It was with a shock of emotions beyond articulation that I read this morning that Aaron Swartz killed himself yesterday.

I first met Aaron when he was 14 or 15, at a conference where he was being consulted by graybeards with technical questions. I kept in touch, and followed his activities. Aaron was a prodigy not only of technology but of democracy. Every single project he undertook aimed at improving the public sphere — more open, with lower barriers, richer connections, better information, and less corruption. He wanted the public sphere to be more of us and be more ours.

I was so looking forward to watching him continue to grow, invent, and contribute. I admired him, and I enjoyed his company, and I didn’t ever want to have to use the past tense in talking about him. The future was so much more appropriate.

Cory Doctorow writes movingly and clearly about Aaron’s here.

I am so sorry for his family, for his friends, for all of us who knew him, and for those who did not have that chance.

Young Aaron (14-15 years old) with Larry Lessig

Here’s something I just posted at Reddit:

Aaron was a hero of the Internet.

Everything he did in his way too short life was aimed at making the connected world more open, with lower barriers, richer connections, more knowledge, more sharing, and less corruption. Consider Aaron’s work on standards for sharing ideas, his commitment to progressive and bottom-up politics, his efforts to provide free access to public domain court records), his work against corruption in politics, his contribution to the struggle against SOPA, the app he wrote for making it easier to create blogs and wikis (acquired by Reddit), his commitment to open information. And more.

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For the holidays, here are some differences between Judaism and Christianity.

But first, here are some caveats:

• I know there are many different branches of Christianity, and there are different types of Judaism as well. I’m generalizing.

• It will amuse my Jewish friends that I have the chutzpah to write about Judaism since I am at best an agnostic, and am non-observant except occasionally to support my wife, who is an observant Modern Orthodox Jew.

Jews are a people

You are a Jew if your mother was a Jew. Even if you despise all Jewish beliefs, you are a Jew, just as you would be an Italian even if you rejected every aspect of Italian culture. (Even the cooking? What are you, crazy?)

This is one good reason we generally have not evangelized our religion. You can’t convert to Italian. Exceptions can be made, however. So, if you go to a rabbi and say you want to convert to Judaism, he will send you away. On your third try, he’ll probably agree to start you on some instruction. If you do convert, the fiddle is that we assume your soul must have been at Mt. Sinai back at the revelation, so you were really a member of the people all along.

Note that this means that Judaism is not a religion based solely on belief. You are a Jew even if you lack Jewish beliefs — you’re probably not a particularly good Jew (as I am not), but you’re a Jew. This is way different from Christians who believe that you come to their religion by deeply accepting a set of propositions.

There is no Jewish fundamentalism

I’m taking fundamentalism as an adherence to the literal meaning of a religion’s basic text. Keeping in mind that I’m generalizing (and I’m now going to stop inserting that caveat), Jews believe something like the following:

God gave the Jews a sacred text. That text has been preserved letter by letter throughout the ages through some careful information-transmission techniques. But, that text cannot be simply read and understood, because reading a text requires human participation, and participation is always based on one’s history and situation. There is no possibility of reading without interpreting, and thus there is no possibility of fundamentalism.

Put differently, God intended this text — what Christians call “The Old Testament” — to last through the ages. The ages are historical. Therefore, the text has to be capable of being reinterpreted within each age. What made sense to people wandering through the desert 5,000 years ago doesn’t make sense now if taken exactly as written. For example, treating your slaves exceptionally well made sense then, but not having slaves makes sense now. Having multiple wives made sense then. Re-re-defining marriage so that it can be between two men or two women makes sense now (at least according to many Jews — this is still a controversial issue).

But we are not free to interpret the text any old way we want. The interpreting of the text requires many years of scholarship. Interpretations must also be done in close conversation with the history of interpretation by the revered tradition of scholars. You must cite your sources. And not to avoid plagiarism. You have to be in dialogue with those sources, using a critical methodology that has evolved over the millennia.

This mix of fidelity to a text and an ability to re-interpret it for modern times while in conversation with the continuing tradition of interpretation is what has kept Judaism alive for 5,000 years. (At least according to my interpretation :)

This enables most Jews to favor harmonizing the divine text and science. That’s why few Jews are Creationists, and many are scientists.

Judaism is not a matter of faith

The caricature of religion put forth by atheist ranters such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is entirely wrong about Judaism. They portray religion simply as a belief in impossible things, belief against all evidence.

Now, there are elements of faith in Judaism, if only the beliefs that the Torah was given by God to Moses, and that it is a guide suitable throughout all of human history. But Jews also believe that God gave us minds and hearts so that we can progress in our understanding, and we need to apply His gifts to our understanding of the text he gave us.

Jews also believe that if forced to make a choice, it’s better for Jews to act in accordance with the Law than to believe in God, although it’s of course best to act well and to believe.

Rabbis have no special relationship with God

Rabbis are teachers and scholars. That’s it. You don’t need a rabbi in order to pray.

You do need a minion, though: ten Jewish men. Judaism is a community-based religion.

Arguments about the Torah are not signs of failure but of health

We do not think there is one right interpretation of the Torah even within any one time or community. An interpretation that does not acknowledge the wisdom of contradictory interpretations will gather little respect.

This is why Jews are argumentative.

It’s always why we make such good lawyers.

(My wife adds that Jewish thought has vacillated over time, sometimes stressing the power of differences, and sometimes aiming for a consolidation of interpretations.)

Judaism is not a universal religion

God revealed Himself to the Jews at Mt. Sinai and gave us our divine text. In that text are seven universal principles that apply to all children of Noah (= everyone). But then there are the many, many practices and rituals required only of Jews. For example, non-Jews don’t have to keep kosher or keep the Sabbath. You’re free to, of course, but there’s no reason to, unless your religion tells you to. (Jews were chosen to carry out a special burden of practice; that is what “the chosen people” means. At least as I understand it.)

About the status of other religions, there is unresolved discussion. There are inferences, for example, that God revealed Himself differently to different peoples (cf. Amos 9.7). What it comes down to is: There’s no reason for others to follow our Laws (excepting those seven biggies from Noah), and it’s not our business what others believe.

The golden rule is not enough

People looking for a universal religious core sometimes cite an anecdote about Rabbi Hillel, who lived during the time of Jesus.

Once there was a gentile who came before Shammai [a friend with whom Rabbi Hillel often disagreed], and said to him: “Convert me on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot. Shammai pushed him aside with the measuring stick he was holding. The same fellow came before Hillel, and Hillel converted him, saying: That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it.”

This is close to the Christian’s golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But there are two differences. The first is often noted by those citing Hillel: The Jewish version is cast in terms of what you should not do, rather than in terms of what you should do. But the other difference is I think more important. Rabbi Hillel does not conclude with this rule. Rather, he continues by telling Jews to study the Torah. My understanding of this is that humans are not wise enough to be able to conduct themselves according to one general rule. We need the details of the divine text, we need a community, and we need a tradition of wise but divergent interpretations with which we can engage. Life is more complex than that, and humans are too small and weak.

Of course Christians also don’t think the story begins and ends with the Golden Rule. Yet it seems to me that Judaism favors complexity in a way that few religions do. But about this we could have a good argument!

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends!

Based on some reactions, I want to clarify three points I did not express clearly enough. First, I meant my comments about Hitchins and Dawkins to apply to their writings about all religions, not just Judaism. The idea of religion that they argue against is drawn from a caricature of Christianity, and is false about Christianity just as it is false about Judaism.

Second, am I committing exactly the same mistake I’m attributing to Ditchin’s and Hawkin’s? I was aware of the danger while I was writing this post, which doesn’t mean that I avoided it. I am even less comfortable talking about Christianity than I am about Judaism, so I tried to stay away from doing so. But the theme of the post at the very least implies some assertions about Christianity. The one that troubles me most is the unintended implication that Christianity is not complex. The fact that Christians have four Gospels to square argues against that, not to mention the history of Christian theology. So, I offered my generalization about Jewish comfort with complexity tentatively. And I’ll continue to maintain it, albeit it even more tentatively. I meant to compare not Christian and Jewish scholars and theologians, but non-scholarly believers. My point was that ordinary Jewish practice has more of the scholarly element than most other religions do. I might be wrong about that and would be happy to learn otherwise. But I certainly wasn’t intending to diminish the work of scholars and theologians in other religions.

Third, I may be using “fundamentalism” differently than others do. I meant it the way I defined it, as a type of literalism, not as a measure of the extremity of belief.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan (a book about modeling that is unlikely to star Natalie Portman) has a new book out — Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder — that has been excerpted by Salon in an article titled “The future will not be cool.” I haven’t read the new book. so what follows is based purely on this 2,000-word excerpt.

Taleb makes a point that challenges some pretty deep assumptions. Life, he says, really hasn’t changed much in the past few thousand years:

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

Had someone in 1950 predicted such a minor gathering, he would have imagined something quite different…

So, why, Taleb wonders, do we keep predicting that technology will radically transform our future? His answer:

Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.

I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable.

The excerpt doesn’t explain what Taleb means by “fragile,” which is the theme of his book apparently, but, after a digression critiquing hip technologists who are too technocratic and uncultured for his taste, he gives some examples. Paperwork was fragile, which we know because the Internet has removed so much of it. Shoe manufacturers are moving from over-engineered shoes to “shoes that replicate being barefoot.” The iPad et al. return us to the “Babylonian and Phoenician roots of writing and take (sic) notes on a tablet. “My dream would be to someday write everything longhand…”

Oh dear.

I’m confused by his overall theme as expressed in this exceprt, since he uses Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and George Orwell as examples of futurists who got it wrong, but they would have gotten it far wronger if they had predicted the future by subtraction. The very things Taleb hopes will be subtracted — “deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology” — were by and large added during the past 150 years. Thus, predictions would have gone right if they had anticipated those additions. Presumably this is cleared up in the book itself.

But let’s go back to the passage I quoted at the beginning that argues that futurologists have tended to over-estimate the extent of change, and that life is pretty much as it always was.

Well, yes and no. At the highest levels of abstraction, Taleb is right: We still eat, shit, and fuck. We still talk with one another. Many of us still live in climates that shove our unclothed bodies out of homeostasis. We still have a system of specialization and economic exchange that lets you cook for me if I provide you with some compensation. So, yes, we eat together, wear clothes, and go to restaurants. We have not transcended our biology, our basic sociality, or our need for a culture and economy. Therefore we have not progressed?

Perhaps the problem is with using eating dinner in a nice restaurant as our example. Perhaps we might look at the systems by which Taleb is served his wine and artisanal cheese. If you can’t tell the difference between a basket and a truck, between a scythe and a thresher, between a root cellar and a refrigerated container vessel, between vassals and unionized farm workers, between planting last year’s seeds and genetically altering crops, between slavery and social mobility, then, yes, you’ll see no progress on your plate.

Ok, I admit that I’m not getting it. I look forward to reading his book.

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This is by Lucas Gray, a Simpson’s and Family Guy animator. (Hat tip to Gawker)

[Minutes later:] I came across this at Gawker as well.

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Jon Lebkowsky in a discussion of Too Big to Know at The Well asked, “What new roles are emerging that weren’t there before?”

Here’s part of my answer (with a few typos fixed):

– Taxonomies, nomenclatures, classification. Having common ways to refer to things is really helpful. We can make up for them to at least some degree by cross-walking and mapping. It’s always going to be messy. The rise of unique IDs and namespaces is helping a great deal.

– Filters. We used to not worry about filters because all we could get was the filtered product. Now we have to worry about them all the time. But we also now filter forward rather than filter out: When the site TheBrowser.com puts together a front page with 10 items on it from around the Web, all the other items that didn’t make it onto the front page are still fully available; TheBrowser.com has merely shortened the number of clicks it takes to get to its ten.

– Consensus. We used to think that we “all” agreed on some things. We had authorities we “all” trusted. Now we have communities of belief. Links and conversation can help us get past the fragmentation that makes us stupid, but not past all fragmentation.

But we should keep in mind that we’ve lost these old formations to a large degree because they don’t scale, and because they presented themselves to us under false pretenses: they were never as baked into the world as they seemed.

It’s our knowledge now.

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More or less as a public service, here’s a message I just received. I am apparently on the GOP media list, which is fine with me. (I’ve removed her phone number.)

If you’re wondering, according to their Web site, the Network of Enlightened Women is the

nation’s premier organization for culturally conservative women. Started as a book club at the University of Virginia in 2004, NeW cultivates a community of conservative women and expands intellectual diversity on college campuses through its focus on education. NeW members meet regularly to discuss issues relating to politics, gender and conservative principles. NeW has expanded to over 20 college campuses nationwide.

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Except Randall Munroe thinks going miscellaneous means giving up, rather than embracing the new organizational possibilities of blah blah blah.

(I am, of course, an awestruck fan of XKCD.)

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Two sets of amazing photos:

Wikimedia Commons has announced its best photos of the year.

Here’s one I like. It’s by Simon Pierre Barrette.

Also, the New York Hall of Science is exhibiting the winners of the international The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. These are amerrrzing photos of microscopic subjects. Totally amahhzning. See them here.

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I saw my friend Michael O’Connor Clarke just about a month ago, after too many years of being cheered by his tweets, rather than by his in-personage. We were at the Mesh conference where Michael gave a paste in the face to traditional marketing in his normal insightful, laugh out loud fashion. He had to run home — he and his wife had tickets to Cirq du Soleil — so we caught up in a hurried conversation, which we were able to prolong because he offered to drop me off at the airport shuttle. He was, in his usual way, funny, frank, warm, and self-deprecating…terms not always associated with someone so driven by values and ideals.

This evening I’ve learned he has esophageal cancer. I cannot do better at expressing how I feel about Michael and about this news than my friend Doc has.

Michael is a devoted father of four, so some friends have started a fund for him . Please consider giving.

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…at least on the web it tends to be. That in any case is the contention of my latest column in KMworld.

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