The SQL NULL; How Computer Nerdery Can Ease Your Life

Bear with me while I fog y’all up with nerdiness. But trust me. It comes back around to giving you a concept that might make your life a little easier.
(Assuming you don’t have this concept down already, in which case, hey, it’s like putting on that “Greatest Hits” album of old favorites.)
Anyway. Computers store data. If you give a business your name, they’re going to want your address. If you give a business your address, they’re going to want a phone number to call. If you give them a phone number to call, they’re going to want an email address to spam you…
And so on.
When computers store that data, they can store the number you gave them: 555-555-5555. That gets plunked down into the “phone number” field in their storage.
Or, if you lie and say you don’t have a phone, you’re a homeless man who will never contact them again, they will dutifully enter a blank space in that field. That means, definitively, “This customer does not have a phone number.”
Yet if you’re a comp-sci major, you’ll remember the third value that can go in that field:
NULL.
NULL means “We don’t know.”
Putting a NULL in the phone number means, “This customer might have a phone number, they might not, but we have no current way of knowing what it is.” A customer service rep might enter that if you didn’t answer all their questions, but they wanted to keep your address.
A “don’t know” is different than a “Doesn’t.” A customer rating a movie as “Haven’t seen” is actually different than a customer not having told us whether they’ve seen this movie or not. And if you’re doing queries of data, you often want to be able to look at what you don’t know.
And NULL “don’t-know” values get treated weirdly, particularly in math. What’s 2 + NULL? Well, if you turn that into 2 + “We don’t know”, the answer is obviously “We still don’t know” – which means that any equation that involves a NULL in it emerges as the mathematical equivalent of a shrug. We don’t know!
And the way this nerdery applies to ordinary life is that I said this on Twitter the other day:
“It’s always weird when total strangers tell me they’re disappointed in me. I only get worried when people I respect tell me I’ve fucked up.”
To which someone replied:
“Just because you don’t know someone doesn’t mean they don’t have a valid point.”
And I thought, “That’s potential NULL behavior.”
Admittedly, I phrased it wrong – I should have said “I only get worried when people I respect say they’re disappointed,” as the feedback of strangers can be of deep concern when they present valid reasons – but the mathematical point is that most people seem to think there’s only two ways to go:
1) The disappointment of these people I’ve never interacted with is something to be concerned about, or:
2) The disappointment of these people I’ve never interacted with *is not* something to be concerned about.
Me? I get by with a healthy dosage of NULL.
I don’t know these people. I cannot say whether their judgment is sound enough for me to be concerned about one way or the other by the withdrawal of their approval – at least not without research I’m not willing to do right now. I don’t have to cling to a binary judgment that this is good or bad – I can simply say UNKNOWN VALUE, and treat it as such.
NULLs are really handy in all sorts of places.

• Is my ex-girlfriend a better person now? NULL. (I’m not willing to hang out with them and find out, but maybe they’ve improved. Who knows? They hurt me enough in the past that I’m unwilling to risk it.)
• Is this person who said a dumb thing online truly as a bigot in every way? NULL. (They said one dumb thing, but everyone fucks up once in a while. Then again, maybe investigation would turn up a lot of other dumb things they’ve said that leads to a reasonable conclusion they *are* that bad. Yet with only one data point, all we can logically say is “They said this dumb thing for unknown reasons.”)
• Is this blogger as good as they present themselves online? NULL. (As I know all too well, it’s easy to look good when you control the stage!)

And I think once you internalize a bit of NULL-ness, you relax as you realize that you don’t need to have a snap judgment on everything.
Fitting every unknown into a “yes” or “no” gets exhausting, anyway. You start to get attached to that answer. Once you’ve decided on your answer with your limited data, your mind starts to defend it, and then suddenly that unknown person who’s disappointed in you slots firmly into one category or another. If it turns out that someone who you’ve categorized as “not worth your time” starts following up with other good points, you fight the data (“This person’s saying things I respect!”) because you’ve come to a conclusion (“They’re not worth listening to!”) and everyone hates to be proven wrong.
Whereas with a NULL, I’m literally not saying whether the disappointment of someone I’ve never met is worthwhile or not. It could be either way. But I talk to a lot of strangers, and if I followed up on every unknown in my life, I’d never get anything done.
Leaving it unknown is fine. With the NULL, I can wait for further data to present itself, if it does, and then form other decisions from there.
Learn to love the NULL. You do not have to possess an answer for everything. And your life gets a lot easier when you realize, “Hey, I don’t know, and I may not necessarily have to know, and this ambiguous state is okay.”  You can free up a lot of cycles withholding judgment, enabling you more energy to go investigate the things that do matter deeply to you.
And you can do things without having to have a foregone conclusion. As I write this, is this a really obvious thing to say? Or is it something that might be of use to enough people that it’s worth publishing?
As I hit the submit button, my answer is NULL.  And that, too, is okay.

A Comment So Dumb, I Had To Memorialize It

So here’s my dirty little secret: nothing I do over here on this little corner of the web causes much fuss, these days.
Which is not to say that I don’t post my Social Justice Warrior-style essays – but I’ve been doing this schtick for so long that people have come to know what to expect.  I hear some of my friends going, “My Facebook, oh, it’s so filled with angry conservatives!”  Whereas I’ve been posting for so long that either the conservatives have learned to live with me, or they’ve fled.  And I’m not popular enough that the opposition will come over here just to make fun of me.
So occasionally I’ll write a piece like “Why Straight Dudes Don’t Get As Offended As Normal People Do,” and it’ll get linked around, and maybe I’ll get a few extra thousand hits – but my comments section looks pretty much the same.  I am, largely, preaching to the same choir.
But on FetLife…
I cross-post some of my political essays to FetLife, where it often reaches their “Kinky and Popular” front page, and hooooly shit do I get some frothing opposition.  Which is good!  Meeting opposition is where you have the potential to change minds!  So most of my spirited debates are over on FetLife these days.
And posting my “Straight White Dudes” essay has been a cauldron of amusement.  People started keeping a tally of the number of straight white cis guys who posted comments without even bothering to read to the end.
And it was there, my friends, that my favorite comment ever originated.
One particularly strident dude took me to task at length for being a sad windbag.  When do words ever change anything?  You’re just a sad sack couch potato, your side doesn’t have any effective protests, you’re useless and worthless and you name it.
I commented back.  I got two private emails from people warning me “DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THIS BOZO, HE NEVER SHUTS UP.”   And lo, he didn’t, going on at further length about the things I did and didn’t do.  (It doesn’t help that I wasn’t arguing my case as well as I could have.)
Eventually, he unleashes this gem:
“In full disclosure I make a lot of money. So I BUY the trappings of privilege, I didn’t inherit it and it wasn’t given to me. When I started my business I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. And I had exactly ZERO privilege to trade on. I didn’t make it because I was White or a man, or had a wife that was born female. I did it because I was willing to do what other people wouldn’t. Got my hands very dirty and handled some truly disgusting shit, but it paid well.
“And then I risked everything I had and took risks. I got lucky, but I worked very, very hard. There were no springs in my boots as I’ve heard used as a common metaphor. And among almost all the small business owners I know the story is pretty similar.
“We rose by our own hands. Yes we had employees. Capitalized on opportunities where we could and now we get to be told that we are to blame for your missed opportunities in this life.”
And actually, even though I hadn’t discussed privilege at all with him, nor had I blamed him for any missed opportunities, I actually did feel some connection with the dude.  I feel that a lot in discussions of privilege – people going, “I worked hard, this is mine, how dare you say I had it easy?” Because hell, I worked hard to get where I am, I could see how people can feel a sense of that pride ripped away from them.
So I wrote a long and rather heartfelt comment that was a reiteration of my essay “If It’s Not Privilege, What Is?” I talked about how I was a depressive, and had twenty-five years of struggle to get my novel published, and I missed out on parties and lost girlfriends and wrote for three hours a night to fulfill my dream –
– and yet despite all that hard work to get where I was, I still had to acknowledge that women have it harder, people with chronic illnesses have it harder, poor people have it harder.  And that’s why I believe that “You worked hard to get what you got” and “Others can have it harder” is not a contradiction.
And despite the fact that a link to my book is literally the first thing on my FetLife profile, this was my favorite comment of all time:
“Then I guess you have to keep hustling don’t you Ferrett. I left that part out. I got up today and knew I had to keep running to stay ahead of the crashing wave.
“See there is no resting on your laurels. It doesn’t work like that. Sorry bud there is no case of bud lite waiting for you after you type another 500 words. You have to be able to sell something.
“Maybe if this isn’t working you should try something else. I realize that sounds harsh, I don’t mean to say you aren’t good at it, but maybe there is no market for what you are selling?”
Wanna know what it looks like when a dude loses an argument?
It looks like that.  And oh, it’s the best feeling in the world.
Despite the fact that he’d made whole posts about who I was and how I acted and how he knew my kind, he didn’t even know I’d sold a book.  (Or two, if you count the sequel dropping in six weeks.  Or, if you’re really into that sort of thing, three books, as I just sold the third in the series.)
He didn’t even read the first paragraph of my profile.  Hadn’t Googled me, hadn’t checked, just assumed that because I was an SJW I was a failure.  (In the way a lot of straight white cis dude are claiming I make assumptions about them, even though I acknowledged those stereotypes were unfair in the essay itself.)
So yeah.  It’s the best feeling in the world for me, watching him now twist and turn, attempting to say things like “I didn’t read your profile because I didnt think enough of you to spend much time researching your life” and accusing me of a “clumsy attempt at a trap” and…
Doesn’t matter.  He just lost the game.  All his authority, dribbled away.
You rarely get to watch such a magnificent foot-shooting, but there we have it!