Is that directed at, or intended to be any more convincing to those holding Callahan’s view in the link? I’m not trying to criticize you, I just want to make sure you know the kind of worldview you’re dealing with here. If you’ll remember, this is the same guy who categorically rejects the idea that anything human-related is mechanized. ( Recent blog post about the issue … he’s proud to be a “Silas-free” zone now.)
On a slightly related note, I was thinking about what analogous positions would look like, and I thought of this one for comparison: “There is no automatist revival in industry. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce every production process into a mechanical procedure.”
So why would this Serious Thinker feel the need to reject, on sight, my comments from appearing, and then advertise it?
You don’t think your making a horrible impression on people you argue with may have anything to do with it? ;)
Seriously, that would be my first hypothesis. “You don’t catch flies with vinegar.” Go enough out of your way to antagonize people even as you’re making strong rebuttals to their weak arguments, and you’re giving them an easy way out of listening to you.
The nicer you are, the harder you make it for others to dismiss you as an asshole. I’d count that as a good reason to learn nice. (If you need role models, there are plenty of people here who are consistently nice without being pushovers in arguments—far from it.)
The evidence against that position is that Callahan, for a while, had no problem allowing my comments on his site, but then called me a “douche” and deleted them the moment they started disagreeing with him. Here’s another example.
Also, on this post, I responded with something like, “It’s real, in the sense of being an observable regularity in nature. Okay, what trap did I walk into?” but it was diallowed. Yet I wouldn’t call that comment rude.
It’s not about him banning me because of my tone; he bans anyone who makes the same kinds of arguments, unless they do it badly, in which case he keeps their comments for the easy kill, gets in the last word, and closes the thread. Which is his prerogative, of course, but not something to be equated with “being interested in meaningful exchange of ideas, and only banning those who are rude”.
“There is no automatist revival in industry. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce every production process into a mechanical procedure.”
I’m not sure that claim would be entirely absurd.
In the software engineering business, there’s a subculture whose underlying ideology can be caricatured as “Programming would be so simple if only we could get those pesky programmers out of the loop.” This subculture invests heavily into code generation, model-driven architectures, and so on.
Arguably, too, this goal only sems plausible if you have swallowed quite a few confusions regarding the respective roles of problem-solving, design, construction, and testing. A closer examination reveals that what passes for attempts at “mechanizing” the creation of software punts on most of the serious questions, focusing only on what is easily mechanizable.
But that is nothing other than the continuation of a trend that has existed in the software profession from the beginning: the provision of mechanized aids to a process that remains largely creative (and as such poorly understood). We don’t say that compilers have mechanized the production of software; we say that they have raised the level of abstraction at which a programmer works.
Okay, but that point only concerns production of software, a relatively new “production output”. The statement (“there is no automatist revival in industry …”) would apply just the same to any factory, and ridicules the idea that there can be a mechanical procedure for producing any good. In reality, of course, this seems to be the norm: someone figures out what combination of motions converts the input to the output, refuting the notion that e.g. “There is no mechanical procedure for preparing a bottle of Coca-cola …”
In any case, my dispute with Callahan’s remark is not merely about its pessimism regarding mechanizing this or that (which I called View 1), but rather, the implication that such mechanization would be fundamentally impossible (View 2), and that this impossibility can be discerned from philosophical considerations.
And regarding software, the big difficulty in getting rid of human programmers seems to come from how their role is, ultimately, to find a representation for a function (in a standard language) that converts a specified input into a specified output. Those specifications come from … other humans, who often conceal properties of the desired I/O behavior, or fail to articulate them.
Is that directed at, or intended to be any more convincing to those holding Callahan’s view in the link? I’m not trying to criticize you,
No, you’re absolutely right. My comment definitely would not be convincing. The best that could be said for it is that it would help to clarify the nature of my rejection of View 2. That is, if I were talking to Callahan, that comment would, at best, just help him to understand which position he was dealing with.
The pithy reply would be that science already is mechanized. We just don’t understand the mechanism yet.
Is that directed at, or intended to be any more convincing to those holding Callahan’s view in the link? I’m not trying to criticize you, I just want to make sure you know the kind of worldview you’re dealing with here. If you’ll remember, this is the same guy who categorically rejects the idea that anything human-related is mechanized. ( Recent blog post about the issue … he’s proud to be a “Silas-free” zone now.)
On a slightly related note, I was thinking about what analogous positions would look like, and I thought of this one for comparison: “There is no automatist revival in industry. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce every production process into a mechanical procedure.”
From looking at his blog, I think you should take this as a compliment.
About “Silas-free zones” you blogged:
You don’t think your making a horrible impression on people you argue with may have anything to do with it? ;)
Seriously, that would be my first hypothesis. “You don’t catch flies with vinegar.” Go enough out of your way to antagonize people even as you’re making strong rebuttals to their weak arguments, and you’re giving them an easy way out of listening to you.
The nicer you are, the harder you make it for others to dismiss you as an asshole. I’d count that as a good reason to learn nice. (If you need role models, there are plenty of people here who are consistently nice without being pushovers in arguments—far from it.)
The evidence against that position is that Callahan, for a while, had no problem allowing my comments on his site, but then called me a “douche” and deleted them the moment they started disagreeing with him. Here’s another example.
Also, on this post, I responded with something like, “It’s real, in the sense of being an observable regularity in nature. Okay, what trap did I walk into?” but it was diallowed. Yet I wouldn’t call that comment rude.
It’s not about him banning me because of my tone; he bans anyone who makes the same kinds of arguments, unless they do it badly, in which case he keeps their comments for the easy kill, gets in the last word, and closes the thread. Which is his prerogative, of course, but not something to be equated with “being interested in meaningful exchange of ideas, and only banning those who are rude”.
I’m not sure that claim would be entirely absurd.
In the software engineering business, there’s a subculture whose underlying ideology can be caricatured as “Programming would be so simple if only we could get those pesky programmers out of the loop.” This subculture invests heavily into code generation, model-driven architectures, and so on.
Arguably, too, this goal only sems plausible if you have swallowed quite a few confusions regarding the respective roles of problem-solving, design, construction, and testing. A closer examination reveals that what passes for attempts at “mechanizing” the creation of software punts on most of the serious questions, focusing only on what is easily mechanizable.
But that is nothing other than the continuation of a trend that has existed in the software profession from the beginning: the provision of mechanized aids to a process that remains largely creative (and as such poorly understood). We don’t say that compilers have mechanized the production of software; we say that they have raised the level of abstraction at which a programmer works.
Okay, but that point only concerns production of software, a relatively new “production output”. The statement (“there is no automatist revival in industry …”) would apply just the same to any factory, and ridicules the idea that there can be a mechanical procedure for producing any good. In reality, of course, this seems to be the norm: someone figures out what combination of motions converts the input to the output, refuting the notion that e.g. “There is no mechanical procedure for preparing a bottle of Coca-cola …”
In any case, my dispute with Callahan’s remark is not merely about its pessimism regarding mechanizing this or that (which I called View 1), but rather, the implication that such mechanization would be fundamentally impossible (View 2), and that this impossibility can be discerned from philosophical considerations.
And regarding software, the big difficulty in getting rid of human programmers seems to come from how their role is, ultimately, to find a representation for a function (in a standard language) that converts a specified input into a specified output. Those specifications come from … other humans, who often conceal properties of the desired I/O behavior, or fail to articulate them.
No, you’re absolutely right. My comment definitely would not be convincing. The best that could be said for it is that it would help to clarify the nature of my rejection of View 2. That is, if I were talking to Callahan, that comment would, at best, just help him to understand which position he was dealing with.