Re: SUO: What the marketplace needs from us.
Bill,
I worked at IBM for 30 years, and I am painfully
aware of that problem:
> Although I am being sarcastic, my statements
> above reflect real attitudes of many computer
> professionals. You might ask why would a computer
> professional take such an attitude.
And I know perfectly well why they take that
attitude: they're ignorant. But it's not their
fault because the people they hoped would enlighten
them were just as ignorant. And you can trace the
chain of ignorance back to the person who has done
more to contribute to the downfall of logic in
the 20th century than anyone else: Bertrand Russell.
Bertie was certainly brilliant, but he was very
one-sided, and his brilliance gave other people
the illusion that he knew what he was talking about.
That is why anything he ignored or derided was
ignored and derided by a much larger group.
Other people who were also brilliant, but one-sided
must share some of the blame. Among them, I include
Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, and Willard
Van Orman Quine. In his youth, Wittgenstein was lured
by Russell into the same trap, but he learned his lesson
and spent the remainder of his life doing penance
for his earlier sins. But by the middle of the 20th
century, philosophy was divided into two warring camps:
one that promulgated a very one-sided view of logic,
and another that denounced logic or ignored it altogether.
When computers came around, the people who used them
were divided in two camps -- the primitives and the
space cadets. The primitives used "seat-of-the-pants"
coding to get results, and the space cadets were misled
by the Russell-Carnap-Quine crowd to use the most esoteric
imaginable theories and ignore anything practical.
(And by the way, SUMO still suffers from a tinge of the
primitive disease, and IFF suffers from a lot of the
space cadet disease. That's one reason why I want them
to work together: I'm hoping they might be able to
cure one another.)
> It is hard to make a logical argument to individuals
> that don't understand logic well enough to follow the
> argument. Give up on historical precedent, most people
> can't appreciate the lessons that can be taken from history.
> Somehow that requires a logical leap that if X happened
> in the past under specific circumstances then X will
> happen now under the same circumstances. Go figure.
The strategy that I have adopted is twofold:
1. For those people who know enough to realize that there's
an awful lot they don't know, I'm recommending some
suggested readings.
2. For the great majority who consider money to be the only
measure of success, I am hoping that the VivoMind company
will produce logic-based software that will be sufficiently
successful to demonstrate that logic does have value.
I don't know whether this strategy will work, but I'll try.
Who knows?
John