Discussion
I have a couple of deeply held beliefs that make me sound like a lunatic shouting from a streetcorner whenever I raise them but this is my corner so you can listen to me: we are collectively blind to what computers and code actually means and what they are for.
We have metis and techne without episteme, without gnosis.
I am exactly correct about that but you can see what I mean about sounding like a lunatic.
It would probably help if you used well-understood English phrases instead of ancient Greek terminology, tbh. I *think* I know what you mean and I *think* I agree with you, but there's really nothing like obfuscatory language to make someone look like a crank.
@suetanvil I get it, but I don't know that commonly-understood terms for what I'm trying to express exist in English. I'm all ears, though if you've got ideas.
Going from having a well-formed thought to conveying it in a way that is concise while still carrying the truth of it is *hard*. That being said here's some brainstorming:
"We are mechanics but not scientists and certainly not philosophers."
"We can write code but we cargo-cult[1] the thinking behind it."
[1] Potentially offensive term, but very concise in certain hackish circles.
@mhoye I agree. The field of software development has been bad at transferring working knowledge, perspective, and wise versus foolish approaches for as long as I have been part of it.
Peer learning communities have been my way of compensating for the general failure of the field to nurture itself as a reflective practice, and instead to mistakenly to look to wealthy survivors of the boom waves for guidance.
@jmeowmeow yeah. This field deserves a lot better than the airplane measles epistemology it’s cultivated over the last four decades.
@mhoye it becomes wildly apparent whenever you look at the unsolved goals of the last thirty years. “How does the system understand the importance of this alert?” Well, that’ll require connecting to all these context systems and understanding what’s in them, and a lot of the data is inaccurate or missing. Or even simpler, “how do I recognize this email is unwanted?”
Computation is at its most base, most crassly uninteresting, in its detail of cleverly solving narrow problems, and yet somehow that is what is so thoroughly valorized that churning out these vast quantities of microstatements has become indistinguishable from a fulfillment of larger ambition. A truckload of nails is not a single girder or a yard of cable. A thousand truck loads of nails is not a girder or cable, a million of them will not build a bridge. This is not why we are here.
Computation in its techne, the deep understanding of a space that is math given verbs, somehow both utterly imaginary and the foundational underpinning of everything that is. Computation in its metis and the knowledge that can only come from a step beyond sight, earned in hours of hands on the machine. Me standing in a room with a thousand first-year CS students, saying, this together is the path to your episteme. For the gnosis you will need, look left, look right. See who is with you, but see.
The gnostic why of computing supersedes all of that; it is growing and evolving communities of people and practice, creating a shared understanding of the complexities of the universe around us. The hardware isn't just tools, and the code isn't just a set languages of convenience, but a co-evolved expression of the summand of that understanding.
Free, open software as a cultural articulation stumbled ass backwards into the fact of this once, and has fought it tooth and nail ever since.
But if you can see what I see, standing here yelling on the sidewalk at the corner of Silicon and Spinoza, then you can see the enclosing of that aspiration by people who want to sell a dripfeed of adulterated and corrupt techne back to us for who they are. You can know the people trying to lock the hours of metis behind pentalobe screws, paywalls and glass by what they're taking from you. You can name the theft and refuse to worship your own lonely, isolate, convenient one-click subjugation.
Anyway in conclusion computers are pretty great when people remember they're about people and when they're both sometimes difficult thanks for coming to my ted talk.
@mhoye My little hill is Knuth’s “programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do”. In my head the whole LLM push is based on (accidental or willful) misunderstanding of what programming and code are.
By people for people, a means of communication and knowledge transfer. But then again: we saw the same “misunderstanding” in the use of LLMs to extrude books or art so I guess it might be a difference of values rather than misunderstanding.
@mhoye yep. One of the main benefits of LLMs for me in my coding practice is doing this kind of research on someone else's library.
@evan You have misunderstood me completely.
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