4 ms·

You're absolutely right. To be clear, I was not saying that everything can and should be simplified, some things just warrant a certain level of complexity beca

You're absolutely right. To be clear, I was not saying that everything can and should be simplified, some things just warrant a certain level of complexity because they're... well... complex and that's absolutely fine (your example of quantum computing is great in that regard, though I supposed it COULD be vulgarized for the masses to some extent, at least more than it currently). I was addressing the difficulty I've seen in the programming community of trying to make things more accessible when they actually can and should be.

jcrites 11y ago
You might be interest to read this article: "The Internet has made defensive writers of us all". https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.html https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm... >> Writers use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. A classic writer, in contrast, counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means in general or all else being equal. If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. Any adversary who is intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway. > I love this notion of relying on “the common sense and ordinary charity of readers”. What a wonderful, inspiring idea. I realize I’ve begun writing defensively on the web, putting in hedges and clarifications that really aren’t necessary for a charitable reader. I’ve also taken to toning down any rhetorical flourishes that could be interpreted uncharitably in a way that annoys some people. The result: boring writing stripped of a lot of my own personal style.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I think there's a kind of naive reductionism that runs throughout CS. You can avoid complexity by ignoring it in the proverbial Dunning-Kruger kind of way - where you don't know what you don't know, but you try to turn your toy misunderstanding of some domain into code anyway. Or you can avoid it by creating over-systematised technologies that try to barricade "impure" unpredictability behind a big wall of abstraction and insider-only jargon. They're both defensive moves against the messiness of the real world. There may be other approaches that trade off accessibility with useful results in other ways.
- harveywi 11y ago
  This "naive reductionism" looks to me like the difference between the way that analysts and algebraists work on problems [1]: "If I have to wave my hands and explain it, I would explain it like this. In algebra there are sequences of operations which have proven to be important and effective in one circumstance. Algebraists try to reuse these operations in different contexts in the hopes that what proved effective in one situation will be effective again. By contrast an analyst is likely to form an idiosyncratic mental model of specific problems. Based on that mental model you have intuitions that let you carry out long chains of calculations that are, in principle, obviously going to lead to the right thing. Typically your intuition is correct to within a constant factor, and you're only interested in some sort of limiting behavior so that is fine." How else is a person supposed to intelligently explore the solution space of a problem other than through some kind of "naive reductionism"? [1] http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/analysis-vs-algebra-predicts-eating.html http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/analysis-vs-algebra-pre...

jcrites 11y ago

You might be interest to read this article: "The Internet has made defensive writers of us all". https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.html https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm... >> Writers use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. A classic writer, in contrast, counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means in general or all else being equal. If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. Any adversary who is intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway. > I love this notion of relying on “the common sense and ordinary charity of readers”. What a wonderful, inspiring idea. I realize I’ve begun writing defensively on the web, putting in hedges and clarifications that really aren’t necessary for a charitable reader. I’ve also taken to toning down any rhetorical flourishes that could be interpreted uncharitably in a way that annoys some people. The result: boring writing stripped of a lot of my own personal style.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

I think there's a kind of naive reductionism that runs throughout CS. You can avoid complexity by ignoring it in the proverbial Dunning-Kruger kind of way - where you don't know what you don't know, but you try to turn your toy misunderstanding of some domain into code anyway. Or you can avoid it by creating over-systematised technologies that try to barricade "impure" unpredictability behind a big wall of abstraction and insider-only jargon. They're both defensive moves against the messiness of the real world. There may be other approaches that trade off accessibility with useful results in other ways.

harveywi 11y ago
This "naive reductionism" looks to me like the difference between the way that analysts and algebraists work on problems [1]: "If I have to wave my hands and explain it, I would explain it like this. In algebra there are sequences of operations which have proven to be important and effective in one circumstance. Algebraists try to reuse these operations in different contexts in the hopes that what proved effective in one situation will be effective again. By contrast an analyst is likely to form an idiosyncratic mental model of specific problems. Based on that mental model you have intuitions that let you carry out long chains of calculations that are, in principle, obviously going to lead to the right thing. Typically your intuition is correct to within a constant factor, and you're only interested in some sort of limiting behavior so that is fine." How else is a person supposed to intelligently explore the solution space of a problem other than through some kind of "naive reductionism"? [1] http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/analysis-vs-algebra-predicts-eating.html http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/analysis-vs-algebra-pre...