Ten Lessons from ‘Intellectuals and Society’

Thomas Sowell’s ‘Intellectuals and Society’ describes what drives intellectuals, and what damages they have produced – and continue to produce – to society.  Typical of his other works, this one cites many references to back up its claims.  This is not a book written by solitary pondering.  Sowell could not have written this book without considerable time and effort exerted at compiling sources.

The ten lessons listed below are not the ten most important things this book says.  They are not even necessarily the most important things I learned (the items are not even listed in any order of importance).

I simply wanted to list down ten things I learned while read this book.

1. Special Knowledge – Many types of knowledge exist. Intellectuals possess a ‘special’ kind of knowledge that is not found in the general population. But this knowledge is taken (often wrongly) to be more important than ‘mundane’ knowledge.  Intellectuals often stray very far from their area of speciality, forgetting that knowledge does not necessarily travel with them as they cross other territories.  Chess grandmasters may be the pinnacle of intellectual skills in that game, but they themselves recognise that expertise in chess does not translate to expertise in politics or economics or indeed something closer, like poker.  Intellectuals seem to brush away this fact.  Even the very smartest intellectual possesses only a minuscule fraction of the knowledge of the general public.  Even taken collectively, the total knowledge of intellectuals is dwarfed by the knowledge of everyone else as a whole. 
   
2. Who Intellectuals Are – for the book’s intent, intellectuals are people whose work ‘begins and ends with ideas.’  Intellectuals do not build anything.  They just produce and propagate ideas.  There are many other professionals who engage in work requiring very high mental demands, but whose work does not end with ideas and therefore Sowell does not regard them as intellectuals (for the purpose of this book).  This latter kind include surgeons and doctors, engineers and architects, lawyers and business men, scientists and mathematicians (although Bertrand Russell when acting as a non-mathematician is included in the list of intellectuals).
   
3. Verbal Virtuosity – intellectuals very often frame reality with an inventive play of words to recast this reality into what it isn’t. They do not necessarily do this on purpose.  Very often it just happens as a result of an intellectual’s ignorance of the subject matter. Sowell gives the example of intellectuals calling for the abolition of ‘mandatory retirement.’ He says there has practically never been such a thing.  People who were let go by they employers due to age have always been free to work elsewhere.  They were not required by any law to not work anymore.
   
4. Intellectuals Have a Depp Need to be Recognised – because intellectuals do not do helpful work daily, they have a need to come up with new, exotic, exciting ideas. Whether there is proof that these ideas work is almost ignored.  They want to change the world.
   
5. Intellectuals can be Epic Fools – Sowell provides evidence that intellectuals have been supporters of Stalin, of Hitler, of unilateral disarmament in the face of Nazi Germany rearming, and many other examples.
   
6. The Media Does not Report on Reality – if you think about it, if the media reported only facts, people would not find them very interesting.  The media, like the intellectuals, have an interested in the new, exciting, and exotic.   Sowell unfortunately does not give guidance on where can find the facts, if the media cannot really be trusted.
   
7. Intellectuals Often Ignore Empirical Evidence – Intellectuals judge ideas, not by empirical evidence of its goodness, but by characteristics like ‘novelty’, ‘exciting', ‘complex’
   
8. Social Vision – Intellectuals have a ‘vision of the anointed’ , a vision of a world unable to improve without their (the intellectuals) wisdom and intelligence.  This vision Sowell contrasts with the ‘tragic vision’, where there is no solution – everything is a trade-off, civilisation people just lead their lives making their own choices in a world where civilised society is a veneer over barbarism forever threatening to spill out – and we can’t do much about that except strive to contain it.  This section is one of the harder parts for me to side with Sowell.  Much of society’s progress (material progress at least) is due to capitalists who have a vision of the world and who have staked their reputation and assets trying to put that vision (I would put the likes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, even though Sowell does not mention them).  Perhaps I have not understood it well yet.
   
9. Don’t Let the Intellectuals Run Your War – Sowell blames the intellectuals for the stunning weakness of France’s performance in World War II, despite it material military advantage.  He blames France’s military failure on the supine psychological attitude of the French, inculcated into its youth by the intellectuals running the education system.  Had it not been for pragmatic leaders like Winston Churchill,  intellectuals would have had Britain disarm completely in the naive hope that Hitler would do the same.  (Had that happened, I think Western Europe would be completely either under Nazi or Soviet rule)
   
10. Judges Shouldn’t be Making Laws but They are – Laws are supposed to be made by the Legislative branch of the government, and judges are to judges individual cases in light of those laws.  Judges sometimes rule in ways that make their rulings applicable ex post facto.

Eliciting Requirements

I was reading Mike Cohn’s book ‘User Stories Applied’.  He starts his chapter on gathering stories by pointing out that ‘Elicitation and Capture should be Illicit’.

Clearly, this is a play at words.  But the idea is that (to him) ‘elicitation’ rather improperly conveys the notion that ‘requirements are out there somewhere and all we need to do is have them explained to us and then we can lock them in a cage.’

He prefers ‘trawling’, a term he says was introduced by James Robertson  and Suzanne Robertson (‘Mastering the Requirements Process’).  The reason for his preference?  Trawling conveys the idea of a trawler (a boat that catches fish by dragging a large wide net behind it). 

Its a confusing argument.  If there is a word that conveys the capture of something that is ‘out there’ – exactly the image that Mike wants to get away from – it is trawling.

From Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms: “Elicit usually implies, pains, trouble, or skill in drawing something forth or out; it often implies resistance either in the person or thing that is the object of effort.’

‘Elicitation’ is far superior to ‘trawling’ when it comes to describing the process of gathering, extracting, and identifying requirements.

User Stories and Roles in Agile

The Agile approaches in system development rely very heavily on the concept of user stories.   A user story is a brief statement about how a specific user might use the system so that he achieves a specific outcome.  It is often stressed that this outcome must be expressed as something of value to the business.

An example user story might be: ‘As a system administrator, I can configure the access rights of users, so that I can restrict access to sensitive areas of the system.’

Identifying the users of the system to be developed is one of the first steps the development team should take (see for example Mike Cohn’s ‘User Stories Applied’).  To ‘identify’ users does not mean identify the actual persons, but rather to identify roles. 

A role is the capacity in which the user interacts with the system.  An example of a role might be the system administrator who is in charge of configuring and maintaining the system.  Another example is an assistant who is responsible for printing reports from the system. A third example is a data entry person who uses the system to input data. And so on.

In addition to the organisational position occupied by the user, it is also encouraged that the system designers further look at finer grains of the roles.   Rather than simply think of the system administrator as one role, think of possible types of system administrators because doing so can bring insights into what the role will need when using with the system. 

A highly experienced system administrator very familiar with the system will have different needs than an experienced system administrator new to the system, who will also have different needs from a system administrator by accident, and so on.

By further classifying the roles, we begin to realise that not all system administrators are the same.  They have different backgrounds.  They may have the same responsibilities, but they may have different capabilities and capacities.

Mike Cohn recommends the project team to hold a brainstorming session near the beginning of a system development project to identify the various roles that will be catered.  In this session, every team member writes down roles that they think about.  After everyone has written down the roles, the team collects the list and refines them, merging similar ones, and further splitting others.

A couple of observations can be made:

1.  The way some authors use the phrase ‘user’ they seem to be not very clear whether they refer only to those who will be actually using the system.  If that is the case, the definition excludes those stakeholders who do not use the system, and therefore some other exercies is needed to identify the larger set of stakeholders. 

For example, if the system is an immigration department front-end used by immigration officers (and never touched, or even viewed, by passengers), are passengers to be considered as users?  I would suggest they not be considered as users, but should be considered as some other kind of stakeholder (a very important class of stakeholder; not to be ignored), and a separate exercise to identify these kinds of stakeholders need to be performed. 

2.  I would also suggest that after identifying the users, and cleaning up the list, a second exercise be taken to note down the key interest of the user with regards to the system.  Why does this user have to interact with the system – what are their responsibilities to the organisation?