Rogers: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.
Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.
Rogers: Why?
Stig: Well he had to, didn't he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.
Rogers: What had you done?
Stig: Er... well he didn't tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy.

It can look like that some days. There was a bit of a toronade del marde over at Dan's blog that I just caught the end of yesterday and it got me thinking about belief, ethics and that new book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, that I will likely never read but I'll hear plenty about at yawny conferences for the next two years. The unhappy exchanges were over one ramification over the insane situation in PEI where a whole bunch of people took zillions in immigrant investment money in exchange for passports providing the province with twice the revenue stream of the potato crop, rivaling, as Chris points out, the sickening Anne machine. The debate turned on the idea of a web coder / designers' code of ethics and whether Ruk setting up a site that mined the data on the PEI corporate registry and made it cross referencing was bad. See, PEI rejigged the registry to stop Ruk from making it possible to see who owned what corporation in PEI, thereby giving folk the ability to see who got the zillions in immigrant investment money. Why is that odd? Ruk used to provide the web work for the government of PEI. But, as I recall, stopped for the most part some time ago. And he has left the scraped information at a point in time up at a renamed site, ClosedCorporations.com. Ruk rightly protests.

What does this have to do with Outliers and belief? Well, as far as I can tell, we do two things as humans: we believe and we do. Some of the things we do are actually of use and some of the things we believe are actually true...but those are besides the point and a bit of a fluke. Outliers will come to stand for the principle that achievement is a fluke as it points out patterns that might indicate that achievers are creations of chance timing as well as long hours of practice. I am sure there is more but that is not important. See, I think that all human activity is a creation of chance and practice. I see the world like this:

• 10,000 hours of practice to create excellence not critical in itself.
• As everyone spends well more at 10,000 hours honing skills just like everyone has belief, much of which is useless.
• But some skills economically useless as trade items or so common that not considered special.
• Skills we all hone over tens of thousands of hours include TV watching, desk jockeying, floor cleaning, day dreaming.
• We are creatures of evolution but that bad uncontrollable sort of evolution: each of our combination of 10,000 of hours of doing and the chance that evolutionary shift benefits.
• The 1990s book The Beak of the Finch indicated that diversity in deviation creates range of applications, some applications survive changes in circumstances better than others.
• The surviving deviant is not more robust or flexible but, by fluke, just better suited for new situation.
• New situations unknown. Many foresee possible futures but few do it well or rather with success.

This may not make much sense. I may not have time to get my thoughts in order but if we think of Malcolm Gladwell as a voice in the wilderness, saying again that things are not as they seem, and if we think of the pervasive belief in something...anything...as being the natural human condition like I described back here in a comment two and a half years ago, then we see the attraction of believing in things like a web designer's code of ethics...something that just doesn't exist. But we create them to fill in the gaps created by our need to justify ourselves. The need to fill in the empty bits caused by the rut of taking on decades of unproductive effort thwarted by the slap in the face of evolutionary fluke. We believe to make sense but for many the belief in only a temporary measure. But we all believe and perhaps have to in the face of the likelihood of failure given evolutionary flux and witnessing the springboards others get.

So remember the seduction of a code of ethics - it creates authority in those who know the code. And, for others, it creates belief in that authority. Read Ivan Illich if you don't believe me. It becomes so compelling that the responses at Dan's site were about how Ruk had not broken the code...as opposed to saying there is no such frigging thing as a frigging web coder / designer code of ethics. This does not mean Ruk was or was not ethical. He may have had established a relationship of confidence with his former client that could be breached. You will have to review the entertaining Clamato case to judge if that is the case. I think not. He may have made a poor business decision in favour of a good civic one. It may have not even been a poor decision as he gave up the contract willingly and moved on. But he was not unethical. He was not really within the realm of ethics at all - except perhaps in the respect of his relationship to the state as a citizen.