The "Best" as the Enemy of the "Pretty Good"

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

Pretty Good Privacy, Pretty Good Remailers, Pretty Good Digital Cash,
Pretty Good Data Haven, .....

One of the main lessons of evolutioary learning theory (aka evolutionary
game theory, market learning, Darwinian selection, and related variants) is
that getting something out early is often more important than getting it
"right." Rigor is important, but, interestingly, rigor is often
best-established in an evolutionary learning environment. (We build
machines and buildings not based on first doing exhaustive analyses for
centuries, but on building actual instances and learning from
mistakes...bridges that fail, buildings that collapse, planes that crash.)

A recent example of this is the Xanadu project, whose members worked for
many years (and spent something like $7 million) to get all the long-range,
rigorous details of hypertext "right"...and were then "scooped" by Tim
Berners-Lee with his simple and straightforward HTML/URL approach. (I am
not basing this analysis on the hatchet jobs done in the press on Ted
Nelson and the other Xanafolks, but on personal contacts with many of them,
including an identical analysis from Mark Miller at an Extropaganza this
past Saturday.)

Another example is that of remailers. There is no denying that "DC-Nets"
are a more elegant approach than "mixes," but mixes (remailers) can be
easily implemented in Perl and deployed rapidly, while I know of not a
single, actual, operational DC-Net.

And of course we cannot forget Phil Zimmermann's "Pretty Good Privacy." Had
a "pretty good" version not come out, where would we be today? (And "pretty
good" does not mean PGP is weak or has been broken.)

Just a reminder that often the best is the enemy of the good.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."