7 ms·

Spaghetti code has more negative connotation than I’d attribute to our insanely adaptive, flexible, and efficient organism.

lmohseni 6y ago
Reminiscent of heavily optimized code perhaps?
renewiltord 6y ago
Well we’re constructed the same way that is: by an intern that is just copy pasting from examples he’s seen work plus occasionally typing it out himself and making an error.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Except no. The error rate is very very low, and is basically the perfectly adapted “error” rate for best survival. So... not even an error. Again, people love teaching for analogy here but humans are just nothing like code, to be honest.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Maybe the lesson is that interns are very good at copying.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      The lesson is that there's millions of copies and the one that performs best on an endurance test gets to be released.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  Except there's no StackOverflow to help with evolution...
sigotirandolas 6y ago
Well, the difference is that for programming you almost always have an enormous surplus of computing power, while evolution is a race to the bottom on who can do most with fewer resources.
Someone 6y ago
“Spaghetti code“ doesn’t imply “buggy”, so I think is a decent description. Evolution found a good local optimum, but I think that the optimal design would be quite a bit better than what we have now. A classical example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve. Nobody in his right mind would design a nerve running from your brain to your larynx that way.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Spaghetti code absolutely implies buggy because code != biology. They operate completely differently, in fact potentially opposites (logic is the opposite/complement of intuition, ie neural nets, of which our body operates far more like an adaptive/analog machine than a logical one which is brutally unforgiving). In code, a single typo breaks the whole thing. So spaghetti code by definition is bad and breaks easily. Sure, we have a fuck ton of complexity. But it’s only messy to us because we don’t understand all the conditions that led to it. Humans certainly have flaws, but in general we are as well suited to surviving on Earth as you possibly can be, especially on the whole. I’d say: we’re so so much better designed than any code that exists anywhere today, that it’s a farce. We are literally the opposite of spaghetti code. We’re Antifragile!
  - fredsanford 6y ago
    Code cockroaches?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > In code, a single typo breaks the whole thing. A single typo sometimes breaks the whole thing. Sometimes, it does not. The same is true for genetic mutations in humans - most typos are harmless, a few give us nasty cancers.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      Yes, but that process is also what makes us live in the first place (variability). It definitely breaks, but on the majority it works better than anything we know of.
ambicapter 6y ago
The problem with spaghetti code is that decently intelligent people are forced to work with it and they would be vastly more productive if it weren't spaghetti. No such advantage with our bodies, as they are only "worked on" by probabilistic processes.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > No such advantage with our bodies, as they are only "worked on" by probabilistic processes. Well, and doctors. Who often have to deal with unintended or undesired side effects of medications and surgical procedures.
koheripbal 6y ago
Evolution is romanticized, but its ability are limited, not infinite. The more complex a species, the less adaptivity it has to fundamental shifts in environmental pressures. The interconnections between protein functions are directly responsible for that trade-off, and become a liability. The time scales for evolution far beyond our current level of genetic complexity, probably extend beyond the life span of the Earth. Now the benefit of this speghetti-code situation is that no intelligent designer is required - obviously a fundamental ingredient of abiogenesis, but does it benefit an species that's capable of genetic editing? Nope. At this point, it's really just a bottleneck to even repairing the most straight-forward genetic diseases. As a species, we're approaching the time where we've obviated evolution. ...I won't say we've seen that yet because reproduction rates are still very uneven across population segments, but it's only a matter of a few more generations (cataclysms not withstanding).
- youareostriches 6y ago
  >As a species, we're approaching the time where we've obviated evolution. This is hubris. Everything that humanity may accomplish in the future, from editing its own genome to creating general artificial intelligence, is a product of that same evolutionary process. We do all that out of our innate need for self preservation and reproduction—evolutionary imperatives for all organisms. But it’s more accurate to think of evolution as a universal computational process occurring within the substrate of (bio)chemistry. That computation will yield further computation (intelligence and its products).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    This way you can define evolution to mean absolutely anything, at which point the word loses its meaning. If we stick to traditional, useful definition of biological evolution, then we can confidently say that it stopped being the driving force for plant and animal life no later than when we've first learned to communicate and remember ideas; we've made it irrelevant when we've learned to write. It still works on microscale, but that's mostly because things breed and die faster at that scale, there's more of it, and we can't efficiently poke at it with any sort of precision.
mcguire 6y ago
Tell that to your immune system. It's necessary, but reasonably likely to kill you or at least make your life miserable. If we're so insanely flexible and efficient, why do we have the same body plan as every other tetrapod? We walk upright, but our weight is cantilevered out from a spine that is manifestly not designed for that.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Sure, every living creature and really any complex system has these problems: they can’t be perfect. But you also can’t point to anything better.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > But you also can’t point to anything better. I mean, not yet. The days of "let's tweak it so the blood vessels go behind the retina" or "let's add a bit more cartilage to the knees" aren't here yet, but they're probably coming eventually. Evolution doesn't really optimize for the "keep this body running at age 100" scenarios that we find ourselves in lately, and there's a lot of legacy code.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redundancy of biology is incredible, the opposite of easy to break.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.
farisjarrah 6y ago
I donno, I am inclined to agree with the spaghetti code connotation. Humans are insanely adaptive, flexible, and efficient, but there are some serious design flaws. Here are some examples of a few things I could see improving: The need to inhale and exhale out of the same place that you need to eat and drink is bad engineering, too much risk of choking or drowning. The sexual reproductive organs sharing the space with waste elimination is unsanitary during copulation. Finally, bipedal upright legs. Legs are awkward and unbalanced, and the knees are extremely susceptible to injury, we would greatly benefit from a more robust mobility design. Extra Credit: A prehensile tail would be extremely useful in many situations and I believe may decrease the risk of injury for elderly people. With an adequately strong prehensile tail, older people would be able to use it as a sort of a tripod leg to keep themselves upright with less risk of falling.
- lurquer 6y ago
  I'm with you on the tails. Tails would be cool. But, I think the double use of orifices (air, food, urine, semen) is a good idea. Minimizing orifices seems to be an advantage... fewer avenues for outside stuff getting in. (And I don't think human sexual organs are necessarily dirtier due their location; urine is more or less sterile, and feces shouldn't really come into play under ordinary circumstances... )

lmohseni 6y ago

Reminiscent of heavily optimized code perhaps?

renewiltord 6y ago

Well we’re constructed the same way that is: by an intern that is just copy pasting from examples he’s seen work plus occasionally typing it out himself and making an error.

nwienert 6y ago
Except no. The error rate is very very low, and is basically the perfectly adapted “error” rate for best survival. So... not even an error. Again, people love teaching for analogy here but humans are just nothing like code, to be honest.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Maybe the lesson is that interns are very good at copying.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    The lesson is that there's millions of copies and the one that performs best on an endurance test gets to be released.
mindcrime 6y ago
Except there's no StackOverflow to help with evolution...

sigotirandolas 6y ago

Well, the difference is that for programming you almost always have an enormous surplus of computing power, while evolution is a race to the bottom on who can do most with fewer resources.

Someone 6y ago

“Spaghetti code“ doesn’t imply “buggy”, so I think is a decent description. Evolution found a good local optimum, but I think that the optimal design would be quite a bit better than what we have now. A classical example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve. Nobody in his right mind would design a nerve running from your brain to your larynx that way.

nwienert 6y ago
Spaghetti code absolutely implies buggy because code != biology. They operate completely differently, in fact potentially opposites (logic is the opposite/complement of intuition, ie neural nets, of which our body operates far more like an adaptive/analog machine than a logical one which is brutally unforgiving). In code, a single typo breaks the whole thing. So spaghetti code by definition is bad and breaks easily. Sure, we have a fuck ton of complexity. But it’s only messy to us because we don’t understand all the conditions that led to it. Humans certainly have flaws, but in general we are as well suited to surviving on Earth as you possibly can be, especially on the whole. I’d say: we’re so so much better designed than any code that exists anywhere today, that it’s a farce. We are literally the opposite of spaghetti code. We’re Antifragile!
- fredsanford 6y ago
  Code cockroaches?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > In code, a single typo breaks the whole thing. A single typo sometimes breaks the whole thing. Sometimes, it does not. The same is true for genetic mutations in humans - most typos are harmless, a few give us nasty cancers.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Yes, but that process is also what makes us live in the first place (variability). It definitely breaks, but on the majority it works better than anything we know of.

ambicapter 6y ago

The problem with spaghetti code is that decently intelligent people are forced to work with it and they would be vastly more productive if it weren't spaghetti. No such advantage with our bodies, as they are only "worked on" by probabilistic processes.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> No such advantage with our bodies, as they are only "worked on" by probabilistic processes. Well, and doctors. Who often have to deal with unintended or undesired side effects of medications and surgical procedures.

koheripbal 6y ago

Evolution is romanticized, but its ability are limited, not infinite. The more complex a species, the less adaptivity it has to fundamental shifts in environmental pressures. The interconnections between protein functions are directly responsible for that trade-off, and become a liability. The time scales for evolution far beyond our current level of genetic complexity, probably extend beyond the life span of the Earth. Now the benefit of this speghetti-code situation is that no intelligent designer is required - obviously a fundamental ingredient of abiogenesis, but does it benefit an species that's capable of genetic editing? Nope. At this point, it's really just a bottleneck to even repairing the most straight-forward genetic diseases. As a species, we're approaching the time where we've obviated evolution. ...I won't say we've seen that yet because reproduction rates are still very uneven across population segments, but it's only a matter of a few more generations (cataclysms not withstanding).

youareostriches 6y ago
>As a species, we're approaching the time where we've obviated evolution. This is hubris. Everything that humanity may accomplish in the future, from editing its own genome to creating general artificial intelligence, is a product of that same evolutionary process. We do all that out of our innate need for self preservation and reproduction—evolutionary imperatives for all organisms. But it’s more accurate to think of evolution as a universal computational process occurring within the substrate of (bio)chemistry. That computation will yield further computation (intelligence and its products).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  This way you can define evolution to mean absolutely anything, at which point the word loses its meaning. If we stick to traditional, useful definition of biological evolution, then we can confidently say that it stopped being the driving force for plant and animal life no later than when we've first learned to communicate and remember ideas; we've made it irrelevant when we've learned to write. It still works on microscale, but that's mostly because things breed and die faster at that scale, there's more of it, and we can't efficiently poke at it with any sort of precision.

mcguire 6y ago

Tell that to your immune system. It's necessary, but reasonably likely to kill you or at least make your life miserable. If we're so insanely flexible and efficient, why do we have the same body plan as every other tetrapod? We walk upright, but our weight is cantilevered out from a spine that is manifestly not designed for that.

nwienert 6y ago
Sure, every living creature and really any complex system has these problems: they can’t be perfect. But you also can’t point to anything better.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > But you also can’t point to anything better. I mean, not yet. The days of "let's tweak it so the blood vessels go behind the retina" or "let's add a bit more cartilage to the knees" aren't here yet, but they're probably coming eventually. Evolution doesn't really optimize for the "keep this body running at age 100" scenarios that we find ourselves in lately, and there's a lot of legacy code.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redundancy of biology is incredible, the opposite of easy to break.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.

farisjarrah 6y ago

I donno, I am inclined to agree with the spaghetti code connotation. Humans are insanely adaptive, flexible, and efficient, but there are some serious design flaws. Here are some examples of a few things I could see improving: The need to inhale and exhale out of the same place that you need to eat and drink is bad engineering, too much risk of choking or drowning. The sexual reproductive organs sharing the space with waste elimination is unsanitary during copulation. Finally, bipedal upright legs. Legs are awkward and unbalanced, and the knees are extremely susceptible to injury, we would greatly benefit from a more robust mobility design. Extra Credit: A prehensile tail would be extremely useful in many situations and I believe may decrease the risk of injury for elderly people. With an adequately strong prehensile tail, older people would be able to use it as a sort of a tripod leg to keep themselves upright with less risk of falling.

lurquer 6y ago
I'm with you on the tails. Tails would be cool. But, I think the double use of orifices (air, food, urine, semen) is a good idea. Minimizing orifices seems to be an advantage... fewer avenues for outside stuff getting in. (And I don't think human sexual organs are necessarily dirtier due their location; urine is more or less sterile, and feces shouldn't really come into play under ordinary circumstances... )