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Believing that the nature of knowledge is dogmatic; that there exists no pattern behind anything and that anything that is knowable must be memorised by rote an

Believing that the nature of knowledge is dogmatic; that there exists no pattern behind anything and that anything that is knowable must be memorised by rote and stored wholesale in the mind, rather than guiding principles abstracted from diverse experience refined and applied in multiple contexts. I humbly submit that this single idea is the root of so much of the mental incompetence in the world today. It encourages the spread of religion and it's comparison with real science, it discourages attempting to comprehend and apply deep unifying principles between all things and a breadth of thought that comes far easier when one isn't afraid of exposing their preconceived ideas and views to the light of critical enquiry. Last but not least, it encourages the emergence of a political class that at best exists purely to coordinate and rule the "underclass" specialists, and at worst offers no independent value themselves.

jquery 17y ago
That's not a dilemma for generalists, that's a critique of specialization.
- etherael 17y ago
  Except that it's far more common for people to believe it and thus ask silly questions that attempt to ascertain the degree to which one has drilled themselves in said rote memorisation. Like a google interview I had a few years ago where they asked me what the number of blocks in an ext2 filesystem for a specific distribution of Linux was at the time. The irony of being asked this by a company who actually would've featured prominently in my answer (ie, just google it) was not lost on me, and it disabused me of the notion that I'd actually like to work there after all.
  - jquery 17y ago
    Specialization is not equivalent to rote memorization. But rote memorization is a bedrock foundation for almost any specialty, because it is the very language of that specialty. The more fluent you are in a given language, the more easily you can write beautiful prose with it.
    - etherael 17y ago
      They often go together, as you illustrate well with your comment, I agree that rote memorisation can be a bedrock foundation for any specialty, however it is not necessarily the only foundation. And the thread of my argument here is that it is not as good a foundation as a complete understanding of many topics in an interwoven fashion. An attempt at an analogy; I assume you're familiar with jQuery as that's your nickname so I'll use that. One could memorise every single API method and syntactical quirk of the framework and be rightfully considered a specialist, but this does not innately suggest that they understand the absolute multitude of concepts that are likely to be bought together in a project making use of this specialty, or how the fabric of a jQuery object might be incorporated into a larger project using a full polyglot of development languages and spanning JRuby, Java, Groovy, Scheme, Scala etc. Knowing the underlying concepts that unite them gives a person the ability to solve problems in any one specific area potentially better than someone who had simply memorised all the API documentation for the jQuery framework. Going through the rote memorisation of all these disparate things you're likely to eventually notice the patterns and ideas that they share, but in my opinion this is a backward way of doing things. Starting with patterns and ideas and fleshing out the specifics with reference documentation on a case by case basis has always been my preferred approach, it's much easier to find a base pattern and go through it's iterations than it is to simply memorise all the potential iterations of a given pattern. How easy is it to memorise a table of results on several thousand experiments demonstrating F=ma compared to simply applying F=ma several thousand times? Even more so with something that moves as fast as development; when the framework changes and your memorised documentation needs to be updated, it is much easier to understand the change from the perspective of cause and effect rather than just "here's how it was including all edge cases and implications, and here's how it is now, including all edge cases and implications."
      - jquery 17y ago
        I completely agree. In fact, this is why physician specialists are required to perform basic clinical duty in many different specialties before diving deeper into their primary specialty (I hope a physician will correct me if I am wrong). The manner of specialization also depends on the field. In programming we have the luxury of time and a search engine, so knowing basic concepts are more important than API details. A surgeon has no such luxury--your heart transplant specialist had better know everything down cold.
foldr 17y ago
Some of that sounds a little dogmatic in itself. It's an interesting historical fact that the idea of there being a deep underlying unity in nature was originally a religious one. In a time before there were any examples of really successful science, the idea that the universe might actually be comprehensible to us on a deep level seemed pretty loopy unless you believed that it was deliberately constructed to be intelligible. After all, the universe isn't all that comprehensible to any other form of life on earth -- why should we be so special if we are not in fact special? So in a sense, the idea that science is possible has its roots in a particular sort of religious belief. Anyway, that is not intended as an argument in favor of religious belief today. But it's worth asking whether any rational justification could have been given in the 13th century for a belief in the deep underlying unity of the universe, before we had available the fruits of the research based on that assumption. I think it would have been far more sensible in those days to believe that the universe is just a complicated place with a lot of different kinds of stuff in it, and a lot of different kinds of principle governing what happens to that stuff. Interestingly, this sort of pluralistic conception of reality is coming back into fashion in some circles, under the heading of the "dappled universe". Nancy Cartwright's work on these topics is really interesting. (FTR: She is trained as a physicist and has no religious agenda.) It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind. edit: There's a good (somewhat critical) review of one of Cartwright's book's here [doc]: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20reviews%20and%20book%20symposiums/Dappled%20world%20review%20by%20H%20Kincaid%202003.doc http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20revi...
- hugh_ 17y ago
  It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind. What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws? Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws? Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?

jquery 17y ago

That's not a dilemma for generalists, that's a critique of specialization.

etherael 17y ago
Except that it's far more common for people to believe it and thus ask silly questions that attempt to ascertain the degree to which one has drilled themselves in said rote memorisation. Like a google interview I had a few years ago where they asked me what the number of blocks in an ext2 filesystem for a specific distribution of Linux was at the time. The irony of being asked this by a company who actually would've featured prominently in my answer (ie, just google it) was not lost on me, and it disabused me of the notion that I'd actually like to work there after all.
- jquery 17y ago
  Specialization is not equivalent to rote memorization. But rote memorization is a bedrock foundation for almost any specialty, because it is the very language of that specialty. The more fluent you are in a given language, the more easily you can write beautiful prose with it.
  - etherael 17y ago
    They often go together, as you illustrate well with your comment, I agree that rote memorisation can be a bedrock foundation for any specialty, however it is not necessarily the only foundation. And the thread of my argument here is that it is not as good a foundation as a complete understanding of many topics in an interwoven fashion. An attempt at an analogy; I assume you're familiar with jQuery as that's your nickname so I'll use that. One could memorise every single API method and syntactical quirk of the framework and be rightfully considered a specialist, but this does not innately suggest that they understand the absolute multitude of concepts that are likely to be bought together in a project making use of this specialty, or how the fabric of a jQuery object might be incorporated into a larger project using a full polyglot of development languages and spanning JRuby, Java, Groovy, Scheme, Scala etc. Knowing the underlying concepts that unite them gives a person the ability to solve problems in any one specific area potentially better than someone who had simply memorised all the API documentation for the jQuery framework. Going through the rote memorisation of all these disparate things you're likely to eventually notice the patterns and ideas that they share, but in my opinion this is a backward way of doing things. Starting with patterns and ideas and fleshing out the specifics with reference documentation on a case by case basis has always been my preferred approach, it's much easier to find a base pattern and go through it's iterations than it is to simply memorise all the potential iterations of a given pattern. How easy is it to memorise a table of results on several thousand experiments demonstrating F=ma compared to simply applying F=ma several thousand times? Even more so with something that moves as fast as development; when the framework changes and your memorised documentation needs to be updated, it is much easier to understand the change from the perspective of cause and effect rather than just "here's how it was including all edge cases and implications, and here's how it is now, including all edge cases and implications."
    - jquery 17y ago
      I completely agree. In fact, this is why physician specialists are required to perform basic clinical duty in many different specialties before diving deeper into their primary specialty (I hope a physician will correct me if I am wrong). The manner of specialization also depends on the field. In programming we have the luxury of time and a search engine, so knowing basic concepts are more important than API details. A surgeon has no such luxury--your heart transplant specialist had better know everything down cold.

foldr 17y ago

Some of that sounds a little dogmatic in itself. It's an interesting historical fact that the idea of there being a deep underlying unity in nature was originally a religious one. In a time before there were any examples of really successful science, the idea that the universe might actually be comprehensible to us on a deep level seemed pretty loopy unless you believed that it was deliberately constructed to be intelligible. After all, the universe isn't all that comprehensible to any other form of life on earth -- why should we be so special if we are not in fact special? So in a sense, the idea that science is possible has its roots in a particular sort of religious belief. Anyway, that is not intended as an argument in favor of religious belief today. But it's worth asking whether any rational justification could have been given in the 13th century for a belief in the deep underlying unity of the universe, before we had available the fruits of the research based on that assumption. I think it would have been far more sensible in those days to believe that the universe is just a complicated place with a lot of different kinds of stuff in it, and a lot of different kinds of principle governing what happens to that stuff. Interestingly, this sort of pluralistic conception of reality is coming back into fashion in some circles, under the heading of the "dappled universe". Nancy Cartwright's work on these topics is really interesting. (FTR: She is trained as a physicist and has no religious agenda.) It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind. edit: There's a good (somewhat critical) review of one of Cartwright's book's here [doc]: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20reviews%20and%20book%20symposiums/Dappled%20world%20review%20by%20H%20Kincaid%202003.doc http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20revi...

hugh_ 17y ago
It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind. What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws? Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws? Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?