Dr. Dobb's Journal September 2007
Although I sometimes tend bar at the legendary Silicon Valley hideaway Foo Bar and also at Summer Jo's, the restaurant-slash-organic farm that my partner Nancy and I own in Southern Oregon, I confess that I have never been able to test the Hair of the Dog that Bit You theory.
This theory, as you are fully aware if half of what I've heard about you is true, holds that the cure for a hangover is another drink of whatever dread concoction did you in. On those rare occasions when I awoke to find myself in possession of the necessary cerebral crapulence for a fair test of this theory, the one shining truth in my muddled mind was that I was not going within a parsec of that culprit canine until my wounds had healed.
Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone other than an alcoholic or a liquor vendor would want to test the Hair of the Dog theory. Wikipedia, which believes everything, attributes the origin of the theory variously to 19th-century Scottish homeopaths treating wounds with actual dog hairs, to a poem by Aristophanes, and to the LucasArts game "The Curse of Monkey Island," take your pick.
Up here in Oregon, we have a brewery named "Hair of the Dog," but I'm pretty sure they didn't invent the theory. They did, though, once invent a 58-proof freeze-distilled beer called "Dave." Hair of the Dog Brewing no longer sells Dave, probably because after one glass of 58-proof beer, you wouldn't remember your own name, let alone the beer's. And any Dave drinker who managed in the morning after to call for a hair of the dog named Dave is probably as expired as the beer.
There are many theories in domains other than the mixological that sound like the Hair of the Dog that Bit You theory, like the political maxim that you can spend your way out of an economic slump, which I'm pretty sure is from The Curse of Monkey Island, and the only foolproof betting system ever devised by gamblers, the doubling strategy. You probably know that strategy well, too, if what your friends say is accurate, but I'll remind you anyway: If you lose, double your bet. That's it. It's an absolute sure-win strategy, although you do have to have an infinite amount of money going into the game.
More in our line here in the world of bits and banter is the idea that the solution to any technological problem is more technology. A generalization of the Tammy Faye Bakker theory of makeup, it is closely related to the notion that the cure for bad information is more information, the operating principle on which I write this column.
Although he never claimed to have invented the Internet, Al Gore did say, "the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason."
Just when I was about to embrace that inspiring vision, Larry King got a podcast.
But science marches on, and we are now witnessing a massive research program testing this Hair of the Bit that Bit You theory, a research program of Animal House kegger proportions. Wikis and blogs are aggressively testing the theory that more information improves bad information. A few random returns from the research front:
Discussion threads get sidetracked into irrelevant chat or flame wars. Solution: Many attempted, implemented by Dkos and Slashdot and others, mostly involving the principle that the cure for bad information is not just more information, but metainformation. Up-rating and down-rating are powerful metainformational tools. Banning is another metatool, but it's not so good, because it doesn't allow for correction of the correction.
Nature seems to have settled on a similar cybernetic model of up-rating and down-rating in biological systems: One enzyme to encourage, another to discourage. In rare cases, she goes brittle binary, simply turning things off or on, but this seems to occur when there is a danger that the organism may die abruptly. Otherwise, Nature seems to like to keep her options open. Probably something to do with local minima, simulated annealing, or her well-known distaste for being fooled.
A platform for reason? The most effective blogs are collaborative, not as obviously collaborative as wikis, but collaborative at a metalevel. Even we annoying people who correct spelling are (one kind of) collaborators.
We have barely begun to explore the power of metamodification of conversation. Was it Marshall McLuhan who said, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a metaphor?" I say it was, but you'll correct me if I'm wrong, right? There are metas beyond meta.
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com