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Yup. It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics. Softwa

Yup. It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics. Software has...a bunch of different mantras and paradigms, and for every one out there, there's one that is its direct opposite.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
Even things that have science are largely ignored - one I always shake my head at - oracles for ethereum. Proved many years ago - there can't be an oracle. Ethereum developers - we'll build oracles so the transactions are guaranteed. No doubt there will be arguments for how oracles for ethereum are different, and so on
btrettel 7y ago
> It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics. I think experimental evidence helps, but if you look at the physical sciences more closely, you'll find tons of similar narratives. This is a fairly universal human behavior unfortunately. Nonsense becomes "canonized" as I put it, and then continues to be repeated by people until someone finally looks into it and realizes it's nonsense and publishes an article saying so. But unfortunately that's not always the end of the nonsense. Even things which have been debunked can continue to be cited and used. One great example (not engineering but the point stands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoe3xXFtmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoe3xXFtmM > In one sense we won. We got our points across. People now understand that this research is wrong. But this 2005 article by Fredrickson and Losada gets citations today at 3 times the rate of our article that demonstrated that it was just utter rubbish. (Note that I'm using "nonsense" as an example here, but the top level comment was more general in that it mentions practices which apply in some situations erroneously being applied for all situations.)

chadcmulligan 7y ago

Even things that have science are largely ignored - one I always shake my head at - oracles for ethereum. Proved many years ago - there can't be an oracle. Ethereum developers - we'll build oracles so the transactions are guaranteed. No doubt there will be arguments for how oracles for ethereum are different, and so on

btrettel 7y ago

> It's a byproduct of software not being grounded in anything compared to, say, every other engineering discipline. They all have the laws of physics. I think experimental evidence helps, but if you look at the physical sciences more closely, you'll find tons of similar narratives. This is a fairly universal human behavior unfortunately. Nonsense becomes "canonized" as I put it, and then continues to be repeated by people until someone finally looks into it and realizes it's nonsense and publishes an article saying so. But unfortunately that's not always the end of the nonsense. Even things which have been debunked can continue to be cited and used. One great example (not engineering but the point stands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoe3xXFtmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoe3xXFtmM > In one sense we won. We got our points across. People now understand that this research is wrong. But this 2005 article by Fredrickson and Losada gets citations today at 3 times the rate of our article that demonstrated that it was just utter rubbish. (Note that I'm using "nonsense" as an example here, but the top level comment was more general in that it mentions practices which apply in some situations erroneously being applied for all situations.)