The simple-minded open=good mentality is thin enough when it applies to technology, but it just plain falls apart when you're talking about diplomacy.
Let's be clear: What Assange and WikiLeaks are doing is incredibly irresponsible. They're uncovering important channels that are going to close up if neither side can trust that what's said won't become public (this is especially true of critical Middle Eastern relationships). Even worse, they're outing confidential informants and information critical to national defence. I hope they're prepared to have blood on their hands.
These documents will undoubtedly reveal some important stuff that the public should know about, and I'm not saying that everything that the government does is automatically good, but I think that most experts in the field would agree that Assange is doing way more harm than good here. There are important trust-based relationships and sources, nurtured for decades, that have just been utterly ruined, if not severely damaged.
Diplomacy is incredibly complicated and nuanced, and this naive belief that indiscriminately releasing thousands of documents and cables is automatically going to make the world a better place is totally out-of-touch with reality.
My theory (and sorry if this sounds mean) is that the same personality traits that make geeks great at visualizing logic and data comes at the expense of being able to understand nuance. You see it with the tech press' bizarre, highlanderistic insistence on everything being a something killer, you see it in the anti-government streak that is rampant on HN, and I think you're seeing it here.
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." — Brian W. Kernighan.
I think good programmers value simplicity and clarity more than the average person because they have more experience with and a better understanding of complexity and nuance. It's easy to build incomprehensible software: just don't make an effort to keep it simple.
I would think the same is true of diplomacy. Without a strict policy of honesty and open dealing, national embarrassment is practically inevitable. It's unreasonable to believe that you can build sound foreign relations on lies and deceit.
Diplomats, like lawyers, are effective because they are persuasive. Not because they are good liars.
I'm not sure it's just personality traits though, the technical professions may be influential as well. In technical matters, things do tend to be much more black-or-white, and if something is "subtle and nuanced", chances are it's a bug. Arts majors have been going on for ages about Aristotelian/Boolean logic being coarse and artificially compartmentalizing, there might be a grain of truth there.
Let's be clear: What Assange and WikiLeaks are doing is incredibly irresponsible. They're uncovering important channels that are going to close up if neither side can trust that what's said won't become public (this is especially true of critical Middle Eastern relationships). Even worse, they're outing confidential informants and information critical to national defence. I hope they're prepared to have blood on their hands.
These documents will undoubtedly reveal some important stuff that the public should know about, and I'm not saying that everything that the government does is automatically good, but I think that most experts in the field would agree that Assange is doing way more harm than good here. There are important trust-based relationships and sources, nurtured for decades, that have just been utterly ruined, if not severely damaged.
Diplomacy is incredibly complicated and nuanced, and this naive belief that indiscriminately releasing thousands of documents and cables is automatically going to make the world a better place is totally out-of-touch with reality.
My theory (and sorry if this sounds mean) is that the same personality traits that make geeks great at visualizing logic and data comes at the expense of being able to understand nuance. You see it with the tech press' bizarre, highlanderistic insistence on everything being a something killer, you see it in the anti-government streak that is rampant on HN, and I think you're seeing it here.