Hm! I see what you're saying here about the difference between Science and God, and perhaps this goes back to the Old Testament / New Testament dichotomy you were talking about before? *thinks* Or, more likely, perhaps just down to my peculiar relationship with God and faith, in which part of my struggle is not feeling like I have at all a handle on what God may or may not be trying to tell me. (This is just me, by the way! Mormons in general have a very, very strong belief in a two-way communication channel between self and God, to the extent that I feel fairly keenly the lack of such a relationship.) So your question on having faith in something that can't make a decision to honor your faith is actually one that I struggle with in terms of God, because where I'm standing I don't know that it's not the case. (Though I know what you're going to say back, I think: that it's our decision (or at least is in Judaism?) to have faith in a God that is making such a decision back. In Mormonism, I think that is also true -- but that this part of the discussion is often elided to some extent in favor of promoting an immediate relationship with God that is very difficult for me. ...and now I think I'm talking in circles, so hopefully this paragraph made any sense at all.) Interesting.
It also, I'm sure, makes a difference that the work I do is, like Moshe, principally analysis work rather than actually building gadgets (the gadgets we do build are mostly front-end for performing the analysis work), because I think you're right: when building things, allowances for the customer's wants are extremely important. (And I think that's true, as I said in the post, for the image from time to time: we are limited by our finite senses and brains, and we have to make images, that's the only way we can understand things -- one of the things I struggled with with "Waters" is that the very title is an image, but finally made my peace with it, mostly because I liked the title so much :) And, once ase finished rapping me over the head with beta, water shows up as both an image, something underlying the image, and the fragment of something connecting the two, so.)
When building there are no right answers, except to build as well and as carefully as possible? --but when doing analysis work, there is a right answer, or at least an uncorrupted one -- perhaps what you're producing is a cost-benefit analysis, but there's the accurate cost-benefit analysis and then there's the one that (maybe isn't even so different! but) looks good and will help you sell more of the algorithm or widget or whatever it is you're developing. And it is so, so tempting -- maybe you just show the results that came out well, not the tests that went poorly. (Oh, don't even get me started on data cherry-picking.) Or you made some optimistic assumptions in your analysis that you don't mention, or downplay a lot. Or you neglect to point out the condition under which your algorithm won't work at all. Or you carefully select what you graph to make things look good. I mean, obviously some of these are worse than others, and some of them are practically expected, and none of them are as bad as what Aaron did (except, oh God, data cherry-picking, and even that depends on how much of it you do). But it's a constant battle, I find, to maintain one's integrity to the work. And my company actually feels pretty strongly about doing good and solid and truthful work, and these problems still crop up because you want to please the customer and make it look like your algorithms are doing a good job, and because there is a fine line between selling your work truthfully/optimistically and making it look exaggeratedly good. (I always err on the side of underselling, but this is (one of the reasons) why management always has to look over my charts before I talk to the customer...)
And it probably also makes a huge difference that for a very large portion of my life, I fully expected to go into academia (and if I'd had just a bit more confidence, I might well have done so), and it would have been in a field that's not the field I currently work in. As a result of both those things, I still have the picture of academia as not so much ivory tower as the ultimate good :) (This is changing as I come more in contact with the academic papers in the field I currently work in, which are sometimes brilliant and sometimes make me roll my eyes because they clearly have not had any experience with real-life problems at all.)
I'd be very interested in that M&A paper if you'd like to send it (raspberryhunter at gmail). I also think, as I said, that I could make some small changes that would change the tenor of the CEO/Moshe relationship to something you would be more happy with, and I'd love to send those to you at some point to see what you thought. Though I think perhaps it's worth having more of this discussion first :)
But hm, so in general I agree that neither Moses nor Aaron (or their relative philosophies) can function without the other, which is part of my argument in both fics (and as you probably saw I even tagged "Waters" to that effect). I'm not convinced Schoenberg believed this, or at least I think he had a struggle with it as well -- I'm not at all convinced that Schoenberg thought Act III was a tragedy. I think he really did think Moses was right to throw Aaron out (perhaps it makes a difference that my libretto says Aaron drops dead at the end, thus strongly suggesting to me that either Aaron himself or God agreed with Moses?) and that Moses' viewpoint would then triumphantly be The Viewpoint (suggested to me by his addressing of the soldiers). Then again, I am also not convinced that the Act III libretto is a final draft -- it just doesn't read that way to me -- so perhaps if Schoenberg had reworked it again, this might have come out one way or another in a more clear way.
I like to think that Aaron and Moshe both overestimated the importance of Meriba-in-the-fic, though I suppose it also depends on what one thinks Aaron and Moses were thinking in Numbers 20. (I did read your Two Princes fic! And loved it! But in your fic, I think, Moses is the one who was clearly in the wrong? I suppose now that I'm no longer at least nominally trying to be anonymous, I can go and have discussions with you on all those too :) ) And the thing is, I think they both would've been in trouble if they hadn't made the deadline, yeah. But I don't think the CEO would have fired Moshe, (even as it was, Aaron assumed Moshe hadn't been fired), and even if Aaron had been fired (and maybe he would have been), Moshe would have been able to fight for Aaron, in that scenario. But he couldn't fight for Aaron precisely because of what happened. Hmm, I see none of that made it into the fic, and it should have... Why can't people just read my mind instead of the actual words? ;)
...I actually have no idea what Catholics believe about saints screwing up. I'll try to remember to ask someone about that at choir rehearsal. From the discussions recently, I know they certainly do believe that clergy can be very much mistaken! I believe the official Protestant line is that we're all saints and sinners, so yeah, a Protestant would say we all mess up. (Except for Jesus, presumably, but he was/is God, so that's different.) Mormons believe in principle that even the greatest people screw up (again excepting Jesus Christ) -- in fact, one of the best stories about Joseph Smith involves him browbeating God into letting him do something he really shouldn't -- and I believe this is the accepted reading of Numbers 20. (In practice, it is Not the Done Thing to criticize living leaders, much like you described the Hasidic sects in our previous conversation.)
It still bothers me, though, both because it's such a stupid mistake (and I don't think of Moses as stupid in that way -- though I like your interpretation in "Two Princes" because it does give a political/personality gloss to it that explains why it happened) and because the punishment for both brothers seems out of line with the magnitude of the offense. I know (and you've said) the answer is that he (they) ought to have known better! But still. Schoenberg, in particular, I think, would say (and pretty much did in Act III, I feel) that this was an Aaronesque touch, to emphasize the image of the rock rather than the idea of the Word, and that choosing the image over the idea (or using the image for himself rather than for God?) was what condemned him, not the bare act. Which I think is a very interesting interpretation, and one that appeals to me because at one stroke Schoenberg explains why it was done and why it was so important and merited such a punishment.
Identifying with Moses' struggle: ...I guess I neither identified with it nor was able to get over Moses being a total jerk when it was about religion, but when I translated it to science, I do identify with it and Moshe's behavior doesn't bother me? I... am not sure I like what that says about me. Well. There it is.
...So, in conclusion, heh. I guess in general this story said more about me than I had thought. That's a little frightening. :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-01-03 02:09 am (UTC)It also, I'm sure, makes a difference that the work I do is, like Moshe, principally analysis work rather than actually building gadgets (the gadgets we do build are mostly front-end for performing the analysis work), because I think you're right: when building things, allowances for the customer's wants are extremely important. (And I think that's true, as I said in the post, for the image from time to time: we are limited by our finite senses and brains, and we have to make images, that's the only way we can understand things -- one of the things I struggled with with "Waters" is that the very title is an image, but finally made my peace with it, mostly because I liked the title so much :) And, once
When building there are no right answers, except to build as well and as carefully as possible? --but when doing analysis work, there is a right answer, or at least an uncorrupted one -- perhaps what you're producing is a cost-benefit analysis, but there's the accurate cost-benefit analysis and then there's the one that (maybe isn't even so different! but) looks good and will help you sell more of the algorithm or widget or whatever it is you're developing. And it is so, so tempting -- maybe you just show the results that came out well, not the tests that went poorly. (Oh, don't even get me started on data cherry-picking.) Or you made some optimistic assumptions in your analysis that you don't mention, or downplay a lot. Or you neglect to point out the condition under which your algorithm won't work at all. Or you carefully select what you graph to make things look good. I mean, obviously some of these are worse than others, and some of them are practically expected, and none of them are as bad as what Aaron did (except, oh God, data cherry-picking, and even that depends on how much of it you do). But it's a constant battle, I find, to maintain one's integrity to the work. And my company actually feels pretty strongly about doing good and solid and truthful work, and these problems still crop up because you want to please the customer and make it look like your algorithms are doing a good job, and because there is a fine line between selling your work truthfully/optimistically and making it look exaggeratedly good. (I always err on the side of underselling, but this is (one of the reasons) why management always has to look over my charts before I talk to the customer...)
And it probably also makes a huge difference that for a very large portion of my life, I fully expected to go into academia (and if I'd had just a bit more confidence, I might well have done so), and it would have been in a field that's not the field I currently work in. As a result of both those things, I still have the picture of academia as not so much ivory tower as the ultimate good :) (This is changing as I come more in contact with the academic papers in the field I currently work in, which are sometimes brilliant and sometimes make me roll my eyes because they clearly have not had any experience with real-life problems at all.)
I'd be very interested in that M&A paper if you'd like to send it (raspberryhunter at gmail). I also think, as I said, that I could make some small changes that would change the tenor of the CEO/Moshe relationship to something you would be more happy with, and I'd love to send those to you at some point to see what you thought. Though I think perhaps it's worth having more of this discussion first :)
But hm, so in general I agree that neither Moses nor Aaron (or their relative philosophies) can function without the other, which is part of my argument in both fics (and as you probably saw I even tagged "Waters" to that effect). I'm not convinced Schoenberg believed this, or at least I think he had a struggle with it as well -- I'm not at all convinced that Schoenberg thought Act III was a tragedy. I think he really did think Moses was right to throw Aaron out (perhaps it makes a difference that my libretto says Aaron drops dead at the end, thus strongly suggesting to me that either Aaron himself or God agreed with Moses?) and that Moses' viewpoint would then triumphantly be The Viewpoint (suggested to me by his addressing of the soldiers). Then again, I am also not convinced that the Act III libretto is a final draft -- it just doesn't read that way to me -- so perhaps if Schoenberg had reworked it again, this might have come out one way or another in a more clear way.
I like to think that Aaron and Moshe both overestimated the importance of Meriba-in-the-fic, though I suppose it also depends on what one thinks Aaron and Moses were thinking in Numbers 20. (I did read your Two Princes fic! And loved it! But in your fic, I think, Moses is the one who was clearly in the wrong? I suppose now that I'm no longer at least nominally trying to be anonymous, I can go and have discussions with you on all those too :) ) And the thing is, I think they both would've been in trouble if they hadn't made the deadline, yeah. But I don't think the CEO would have fired Moshe, (even as it was, Aaron assumed Moshe hadn't been fired), and even if Aaron had been fired (and maybe he would have been), Moshe would have been able to fight for Aaron, in that scenario. But he couldn't fight for Aaron precisely because of what happened. Hmm, I see none of that made it into the fic, and it should have... Why can't people just read my mind instead of the actual words? ;)
...I actually have no idea what Catholics believe about saints screwing up. I'll try to remember to ask someone about that at choir rehearsal. From the discussions recently, I know they certainly do believe that clergy can be very much mistaken! I believe the official Protestant line is that we're all saints and sinners, so yeah, a Protestant would say we all mess up. (Except for Jesus, presumably, but he was/is God, so that's different.) Mormons believe in principle that even the greatest people screw up (again excepting Jesus Christ) -- in fact, one of the best stories about Joseph Smith involves him browbeating God into letting him do something he really shouldn't -- and I believe this is the accepted reading of Numbers 20. (In practice, it is Not the Done Thing to criticize living leaders, much like you described the Hasidic sects in our previous conversation.)
It still bothers me, though, both because it's such a stupid mistake (and I don't think of Moses as stupid in that way -- though I like your interpretation in "Two Princes" because it does give a political/personality gloss to it that explains why it happened) and because the punishment for both brothers seems out of line with the magnitude of the offense. I know (and you've said) the answer is that he (they) ought to have known better! But still. Schoenberg, in particular, I think, would say (and pretty much did in Act III, I feel) that this was an Aaronesque touch, to emphasize the image of the rock rather than the idea of the Word, and that choosing the image over the idea (or using the image for himself rather than for God?) was what condemned him, not the bare act. Which I think is a very interesting interpretation, and one that appeals to me because at one stroke Schoenberg explains why it was done and why it was so important and merited such a punishment.
Identifying with Moses' struggle: ...I guess I neither identified with it nor was able to get over Moses being a total jerk when it was about religion, but when I translated it to science, I do identify with it and Moshe's behavior doesn't bother me? I... am not sure I like what that says about me. Well. There it is.
...So, in conclusion, heh. I guess in general this story said more about me than I had thought. That's a little frightening. :)