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I feel bad that it seems like I'm really not in favor of this idea but I'm not entirely saying why. It's difficult to articulate. Work in tech long enough and
by conartist6 3mo ago
I feel bad that it seems like I'm really not in favor of this idea but I'm not entirely saying why. It's difficult to articulate.
Work in tech long enough and you'll encounter the idea of purity.
It is a highly useful concept in technology. It usually means that you've entered the domain of math -- that things have become elegant in their simplicity. Functions without side effects are commonly called "pure functions" for example becuase of the mathematically beautiful ways you can reason about them. A greeat deal of Computer Science in practice depends on the composability that comes from working with pure functions.
But there's a catch!! It's no mistake that "purity", the word used for the math-i-ness of a thing, is the same word used to describe religious extremism. Functionally pure systems only work if every function inside them is pure. One side-effect-having stinker deep, deep down there in the call tree ruins the whole illusion. Purity is necessarily all-encompassing and must seek to eradicate that which is impure so that only that reasoning can be restricted to that which is pure, and clean mathematical axioms can then be developed on which to base the elevated reasoning.
What I'm telling you in no uncertain terms is that Naziism was just such an exercise in the idea of purity as applied to human beings. All of the most horrific crimes against humanity: genocides, mass murders and the like, have been executed by people pursuing purity.
To hate people is, in a way, much kinder than to simply consider them to be completely outside the domain you care about. And because your goal is to reduce all of society and humanity to fit inside a domain with clean, machine-executable roles, you will only be able to fully satisfy your itch for purity once you have destroyed or fully excluded and marginalized all that does not conform.
I'm thankful then that I agree with others that your technical premise is a literal impossibility, a child's fantasy dispelled by first contact with the school of hard knocks.
- conartist6 3mo agoThe opposite of purity is resilience. Resilience is messiness. It's waste and death and competition and nations with different currencies and systems of measure and different languages and cultures. Pure systems are stiff and brittle. Resilient systems are supple and vital. Resilient systems resist moving totally in any direction. The forces towards purity are as inevitable as is the growth of crystals, but it is roots and cells and creatures that took over the earth, not diamonds. Life finds a way.