but inadequately endowed for the long term. Computer systems are designed for the state of the art in one period but never fundamentally upgrades, leaving airlines (for example) still using dot-matrix printers. Cities build ambitious infrastructure projects with wide boulevards and eye-catching bridges, but neglect to upgrade the hidden infrastructure of levees and pipes and sewers that make urban life sustainable. ■ America is exceptionally good at tearing down the old and replacing it with the new; this much is to our credit. But we need to find ways to grow more dedicated to the often uninspiring but essential duty to pay for ongoing maintenance as an investment. That tends to express itself in political outcomes, but it starts as a cultural choice: We have to value a practice enough to be conscious of what it does for us, and to be ashamed if we don't follow through on doing it. Rust and entropy eventually come for almost all things.
February 8, 2025
Just half a decade before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote a set of memoirs which included this assertion: "Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problems to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied." ■ If the idea of Black History Month is to have any meaning, it ought to be in exposing Americans to more encounters with historical artifacts that been under-appreciated or under-exposed -- foremost among them, primary source materials written by authors like Washington. Invariably, that leads to uncomfortable tensions: After all, one of Washington's own "hard, stubborn problems" was that he suffered enslavement at the hands of another human being. The very idea is so offensive that it's natural to be turned away from wanting to consider such an awful institution or any of its consequences any further. ■ But if the reader looks away or retreats to a categorical way of thinking, they risk denying something enormously valuable to the author: His agency. Washington published "My Larger Education" in 1911, just shy of half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 46 years after the 13th Amendment. He had every reason to expect that any intelligent reader then would share the same categorical rejection of slavery as a reader would today. ■ Yet he still shared those words intentionally: He pitied people like those enslavers who enjoyed a life of nothing but ease, not because he wished enslavement on anyone, but because he knew that choices make a life just as much as circumstances. ■ Even if it makes us uncomfortable, and even if it makes us want to object categorically ("Nobody should have to face the circumstances he did!" is a perfectly normal reaction), it's important for modern ears to hear a reflection like Booker T. Washington's and appreciate the enormous strength of his character. To receive and repeat his words isn't to validate the conditions of slavery, it is to celebrate the triumph of human character over evil circumstances and sinister institutions. ■ This is a real person, speaking to us from beyond the grave, asserting the right to look down with pity upon people who undoubtedly thought themselves to be his superiors in life. That's an assertion of moral standing; one which says that his human life was fully valuable, no matter what others did, and that we should see equal value in all human lives in our own time.
February 9, 2025
What happens between and among celebrities is generally of lesser importance than the value of the paper upon which the gossip columns are printed. Very few things worthy of note or admiration happen in the limelight. ■ Occasionally, though, rather than serving as a helpful example to others, someone chooses to serve as a horrible warning instead. Howie Mandel, for instance, has done exactly this by bringing the comedian Bill Burr onto his podcast and surprising Burr with a guest visit from rock star Billy Corgan. ■ Corgan has previously suggested to Mandel that he has been told credibly of the scandalous prospect that he and Burr are unwitting half-brothers. Mandel decided to exploit this rumor because "I thought it was funny". ■ The stunt should have been stopped at the brainstorming stage for sheer lack of good taste. But there are certainly quarters where good taste isn't considered a useful boundary, since it can fail to get audiences' juices flowing. That's sad, and it speaks poorly of people who continue to patronize that kind of entertainment, almost as much as it does of the people who create it. ■ Certainly, though, the encounter should have been stopped on the grounds that it treated both Corgan and Burr as objects to be manipulated for entertainment value, rather than as dignified human beings. Something is badly broken in a person who sees a shadowy but potentially intimate connection between other people as a vehicle for laughs and attention. ■ It's even worse that Mandel has put on a show of feeling wounded by a lack of acknowledgment of his supposed apology. Nobody is entitled to forgiveness, and even a sincere apology is often far less than a complete act of repair for harm done to others. There's a real sickness in objectifying others and then whimpering about one's own hurt feelings. It may be too much to expect Mandel or anyone on his team to truly reconcile the error of their ways, but it shouldn't be too much for audience members to ask honestly whether their own appetite for shock value has gone too far.
February 13, 2025
Apparently not content with the neverending flood of spam texts and voice messages promising deals on "your car's extended warranty", Jeep has decided to permit in-dashboard advertising for an extended warranty plan on new vehicles. The oversized display screen has been a feature of some vehicles for more than a dozen years, and a majority of all new cars for at least ten, but the explicit conversion of the displays into advertising panels is reckless. ■ Giant touchscreens may be adaptable for the programmers working behind the scenes of automaking, but they are a terrible development for the drivers of any vehicles that are not fully self-driving. They are distracting (basically out of necessity) and inevitably cause problems particularly at night, when drivers' eyes need to be able to detect obstacles in low light. But even in the best of circumstances, touchscreens demand lots of attention that should be devoted to the act of driving instead. ■ Analog inputs, like buttons, dials, and switches, are not always well-designed. But, at their best, they are plainly easier to make intuitive and non-disruptive to the conduct of the driver. It's known that drivers perceive their vehicles as extensions of themselves -- it's why a rental car takes some getting used to, and why someone driving their own car can often tell precisely how far away they're parked from a curb. Likewise, a good cabin design becomes an extension of the driver's space, making it intuitive where to reach to raise the temperature or turn down the radio. Touchscreens and their menu trees are impossible to navigate so unconsciously. ■ And an analog display is much harder to abuse by filling it with uninvited advertising for extended warranties -- or anything else. Just because technology makes some behaviors possible doesn't authorize making parasitic choices about how to treat vehicle "consumers". It's dangerous enough to let us all on the road with vehicles that can weigh 7,000 or 8,000 pounds and have deadly blind spots caused by factors like wildly excessive hood heights. Automakers need to show the social sense and public-interestedness to know when it's time to pass on one more opportunity to advertise to chronically distracted drivers.
February 14, 2025
Like people, companies sometimes have suitors. And sometimes those suitors get rejected, just as OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) have spurned a takeover offer from X (formerly known as Twitter). ■ The offering price tells us one thing: At least two parties think the company is worth more than $97.4 billion -- the offeror and the offeree. It would be irrational to offer a price higher than the perceived value of the firm, and it would likewise be crazy to reject an offer for much more than intrinsic value. ■ But the whole story tells us something else. We are not well-equipped to handle large institutions run by any rules other than large, for-profit shareholding. OpenAI has an unusual structure that tries to blend a non-profit mission with a semi-profit business. The origins of the structure come from the perception that artificial intelligence is a special kind of public good, and that it requires a special kind of managerial orientation. ■ Within a capitalist or market-driven economy, the for-profit model will always predominate. The profit motive is almost undefeated when it comes to encouraging innovation, progress, and efficiency. But that's not always what's optimal for society. ■ Especially where there are distinct matters of public interest involved, we need to be experienced and familiar with a toolkit that doesn't just include C-corporations, but also regulated utilities, mutual associations, co-ops, and the like. And then we need to be sure those other structures attract people just as skilled, thoughtful, and forward-thinking as any conventional for-profit.
February 15, 2025
One of the main objections cited against the practice of a country running trade deficits with others is that the accumulated deficits ultimately represent a transfer of capital, now or in the future, from the country running the deficit to the countries on the other side of the ledger. Some very intelligent people have raised this objection, as have more than a few unintelligent ones. ■ Foreign ownership is often unpopular: Just look at the excruciating lengths to which two Presidential administrations have now gone to block Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. And Japan is one of our strongest allies -- its interests are tightly aligned with America's, both geopolitically and economically. If ever there were a friendly country into whose hands we could trust to place a few assets, Japan would be at or near the top of the list. Yet even with that in mind, the objections remain loud and often deeply irrational. ■ But there is a different way to look at trade deficits. Lots of countries have really big export economies in very specific products: Finland exports a massive amount of wood. Saudi Arabia exports oil and its byproducts. Iceland exports lots of aluminum. These countries have certain inherent competitive advantages in those products, and it would be silly to expect them not to make full use of those advantages. ■ What if the United States were seen to have a massive natural advantage in business formation? What if our strength isn't an endowment of natural resources, but the ability to start valuable new companies? In other words, what if LLCs and Delaware-based S-Corps are our version of Saudi Arabian oil? ■ And what if that's OK? Ecuador produces more bananas than its population could possibly eat, so it exports huge volumes of bananas. Perhaps we simply ought to see (to oversimplify a bit) that the United States produces more shares of stock than our population is willing to buy -- at least, in comparison with the bananas and big-screen TVs and other stuff we'd rather buy -- and so we export those shares of stock rather than letting them go to waste here. ■ There may, of course, be sound reasons to object to other aspects of our trade behaviors, and some people are so unwaveringly opposed to foreign ownership of any type that they object on that principle alone. But just like Ecuador has a physical climate especially conducive to growing bananas, the United States has a legal, social, and economic climate that is especially conducive to business formation. ■ Maybe we should recognize that as a unique strength -- one that ought to temper how we look at trade deficits. If we can put aside our reflexive nationalistic pride, is there anything entirely wrong with selling off a few businesses once in a while, especially if our capital markets are so well-developed that domestic investors have countless other investments from which to choose? ■ There are few, if any, real obstacles to Americans buying American assets, so the ones that ultimately end up for sale on a global market might well be those that Americans don't see a future in owning. Besides, if those American companies require further investment to stay competitive, most of the spending on them will probably take place with nearby American vendors. If we can think of business creation as a special American export, then we might not be in the dire straits that conventional thinking about trade may lead us to believe. Maybe we're just bottling our entrepreneurial spirit and selling it for a premium price.
February 16, 2025
An award one would rather not receive
Kaja Kallas, until recently the prime minister of Estonia and now one of the European Union's top diplomats, has been honored with an award at the Munich Security Conference to recognize her "for her essential leadership in rallying support for Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion, recognizing her as a resilient and widely respected leader and staunch defender of the rule of law". ■ Unsurprisingly, she deflected praise from herself to the people of Ukraine. Kallas proves that clarity and direct language have a vital place in orienting a response to bloodthirsty aggression. Everything that has happened to Ukraine over the last three years has been the result of choices ultimately made within the Kremlin. The war could end tomorrow if the right order were issued from somewhere within sight of Red Square. ■ Kallas is one of the clearest voices about the tragic consequences if no such order is given, because it's clear that the aggressor's impulses aren't limited to Ukraine alone. But Europe needs to not only be included in discussions about peace, but to have broad popular buy-in over the importance of standing strong, too. ■ Europe's defensive posture has, in many ways, grown flabby and sclerotic. That's particularly so when looking beyond just the obvious measures of military capability: Depending on natural gas from Russia or telecommunications equipment from China leave European countries strategically tied up. That in turn makes the EU less of a credible threat, and people other than the leaders of the Baltic States need to be vocal about fixing that.
Iowa: No teams, six "home" markets
Major League Baseball makes life really hard on fans in Iowa, giving six different teams the right to black out games in a state that is home to none of them.
A plea for the integrated psyche
Samantha Hancox-Li: "[P]arodies of traditional masculinity or femininity can never fill the gaping void left by the absence of the other gender's virtues"
An assessment worth reading about what Ukraine has been able to do when challenged by a much more fearsome enemy
February 17, 2025
Some Los Angeles fires were sparked by live power lines
If there really were serious breakdowns in communication between firefighters and the power company, it points to a serious failure in systemic design. Some things just shouldn't be difficult to do, and getting power lines de-energized in the middle of a fire outbreak should be counted among those things.
Airliner crash at Toronto Pearson
Astonishingly good fortune that nobody was killed
The dawn of computer weather graphics
(Video) The BBC shares clips from the changeover from giant maps illustrated with magnets to computer-generated graphics. Noteworthy is how clean the graphics (including the text) come across, despite how comparatively rudimentary computer graphics were in 1985. Someone at the BBC put real thought into color, fonts, and shading.
February 18, 2025
A major warning sign from China
China has just issued a major warning sign which the rest of the world shouldn't ignore: Not about its external ambitions, but about its internal fragility. Xi Jinping has been quoted by state-run media saying, "It is the right time for the majority of private business and entrepreneurs to show their talent". It's not a particularly poetic take, but it reveals a lot in its subtext. Something has Xi alarmed about his country's economy. ■ It's also worth noting that among the audience members targeted for the message was Jack Ma of Alibaba. The same Jack Ma who effectively went missing for a couple of years after he criticized some government regulators. Someone like him doesn't just show up in the government's favorable public light if they feel strong enough to keep him in the penalty box. ■ If Xi is putting the private sector on notice that it's going to need to step up its game, he is telegraphing that the economy is weaker than he needs it to be in order to feel secure in his regime's internal stability. Every power structure depends on some form of legitimacy. Democratic elections are the best way, to be certain, but even dictators depend upon a certain amount of buy-in from others. When they lose it, they often lose their own lives (see: Muammar Qaddafi, final days of). ■ Xi needs economic growth because it is the widely-recognized token the Communist Party has exchanged with the people of China as a substitute for their natural political and civil rights and liberties. If the economy stalls, the party's legitimacy is undermined. And if it has stalled enough that Xi is trying to rally the economic troops in public, then things may be worse than the official data might reveal. ■ The CCP isn't particularly good at adapting to bad news or big trends promptly; look at how long it took them to realize that the One Child Policy was a demographic doom loop (something that should have been evident from simple math done decades ago). Even the tech industry can't move fast enough to reignite a stalling economy of China's size, so the fact there appears to be some grasping underway should serve as a noteworthy warning.
Someone's been trying to sabotage German naval vessels
It's not hard to guess which country is probably the culprit
Import taxes and the American manufacturer
The higher up the economic food chain, the more likely it is that import taxes are going to cause hassles
Nearby pilot caught Toronto crash on video
(Video) And there's at least some data to suggest that the plane was coming in hard at a very bad time for ground conditions
February 19, 2025
Repair is possible, but it takes time
In 1945, the Japanese occupation of Korea was ended by the defeat of Japan by Allied forces. That occupation lasted for 35 long and painful years, during which countless crimes and horrors were committed against the Korean people. Korea had little time to recover before the Korean War split the peninsula and brought further agony to the people. ■ Yet, despite an often tumultuous path, South Korea has emerged as one of the world's biggest economies and most technologically advanced societies, with a civil society strong enough to put a rogue president in his place. ■ In the aggregate, it's a spectacular tale: The Japanese occupation ended just 80 years ago, the blink of an eye in historical terms, and yet the two countries were able to normalize relations just 20 years after the occupation ended -- and today, both are among the most advanced societies in the world, able to jointly celebrate their mutual accord. ■ That doesn't mean the past is entirely forgotten, nor forgiven, nor repaired. The relationship remains a work in progress. But it does go to show that prosperity and liberalization can go a long way towards creating incentives to get along and even to reconcile. ■ It's unlikely that the two countries would recognize anything remotely close to an alliance today if either one had remained poor or had rejected many of the hallmarks of a modern liberal society. That's worth remembering and recognizing in the affairs of the world around us: It's possible to overcome a terrible past, but doing so takes time and effort. It stands the best chance of success if other macro-scale conditions, social and economic alike, are right.
The Secretary of Defense says he wants to cut Pentagon spending by $50 billion in a year -- out of a budget of about $850 billion.
On-ramp phrases for an Irish accent
"You know, your man across the road turned 33 the other day"
Russia attacks Ukrainian energy infrastructure
Look at whom they're trying to hurt and you'll have an idea of who's the evil side in the war
Warning indicators on the US economy
It's effectively impossible to predict when the economy will experience a downturn -- economics is a social science, and nobody can really predict the timing or the triggers that initiate a downturn. But it's prudent to keep an eye on mathematical models that have held up in the past.
Signet rings should make a comeback
The real killer app is to find a way to seamlessly use them for multi-factor authentication. If you could prove who you are with something light, simple, and always on your finger, it could be revolutionary. Multi-factor authentication looks for people to furnish two or three of (1) something you know, (2) something you have, or (3) something you are. Passwords are how we furnish the "something you know", but digital jewelry could be a great way to supply the "something you have".
February 20, 2025
Aside from clothing (where "fast fashion" is a very real market force), few areas of culture are as subject to trends as parenting. Even if not everyone becomes a parent, everyone has been on the receiving end of parenting -- so feelings run high and nobody much doubts that they, themselves, see how it should be done. ■ The latest in the ultra-long line of parenting trends is "FAFO parenting", which derives its name from an off-color phrase that effectively means "You'll get what's coming to you, and you'll deserve it". ■ To a narrow extent, there is some room for parenting via natural consequences -- when the stakes are low and the feelings run high, it can be useful for children to see that the world is indeed ruled by cause and effect, and that their choices can be those causes. As some people represent it, "FAFO parenting" is just an extension of that logic. ■ Yet it's noteworthy how many approaches to parenting -- and management, teaching, coaching, and law enforcement -- depend upon a faulty model of the person who is being influenced. The flaw is in seeing them as objects, rather than as complete human beings. Certainly, the whole experience of childhood is formative; there's lots of shaping and molding that takes place. ■ But we recognize fairness before we can form sentences and we remember circumstances of our treatment from our first years, even if toddlers can be unreliable narrators. Everyone has at least a hazy memory or two of how they felt in the midst of a pre-school experience. That memory is part of the integral whole of the person. ■ We are, in terms of temperament, personality, and lots of other orientations, whole not long after birth. And a lot of parenting would be better if it started from the assumption that the child is, in fact, complete, rather than some kind of puzzle still under construction.