Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.
So... who gets to edit Human? Should we have exclusively non-mathematicians editing the mathematics pages? Non-philosophers writing about philosophy? It seems the whole *point* of Wikipedia is to get experts to comment on their expertise, for the benefit of many. If experts don't have a vested interest in their own subject, I don't know what a vested interest is.
This isn't college anymore. You don't get to work by yourself. A good coder who can't interact with people is less valuable than a decent coder who can.
If you care to notice, you could learn a valuable life lesson here.
I have (generally) found that in many cases those who are good coders but have bad people skills really only have "bad people skills" because they have to deal with (1) terrible programmers on the same project or (2) silly rules they shouldn't have to follow, but have to follow (for whatever reason). It's not that the person has a hard time getting along with anyone, it's that most of the people with whom he interacts (in terms of the given project) have no idea what they're talking about, and this he is disinclined to talk to them, because it is of no use.
But this would require people to actually get computer science degrees, or have enough self-motivation to read books on algorithms and do the excercises. For most, that's too much to ask
Why is that a problem? Being a good coder is not something you can pick up a few books on and be good at in a weekend. It's both a skill and a discipline. Part of the discipline (and practice) is actually taking advantange of the large numbers of people (like Dijkstra, Knuth, and countless others) who have faced the exact problem your boss has put before you (at least it's the same problem in some incarnation), formalized it, and come up with a solution. You shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. With overwhelming probability your solution will suck (i.e. the algorithm will have terrible time complexity) and theirs will be good.
Would you argue that aerospace engineers shouldn't learn differential equations because "it's too much to ask"? No, it's a necessary part of the discipline to understand advances in the field and to be competent. The same goes for learning algorithms and learning how to characterize their time and space complexity.
"The bottom line: there is no way to prove that you're not a brain in a vat."
Actually, there is no possible way you could know with certainty that your "bottom line" is absolutely true, unless you know everything there is to know about anything. In other words, really in order to know that something (a statement, for instance) is absolutely true, you have to know its relation to every other truth in the world in order to know if its really true or not.
Because what if you thought something was so true that it was almost beyond question, and then somebody discovers something that just knocks what you believed right out of the water?
So really you have no proof at all that, in fact, "there is no way to prove that you're not a brain in a vat." It's just your opinion, which, as you have pointed out, has no bearing on the issue whatsoever.
(Incidentally, some may hereafter accuse that I seem to have just said that one has to be omniscient in order to be sure of the truth of anything. They have gotten the point.)
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So... who gets to edit Human? Should we have exclusively non-mathematicians editing the mathematics pages? Non-philosophers writing about philosophy? It seems the whole *point* of Wikipedia is to get experts to comment on their expertise, for the benefit of many. If experts don't have a vested interest in their own subject, I don't know what a vested interest is.
This isn't college anymore. You don't get to work by yourself. A good coder who can't interact with people is less valuable than a decent coder who can. If you care to notice, you could learn a valuable life lesson here.
I have (generally) found that in many cases those who are good coders but have bad people skills really only have "bad people skills" because they have to deal with (1) terrible programmers on the same project or (2) silly rules they shouldn't have to follow, but have to follow (for whatever reason). It's not that the person has a hard time getting along with anyone, it's that most of the people with whom he interacts (in terms of the given project) have no idea what they're talking about, and this he is disinclined to talk to them, because it is of no use.
Why is that a problem? Being a good coder is not something you can pick up a few books on and be good at in a weekend. It's both a skill and a discipline. Part of the discipline (and practice) is actually taking advantange of the large numbers of people (like Dijkstra, Knuth, and countless others) who have faced the exact problem your boss has put before you (at least it's the same problem in some incarnation), formalized it, and come up with a solution. You shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. With overwhelming probability your solution will suck (i.e. the algorithm will have terrible time complexity) and theirs will be good.
Would you argue that aerospace engineers shouldn't learn differential equations because "it's too much to ask"? No, it's a necessary part of the discipline to understand advances in the field and to be competent. The same goes for learning algorithms and learning how to characterize their time and space complexity.
It's used at GA Tech. At least it was used in my English class last year.
"The bottom line: there is no way to prove that you're not a brain in a vat."
Actually, there is no possible way you could know with certainty that your "bottom line" is absolutely true, unless you know everything there is to know about anything. In other words, really in order to know that something (a statement, for instance) is absolutely true, you have to know its relation to every other truth in the world in order to know if its really true or not.
Because what if you thought something was so true that it was almost beyond question, and then somebody discovers something that just knocks what you believed right out of the water?
So really you have no proof at all that, in fact, "there is no way to prove that you're not a brain in a vat." It's just your opinion, which, as you have pointed out, has no bearing on the issue whatsoever.
(Incidentally, some may hereafter accuse that I seem to have just said that one has to be omniscient in order to be sure of the truth of anything. They have gotten the point.)