There is (at least in me) an ongoing brawl between (at least) 2 homunculi: the one that embraces novel
situations where I have zero knowledge or control and have to "live in the present" versus the one
that embraces knowledge and control. As I age, the latter usually has the upper hand. (During chemo, I
found myself shying away from experiences I would have previously launched into without thought. And it was
all "I told you so" after a horrific sunburn I got at one point ... "use sunblock or stay in
the shade while they're poisoning you", it said ... Bah!)
And this mailing list might well provide an interesting opportunity for such
contrast ... being seemingly populated mostly by old people (where the latter
homunculus likely wins more) but orbiting the concept of complexity (where
control and understanding are rare). The former homunculus would die off if we
didn't feed it at least sporadically.
So, I'm glad it's all peek&poke these days. It means we're builing shoulders
on which later generations stand. The opposite situation would be _sad_, say if
everyone had to learn quantum mechanics just to add numbers together ... or if
everyone had to know how to surface mount with a hot plate in order to post to
Facebook ... well, OK, that might be a good thing, actually ... but you get my
point.
On 05/09/2016 02:47 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
In the early days of Linux there was a period where they fastest way to figure
out what was going on was to grab the source and study it. Contrast that with
the current world of Stack Exchange and Google. There’s enough information
out there that I suspect many people may never learn to do careful analysis.
They can get by on poke and prod, and the industry drivers for intellectual
property reinforces that behavior. Not that anyone really is “taught” to
program -- at least that is worth hiring -- but it is sad to see computer
science diluted in this way. I’ve helped someone through the current Harvard
CS-50 curriculum and, no, SICP it ain’t.
On 05/09/2016 12:29 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
I think it's pretty funny. The singularity happened before the millennium, when
our libraries outgrew our ability to thoroughly test or understand them. In
mere decades the artificial universe, starting from nothing, had become as
mysterious as reality.
On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Gary Schiltz <g...@naturesvisualarts.com
<mailto:g...@naturesvisualarts.com>> wrote:
In the words of the (in)famous Ross Perot, "Now, that's just sad."
On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:57 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206&imm_mid=0e370a&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160507
--
⛧ glen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
