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That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely. To machines and to fellow
by ctdonath 10y ago
That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely.
To machines and to fellow experts, yes - but not to the general population, and not to people who may be persuaded to jail him, or fine him at tremendous expense, if he doesn't adequately explain it while someone else is being paid big money to obfuscate his explanation.
This isn't advertising or fundraising. This isn't helping people understand who have an ulterior motive for understanding. This is a hostile environment trying to convict him, an environment that leverages ignorance.
And the complex topic at hand isn't sufficiently explained to ordinary people in a matter of hours, he'd have to put them thru a complete "high school thru post-doctoral education" process and bring them up in the vicinity of his level as an "among the greatest of all time in the field". When learning about a particular topic, I was directed to keep notes in a safe-deposit box precisely so if I was ever criminally charged for related reasons, I could literally put the entire jury thru the full education on the subject - and that would take about a month of courtroom time. I can't imagine Carmack's lawyer arranging to put a jury of commoners thru arithmetic-to-post-doctoral-rendering to "explain what he's doing".
I've heard it said that the simple (in rules) game of Go can be so complex that it takes mastery of seventh-level skills just to comprehend what ninth-level skills are doing. You can't just take someone who barely learned the rules and explain, in a short time, what the grandmasters are doing to win.