3 ms·

Smolin actually singles out Markopoulou as one of the great modern Seers (in the same chapter): "It is easy to list those whose thinking has led to papers and

Smolin actually singles out Markopoulou as one of the great modern Seers (in the same chapter): "It is easy to list those whose thinking has led to papers and even books addressing foundational issues: Roger Penrose is perhaps the best known to the public, but one can name many others including John Baez, Louis Crane, Bryce DeWitt, Fay Dowker, Christopher Isham, Fotini Markopoulou, Carlo Rovelli, Rafael Sorkin, and Gerard ’t Hooft."

theoh 10y ago
I see Nathan Myhrvold (who published a lavish technical cookbook) isn't on that list. It shouldn't be a big deal when someone decides to step back from working on abstract algebraic models of highly constrained physical systems (Feynman's "creativity in a straightjacket") to working on the more human task of design. Design is fascinating, but it's all about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. What does the user want? Why should the user have to do X at this point? It's different and it exercises different parts of the mind from theoretical physics. It's a lot more natural for humans. Cryptographic protocol design is IMO the closest thing in CS to product/service design in the corporate/engineering world. There you have formal proofs and formal breaches in security, but everything hinges on implicatures and difficult-to-formalise expectations of what the protocol is intended to achieve. The architect Zaha Hadid apparently studied math at university before switching to architecture. She's a controversial figure (also a woman) and her architectural achievements were absolutely from an imaginative rather than a mechanical part of her personality. As for "Seers and Craftspeople", if you replace those words with "Visionaries" and "Mechanics", you're in danger of reproducing the already widespread prejudices in Western society about intelligence and human worth. It starts to sound like normative vs positive, prescriptive vs descriptive, which is, like all binaries, a bit divisive.

theoh 10y ago

I see Nathan Myhrvold (who published a lavish technical cookbook) isn't on that list. It shouldn't be a big deal when someone decides to step back from working on abstract algebraic models of highly constrained physical systems (Feynman's "creativity in a straightjacket") to working on the more human task of design. Design is fascinating, but it's all about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. What does the user want? Why should the user have to do X at this point? It's different and it exercises different parts of the mind from theoretical physics. It's a lot more natural for humans. Cryptographic protocol design is IMO the closest thing in CS to product/service design in the corporate/engineering world. There you have formal proofs and formal breaches in security, but everything hinges on implicatures and difficult-to-formalise expectations of what the protocol is intended to achieve. The architect Zaha Hadid apparently studied math at university before switching to architecture. She's a controversial figure (also a woman) and her architectural achievements were absolutely from an imaginative rather than a mechanical part of her personality. As for "Seers and Craftspeople", if you replace those words with "Visionaries" and "Mechanics", you're in danger of reproducing the already widespread prejudices in Western society about intelligence and human worth. It starts to sound like normative vs positive, prescriptive vs descriptive, which is, like all binaries, a bit divisive.