4 ms·

holding 'truth' as a single fixed thing is not 'modernist' any more than being relativist is true because it is what people do in some social setting. you are

by cat199 6y ago

holding 'truth' as a single fixed thing is not 'modernist' any more than being relativist is true because it is what people do in some social setting. you are talking about philosophical relativism and using a philosophically progressivist bias to claim legitimacy. at some point, Alice and Bob's linux will diverge to the point that Charlie will recognize neither as being linux, at which point there needs to be some basis for legitimacy to have a common ground, which in turn 'devolves into asking questions about power' (e.g. authority/legitimacy) one can certainly be too fixed in ones approach, but the inverse is also true. if bob, alice and charlie all work for an organization of people delivering 'the same linux' (whether open source/community driven or public company), what will a consumer of this 'linux' recieve when they get it? which in turn 'devolves into asking questions about power' .. ultimately we need to be on some same page, even if it is a bunch of post it notes on a desk and not a neatly bound hardcopy, so i wouldn't let the dualism implicit in being relativist create a false dichotomy whereby being organized at all is somehow outside of the realm of possibility. what does your vision of 'keeping track of being on the same page' look like, if the page doesn't even need to exist to be on it? or does so-called software 'enlightenment' require dissociating from all fixed concepts altogether? (show me the computer that will work this way and not be a magic spell, quantum included, since we are talking about 'being realistic')

crdrost 6y ago
I’m not sure that we should read postmodernists as being willy-nilly relativists. Like certainly the sort of “practical postmodernism” that I see in Git is not willing to say “Linux is BSD” the way a relativist might. Linux is a unix kernel and more broadly an operating system and a community led by Linus Torvalds for several years and a dozen other things besides, postmodernists would claim—and that there is no Archimedean “sturdy enough place to stand” to tell you which of these definitions is the “best”—but it is not a bouncy castle or a monad burrito tutorial or whatever nonsense I just “cook up”. Like the philiospical postmodernists’ criticism of the modernist “reason is going to solve the problem of finally accessing truth and we are gonna have a big truth party” is that reason essentially makes a 2D projection of a 3D truth, and so you have to approach the same truth from multiple perspectives with reason to get a full appreciation for it. Reason does not eliminate the problem of perspectives—sort of a Platonic fallacy, that reason will give you one single “world of the forms”—and that it shouldn’t even try because perspectives are great, let’s have some more perspectives. I’m tying this to the notion of Git’s branching model of course, each branch being something of a slightly different perspective or reference code for the same amorphous project of Linux. What consumers receive is just that then, a perspective on the broader project, one particular snapshot with various patches and so forth. In an OOP analogy Linux is a class and they receive an instance of that class, maybe. But yeah I think I am with you, dissociating from all fixed concepts altogether is probably not a great direction to go with this. You want some project organization and request or issue tracking. I am sorry if I sort of was suggesting that issue-tracking at all was meaningless, I definitely don’t agree with that. But I do think it instead has something to do with recognizing that the code to resolve an issue (if there is code at all, if it's not just getting closed as works-as-intended) leads to that issue having a “status” which needs to be tracked across multiple branches, and that this process is tedious and error-prone when we try to do it by hand.

by cat199 6y ago

crdrost 6y ago

I’m not sure that we should read postmodernists as being willy-nilly relativists. Like certainly the sort of “practical postmodernism” that I see in Git is not willing to say “Linux is BSD” the way a relativist might. Linux is a unix kernel and more broadly an operating system and a community led by Linus Torvalds for several years and a dozen other things besides, postmodernists would claim—and that there is no Archimedean “sturdy enough place to stand” to tell you which of these definitions is the “best”—but it is not a bouncy castle or a monad burrito tutorial or whatever nonsense I just “cook up”. Like the philiospical postmodernists’ criticism of the modernist “reason is going to solve the problem of finally accessing truth and we are gonna have a big truth party” is that reason essentially makes a 2D projection of a 3D truth, and so you have to approach the same truth from multiple perspectives with reason to get a full appreciation for it. Reason does not eliminate the problem of perspectives—sort of a Platonic fallacy, that reason will give you one single “world of the forms”—and that it shouldn’t even try because perspectives are great, let’s have some more perspectives. I’m tying this to the notion of Git’s branching model of course, each branch being something of a slightly different perspective or reference code for the same amorphous project of Linux. What consumers receive is just that then, a perspective on the broader project, one particular snapshot with various patches and so forth. In an OOP analogy Linux is a class and they receive an instance of that class, maybe. But yeah I think I am with you, dissociating from all fixed concepts altogether is probably not a great direction to go with this. You want some project organization and request or issue tracking. I am sorry if I sort of was suggesting that issue-tracking at all was meaningless, I definitely don’t agree with that. But I do think it instead has something to do with recognizing that the code to resolve an issue (if there is code at all, if it's not just getting closed as works-as-intended) leads to that issue having a “status” which needs to be tracked across multiple branches, and that this process is tedious and error-prone when we try to do it by hand.