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Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories. It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially
by d--b 9y ago
Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories.
It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind.
Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works.
Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc.
Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about.
I don't really see what the problem is with that...
- titzer 9y ago> It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Citation needed.
- titzer 9y ago> Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc. People love to throw around junk like this, and it's maddening to try to argue against such vague statements. Which physicists? Have you interviewed all of them? How many material science PhDs do you know? What properties of glass are not well understood? Is it not possible to engineer structures and objects out of glass? When in fact, physicists know tons about glass. What is made of, how its crystalline structure looks, its tensile strength, shatter resistance, acoustic and thermal properties, molecular weights, melting points, optical properties. I could go on and on and on, and it'd eventually be clear that physicists know a hell of a lot more about glass than /you/ do, and then you could still make that vague statement with a derisive smile. It's just absurd argumentation to say some group doesn't /really/ understand something. What is memory, what is an atom /really/? For that matter, what is language? Art? Feeling? Love? Hackernews?
- talles 9y ago> we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Do we?