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There’s an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in information theory has probably been solved on some mundane business task without the author even knowi
by hinkley 2y ago
There’s an old xkcd joke about how some grand problem in information theory has probably been solved on some mundane business task without the author even knowing what they’ve done.
- daveguy 2y agoThis one: https://xkcd.com/664/ https://xkcd.com/664/ (Title text is about some engineer solving P=NP locked up in an eggbeater calibration routine)
- random3 2y agolol - thaught about this so many times in the past two years as I read thousands of papers and realizing that a poor engineer may have to deal with 2-3 discoveries a day without having the time (nor the math background) to deal with their deeper meaning and every time they see the "grand picture" it gets burried in the backlog maybe even stoned as NIH syndrome.. I always find it funny when some FP programmer ridicules others for not understanding monads, when in fact, those riduculed may have more extensive experience using them without knowing they are called monads. After spending a little more time on both history and philosophy of science, I realized this is generally the rule rather than the exception, across all fields and functions