ccalf

I just found this week's blog posting by RJ Lipton: https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2019/10/21/a-polemical-overre...

The Mackenzie book chapter discusses both the Fetzer and DeMillo Lipton Perlis controversies.

It's really interesting that the debate got into the questions like, can one formally verify a bridge?

Actually, the SAT reading comprehension questions are not that simple and trip people up. Which is really my point of analogy. They're the kind of questions where you either got the right answer or not, but explaining it to the person who got it wrong can be non trivial.

There is none; the people who keep promulgating this falsehood about Stallman say that because of one paragraph that anyone who can pass the SAT reading comprehension tests, parse standard English, or understand the basics of logical reasoning, would have understood that it is simply a wrong interpretation at the level of how 1+1 = 3 is wrong.

It is much better to accuse Stallman in that instance that he was mansplaining and contributing to workplace toxicity, and/or to accuse Stallman of a historical pattern of objectifying women. Those are better because they are closer to the truth. But people like simpler narratives, that he said this one horrible thing, when it is not even that far fetched to show using the exact same quote that he was actually arguing quite an opposite, or orthogonal, point.

The other thing about this is that people ignore the context of the speaker; in this case Stallman was talking about media abuse of terminology. To complain about media manipulation is a very standard, leftist position. So like the above, to implicitly suggest that he was using this position as a cover for his personal misogyny, has merit, but nobody cares about this angle, because again it's too complicated to sort through.

I find this approach strangely condescending. For example the author says:

> Understanding the value attributed to X, Y, and Z in that particular text requires assessment of the rhetorical strategies of the author(s).

They could've just said, if you want to know why the author thinks XYZ are important, you need to look at what they are saying about it.

I'm a hardcore postmodern leftist, but I don't see how writing in such a contorted way helps practicing scientists. In fact I would argue that this kind of listing obscures a politics of its own; it is so busy prescribing citation practices that it won't examine its own politics.

That said, it's the first time I've seen this guide so maybe I need to read up on the issues; a list of do's / don'ts isn't the best way to introduce and help people understand the issues.

> Too many of the people I meet are ground down, sliding by, holding on, grappling with their identity and place in the world, somewhere on the scale of mildly scarred to full blown post traumatic, anxiety ridden, and/or profoundly lost.

How do you diagnose this? Is there a checklist of signs you look for? Do they eventually tell you, etc.?

Just curious, because I don't get to meet than many people all the time, so I can't collect sociological samples and reach conclusions in the way you seem to be doing.

I think it's clearer to understand the Church-Turing thesis as two theses, not one. Turing's thesis was that (intuitive) computability equals (formalizable) Turing computability.

So you could completely ignore the recursive functions part (and so, Church's Thesis) and there would still be the same sort of lay confusion about the computability thesis.

OK but if by saving 1000 lives a year required as a side-effect that you personally be among the fatalities, would that be OK for you? I hope not. Think of this as a technical corner case; so, the question is the soundness of the analysis—for example, the distribution of deaths and what that means for safety—and not letting various facile logic get in the way of that work.

It's plausible and goes to show why the blog post choosing salary is itself a bad metric to begin with. It has skewed the entire discussion.

Well the real issue is defining what's better. And the worry some of us have is this new trend of grappling with increased complexity seems short-sighted; we don't like the direction it's going. As much as Sussman shows understanding of the current situation, what he's saying is also a criticism--doing this sort of ad hoc "science by poking but not really science" is the heart of the issue.

And what's interesting is if you look at actual scientific research around programming, say dealing with concurrency and advanced tools like model checking, etc—all of that is very theoretical stuff that assumes you know SICP or have equivalent foundations. So it's not really an argument that theory is dying; in face of this new level of complexity in practice, perhaps we could benefit from theoretical research now more than ever.

SICP is programming for the theoretically inclined. It seems analogous to calculus in math versus calculus for physics: you can study it more formally with all the proper proofs and derivations (and bizarre cases), or pick up just the applied bits (such as chain rule and dot notation) that you need for doing AP physics. This analogy suggests the existence of two approaches, with different implications and consequences for programming culture.