Philosophy vs Pragmatism — Fantasy Football

Fantasy football is for fun, supposedly. Of course, you also play it for the thrill of beating your competitors in a game that is a mixture of skill, chance, and darkest necromancy (or some other kind of divination). And yet, there is also some room for personal philosophy.

In most fantasy football games based on the English Premier League, people think nothing of buying Chelsea's Didier Drogba and making him their captain. He scored a hattrick last night, so those people all received a handsome return on their investment. In real life, of course, he's not often captain, and his cost would be prohibitive to most.

I always start off the season with Arsenal's Cesc Fabregas as captain. It reflects my natural optimism. It might not be the most pragmatic choice, but at least he is in real life the captain of his team.

My philosophy is thus based on some sort of realism. I've seen players think nothing of fielding three left-backs in a squad with only five defenders. Would that make sense in real life? Unlikely. But it can get you a lot of points in a season when left-backs are doing well.

I guess the point about Fantasy Football is that it's fantasy. Do what you want. Enjoy it. No regrets. That's a good philosophy for fantasy games in general.

The Overimportance of Objectivity

Friar Tuck reminded me that we are subject to curious fits of self-doubt, by which I mean that we can always set up thought experiments to doubt that the self exists. But the fact is that while there are many ways to distract you from yourself, there is much more that persuades you that you exist.

No matter what science tells you about the molecular, atomic, or subatomic composition of your too-mortal frame, the fact is that you wake up in the morning, you feel the hangover. You feel the aches and pains, the sensations of being. No matter how unearthly the scientist, how objective his intellectual sensibilities, if he has heartburn or a headache, it is hard to remain purely objective. The disinterested observer of self does not exist.

To me, science and mathematics are games. Neither of them impacts my sense of self. I can intellectually believe that I am soup, or as Asimov (I think) once put it, water with impurities. But no matter how much empathy I muster, how much sensitivity I have that makes me tear up during certain movie moments, I am centred around me. It is my pain that I feel in my aching feet, it is my heartache I feel when I am sad. Even when I am sad for someone else, I am sad in me.

But what then of religion, of faith and my own quirk (at least that's how my non-religious friends see it) of Christianity? Well, since subjectivity is all, I am sure God will forgive me for having the purely subjective belief in Him. Do I care if I am wrong about Christ? No. Does it then devalue Christianity to not care if I am wrong? No. All such reasoning is hypothetical. I believe, I believe 'in my heart', and that's it for me. Not that I can't defend my belief if that's the game to be played, of course.

Objectivity is the Great Lie. There is no such thing. One would have thought that Einstein's ideas on relativity, and Newton's ideas before that, and the entire chain of ideas (for those who claim objective belief or beliefs can exist) would dissuade people from believing in that which they cannot directly engage.

Which brings us to the last frontier. Do we directly engage what we think is the self? I have no idea. All I know is that my feet hurt, I like coffee, I do things that seem to me to be good things, and I enjoy the company of certain people — who appear to have a real existence to me that I cannot penetrate. I have dislikes, I have tastes, I have the desire to use what functions as a language. But it's all me, and no matter how you can discredit solipsism by intellectual reasoning (yes, I know how it's done), that's all a game.

As that famous sage once said, "How are we to know if our reason has anything to do with reality at all?" I don't know, but if the game comes round, I'll play it.

Transfer Mechanisms

Transfer deadline day has come and gone over at the English Premier League. It's all about which club moves what players either incoming or outgoing, and it provides lots of entertainment.

At moments such as this, I wonder what an education system would be like if classroom lessons were televised 'live' with analysis in between classes. "So will he sign a new utility player to replace the teacher he free-transferred for what is looking to be a really bad reason?" "It looks like his back four (or is it five) is keeping the balls out well. But are they learning anything out there?" "Oh it's definitely a disaster, that own goal, but he has to pick himself up and do his best." "The fourth official is not having a good day. Surely that student was offside." "Did you see the chemistry in that class? Superb qualitative analysis under pressure!"

And so on.

Actually, it would be fun to see transfer fees for teachers, with ESPN (Education Service Professional Nationwide) tracking them by blogs and suchlike. It would be even more fun if promotions and appointments at all level were made public. "What? Titus B for team captain?" "The manager's gone berserk!" "£160k a week for that kind of performance isn't going to make the fans happy." "It looks like the Gryphons have made a record signing this year and their Integrated Programme will benefit."

It would be even more amusing to do it like Fantasy Football. Every school in the country would be given a fixed budget and they'd have to choose their teachers within the budget. Ho ho ho.

Word of the Day: Ничья

I've picked up a little bit of Russian by accident. You can't avoid it if you play chess, since for decades of Soviet dominance it has been one of the major chess languages. I always knew that the ничья at the end of a game score meant 'drawn' because the score would be 0.5-0.5 or 0,5-0,5 (some Europeans do this), or ½-½.

After learning Greek, I began to realise that the impenetrable thicket of Russian alphabetical symbols was somewhat related. Those letters can be more or less transliterated nechya, and yes, they do mean that the game is drawn.

But nechya doesn't literally mean 'draw'. It means ' nobody's ', which does provide an interesting insight into the Russian mind.

=====

As an aside, do you know why a game is said to be 'drawn'?

The word 'draw' comes from things like Old English dragan and is related to Latin 'tractus' (from which we get 'traction', 'extract', 'subtract' and so on). It is even related to the word 'trek' which is some Western European version. In all these senses, it implies 'to draw out' or 'to exhaust'. A drawn look is an exhausted look.

A drawn game is therefore one that has been exhausted. Everything's been extracted and nothing's left.

Gridlock

Sometimes, when you're playing a new game, perhaps for the first few times, you come to several realisations about what you might be doing wrong and have no clue as to what to do about it. Or sometimes you have a very good clue and then you find out that doing something about one problem actually causes worse problems (or 'suboptimalities') elsewhere.

The solution to this is called 'minimaxing'. In most games, some sort of optimal expectation-based strategy allows you to figure out what a good solution might be, in terms of maximising your gains while minimising your losses.

But in complex games (or worse, games which you aren't sure are games, or games which don't seem to have success conditions, or games which you have a sneaky feeling are set up so that success might actually be failure), this strategy may not work. It might even work against you.

Once in a while I look at the world in which I live and I realise that if it is a game, or game-like, then it probably can't be optimised by minimaxing. It's too complicated, and if you think about it too much, your thoughts and theories degenerate into handwaving and other gestures of uncertainty. Eventually, things come to a gridlock; they don't work out because too many goals and interests have come into conflict.

There may be no solution; there may never have been a solution. The world may be solid, opaque, intractable all the way through, insolvent and insoluble, inscrutable but pretending to scrutability. All we can do is work things out the best we think we can, and trust that there is some validity to what we're doing.

The most important idea behind all this metagame theory is: are the rules spontaneous and hence random in origin, or are the rules imposed deliberately by an external agency? And one nagging thought beyond that is: are there any other options?

It is all terribly fascinating.

Shooting Craps

I've never been a big fan of dice games, gambling, stuff like that. A small fan maybe, but not a big fan. I prefer card games like bridge or board games like chess, and occasionally I obsess over various computer-based games. I was there when Warcraft first came out.

But recently, some friends of mine (like Khaos and the Wiccan Wonder — which makes it sound like some superhero team-up) got me thinking about one particular probability phenomenon: the sweepstakes or raffle. I started wondering about the etymology. So I looked here and read the following:

c.1386, from O.Fr. rafle "dice game," also "plundering," perhaps from a Gmc. source (cf. M.Du. raffel "dice game," O.Fris. hreppa "to move," O.N. hreppa "to reach, get," Ger. raffen "to snatch away, sweep off"), from P.Gmc. *khrap- "to pluck out, snatch off." The notion would be "to sweep up (the stakes), to snatch (the winnings)." Dietz connects the O.Fr. word with the Gmc. root, but OED is against this. Meaning "sale of chances" first recorded 1766.

It's an interesting little piece of research there, something to while away a lazy Thursday night and wake you up on Friday morning feeling cheerful and full of energy...

White House

That's a problem. I grew up in the 70s and 80s of the last century, and when people mention 'White House', I immediately think of a mailbox and a house made of wooden planks. You need a bit of thinking to get in, and a lantern to avoid grues. Before long, you find yourself visiting the Great Underground Empire, and hopefully, armed with a sword that glows fitfully, you will deal with the troll, and the maze of twisty little passages all alike, and the guy who keeps stealing your stuff.

Well, a lot of it is back, like nostalgia. You don't have to map it yourself, which is what we used to do with pencil and paper. But there it is. And now you too can relive the glory days of J Pierpont Flathead and his ilk, run along the White Cliffs, enter the Dark Forest, and in general make a nuisance of yourself.

Enjoy!

Lessons From Games

Over the last few decades, I've had both opportunity and reason to compare rugby, chess, soccer and water polo. These are more traditional games, compared to the rash of strategic boardgames and role-playing games I've also had the pleasure to examine and try out.

A few things stand out. All four of these games have a strategy best described as 'hold up the centre and infiltrate round the flanks'. They also have 'open up your opponent by shifting the thrust to the other flank'. They have 'dominate the key player by cutting off his supply and support', 'defend your links' and 'protect your home rank'. Of course, they don't all use this terminology, and the circumstances are different in each case—but the concepts are the same, and strong analogies and consequent lessons can be drawn from this.

You see, all four games are about spatial control and getting your stuff from one end to the other after mixing it up in the centre (or avoiding the mix-up in the centre). Dominance can be unit-on-unit, group-on-group, by local outnumbering at some minor sacrifice elsewhere, and so on.

I realise that I've benefited a lot from all the sports and games I've managed to get a taste of. By watching the professionals in action live and in videos, I've learnt much about strategy that has transferred from one game to another. What I'm not about to try, though, is chessboxing, that peculiar alternating chess+boxing contest which ends up either by checkmate or knockout.

ASCII

It's funny how little artifacts of the Digital Age affect our lives. The venerable American Standard Code for Information Interchange received its last revision in 1986. It is a simple code, with 128 characters in it: 33 control characters which are non-printing, the 'Space' character (ASCII 32 or HEX 20) which is technically printing but leaves no trace, and 94 printable symbols. The codes are designed to fit a scheme using binary numbers 0000000 to 1111111 (zero to 127), with an extra bit (or binary digit) used for various other purposes.

ASCII was really conceived in 1960. Since then, generations of programmers have grown up having fun with the 128 characters, many of which we have come to know and love like close friends. You can find a family photograph here.

For a long while, these were the only characters anyone ever used in computer games, computer graphics, and other kinds of interesting stuff. A lot of the graphics constructed with letters are beautiful works of art, making use of the relative density and ink distribution in each character to act as shaded blocks of monochromatic tint. You can find some of it here, and at various archival websites. (For many years, I used an ASCII wolfshead as my signature.)

Recently, I rediscovered the pleasures of ASCII and ASCII art when I took a long-delayed break to play a game called Dwarf Fortress. I'd long abandoned such games, which are called 'Rogue-like' games after a particularly seminal example of the genre. But I found myself enthralled by the terrible little graphic sprites, remembering through a mist of nostalgia all the times I had in the old computer labs of my past.

Gaming the System: A Brief Introduction

The rise of Atlantis has always been predicated on quantitative sorcery. The numeromancers and numerologists of the Thunderbolt Circle have always looked back to the time of the Gnome and his infamous 1954 thesis on 'How to Look Rich by the Standards of the World'.

Let me put it to you in simpler terms. It's not how much you own, or how much you have, or how much you can move, that necessarily makes you rich. It's how 'rich' is defined. So if you want your country to look rich, you ask around and see how people define 'rich'. Then you rig the outputs (not in the sense of 'bias the game', but more in the sense of 'setting the sails') so that the nation (or the game, or the ship) appears to be heading towards the right direction as far as 'rich' is defined.

This prestidigitation (also known as 'extremely fast number-management process'), if successful, will give rise to the impeccable claim that you are rich by any official measure. Whether you are rich or not in reality does not matter, since all that matters is what the numbers are supposed to say; all else is ineffable, immeasurable, beyond the terms of the discussion.

Let me put it to you in more relevant (to some of us) terms. Let's say your bank balance is US$500,000. You put the card into the machine and ask for a statement of account, and that is what is shown. But how do you know how much that money is? How do you know if you are rich? What if, unbeknownst to you, you have slipped into some sort of timewarp, and US$1,000,000 is actually the cost of a loaf of bread? Well, you'd have to ruefully remind yourself that half a loaf is better than none.

It's all about numbers, to some people.

But let's think about what happens when an education system begins to experience this sort of numerical subversion (or subvention, as some inventive people have called it).

In order to establish how good an education system you have, you decide that only quantitative measures are used. Even when you bring qualitative measures in, you use numerical rubrics and a final score expressed as some number. Worse, you require trend lines for everything, including the development of human virtue or social behaviour (for example, what percentage of the student population expresses confidence in the long-term prospects of your nation).

You decide to create an examination system that is vulnerable to the same prestidigitation. Everyone gets a number. The smaller, the number, the closer to Number One you are. The minimum magic number is 6. But if you are clever, this becomes 4, or 2, or zero. Or perhaps you make it the other way round; the higher the number, the more you've scored. If you get 45, that's the highest; if you get anything approaching 24 and below, time to start looking at the fine print.

The problem is of course that while numbers are good things to have in analysis, a lot of their relevance depends on two things: the assurance that the system is not being gamed in such a way that it fails to measure the quality of education (validity), and the assurance that everyone who does the same thing gets the same mark (reliability). If you look at these two things, you will realise that gaming the system — by doing things which are not educational but are number-manipulating or system-gaming — can give you marvelous results.

It's a bit like parents who insist on helping their kids with homework projects which are graded. You're not measuring the child's ability, but something else (the ability of the child to con the parents into doing it, the pressure society exerts on parents to do unethical things, etc). And if you build the whole edifice on it, the edification is not real.

Stacking

How many things can you put in one place? It depends on how much leeway you are allowed in other dimensions besides the one(s) that determine the location of the place. I remember all this stuff by reading people like Donald Knuth a long time ago, in my other life as a computer scientist. To this day, I have not found a better computer science textbook (i.e. a textbook about any particular aspect of that field) better than the first three volumes of his TAoCP.

Some time ago, a student asked me how the various things I have studied in my life affect the kind of behaviour I evince while living the rest of my life. I think I've mentioned some of those behavioural quirks before (for example, here). You can probably find more by searching for 'life' and 'computer' or whatever in this blog.

I think that all of the things I've learnt stack in my brainspace, and provide bonuses which are independent of each other. But you'll have to ask my Master if that is true.

Robotization

Sigh. If it isn't Chess or Scramble, it's one of those silly collection games that consumes your time. These days, I am having a lot of fun building robots. Terrible. At least it's not as addictive as the rest. So far.

TeaSeR

This month's issue of Scientific American has a brief and entertaining article on crash prevention technologies. One of them is TSR — Traffic Sign Recognition — which recognizes when a driver "enters a zone where traffic rules have changed". Of course, long-time aficionados of wargaming and other such recondite pastimes will recognize the acronym immediately as referring to other situations in which people 'enter a zone where traffic rules have changed'...

No Clue

We live in a world that is full of information. That is nothing new. What is new is that there are three factors that have increased so quickly over the last 8 years that they are on the verge of precipitous descent into uncontrolled states. The three factors are pretty obvious:

• increasingly free access to information
• increasing complexity of information items
• increasing complexity of relationships between information items

A note here: the first is often taken as a good thing; this is not true for the simple reason that the free access is not equal, ubiquitous, instantaneous or rational.

We've been fed a mantra that the information age is good for you. This is true only by comparison to what can happen with insufficient information. The problem is an old one and has two components: 1) we are happy when we have enough information to solve existing problems or answer existing questions; 2) we are happier when we can find new problems to solve and new questions to answer. The two form a cycle, although the viciousness or virtuousity of the cycle is debatable, depending on the kind of problems. There is therefore never enough information, we always want more, and hence an age of increasing access to information is a Good Thing.

The sticking point perhaps is that there is a point at which we can no longer be our own data specialists. In the not-too-recent past, it was possible essentially to have restricted information access (or to restrict information access) and still be expert enough to get the job done. But people have incentives to stand out and hence earn greater rewards. So they recast the roles of professional, expert, master of a discipline, until they stand out. It is a question of whether your information brokerage level (whether it's a skill, a talent, a knowledge base, a database, a process, a capacity for synthesis etc) is outstanding enough.

It never will be, and that will eventually be because the human mind, no matter how complex or augmented, will never know enough. To address this based on my first three points, let's begin with access.

Access to information is a good thing when the information requirement is known in advance. For example, I need to know the best place for beer and pork knuckles in town. I ask people, search websites, do other information-gathering activities, until I have an answer I am satisfied with. Then I go and try out my search results physically. At the end of the experience, I will have updated my own database and am now qualified to offer my own opinion.

However, the questions of "What shall I eat?" (which according to Douglas Adams, is a relatively sophisticated question) and "Where shall I eat?" (which according to Adams is the most sophisticated question in this domain) are a lot more complex if I have no idea at all – or if I have too many ideas, brought on by a vastly greater access to information and travel capability than my ancestors had. With this, and the fact of human variability in opinion, I might face the centipede problem. That's often described as asking a centipede, "Which foot do you first move when you start to move?" and watching it attempt an answer, fail, and never walk again.

Access to information is inherently unfair, as it leverages off information sources and technology in depth, scale, range and speed. We keep talking about free markets, free speech and ideas, things like that; we fail to realise that unless information is ubiquitous, instantaneous, immediately processed, appropriately processed, and acted upon at once, all this is a very shady approximation to anything that could possibly be considered realistic. And yet we persist, perhaps beyond the limit of humanity's ability to make sense of it.

Which leads me to the second point. The information packages and 'chunks' we are presented with are sometimes far too complex. They cannot be evaluated fully or sometimes even usefully by us, our expert systems, or any other information processing tool we have. When the education system was a master teaching five apprentices in a workshop, the possible interactions and processes were far more limited that when the education system became a teacher teaching 25 students in a modern chemistry lab with internet access.

Where in the past, a sound-bite (like 'atoms are indivisible particles which our material universe is made of') could essentially be a workable fragment of reality, the present nature of education and information demands much more (like 'atoms are social constructs which can be considered to be statistical models of...') and sometimes too much more.

The modern sound-bite is of course not just a fragment of text encapsulating a key idea. Watching viral videos on YouTube or looking at campaign slogans and advertising literature, you will see that the entire semiotic domain is exploited at deeper and deeper levels. This is intended to affect us in ways that increasingly complicated analysis say might just be useful as the psychological leverage to push us into buying (into) things. We can no longer evaluate any of this easily; what's interesting is that neither can the merchants of materialism, the nabobs of nationalism, or the emirs of entertainmentism.

My third point is that as information chunks become more complex and more accessible, the number, kind and usefulness level of all their possible relationships spirals way out of control. Who is to know what might possibly be tangentially useful or critically useful? Only in very well-defined domains is this possible; domains such as a deliberately-limited math textbook or an intentionally-limited chemistry lab. With people inventing derivatives of data (information), second derivatives of data (information chunks and packages), third derivatives of data (knowledge packages and information systems), and fourth derivatives of data (information networks and dynamic knowledge bases), we are seeing an approach to the (we think) final level of the true artificial intelligence.

The likelihood is that this 'final' level will probably be centipeded after a while. Yes, it will be like us but smarter in some ways (mostly by more coherent and more rapid processing and access); yes, it will be like us in not knowing what questions to profitably ask for the unknown future.

And so, the correct thing to say is that unless one looks for some other standard by which to look at life, the universe and everything, the answer might as well be '42'. Information doesn't provide us, on its own, with answers to some questions. You might say, "I'm sorry, but I haven't a clue," to the question of what life is all about. Then, I would direct you to try some useful games.

Game-Playing

There is just not enough time in one day to do all the things you want and so you just cruise around picking up the little things when you ought to be saving up your cash and energy and resources for the big things. But sometimes scoring little points seems more fulfilling than not scoring anything for a long while as you wait for the big ones. It's a matter of which game you're playing.

Take word games for example: I've realised that the brain power required to find a 12-letter word just doesn't provide the rewards equivalent to finding five 4-letter words in the same time. So the small scores win in things like Scramble. But in Scrabble, even with time limits, a 7-letter word has a huge bonus and is worth thinking about.

Then there are the long-term planning games which allow you to stockpile stuff. Stockpiling without doing anything is the best policy. But that human itch that makes us want to check our stockpiles every few hours and do something with them is the greatest enemy of rational policy. I noticed today that somebody, by stockpiling without fighting, had built up a huge personal resource level while remaining at a low accomplishment level. This fellow was thus able to remain under the radar, immune to harassment and happy to just bum around doing... nothing.

There are implications in these small, perhaps petty, games that we play on Facebook or in real life. These implications are all part of game theory, that esoteric combination of psychology and statistics. They are played out on a larger scale in diplomacy, politics, economics and various social milieux. Do you work on safety? Is it better to emphasize health? Entertainment or culture, which is better and can they be the same thing? What role does science play? Or a huge workforce? Shall we go for prosperity at all costs, hoping that the others will follow?

And the biggie: if you give up all things for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, how does that change the world?

Change Forces

Things have changed: the College of the Wyverns is larger within its crammed confines, and the School that feeds it feeds it much less than before.

Things have not changed: the young people are the same, idealistic without knowing why and cynical for much the same reasons.

Things have changed: the people who worked for the God first, and the youth of the island next, then Family and society, and lastly themselves – these people have a different order of priorities.

Things have not changed: the same people are behaving the same way, as always; it is only that there are more of some kinds of people and fewer of some other kinds.

Things have changed: the education we provide is a new, post-colonial, globalist, rationalist, multicultural, holistic... (et cetera) kind of education.

Things have not changed: the students treat their education as cavalierly as ever.

Things have changed: the vision and mission are not the same.

Things have not changed: the real vision and mission are the same; it is only that they are not up there in big letters of wood and stone.

The equilibrium has shifted, but not as far as some people think. The game has still got much to play for, and it is only just after the opening stage.

Scrambled

It's worse than being twirly. I used to play this game called Boggle. You roll 16 dice, each with letters on it, placing them into a 4 by 4 grid. Then you search for words which you can form by moving through the grid vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, from one die to an adjacent die.

Now there's Scramble on Facebook, with an option for a 5x5 grid and automatic lists and scoring. And analysis. Urgh. This is terrible. I shall limit myself to three rounds a day.

And by the way, you can also visit my city and add a Polish Vodka distiller. I seem to be collecting those. Ho ho.

Twirly

Urk. Sometimes one unexpectedly enters a cycle of somewhat obsessive gaming behaviour. It happens with mahjong players, actors, musicians, teachers, anybody who has ever demonstrated the traits of homo ludens – game-playing humanity.

And it appears that on Facebook, I have not really become obsessed with 'Text Twirl', except that every time I see a random sequence of about six letters, I feel this great urge to form them into a six-letter word. It is a sort of throwback to my Scrabble-playing days, a situation brought about by dear parents who love anagrams, wordplay (especially punnery), and the romance of the unexpected linguistic denouement.

So, faced with a bunch of miscellaneous letters, I make anagrams. The funny part is that someone then tells me, "Hey, you make anagrams. You must be responsible for the infamous anagrammatical wild yak blog."

To which I then reply, after taking some time to drink my coffee, "Macavity Syndrome. Please."

Corvidae

Rook and jay, crow and raven, we sat and feasted on dragon and phoenix and rare meats. It has been a long time since the ancient fellowship was first convened in 1989 (or thereabouts). We had different names then; we have different names now – but the fellowship remains. Here is an account.

Over the years, we have been Man-in-Grey, Hunt-for-White-Lion, and many other life-brooches of the Aesgarnir. We "have seen the Eternal Footman... snicker," and we are not afraid. We know that we too have an eternal existence, whether in roles or at play or in the communion of the sanctified. And we partake of a brotherhood that has not been sundered for twenty years.

What a gift! What a life!

Authority & Independence

Today is US Independence Day. So it is rather odd to be talking about authority. That's a word with a ring of finality to it, and its often associated with the death of independence. But there really ought to be no difference between 'authority' and 'authorship'. They both convey the sense of bearing the stamp of the author, the evidence of auctorial rights. In a strange way, establishing authorship establishes auctorial independence to some extent.

There are two main authority-related issues in an auctorial context.

Firstly, there are people who look at others' intellectual property and misappropriate it. This effectively changes the author of a work, an idea, a process – anything that has already been committed to a physical medium by somebody else. It happens whenever people fail to acknowledge significant contribution, regardless of what legal authority says. This is why creative people occasionally are driven to assert a moral authority, realising that legal authority and casuistry will not necessarily protect them. Moral authority does not protect one's auctorial rights very well either, but moral victories have different standards and produce different elements of retribution.

Secondly, there are people who reserve the right to rewrite the rules of the milieu to suit themselves. Sometimes, this is fair; sometimes, this is merely dictatorship. Most times, it is somewhere in between. One ought to be careful when attempting to rewrite the rules of the game to one's advantage. Some players are better at gameplaying than others, regardless of rules changes. It is the 'metagaming' ability which sets these apart. A more reprehensible version exists in many major organisations – it normally takes the form of a written or unwritten clause which allows for rules changes without consultation or prior notification or warning.

These two issues are quite separate from the traditional issues of authority. Earlier issues of authority were mostly about physical and social control of the traditional elements: money, power, sex, influence and such. These are hoarded, traded, and encashed much like any other kind of token. But the modern world revolves around information, another kind of bargaining chip.

I find it reprehensible, but unfortunately all too justifiable, for a morally-oriented organisation of any kind to slam the gates down on information and engage in the cyber-equivalent of skullduggery and espionage in order to control the flow. If you want to be a pure power-broking institution of the mundane and secular kind, say so. If you're an eagle, don't call yourself a dove. Don't call yourself a charity, a mission school, a bible society, a church, whatever. Especially if you are a Christian institution.

For Christians, Romans 12 warns very firmly about not conforming to the patterns of the world. This is not to say that we shouldn't be law-abiding, peaceable, societally-appropriate in some contexts. Rather, it tells us to disdain the lure of the human-oriented chips: the hoarding of counters based on information, sex, power, money, control, physical force.

Isn't that rather idealistic? No, not at all. Earlier, I mentioned meta-gaming. If you are right about God and happen to be a Christian, then logically you have access to the Author and Finisher of your faith, the Architect of the Foundations, the Lord of Hosts, the Ruler of the Game. You are already a meta-gamer, and no matter how the world's patterns shift and flow, you will remain ahead of the game as long as you remember the true Author. And give Him the intellectual property kudos that belong to Him. Then you will be free indeed.

Happy Independence Day.