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Monday, August 03, 2009

Futurological Brickbats

Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him.
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4 comments:

Tree Hugger said...

...or HER.

10:18 AM
Dale Carrico said...

It's a bunch of dumb guys, frankly, but, sure, this point is always in point.

1:54 PM
Dale Carrico said...

Michael Anissimov celebrates the interminable cluelessness of dumb boy coders who think they are also scientists, or economists, or biologists by virtue of the special insights they achieve as software crunchers in the veal fattening pens of exurban corporate campuses, describing this phenomenon as "interdisciplinarity." Since few to none of these "interdisciplinarians" contribute anything to the disciplines on whose surfaces they so gracelessly and embarrassingly skate, I daresay I'll stick to the word more commonly applied to them from within the disciplines themselves: Cranks.

9:10 PM
jimf said...

> I'll stick to the word more commonly applied to them
> from within the disciplines themselves: Cranks.

My work from 1965 on can be seen in retrospect as a
repeatedly revised attempt to justify my intuition,
based on my study of Martin Heidegger, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and the later Wittgenstein, that the
GOFAI research program would eventually fail. . .

During twenty years of trying to spell out the components
of the noema [mental representation] of everyday objects,
Husserl found that he had to include more and more of what
he called the "outer horizon," a subject's total knowledge of the
world. . .

He sadly concluded at the age of seventy-five that he was
a "perpetual beginner" and that phenomenology was an
"infinite task". . .

[The GOFAI program, as exemplified by Marvin]
Minsky has embarked on the same misguided
"infinite task" that eventually overwhelmed Husserl. . .

Minsky's naivete and faith are astonishing. Philosophers
from Plato to Husserl, who uncovered all these problems
and more, have carried on serious epistemological
research in this area for two thousand years without
notable success. . .

Minsky seems oblivious to the hand-waving optimism of
his proposal that programmers rush in where philosophers
such as Heidegger fear to tread, and simply make explicit
the totality of human practices which pervade our lives
as water encompasses the life of a fish.

-- Hubert L. Dreyfus,
_What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of
Artifical Reason_, MIT Press, 1992
Introduction to the Revised Edition, pp. 34-36

-----------

[T]he year following the publication of my first
investigation of work in artificial intelligence,
the RAND Corporation held a meeting of experts in
computer science to discuss, among other topics,
my report. Only an "expurgated" transcript of this
meeting has been released to the public, but
even there the tone of paranoia which pervaded the
discussion is present on almost every page. My
report is called "sinister," "dishonest,"
"hilariously funny," and an "incredible misrepresentation
of history." When, at one point, Dr. J. C. R. Licklider,
then of IBM, tried to come to the defense of my
conclusion that work should be done on man-machine
cooperation, Seymour Papert of M.I.T. responded:
"I protest vehemently against crediting Dreyfus with
any good. To state that you can associate yourself
with one of his conclusions is unprincipled. Dreyfus'
concept of coupling men with machines is based on
thorough misunderstanding of the problems and has nothing
in common with any good statement that might go by
the same words."

The causes of this panic-reaction should themselves be
investigated, but that is a job for psychology,
or the sociology of knowledge. However, in anticipation
of the impending outrage I want to make absolutely clear
from the outset that what I am criticizing is the
implicit and explicit philosophical assumptions of
Simon and Minsky and their co-workers, not their
technical work. True, their philosophical prejudices
and naivete distort their own evaluation of their
results, but this in no way detracts from the
importance and value of their research on specific
techniques such a list structures, and on more
general problems. . .

-- Op. cit., Introduction, pp. 86-87

9:28 AM

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