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Your apparent mental prowesses will fail to impress those who find it easy to do the same. I have met my share of college students and professors who excel at d

by pzone 9y ago

Your apparent mental prowesses will fail to impress those who find it easy to do the same. I have met my share of college students and professors who excel at dropping the name of a few philosophers, at using words only 1% of the population knows about… but, at a certain level, it does nothing for them. People simply roll their eyes and move on… Solid life advice.

chubot 9y ago
Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.) It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate. As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software: "The Map is not the Territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation Likewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too. This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.
_tulpa 9y ago
My pet peeve on HN is people writing comments like they're gonna be peer reviewed. Either the less common words that they use are obviously out of place like someone just discovered a thesaurus (conflated is my favourite example), or it's consistently formal and quasi-academic so I have to put extra effort into reading it. Either way it just makes the authour sound like a pretentions wanker.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Yep. "Orthogonal" is one of my favorites. Along with "order of magnitude".
  - sincerely 9y ago
    “order of magnitude” is a pretty useful concept, to be fair.
    - combatentropy 9y ago
      But it's twice as long as saying "ten times." "The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one." "The server is 10 times faster than our old one." -- More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
  - milesvp 9y ago
    Yeah, except orthogonal has a very precise meaning in mathematics, there is no other word that can be used to replace it when describing a multidimensional vector that is perpendicular to every other vector. This is a very important feature in that it means the vector can be modified and it won't impact any other vectors. You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another. I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.
- kilburn 9y ago
  As a non-native english speaker trained in academia, I'm pretty sure that sometimes my comments must come out like that. I'm not doing it on purpose, it's just that I don't know better! I suspect there are many others in my situation here, specially those whose native language is of latin origin, because latin-based words are considered more formal/academic in english, yet they're much easier for us to learn! Just keep that in mind when judging other's comments please ;)

by pzone 9y ago

chubot 9y ago

Since he's a professor, I have no doubt that what he says is true in his environment. On the other hand, it's all relative. After having worked in Silicon Valley for over 15 years, I think the more common mistake is knowing too little philosophy rather than too much. (Of course, I agree that 5 dollar words confuse issues more often than they illuminate them.) It wouldn't hurt a lot of engineers and tech companies to learn more about the past and be more literate. As an example, off the top of my head, here is a concept which comes up a lot in software: "The Map is not the Territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation Likewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy You don't have to do statistics / big data for very long before you hit philosophy. It bottoms out pretty quickly, i.e. how do you learn about the world. Likewise programming is about making things, and sometimes about modelling the world, and there are a lot of useful philosophical concepts in that realm too. This is without even getting into the "morals" of technology, which is a big thing in the news lately.

_tulpa 9y ago

My pet peeve on HN is people writing comments like they're gonna be peer reviewed. Either the less common words that they use are obviously out of place like someone just discovered a thesaurus (conflated is my favourite example), or it's consistently formal and quasi-academic so I have to put extra effort into reading it. Either way it just makes the authour sound like a pretentions wanker.

mythrwy 9y ago
Yep. "Orthogonal" is one of my favorites. Along with "order of magnitude".
- sincerely 9y ago
  “order of magnitude” is a pretty useful concept, to be fair.
  - combatentropy 9y ago
    But it's twice as long as saying "ten times." "The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one." "The server is 10 times faster than our old one." -- More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
- milesvp 9y ago
  Yeah, except orthogonal has a very precise meaning in mathematics, there is no other word that can be used to replace it when describing a multidimensional vector that is perpendicular to every other vector. This is a very important feature in that it means the vector can be modified and it won't impact any other vectors. You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another. I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.
kilburn 9y ago
As a non-native english speaker trained in academia, I'm pretty sure that sometimes my comments must come out like that. I'm not doing it on purpose, it's just that I don't know better! I suspect there are many others in my situation here, specially those whose native language is of latin origin, because latin-based words are considered more formal/academic in english, yet they're much easier for us to learn! Just keep that in mind when judging other's comments please ;)