good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
Awesome line. Up goes the vote.
insufferablejake
Karma: 15
In case of a down vote on something that seems reasonable and/or is non-inflammatory, it’d be informative if someone left a note as to why it was being down voted.
I agree with you in that text is a visual representation of ‘units’ of ideas, if I were to be not very precise about this, that we string together to convey more complex ideas. And I agree with you that in the kind of complex scaffolding of little ideas into big ones ad. infinitum, that happens in computer science, that the kind of ‘coding’ medium I was suggesting, would be inefficient. But still the idea has a novelty for us humans who are more at home with spatially manipulating objects and stringing them together as opposed to doing all of this in abstract space.
No. Is it not more like that there is our cognitive landscape/real estate and on this (amongst others) are visual representations of objects/ideas/whatevers? And so all I was saying was that if you were to look at the space within which we code, then a visual representation of objects, the functions that operate on them and the state/data flows between them might be a more compelling medium of work.
There is this aspect of coding (and I write code for a living), the very act of it, that I do find sensual, (I don’t know if others perceive this in the same way or my calling it sensual is just a convenient metaphor for my experience) but as my fingers dance across the keyboard and I see my thoughts take shape on screen, there is a certain poetry there in the form of the combined sounds of my typing, the tactile feedback of the keys themselves and a well executed subroutine staring back at you. Writing that routine was not just a purely mental activity, it involved fine-motor skills, long hours of tapping away to get to stage where you don’t even have to look down at the keys, you think the words and your fingers move, of their own accord, to put those words on screen! (This is even better if you use a good tool, such as Vim, to maximize the efficiency of your keystrokes. It’s also the reason why I find it supremely satisfying to use mechanical keyboards.)
3) Can strongly intellectual jobs be reformatted in a more physical way? For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man? This would at least activate significantly more visual cortex than symbols on a screen.
I was going to make just such a point about programming. If one were to look at coding as a means of controlling data flow, or controlling state machines or decision paths, then ‘coding’ by means of drawing up an active flow chart and manipulating this spatially, much like what Stark did, would be awesome fun. This lets me visually and in space stack the scaffolding of ideas, blocks, functions and subroutines, ‘see’ the connections between blocks and watch the—the flow of control and data, yank things around ‘literally’, and so on and so forth.
There is a base level scaffolding here called A. A is based on shaky assumptions and essentially a choice to ‘believe’ in something, and nothing else. People standing on A refuse to look below it, or question why/how it came about, but instead they build these fabulous castles and really intricate structures, the supports and beams for which they easily carve out of A—since nobody is going to think about how A came to be, or what supports it, we can just have it give us more pillars and beams for the next floor of the castle. Let’s build as many floors, as we want.
I do not see this as rigour, or worthy of any merit.
As a continuation of what I have said in my previous comment, I’d like to suggest, that what google and the internet in general seem to be doing is aggressively providing candidates for inclusion into the local set. And so, by repetition and easy access they, possibly, help enlarge the local set. If technology gets better, then we can imagine a day where the local set more or less overlaps with the super set, and there really is no difference between the two; a fetch from local set and a fetch from the super set take about the same time and so qualitatively ‘feel’ the same. Our intuition then has a data set (to draw upon) that is immeasurably vaster than the small set of experiences that a single person can hope to acquire. This is a nice fairy tale.
There is an earlier comment by Kaj Sotala, that I just read, that states, better and more succintly, what I was trying to say with ‘our great brains have always been outside’. Let me quote
One central idea is that social communities are cognitive architectures the same way that individual minds are [4]. The argument is as follows. Cognitive processes involve trajectories of information (transmission and transformation), so the patterns of these information trajectories, if stable, reflect some underlying cognitive architecture. Since social organization—plus the structure added by the context of activity—largely determines the way information flows through a group, social organization may itself be viewed as a form of cognitive architecture.
But if you were an illiterate random peasant farmer in some historical venue, and you needed to know the growing season of taro or barley or insert-your-favorite-staple-crop-here, Wikipedia would have been superfluous: you would already know it. It would be unlikely that you would find a song lyrics website of any use, because all of the songs you’d care about would be ones you really knew, in the sense of having heard them sung by real people who could clarify the words on request, as opposed to the “I think I heard half of this on the radio at the dentist’s office last month” sense.
Everything you would need to know would be important enough to warrant—and keep—a spot in your memory.
I am not sure how different this example here is any different from Googling.
The first time a farmer wants to know something, such as the season to grow a crop in, he taps into the local pool of knowledge available to him. This pool could consist of his father, or the village elders, or the experienced farmer two miles in the neighbouring farm. And he only bothers remembering this factoid about seasons, and whatever else, because it would be a real pain to run two miles each time he wants to do something on his farm, every day. And by the same argument, things he doesn’t have to know on a daily basis or can live without, such as that village song, or the latest gossip in town, he will not bother committing this to memory. He will wait for the next time they gather around a fire or something to gather the latest. Again consider somebody looking at the man page for the arguments to a system call that she uses on a daily basis, and committing this to memory because it is more optimal to just remember it (because the two monitors she has are only big enough to keep her code windows open) and it would improve her productivity do so. She will not bother to commit to memory those calls and their arguments that she doesn’t use as often, and will go hunting in the man pages.
I guess what I am trying to say is that our great brains have always been external. There is a bunch of stuff that is local, and there is the bunch that is non-local. The non-local stuff is the collective of stuff that exists in and amongst the people we live with, talk to, our books and now of course the internet. And what is local, a vast majority of it, has always been a subset of that which is non-local. It’s only the magnitude of this non-local set that is easily (relatively speaking) accessible that has changed (by orders of magnitude).
Why was this down voted? The comic is a take on a fairly prevalent belief, heck, Hardy said it!
I wish more people on this forum would explain why they were down voting something, that on the face of it, seems reasonable.
I’m up voting this.
EDIT: When I posted this, I was of the opinion that the comic was just giving a funny take on the maths is a young man’s game thing. Now, after looking it several times, I am of the opinion that it was trying to poke fun of this said misconception. And, giving the benefit of doubt to the original poster, I still stand by my upvote.