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That reminds me of this one...

"Reciprocal Cosmology": http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r3/index.html

> I would disagree that it is not an inevitable consequence of intelligence.

Up to a point perhaps, but how much compassion do we have for chickens ?
It seems like a very hand wavy argument that since the machines would be that much
more intelligent than us they would be that much more compassionate than us. Our
compassion seems to tail off pretty quickly the further down the scale organisms are
from us - chimps: ok, dolphins: ahhh, pigs: hmm, cute when small but I
*like* bacon, chickens: fuckit, who cares... I wouldnt want to stake my life on
the compassion a 5th generation AI has for the violent ape like taking up
a thoroughly disproportionate amount of the planet's resources.

It probably doesnt matter anyway. I doubt very much we'll create an AI faster
than we simply merge with the technology
[i ranted about this ages ago http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r4/borg .html%5D

There are "mappers" and there are "packers". http://www.sabren.net/rants/1999/09/19990930a.php3 http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/Day1 .html

Your comment about inactivity itself being potentially addictive being reminds me of The Programmers Stone.

They are glorified mouse experiments where the stupid mouse keeps pressing a lever for a shot of dopamine until it forgets to eat and dies of starvation.

Drop out.

You don't need a degree to do incredible things.

Excessive schooling and socialization could be holding you back, at worst permanently infecting you with an inability to create and lead. A mind is a terrible thing to lose!

Has she read this?

Reciprocality.

How about encouraging the "patient" to go outside or do something constructive, instead of coercing him into repeating a mindless task for no real reward. Oh, right - because that's what he would have done ANYWAY if he weren't one of the majority who by about age six are infected with an affinity for pointless busywork, and an inability to learn except by rote.

I have no objection to psychotropic drugs and behavioral treatments when used judiciously to relieve real suffering or addiction. But using these tools to homogenize children to the societal norm is absolutely repugnant. How we can get through to these deranged teachers, parents, and psychiatrists?

A while back, I was reading a site called "The Programmer's Stone." It is a site to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming.

It turned out that The Programmer's Stone is only chapter 0 in a larger site, Reciprocality.org. Chapter 1 is about a human parasite they call M0.

"M0 is a previously unsuspected public health problem. It is ancient and vast, and only fragments of information regarding its origins and the psychological state of humans prior to its instantiation have passed down to us. It consists of a neurochemical effect induced by boring social conditions that people get addicted to like some athletes get addicted to their own adrenaline and end up B. A. S. E. jumping."

The other chapters, well, see for yourselves . . .

A while back, I was reading a site called "The Programmer's Stone." It is a site to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming.

It turned out that The Programmer's Stone is only chapter 0 in a larger site, Reciprocality.org. Chapter 1 is about a human parasite they call M0.

"M0 is a previously unsuspected public health problem. It is ancient and vast, and only fragments of information regarding its origins and the psychological state of humans prior to its instantiation have passed down to us. It consists of a neurochemical effect induced by boring social conditions that people get addicted to like some athletes get addicted to their own adrenaline and end up B. A. S. E. jumping."

The other chapters, well, see for yourselves . . .

Two links for you:

The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical, is a satirical site by AS people, and the place where that quote probably came from.

and the Reciprocality Project is a site with a more serious theory that the neurotypical mentality may in fact be a real mental disorder (sections 0, 1, and 2, and the special introduction linked at the top, will be of particular interest on this topic).

Believe it or not, there are people who actually understand what all those stupid electrons do. Those are the ones who become chemists.

The rest of us, a category that includes you, me and (he leaves not the slightest doubt about this) the submitter, have no choice but to suck it up and memorize the damn things.

Have you ever seen the discussion of mappers vs packers at The Programmers Stone?

I teach my daughter Buddhist mythology because I feel that mythology is an extremely important, but neglected part of society. In fact I think it's fair to say that the lack of a meaningful mythos is a large part of what's wrong with many societies today. However this is something that I teach at home, or occasionally at temple. I don't expect the local middle school to teach mythology, of any sort, along side of science coursework. What I do expect is that her school teach her something about other cultures & beliefs and that while some beliefs may seem silly, and potentially deluded, they are NOT a reason to persecute another human being.

I wasn't aware that Buddhism had a particular mythology associated with it. Most of the Buddhists I know are subscribers to many Buddhist philosophical ideals but do not follow it religiously, or even consider it a religion but rather "a philosophy" (i.e. they don't take it as irrefutable dogma, but rather, as a set of possibly questioned notions which they presently agree with for the most part).

From the rest of your message I get the impression that the mythology you speak of is more a set of parables than the typical western epic mythology of gods and heroes, or Zoroastrian/Abrahamic battles between good and evil. If that is so, or even if that's not entirely so but the parables are the parts that you emphasize to your children when you teach them this mythology, I have to agree with you that that sort of thing is a major lack of our modern culture, though I wouldn't quite say it that mythology in specific is what we lack. I think the missing piece is proper narrative illustration of the dry and abstract facts of reality and morality. Parabolic mythology (I think I just made that term up) is a good means of illustrating those lessons, but what could function just as well, and justifiably be taught in secular classrooms, bringing this kind of illustration to the masses, is a better teaching of history.

Tell the factual stories of our past as the interesting and engaging *stories* that they are, humanize them so the students understand that these things happened to real people, and *as a consequence of* other things happening, rather than just an unconnected series of meaningless dates and names as most history is taught today. Don't oversimplify the chain of cause and effect, and don't tell the stories with any particular moral agenda - try to tell them as completely and neutrally as possible - but make it a point to ask the students, "what do you think we can learn from these events?". Just make the connection that this isn't irrelevant dry stuff that happened and so what who cares, but that these are interesting true stories, and there are important lessons in there that are immediately applicable to today's life. And encourage the students to think about what those lessons might be.

It's very, very easy to get caught up in a strongly anti-theist thinking because, particularly in US, those mythos has little or no resonance with most people and the behavior of many of the Abrahamic Fundamentalists can be profoundly negative. I, Myself am fortunate to have stumbled upon the wittings of Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi as a youth and the struggle to come to terms with and understand the powerful and beautiful writings of a devout Muslim did much neutralized my "All Abrahamics Must DIE" sentiment.

I'd like to recommend you also look up the Gospel of Thomas online if you can find it. It's one of the early Christian books that didn't make the cut for the Bible. I never really put much thought into examining Christian teachings too seriously once I got fed up with all the B.S., but this book made me realize that Jesus really was quite an astute philosopher, provided you can read through the flowery and hyperbolic language he uses. The site that linked me to that book, which also has a good deal of other interesting original notions on it, was the Reciprocality project.

In The Programmers' Stone Alan Carter and Colston Sanger describe mapping, a cognitive strategy they believe explains the difference between average and excellent programmers. It was part of a course about gave at one time about improving one's skill at programming.

This reminds me of the section near the bottom of chapter 3 of Reciprocality.

tylersoze -> Tyler Soze -> Tyler [Durden] (Fight Club) + [Kaiser] Soze (The Usual Suspects)?

This reminds me of the section near the bottom of chapter 3 of Reciprocality.

tylersoze -> Tyler Soze -> Tyler [Durden] (Fight Club) + [Kaiser] Soze (The Usual Suspects)?

Oh yeah, and since that introductory page stupidly doesn't link back to any other pages on the site, and the root page of the domain is less than helpful for finding the bulk of material on that site here is the link to the main site for anybody who wants to read more...

... if reading my email every morning is an addiction, what's the difference between "addiction" and "daily routine"

Maybe there is none..

A good bit of reading to help clarify some of the concepts here would be the "Programmer's Stone."

http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0

There are no natural rights. Rights are bestowed upon by a governmental authority.

You've got that backwards. Naturally, every person has the (legal, if not material) power to do whatever they please. Governments are composed of people, artificial entities created specifically to combine material powers in order to curb other people's powers for some supposed greater good. What powers are not curbed by the government are your "rights", i.e. those actions that are not held to be wrong by the government, and thus OK (or "right") to do. If it's not explicitly said to be wrong (illegal), then it is within your rights.

Governments did not create people and endow them with certain rights; people created governments and endowed them with the power to curb others peoples' powers for some collective good. The power of a government derives from people, not vice versa.

Sometimes it's a small number of powerful people, who together (as "the government") curb the power of large numbers of other people; other times, it's many people curbing the powers of a few. In both cases the result can be good or bad, but in both cases, the power wielded by "government" ultimately derives from some set of people.

As for "pursuit of happiness", I'm aware that that's not explicitly stated in the Constitution (and it would be an awfully imprecise way to say it, so that's a good thing). I meant that as illustration that this point of view (government derives power from the people, not vice versa) was held by the founders of our government. As for what is in the Constitution, I refer you to the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

One last bit...

The constitution grants the federal government the explicit power to regulate copyrights. That is what this is all about.

Here's how that works, start to finish:
1) In the beginning, the people can do what they want, including copy things.
2) The people allow their government to limit that right to copy.
3) Government limits that right to copy with copyright law.
4) The Fair Use doctrine limits what copyright law can limit.
5) What's acts of copying are not made explicitly illegal by law (those allowed under the Fair Use doctrine) remains as your legal RIGHTS.

The mindset you exhibit is why many of the founders did not want to enumerate any rights in the Constitution, and they were only later tacked on in the Bill of Rights. They felt that whatever was not explicitly disallowed was within your rights, and that if they said "these are your rights", people would think exclusively instead of inclusively and believe those rights were ALL of their rights, instead of just a representative sample of specially protected, very important rights.

I believe such exclusive thinking in the general public (including lawmakers and lawyers) is why, as other responses to me said, the term "right" now means in legalese a specifically enumerated thing that the govt says you can do, and not as is commonly (and correctly) meant, anything that you are not expressly forbidden from doing.

If you want an interesting explanation for this behavior, a paper about the theory (dopamine addiction and "M0") is available here...

Now - I don't know how serious the authors are about this paper, and I have heard that it is a "bunch of bull" - but at the same time, these crys that it is false could be nothing more than M0 and dopamine addiction in those who are crying foul - because to acknowledge that such a thing exist is anaethema to its very existance, thus those already under the influence of M0 must decry it, otherwise M0 would perish.

It sounds so very much like a weird conspiracy - shadowy, implausible, etc - but if you read the paper, and make the assumption that the paper is "true" (regardless of the reality for the moment) - it seems to explain a lot of behavior in many people and the society in general around you.

Curiously, geeks in particular tend to not be affected by M0 - according to the theory this is why there is such bullying and such by others towards geeks (and similar creative driven individuals) because M0 needs dopamine addiction to continue to "live" - and where is isn't possible, a forced regemin of dopamine enhancement drugs are forced on these kids today to "get them into the fold", or if this isn't possible, other methods are used (ie, in other words it is possible to get a geek to become M0-positive - but such individuals are not naturally predisposed to it from the outset of life).

Something I have found interesting from the paper - even if it truely is a load of bull. If you study the theory enough, and are of such a bent, you can use the knowledge of M0 (and other works) to "pick away at the filter" - so to speak, but in a very refined way. In such cases, most of the time the individual will become "enraged" (and why is covered by the paper) - but in some cases, it is possible to cause the individual to have a mental breakdown or disconnect from reality in some manner. It is kinda like deliberately inserting a subtle bug into code, and watching the system slowly grind to a halt. From my experience, these people tend to go into a weird "looping" persona, that makes even less sense than their old persona. I imagine though, with proper application, it might be possible to cause such individuals to have complete mental breakdowns causing them to seek psychatric or similar care - or possibly, in extreme circumstances - suicide.

Read the paper - decide for yourself. Further realize that if M0/dopamine addiction truely does exist - that it is these self-same people who seem for some reason (probably because if it does exist, everybody else is "addicted") to "rise to the top" - becomeing the individuals high up in the power structure - CEO's and government leaders, even. Are we scared yet...?

I only hope and pray that it is fake - but the theory of M0 seems to explain/coincide with observations of people and society I have made - I know that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it is chilling to think about, nonetheless...

They usually are more interested in qualifying buzzwords (years of experience and certs in tool X) than in how one thinks and solves problems.

I generally find that people who don't get it - "but it doesn't tell me how to do yada yada" - are the clueless ones who hardcode things all over the place, duplicate code etc etc.

Sure, you can get unskilled laborers to hook the parts together and plug the things in afterwards, just like you can get non-programmers to build a GUI using Visual Studio or whatever. And you can buy off-the-shelf machines to hook together, just like good programmers know how to locate useful libraries.

But anyone who things programming is an assembly line process needs to read this. You can't program via steps, anymore than you can design a factory by steps. Steps can tell you one way to do a big design, and can tell you how to write the tiny bits. But you'll never have the slightest clue how to write the middle, or whether or your big design was a good one.

At some point, you need to hook up a machine dumping out 10 items a second at 5 mph at three feet off the ground and need to hook it up to a machine accepting 3 items a second at 12 mph six feet off the ground, which is twelve feet away and facing at an odd angle...and you won't be able to buy a part for that. You'll have to build it. And it will be crap if you asked me to do it, because I am not a mechanical engineer.

Companies look at the programming mills in India that can churn out the little steps, and they grab some random programming structure and think they can make a program from that. Well...they can. And it will be crap. The middle is important, no matter how many books come out trying to say otherwise, or trying to come out with ways of making the top and bottom closer.

And while the bottom is extremely uncreative, or at least can be done well without creativity, and you can basically write any program with any top, the middle is creative, period. (And it will get even more creative as management, in an attempt to remove it, builds more and more of the top, and outsources more and more of the bottom.)

Frankly, there is plenty of grunt work in programming that can be gotten rid off, and just like other industries, the correct way is not to pretend there's no creativity, but to give the creative people some assistants. We don't pretend we don't need sound engineers, we give them assistants so they don't have to run around all over the place adjusting mics. And most civil engineers never do any construction work. OTOH, most programmers are already carrying around code libraries, so I don't know how much assistants would help. But it would be nice to say 'Hey, I need this single linked-list turned into a double. And change that place in foo.c where I had to start walking the list from the start to back up one. And anywhere else I did that.' and have some grunt in India do it magically overnight. Saves money, too.

It's times like this that I'm reminded of the story with the plumber who charged 1 dollar for a part and 99 dollars to know which part to replace. Companies today have realized that anyone can operate a wench, so they think they can save 98 dollars by hiring the cheapest guy. Of course, they've ended up paying him for 3 hours instead of five minutes, they've spent 70 dollars in parts, you can't operate more than one sink at a time, and there's still a leak.

A full explication of the disaster anyone buying this line of insane bullshit is setting themselves up for is detailed in The Programmer's Stone by Alan G. Carter (and here are the appendices.

A full explication of the disaster anyone buying this line of insane bullshit is setting themselves up for is detailed in The Programmer's Stone by Alan G. Carter (and here are the appendices.

I don't have any first-hand experience, and I certainly can't improve on the many helpful and enlightening posts already added to this thread, but I would be like to recommend the Reciprocality Project, and their page about the ADHD, CFIDS and Acquired Autism connection.

I don't have any first-hand experience, and I certainly can't improve on the many helpful and enlightening posts already added to this thread, but I would be like to recommend the Reciprocality Project, and their page about the ADHD, CFIDS and Acquired Autism connection.

Design patterns and UML were designed as practical tools, not dogma. If they help you do what you were doing anyway (and they often do), then great: use 'em. But if they don't, then don't. They're there to serve you, not the other way around.

UML is simply a way of describing objects and their relationships; not a way to create those things, just a way to communicate them afterwards. Similarly, design patterns are simply practical examples that have worked for people before; reusing them may save you time, and give you a common language others can recognise. That's all. The moment someone with pointy hair tries to treat them as a methodology is the moment you need to worry.

Personally, I think the main problem with software design (at any level) is that it CAN'T really be codified, bundled into a neat set of rules and procedures to be followed. It's creative. People like to call it 'engineering' and compare it with areas of physical construction, but it's too different - whereas one bridge or building is likely to be the same order of magnitude in size and complexity as another, and have similar technical challenges, software developers are constantly dealing with new ideas, greater complexity, new techniques, and greater demands. And you can't always solve these by using the same old methods. Of course, some parts are repetitive and mindless, but some parts will always be creative (or, as Alan Turing observed, you could get the computer to do them!).

Some people are naturally good at creative tasks, and others can grow to be so by exposure to good examples and guidane, but some are so used to making and following standard procedures, rules, and processes, that that's all they can do. In software developers, this can work as long as they're writing 'standard' software, but the lack of deep insight can lead to baroque monstrosities, unnecessary repetition, pointless layers of abstraction (or lack of necessary ones), vast bloated frameworks where little is needed (or vice versa), &c, simply because that's The Way Things Should Be Done. You can't codify insight itself.

And in management, it can lead to the enforcement of methodologies. When things go badly as a result of the sort of developer above, it's natural to consider how that can be avoided. But the idea that software development can be reduced to standard procedures, rules, and processes, while natural for people who've seen it work in other areas, just doesn't work for software. It may give excuses to those who can't do the job, but it merely cramps those who can. Methodologies and tools can make great slaves; but they're lousy masters.

(The Programmer's Stone is an interesting read and develops this idea much further.)

• The programmer's stone, a *must* for anyone who is into programmation
• How to design programs
• Books by Bruce Eckel

An good example is the story of young Carl Gauss. As the story goes, his elementary school teacher gave the children this arithmetic assignment in an attempt to keep them busy: sum the integers from 1 to 100.

But that isn't an SAT math question. That's why I say I've taken better tests of general ability.

Interesting choice of domain name given the following...
M0: A Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite
A brief intro here

Interesting choice of domain name given the following...
M0: A Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite
A brief intro here

But way over there in the corner, in a little room, there's this guy. He sits about thinking, coming up with new ways to build cars. Faster, better, higher quality. Now THAT'S equivalent to programming. But no-one ever talks about him .... (Have a look at "The Programmers Stone" for some sensible thoughts)

I figure it's time to dust off The Programmer's Stone since it sounds so very much like what you're describing.

Chapter 1 is especially relevant: Thinking About Thinking

They talk in this about "mappers" who build mental maps in their minds that describe meta processes vs "packers" who simply try to memorize packets of information which may be reassembled later to perform various tasks. Very interesting read, and very on-target, I thought.

A packer treats knowledge as a large collection of disparate facts. These are the people who go spastic if you don't give them step by step instructions. The don't understand systems that require interaction, and get greatly frustrated when you present them with an algorithm, as opposed to the list of steps the require to be able to do a task.

A mapper is someone who has a large number of disparate facts floating around, in the background, waiting for them to fall into place on the map they make of the universe. To them a fact is of very limited value until it has been connected with others, and placed into the map. Mappers are very good at sensing when something doesn't fit, and have a keen sense of "the ring of truth" that resonates when a new fact makes many others suddenly converge into focus.

Packers treat all facts with equal value, or that of the source. They are into such things as credentials, and structured authority.

Mappers know all too well that authority is made to be abused, that systems need a swift kick to get them back on track, and that rules always drift away from the situations for which they were created. Thus mappers have issues with authority. It also makes them great programmers.

I believe that mappers keep a "grain of salt" value linked to everything they know, and are willing to change that value as facts present themselves and change the picture. For example, I believe in ESP, as a vague sort of premonition that may someday be explained by physics. While I don't know how it works, there is sufficient evidence, in my experience, to concede that it probably (not definitely) exists.

Thus, for me, I 80% believe in it. Which doesn't fit the boolean 100% required of a packer.

--Mike--

this "something unknown" factor is called dopamine self-addiction, and can be cured.

to find out more, please read Reciprocality.

only we can make a difference.

Reminds me of a scene in that stop-motion skit that was on Saturday Night Live last night, which went something like: "You need to give blood more they we need you to give it."

True.

I'm a New Yorker and am JUST as cynical as the original poster. Sure, ~3K good people died, and we lost an important phallic symbol, and people were jarred from their safe routine, etc., etc., but people lost all sense of proportion just because of the population/financial/political/news density of NYC. If the same hollywood-scale disaster had happened to just about any other city, it wouldn't have got the knee-jerk that it did. *shrug* .. that's a fact.

In fact, I view the exploitation of fear and patriotism as WORSE than the "exploitation" of women.

Anyway, comformist partyline time... rah-rah-rah-rah! Gimme a 1! Gimme a 2! Gimme a 3! Gimme a N-Y-C!

--

On a serious note, how exactly have you spent your life fighting mind-entropy? And how do you see April Fool's as being a serious source of entropy? Okay, so Slashdot is fast becoming somewhat moronic in its slavish posting of virtually every April Fool's joke it can find (not that I mind - I find it amusing), but I'd hardly call the holiday as a whole a menace to public health. Certainly it encourages behavior outside a socially-accepted norm, and it requires that people be more "on their toes" than usual, lest they fall prey to an unfortunate prank, but I hardly think that those things are detrimental.

If that is indeed what you're worried about, I'd suggest checking out some really cool philosophical work that's being done at reciprocality.org, specifically M0. It's a little dense but highly interesting.

On a serious note, how exactly have you spent your life fighting mind-entropy? And how do you see April Fool's as being a serious source of entropy? Okay, so Slashdot is fast becoming somewhat moronic in its slavish posting of virtually every April Fool's joke it can find (not that I mind - I find it amusing), but I'd hardly call the holiday as a whole a menace to public health. Certainly it encourages behavior outside a socially-accepted norm, and it requires that people be more "on their toes" than usual, lest they fall prey to an unfortunate prank, but I hardly think that those things are detrimental.

If that is indeed what you're worried about, I'd suggest checking out some really cool philosophical work that's being done at reciprocality.org, specifically M0. It's a little dense but highly interesting.

Quite frankly there hasn't been a single conclusive study showing that there is any risk from GM crops.

Cool! It is the new meaning of impossible. Now it mean "NASA does not know how to do it". Look at this paper and this paper to learn more about such thinking bug. These papers worth reading.

(I'm speaking about the "typical geek" here: proficient with >= 1 programming language, knows his/her way around Unix/Linux, etc)
That is right. Geeks prefer advanced, difficult, powerful user interfaces, whereas novice users prefer simple, easy, "magical" UIs. This is because geeks already know their way around. They know how things depend on each other. They have already mapped the Interface in their brain.
Novices have not. They need to learn the UI, begin to place pieces of the map in the right places in their heads.

So, GNOME and KDE are trying to make life easier for the novice by providing them with simple user interfaces that they can use. Of course, they should be consistent. This is one of the most important points of UIs: to make life easy for the user, so that he/she can easily get acquainted with a tool.

But, what if the user already knows the tool? What if he/she has used it often and thououghly enough to have a mental map of what it does in his/her head? If this happens, most tools seem restrictive to advanced users, and therefore, when given the tools to do it, they construct these powerful, hard-to-learn environments.

But that's not the way to do it, IMHO. Instead of producing a one-size-fits-all tool, you (and you, and you) should create tools that are fit for differently experienced users to use. See UN*X, for example. It's philosophy was:

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
(Peter H. Salus, A quarter century of UNIX[TM])

This is a concept that is both simple and powerful. It brought forth tools like sed, grep and so on. These are extremely simple to understand, and if you understand them, they are extremely powerful. Why noone has succeeded in creating an equally powerful and simple concept in GUIs escapes me, but it's definitely time to go create one.
--
this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

There is also an Extreme Programming web site. You might also want to visit The Programmers' Stone. It offers some interesting insights into how programmers think. It might change your view of what is happening inside your head when you get programmer's block.

That's not to say that some process isn't a good thing, and unless your team of programmers is absolutely excellent, that process will have to be mandated from above. Without some order, your project will slip into chaos, and I've seen that happen firsthand. But process is only one part of a much larger whole, and many companies on the bandwagon treat it as if it's everything.

In general, I think that methodologies are bad. They might be born out of a good thing, and people tried to capture that good thing into a "standard", but eventually most Good Things that people do depend more on the state of mind of the people than the actual things you see them do. (The Programmer's Stone is an enlightened discussion of this.)

Methodologies usually lead to the people in the right state of mind being repressed by the people following the methodologies; all new ideas are pushed into the straightjacket of the methodology, killing all fun in work for the more pragmatic workers, who also happen to be the brightest ones usually.

A friend of mine used to say that a methodology is a systematic way to overlook reality.