A small address of respect toward Richard Stallman

I find Richard Stallman charming and endearing. He is the eminent founder of the free software movement, where free software is what some people refer to as open source, to Stallman's dislike, and is to be contrasted to mere freeware. The term libre software is sometimes used to drive the point home. A combined term is free/open source software (FOSS).

His having started the GNU project was key. It was then so much easier for Linus Torvalds of the Linux fame to add kernel, and by combining it with GNU tools (and gcc), have a complete, if minimal, system. Even if Torvalds dislikes Stallman, he would have to admit to have benefited from Stallman's GNU GPL, the quintessential copyleft license. Wikipedia started with Stallman's GNU GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), I think, before it switched to CC-BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike). From what I recall, Stallman cooperated with them by making changes to GFDL to make the switch easy or even possible.

I was appalled when I saw Stallman unfairly attacked in 2019. I think he would even have had a case to sue for libel: untrue statements were made that harmed his reputation. I am not a lawyer, let alone a lawyer of American law (I am a Czech located in Czechia). The mindless quotation of the untrue statements by various media demonstrates what kind of bad/stupid people too many journalists are (it is quite possible that the stupidity is faux). There are also honorable journalists, e.g. Robert Whitaker.

All people who use their Android phones indirectly owe at least a little to Stallman; Android uses the Linux kernel. Linux, using Stallman's GNU GPL license and combined with GNU tools, is sitting on Google servers and elsewhere, doing the work not directly visible to the end users. (There are now some attempts to replace the GNU tools with Rust-based ones. I saw a report of a bug thereby introduced, but I cannot find neutral media reporting on it.)

Unlike e.g. Elon Musk, Stallman did not play the make-copies-of-the-genes game, the implied purpose/quasi-purpose of a biological body. The idea that he is some kind of woman-molester seems bizarre, if not impossible. Testimonies of women put that idea in doubt[1]. Instead, he contributed efforts from which many of us benefit, at relatively modest compensation. In return, he got notoriety, not always positive one (consider e.g. the Wired's title "Richard Stallman and the Fall of the Clueless Nerd"). He may have had a fairly leisure life, travel around the world, etc. He has not earned the huge money earned e.g. by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Google, Apple and Facebook executives, etc.

Some people seem to find Stallman difficult to work with, e.g. in relation to GCC (GNU compiler suite) and Emacs (extensible text editor using then-AI language Lisp for scripting), both having been forked as part of their history, where the forks seemed to have to do with Stallman. At the end of the day, it does not really matter all that much. If the only thing that Stallman did was create GNU GPL and GNU Manifesto, he would be a hero or would be properly credited as one. He did much more.

(I may have first taken note of Stallman when I downloaded Geek Gadgets for the Amiga, a port of GNU tools. It could have been in 1997 or 1998. From what I recall, they would not run on the plain Amiga 1200, which I originally had; a turbo card was required. They could have been one of the reasons for me having bought a turbo card.)

Further reading:

• Richard Stallman, wikipedia.org
• Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, 2nd edition changes by Richard Stallman, fedorapeople.org
• Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman, gnu.org (essays)
• stallmansupport.org

Simplicity and complexity

Some chaotic items (not a systematic outline):

• Occam's razor; Popper; empirical content of theories; Einstein's adage (theories should be as simple as possible but no more simple)
• number of items; number of tokens; number of types 
• Kolmogorov complexity: algorithmic compressibility
• apparent complexity joined with underlying simplicity: Mandelbrot set
• contrast: random-color pixel bitmap does not look complex, but has in general max Kol. complexity
• caveat: any bitmap can result from a stochastic/genuinely random plotting process; monkey at the typewriter writing a novel, given enough time
• complexity as a bareer to understanding
• simplicity and complexity in visual art
• (moderate?) complexity as source of pleasure 
• ornament as an addition to complexity; boring rectangles in modern architecture
• network; interrelatedness; tangledness
• simplicity and complexity of biological organisms
• apparent tendency toward increased complexity (multicellulars; ever more complex brains?)
• does Gould have a reservation? 
• simple organisms do not disappear; they are in general viable

This article could quite possibly be broken down into separate subjects. It implements the idea that doing semantic lexicography on names of concepts is not good enough; one should have a more discursive treatment. And that discursive treatment turns out to be rather encyclopedic. That is fine.

Kolmogorov complexity

Since in what follows, I repeatedly single out Kolmogorov complexity as one of the most plausible measures matching the intuitive concept of complexity (but beware of Manderlbrot!), let me introduce the concept. Approximately, the Kolmogorov complexity of a sequence of bytes is the minimum length of a program outputting that sequence, or the length of the sequence if all programs are longer. For instance, we could take Python to be the environment, prohibit all imports and then define Kolmogorov complexity as the length of the shortest Python program so constrained. This is usually not done in a mathematical treatment of Kolmogorov complexity. If we do not prohibit imports from Python standard library, it will feel more like cheating since the complexity will be hidden in the library being imported.

Let us have a look at some consenqunces of the definition. A string 010101...0101 has a low Kolmogorov complexity since a program outputting the sequence is very short no matter how long the sequence is. Similary, a sequence of squares (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, ...), no matter how long, has a low Kolmogorov complexity. On a more counter-intuitive note, images of the Manderlbrot set have low Kolmogorov complexity, since the program generating them is very short (we can hardwire the parameters into it). That is perhaps a bit counter-intuitive since the images appear rather complex, when made with the right parameters.

Simplicity and complexity of theories

The concept of simplicity is sometimes related to Occam's razor. From what I recall, it states that a theory should not posit more entities than necessary. Whether this should be called "simplicity" is unclear. There is an Einstein's adage that scientific theories should be as simple as possible but not more simple. (Should software user interface be as simple as possible but no more simple? Is the single-button mouse of Steve Jobs better? Does Dijkstra say something about untamed complexity?) Popper criticizes the criterion of simplicity and indicates that what really matters is the empirical content of a theory. The empirical content is the set of all potential refuting/falsifying observations. An empirical theory says the more, the more it forbids. But what is the complexity (lack of simplicity) of a scientific theory? One measure that comes to mind to Kolmogorov complexity. The theory is more simple, the easier it is to algorithmically compress. Ohm's law is an example of a very simple law, a linear dependence. Perhaps linear dependence is in some sense more simple than a quadratic dependence. And then, Ohm's law would be more simple than the Newton's gravitational formula relating masses and distance to force.

Simplicity and complexity of geometric shapes

One could perhaphs again use something like Kolmogorov complexity to identify the complexity of geometric shapes. Let's have a look.

What is more simple, a circle or a square? To my mind, intuitively, a circle is more simple. It shows rotational symmetry. Rotation is a key operation in the space in which we are living. Human motor system depends on rotation; translation is achieved by combining rotary motions. Our space seems to show no fundamental preference to orthogonal predefined axis, although on the Earth, the vertical direction seems well singled out. However, using something like Cartesian coordinates in the context of pixels on the computer screen (pixels organized orthogonally rather than, say, hexagonally as used to be the case on CRTs), plotting a square is much easier than plotting a circle. And thus, from that perspective, a square would be more simple than a circle. What is more simple, a circle or an (general) ellipse? Circle is more simple, since it has fewer parameters. Moreover, in the context of human artifact making (e.g. of a cup or a vase), the rotational symmetry of a circle is of great importance. It seems much more simple to make material artifacts showing rotational symmetry. Indeed, cups, plates and vases use the shape of circle, not an ellipse. The simplicity of the circle is what lead Aristotle to speculate that there are only two kinds of elementry motion, circular and translational. It was Kepler who discovered that the shapes of planetary orbits are approximately elliptical (he would have thought they were exactly elliptical, I guess). Any closed curve can be broken down into a composition of circular motions, per Weitz. I suspect that an ellipse needs an infinite sum of such circular motions. And then, what is more complex, a cardioid (a cycloid) or an ellipse? A cardioid would be more simple, perhaps, being composed of only two circular motions? But plotting an ellipse on an orthogonal pixel grid is rather simple: sin, cos and multiplication (plotting a circle is similar when one uses a similar algorithm, but is in a sense more simple using the Bresenham algorithm, which does not require float multiplication). What I suggest is that a technical examination of simplicity and complexity of shape may yield results a bit different from intuitive human responses.

The Mandelbrot set and other fractals are examples of shapes that appear rather complex to human inutition, but are supremely algorithmically compressible (the program plotting the Mandelbrot set is very short), and thus, they have low Kolmogorov complexity. In relation to the Mandelbrot set, each approximation of it seems to be a polynomic curve, in any case a smooth curve (assuming we use the criterion of distance from 0 greater than 2 as the escape detection criterion; we could also use a square criterion). Ever better approximation is achieved by increasing the number of iterations after which the examination of escaping is given up. The first approximation is a circle, the second is perhaps an ellipse, and further approximations increase the number of "folds" (or whatever I should like to call it). From a PNG (raster bitmap) coding perspective, the Mandelbrot set contains infinite information/structure: we can zoom ever deeper and see ever more detail; from the generability perspective, it only contains finite amout of information captured in the generation program/code. The point: what to a human can appear infinitely complex may hide great underlying simplicity.

The above may have a bearing on biological morphogenesis. Perhaps the underlying shape-generating process is more simple than the resulting shape appears to be. I don't know.

Simplicity and complexity in visual art

The right kind of complexity in visual art adds to its beauty, or to the pleasure from looking at it, I think. As regards paintings, the minimum complexity is in the empty canvas. The complexity has to be of the right kind: a random-color-pixel bitmap has great Kolmogorov complexity, but is in general no more interesting than Duchamp's pseudo-art (pseudo- by my assessment).

Modern functionalist or even brutalist architecture shows little complexity. It is rectangles all the way, quite often, with no ornament (since ornament is crime?) When in Brno in Freedom Square, when I look at the modernist Omega building, I see nothing of interest or worth noting; it could as well be a commie apartment block. Next to Omega, there is an interesting building full of ornament, with statues of men holding something (I am not good at describing these kind of things; at school, they taught me to spell properly, inflect properly and to analyze the grammatical structure of sentences, not to describe). I guess the purpose of this Omega thingy is to make the beauty of the building next to it stand out. (Okay. I dislike this modernist nonsense, at least in architecture.)

Simplicity and complexity in games

Chess is a supremely simple game, and still very popular. So is Japanese go. To my mind, go appears to be simpler; it has fewer kinds of pieces and the rules are simpler. But go seems harder to play by computers, and in that sense, one might consider it more "complex", although that may be a misnomer (see also my remarks on "computational complexity").

8-bit computer games were often rather simple (usually more complex than chess and go), and as the computer power increased, the games seemed to get more complex in general. And thus, Team17 Worms on the 16-bit/32-bit Amiga seems much more complex than Draconus on the 8-bit Atari. It seems players appreciate the increased complexity; as much as I like Draconus, I find Worms so much more appealing. This seems to relate to my previous remark that the right kind of increase of complexity in visual art seems to increase the pleasure response, although here, we are dealing with an increase of complexity in the game mechanics. (Worms also has more complex visuals, but that is not my point here.)

As something of an aside, even the simple Draconus on the 8-bit Atari understood that the right kind of visual and auditory complexity creates an aesthetic appeal. From the game mechanics perspective, the introductory graphics and animation is beside the point, and so is the celebrated introductory music. In general, computer game makers have not sided with the functionalist(?) doctrine that ornament is crime. Even in the context of the simple game of chess, makers of chess sets often make the point of making the pieces look complex in the right kind of way and thereby aesthetically pleasing. In a software implementation, one can surely implement a Unix-style console-based chess, where pieces are represented by letters, but a great deal of appeal is missing. Beauty is a great seducer of men, a saying goes. And thus, eye candy is a thing.

Complexity in font faces

Modern antiqua font faces (is that the right term?) are relatively simple, compared to fraktur. Sans-serif seems to be more simple than a serif font; and thus, Arial seems to be more simple than Times New Roman. When these faces are specified in Metafont or other font specification format (and sure enough, one installs fonts as computer files), we can again apply Kolmogorov complexity to determine one kind of complexity.

Gothic faces seem to be "cool" and more complex. These are not display faces.

Complexity of a writing script

Arguably, letter-based scripts (Latin, Cyrrilic) are more simple than east-Asian scripts. This relates well to Kolmogorov complexity. 

Computational complexity

There is what is known as time and space computational complexity (linear, n times log n, polynomial, exponential, etc.). I find that to be a misnomer. Since, Bubble sort is a supremely simple algorithm, but it has higher time computational complexity than quicksort. One could argue that the differentiating adjective "computational" saves the matter. I don't think so. I think it should be "demandingness" or the like. Perhaps "demanding" is a Anglo word, not Romance, and one would like to find a Romance (stemming from Latin) word, to have scientific vocabulary Latin-based or Greek-based.

Complexity of words

The number of syllables could be taken as one measure of the complexity of a word. And a word that is "foreign" could be taken to be more complex. Moreover, a word that is combined transparently from native morphemes could be more simple: it could be stored in the mind as indices to the morphemes (it perhaps is not so stored, but it could).

Complexity and information

Since Kolmogorov complexity can be taken to be one measure of information content, it suggests that a more complex object contains more information than a more simple object. Here, the idea is that an object contains "information" even if there is no mind trying to describe the object and even if the object is not about another object. The information amount in an object could be taken to be the information amount in a relatively complete description of the object. And thus, while e.g. a (material) vase is not an information object, it could be taken to contain information, e.g. in its shape. The matter is complicated by microscopic/nanoscopic chaotic irregularities present in material objects, including vases. A human describing or representing a vase would not usually care to represent these, in part since these are not easily accessible to inspection. If one would take the locations and other properties of the atoms in the vase to be part of complete information about the vase, the information amount would be huge.

Here, it is perhaps worth recalling the irony that a random-pixel-bitmap contains a lot of information in terms of Kolmogorov complexity (and perhaps also Shannon information measure), but to human mind, upon inspection, it contains no information at all. At any rate, it seems to contain no signal at all, only noise. This point has been made many times, including in Kevin Kelly's article on extropy, I think. At the same time, if we take a meaningful text stored in 7-bit ASCII and put these bytes into a video buffer, we also get something that looks like noise. But this apparent noise, when properly decoded, yields meaningful English text.

See also my Wikiversity userspace article on notes on a theory of interpretation, with related keywords decoding and deciphering.

Complexity of software

It was perhaps Dijkstra who said that untamed complexity is a key problem in software making, or the like. Modularization is a technique to make complexity more manageable. The fundamental module is a function/procedure, not a class, by my assessment. A larger module is the compilation unit, which can be reinterpreted as an analogue of a static class; in Python, that is a "module". I noted that the right kind of complexity adds to aesthetic appeal of visual artifacts. More complex software can be more interesting. But the purpose of most software is not to be interesting; it is to address practical problems. When the problem to be addressed is how to make the programmer harder to replace, this can naturally result in otherwise unnecessary complexity.

Use of simple language

From what I recall, Popper advocates for use of simple language in science and especially philosophy. The objective is to make refutation/criticism as easy and simple as possible. Additional layers of obfuscation make it harder to determine what exactly is being said, and then harder to discover problems. Simple language may be less aesthetically pleasing, but as far as accuracy/validity is concerned, that is beside the point. A pseudo-sophisticated person may produce superficially impressive complex sentences and challenging vocabulary that, upon closer examination, are saying little. That said, thinking back on the Einstein quote, science has to be sufficiently complex to capture the domain it is trying to capture. Arguably, Newton's mechanics is more simple than Einstein's mechanics, but that does not justify avoiding Einstein.

Simple persons

Some persons are said to be simple, perhaps to be called simpletons. Others are more sophisticated. One could talk of a complex personality, I think. The Czech humoristic novel Saturnin makes fun of someone speaking of complexity of human soul, I think; here being more of a simple person is not seen as necessarily bad. Let's also think of the pseudo-profundities and apparent sophistication of Hegel.

Complex as a noun

There is the military-industrial complex, or so they say. And some people seem to suffer from having a Freudian complex, or something of the sort. It is not clear to me what to say to elucidate these kinds of entities. A complex seems to be some compound object, perhaps not really an object but rather a quasi-object, depending on what concept of an object one has in mind.

Etymology

One can sometimes learn something from the etymology. Both simple and complex seem to be from Latin plectere (I did not bother to check a dictionary, to prevent going into yet another rabbit hole). More is to be added later.

Questions

• Does Stephen Wolfram have something like (new) science of complexity?
• Does Stewart Kaufman have some kind of science of complexity? (See also Kevin Kelly's Out of Control.)
• What does Kevin Kelly say about complexity, in his Out of Control? (Is that book online?)
• Is there Steven Jay Gould online, about complexity in biological organisms as evolutionary tendency?

Sources and inspiration 

Part of the literature I have read is listed in Wikiversity, on my user page. Popper is an obvious source here. Perhaps Hofstadter. Perhaps Kevin Kelly. I have a book by Gould, but I am not sure it treats of complexity. I wonder whether Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea could be relevant (which I have). Surely anthropology would have a lot to say about complexity, ornament and aesthetic response of humans to visual and other stimuli.

Further reading

• https://www.britannica.com/science/complexity-scientific-theory 

An analysis of the concept of good

 Some items serving as a rather chaotic mnenomic (not a systematic outline):

• multiple meanings of good 
• good vs. valuable; why value theory/axiology; ethics (not only)
• good artifact, good swimmer, good at swimming, good for X, good person; polymorphism
• reduction
• e.g. good artifact is one that serves well (goodly) its purpose
• e.g. good will is one that wills a good outcome
• e.g. good conduct is one that obeys good rules
• e.g. good rule is one whose universal adoption tends to lead to good outcomes
• e.g. good outcome is one that pleases a good person
• e.g. good person is one that is pleased with good outcomes (this, together with the above item, yields circularity) 
• e.g. good analysis is one that is true or valid (regardless of whether it is pleasing) 
• good horse
• good at work at a field
• good racing horse 
• good outcome, good state of the world
• X is a good swimmer; X has beeing a good swimmer; X has good being a swimmer
• good news
• good will
• self-reference: good analysis of the concept of good 
• good as desirable
• desirable vs. desired
• Aristotle speaks of good desired for its own sake (I think; beware of Greek-English translation)
• desirable by whom? 
• desirable by humans
• desirable by chimpanzees
• desirable by members of homo neanderthalis 
• desirable by Čapek's newts/salamanders
• desirable by human-like aliens/extraterrestrials
• desirable by artificial intellects
• desirable by Christian God
• desirable by Greek gods
• desirable by abstract universal cognitive and executive agents
• desirable by the creator of the universe, if any 
• situational concept of good; situation-relativism
• inversion
• missing a train seems bad but if the train derails, it may turn out good
• Three Miles Island was bad per se, but it was a good warning
• good as pleasing/pleasurable 

What follows is likely to be a rather poorly organized article, serving above all to capture ideas. The concept (or concepts) of good seems to be an outstanding philosophical challenge, a matter of disagreement.

Focus on adjectival concept of good. What follows will ask about the adjective good, its meaning or concept or concepts pointed to by that meaning (if that phrasing makes any sense). It does not deal with the noun good. It deals with English, but is expected to work reasonably well for other languages. For instance, an analysis of Czech (Slavic) dobrý and German gut is expected to deliver similar results.

Good as opposed to bad, not evil. The analysis is of good as opposed to bad, not evil. An analysis of good/non-evil can be done later. Nietszche has some sinister(?) analysis going jenseits/beyond good and evil, I think.

A survivalist/existentialist account of good can be this: an agent considers some things good and others bad. The agent seeks what is good (by his assessment) and avoids what is not good (by his assessment). The combination (agent, good-assignment) survives or it does not survive. If the agent is a biological individual, the good-assignment depends in part on the genes. Not only does the agent survive or not survive but also the genes get copied into future generations or they do not. Not only do the genes get copied or not but also the good-assignment, when put into words, gets copied into future or not. This account seems to have a subjectivist element, and focuses on the viability of a particular concept of good (but is it a concept? isn't it rather an operationalization?). For some uses of the word good, that seems uncompelling/unconvincing, e.g. a good swimmer or a good racing horse.

The concept vs. multiple concepts. The title speaks of the concept with a definite article but that is misleading; a dictionary entry typically gives multiple meanings. I hope that I will be able to ignore most of the meanings and obtain some interesting analysis anyway. In a self-referential bent, I hope to produce a good analysis, or at least half-good.

Good vs. valuable. See also my Wikiversity article An analysis of value, where I proposed to connect valuable and good thus: X is valuable iff X is good to have. And thus, even a relatively bad knife could be good to have. A relatively bad spouse could be good to have, from genetic perspective.

Good can be analyzed as polymorphic. By this I mean that the definition or technical definition may depends on the kind of entity of which good is predicated. And thus, a good artifact, e.g. a good knife, will have quite a different analysis from a good outcome (of an intervention).

Good and ethics and axiology/value theory. One might think the concept of good is studied by ethics. That is not clear. The words ethics and ethical are being used in a confusing manner. In the context of medicine, good treatment is one that is likely to lead to saved life or improved health at low risk of side effects, but that is not what medical ethics is concerned with. Perhaps medical ethics is concerned with a good conduct of the medical doctor in a sense that goes beyond these primary concern. And thus, medical ethics could require the medical doctor to treat the patient as a liberal subject capable of giving an informed consent or dissent, which requires that the doctor treat the patient as a subject rather than a passive object to be acted upon. I will therefore avoid the semi-plausible speculation that this article belongs to the field of ethics. As for value theory, I indicated that I see good and valuable as distinct, so I do not see why the designation value theory should apply to the analysis of good. If someone defines value theory as including an analysis of good, admitting the designation to be slightly misleading, then the article would belong to that field. To which field this article belongs I find rather insignificant; that is a job for a librarian or meta-philosopher. It is nonetheless an interesting consideration since it seems to bring in additional clarifying observations.

Good artifact. A good knife is one that can well serve its purpose. The purpose of the knife is presumably to allow cutting. Whether the knife can well serve as a weigh is insignificant. And thus, the being good does not really apply to the individual object (that is a knife); it applies to or relates to its being a knife. Even so, if we are given an individual object and we can determine that it is a knife (and thus, an artifact), we can determine the primary purpose for the individual object.

Good swimmer. Someone can be a good swimmer or be good at swimming. A human is not an artifact (or not obviously so; one might claim humans are self-domesticated animals and thus quasi-artifacts, like dogs). Given an individual human, we generally cannot unambiguously determine his primary purpose or function. Even when we can, that does not help: a good medical doctor can be a bad swimmer. And thus, being good applies here to being a swimmer rather than to the object that exhibits being a swimmer (and being a human).

Good human/person. A human can be a good swimmer yet be considered a bad human or a bad person. An example of a bad person could be one that is a dishonest liar, cheater and one that disregards causing harm to other people. That person's being a very good swimmer or painter would be beside the point. It is perhaps worth noting that it is other humans that are predicating the human to be good (or not good). And thus, it is the interests of other humans that get reflected in the person being described as good (or not good), much more than the interests of the human being described. One might think: it is not good (for one's interests) to be too good a person (good as considered by others). Moreover, if one considered a general standard of good  (perhaps decreed by God, if any), the predication of good assigned by other people may reflect their selfish interests. The best concept of a good person would perhaps be one that is predicated by God (or Martians?).

Good will. A good will could be one that aims at good outcome. Alternatively, a good will is one that aims to obey good rules. Good rules could be those whose obedience leads to good outcomes. It might seem that both takes are in reference to outcomes and are therefore equivalent. I don't think they are equivalent.

Good action. An action could be good if it leads to a good outcome. But we do not know which actions are guaranteed to lead to a good outcome. Actions are undertaken under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete knowledge.

Good outcome. From gene-selfish perspective, for a biological individual/agent, a good outcome is the genes being copied or states of affairs becoming more favorable toward that objective. From a tribe-selfish perspective, a good outcome is the tribe continuing existing or having its power expanded. There are many other perspectives, leading to different concepts of a good outcome (maybe not concepts but operationalizations; I don't know).

Good horse. A horse can be analyzed as an artifact (one might claim it is a semi-artifact, being a domestic animal, and the domestication could be analyzed as artificing). Thus, we may ask about the purpose of the horse or at least purpose for which the horse is being deployed. Some horses can be deployed for work in the field, other as racing horses. A good racing horse can be bad at work in the field. And thus, we cannot determine the goodness of the horse of the horse class level; we need to look closer.

Good as desirable. One general idea of good is as desirable. That could apply above all to good outcome. And thus, an outcome is good if it is desirable. Here, a contrast between desirable and desired is to be drawn. A deranged human can temporarily desire an outcome that is generally not desired. A deranged human in need of insulin could throw away the insulin, an undesirable outcome. A possible criticism may be that human desires are not to be trusted. That is, not only are the desires of individual humans to be trusted, also the aggregate desires of human collectives are not to be trusted. One might object that thing desirable to humans merely appear to be good and are not really good. Perhaps things desired by God, if any, are really good (I am an atheist).

Good as preferable. This seems similar to desirable but seems to have a little less hedonic ring to it. The relevant verb is to prefer, not to desire.

Good as worthy of seeking. One generic definition of good could be as worthy of seeking (and bad as worthy of avoidance). The question what is good would not be a question about semantics of the word good but rather a question about ultimate objectives or the like. And thus, the following statement would be implausible: we considered three options; we evaluated the options using five criteria; the first option turned out to be the best using all five criteria; therefore, we picked option two. Here, we do not know what the criteria of goodness are, only that some were used. And we can reduce it to one dimension: we considered three options, our evaluation showed the first option to be the best and the second to be the worst, so we picked the second option and implemented it.

Good as choice-worthy. Similar to the above. 

Good as pleasing. Hedonism indicates that (human) pleasure (and pain taken as negative pleasure) is the ultimate measure of good. However, one can well derive pleasure from aiming at the right concept of good, and if the concept of good is defined as pleasing, we get a cybernetic self-referential loop, which I propose is bad (meta). Mill seems to accept that his (in my view misnamed) utilitarianism is attacked as a philosophy for the pigs, to which he raises a defense. There is more, I hope, in my article on Hedonism in Wikiversity.

Good as fit for purpose. This applies pretty well to artifacts (knives, etc.) it seems. It may well apply to quasi-artifacts such as horses as well: here, horses are seen as subservient to human purposes and objectives, and are evaluated (good-predicated) from a human perspective. And thus, the purpose of a racing horse would be to win a horse race and the purpose of a horse for field work would be to last under load of the specific work, be obedient, etc. A medieval lord can good-predicate of the human serfs from the point of view of his objectives and purposes, e.g. for a serf, to be good entails being obedient and non-revolting. An ancient slave-owner can similarly good-predicate of his slaves in reference to purposes for which he keeps them, treating them on par with tools/instruments, cattle, etc. Whether a free human (non-enslaved, non-serf, etc.) can be analyzed as having a purpose in reference to which he is fit is unclear; my guess is that a free human, rather than being fit for a purpose, imposes purposes (and his will). (Maybe I am using the word purpose in multiple ways, which may lead to the fallacy of equivocation.) I vaguely remember that Aristotle might have been seeking such a purpose for humans, and that purpose would be to engage in an activity in accordance with rational rules, or something of the sort (verification pending).

Good as a partial order. Sort of obvious given the right educational background, e.g. set theory, economics, administration, optimization theory and decision theory. To be properly articulated later. Multiple dimensions. Prioritizing. Weighing. Incomparability. Better in one regard, worse in other regard. Better price but worse quality. Incomplete information. Risk aversion. Indecisivenes.

Good for (and good as). The form is "X is good for Y". And thus, artifacts are good or less good for their purpose. The key word is instrumentality.

Competing interests. In a business transation, obtaining a high price is good for the seller, but generally bad for the buyer.

Inversion of good. Bad events or outcomes can be good for something (covered by proverbs). Missing a train can look bad, but it may turn out fortunate if the train derails and many passengers get killed. The Three Mile Island accident was bad on its own, but it served as a good warning of dangers of nuclear energy.

Good painting. One could think that a good painting is beautiful. However, as long as painting serve as store of value assets, the matter may be much more complicated. Originality and inventiveness, even perverse one, can impact the perception of whether the painting is good. It can in any case lead to a high price.

Situational good. In reference to Popper, Wittgenstein and the poker, it may seem unconditionally good that a debater does not wield a poker and does not create an impression of a threat by it. This does not seem to lead to some universal concept of ultimate good. This merely leads to the idea that the situation of a debate calls for some things to be avoided. A debate is a joint enterprise. By contrast, if Wittgenstein wants to rob Popper (very unlikely), threatening him with a poker and requesting Popper to give him money would be instrumentally good (and be considered "ethically" bad). Therefore, Popper may seem to have won or scored with the poker, but Wittgenstein in fact did seem to have a solid case for his resistance to analysis of good.

Good and self-reference. When I set out to write this analysis, one of my aims was that it would be a good analysis or at least moderately good. I had a pre-theoretical concept of good. The pre-theoretical concept of good was guiding the analysis but was not binding. On the other hand, it would be quite suprising if the analysis would bring about a definition or clarification that would rather fit, say, the common use of the word heavy. More on this topic of pre-theoretical concepts, etc. can be found e.g. in the article on the definition of woman by an author whose name I forgot (I can find him in one of my articles in Wikiversity, I guess).

Common good and human-centeredness. In the age of the awareness of humans causing great harm to the natural environment, human-centered concepts of good may be not good enough (meta). Common good would be some aggregate of good of individual humans, perhaps Millian greatest happiness of greatest numbers of humans or aggregate human well-being. Perhaps if chimpanzees had nuclear weapons, they could be counted into the common good as well, or else. An agent capable of making credible effective threats, even without words, could quite possibly ensure being counted as part of common. Human-like Martians or aliens could quite possibly ensure their being counted into the aggregate well-being. They could as well discount humans. So could Čapek's salamanders from the War with Newts. The chief salamander could well prioritize salamander well-being over animal (human) well-being. In the age of increased debates about artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial intellects (artilects), perhaps the artilects could also want have their well-being counted or they could treat humans as mere animals to be kept in a zoo, and thus, common good in their understanding would be the common good of the artilects.

Good and Wilson and Ruse. From my reading of an article on Wilson and Ruse, they are something like good-nihilists or absolute-good-nihilists, indicating that the genes deceive us about the existence of objective good/objective morality (The Evolutionary Ethics of E. O. Wilson — The New Atlantis). At the same time, Wilson speaks in favor of protecting the natural environment; keyword: biophilia. From what I recall, someone threw a glass of water at Wilson. Wilson is of Sociobiology fame; sociobiology would be in part a precursor to evolutionary psychology. Wilson would be a biologist or specifically ethologist (student of animal behavior); Ruse would be a philosopher.

Good and Pirsig's Quality. Pirsig's popular 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be about what is good, as per the initial question at the beginning of the novel. The subtitle is An inquiry into values. (The subtitle for his novel Lila is An inquiry into morals, I think.) Pirsig mostly does not use the word goodness but rather quality, which he capitalizes as Quality. The word quality is indeed often used as a synonym of goodness, or quality of being good; I find this to be an etymological trainwreck, but this is not Pirsig's fault. Pirsig proposes to keep Quality (goodness) undefined. He first investigates the concept in the context of text composition: what is Quality in thought and statement. He eventually proceeds to a spectacular statement that Quality is the continuing stimulus that forces us to create the world we are living in, every last bit of it. He also relates Quality to Kitto's (and thus Greek) arete (check spelling), something like immortal fame rather than virtue. My best assessment is that Pirsig's uses of the word Quality do not point to a single coherent concept. That's it as a brief note; more would be for a separate article on Pirsig's philosophy.

As I indicated, this is much less well organized than it would ideally be. I hope some of it was interesting or useful, although it may well look like platitutes.

Questions:

• Which good sources treat of the present topic?
• Who defined the German word Axiologie? Did the definer and examiner proceeded in such a manner that the present analysis would come under his head?
• Do I want to analyze the lead sense in Merriam-Webster:good and compare it to my analysis? Other dictionaries, including Czech dictionaries?
• Should I link to Wittgenstein's article on ethics? (I link to it from Wikiversity, What is ethics).
• Should I turn the semi-sections into heading-sections?

Further reading:

• Value Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – seems to cover this topic of good

Copyright/license: I am considering using a free-as-in-freedom license, e.g. CC-BY-SA (or perhaps CC-BY-SA-NC), but until I make that decision, this is a proprietary artifact, copyrighted by me.

Last update: 8 Dec 2025.

On unhealthy trust of experts, the value of experthood, credentialism, etc.

Some items (not a one-to-one outline):

• American popular culture
• ZMM 1974, experts broke the motorycle
• COVID-19 experts
• We need experts
• Distrust vs. outright dismissal 
• Meta-experts? Meta-expertise? Becoming an expert on dealing with experts?
• Asking experts questions (including stupid questions) to uncover red flags pointing to likely incompetence?
• Experthood in psychiatry 

In American popular culture, there seems to be quite a bit of distrust of experts. One item substantiating the idea is the hugely popular American philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from 1974. There, the narator recounts how professional mechanics damaged his motorcycle instead of fixing it; he had to fix it himself. He indicates that there is a school of mechanical thought that says that you should not try to fix the motorcycle yourself. You should contact a professional mechanic. The narrator (Pirsig) says that it is this elitism that he would like to see wiped out, or the like.

In Programátorské poklesky (Programmer's failings or missteps, let's say) by Kučera and Kopeček, there is a quote to the effect that there are three things that can ruin a man: wine, women and an excessive trust of experts. I suspect they get this sentence from American culture (they both worked with computers and computer science, and computers are an American thing; the British with their ZX Spectrum and the seeds of what became ARM will pardon me), but I do not know that for sure.

In relation to the COVID-19 crisis, experts first worked out epidemiological plans that indicated that lockdowns were a bad idea, likely doing more harm than good. Then other experts published spectacularly badly failing mathematical models for COVID-19 (recall that certain strands of astrology are also mathematical: they are pseudo-random generators taking heavenly data as seeds). Expert articles started to pop up supporting the lockdown idea. Moreover, some media pointed to the institute doing the bad modelling being funded by Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Quite a bit seems astray here.

Richard Faynman recounted how medical doctors misdiagnosed his girlfriend Arlene. He wrote that the doctor was an idiot and did not know what he was doing. There was another doctor, asking the right questions about the diagnosis, but a nurse dismissed him as a troublemaker from a neighborhood. I have more notes on this in Wikiversity, full with Feynman quotes. 

Ben Goldacre (a British epidemiologist, I think, who had a TED presentation) reports how medical literature is skewed by widespread corruption, e.g. by unfavorable results being withheld and favorable published by the big phrama companies doing the medical trials.

In socialist Czechoslovakia, so-called "experts" in what they mistakenly called "social sciences" (under which head they filed philosophy as well) produced swaths of economical and philosophical analysis, most or lot of it arguably nonsense (or very bad) supporting the official doctrine of the state.

What, then, should one do as far as experthood? Should one do everything oneself? Should one never consult an expert? Should one pay no attention to who is and who is not an expert?

It is obvious that the concept of experthood is important and indispensable. Even Feynman depends on experts, that is to say, the people who wrote the medical literature that he studied. But here, a nice contrast can be made: a single diagnosis that is not a reviewed publication vs. a reviewed publication.

A healthy distrust of experts is not the same thing as dismissal of experthood on the whole. For instance, should one distrust medical doctors, one could order multiple independent diagnoses from different teams (if one can afford to pay for it), and then compare whether they agree. These kinds of procedures are standard in engineering, where in some settings an artifact or its change is required to be reviewed by independent reviewers/inspectors; when they disagree, they try to find out who, if anyone, is right (the disagreement may reveal that they have it all wrong).

In the field of law, one seems well advised to consult an expert, even if maintaing a healthy distance. A lawyer would have learned a lot of things about the statutory law and the common law that an amateur is unlikely learn with reasonable effort.

One general idea supporting experthood is this: an expert visits cases or items in his field again and again. He will have made a range of mistakes in his field and have learned from them. In short, he would have gained "experience". That is at least true of a real/true expert. What is key is to distinguish a true expert from all those all too abundant phony experts. Unfortunately, there is no simple way of doing so. Certification and credentials are items supporting expert identification, but they are not infallible/perfectly reliable. In medicine and aerospace, only certified professionals are allowed to practice, in many countries (for some professions; not a floor cleaner on the airport, I figure).

More on the note of credentials, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples of people without university-level education, and thus lacking the credentials. When Wozniak, the genius engineer behind Apple I and Apple II, co-founded Apple, he did not have a university degree. (Question: what are other notable people in management and engineering without university degree?) Einstein made his ground-breaking contribution while working in a patent office, but he did have a physics degree at that point. Richard Stallman gained a physics degree but achieved fame for results in software and its philosophy (GPL is not computer software, nor is GNU Manifesto; they are cultural software, if anything). Linus Torvalds started his work on Linux while he was a student, before he completed his master's thesis; he had a disagreement with an academic expert, Andrew Tanenbaum, concerning the best design for an operating system kernel, monolithic kernel vs. microkernel. Steven Wolfram has a PhD in physics, but his most notable work seems to be in computer programming and software design (Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha). While Elon Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics (and economics), it is not clear he specifically studied rocketry, vital for Space X. In many of the cases, learning by doing is a key phrase. However, one should not be misled: there are many successful people with degrees in their relevant field and, in 20th and 21st centuries, it is quite possible that having a degree is rather typical for successful people (I don't know). It seems likely that many people benefit from attending a university. (There seems to be a modicum of truth in Charlie Kirk's statement that college is a scam, but the statement seems greatly overblown. Or maybe I do not know what "college" is exactly, other than a university. Since Charlie was in the U.S. before he was assasinated, the word "college" in his statement is to be interpreted in U.S. context.)

On how to tell whether someone is an expert, let me recall a conversation I had many years ago with a medical doctor in Brno, Czechia (the doctor shall remain unnamed). The conversation was approximately as follows (from memory):

• DP: What is the probability that the diagnosis you have determined is correct?
• Doc: I don't know.
• DP: Okay, is it least 5%?
• Doc: In medicine, just like in life, nothing is certain.
• DP: In life, some things are certain, such that you are sitting in this chair right now.
• Doc: Given quantum mechanics, something something. (I do not recall what the doctor said exactly, but the point was that that was not certain either.)
• DP: (Angrily) I think you have a major cognitive disturbance. (I should not have said that. It did not help anything.)

As fas as I am concerned, the above was a huge red flag concerning the validity of the diagnosis and the trustworthiness of the medical doctor. Poincaré's adage applies here, I think: to believe everything and to doubt everything are two equally convenient solutions: both dispense with reflection. On asking incisive questions to putative experts, let me remind the Czech audience of the inquiry by the TV personality Kraus into the meaning of biomasa, directed at the Czech politician Jacques[1]. This classic is a great reminder. (Young Kraus played a nasty/disruptive boy in the film Saxana. He seems to be fit for these kinds of irreverent endeavors.)

On psychiatry and experthood. Let me quote user thienvu812 from under a video on Study 329: "I know when I worked in the mental health field and questioned the side effects of the drugs; I was told I wasn't a team player and the Drs are experts. I am glad there are Drs like you exposing the corruption. Thank you". Let us recall some of the performance of the "experts": 1) on life unworthy of living (a German psychiatrist whose work contributed to killing and sterilizations of psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany); 2) insulin shock therapy (bogus); 3) lobotomy (bogus, leading to a Nobel price). Let us also recall that the concept of team player is at direct odds with the critical attitude, championed by Popper's critical rationalism. One should perhaps also think of the socialist member of the collective; in Czech discourse, the word for collective (kolektiv) was replaced with the word for team (tým) to much the same effect. Words change; structures remain. On this topic, there is more in my "A critical look at psychiatry" at Wikiversity, which includes some great further reading.

That's it for experthood for now, as a first quick take. I apologize for this being more rambling/disorganized than I would like it to be. I hope some of the ideas are useful to someone.

Questions:

• What are some of the best sources online covering the topic?
• What does Stephen Wolfram say on the topic, if anything?
• Are Kopeček and Kučera indicating the source of their memorable quote?