Hello, hello, writers. I'm Kristin Kiefer, author of fantasy fiction and creative writing resources. And you are listening to the Well-Sturried podcast, where I share insights, encouragement, and actionable advice designed to help you craft sensational novels and build your best writing life. Always in 30 minutes or less, so you can get back to writing, of course. Ready for the show? Let's get talking. Hello again, writers. My name is Kristin Kiefer, and you are listening to the Well-Sturied podcast. Today is Saturday, April 11th, 2020, and today's episode is entitled How to Craft Positive Character Arcs. If you would like to read the article that corresponds with this episode as you listen in, please visit www.Well-Sturied.com-positive. Now let's dive in. External conflict often plays a major role in genre fiction, forming the foundation for a story's plot as the protagonist struggles to achieve their goal in the face of opposition. As such, many genre fiction writers spend a considerable amount of time developing their story's plot arcs while giving little thought to an equally powerful story element. Character arcs. A character arc is a sequence of events that details a character's internal struggle. Even in heavily plot-driven stories, character arcs play an important role, lending emotional weight that gives meaning to all that external conflict. Just imagine how much less impactful Katniss's decision to kill Cato would have been if Suzanne Collins hadn't first established her struggle to hold true to her values in the face of the capital's corruption. The fight to maintain one's values in the face of temptation is the definition of a static character arc, a less common type of arc that I discuss at length in another episode of the podcast. However, most character arcs are transformative, with a character either overcoming a significant internal obstacle or succumbing to it. This obstacle can be mental, emotional, or spiritual in nature, and often results in a false belief that shapes your character's identity. This false belief is also known as the lie your character believes. Of the three types of character arcs, that is positive, negative, and static, positive arcs are by far the most prominent in genre fiction. It's for this reason that I'm going to show you how to develop an effective positive change arc today. How to structure a positive change arc. Like plot arcs, character arcs can be structured before drafting and further refined in revision. A strong understanding of this structure is key to crafting an effective positive change arc, no matter how you prefer to approach the pre-writing, drafting, and revising processes. Establishing the lie your character believes is the first step in crafting an effective positive change arc, as your character must ultimately discover a truth that counteracts this lie if they're to transform their identity for the better. Here are a few examples of both the lie your character might believe and the truth that would counteract that lie. Lie. I've done too many awful things to be worthy of love. Truth. I am worthy of love, not because of who I am or what I've done, but because I'm human. Lie. I'll never be good enough to win the competition. Truth. Whether or not I win the competition, I'm capable of working hard to hone my skills and talent. Lie. If I can only make enough money, I'll finally be happy. Truth. No amount of money in the world can compare to the simple joy of being loved. In a positive change arc, your character should begin their journey gripped by the lie that they believe. Events then showcase how that lie causes damage in both your character's life and in the lives of those around them. In time, additional events send your character on a journey that forces them to confront their lie before ultimately accepting the truth and transforming into a better and happier person. This transformation can be mapped over the course of 10 major beats, that is key moments in your story. A structure that is nearly universal across positive change arcs. Let's break down each of these beats together. Beat number one. The hook. The first major scene in a positive change arc showcases who your character is in their everyday environment. That is, before they become entangled in the arc's core conflict, and introduces how the lie that they believe impacts their daily life. Creating conflict within themselves and with others. Example one. A character who believes himself unworthy of love declines an invitation to a local ball where he might meet new people. Example two. A character who believes money is the key to happiness misses their young son's school play in favor of working longer hours. Beat number two. The inciting incident. Shortly after the hook, an unexpected event occurs that introduces a change in your character's life. This change will either challenge your character's lie or introduce them to some element of the truth. In most cases, your character will hesitate to accept this change. Example one. The character who believes himself unworthy of love meets someone who is bound to become their love interest. Example two. The character who believes money is the key to happiness learns of a lucrative business opportunity. The only downside? It's highly risky. Beat number three. The first plot point. Not long after the inciting incident, another unexpected event forces or prompts your character to accept this change. They then set out on a journey that challenges their lie. A journey that ultimately leads them toward the truth. During this beat, your character also determines to pursue a goal based around the lie they believe. Example one. After both he and his love interest are roped into helping prepare for the ball, the character who believes himself unworthy of love determines to complete his work as quickly as possible while avoiding his new love interest. Example two. The character who believes that money is the key to happiness learns just how much money he could make from this risky business venture and decides to pursue it despite his wife's objections. Beat number four. A series of defensive conflicts. Before the midpoint of your positive change arc, your character will strive to fulfill their goal while encountering a series of conflicts that highlight the flaws of their lie and or hint at the benefits of accepting the truth. However, at this point, your character isn't yet willing to reject their lie and so reacts defensively, often hurting others and further miring themselves in internal conflict. Example one. The character who feels unworthy of love reacts negatively when he and the love interest must work together to help prepare for the ball. He continues to react negatively when he feels his own attraction to the love interest begin to grow. Example two. The character who believes that money is the key to happiness begins working to secure his new business venture. Even his tensions mount between him and his family. Beat number five. The midpoint. Roughly halfway through your positive change arc, a major conflict occurs that forces your character to confront the truth. Though your character won't yet give up their lie for good, they'll see the value in the truth. And in the second half of your arc, begin entertaining how this truth might ultimately benefit their life. Example one. The character who feels unworthy of love shares a heartfelt conversation with their love interest that results in a kiss and a burgeoning romance. Example two. After his wife threatens to divorce him, the character who believes money is the key to happiness realizes just how much he loves his family and decides that he doesn't want to lose them. Beat number six. A series of transformative events. Having at last seen the light of the truth, your character will experience a sequence of events in which they further see how the truth can benefit their life. As a result, they'll allow the truth to shape their words, deeds, and identity. However, at this point, your character still hasn't fully relinquished their lie. At heart, they still believe it, even if they no longer embrace its effects. This creates an internal push and pull in which they try to reconcile their lie with the truth and attain the best of both worlds. This false belief ultimately leads them to continue making mistakes that hurt themselves and others, even as they enjoy the benefits of the truth. Example one. The character who believes himself unworthy of love begins spending time with the love interest outside of their preparations for the ball. However, the closer they grow, the more he worries that she will see just how unworthy of love he is. This sometimes leads him to rebuff the love she shows him. Example two. The character who believes that money is the key to happiness begins spending more time with his family, which helps him repair their relationships. However, he worries that his lucrative business opportunity will ultimately slip through his fingers. This fear leads to continued strain between him and his family. Beat number seven. The false victory. Shortly before the climax of your positive change arc, an event occurs that presents your character with the opportunity to finally seize the goal associated with their lie. The thing they've wanted for so long is finally within reach and your character is elated, even though some part of them recognizes that the act of seizing this goal is in direct opposition to their truth. Nevertheless, your character believes they can have the best of both worlds, the goal associated with their lie and the effects of the truth, and so foolishly chooses to fulfill their goal. Example one. With the preparations for the ball complete, the character who believes himself unworthy of love once more declines to attend. His love interest wishes to spend the evening dancing with him, but he fears that such a public display would only lead to gossip that will confirm that he is unworthy of his love interests affections. He convinces himself that he's declining the invitation to protect his love interest from humiliation. Example two. The character who believes that money is the key to happiness receives an opportunity to secure the business venture. All he has to do is take a short business trip that just so happens to coincide with his son's birthday. He decides to seize the opportunity, believing his wife and son will understand his motivation to secure the family's finances. Beat number eight. The third plot point. Having chosen to embrace their goal, your character believes they've made the right decision. However, this false victory doesn't last long. Soon, an event brings your character to the startling realization that embracing their goal has come at the cost of the benefits of the truth. Suddenly, your character sees their lie with devastating clarity and at last chooses to reject this lie once and for all. Example one. When the love interest decides to attend the ball on the arm of another suitor, the character who believes himself unworthy of love realizes just how unhappy he is without his love interest by his side. Example two. When the character who believes that money is the key to happiness calls his young son on his birthday, he is devastated to hear his son weep over how much he misses his father. Beat number nine. The climactic sequence. The climactic sequence of an arc is the moment at which its central conflict is resolved. In a positive change arc, this moment isn't your character's decision to reject their lie, but rather the moment in which they fully embrace their truth. Sometimes these moments are one and the same, but more often than not, this beat comes slightly later when your character takes decisive action that proves they've chosen to embrace the truth. Example one. The character who now believes himself worthy of love decides to attend the ball after all. After inviting his love interest to dance, he confesses his love for her before everyone in attendance. Example two. The character who now believes that true happiness is found with those he loves decides to take the next flight home, arriving just in time to attend his son's birthday party. Beat number ten. Resolution. Having embraced their truth once and for all, your character's internal arc now comes to a close. Your character makes amends for the damage they cause to unclinging to their lie and takes steps to ensure the truth now guides them in their life moving forward. Example one. Several months later, the character who now believes himself worthy of love proposes marriage to his love interest. The two wed and begin a new life filled with love and laughter. Example two. The character who now seeks happiness in his relationships apologizes to his wife and son and commits himself to being the husband and father he ought to be. He quits his high-powered job in favor of a new position that allows him to spend more time at home. Utilizing character arcs within your story. Like plot arcs, a character arc is not a plot in and of itself. Rather, it's a sequence of events that can serve as a story's primary plot or as a subplot that lends depth and meaning to the arc at the heart of your story. No matter the role a character arc plays, don't overlook the importance of this story element. External conflict breeds internal consequence, just as internal conflict drives external action. In this way, plot and character arcs are inextricably tied, which explains why the positive arc structure I broke down a moment ago so closely mimics the structure of a plot arc. Internal conflict plays a large role in shaping a character's words, deeds, and motivations. For this reason, I recommend developing a character arc for every major character in your story. If a character's actions shape the plot, then taking the time to explore their inner world and internal struggles can lend meaning and emotional impact to those actions. How Character Arcs Develop Theme Finally, remember that character arcs often reveal a story's thematic statement. This is a concept we first discussed in our episode on theme, and I believe it's worth reiterating now. Theme is a topic that a book discusses, and never is theme more apparent than in the lie your character believes. If your character doesn't believe themselves worthy of love, then love is a theme in your story. Furthermore, the truth your character comes to believe directly correlates with your book's thematic statement. The subtle message readers can derive from the story's subtext. If your character comes to believe they are worthy of love regardless of what they've done in the past, then that is your story's thematic statement. Can you see just how powerful a role character arcs can play in the grand scheme of your story? From deepening characterization to lending meaning to external conflict and laying the groundwork for theme, character arcs hold the potential to transform a so-so story into a spectacular read. Consider using your newfound knowledge to develop your story's character arcs today. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Podcast Writer. I hope you found it helpful to your writing journey. If so, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode, and to give the podcast a quick rating and review. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the podcast reach new writers, and lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm creating. You can also give me a shout-out directly on Twitter at christen underscore keeper. For additional guidance as you work to craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, be sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com where I share blog posts, workbooks, e-courses, and other helpful resources for writers. Again, that's w-e-l-l-s-t-o-r-i-e-d.com. Thank you again for tuning in to today's episode, my friend. Until next time, happy writing!


All right, well, good morning, everybody. Good to be here. There we go. This worked. Before it should certainly work this time as well. So my name is John. I'm here to talk about the kernel. I've got a whole lot of stuff to cover in a short period of time, so I'm going to go fast. So let's just get right into it. I'll start with a picture that I put up in a lot of talks. This is a simple table of the major kernel releases that we have done over the last about 13 months. It's pretty boring. It doesn't change a whole lot. You see that we've done six releases over this period of time. Each one contains something on the order of 13,000 or so changes in it, quite a few changes for a 10-week development cycle, contain the work of 1,700 or so developers. We can extend this forward pretty easily to the 4.16 release, probably come out right at the beginning of April. Maybe the worst April Fool's joke ever. We'll never know. But we can predict this pretty readily based on what's happening on there. Like I said, it's boring. I'm not really sure why I put these up anymore.  It continues to run as a pretty well functioning machine. There is one thing that's a little bit different on this one, though, that stands out, which is that 4.15 took 77 days, 11 weeks to come out. It's the first time we have taken that long to produce a kernel since 3.1, several years ago. And 3.1 was delayed because kernel.org was compromised, and we were trying to recover from that. So one might imagine it took something fairly significant to delay the kernel release this time around. And of course, we all know what that was, which is our good friend's meltdown inspector. These were disclosed to the kernel development community around the beginning of the 4.15 cycle. By the time 4.15 came out, we had the meltdown medications merged, and the specter medications pretty much on their way towards coming in at that time. I'm not going to get into the details of meltdown inspector. There's lots of information out there. If you're really curious, I can recommend a website that has covered them in a fair amount of detail. But I do want to look a little bit about what meltdown inspector and the response to them can teach us, because there is a certain amount of unhappiness in the community about how this stuff was handled and how it played out. And so it's worth looking at in the hopes that the next time around, we can do a little bit better. But the first thing that I would actually like to point out that we learned from all this is the development community really has our back. Over the course of two months, we saw many, many kernel and beyond developers working around the clock, doing without sleep, doing everything they could to protect us against these problems that were not in any way of their own making. They got a little grumpy towards the end of it, because they were having a pretty hard time of it. But if you look at the people who came in, some of them were obviously doing it as part of their job. Others came in just because there was a problem to solve. And we needed to get it solved and contributed to it. And it was an amazing effort. And I think that we owe the people who worked on the meltdown inspector mitigations a pretty big round of applause, honestly. So they did a whole lot of really good work. But it has to be said that there were people who were left out in the cold anyway. We can start with, for example, the BSD communities. There are millions of BSD users out there. Depending on which version of BSD you're using, they either got no notification of all prior to the collapse of the embargo, or their notification was measured on the order of one or two weeks. So when the embargo fell down and these vulnerabilities were disclosed, they really had nothing to tell their users other than, stand by, we're working on this, we'll get there as soon as we can. And in fact, they're still scrambling to try to resolve these things. That's not a good thing to do with the BSD community. I would like if we could do better than that in the future. But even in the Linux world, there were some interesting things that came out of this. The major cloud providers all put out nice releases saying we've protected all of our users from the very beginning, everybody is happy. But not everybody uses the major cloud providers. Some of us are using what are called tier two providers. If I go on to one of the LWN cloud servers and go into this nifty directory that you should know about, where you can see what vulnerability is your particular CPU has and what the responses are, I look and I see, OK, I'm nicely protected against meltdown, right? It has kernel page table isolation installed. This happened about a month after the disclosure on this particular provider, pretty much the case for all the tier two providers, and still completely vulnerable to Spectre. None of the Spectre mitigations have yet gotten into their kernels. That is because the tier two providers were not notified. They were blindsided by it. They learned about it when the rest of us did, when the embargo fell down. This, I think, is kind of worrisome. We have a market already that's pretty well concentrated between a small number of tier one providers. This kind of sharing information is only going to serve to further consolidate that market. And I don't think that's really a good thing for anybody that is involved. I think we need to find a way to get this information out a little bit more widely than we have in the past. And there are a couple of some things that we can do about that. But one thing, another thing I want to point out here, that we learned very well is that the kernel community works as a single engineering organization. We have people working for hundreds of companies working on the kernel. But when they work on the kernel, they're working as kernel developers. And you can see this, perhaps most clearly, in the different response to meltdown and to specter. The kernel page table isolation patches were posted in mid-November, first time around. They then saw a broad influx of participation from the community, people from all over worked on these patches. Improved them, made them much less invasive, made their coverage much better, made them more secure. What was merged into the 4.15 kernel, a little before the embargo, didn't much resemble what was first posted. It was much better than that. Because of this kernel community development process that was applied to them. So in fact, when the embargo fell down, we already had that stuff merged into the mainline kernel. The specter fixes instead were worked on in private. And they were not only worked on in private, but the people who were working on them often even were not able to talk to each other about what they were doing. As a result, when the embargo ended, we had nothing that was set to go into the mainline at that point. We had distributors who had been notified shipping something. We had very different responses from one distributor to the next. And if you look at some of the publicly posted benchmarks, you see that the performance characteristics are very different. The protection characteristics are very different. What did eventually go into the mainline kernel didn't much resemble the patches that were floating around right after the embargo fell. Because again, once the community got a look at them, yes, I didn't like them very much and made them a whole lot better. Had there been some sort of a way for the community to work, or at least a subset of the community, because you couldn't really do these in the open. But if there had been a way to bring in a proper subset of the community to work on these, we would have had a much better result and a better story when the embargo collapsed. Something that would have helped with that would have been to realize that the kernel development community actually has some pretty well-evolved responses to security issues. We have a mailing list of trusted people who can look at a problem, bring in anybody else who needs to be brought in, get it fixed developed, get it out to the distributors, get it into the stable kernels. I've been told that this process handles about one security issue a week. Most of these we never even know about. They just get fixed and they go into the kernel and life goes on. Not all of us actually agree with the nobody knows about it part, but that is how it works. And the important thing is that we're getting the fixes out there. These processes were not followed from Meltdown Inspector. And this was perhaps because it was a hardware issue, not a software issue. But we had to respond to it as if it were just another software issue. It was something that we had to fix in software. We had to develop patches in pretty much the same way. Had we been able to actually apply our community responses to these problems, I think we would have had better solutions faster and perhaps better distributed solutions as well. So I really hope that the next time this sort of thing comes around, because I think we all agree that there will be a next time. I hope that we can follow our procedures a little bit better and not try to kind of wing it and do things on the fly as it was done this time around. The last thing I was saying this, we think of ourselves as running all this nice free software on open systems and so on. But what we see with vulnerabilities like this is to a great extent our computers are still proprietary black boxes with a lot of proprietary software running underneath what we think of as being the hardware level. We saw this, for example, with the Intel Management Engine issues that came out last year, which were quite surprising to a lot of people.  I really would like to see a future where we move a little bit more towards open hardware. Something like some of the open firmware stuff that Imad was talking about before. I think that's the kind of stuff that we'd like to see. But also open hardware design, where we can actually review these designs in public and affect them the way we do with software. It's not a panacea, it's not going to fix any problems outright, just like it hasn't with software. But I think it can only improve the situation quite a bit. All right, enough on that. But while I'm on the topic of security, I'm often a little bit pessimistic about how our community deals with security. So I thought I'd put up some good news for a change, just to be different. Keep you on your toes. Because there are some good things happening. Perhaps the most significant being that work on hardening the kernel is going strong and accelerating. Hardening means putting protections into the kernel so that even in the presence of known vulnerabilities, the kernel itself is difficult or impossible to explain. This kind of work was very difficult to sell to the kernel community for many years. Developers didn't see the need for it. They didn't like the sort of overhead that came with it. But the case for hardening, I think, has now been quite effectively made. And so that work is happening, and it's picking up, and we are all safer as a result of it. We're seeing a lot more testing and fuzzing than we used to, finding problems before they hit our users and getting them fixed. And more fixes getting into the stable trees. And this is important. In the kernel community, we fix incredible numbers of bugs, thousands of bugs, a really embarrassing number of bugs, actually. A lot of these bugs have security implications, but those are often not apparent at the time that the bug is fixed. It just looks like a bug, and it takes some enterprising attacker to come along and figure out a way to exploit it and take advantage of our systems. So the best way to be safe is to get as many of these fixes as you can, because many of them are fixing security problems that we don't actually know about yet. And that means getting those fixes into the stable trees. There's been a real effort to get more of them.  So if you've been looking at the stable trees, you're seeing a whole lot more of these stable releases coming out with a lot more fixes in them. And this is part of why we're doing that. And I think that, again, that's a good thing in terms of keeping ourselves and our users safe. On the other hand, we still don't have anybody who you could call the chief security officer for the kernel. Nobody whose job it is to keep the kernel secure. Make it secure, keep it that way. This is an area of chronic underinvestment, I think, in our commercial ecosystem. Everybody seems to think it's somebody else's problem. I wish that we could get a little bit more funding in that area to improve our story in that regard. And of course, vulnerabilities abound. We're still very good at adding vulnerabilities. When you're adding 13,000 changes every 10 weeks, some of them are gonna have problems in them. So we have a long way to go, but I think we're heading in the right direction, and that is a good thing. One area where I think we do have a long way to go that's relevant to this community, how many of you out there, I think, have some sort of an embedded system that will never be updated to address the meltdown of spectra problems or many other ones as well. So those of you who have not raised your hands, I think haven't looked closely enough yet. So there are a lot of reasons why this happens. One of them certainly is the simple problem of the huge amount of out-of-tree code that is shipped on these systems. If you've added a bunch of stuff to your kernel and you've backported it to whatever kernel you shipped, the idea of moving to a new kernel and dragging all that code forward is intimidating at the very least. It serves as a sort of ball and chain that prevents these sorts of updates from happening. And we see it come out every now and there was actually a fascinating discussion that just went on about a backport of the meltdown patches to the 4.9 kernel for the ARM architecture. And this led to a kind of an exploding rant from Greg Crow Hartman that's actually worth reading. He was questioning the need to do this big backport at all, saying just move to the 4.14 instead. And then when you realize you can't do that, go and yell at your SOC for forcing you into the nightmare that they conned you into with their three-plus million lines of added codes added to their kernel stream.  These are pretty strong words, but there really is some truth to this, that we have so many systems that are not getting so many important fixes because they are held back by all these lines of code. And should you think that that three million lines is a bit of an exaggeration? This is a slide I ripped off from Tim some years ago. Should maybe get a new one from you. Just showing the amount of out-of-treat code being shipped with popular mobile chip sets. And you see that we really are talking millions of lines of code. That's a huge anchor holding this sort of stuff back. So we need to do better. There are actually some reasons for optimism in this area, including the work that Google's done to bring Android up to at least a set of well-supported, long-term stable kernels. So that has helped quite a bit. But more encouraging perhaps is the fact that a number of SOC vendors are actually starting to see the light and starting to realize that by carrying all this out-of-treat code, they have not only made life harder and more insecure for their users, but they made life more difficult for themselves because it really is a pain to deal with all this. So a number of them have actually committed, at least in private, to working more closely with the mainline and with upstream and reducing that delta in the kernels that they ship. This is gonna take years to play out, but I think the end result is gonna be a whole lot better for everybody involved. So just to finish this out, if you're working in the embedded area, I think there might be a couple people in this area doing that. Work upstream. Don't drag all this out-of-treat code with you and use mainliners, at least long-term stable kernels to the greatest extent that you can and we'll all be better off for it. Meanwhile, there's a whole lot of new technologies going into the kernel, of course, with all of these changes. I don't have time really to even mention them all, much to talk about them, but there's one thing I wanted to talk about because I think it's gonna affect a lot of us over time. And that's a thing called BPF or the Berkeley Packet Filter because there's a lot happening here. BPF is, at the lowest level, a simple virtual machine that runs in the kernel. It's got a simple processor model, registers various operations that it can form. The idea being that you write a program in this particular assembly language that's understood by this virtual machine, you load it into the kernel and it actually gets run in kernel space by the kernel. This may seem like a radical idea, but it's really just one of many in the kernel now. We have things like the ACPI interpreter, the classic BPF engine, which is still there, still used for a couple of things, go away eventually. And the various firewalling mechanisms in the network, I believe they have five of them at the moment, are all virtual machines as well in various types and forms. So a virtual machine is nothing special or new in the kernel, they are, they abound. But there are some things that are different about the current extended BPF work that is going on. It has been designed from the outset to be easy to just in time compile into native code. So you upload this program, it turns into native code, it runs very quickly. There's an extensive verifier built into it to ensure that any program given to the kernel is safe for the kernel to run, make sure it doesn't access memory, it shouldn't access, doesn't leak memory to user space, doesn't go into infinite loops, lots of things like that. Has the map data structure for communication with the kernel with user space, the ability to call functions in the kernel itself to obtain kernel functionality. And extensive support in the tool chain, you can write programs in C and compile them to BPF with the LLVM compiler. You don't actually have to write in the BPF virtual machine. Then there's a whole Python-based development structure around that for writing programs that have a BPF component. It makes it all really pretty easy. And as a result, BPF is showing up in a lot of places. Think of the express data path, or XDP, is a set of BPF hooks in the networking stack that are designed to allow packet processing decisions to be done very quickly under user customization by the uploading of a BPF program. So this is a response to the performance concerns that have driven a lot of users to user space networking stacks and things like that. And it seems to be working, bringing some of those people back to using the actual in-kernel networking stack, which is a good thing. BP Filter is yet another firewalling module built around BPF. Looks like it has a good chance of eventually taking over pretty much all the firewalling duties within the kernel. Secure Computing uses classic BPF now where work is being done to update that to the extended BPF engine. And there's a huge amount of work that has been done around tracing. And using BPF programs for selection of tracing events, data aggregation, things like that. The result of this, if you go and you look up the BPF compiler collection and the tools associated with it, we now have hundreds of tools for looking inside the kernel, understanding what's going on deep within the kernel, within a running production level kernel that we never had before. We have a level of introspection that we didn't have. If you haven't looked at those tools, you should. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening there. And BPF, I think, is gonna show up in a lot of other places as well. We may be heading towards a situation where when new functionality is added to the kernel, especially if it has highly performance critical characteristics or needs, certain kinds of customization, this functionality may be provided as something that you access by way of a BPF program, not by way of a standard system call. And so you end up having to use these BPF components to get it to work the way you want. We come from a standard UNIX mindset where C is our system programming language. This is a little bit hyperbolic, but we may get to a point where access to do a lot of interesting things with the kernel in the future, we may end up using BPF components for pieces of that. I think this is, I think it's a good thing it's gonna give us a level of performance and flexibility that we haven't had until now. But it is gonna be a change. It's an interesting thing to watch. So we add new stuff to the kernel all the time. The kernel grows and grows and grows. We're not so good at taking stuff out of it for various reasons, but as Arn Bergman just said, the main reason simply is that the stuff that nobody cares about, nobody cares about. And so it's hard for us to identify. But Arn doesn't care about such things. And he decided to look and see if there are maybe a couple of architectures that we could get rid of because they weren't being used anymore. He found eight of them. So the current plans are to remove eight architectures from the kernel in 4.17. That's quite a few. That's something like about a quarter of the number of supported architectures that we have. All of these are pretty much single vendor SOC designs that the vendors decided that it was cheaper just to go with the more common commercial designs, whatever. I looked at the patches this morning. This is the better part of 500,000 lines of code that will go out of the kernel in 4.17. That's a good thing. The history of the kernel is such that only two releases have ever been smaller than their predecessors in terms of lines of code. But I believe 4.17 might be the third one. Although if we have someone come along with another 100,000 lines of GPU register definitions or something, we might yet blow that, but it could happen. While we're on the topic of old stuff, if you look at the documentation, it says that if you're building the kernel, you need a version of the compiler that's at least 3.2. The documentation is lying to you. The doc's maintainer has been sleeping on the job again. The earliest known compiler that anybody's made work on current kernels is 4.1. You have to work pretty hard to do that. I think that we're gonna see in the very near future it will be documented that if you want to build the kernel, you need at least 4.6, and maybe something a little bit newer than that to do the job. So if you're building the kernel with ancient compilers, you're gonna wanna look at moving forward on that. We're finally gonna update that. And I wanna just close out with on the topic of disruptive systems, something that I see happening here. Linux was once a classic disruptive system, as it's defined, this tiny little toy system didn't do a whole lot. It wasn't taken seriously by a whole lot of people, but then it grew and eventually displaced a whole bunch of big, well-established legacy players in the market. And it's now dominant, as we heard before, over much of the industry. Linux is kind of that legacy system now. We've been around for a long time. It's an old and big project. It has a lot of momentum and a lot of inertia. It has large resource requirements that make it somewhat unsuitable for a lot of the smaller deployments that people want to do. It has a large and obstreperous development community that can often make it hard to get changes into the kernel, can make it hard to make the kernel do what you want it to do. You look at the rate of change of the kernel and you say, okay, we move very fast. But I think the way that it best describes this is that our bandwidth is indeed very high, but also our latency can be very high. It can take a long time to get stuff into the kernel. And this bothers some to a lot of people in the industry, especially in this part of the industry, that needs often to move faster than that. And not everybody likes the GPL license, of course, is associated with the kernel. I think that's short-sighted, but people don't ask me on that. So if you look at the program for this conference, you'll see a lot of talks about a system called Zephyr, for example, which is a small, lightweight, permissively licensed system that people are looking at using instead of Linux in a lot of situations. Equally notable in its absence from this particular conference is a system called Fuchsia, which is a small permissively licensed kernel being developed at Google that has been mooted as a replacement for Linux on Android systems, which would be a pretty significant change to our community if this were to happen. There are a lot of other things that are going on as well. We hear a lot about these other systems out there. And, you know, so be it this is free software, this is all good stuff that is happening in a very real way. But I would like to make the point that we have all benefited hugely by having an operating system and a kernel that is, one, not dominated by any one company, and, two, that has a copy-left license. That has helped us to build a huge community where everybody works towards the good of everybody else, and we end up with a system that suits the needs for everybody else. A lot of these other systems that are coming up don't necessarily meet either of these particular criteria here and are often designed to do so. And maybe that's our future, but I think we should be asking ourselves, do we want to move away from this nice situation with our shared copy-left license kernel? Is that the future that we want? And if it's not what we want, what can we do to prevent it? I think the only way that we can prevent that is to continue to work to make Linux so compelling and so widely usable that it's the automatic choice for people to use. If we don't do that, I don't think that we can count on the continued dominance of Linux in much of these areas, but I think that we shouldn't give up on that quite yet. And with that, that's pretty much all the time that I have, and I thank you all very much. Thank you.


So, good afternoon everybody, welcome to my short lightning talk today. I would like to talk about heat and how to get started, so this is more to get a brief overview or short introduction on heat and how to get started with it. My name is then Jela Ebert, I'm working for T-Systems. As you might have seen, we have our open telecom cloud product, we wear hairline sponsor, maybe you came to our booth and get some nice t-shirt. Also Christian Beren prepared this presentation with me, he's from Beta Cloud Systems Solutions, but unfortunately he cannot be here today, so you just have to take me. Well, as I mentioned, I would like to talk about heat. So I would tell you shortly what it is, some kind of terminology and what the concepts and architecture are and what is from my point an easy way to get started, to get in touch with heat, what you can do, what documentation, what templates are around and if we still have some time then I have a short video to show some simple presentation on how heat works. What is heat? I had a look around to find a really nice sentence about what heat is and I think this sentence has all in one about what it is. It's one of the main open stack projects and it's the orchestration component of open stack. So you can launch VMs and applications based on templates and I think one of the main things is like you can define your infrastructure as a code. So I just copied that from the open stack org site and yeah, I think that is the main thing heat provides. On the next page I would like to show you a really simple overview on how it works. So you have your template file there where you define how your infrastructure should look like and you have a command line, you have an API interface which then tells the heat engine what to do and the heat engine is yeah, let's say doing all the work and at the end you will have resources like VMs, you will have as an output or like networks, like IP addresses, like software deployments. These templates are YAML based format and yeah, they describe how your infrastructure should look like, means that you can reproduce your infrastructure every time with the same template which is quite neat. So coming to some terminology, we are talking about templates so they are in a special YAML format as I stated before and they describe how your VM, how your application should look like and these templates also define how the resources and the relationships between your VM, your software deployment, your IP address network should be.  This is all the resources you created by one template are defined by a stack and this stack can be then managed by you with the appropriate heat commands. I was looking around to find a nice picture on how the heat architecture looked like and I thought that's at least an easy one and not so complicated one to see how it works. It's basically a different picture from what we saw on the first page so you have your template, you have an API or a dashboard where you have your rest calls and then this is being queued to the heat engine and the heat engine is the heart of it all which knows the function which knows how to treat the parameters, parse the templates and the heat engine is the one talking to all the other projects like Keystone, like Nova, what to do. So this is the main orchestration thing which is doing all the work. So let's have a look on how to get started. I think the first important thing is to understand how the template looks like and what are the important sections and what you should know. So a template has always the same structure. Do you see my mouse? No, okay. The first is the template version. This needs to be a valid version. This is described in the documentation. So 2015 is something a little bit older. For example, Ocata is 2017 or 224. And the template basically describes which features are available, which hot template to use. So with every release there will be also a new hot template version depending on what functions and features are available. Then you have a description. This is an optional parameter. It's of course nice if you write a template and someone else is going to use it then what is it doing? Then there is a parameter section where you can define all the necessary parameters. You can define default parameters like security group or which network to use or which SSA key to use. And the really important part is the resource part. There is where you define which resources you want to have created, like the VM for example. And the output section is quite nice to define what kind of output do you want to have when the resources have been created. For example, I'm going to create a VM. So it would be nice to have in the output section. This is the IP address to log in or this is the SSH key to log in. We will see how that works later. So I have prepared a really little example which does work. I tried that before. So this is a really, really basic example to create a VM. I just picked a template version and here in the have a short description, okay, simple hot template and in the resource description I say I like to have a VM. It's called my instance. It's of type OS Nova server. That's the resource type which he knows and I'll give that a few properties. So what kind of image to use, which flavor to use, which is my SSH key. If I have more than one subnet in my tenant, then it's good to specify a network otherwise he won't know which one to choose. But the last one, the user data format raw will tell that, for example, that this is not a software deployment, that the cloud init function should be deployed as or executed as they should be in a cloud. So you can define here if you want to have additional software deployments or not. Yes. So you can deploy that and at the end you will get a VM with an IP address and you can log into this. If you want to deploy it, you need to have a few commands. And I think from my point of view, these are the most relevant commands. You can have a stack list to see what kind of stacks you have. You have the stack create commands where you specify the template and the name. With stack show, you can see the output of how your stack looks like, what resources have been created. You can also see the events and, of course, you can also delete your stack. I just got a sign that I do not have that much time left. So I can maybe show the video to you if you like afterwards. But I will also provide it to this presentation. These are the few commands I used in my demo. And the video will be uploaded as well. So I have a tenant on my open telecom cloud running Ubuntu doing these commands. At the end, I would like to give you some really useful links on where you find heat template documentation, the official heat templates from openstack.org, where there are also application lamb stack heat templates, which are easy to use. We also are an open telecom cloud GitHub where you can find some simple templates. Thanks for your attention and listening to me this afternoon.


How are you doing out there? All right, so you think that's good spacing no babies could fit through How many are there 11? So we need 11 in each spot. How many spots are there? 132 posts. Yeah Okay, we decided on nine Posts on each section 12 sections nine times 12 is 108 Yeah And This stack plus the ones up there 51 And I've got another 21 worth up there that are not yet cut into strips Which leaves me with 36 left I think see how many Cut a bunch this morning. Okay. Well, I'd be nice with a 36 there Three one three two three three four three five three six three seven three eight three nine forty forty one forty two nice Okay, okay if I could These ones these four and then that one And those two I'll have six extra so I don't cut those two. Yeah, so One two three four five is that it? Well, it's pretty sweet. I like it. Yeah good stuff This guy thinks it's already a running track Why is he's being careful? If you fall you two are in big trouble if you fall So coming around here that'll keep it from you know falling out It's pretty sturdy Hopefully no one will pull it in But yeah, falling out is the big Hey, you think you can fit your head through there good So there are loads of boards in here now Just drying when they get dry enough I can Cut them so 11 more of those I think I Think I'm gonna not sure actually well I think I'm gonna do railings most of the way around the only two places. I might not do railings are like right Through the middle here But I'm thinking about making a bridge that goes from there up to these two posts And then right up to here And then there'd be railings everywhere else and then I would have to put also put railings along the side of there All right, three-year-olds are not allowed to run all the way around you stay in the safe area Where there's lots of floor right?  This would be plenty of space on this side for running track It takes and then I can also have the stairs to go upstairs to the third floor here So from the bottom floor come up there and then it'll go up there Yeah, so maybe a bridge. I thought the more I think about this the more I think I'm gonna do it Like starting at these two pillars here a bridge that goes connects to those Two posts and then goes to the other pillars over there So not a completely open middle. There'll be a circle all the way around And then one way straight across That'll that'll make it extra fun for tag up here Yeah, cuz then there'll be there'll be different ways to go to escape from chasers You know don't go well you can go part way around just don't don't go to where the floor is like there's hardly any floor over there Just don't go anywhere near holes Your big brother and sister are very coordinated, but All right, let's go down We don't want to keep playing until things get too crazy Anyway, so Yeah, the stairs to the third floor like from the second up to the second floor It'll go from down there up to there and then from here up to the third floor And then the third floor will be very exciting to do That's just gonna be solid floor all the way across and all of this that's up here right now That was just temporary It was just it's not very good wood and it's I cut it with a chainsaw real rough and fast I know it did a pretty good job. Anyway, but anyway, I want to take out all of this Scaffolding all the joists that are up there now. That was just up there so I could build the roof So I'll replace this all with you know nice wood and Looking at how many floorboards I have here. I think I cut extra floorboards All right when I was cutting the wood in the jungle, I did count the joists It made sure I had a few extra To build the stairs and stuff, but the floorboards I just cut a lot And I'm pretty sure I cut way more than I need so I'll have some for upstairs. Hopefully like look at that that's like When I cut the edges on these You know, I'll lose a bit of space But that basically fills this area And this is double layered because there's another whole set of boards under here Yeah, anyway, I have a lot more wood in the jungle to bring over I'm pretty sure I have extra floorboards Oh, it's nice up here. Is it okay? Don't go past here because we start getting more holes All right, let's go back Yeah, yeah, you can stay up here. I want to take the Little one down there. You want to make another railing before dinner one more railing? Did I hear it no and a yes and a yes. All right, let's do one


So the dish is just made from some just standard normal plywood. I mean it's jungle So it's marine life, so it doesn't doesn't rock, but it's not gonna get wet. It doesn't need to be we've got Small-cell chicken wire in here, which is just standard chicken wire And then just just cable ties just zip ties to to pull that mesh tight to the to the paraboloidal shape So we're making these like these slats are super easy just to just mark out the box. There's the on the full tutorial on On the website, which the link is to in the description of the video To get the parabolic curve. I just done As is sort of spelled out in the tutorial Just hang like a light chain of a fixed length between between two points and that'll hang in a catenary curve, which at this kind of Focus is about it's very very similar to a parabola So I mean your spray paint over over that chain and then jigsaw out the you know the shadow That it that it leaves And that's it pretty much so both of these dishes Took me about one day to make the to make the frame But that's like an easy day and then another easy day to get the mesh And there's a whole the cost of all of this is about $20 per dish I guess I mean less really because we already had the plywood on the side, but if it bought it new that's about what that would come to the only other materials is to this a string which Pull tight and that's that's the focus so the things like designs that you know It gives you the focus where the string meets and that also gives you like a hard point to to mount your whatever on So that the setup here would be having Like an adapter like this or like a phone or something and then like a like a father like Have if it was a phone broadcast it out through Wi-Fi tethering or or Bluetooth tethering or USB cable You can get these up to five meters length before it starts to become like too long Run that into a window patch that into like a laptop or something And then patch that into the Wi-Fi card in the laptop and broadcast it out into the rest of the house So all those devices connect through that one laptop through the dish and Through the air gap and then into the internet connection at the other end. So we're getting about 57 Isabelle's signal there, which is very good for hundreds of meters of trees We're also picking up someone's phone. I don't know who that is but they're a long way away whoever they are and then We've got Good enough connection that You know, it can load Facebook Pretty much as quickly as if this was like in the house with the router like The speed that that's going is pretty much the speed of the internet connection like because it's a little bit Dodgy into the top house as it is This is over the back end of the house Front of the router So also having the Main house broadcasting pretty much over the entire property means that as other houses get built here They'll be able to tap into that signal as well And basically just have like full high-speed broadband internet in the jungle in Panama And if we can make it work here, then theoretically it should work pretty much anywhere So the dish wasn't really something that was like a project itself I was in New Zealand working on a greenhouse project and they came out with you and my father lives in a very remote part of New Zealand and So many of the internet to work on that project So we borrowed this mobile USB like into that dongle from a guy like there as well And then I drove round to the property with them with like me leading up a window of the car with like the dongle was like I like a frying pan like a wok as like as a reflector dish plugged into my laptop I managed to get like enough signal to see that like, you know, we could connect with a better reflector So then this drawer is like a sign for that and in my cat package and like I'm worked out that small cell chicken wire would be like Would be a small enough mesh size to reflect the signal as a solid surface but All the all the cuts that we did with that first version. We didn't think we had like a jigsaw so like All of all of those cuts were done with that Which took like hours and like killed about four of us and then I'm like Pete the young guy in the Dr. Hill came in and was like, I should have used that jigsaw that we've got at home Like I'm gonna lend that to you like just yeah, okay Thanks for that that would have been really useful about four hours ago It works really well We just chucked one of the five meter cable and like put it outside the common house is linear It's the wall like point of a tree didn't bother to optimize it at all and we're getting like a hundred kilobits per second through the thing And then sort of yeah, pass that through my laptop into the rest of the rest of the building Wi-Fi wise and um So I've tested this I've made these in Spain I got four and a half kilometers range with line of sight just to some basic home network at the other end Made them into bet in Ladakh in the high Himalayas It's called sacmo. We were gonna build beam like internet from Spatulka Monastery up to sacmo down the end of some river valley Which is like seven and a half kilometers with a dish in each end like we've got here and The like taught the local guys how to how to make the dishes that they can make more of them Because there's one guy who really wants to do it because he had he lives like this really remote village But even by the ducky standards like super remote, but they just built a cell phone tower Which you thought would be visible like 40 kilometers away from the top of the mountain like about the village so the plan was that make like a couple for the village and then Like put it up on the top of the mountain and like people going up and like you know taking the livestock up the mountain We're like like a bag of phones Put that in the dish feed the animals and stuff all the you know SMS's and all that sort of stuff You know sends and receives grab the bag take it back down and had everybody's phones out again So yeah, it wasn't meant to be a project in and of itself But it has been like really effective and it's gotten quite a lot of interest so We've installed it here in Panama to bring Internet to the Panamanian jungle and so that seems to be working out really well


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with a quick little break here 2019-2020 Panini contenders optic basketball Pick your team number 86. Thanks everyone for making this happen. Really appreciate it right there There are the people right there at the end of the break actually let's print this out at the end of the break We'll re-randomize or not re-randomize, but we'll see who got the requisite number of teams To get the entries to win the break credit so Stay tuned for that. Here is a fresh master case I think a master case, right? There's two in here 2019 contenders optic Contenders optic football drops on Friday brand-new release drops this Friday the 9th Friday the 9th. Yes, so it's a hybrid of Not contenders and it's not optic. There's contenders off It's a hybrid product mashup All right, let's select the inner case We'll use that die right there one two three four five six Three so this will save for Next time So these are for YT YouTube two box pick your team breaks It's stolen for something else Now let's pop this box open All right, so on the top camera you can see one two three four five We're gonna go by that if I roll a six. I'll just roll again So if I roll a three, we'll do these two right here. I'm gonna go by row use that guy right here and It's one we're gonna do the two right off the top Bam, and we'll save these for next time. All right now. Let's rip these and see what we got. Good luck Here's the The official printout hot off the presses. All right, there's Anthony Davis who's on the cusp of? Coming back Jimmy Butler Bogdan Bogdanovich and Behind Robert Covington for the Rockets. All right Red which is not numbered is Jalen Noel Rookie ticket autograph for Mark and the T wolves He's shown some glimpses of brilliance here remember because of our top loader shortage we're putting Cards and much larger top lures and then then necessary We're gonna put blue painters tape right here to make sure they don't rattle around during shipping But if you remove that or if if if there happens to not be any blue tape There should be but just be careful is what I'm trying to say be careful when you receive your cards Especially the thing we've got plenty of regular top loader I think they put those in production pretty quickly and got plenty of that But it's just for the thicker cards. We're starting to run out and we have run out in most cases The final one here. We've got a randomizer. Maybe Yeah, Sixers that's gonna be Brandon and Cleveland That's gonna be Rashid. So we're gonna randomize the first Historic first overall picks. It's pretty historic Alan Irish and Kyrie It's pretty nice We got another one here this time cracked ice This is historic 27th overall picks Pascal Siakam and the worm Dennis Rodman We'll do two different dice rolls for that All right, Mark Hill-Fultz, Eric Bledsoe, Blue DeMar DeRozan Which is numbered to 99 and the hit is Cameron Johnson For the Phoenix Sun there you go mark with that one And there you go ladies and gentlemen the DeMar DeRozan for the Spurs that'll be for Rashid. All right now Let's do some randomizing here and we'll use the same dice roll for these two randomizers as well as the As well as the break credit. All right, so let's go back to some new dice right here and the first list will be Sixers and Cleveland the second list Will be Toronto and Detroit and the third list Will be the people who bought at least two teams. So Barry bought at least two teams. That's an entry Brandon bought six teams That's three entries Brian with two teams. That's an entry Jarell with two teams. That's an entry mark with four teams. That's two entries Michael S. Got two teams. That's an entry Michael Schwartz bought two teams. That's an entry both Michael S is Oliver bought two. That's an entry Rashid bought two That's an entry Rosario bought two. That's an entry Sean bought three but for the purpose of the promo to count That's still an entry. All right, so let's copy all those names here Put them into this final blank list right there And that's a situation where top five will get $60 a break credit each All right, one dice roll for all the lists and it's gonna be I wanted a low number not 12 random.org Every second counts, you know after 12 sixers on top. So there you go, Philadelphia You'll get this one here Brandon Richards with the sixers All right, next one Yep, it's still 12 times one two three and 12th and final time goes to Toronto Brandon Richards with the Raptors And this is the most important one here 12 times the break credit once again top five After 12 Good luck one two Ten and good luck everybody 11th final time top five after 11 mark Brian Brandon and Michael and Brandon There you go, Brandon Richards. I'll send your break credit in one check your email Check your spam folder if you still don't see it check your other email if you still don't see it Give it a moment. Maybe maybe Shopify is acting a little slow, but congrats to you and Thank you. I'm Joe for jazpiece case breaks calm. I'll see you next time for the next break


Do psychopaths have a conscience? Can narcissists be moral? Can psychopaths do the right thing because they feel guilt or shame or adhere to social mores and conventions like all of us? All of you. Can narcissists act ethically? 25 years ago I coined the phrase communal narcissists or pro-social narcissists and I describe the narcissist who is invested emotionally in being morally superior but that's not the same thing. Even psychopaths can be pro-social and communal. Actually I have a video on this channel which describes communal and pro-social psychopaths. Psychopaths who work for the greater good are pillars of the community and benefit humanity. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm asking whether psychopaths can have this internal small voice. This overriding introject that tells them what you're doing is wrong. Don't do it. It's not okay. It shouldn't be this way. You don't have to do this. This voice is known as conscience and it's the outcome of a processing childhood known in adolescence known as socialization. Parents are agents of socialization.  So can we find psychopaths who have this small flickering voice that keeps telling them don't do this? It's wrong. Can we find narcissists who have this introject that inhibits their actions, limits activities to socially commendable and condone to the socially acceptable, sublimates their actions. Are there such things? To be pro-social, to be communal is to act in society in ways which are beneficial to others. But there's no inner conviction. The communal and pro-social narcissists and psychopaths don't have anything inside. They're empty anyhow. They don't have anything inside that compels them to act this way. They act this way because, I don't know, of appearances because they want narcissistic supply. Because they're afraid because these are all ulterior motivations. These are all the wrong reasons to act in ways which are altruistic and charitable and loving and caring. Wrong reasons. You can do the right things for the wrong reasons. Conscience is the right reason.  Your upbringing, your childhood environment that had conditioned you or shaped you into someone who doesn't harm others. Shockingly, the answer to the question do psychopaths have a conscience is not decided and not clear.  Not because I care about you. Conscience? What on earth is this? Okay, Shoshaneem. My name is Abaknein. I'm the author of Malignant Cell Flower. You guessed it, narcissism. Revisited. And, and, and, I'm a professor of psychology in various universities where suffering students are subjected to my diatribe's endogmatic endocrination, also known as higher education. Okay, let's get to business and get serious. But before I go there, service announcement. I'm going to be in Romania, July 1st to July 11th. If you want to organize an event, questions and answers, I will do it free of charge. Just get in touch with me, assemble 20, 30 people, find a venue and I will be there. Also, I'm available for one-on-one in-person counseling in Bucharest. I'm going to be in Bucharest. Okay. There was a psychologist. There is a psychologist. His name was Elliot Touriel. And he discovered that young children don't react the same to situations which involve morality. So, when one child hits another child, he reacts one way. And when he wears pajamas to school, he reacts another way. So, Touriel made a distinction between morality that involves harm, not harming other people, not beating them up, not, you know, morality that involves injustice and violation of right. And so conventional morality versus regular morality. So we have moral transgressions and conventional transgressions. Conventional transgressions is not behaving according to societal and cultural expectations. As I said, we're in pajamas to school. Moral transgression is harming other people, violating their rights and causing them injustice. Now, this Touriel's work with children unleashed a hailstorm of studies, analysis, arguments, debates, philosophers entered the fray and they asked questions about the impact of culture on what constitutes a moral transgression. In some cultures, behaving against moral, against society's conventions is a moral transgression. Richard Schweder and Jonathan Haidt, HAIDT, they argued that Touriel's distinction between conventional transgressions and moral transgressions is not universal. Because there are cultures, especially non-Western cultures, which regard a much wider range of behaviors as moral. They define many behaviors as misbehaviors. And because they're misbehaviors, they are immoral. So this sparked a huge debate about moral cognition in various cultures. And so at some point, people said, okay, we can debate this till doomsday comes. Let's do some empirical work. Let's go to ground. Let's go to seed. Let's see what's happening in reality with flesh and blood people. Is there really a distinction between moral and conventional transgression? Is there an internalized version of conscience? What is the moral responsibility of it? And so they decided to study psychopaths. When someone judges that an action is morally right or morally required thing to do, usually they go and do it. Like if you tell yourself, I ought to do this. This is what I should do. This is the right thing to do. In the majority of cases, you would proceed to do it. Now that's not always true. For example, majority of people say that cheating in romantic relationships, adultery, extramarital affairs are wrong. And yet, huge portions of the population, some at a very least 40%, if not 60%, go on to cheat. But with the exception with this, with a few radical or extreme exceptions in daily life, normal pedestrian traffic, meeting people and so on, you are likely to follow the edicts and mores and morality which are embedded in your mind. If you say this is morally right, this is the morally required thing to do, you're likely to follow it. But then why? It raises the question why. So there are two versions of why, the two answers to this question. First answer is internalism. It's the belief that motivation is internal to moral judgment. Moral judgment itself motivates. All you need to have is moral judgment and then the moral judgment will act. It doesn't need to be mediated through will or through desire. It's enough just to have moral judgment. This is internalism. Externalism says that moral motivation happens when a moral judgment combines with will and desire and the content of the judgment is related to the content of the desire. So we rationalize the action. In other words, internalism says you have morality, it's embedded in your mind and it tells you how to act. Externalism says you want to act in certain ways and you use moral judgment to rationalize your actions, to justify them somehow. Okay? Internalism, externalism. And so Rosati wrote this. She says, debates between internalists and externalists often center on the figure of the amoralist, the person without morality. A person who apparently makes moral judgments while remaining wholly unmoved to comply with them. Can we find such a person? Someone who is aware of morality, knows to tell right from wrong, realizes that he should act in certain ways in order to not harm others and then just doesn't care. Of course we can. It's called a psychopath or a narcissist. So internalists insist that the amoralist doesn't exist. Shockingly, by the way, in my view, there are whole groups of very, very venerable and respectable philosophers and psychologists who say that there is no such thing as an amoral person, the amoralist. Some Robert Hare, strangely, wrote the following. The person who appears to be making a moral judgment while remaining unmoved must truly be speaking insensibly. She or he judges and act right only in inverted commas. So, Robert Hare says, psychopaths and narcissists are faking moral judgment. They don't really have it. They're just imitating. They're just copying other people. They're copycats. I beg to differ, as I usually beg to differ with Robert Hare. I think his experience was so extremely and severely limited. He spent all of his professional career in prisons and I don't think he has a real grasp of life, I'm terribly sorry. I would prefer Martha Stout, for example, and Herve Cleckley to Robert Hare. Anyhow, some philosophers believe that psychopaths provide a prima facie challenge to this claim. Some philosophers say there are people who do have moral judgment and then just don't care enough to act on these moral judgments. Now, psychopaths, ironically, are diagnosed mostly using a test designed by Robert Hare in 1991, the PCLR test. These are individuals. Psychopaths are individuals who appear to be cognitively totally normal, as distinct from the narcissist. Psychopaths don't have many or at all cognitive distortions. Narcissism is a fantasy defense, so it is based on falsifying reality and falsifying your self-image and self-perception via grandiosity. Narcissism is a massive cognitive distortion, while psychopaths are actually cognitively normal. Psychopaths don't have impaired reasoning abilities, which many narcissists do. The narcissist's ability to reason and to analyze cogently and rationally is damaged. He has a problem with this, not so psychopaths. And psychopaths are aware of and seem able to comprehend moral rules, social rules, social cues, etc. They're actually very astute. They have the narcissist's cold empathy without the narcissist impediments to acting on his cold empathy, without cognitive biases, cognitive distortions, lack of reasoning, and so on. Narcissists are far inferior to psychopaths in their ability to function, actually, which causes a lot of confusion, especially online among self-styled experts. Okay, but again, as distinct from narcissists, psychopaths often engage in antisocial behavior. Few narcissists act antisocialy. Few narcissists act against other people. For the simple reason that narcissists depend on other people, for narcissists to comply, the psychopath doesn't, so he doesn't care about other people. He has no guilt, he has no remorse, and his behavior is usually morally aberrant, morally deviant. That's the psychopath. Psychopaths apparently can and often do make moral judgments. They are great, some of them are moralists, like they know moral theory, moral history, history of morality, and so on. But they're not motivated to follow up. They don't comply with the moral judgment. The moral judgment is a piece of austere, sterile knowledge, which is not connected to their emotions, motivations, and so on. It remains like reading about the composition of the sun, or I don't know, a history of the 14th century. It's like irrelevant. They have moral judgment, but it's just a text, and it's an overt text with no hidden text. In the sense that it doesn't motivate the psychopath to modify his behavior. And this presents a massive problem for internalism. As internalism says, if you have moral judgment, you're going to act. It's almost robotic, almost automatic. And here we have psychopaths. They have moral judgment, and they definitely do not act. Roskis in 2003 said that psychopaths appear to be walking counter examples to internalism. So there was a paper published by the psychologist James Blair in 1995. He took the experiments of Turiel with children, the moral conventional distinction, the moral conventional task. And he applied these tests, which were originally designed for children. He applied these tests to incarcerated psychopathic offenders. So he selected psychopaths who were in prison, and they had average intelligence. And then he selected a control group of same offenses, but non-psychopathic offenders. All of these were charged, by the way, with murder or manslaughter, so serious offenders. So he had two groups, one of them psychopaths, one of them not. And he administered the two real tests of moral conventional tasking to these two groups. The non-psychopathic offenders reacted in a way which social domain theories had predicted. In other words, they reacted like normal adults. Even though these people were charged with murder, manslaughter, and other very nice behaviors, when they were confronted with moral dilemmas and with non-conventional behavior, they recoiled. They said no, they put a boundary, they put a border, they modified their behavior. They reacted totally normally, like normal people. That's the non-psychopathic offenders. The psychopathic offenders were notably different. They responded in the same way to moral transgressions and to conventional transgressions. They saw no difference, for example, between killing someone and getting a parking ticket. For them, both these were wrong. But wrong just, you know, cognitively. They just labeled it. They said, yeah, it's wrong. But there was no emotional reaction. Definitely no intention to modify behavior. They just labeled the thing wrong. And there were similar results where children were compared directly with children with contact disorder. Children with psychopathic tendencies were compared to non-psychopathic children. And these non-psychopathic children, they had behavioral and emotional problems, but they didn't have contact disorder. They were not children psychopaths. There was again Blair in 1997, and he compared these two groups of children. And the results were more or less the same. So some authors said, okay, psychopaths do not have normal moral concepts. Their moral concepts are impaired. I refer you to literature articles by Prince in 2007, Schroeder and Woskies and Nichols in 2010, Nichols in 2004, etc. Everyone was saying, because psychopaths react differently to other offenders, because psychopathic children react differently to non-psychopathic children, it must mean that something is wrong with their morality. Otherwise they would have reacted the same. And so Kenneth and Fine in 2007 summed it up and said, they do not mean what the rest of us mean when we are using moral terms, when we are using moral language. So when they say the word wrong, when psychopaths and narcissists use the word wrong, they actually mean something different. They don't use the word wrong the way normal people do, healthy people do, socialized people do, the way non-psychopaths and non-narcissists do. Narcissists and psychopaths give different meaning to right and wrong, moral immoral, should and ought. It's a different vocabulary, different dictionary. If this is right, then psychopaths do not really have moral judgment and they do not make moral judgment. And so there's no problem with internalism. As internalism says, moral judgment leads to moral action. And then if psychopaths have moral judgment and they don't act morally, then internalism is defunct, is wrong.  So they don't have moral judgment, then internalism is okay because psychopaths and narcissists don't have moral judgment, they don't act morally, it's perfectly okay. But then in 2016, Kumal argued that Blair's results were either misinterpreted or overinterpreted. He said, the studies of Blair indicate that psychopaths don't have a full grasp of moral concepts. That much is right. But Kumal said, these studies didn't show that psychopaths completely fail, completely fail to grasp moral concepts. So what Kumal said is, it's not that they mislabel or misinterpret moral concepts, it's that they have partial moral concepts. Psychopaths don't make full-fledged moral judgments. They do make proto-moral judgments, primitive, basic moral judgments. And so Kumal says that the implications of research on psychopaths is, these implications are less straightforward than we had assumed. We need to be more subtle, more discerning and more discriminant, said Kumal. Worskis in 2007 largely agreed. He argued that studies of psychopaths do not establish that they lack moral concepts or an adequate understanding of them, I'm quoting him, or that they are incapable of anything but moral judgments in an inverted comma sense. He said, no way, the Blair experiments are not showing this.  That was in 2007 as well. As you see, the debate was raging. People didn't know how to interpret the fact that psychopaths were using words like right and wrong, should and ought, you know, on the one hand. And on the other hand, they were acting not in accordance to what they were saying. So there are two possibilities.  Psychopaths know that their actions are widely perceived to be wrong.  But psychopaths are unable to grasp the distinctive nature, the essence, the significance of the wrongness of these actions. In other words, they know that something, they're doing something, they're acting in some way, they're being defined or reckless or they harm someone, or they defraud someone, or they con someone, you know, they do, they do bad things to people. And they know that almost all of humanity would regard this as wrong. But then when they try to interpret to themselves, first of all, why is it wrong? What is the distinctive nature of this act that renders it wrong? And what is the significance of an act being wrong? They come up short. They say, when I harm other people, it's wrong because it's against the rules. In other words, harming other people is not wrong because it's wrong to harm other people. It's bad, you shouldn't do it. They say it's bad because you shouldn't do it. They don't say it's bad, end of story. They say it's bad only because you shouldn't do it. In other words, breaking the rules is what makes an action wrong. For example, if there were no rule, if there were no law that says that you shouldn't murder people, then murdering people would not be wrong according to a psychopath. According to a psychopath, only breaking the rules makes an action, an act, wrong. If there's no rule or law, then the act is not inherently wrong. So the psychopath doesn't recognize that there are choices, decisions, actions, acts, courses of action which are inherently wrong. You don't need to be told that they're wrong. There doesn't have to be a rule or a law that says that they're wrong. It doesn't have to be actionable. You don't have to be persecuted in court. You don't have to. You just know that it's wrong. You don't do that. A psychopath doesn't understand that. This is, wait a minute. Let me see what society says. Our society says it's wrong. For example, there's a law in the books or there's a rule spoken or unspoken. Society says it's wrong, then probably it's wrong. It has to look to others to derive the wrongness of his actions. For them, for the psychopath, to steal from someone, to kill someone, to hurt someone is not more wrong than double parking or line jumping or going nude in the street. It's not more wrong. They're all equally wrong. Why they're all equally wrong? Because all of them violate the rules of society. And even then, it's wrong for society because the narcissists and the psychopaths, they are a law unto themselves. It's my way or the highway. I make my own rules. So yes, it's wrong, but it's wrong for society. Society says it's wrong. The kind and degree of wrongness, the blame that attaches to the infringement of rules is very different than the much less significant kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs. In other words, the psychopath monitors is their blame, is their guilt, is their possibility for punishment. He monitors this and he doesn't care a thing almost. Whether what he's doing is morally wrong. The psychopaths, all offenses are conventional, never moral. That's the two real distinction. Psychopaths see everything as conventional wrong. I repeat, the kind and degree of wrongness and therefore blame that attaches to infringement of the rules is very different and usually much less significant than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs. Because there are no moral wrongs, only conventional wrongs. There's only breaking the rules, not whether breaking the rules is wrong. Breaking the rules is wrong, but not whether the action that broke the rules is wrong. The action is neutral. Whatever the psychopath does is morally neutral. Only when society frowns upon it, criticizes the psychopath and punishes him, only then he would admit that in the eyes of society what he had done is wrong. Nothing at all is serious, not even murder. The degree of responsibility is smaller, much smaller than for a normal agent. If a normal person kills someone and if a psychopath kills someone, theoretically we should hold the psychopath less accountable because he is incapable of perceiving moral wrongs. He is capable of perceiving only conventional wrongs. He is capable of reacting like a domesticated or tamed or broken animal, reacting to reinforcements, positive and negative. It's very primitive, it's a binary machine. So if it's not his fault, if he's incapable of morality in effect, I mean why are we punishing him? And their grounds for excusing psychopaths from morality altogether said Levy in 2007. Levy, Levy, Levy, Levy. Back to Feyn and Kennett. Feyn and Kennett actually reached a very similar conclusion. They said while psychopathic offenders certainly appear to know what acts are prohibited by society or the law and therefore know that their transgressions are legally wrong, they do not appear to have the capacity to judge an act to be morally wrong. We would argue that psychopathic offenders who fail to understand the distinction between moral wrongs and conventional wrongs cannot be considered to be moral agents. Now that doesn't mean that psychopaths should not go to prison. They should because they know that they had done something illegal, they had broken the law. But they don't have a corresponding reaction to the violation of a moral obligation. That's why they don't feel shame or guilt or remorse. Since Levy, Feyn and Kennett and others, they took moral responsibility to be necessary for criminal responsibility. They said that psychopaths are not criminally responsible. I beg to disagree because the psychopath knows that what he's doing is punishable, is actionable. Society will punish him for this. He realizes this in advance so the terms of the social contract are utterly clear and the law is in the books. The psychopath chooses to defy society and to break the law and so he should definitely be punishable. That he doesn't internalize this, that he has no guilt, no shame and no remorse has nothing to do with the legal aspect. Criminal responsibility has nothing to do with how you feel about it. So I disagree strongly with his scholars and many others do. Maybom, for example, in 2008, Vargas and Nichols in 2007, they noted that despite the apparent inability to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions, psychopaths are sensitive to the fact that their norms prohibiting a wide range of behaviors and that violating these norms can lead to sanctions. So why shouldn't they be sanctioned? Maybom said that this awareness is enough to establish both moral and criminal responsibility. Vargas and Nichols noted that, I'm quoting, we do think it is appropriate to blame and punish transgressors of conventional rules and of story, whether they're psychopaths or not. Why they ask, is this not enough to blame and punish psychopaths? And they're right, 2007. David Shoemaker in 2011 was very skeptical, generally, about drawing any conclusions about the moral and criminal responsibility of psychopaths based on the studies of Blair. He drew attention to critiques of the work of Turiel and his tradition by Nissen, N-I-S-S-A-N, to 1987, Haid, Koller and Diaz, 1993, Kelly and others in 2007 and so on. There's a whole debate about the Turiel work. Shoemaker said that judgments about the seriousness of a transgression, they play a central role in Blair's version of the moral conventional task. Shoemaker challenges the assumption that moral transgressions are judged to be more serious than conventional transgressions. He said that some conventional transgressions can be actually so serious that they're even more serious than moral transgressions. And there are many moral transgressions which are minor. He said, Blair said that all moral transgressions are more serious than conventional transgressions. To remind you, conventional transgressions mean breaking the expectations and rules and worries of society. So Blair said that they are inferior, they're less serious than moral transgressions. And Shoemaker notes correctly that it depends. Shoemaker makes reference to a study by Elizabeth Fitton, F-I-T-T-O-N and Ann Dauker. And these two controlled for seriousness. They rated the seriousness of the moral transgressions and the conventional transgressions. And they found, and I'm quoting, when the so-called conventional transgressions matched the so-called moral transgressions in perceived seriousness, normal children failed to differentiate the domains in terms of rule contingency, perceived obligations and the justifications used. These children tended to judge that the conventional behaviors were more obligatory than the moral behaviors. Which is pretty interesting. In other words, when seriousness or ranking of seriousness was introduced, even normal children reacted as psychopaths do. They considered conventional transgressions to be more important than moral ones. Taking into account the children and adolescents, value peer pressure and peer input and peer feedback more than parental input, more than morality. Here we see a situation where what their peers have to say, what society as represented by the peer group has to say, matters to children and adolescents and renders them clinically psychopaths because they are more reactive to conventions than to morality. They consider obeying conventions, following conventions, much more important than following morality. And so there was a paper that Schumacher presented in 2002, as early as 2002 in the Mosaic conference in Liverpool of all places, titled Qualitative and Quantitative Dimensions of Domain Differential, A Delightful Read with Your Morning Coffee. Back to Schumacher, his skepticism about the philosophical importance of Blair's findings was reinforced a year later by work by Aharoni and colleagues in Israeli. They undertook a conceptual replication of Blair's prisoner study. They used a modified version of the moral conventional task test, and they focused on authority independence. They also used the forced choice format to minimize strategic responding or manipulative response. So the study was very interesting, the constructional study was very interesting. Aharoni and his associates, they selected 109 incarcerated criminal offenders. Mind you, in Blair's original work, there were only 10 psychopathic participants and 10 non-psychopaths. In Aharoni's studies, there were 109, and to assess the level of psychopathy for each inmate participant, they used how else, hairs, revised PCLR, revised psychopathy checklist. But they also applied two other measures to other tests. The crucial finding was that total psychopathy score did not predict performance on the moral conventional task. So they have demolished Blair and his work. Aharoni and his allies concluded that contrary to earlier claims, which is a polite way of saying Blair was talking nonsense, contrary to earlier claims, insufficient data exists to infer that psychopathic individuals cannot know what is morally wrong. Today we tend to think that psychopaths know damn well what is morally wrong, know what is conventionally wrong, and they just don't care. They defined the consummations, the hate authority, it's my way of the highway, I make my own rules as I go along. So it seems that psychopaths do have moral judgment and don't act on it, but invalidates completely the internalism approach. The moral and conventional tool, two reals tool, is not the only one that psychologists have, and not the only one that psychologists have used to explore deficits in moral reasoning. There was, there's a survey of literature by Borg and Sinot Armstrong, 2013, and they review the findings of studies with psychopaths using the moral conventional task and five other tools. And the conclusion is problematic. It's not clear. The studies support a tentative and qualified conclusion. If psychopaths have any deficits or abnormalities in their moral judgments, these deficits are very subtle, much more subtle than what could be expected or inferred from their blatantly antisocial abnormal behavior. In other words, if you just observe psychopaths, psychopaths in the wild, psychopaths in prison, if you just observe them, they behave as if they have no clue what is morality. They kill, they steal, they defraud, you name it. They don't care. It's like they have no moral judgment. But when you test them using, using Blair's own methodologies and two reals own tests and five other measures, when you test them, you discover that they actually pretty nuanced. Psychopaths are pretty nuanced, pretty subtle when it comes to morality. They do have moral judgments. The deficits or abnormalities in their moral judgment is difficult to discern, difficult to find out. It suggests that, I'm quoting, psychopaths might not have any specific deficits in moral cognition, despite their differences in moral action, moral emotion and empathy. So what do we make of all this? It seems that the problem is not a lack of moral judgment, but a lack of empathy. If you have only moral judgment and no empathy, you are not motivated to act on your moral judgment. The internalists were wrong about this. You need will and desire. Externalism is 100% right. Internalism is 100% wrong. But where internalism perhaps got it right, partly, is that it's all an internal process. Moral judgment is mediated to the will and desire. It becomes a motivation, a moral motivation via empathy. The many different versions of morality and of moral tasks, it's difficult to compare all of them. But we can say that the moral cognition of children and psychopaths, two comparable groups and two very similar groups, is such that as their empathy evolves, their moral cognition, moral judgment would tend to translate into action. And they would wish to act this way. They would have a will and desire to act this way. This is, children do evolve empathy, but psychopaths don't. We see this breakdown, this divorce in the case of psychopaths. Their moral judgment is intact, in my view, fully. The moral cognition is perfect. But they have no empathy. So it cannot be mediated. It cannot be transmitted to the outside. It doesn't generate a will and desire to act morally. So they don't. No empathy means they don't regard other people as people, but as production units, instruments, tools. The lack of empathy means they cannot develop a theory of mind. They cannot conceptualize other people's separate existence. And consequently, morality is meaningless to them. It's just an exercise in futility, intellectual futility. Because if there's nobody out there, if everyone around you is just a 2D cardboard cutout or an avatar or a tool or an instrument or an extension, then morality loses its meaning because morality is about recognizing the separate existence of the other, a similarity of the other to you, and the fact that, therefore, you should not cause harm. Do no harm is the essence of moral cognition and moral judgment. But do no harm to who, says the psychopath. There's nobody out there.


Hi everybody. I want to invite you to participate in a Facebook Town Hall I'm having on my budget tomorrow at Facebook.com slash Governor Wolf. It's going to be live streamed on my Facebook page and I'll answer questions from Pennsylvanians about my budget's three priorities. Jobs that pay, schools that teach, and government that works. So go to Facebook.com slash Governor Wolf to ask me your questions and I'll answer as many as I can tomorrow. Thanks so much. I'm looking forward to it.