Introduction

Greetings! Welcome to FrankAndFriends

The focus of this blog is the discussion of what was, what is, and where appropriate, what might be. In order to fully understand a presented idea, I will sometimes post strictly personal pieces, and make personal remarks in objective posts. Contributors and commentators are encouraged to do the same if they are so inclined.

I believe that the overriding issue of our time is the long-term continuation of our civilization. In the present era I see three possible long-term futures for humanity:

1. It will be entirely wiped out.

2. It will regress to a Neolithic existence on a decimated planet.

3. . It will continue to evolve, to survive and flourish, to continue its long-term upward arc in all its creative and humanistic endeavors.

In this blog, with useful posts and comments from others, I will attempt to discern and understand the forces that are driving us toward one of these futures, and to consider policies we might consider, and actions we might take, to move to a desirable future for humankind.

It is my experience that only via interpersonal discourse can I develop truth-approaching opinions, so any post I make is an invitation for comments. Similarly, for comments on comments.

Anyone visiting this blog may comment on a post or another comment. However, if I don’t judge your comment to be appropriate for productive and civil discourse, I may not publish it.

I’m an exceptionally poor clerk. I labor hard to make my posts grammatically and lexically correct. I appreciate any comments on where I have goofed.

If you would like to make a post for me or others to discuss, you can email me via the Contact tab on this site’s ribbon.

Lately (September, 2022) I’m started to use my Facebook page (A Frank Ackerman) for briefer, more elementary posts on some of the topics covered in this blog.

A Brief Personal Biography

I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1939, the year WWII began in earnest. My father was a US Labor Department economist. He was the middle of five sons of a German speaking, Lutheran pastor in rural Minnesota. My mother was the fifth child of an Oklahoma cotton broker and Alabama cotton farmer.

I do not have any significant memories from my early childhood. Early in 1946 my father took a job as a civilian consultant to the US Army occupation group in Vienna, Austria. In the fall of that year my mother, myself, and my two younger brothers boarded a US Army transport ship to join him in Vienna.

In Vienna I attended a US Army run elementary school. As a dependent of a civilian contractor I didn’t fit in very well with my classmates. Most of them were US Army scions. Our living quarters were all commandeered from ex-Nazis. We had little contact with the Austrian people. We lived in our own occupied-forces bubble. We traveled on US Army bus routes in the American Zone or in an imported US car, and bought all of our essentials at the PX with Army script. As a result I was imprinted with an enduring sense of patriotism that I still carry with me.

In  the spring of 1951 my family returned to the US. While my father did contract work, my mother, my bothers, and I lived with my maternal grandparents in a small agriculture supply town in southern Alabama. Here I was exposed to the rural southern culture of the 1950s.

In the summer of 1951 my father landed a new job with the US Labor department and we moved to a large house in a working class neighborhood on a trolley line in Washington, DC. The next year we moved to a duplex on a bus line on the edge of one of DC’s upscale neighborhoods, and I took a public bus to the area’s middle school. After middle school I went to one of DC’s upscale high schools. In the summer before high school I read Plato’s Socratic dialogues, joined the school Philosophical Society, and began to wake up to the world around me.

On graduating from high school I took advantage of a scholarship at the University of Chicago to become part of UofC’s College, where world-renowned professors taught seminars to small groups of undergraduates. After a short run as a physics major, I had a even shorter run as a philosophy major. In my junior year I got concerned about making a living with a BA and went to the school counseling service. They looked at my grades and said, “Hey, you do OK in math, there’s this new thing. It’s called a computer.” So I enrolled in UofC’s first computer classes, and ran my first program on a Univac I.

On graduating from the UofC in 1961 with a bachelor’s in math, I got my first job writing submarine warfare simulations at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Here I spent about two years developing a very large FORTRAN computer program that officers working for Chief of Naval Operations could use to study submarine warfare at an ocean-level scale. This was my first brush with using a computer to study the real world. The experience stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Programming computers, trying to make software engineering a profession, and teaching programming and software engineering to undergraduates completely occupied my mind from 1961 to when I retired at the age of 80 in 2019. When I retired, I thought my mind would still be occupied with computer science, but when I discovered that our retirement funds were likely to be sufficient for a comfortable old age, I was free to let my mind roam widely over all of the branches of human knowledge that might be germane to exploring the future of human civilization.

Who’s Writing?

Traditionally pundits do not include any personal details in their philosophical, scientific, or analytical writings. There are good reasons for this: doing so lets the reader focus on the intellectual content without being distracted by personal bias. On the other hand, as the philosopher William James pointed out, we tend to argue from subjective temperament rather than objective reasoning.[1]

It is my view that to truly understand anyone’s intellectual position it is helpful to have at least some personal knowledge about the presenter. Thus, this blog has personal as well as strictly intellectual pieces. If you are so inclined, I encourage contributors and commentators to do the same.

---

[1]  William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture 1 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 6-7: The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.… Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is not conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.