Hi, I gave a talk at Ignite Strata on “Secrets of Fire Truck Society” and at the end I promised that for more information you could visit this blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to write a blog post. Here are some links to tide you over until I do:
Several people in my influencesphere have linked to this essay by a CS prof who’s leaving academia to join Google in order to “make a positive difference in the world.” I am, of course, wholly supportive of such a program, if not of his precise rationale, which is a mish-mash of ranting about wicked Republicans and wild-eyed idealism about the Academy.
What interests me most about his essay is the section entitled “Mass Production Of Education”, which is misguided in all the ways you’d expect from someone steeped in the culture of “bespoke” education. It lists three “worries”:
First, I worry that mass-production here will have the same effect that it has had on manufacturing for over two centuries: administrators and regents, eager to save money, will push for ever larger remote classes and fewer faculty to teach them.
Said differently, technologies that allow fewer faculty to teach the same number of students will allow universities to operate with fewer faculty. Let’s call this worry “Luddism“. I love a good loom-smashing as much as the next guy, but it’s sort of hard to take seriously a preference for the 19th-century manufacturing regime.
It seems likely that in a hundred years our grandchildren and those of us who’ve successfully been cryonically revived will share a laugh about how “education” used to involve crowding people into a room and making them sit still while someone stood up front and lectured at them. And then someone will brain-cast a ludicrous hyper-essay about how 4-D printing is democratizing the singularity, pining for the good old days of 3-D printing. And so on.
Second, I suspect that the “winners win” cycle will distort academia the same way that it has industry and society. When freed of constraints of distance and tuition, why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM?
Said differently (and with apologies to UNM, which I’m sure is a fine school), if every student has access to cheap, high-quality education, few of them will choose to pursue a low-quality education. It is easy to see how purveyors of low-quality education might worry about this, but it’s hard to imagine why anyone else should.
Are we approaching a day in which there is only one professor of computer science for the whole US?
Seems pretty unlikely, but if we were that would be awesome because it would free up all the other computer science Ph.D.s, many of whom are brilliant, to do other stuff (like building Groupon and Pinterest clones)! This would be sad for the ones who really, really, really want to be teachers, but on balance it would be a huge win for the world.
Third, and finally, this trend threatens to kill some of what is most valuable about the academic experience, to both students and teachers. At the most fundamental level, education happens between individuals — a personal connection, however long or short, between mentor and student.
I have no idea how to say this differently, so I won’t try. Having been a teacher, I agree that the most rewarding moments happened between individuals. (Particularly when one of the individuals was the cute goth freshman girl who aced all the quizzes but still came to office hours.) Were those the most valuable parts of the teaching experience? Less clear. What’s more clear is that what was/is most valuable about my experience as a student was/is learning stuff. And these days most of what I know that’s useful I’ve learned from books or doing or even Coursera, not from the academy. I’ve broadened my horizons by pleasure reading, by arguing on LiveJournal, by discussions with peers on geek hikes far more than I ever did through school. With very few exceptions, my most profound intellectual connections have been with people I met outside of the school system.
It resonates at levels far deeper than the mere conveyance of information — it teaches us how to be social together and sets role models of what it is to perform in a field, to think rigorously, to be professional, and to be intellectually mature.
I suspect you have to have spent your whole life in academia to seriously assert that “the human connection in education” is the only path to these things, or even the easiest path to these things. College taught me how to play the same juvenile bulshytt status games we played in high school but at a slightly higher level. College professors were (sometimes) great role models for how to behave if you ever became a college professor, but not for much else. The levels of professionality and intellectual maturity I experienced in the academy were certainly no greater than I’ve experienced in the real world. I will freely admit to learning rigor (some would say too much rigor) while studying mathematics, which primed me to recognize the lack of rigor in so many other fields.
I am terribly afraid that our efforts to democratize the process will kill this human connection and sterilize one of the most joyful facets of this thousand-year-old institution.
Said differently, “we fear change”. Hopefully at Google he’ll learn to stop saying “democratize”, and maybe he’ll even meet a Republican or two. There must be one or two Republicans at Google, right?
Last fall I signed up for two of the hyphen classes: the Machine Learning ml-class (Ng) and the Artificial Intelligence ai-class (Thrun and Norvig). Both were presented by Stanford professors but one of the conditions of taking the courses was that whenever I discuss them I am required to present the disclaimer that THEY WERE NOT ACTUALLY STANFORD COURSES and that I WAS NEVER ACTUALLY A STANFORD STUDENT and that furthermore I AM NOT FIT TO LICK THE BOOTS OF A STANFORD STUDENT and so on. (Caltech is better than Stanford anyway, even if whenever you tell people you’re in the economics department they always say, “we have one of those?!”)
My background is in math and economics, but I’ve taught myself quite a bit of computer science over the years, and I consider myself a decent programmer now, to the point where I could probably pass a “code on the chalkboard” job interview if that’s what I needed to do in order to support my family and/or drug habit.
I’d worked on some machine learning projects at previous jobs, so I’d picked up some of the basics, but I’d never taken any sort of course in machine learning. At my current job I’m the de facto subject matter expert, so I thought the courses might be a good idea.
The classes ended up being vastly different from one another. Here’s kind of a summary of each:
ml-class:
* Every week 5-10 recorded lectures, total 1-2 hours of lecture time. (There was an option to watch the lectures at 1.2x or even 1.5x speed, which I always used, so it might have been more like 3 hours in real-time. This means that if I ever meet Ng in real-life, he will appear to me to be speaking very, very slowly.)
* Most lectures had one or two (ungraded) integrated multiple choice quizzes with the sole purpose of “did you understand the material I just presented?”
* Each week had a set of “review questions” that were graded and were designed to make sure you understood the lectures as a whole. You could retake the review if you missed any (or if you didn’t) and they were programmed to slightly vary each time (so that a “which of the following are true” might be replaced with a “which of the following are false” with slightly different choices but covering the same material).
* Each week also had a programming assignment in Octave, for which they provided the bulk of the code, and you just had to code in some functions or algorithms. I probably spent 2-3 hours a week on these, a fair amount of that chasing down syntax-error bugs in my code and/or yelling at Octave for crashing all the time.
* Machine learning is a pretty broad topic, and this course mostly focused on what I’d call “machine learning using gradient descent.” There was some amount of calculus involved (although you could probably get by without it) and a *lot* of linear algebra. If you weren’t comfortable with linear algebra, the class would have been very hard, and the programming assignments probably would have taken a lot longer than they took me.
* The material was a nice mix of theoretical and practical. I’ve already used some of what I learned in my work, and if there was a continuation of the class I would definitely take it. As it stands I’m right now signed up for the nlp-class and the pgm-class, which should be starting soon, both of which are relevant to what I do.
* The workload, and the corresponding amount I learned, were substantially less than they would have been in an actual 10-week on-campus university course. This was great for me, since I also have a day job and a baby. If I were a full-time student being offered ml-class instead of a real machine learning class, I might feel a little cheated. (I saw a blog post by some Stanford student whining about this, but he was mostly upset that the hyphen classes were devaluing his degree. Someone should have reminded him about the disclaimer.)
* The class was very solidly prepared. The lectures were smooth and well thought out. The review questions did a good job of making sure you’d learned the right things from the lectures. The programming assignments were good in their focus on the algorithms, although that did insulate you from the real-world messiness of getting programs set up correctly.
* It certainly seemed like Ng really enjoyed teaching, and at the end of the last lecture he thanked everyone in a very heartfelt way for taking the class.
ai-class:
* Every week dozens of lectures, each a couple of minutes long, interspersed with little multiple choice quizzes. This was my first point of frustration, in that the quizzes were frequently about parts of the lecture that hadn’t happened yet. Furthermore, they often asked ambiguous questions, or questions that were unanswerable based on the material presented so far.
* Each week had a final quiz that you submitted answers for one time only. Then you waited until the deadline passed to find out if your answers were correct (and then you waited another day, because the site always went down on quiz submission day, and so they always extended the deadline by 24 hours). These quizzes were also ambiguous, which meant that if you wanted to get them correct you had to pester for clarifications (and sometimes for clarifications of the clarifications).
* This resulted in the feeling that the grading in the class was stochastic, and that your final score was more reflective of “can I guess what the quiz-writer really meant” than “did I really understand the material”. Although I didn’t particularly care about my grade in the class, I was still frustrated and disheartened by the feeling that the quizzes were more interested in *tricking* me than in helping me learn.
* What’s more, the quizzes often seemed to focus on what seemed to me tangential or inconsequential parts of the lesson, like making sure that I really, deeply understood step 3 of a 5-step process, but not whether I understood the other four steps or the process itself.
* The material also seemed very grab-bag, almost like an “artifical intelligence for non-majors” survey course.
* Anyway, partly on account of my finding the class frustrating, partly on account of time pressures, and partly because I didn’t feel like I was learning a whole lot, I dropped the ai-class after about four weeks.
* There were no programming assignments, but there was a midterm and a final exam, both after I quit the course. From what I could tell, they were longer versions of the quizzes, with the same problems of clarity and ambiguity. (I never unfollowed the @aiclass twitter, and during exam time it was a steady stream of clarifications and allowed assumptions.)
* Compared to the tightly-planned ml-class, the ai-class felt very haphazard. In addition, the ml-class platform I found more pleasant to use than the ai-class platform.
* I quit long before the last lecture, so I have no idea how heartfelt it was.
One thing about both classes: I *hate* lectures. I learn much better reading than I do being lectured at, and I found the lecture aspect of *both* classes frustrating. I have complained about this in many venues, but my prejudice is that if you’re using the internet to make me watch *lectures*, you’re not really reinventing education, because I still have to watch lectures, and I hate lectures. Did I mention that I hate lectures?
By way of comparison, I have also been doing CodeYear. It is currently below my level (I am plenty familiar with variables and if-then statements and for loops), but I don’t know much Javascript, and the current pace makes me hopeful that it will get interesting for me after another month or two.
If you don’t know that platform, it gives you a task (“create a variable called myName, assign your name to it, and print it to the console”) and a little code window to do it in. Then you click “run” and it runs and tells you if you got it right or not. There is a pre-canned hint for each problem.
What I really like about Codeacademy is that I can do it at my own pace. The lessons are wildly variable in quality, but I’m glad not to have to sit through hours of lectures every week. They also do “badges”, which I find more satisfying than I wish I did. That said, I suspect someone with no experience debugging code would find the experience impenetrable and waste hours tracking down simple syntax errors, and indeed I saw on Hacker News a post to this effect a few weeks ago.
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In the end, despite all this, the way I learn best is through a combination of reading books and writing actual code. I’ve had to learn F# over the last month, which I’ve done by reading a couple of (quite nice) books and writing a lot of actual code. It’s hard for me to imagine the course that would have done me any better (or any faster).
Similarly, if I wanted to learn Rails (which some days I think I do and other days I think I don’t), I have trouble imagining a course that would do better for me than just working through the Rails Tutorial (which I have skimmed, which has convinced me that I could learn well from it).
Similarly similarly, I suspect that the right Machine Learning book (and some quality time with e.g. Kaggle) would have been much more effective for me than the ml-class was. But if such a book exists, I haven’t found it yet.
The government has a CIO, it turns out, and when he’s not hassling us to change our passwords again or to stop BitTorrenting on company time, he’s got a plan to re-invent government itself:
On Tuesday, VanRoekel said that he wants to overhaul the federal bureaucracy to become more agile in an age of services delivered via mobile apps, and where information is atomized so that it can be mashed up by anyone to provide deeper insights. He also wants to break down massive multi-year information technology projects into smaller, more modular projects in the hopes of saving the government from getting mired in multi-million dollar failures.
[...]
“Going forward, we need to embrace modular development, build on open standards, and run our projects in lean startup mode,” he said.
No one can argue that he doesn’t grasp the lingo. However, a career Microsoftie is maybe not the best choice to run anything in “lean startup mode”. As someone with a fair amount of startup experience, I offer him the following pieces of advice:
1. Never say “lean startup mode” (or “agile” or “mashed up”)
Each of these buzzwords sends a clear signal that either you’ve been in a coma since 2006 or that your “startup experience” consists entirely of eavesdropping at a coffee shop where programmers hang out.
2. Also, “mobile apps” are very 2009
I’m not saying you couldn’t hit the jackpot and sell several million copies of “Angry Birds D.C.” or “Laws with Friends” or even “Doodle Congress”. But the odds are against you.
3. Startups have to convince investors to give them money
This is part of what makes startups startups. It’s tough to stay “lean” and “agile” (let alone “mashed up”) if you can simply close a funding round at gunpoint each April 151. If VanRoekel can somehow make it so that government has to make PowerPoint slides and beg us for money each time it needs some, that would be a huge win.
4. Startups have to at least pretend to have a revenue model
It doesn’t have to be completely realistic. It can in fact be pretty ludicrous, like “we’ll sell ‘$50 of junk for only $25′ coupons and then only give the merchants half of the $25.”
But it does have to involve revenue. For instance, “we’ll use the funds to subsidize our friends’ failing businesses and also to bail out our other friends’ failed businesses and then to send troops to Africa and then finally to imprison some recreational drug users” is not a revenue model. Could you maybe add some sort of group shopping component?
5. Startups need an “elevator pitch”
At some point you’ll be in an elevator with someone, and he’ll ask you what your startup does, and you’ll have to explain it to him in terms of something he already knows (and recognizes as a success for venture capital).
For instance, a startup might be “Flickr but for dogs” or “Facebook but for cats” or “Pets.com but for group shopping deals.”
Obviously, none of these describes the federal government. Coming up with these analogies is more of an art than a science, but you might consider “Enron but bigger” or “Swoopo but mandatory” or “Pets.com but with guns and a no-knock warrant”.
6. Startups fire people
Part of being “lean” and “agile” and “mashed up” is that you can’t afford to keep the wrong people *cough* Tim Geithner *cough* Janet Napolitano *cough* Eric Holder *cough* Steven Chu *cough* in their jobs when they suck at them. If the CIO is empowered to make this change, then good for him!
7. Startups have a “fun” culture
| fun | not fun |
| ping-pong table | metal detectors |
| free popcorn | the toothpick rule |
| catered meals | Supreme Court cafeteria |
| geek shootout | Waco shootout |
8. Startups usually fail and go out of business
I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the most exciting part of the “government as startup” plan.
1. Can we dispense with the fiction that taxes are due on April 15? Multiple times I paid my taxes by April 15 and yet was still “penalized” because I didn’t “estimate” and “prepay” them sooner.
Although my formal training is in subjects like math and economics and animal husbandry, most of the money-work I do is in subjects like data science and fareology and writing over-the-top religious polemics. This is one of the reasons why I’m so sour on the value of college, as my multi-million-dollar investment in tuition and pitchers of Ice Dog beer and Tower Party t-shirts didn’t even provide me the opportunity to learn any of these.
I did get to take an “Artificial Intelligence” class. The only listed prerequisite was the “Intro to CS” class, but a brand new professor was teaching and she decided to make it a much more advanced class, and then I was going to partner with my friend who was a CS major so that he could handle all the more advanced programming aspects, but he dropped the class after a couple of weeks so he could spend his senior year focused on “not taking classes”, which meant that I got to spend my senior year focused on “learning enough about computer programming to not fail the class”, after which I picked up a bit of “how to sometimes beat the computer at tic-tac-toe” and “how to sometimes beat the computer at Reversi” and “how to narrowly avoid coming in last place in the classwide ‘Pac War‘ tournament.”
Despite that initial setback, over the course of my career I’ve managed to learn bits and pieces of what’s variously called “machine learning”, “artificial intelligence”, or “guessing stuff”. I suspect I would be more popular at data mining parties if I had a smidge more training in these subjects, and so I was very excited at the prospect of Stanford’s free online Artificial Intelligence Class and Machine Learning Course, both of which are offered this fall. (There’s also a Database Class, but I know too much about databases already.)
You don’t get actual Stanford credit if you take the classes online, but I don’t particularly want Stanford credit, which means that’s not a deal-breaker. You get some sort of certificate signed by the professors listing your rank in the class, which will probably be somewhere in the millions thanks to all the Chinese students who will be cheating on their assignments, but I don’t particularly want a certificate either. I wouldn’t mind some sort of bumper sticker (“MY COMPUTER ALGORITHM IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR STUDENT AND FURTHERMORE WON’T EVER BE UNEMPLOYED AND LIVING IN MY BASEMENT UNDER A CRIPPLING MOUNTAIN OF STUDENT-LOAN DEBT”), but that doesn’t seem to be part of the plan.
Most likely I won’t have enough time to devote to the classes anyway, what with work and training the baby to take over the world someday and trying to finish the novel about the boy who likes to play baseball but is no good at it. And this isn’t helped by the fact that both classes are going to have hours of online lectures that I’m going to have to sit through. Lectures!
I twittered the other day that if I have to sit through lectures then you’re not really transforming education. A lot of people (reasonably) interpreted this as a dig at the Khan Academy, but I was more angry at the Stanford CS department, which is tech-savvy enough to offer courses over the Internet to millions of cheating Chinese people and yet not tech-savvy enough to think of a better method of knowledge transmission than lectures with slides, which were invented by Moses or possibly even God, making them thousands of years old. I’m happy to take their quizzes and solve their problem sets and write their examinations, but the prospect of having to spend time listening to lectures is really glooming me down.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate what they’re doing, but if the Stanford Computer Science department really wants to revolutionize the educational process, they should figure out a way to upload information directly into my brain, or to embed it subliminally in Spider-Man cartoons, or to make it somehow drinkable. “Machine Learning Class” is the past; the future belongs to whoever first figures out “Machine Learning Beverage”!
If you have been living in a cave without Internet access, you might not be aware of Google Plus, which you might think of as Google’s answer to Facebook (if Facebook were a question). After playing around with it a bit, it seems to have several advantages:
Whereas Facebook makes you lump all your friends together in one feed, Google lets you segregate them into circles for browsing and sharing. If you curate correctly, it’s easy to share links only with the “Asian females” circle and to browse only the “people on my kickball team that I like” circle.
Unfortunately, at this early stage of the game you cannot nest circles, which means it’s important to partition your friends correctly. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve found the following scheme of circles works pretty well for me:
If there’s a downside to Google Plus, it’s that it’s a lot of work to check it all the time, and to casually brag about how many people are adding to me to their circles, and to ask everyone their heights so that I know whether to put them in the “Tall people” circle or the “Jackie Passey” circle. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear at this point that circles are the wave of the future, which means that my decades-long investment in analytic geometry is about to pay off!
Bill Gates, always a man with big ideas, suspects that the internet is going to shake up our educational system:
“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.
In fact, this is already true today. When I used to bus-commute across the bridge, every bus ride that I didn’t spend reading pirated young-adult Star Wars novellas or playing “Angry Birds” I spent watching “iTunes U” lectures from Stanford and MIT and iPorn about “Machine Learning” and “Computer Science” and “The Naked Female Body.” If only I could somehow put these on my resume, I’d be able to talk my way into all sorts of jobs I’m not really qualified to do. BillG has got a plan for that too:
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
Now, there is a cynical school of thought that says that the value of a MIT degree is not that it signals that you learned dozens of MIT-lecture-worths of things; rather, it’s that it signals that you were admitted to and jumped through all the hoops necessary to survive four years at MIT, in which case the hypothetical third-party credentials “watched a bunch of MIT lectures on the bus” probably aren’t that useful to employers.
Furthermore, being lectured at is frequently not the best way to learn something. Nonetheless, I join BillG in applauding this trend. If it puts competitive pressure on colleges, it will be a good thing.
It seems to me that it’s even more promising for K-12 education. Rather than having centrally-assigned, underqualified teachers trying to lecture 30 students who learn at varying paces (and several of whom are disruptive), each student could find the lecturer and lecture style that works best for him. In many cases these might be no lectures at all. Think of the innovations that would ensue! I bet BillG is most excited about this:
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.
Wait, what? K-12 education needs to be “place-based”? I mean, I understand that the internet can’t yet teach kids valuable life skills like “staying in your seat” and “raising your hand before you speak” and “not going to the bathroom without getting permission first” and “getting duct-taped to a bench in the locker room for being too slow at running laps.” But surely virtual locker rooms and virtual duct tape are only a few years away!
(Also, for those of you who don’t know, I am delighted to report that the post-college years contain a huge number of parties, including Oktoberfests, Nights of Decadence, 80′s Parties, Bacchinaliae, Shut-up-and-Drinks, and Lovett Casino Parties.)
It’s tough to assert with a straight face that competition (from the internet or otherwise) will provide vast benefits for students in grades 13-16, but has no role to play in grades K-12. If Bill ever decides to spend his vast fortunes improving education, hopefully he’ll revisit his opinion on this first, before he wastes billions of dollars.
In my previous post “Why Software Developers Shouldn’t Run for Congress” I poked fun at the idea, proposed by a pie-in-the-sky, government-would-work-well-if-only-it-were-run-by-my-kind-of-people type, that an influx of software developers would noticeably improve the quality of our laws.
During a subsequent Facebook discussion, I came up with an additional “reason” why developers might enjoy Congress: developers hate testing their code, and Congress never tests before shipping. Of course I was being flip, but the idea has since gotten stuck in my head.
In software, when you want to make changes to code, you test them. You change small pieces and use unit tests to make sure they don’t break existing functionality. You develop a spec outlining what the code is supposed to do, and then you check that it does those things before you ship it. You have code reviews so that other coders can inspect your code looking for possible unintended consequences. You let normal users try to break the code before it ships. You try using the code yourself for a while before you inflict it on your customers. When you know that people will try to “game” your final product, you model their behavior and try to account for it in your design.
In particular, if you want to stay in business you don’t show up the night before release with thousands of pages of unreviewed, untested, hodge-podge code written by the very people hoping to hack your systems, full of hidden side effects, functionality that wasn’t in the spec, backdoors, and billion-dollar bugs. Unless you’re Congress, of course, in which case you stay in business no matter how sloppy your “coding” habits are.
So while I still don’t think Congress would be particularly improved by the addition of software developers, it sure as hell could benefit from some testers.
Over on his blog, Clay Johnson gives five reasons why software developers ought to run for Congress:
1. They’re underrepresented. (Similarly, so are people without college degrees, so perhaps they ought to run too.)
2. Congress could use their expertise. For example, think about the more-than-1000-page Stimulus Bill. Not only does it monkey in an unintended-consequences kind of way with multi-billion-dollar swaths of the economy, it also contains a poorly written website spec for recovery.gov! If we had more developers in Congress, perhaps the bill would only do the former.
3. Software developers like solving problems, and will make the Congress more efficient at doing what it does. Like, maybe instead of just posting self-serving press releases on their websites, they can add them their Twitter feeds as well. Rather than ignoring their constituents’ letters and phone calls, they can ignore their emails and tweets. Rather than arbitrarily deciding where to allocate waste-of-taxpayer-money pork funds, they’ll write software programs that use “algorithms” to decide where to waste our money. The possibilities are endless.
4. They’d probably staff their offices with other software developers, who would not only Rails-ify House Subcommittee websites that no one cares about, they’d also be much less likely to sue the taxpayers for sexual harassment. Everyone wins.
5. Software developers are great communicators! Sure, they use too many acronyms, and they tend to stare at their shoes instead of making eye contact, and they’re afraid of girls, and they prefer instant messaging to actual conversation. But they’re also much better at foursquare (“Congressman Jones is now Mayor of D.C. Madam“) and they’d probably update their blogs a lot more frequently.
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The blog post doesn’t mention it, but there are also some good reasons why software developers shouldn’t run for Congress.
1. Congressmen spend most of their time raising money, which will bring back all those bad memories of your last failed startup.
2. Not only does Congress not provide free sodas, they’re always trying to tax them!
3. (# of foosball tables in Capitol) + (# of XBOX 360s in Capitol) + (# of ball pits in Capitol) = 0
4. Terrible iPhone reception in Congressional office buildings.
5. Software developers hate bullshit; Congress non-stop bullshit.
There’s a scourge stalking Broadway. It’s called the “synthesizer,” and it uses “technology” to generate sounds that heretofore could only be generated by human “musicians.” And like other human-supplanting devices such as mechanized looms, grain threshers, and sex robots, the “synthesizer” must be stopped.
So warns violinist Paul Woodiel, who is quite sure that Leonard Bernstein would have been at the head of the smashing line:
Now, after 500 performances, our producers have told us and our union that in order to cut costs they will chop our string section in half, releasing five musicians and “replacing” them with a synthesizer piped in from another room. I don’t think Lenny would have approved.
[...]
Soon, though, if all goes according to plan, these songs will be produced by a skeletal string section accompanied by an inert, artificial, electronic device, which an engineer will try to manipulate, hoping to deceive audiences into thinking it’s the real thing.
Indeed, it would be pretty unfair to deceive audiences that way. If we grant the producers this one deceit, they’re sure to follow it with others. Next they’ll replace the story’s gang members with “actors” only pretending to be gang members. Instead of expensive real guns, they’ll probably start using prop guns that only pretend to fire bullets. Heck, they might even start faking some of the deaths in the play!
Better just to pull the plug:
So here’s my proposition: if the show is no longer profitable, the producers should simply close it with its dignity intact. Doing so might put me out of work, but it would honor (rather than demean) the legacy of Bernstein’s crown jewel.
That’s a pretty forceful statement, that he and all his co-musicians and all the actors and all the stagehands and the directors and costumers are all offering to quit their jobs in order to fight off big King Synthesizer. All of the co-musicians and actors and stagehands and directors and costumers are on-board with his crusade, right?
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