I can't speak for other professions, but as a software engineer, I am
a rational empiricist. I design a specification, translate it into an
implementation, compile it with a trusted compiler, observe behavior
on a target machine, using the user interface and possibly debugging
tools. I once spent two weeks on designing an overlay loading
operating system. Of course I had a bug in the 3000 lines of code
which I typed up. After five days of trying diagnostic methods, and
repeatedly reading the code over and over again, I found that the bug
was simply that I had reversed two lines of code performed
sequentially for calling certain functions. Despite repeated efforts
at finding the problem, of my OWN design and implementation, I was
blind to the oversight until I was tearing my hair in frustration and
looked at the code with the eyes of an idiot rather than an expert. If
I had not KNOWN that there was a flaw in the code which occurred only
under certain specific circumstances, then I would have passed it out
as bug free.

The lesson to be learned is that unless you go LOOKING for flaws in a
theory or practical application, your ASSUMPTION that there are no
flaws (based upon insufficient evidence) will blind you to the fact
that flaws exist. Only rigorous testing by persons with various
cultural blind spots will detect the gems of inconsistency which lead
to great leaps forward in theory, and ultra reliable applications.

Lonnie Courtney Clay

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