So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic.
That, ahem, sounds like bullshit to me. I would like to see some empirical evidence.
Liberal-arts intelligentsia and hackers are of the same mind-people, ex-clergy, ex-shaman stock.
I disagree. I think they are very different kind of people—you may know their opposition as poets vs. techies. Of course both are different from rah-rah idiots, but that still doesn’t make them similar.
Well, you know anthro is hard, because the fact that currently living hunter-gatherers stayed so while everybody else moved on makes them rather atypical and unrepresentative, and everything else is just reasoning from archeology aka throwing darts to a football field from a helicopter. So I cannot provide that.
As for poets vs. technies being a very different kind, sure, my post is about the difference, I am just arguing they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer, because he has a certain respect for the blacksmith with a hammer, this kind of my point.
...they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer
And that’s what I’m disagreeing with :-) I think they are two different subspecies and even if a poet picks up a hammer out of the respect for the blacksmith, he’s not going to become a techie. Similarly, a techie who puts down his hammer is not a poet.
Okay. Let’s try to get empirical—which will not be easy. In my high school, 1992-96, correlation between interest in computers and interest in literature: high. Getting good grades in literature or history vs. math, science: mid-high. Visual arts vs math: low.
I think there is a large gap between hard mathy science and the visual arts.
But the gap between programming and reading / writing stuff not high—most of programming is not actually that mathy as it is advertised to be, while schools like to start with computing the Fibonacci, much of it in real life is just a bit more rigorous way of defining processes in pseudo-English. To give you a good example, Ruby on Rails is considered a fine piece of hackerdom, I think DHH won some hacker award with that, I looked into the codebase, and it is smart, often too much so (i.e. hairy, at least the early version I looked at) but it is more of a writing type of brilliance twisting expression this way and that way rather than mathy hard-science kind. Or another example, and this is considered a tutorial with fairly high-level concepts, http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database.html frankly it is way easier for my non-mathy mind than even calculus. It is just writing rigorously.
Hard mathy science, programing, writing, visual arts
Putting it differently. The closest relative to programming is that kind of more rigorous analytical philosophy Wittgenstein was doing. Like the “Is the king of France bald?” problem which cannot be answered with Y or N if you know France has no king. A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class and it used to have instances and now it has no instance, and baldness is an instance attribute and...”
And I think the gap between analytical philosophy and quantum physics is huge. The gap between that and writing smart essays, not so much.
One evening, when a friend and me were drunk, we seriously got into discussing things like the Krshna-religion he was interested in is basically the idea that the godhead is the base class all other classes inherit attributes from, and I was saying I am more interested in Buddhism because I see no fixed classes just processes bit like in Erlang and and and… my point is we seriously built theology on top of programming. I am not exactly proud of this exercise, but we were drunk and young. So my point is, we went really far off the softest soft science—liberal arts direction and we were still related to programmers-hackers.
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math. I, too, think that math and programming are not as close as they are usually made out to be.
I disagree that literature (fiction) and writing are close to programming. Academic or technical writing, maybe, but fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Yes, there is Tolkien with his world-building, but notice how he is beloved by (techie) geeks and looked down at by (poet) high-culture literary types. Those literary types much prefer writers like James Joyce, or Nabokov, or maybe Marquez, writers who are not analytic and are not much concerned with logic, consistency, etc. And, of course, there is poetry.
A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class...
Yeah. Reminds me of an old joke about a programmer who each evening would put two glasses on his nightstand: one full of water if he gets thirsty during the night; and one empty one if he doesn’t :-)
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math.
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking. You wouldn’t expect to use, say, calculus or linear algebra in a Rails database application, but math-heavy computer science (databases, parsing and whatnot) comes up all the time.
fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Even literary fiction uses common narrative tropes all the time. And one ingredient that makes it popular in liberal-arts academia (and that’s sorely lacking in the likes of Tolkien, and most sci-fi/fantasy) is basically characterization of an introspective kind. But HP:MoR is heavily based on that kind of introspection. Also, even James Joyce only used “non-logical” language as a hack to immerse the reader in the characters’ thought process. A lot of poetry does the same thing: it’s highly evocative and not at all “logical’, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be understood on its own terms. There’s no real divergence, only a contingent cultural divide.
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking.
Technically speaking, yes, practically speaking, no. In particular, people good at logical/analytical thinking are not necessarily good at math and vice versa.
That, ahem, sounds like bullshit to me. I would like to see some empirical evidence.
I disagree. I think they are very different kind of people—you may know their opposition as poets vs. techies. Of course both are different from rah-rah idiots, but that still doesn’t make them similar.
Well, you know anthro is hard, because the fact that currently living hunter-gatherers stayed so while everybody else moved on makes them rather atypical and unrepresentative, and everything else is just reasoning from archeology aka throwing darts to a football field from a helicopter. So I cannot provide that.
As for poets vs. technies being a very different kind, sure, my post is about the difference, I am just arguing they are hatched from the same egg. A techie is a poet with a hammer, because he has a certain respect for the blacksmith with a hammer, this kind of my point.
And that’s what I’m disagreeing with :-) I think they are two different subspecies and even if a poet picks up a hammer out of the respect for the blacksmith, he’s not going to become a techie. Similarly, a techie who puts down his hammer is not a poet.
Okay. Let’s try to get empirical—which will not be easy. In my high school, 1992-96, correlation between interest in computers and interest in literature: high. Getting good grades in literature or history vs. math, science: mid-high. Visual arts vs math: low.
I think there is a large gap between hard mathy science and the visual arts.
But the gap between programming and reading / writing stuff not high—most of programming is not actually that mathy as it is advertised to be, while schools like to start with computing the Fibonacci, much of it in real life is just a bit more rigorous way of defining processes in pseudo-English. To give you a good example, Ruby on Rails is considered a fine piece of hackerdom, I think DHH won some hacker award with that, I looked into the codebase, and it is smart, often too much so (i.e. hairy, at least the early version I looked at) but it is more of a writing type of brilliance twisting expression this way and that way rather than mathy hard-science kind. Or another example, and this is considered a tutorial with fairly high-level concepts, http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database.html frankly it is way easier for my non-mathy mind than even calculus. It is just writing rigorously.
So let’s define a scale
H--------------------------------------------P---------W--------------------------------------------------------V
Hard mathy science, programing, writing, visual arts
Putting it differently. The closest relative to programming is that kind of more rigorous analytical philosophy Wittgenstein was doing. Like the “Is the king of France bald?” problem which cannot be answered with Y or N if you know France has no king. A programmer would instantly go “Oh, we have a KingOfFrance class and it used to have instances and now it has no instance, and baldness is an instance attribute and...”
And I think the gap between analytical philosophy and quantum physics is huge. The gap between that and writing smart essays, not so much.
One evening, when a friend and me were drunk, we seriously got into discussing things like the Krshna-religion he was interested in is basically the idea that the godhead is the base class all other classes inherit attributes from, and I was saying I am more interested in Buddhism because I see no fixed classes just processes bit like in Erlang and and and… my point is we seriously built theology on top of programming. I am not exactly proud of this exercise, but we were drunk and young. So my point is, we went really far off the softest soft science—liberal arts direction and we were still related to programmers-hackers.
I agree that programming is much more related to logic and analytical thinking than to math. I, too, think that math and programming are not as close as they are usually made out to be.
I disagree that literature (fiction) and writing are close to programming. Academic or technical writing, maybe, but fiction—especially fiction that the liberal-arts people revere—nope.
Yes, there is Tolkien with his world-building, but notice how he is beloved by (techie) geeks and looked down at by (poet) high-culture literary types. Those literary types much prefer writers like James Joyce, or Nabokov, or maybe Marquez, writers who are not analytic and are not much concerned with logic, consistency, etc. And, of course, there is poetry.
Yeah. Reminds me of an old joke about a programmer who each evening would put two glasses on his nightstand: one full of water if he gets thirsty during the night; and one empty one if he doesn’t :-)
“Math” of the kind that’s taught in school/college is really a specialized kind of logical/analytical thinking. You wouldn’t expect to use, say, calculus or linear algebra in a Rails database application, but math-heavy computer science (databases, parsing and whatnot) comes up all the time.
Even literary fiction uses common narrative tropes all the time. And one ingredient that makes it popular in liberal-arts academia (and that’s sorely lacking in the likes of Tolkien, and most sci-fi/fantasy) is basically characterization of an introspective kind. But HP:MoR is heavily based on that kind of introspection. Also, even James Joyce only used “non-logical” language as a hack to immerse the reader in the characters’ thought process. A lot of poetry does the same thing: it’s highly evocative and not at all “logical’, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be understood on its own terms. There’s no real divergence, only a contingent cultural divide.
Technically speaking, yes, practically speaking, no. In particular, people good at logical/analytical thinking are not necessarily good at math and vice versa.