[FRIAM] Fwd: Re: Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

[glen]

Oops.  I meant to spam everyone with this, not just Leigh.


 Forwarded Message 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"
Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 12:38:25 -0700
From: glen 
To: Leigh Fanning 


The "click bait" meme is pretty interesting, too.  It seems (to me) related to 
science journalism (or the lack thereof).  However, I've always worried about 
my apophenia.  Are all these things related (programming by poking, 
hyper-specialization, supervenience, ADHD, click bait, the monotonic NPI, 
etc.)?  If I could only tie in the Singularians, I'd be ready for an all-out 
conspiracy theory!

Seriously, though.  In an upcoming publication, some of the domain people 
suggested we use the term "rejected" (or "refuted" or whatnot) in place of our 
term "falsified".  This highlights that when writing for a given audience, 
there's this tension between using language that does both of 2 things: 1) 
evokes extant concepts in the readers' heads and 2) avoids evoking the wrong 
concepts in their heads.  Such tension is part of the art of good writing.  
Things like click bait, "dog whistling", and the much more subtle go-to 
phrasing you're referring to are similar to the change in the state of 
programming Sussman pointed out.

A good example (I think) is the noise surrounding Justin Trudeau's 
"explanation" of quantum computing.  Do we laud him for being a skilled parrot? 
 Is he (merely) a skilled parrot?  It's interesting to contrast him with Sarah 
Palin, who strikes me as a skilled parrot, albeit shallower than Trudeau ... or 
perhaps with a slightly different skill set.  Another related kerfuffle is the 
accusation that Bill Nye isn't a scientist.  We could slide down the slippery 
slope and say the same thing about Carl Sagan.  Is any popularization effort 
destined to be plagued with similar problems presented by climate denial, where 
"credentials" are munged to support one or another motivation?

In a world governed by breadth-preference thinkers, credentials and ad hominem 
are crucial rhetorical tools.  It's become a fallacy to _not_ insult one's 
opponent.  Is it any wonder Trump or someone like him would end up becoming 
President?  He's just following right along from the impact of television on 
elected offices all the way up through online bullying to recruiting ISIS 
fighters.

We are steadily becoming a tissue/film, rather than a collection of individuals.



On 05/10/2016 09:24 AM, Leigh Fanning wrote:
> Ain't that the truth.  Furthermore, I've noted that the range of words
> used in conversations is steadily being restricted to words people are
> commonly using with their e-conversations.  Hence, entire exchanges
> are becoming meaningless piles of non-expression populated with "awesome,"
> "there you go," "no problem," and the ever-sincere "thanks so much."
> 
> The only antidote is to step away from the screen as often as possible
> and go back to real thinking and expression.  
> 
> It's not an old vs. young dichotomy.  It's based on a threshold of
> net consumption.  Here's a general possible essay title, with multiple
> correct inferential meanings, summarizing the downgrading of 
> collective human intellectual capacity:
> 
> Internet considered harmful.  
> 
> (Doh! I'm infected!  'considered harmful'
> has it's own net niche as the go-to title phrasing for tech
> criticism essays!  This virus engenders systemic laziness
> in thought formation!)

-- 
⛧ glen




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Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

[glen]

Yes, I agree.  I was going to be cantankerous and respond with something about 
imperfect closure and the "openness" of all processes.  But this article brings 
me back to a steady irritant:

  Are our smartphones afflicting us all with symptoms of ADHD?
  
https://theconversation.com/are-our-smartphones-afflicting-us-all-with-symptoms-of-adhd-58330

The inability to "do analysis" or for deep thought may well simply be a symptom 
of the larger issue of attention-spreading (for lack of a better term).  There 
seems to be a dichotomy between depth- vs. breadth-first attention at the root 
of the problem Sussman bemoaned.  Us old people (well, geeks anyway) tend 
toward depth-first ... or at least depth-preferred ... attention, whereas the 
younger ones tend toward breadth-preference.  You don't have to know _about_ 
the incident things, you only need to know _of_ them.  You can have whole 
conversations simply mentioning various things without discussing any single 
thing in any depth.

There's a deep theme, here somewhere ... oops, my phone just dinged.


On 05/09/2016 04:26 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If you have a closure over the whole universe and you are given one knob to 
> turn, and once doing so out pops a new projection of the world you can see, 
> then you 1) don't necessarily see the whole universe, but 2) can potentially 
> be a specialist in the things that are observable in that projection.The 
> part I don’t like in this picture is that the niche-fillers start to fancy 
> the idea there are different universes popping out the closure and see no 
> need to reconcile them.  They see N vectors instead of one eigenvector.

-- 
⛧ glen


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Re: [FRIAM] Tagged "Get off my lawn!"

[Russell Standish]

TCL/Tk, eh? Minsky is an graphically-based open-source dynamical
systems simulator I've mostly written using TCL/Tk that weighs in
around 10K lines. I've often fantasised about porting it to a
different toolkit, one that supports web browsers, and/or tablets. Qt
being one possibility.

Remind me not to use Gnome if at all possible. Bits of gnome are used
in Minsky, for doing things like font and SVG rendering, but used
reluctantly, because those APIs are just plain ugly, obviously written
by someone with a disdain for the C++ way of doing things.

Cheers


On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 07:47:01PM -0400, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> I've done a completely "off my lawn" thing over the past few weeks.
> Playing Mahjong solitaire on Ubuntu is one of my vices, but I don't like
> the way the supplied program works in many ways.   At least twice I've
> downloaded the source for gnome-mahjongg and looked at it until my eyes
> started bleeding and gave up.  It's a gnome application and, furthermore,
> it's a gnome-game application, its source code is not its source code, it's
> source code is a specialization of a framework that's a specialization of a
> framework.
> 
> I've written my own version of mahjong in Tcl, Tk, and Snit.  The entire
> source, including the svg for the tile set (which I stole from
> gnome-mahjongg and rewrote), comes to 3382 lines of code as of right now.
> Tcl is the other scripting language that isn't Perl and isn't Python and
> isn't Ruby.  Tk is the user interface toolkit written for Tcl to prove that
> there could be a one line "hello world" progam for X windows, which
> subsequently has become available on Windows, Mac, Android, Perl, Python,
> and Ruby.  Snit is a pure Tcl object extension for Tcl, that also allows
> you to extend Tk widgets.
> 
> It's not really a fair comparison, since I left out all the layouts and
> tile sets that I don't use, and I haven't even implemented everything I
> planned to do, and I didn't even plan to implement it all, and everything
> doesn't work right, either.  None the less, I can play Mahjongg solitaire
> with my 3382 line Tcl/Tk/Snit script, and the source tree for
> gnome-majongg-3.20.0 is 19.5 Mbytes and 576 files or directories.
> 
> http://github.com/recri/mahjong, I think it may be a better program if I
> purposely leave some bugs in it,
> 


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au



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