Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dang on Thursday July 20, 2017 @06:27PM (#14816796)

Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough to keep a word alive!

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by justin66 on Thursday July 20, 2017 @08:10PM (#14817218)

I wonder if you can offer a pair of online dictionary definitions that illustrates what you see as the difference in meaning between the two words. (I bet you can't)

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dang on Thursday July 20, 2017 @09:20PM (#14817439)

Look closely enough and you'll see that they all do. One meaning for 'heterodox' is 'holding unorthodox opinions'. That's an attribute of the person, not the opinion.

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox = opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion", which to me seems clearly meaningful.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dragonwriter on Friday July 21, 2017 @01:57AM (#14818374)

> The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology

No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by DonHopkins on Friday July 21, 2017 @05:02AM (#14819064)

How is heterodoxophobia more nuanced than literally meaning being afraid of different opinions?

http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and-hetero...

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dang on Friday July 21, 2017 @03:10AM (#14818647)

I couldn't disagree more.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by pvg on Friday July 21, 2017 @01:55AM (#14818365)

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain.

Is it? (to either of those things). In current English usage, 'unorthodox' doesn't mean 'incorrect' and doesn't connote 'incorrect'.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by DonHopkins on Friday July 21, 2017 @05:14AM (#14819102)

Etymology be damned: I'm still trying to figure out if he meant "royal" as in "Royale with Cheese" or "royal" as in "royal pain in the ass".

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by justin66 on Thursday July 20, 2017 @09:33PM (#14817481)

Cool.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by jhpriestley on Friday July 21, 2017 @11:24AM (#14821256)

There is definitely a difference in meaning, maybe just in specialized fields like theology and economics.

An Austrian school economist, or an Arianist in the early Christian church, would be called "heterodox" but probably not "unorthodox". It has the connotation of following a definite tradition that is not the main tradition in the field. "Unorthodox" means something more like "doing your own thing", so Steven Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) might be called an "unorthodox economist" because he studies unusual topics like drug dealers, but not a "heterodox economist" because he studies these strange topics using mainstream theories.

I think "heterodox" fits reasonably well in this article, it suggests that these engineers are following a distinct tradition, not just "doing their own thing".

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by telharmonium on Friday July 21, 2017 @10:31PM (#14825091)

Funnily enough, an essay cited by the article contains this quote in its opening paragraph:

"...defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming Information Age..." [1]

Presumably Victor's research group is working in opposition to this conventional thinking, making them... unheterorthodox?

1. 'THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY' - http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-i...

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by laxatives on Thursday July 20, 2017 @07:13PM (#14816983)

The word aside, he's not wrong. That article is filled with flowery non-sense, making long prosaic paragraphs from thin-air. I like reading long articles, but this doesn't contribute much.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dang on Thursday July 20, 2017 @09:14PM (#14817414)

Quite possibly! But a bad article can contain a good word. I wanted to stand up for 'heterodox', first because words are my friends and I like my friends, and second because HN is a textual place and good English is part of the business here.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by DonHopkins on Friday July 21, 2017 @04:57AM (#14819042)

Have you tried deconstructing it?

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure

by Chip Morningstar, June 1993

"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by rl3 on Thursday July 20, 2017 @07:39PM (#14817091)

I respectfully disagree. The article made considerable effort to evade techno-solutionist fantasies.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by rl3 on Saturday July 22, 2017 @01:49AM (#14825632)

Nobody? Tough crowd.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by wtvanhest on Thursday July 20, 2017 @07:07PM (#14816959)

At risk of sounding foolish... I even read yours/his comments, and I am still confused.

I am fairly confident that I have never seen the word heterodox used before.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by dang on Thursday July 20, 2017 @09:11PM (#14817397)

For each of us there are good words we haven't seen before. That's lucky, since life would be duller otherwise.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by justin66 on Thursday July 20, 2017 @08:03PM (#14817189)

That's because it means exactly the same thing as "unorthodox" and almost everyone simply says that. Hence the discussion - you aren't alone.

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by DonHopkins on Friday July 21, 2017 @05:28AM (#14819163)

When given the choice of a naming a variable notSomethingDescriptive or somethingElseDescriptive, I always choose the positive name, because it's easier to understand in logical expressions, and reduces double negation. It's better to describe what something is, instead of what it's not. So unOrthoDox is more negative (and more complex) than heteroDox, because it begins with the prefix "un".

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Re:Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC by justin66 on Friday July 21, 2017 @10:20AM (#14820723)

You're right, but on the other hand, it's probably not best to use words that few are familiar with if you are trying to make yourself understood. On the gripping hand, a variable name is just a variable name and its true meaning doesn't really depend on its name at all, so okay, go for the burn. (especially if you're writing Java code)

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