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Beyond The Programmers' Stone 77

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Alan G. Carter writes "Some transcripts of lectures to software engineers called The Programmers' Stone recently created some interest here on Slashdot, and I had a great many, very positive responses. Since doing the Stone, I've been looking for a deeper theory that explains what is going in the "Mappers vs. Packers" divide. Because of the wonderful response to the Stone, I've created a new website, Reciprocality, that describes the deeper work. Some of the ideas are radical, but it answers an awful lot of questions. It's all concrete and testable, and the fact that it's also an extropian technomystical feeding frenzy just proves we were right all along :-) "
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Beyond The Programmers' Stone More

Beyond The Programmers' Stone

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  • Re:Programmer's Stone, et al. (Score:3)

    by ashpool7 ( 18172 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @02:13PM (#1586000) Homepage Journal
    1.Communicating an idea which is new to your audience
    2.Providing a better discussion/presentation of an old idea than previously existed.

    To many programmers out there who have neither the time nor inclination to search out philosophical musings on different thought processes and realate them to their life, the ideas contained in The Programmer's Stone are very new to them.

    The whole mapper/packer perspective may be a rehash of some philosophy that is common knowledge in philosophical or literary circles, but that is not the intended target of the writer, and why should you assume that? ("these writings are neither novel...") The Programmer's Stone is directed to a programmer: someone who would come along, see the title, and peek into it to see what it's about. It explains (yes, with flowerly language) things to that programmer in a method similar to how he/she may operate: Mapper Style. A Mapper reading the document will begin to take in the paper and relate it to his/her own network of information, as described in the Stone, and completeley understand the key elements of the paper.

    The presentation may seem "not particularly well presented" because of the language, but this is a style reminiscent of William Gibson, who uses long and concise words and sentences to describe not only the thing he is talking about, but to give the reader a feel for the subject as well. This allows a Mapper to not only glean information out of the paper, but have "feelings" for extending the ideas presented out into other reigons of his/her map.

    (There is a historical term for this style: either Romantic or Neoclassical, but I don't remember which one it is)

    In My Humble Opinion, The Programmer's Stone (specifically) has presented it's ideas well to it's intended audience. I extremely enjoy it and pass it along to my other fellow programmers.

    As for the other works, It is to be noted that they aren't really targeted to anyone and are actually spawned off because of the ideas presented in The Programmers Stone. It's the ideas about Mapping that spawned the other articles. Therefore, unless you are a Mapper in the field that is being described, the essays will probably seem like gibberish to you. There's no reference point on your map to link it in.

    What the author has done is found out that one of his writings (The Programmer's Stone) was wildly popular and has commenced to publish the rest of his work to see if it garners the same attention. He is probably more a philosopher than a programmer, and wishes to share the rest of his thoughts to the world in hopes that they will enlighten and stimulate those who think in a manner similar to him.

    I have a friend who is doing the same thing. I think it's a great idea. It's similar to posting source code to a algorithm. People can stop by and look at it, give their opinion, be inspired, write a new algorithm to do the job better or differently, comment on how crappy the routine is but not do anything about it, etc.

    But the first step is reading it...by discounting wildly this man's writings as complete garbage, you are performing the role of a bad critic: Trying to drive away the audience because the writings do not meet all of your criterion for being "good" versus weighing the good with the bad.

  • This is from a comment on my favorite news-site, slashdot. Mr. Carter has constructed a theory of anthroplogy based about the premise that some large percentage of people are diseased. He has done this based on his observation of white-collar workers, primarily in technical fields. Earlier in this century Katherine C. Briggs cast her net wider. She observed some of the same phenomena, but in a much bigger context. She came up with a different interpretation. The sub-branch of psychology she founded has the following paradigm: A certain sub-population can be characterized as particularly change- and risk- adverse, very traditionalist and conservative, very methodical and habitual - among other traits. Testing indicates these people comprise about one third of the US population. Testing in workplaces, the military, and college programs which specialize in business training indicates that this change-adverse population is disproportionately represented among executives and business people. Let's call these people group A. A different sub-population (group B) can be characterized as particularly risk- and change- embracing; more dare-devil and capricious. They, too, account for about one third of the US population. This population has disproportionately high school drop-out rates, and a much lower tolerance of the routine of the office; they are less common in the white-collar world, and tend to work in "interupt-driven" jobs such as "business development". Group C, the remaining third-to-a-quarter (depending on which study you use) is the lump which has several familiar factions in it. It is not characterized (as a whole) as being particularly change-adverse or change-embracing (though individual members maybe on either end of that scale.) Instead, they are characterized by a facility with (and reliance on) abstract thought, which the other two populations don't share. In is in this population that you find the Poets, the Activists, the Mystics - and the Scientists, Architects, and yes, Hackers. If you didn't have a chance to, I suggest reading these comments now: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/26/137207 &mode=thread I myself have found that these groups are all equally necessary in society. They all make up approximately 33% of the population. Like all groups, some are smarter, some dumber. Some are less useful, others produce work of global importance. In all groups we see jobs they can be better or worse. Einstein may well have been group C, but most American presidents (even great ones like Lincoln and Washington) were almost certainly group A or B. I believe by the quick-changing nature of President Clinton, we can assume he is group B (possibly yet another way of saying "liberal"). Therefore we see that good or bad, there are important traits to being ritualised, to being trend-setting, and to being trend-following. Let's not get into what groups Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin were. What I'm trying to say is this: People aren't just around today waiting to be changed into better people, at least not most of them. There have been historical reasons for each of these wonderful groups and noone really needs to change them. HOWEVER, you do have a great point, which you made in "The Programmer's Stone", that mappers are better then packers at software engineering, and that packers act more like programmed computers then the other groups. I assume that Packes map to group A and Mappers map to group C. I'd probably be group B. But I've found that at 7:00 a.m until 9:00 a.m. I think more creatively, and from 1:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. I think more linearly. I'll leave the point of that statement (which may need more refinement and testing on my part I admit) to your imagination on the focus of these many groups. All the same, like the problem with the Meyer's Brigg's test, categorizing people will always lead into a game of herding cats. People have long lives and WILL switch from one group to another, maybe more than once (especially if they are group B, they may change from A to B to C rapidly. No this isn't a contradiction.). A large percentage of people are on the fence. And similarly a large percentage of people and things are simply outside of any theorizing we can do (like: what are bees, bears, and microorganizms? What is the queen bee, yogi bear, and an ameoba?) I'm sorry to say this, but I believe your problem is this: You started out realizing that people need to think like a mapper in order to do software developement. (true) Then you decided everyone should learn to think this way (false). Stick to helping programmers program, and you may be better off. -Benjamin Shniper

  • The Pathology of Pathology (Score:5)

    by goliard ( 46585 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @02:16PM (#1586002)

    Mr. Carter has constructed a theory of anthroplogy based about the premise that some large percentage of people are diseased. He has done this based on his observation of white-collar workers, primarily in technical fields.

    Earlier in this century Katherine C. Briggs cast her net wider. She observed some of the same phenomena, but in a much bigger context. She came up with a different interpretation.

    The sub-branch of psychology she founded has the following paradigm:

    A certain sub-population can be characterized as particularly change- and risk- adverse, very traditionalist and conservative, very methodical and habitual - among other traits. Testing indicates these people comprise about one third of the US population. Testing in workplaces, the military, and college programs which specialize in business training indicates that this change-adverse population is disproportionately represented among executives and business people. Let's call these people group A.

    A different sub-population (group B) can be characterized as particularly risk- and change- embracing; more dare-devil and capricious. They, too, account for about one third of the US population. This population has disproportionately high school drop-out rates, and a much lower tolerance of the routine of the office; they are less common in the white-collar world, and tend to work in "interupt-driven" jobs such as "business development".

    Group C, the remaining third-to-a-quarter (depending on which study you use) is the lump which has several familiar factions in it. It is not characterized (as a whole) as being particularly change-adverse or change-embracing (though individual members maybe on either end of that scale.) Instead, they are characterized by a facility with (and reliance on) abstract thought, which the other two populations don't share. In is in this population that you find the Poets, the Activists, the Mystics - and the Scientists, Architects, and yes, Hackers.

    One of the foundations of this paradigm is that all these trait-clusters (which define these populations) are equally "normal", healthful, viable and valid. They have pathologies, but they aren't themselves pathologies.

    What it looks like, from the perspective of this paradigm, is that Mr. Carter generalized from the interactions of his Group C friends, students and collegues with a largely Group A -rich population, to wit, The Suits. And perceiving the very palpable difference between these kinds of people, he then made an presumption as old as humankind: If They are different from Us, either They or Us must be broken/wrong/bad/defective/sick/disordered.

    It is these Suits, these (usually) Group A people, who are Packers. They are not Packers because they are defective or diseased. They are Packers because Packing is an amazingly useful and viable memetic strategy - ask Mr. Ford about his factories. I agree: Packing is an abysmal strategy for making software. But it is kick ass for making cars, running a farm, or, yes, packing boxes.

    In fact, it's they very success of Packing that's at the root of this problem. All those Packers have had such success with it so far, they have trouble imagining it could fail them. They have a hammer, and have seen many nails; if they are skeptical about the concept of certain nail-like objects being "screws", that is only to be expected.

    And give them some credit: If someone working for you insisted that the methodology which has worked for you your entire life was wrong, you'd probably be rather skeptical.

    Packers live in a world in which Packing, by and large, works. Mappers, unfortunately, have to live in a society filled with Packers (the Group B, the swing vote, usually effectively supports Group A for reasons to complicated to go into here). So natural Mappers to learn to Pack. Since Packers can get through life without learning much to Map, they often slack off and don't bother.

    Briggs wrote about the phenomenon of "Protective Coloration", whereby people of a minority type learn to behave in the way of a majority (or socially sanctioned) type. This is a major life stressor, and trying to keep up the charade generally makes one awfully miserable. This applies precisely to the problem of our native Mappers, people from Group C, who learned to put aside the strategy of Mapping for the more approved strategy of Packing.

    It is this which causes the Ghost Not, and from there, the rest of Mr. Carter's theory can proceed.

    But I must take issue with the presumption that someone has to be pathological. The problem is not that Packers are defective or diseased Mappers languishing for a cure. The problem is that Packers can impose Packing on software projects.

    The solution in some combination of

    1. "Mapping Appreciation" for Packers - the training of Packers to accept and respect the Mapping strategy, so they keep out of the hair of the Mappers while they do their work, and
    2. Preventing those Packers without that clue-attitude combination from having anything to do with development, except possibly the Q&A.

    People interested in learning more about this paradigm of psychology/anthropology should turn to:

    and should ignore just about everything on the www about the MBTI.


    ----------------------------------------------
  • I have a friend who is doing the same thing. I think it's a great idea. It's similar to posting source code to a algorithm. People can stop by and look at it, give their opinion, be inspired, write a new algorithm to do the job better or differently, comment on how crappy the routine is but not do anything about it, etc.

    I think it's a great idea as well. It's amazing to me, though, how everything on slashdot gets credited in some way to open source, even when wildly inappropriate. Open source is a wonderful thing, but it is a descendent of this process, not an ancestor.

    But the first step is reading it...by discounting wildly this man's writings as complete garbage, you are performing the role of a bad critic: Trying to drive away the audience because the writings do not meet all of your criterion for being "good" versus weighing the good with the bad.

    I certainly don't want to give someone the impression that I can (or would even want to) be an absolute judge or filter to what they read. Nor do I want to suggest that the author be shunned in all future work. However, the critic's job is not always to evoke discussion, sometimes it is to warn others that something may be a waste of their time. I certainly don't think the author should be silenced...by no means! But at least in the U.S. it is right of speech which is guaranteed, not the right to be listened to.

  • Re:Is it just me? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I buy into a lot of the philospher's stone and a lot of the Myers Briggs stuff - and I evangelise reading them, especially between the lines!

    But I'm an ENTP - 'inventor'. I have to be a mapper, because I can't remember enough knowlege packets to be productive otherwise. Or maybe it's the other way round.

    Mapper vrs Packer is to do with more than being a geek, or even a good productive geek - it's about figuring out how things fit in with each other, being open to new ideas.

    If anything by Myers Briggs it's an NP thing - which isn't one of their meta-catagories. The NFPs (unrational, creative, emotive 'thinkers') are the inventive mystics and artists. Not that NTPs can't do those things in a more cool headed, less inspirational way.

    Don't believe all geeks are 'mappers' either, problem solving, mapping, real creativity are very different from memorising the C++ ARM and every startrek episode (I couldn't do either, even if I wanted to).

    If you are open to seeing people's strengths, you will see many different types of people mapping problems in different ways. People who couldn't and wouldn't want to program are learning from immediate experience and building these things into their world view. It's not to do with intelligence (though it helps), more about attitude, and confidence that you have something you can say creatively.

    By the way, don't believe the temperament test results without checking against experience. I've had people lie in them, and people answering how they'd like to be and believe they are.
    L298 can't find my password, and my mail server's down.
  • > statements not a tautology or emperically
    > verifyable are meaningless

    ... to which the classical rejoinder is that since "statements not a tautology or emperically verifyable are meaningless" is neither a tautology nor emperically verifyable, it can't be true (for then it would be meaningless).
  • It's all about finding the deeper truths that unite the truths found by prior sincere investigators. So I took two ideas that fit well together in the new picture, but seem poles apart in prior thinking. These were Gurdjieff's "Reciprocal Maintenance" and Einstein's "Relativity". Then I arranged them... In a vase...
  • Methinks thou does protest too much... One of the features of a blindspot in the mind such as I have attempted to describe is that detractors will not address the concrete and falsifiable proposals made. Instead they will deliver hysterical abuse *around* the subject. The question for example, is not whether the work is invalid *because* I propose a mass psychlogical explaination for the origins of religions (which I certainly do), but whether my proposed expaination might be *correct*. And my argument has not been addressed by those who have cited the very topic as evidence of lack of merit. The mere fact that the work addresses a topic does not make it inherently invalid. At least, to people not trapped by the blindspot in the mind, it doesn't :-) With the blindspot in place, the very mention of certain topics is enough to set the victims cavorting about making the most extraordinary contempt and threat displays. Personally, I don't think I'm a genius by the way. I think I'm *normal*. But it doesn't actually matter if I am a genius or not, or if I *think* I'm a genius or not. The question is, does the argument *work*.
  • Totally freelance. I deliver - I eat. It's people who are on regular paychecks that are far too clever to actually spend time *thinking* before they act. If they haven't got a ridiculous deadline to excuse short sighted and sloppy work, well they just make one up. At this level, nothing more need be said beyond Ed Yourdon's wonderful "Decline and Fall of the Amierican Programmer", a good 7 years ago.
  • I do not believe I have rejected any model, except for an implicit model that says that there is nothing going on in human sociology that we are unaware of. That implicit model proposes that the human state is fully explained and rational, which anyone would have to be deluded to believe. Nor do I believe that the Reciprocality model is complete - quite the reverse. It is merely the beginning of a new way to see things that is more complete than the vacuum we've had to date. The argument of this posting seems to be that since all is mush, and there is no such thing as reality, no theory or attempt to understand anything can ever be valid. Certainly no model can be an imporvement on any other, so there is no point trying. I do not agree with any of these ideas. There is in fact an objective reality, and we can get better at seeing it. All mystics invite us to see what is there. Not some arbitrary human-constructed irrationality. This is true from the Christian "what is before your sight" to the concept of the material world being a wonder to be studied with reverence that is at the core of Islam, to Steiner emphasis on mathematics, to Gurdjieff's "perfecting of one's objective reason". Claims that it is the mystics that are irrational are not usually backed up, and simply accompanied with contempt/threat displays. It is true that I have not repeated the *conventional* interpretation of Magritte's "This is not a pipe" - to a packer my view of it would by definition be wrong. That's why I've never wasted time on things like academic art history. But as far as I know, Magritte did not endorse the conventional interpretation, and mine does more to explain the abiding, disturbing nature of this painting than the usual one.
  • From "The Ghost Not":
    ---------------------
    In the problem, a gameshow contestant is shown three closed doors, and is told that there are lemons behind two of them, and a car behind the third. The contestant must pick a door, and then the host opens one of the two doors the contestant didn't pick, to reveal a lemon. Then, the contestant is offered the chance to switch choice to the third, unopened door, or stick with the original one. Most people don't believe there is anything to be gained by switching. Since they have moved nothing about on their internal whiteboard, they cannot see any way that the situation could have changed. This position omits the fact that the lemons and cars all have definite positions at all times, even though the contestant doesn't know them. Moreover the host knows which door conceals the car, because he must never open it by mistake. So the first choice the contestant made had a 1/3 chance of concealing the car, but after the host had thrown a lemon away, the remaining door had a 2/3 chance of concealing the car.
    ---------------

    Am I missing something, or does this maths just not make sense?

    You've got three doors, one car, you make a blind choice of one, that's a 1/3 chance. Fine. Got that.

    Then the host discards one door, which is guaranteed to not be either the door with the car or the door you picked.

    This leaves two doors, one of which must have car. You now have the choice of moving or staying - in other words, no matter what your original choice, the entire problem collapses to a blind choice of one out of two doors.

    That's a 1/2 chance. Not 2/3. So there's no difference whether you move or stay, and most people are right.

    I'm obviously infected with the Ghost Not, because I can't see how anyone can make 2 equal 3. What strange maths am I missing that could possibly make this bizarre claim work?
  • I do not believe I have rejected any model, except for an implicit model that says that there is nothing going on in human sociology that we are unaware of.
    Well, by dismissing the conventional view of the world as a "disease" (or symptomatic of one), I would say you are rejecting it. If that is the "implicit model" you are now referring to, and which you seem to acknowledge rejecting, then I think we are in agreement: you are indeed rejecting it.
    Nor do I believe that the Reciprocality model is complete - quite the reverse.
    True, you do make the point that it is a work-in-progress. I think because you seem so eager to trumpet the great breakthroughs you believe yourself to have reached, I got the impression that you considered the new model to be, if not complete, at least objectively "correct" as far as it currently goes, and theoretically extensible to become a complete, perfect explanation of everything. That may well have been a too-hasty assumption on my part, for which I apologize.
    The argument of this posting seems to be that since all is mush, and there is no such thing as reality, no theory or attempt to understand anything can ever be valid.
    I don't believe I suggested that. My view, which I did not really go into in my earlier posting, is that no model, including yours, can ever be perfect, and that the closest one can come to "escaping the box" is not to build another box, as you are doing, but to see the merits and demerits of a variety of paradigms, understanding that they are all, at best, only a partial and imperfect explanation of reality as it appears from a particular point of view.
    There is in fact an objective reality, and we can get better at seeing it.
    Unless one chooses the path of pure solipsism, there is presumably something out there, sure. The problem lies in being able to say anything certain about it, given that you cannot escape the limitations of the human brain and experience reality directly and in totality. Everything you perceive is basically an image created by your brain from the intersection of various sensory inputs, subjected to a variety of preconscious filtering designed by evolution to detect patterns in fragmentary data (which sometimes involves seeing things that aren't there, as when you see a familiar face in a crowd, but then get a better look and realize that it's actually a stranger). This imaged world in the mind is, according to some interpretations, the world of illusion which is called Maya, the Abyss of Hallucinations, and various other names. You can never really escape it, but seeing it for what it is helps to reduce its influence on you. Thus the notion of "perfect seeing" involves not a direct view of objective reality (though, due to semantic confusion, some have claimed that it is), but an understanding of the nature of seeing (and, thereby, an understanding of yourself, since you are not only the thing that sees, but also one of the things that you see, and therefore, just as much a part of the brain-imaged world as anything else).

    I remember a wonderful quote of Stephen Hawking's about Schroedinger's Cat. I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the article anymore (it was in Scientific American a few years ago, as I recall), but he basically said he didn't care whether it was possible in "reality" for a cat to be dead and alive at the same time, because he didn't know anything about "reality". All that concerned him was whether quantum mechanics could be used successfully to predict the outcome of experiments; by that standard, he was quite happy with it.

    Claims that it is the mystics that are irrational are not usually backed up [...]
    Some mystics are quite clear about their claims to be, not irrational, but beyond rationality. This is what Zen koans are all about, for example.
    But as far as I know, Magritte did not endorse the conventional interpretation, and mine does more to explain the abiding, disturbing nature of this painting than the usual one.
    This is what is conventionally known as a matter of opinion. I happen to disagree. Since your view, apparently, is that you possess the one objective truth, and mine is that you possess merely an arrogant opinion, there probably isn't too much point in pursuing this part of the discussion.
  • The material *was* offered up for discussion and evaluation. It was evaluated and commented on.

    Comments were solicited, and negative comments, especially when they list a reason, like this one did, are comments too. If the poster was needlessly rude, or just said they didn't like it, without reasons, then it would be a useless post. But the poster listed valid criticisms.
  • While the author's original philosophers stone piece was of interest, the follow up site is a poster child of metaphysics gone bad. Appying the filter of the verification principle [demon.co.uk] (statements not a tautology or emperically verifyable are meaningless) to the work leaves relatively little, and of that the bits on cognitive limits imposed by language and culture has in fact been previously noticed, as recently as 400-something-BC by Buddha. See just about any of the 1,400 years of writings on this for details.

  • Social behavior a virus?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, there is clearly a link between ADD, hypersensitivity, and personality on one side and creative, free-thinking, 'highly gifted' intelligence on the other. Not so many people seem to be like this.

    But there is good reason most people don't have these traits. A large, organized society requires a large degree of conformance of its members to function. 'Normal' people (M0 infected according to Carter e.a.) fit in and function well in society. Radical ADD free-thinking being the exception rather than the norm is quite obviously an adaptation of our species to post-nomadic social circumstances. Claiming that this is caused by some sort of mental virus that mankind has somehow been unable to evolve out of is simply too baroque to be credible.

    If 'normal' people are really pathological cases, then they should have been all but extinct by now. (Neo-) Darwin tells me that these people are quite succesful, just look around you. Or, reasoning the other way around, if we were all ADD free-thinking radicals, then what would society be like? Total anarchy, probably. That's nice, but not very efficient. So 'normal', social people win.

    Conclusion: social behavior pays off. Wow, this is deep. I should write a fancy paper about it sometime. Maybe call it "The Stone Age Brain" or something :-).

    - Reinoud

    PS. I'm sorry to see the names of Bill and Mary Allsopp on the M0 paper. I had hoped they would understand better.
  • What so many of the replies seem to miss is something which people like Robert Anton Wilson got, as long ago as the hippie heyday - that it's better for people to shoot off at wierd new tangents, than to endlessly grind smaller and smaller the same old knowledge.

    It may be full of holes, it may be limited utility - but it may be right. Or it may lead on to something right, after further refinement. If you say "shut up and train your mind into the conventional channels", then valuable better ideas may be lost.

  • I'm glad to see that the Slashdot response has been an appropriate one, as a whole.

    I would have been more impressed with the articles, had there been empirical evidence to suggest that dopamine levels were elevated under the conditions described. As they stood, they reminded me of a letter I read once, written by a certified schizophrenic, weighing in at some 40 pages, and filled with diagrams explaining how his view on life was supported by ample evidence. Naturally, haveing drawn analogies in the diagrammatic form, the diagrams then became indisputable evidence from which conclusions could be drawn.

    I trust flashes of intuition which make one unforseen progression which explains the obvious facts, rather than GUT instincts. (I'm not shouting, it's an acronym).

    Everyone who still believes in the theories discussed should be forced to read Foucoult's Pendulum, by a Snr. Umberto Eco, over and over, until they get it.



    A.D.Venturer
  • This is one of my favorite probability theory problems, and the answer as given is completely correct.

    Look at it this way:

    Q1: When you make your first choice, what is the probability that you are incorrect?

    A1: 2/3

    Q2: Does the fact that the host did something after the fact change that probability?

    A2: No.

    Q3: Did the host actually give you information about which door DOES have a car behind it?

    A3: Two out of three times, the host is TELLING you which door has a car behind it, by showing you which door does NOT have a car behind it. The exception, the 1/3 chance, is that you picked the right door in the first place -- which is not usually the case.

    And yes, you probably are "infected with the Ghost Not". But don't feel bad. I ask people this question very frequently (because I don't really know any good riddles). I have never seen someone get it right the first time, including myself. It is a very common problem that people who don't yet fully understand events often believe that they do understand event probability.
  • I have learned to be very suspicious of folks who go on at great length about those people and their problems, contrasted, of course with the elect who know and tread the righteous path.

    It's not that they might not be right, it's just that every time I have encountered any of this ilk, they have ultimately had nothing of substance to contribute.

    Science has made great strides in discovering methods to help humans determine the truth value of a proposition. Things like predictability, repeatability, the limiting of propositions to those that are falsifiable, and thus capable of being proven wrong; these are essential factors in our ability to judge a notion.

    The thing that is missing from Carter's writings is anything that can be used to judge the ideas objectively. Without that, all we have is his ability to weave words in patterns that seem appealing and that elicit a favorable response. History has shown that this ability is not often linked to movements that bring any realy benefit to society.

  • His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.

    After two years of intensive study in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, I can speak to this with authority.

    It is absolutely not true that Buddha Shakyamuni denounced rationality. All of the sutras appeal to logic and reason. If you ever study Buddhism in the Tibetan lineage, you will discover that the Sutra path is a very logical and reasonable one. Also take a look at the debates on emptiness between that Madhyamaka-Prasangaka school and the Chittamatrin school.

    Now, Tantra is a different matter, and Zen seems to be very anti-reason (from my distant vantage point). But Zen does not represent all of Buddhism accurately, nor does Tantra, which is to be practiced only with a strong Sutra foundation.

    Dave

  • WWWebster Dictionary

    No entries found that match your query.

    Guess not. :)
    Seems to me the site is already down from the /. effect? or that just me...
  • It is accessible as of this time. It is very slow, however. The almost totally text page took about 3 minutes to download through my fast connection.

    Be patient, be early, and you too might see the page. ;)
  • Is Reciprocality a word??
    Nope. The word is 'reciprocity'. But it's still a cool page, and one that's found a permanent place in my bookmarks.
  • As I was driving to a client [physical] site site this morning I was thinking about how fantastic the web was for the pure fact that we have access to great documents/research like the Programmers Stone. Prior to this, such academic reading material was only available at the university libraries. And nowhere near the amount today was available since usually only thesis-type work was carried by the libraries and it was all hidden in obscure corners in the basement.

    Now we have entire [web] sites devoted to this kind of stuff... sure makes it hard to code when there's all this great reading available and so close at hand. Now if we could just globally increase bandwidth to get rid of this /. effect... :)

  • I don't know about Reciprocality, but I =do= know that there are a LOT of English words that don't appear in Webster's. Floccinaucinihilipilification being one. (It's in the Oxford English Dictionary, the One True Dictionary. :)

    However, if I were to derive a definition, I'd take a look at the two parts of the word. "Recipro" would be to return that which was given. "Cality", would imply location, as in "locality".

    Giving or returning a location? Sounds like a self-referencing pointer.

  • I wonder if "Reciprocity" is the word for which they are looking. Then again maybe they wanted some made-up-not-quite-right word. I'm not in a position to know. I do, however, know that "reciprocity" is a cool word. Everyone say it out loud.

  • Just because it is not in the dictionary does not make it not a word.


    [insert good sounding number here] words a year get added to the language, and its not because they get added to the dictionary, its because ppl use them and the dictionary writers catch on that they're being used.

  • So this is where the practical advantages of the French language shine through, with the College Francaise or whatever the French Language Police are called outside Quebec. That way, thee is One True Authority (tm) on the language. In English? We have that funny yankee spelling (color anyone?) and True English Spelling(tm)...but now i'm suffering tangentitis again (also a new word :))

    Ignore this. I'm beyond help.

  • Is it just me? (Score:3)

    by Jack William Bell ( 84469 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @11:29AM (#1586037) Homepage Journal

    Or does it seem to others like Alan G. Carter is wandering through some new-age philosophical problem." Huh? People addicted to boredom? Ritual junkies picking on the 'immune'?

    wasteland? For example 'M0' as a "...previously unsuspected public health

    I would think an easier explanation (and better if you apply Occam's Razor) is that most people are either intellectually incapable or intellectually lazy. In other words, some people can learn to actually use their brains and enjoy novelty, but it requires work. Others are born with it and yet others are missing a crucial component. But the author is so in love with this concept of Ritual Junkies that he nearly bursts into song. For example the following passage makes more sense as free verse than it does in context:

    "There is an Inner Not at the base of all thinking that ends up as an invisible and unremovable Ghost Not that makes the conclusions invalid. It is because of this generality that the effect is so mathematically elegant."

    Then add in some of the other stuff the web site meanders through, like 'Hypertime' and 'Reciprocal Cosmology', and you realize this stuff is straight out of a ketamine dream. I prefer my physics straight, thank you...

    I didn't really buy into Carter's 'Programmer's Stone' thing all that much anyway. After all it seemed kinda self-evident. No need to use funny phrases like 'Mappers' and 'Packers' when we already know that some people are capable of seeing the big picture and others cannot (unless they get some major training). Personally I think the Myers Briggs Type Indicator personality test [typelogic.com] is a better predictor of this ability than anything else. Basically, the people that Carter describes as 'Mappers' are 'NT' types (iNtuitive Thinking).

    Jack (who is an INTP, aka 'The Architect' [orci.com])

  • I previewed my post above and it looked fine. But when I post some of the HTML tags get stripped and it looks like crap. Good looking posts are important to me and I really don't like it when this happens...

    Jack

  • I think what he is trying to say is that technical people like us have a disease were we are locked into a way of thinking so we cannot understand our own being. He's also saying that all the physics problems we've made for ourselves to solve are a result of this. My problem with what he is saying is that we seem to have reached singularity already and that it doesn't really involve technical stuff at all. Rather it involves abandoning all rational though in favor of some kind of zen bliss? You can call me ritual addicted, but i like living in a reality where there are problems that we have to solve and where we have a set way of solving them. Of course his theory doesn't leave any room for problems that are impossible (Godel) which I think shows that he is just a new age type looking for any kind of sense out of the world even if it isn't rational.
  • yeah, this Carter guy bored me with his Mapper, Packer crap. All pseudo-intellectuals bore me, though. Some people write to communicate. Others write to "hear" themselves speak. Which group do you think Carter is from ?
  • most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.
    Buddha *demanded* analysis. Putting him in the same bucket as Lao Tse suggests you should stick to areas in which you have a clue.
  • I'm a "floccinaucinihilipilification" affiliate. It's my favorite word!

    Floccinaucinihilipilification! What a great word..."the act of estimating as worthless."

    I remember it from a David Brin(?) SF book which I read back in high school. He cited it from OED.
  • Are you confusing meditation with intellectual analysis?

    There is something amusing about finding myself accused of cluelessness regarding Buddhism from someone who descends to rudeness at the first hint that someone else's interpretations differ from his own.

  • Metaphysics? It reads like pop psychology to me. Metaphysics is very much different.
  • No, this stuff really *IS* gibberish. What I find frightening is all the adulatory comments to this dreck in /. I think this reveals a need for a stiff injection of some required DWM classical philosophy courses into the average CS and EE curriculum.

  • This is a repost to see if I can get the correct HTML in. Note that I picked the stuff below up by using the browser back button...

    Or does it seem to others like Alan G. Carter is wandering through some new-age philosophical wasteland? For example 'M0' as a "...previously unsuspected public health problem." Huh? People addicted to boredom? Ritual junkies picking on the 'immune'?

    I would think an easier explanation (and better if you apply Occam's Razor) is that most people are either intellectually incapable or intellectually lazy. In other words, some people can learn to actually use their brains and enjoy novelty, but it requires work. Others are born with it and yet others are missing a crucial component. But the author is so in love with this concept of Ritual Junkies that he nearly bursts into song. For example the following passage makes more sense as free verse than it does in context:

    "There is an Inner Not at the base of all thinking that ends up as an invisible and unremovable Ghost Not that makes the conclusions invalid. It is because of this generality that the effect is so mathematically elegant."

    Then add in some of the other stuff the web site meanders through, like 'Hypertime' and 'Reciprocal Cosmology', and you realize this stuff is straight out of a ketamine dream. I prefer my physics straight, thank you...

    I didn't really buy into Carter's 'Programmer's Stone' thing all that much anyway. After all it seemed kinda self-evident. No need to use funny phrases like 'Mappers' and 'Packers' when we already know that some people are capable of seeing the big picture and others cannot (unless they get some major training). Personally I think the Myers Briggs Type Indicator personality test [typelogic.com] is a better predictor of someones ability than anything else. Basically, the people that Carter describes as 'Mappers' are 'NT' types (iNtuitive Thinking).

    Jack (who is an INTP [intp.org])

  • Having realized some of the limitations of one intellectual model, Carter constructs another model and claims it to be perfect. You would think someone as seemingly conversant with philosophy and mathematics as Carter would not have missed the point of Godel's proof that no system can be both complete and without contradiction. Far from solving the mysteries of the universe, Carter has escaped one cage only to build another and lock himself inside.

    His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.

    Some of his examples from art are rather amusing as well. He seems to have totally missed the point of Magritte's "This is not a pipe" -- the point is not that "it might be made of chocolate", but that it is, in the most literal sense, not a pipe, but merely a painting of one.

    Despite all this, I may read more of Carter's work. Sometimes even the most glaringly wrong ideas can help you to think a bit more carefully about your own views.

  • Yes, I thought the Programmer's Stone was mostly old ground; some of the presentation was new, but most of it was much more obfuscated than it needs to be. This new stuff seems even more obfuscated; I'm reminded of an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about how "the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

    Oh, and the diagram under the "M0" page use yellow text on a white background! I mean, c'mon...

  • How to identify a seriously mad social scientist (Score:5)

    by marcelmouse ( 74690 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @12:12PM (#1586057)
    I'm fond of the lunatic fringe. Any social theory that obviously springs from the mind of someone "not addicted to ritual thinking" (like, say, providing citations, or reading any of the foundational theorists) is bound to have some genuine gutbusters.

    First off, any theory which claims to "provid[e] an explicit, physical interpretation" of any of the Gnostic Gospels is a winner. Anything that make the Gospel of Thomas more comprehensible without the use of hallucinogenic drugs is a valuable resource in my intellectual toolkit. I will put that document in the toolkit, right next to the hallucinogenic drugs.

    Secondly, any theory that discusses a social structure using terms generally applied to operating systems (http://www.melloworld.com/Reciprocality/r1/index. html) makes me wonder about whether or not I'm still under warrantee.

    "Hi, thanks for calling the Western Culture Manufacturing Corporation Technical Support Line, my name is Marcel, how may I help you today?"

    "Uhh, I downloaded the Irony Service Pack, and I was trying to install, but I got this error... it was, like, explorer.exe caused an invalid meme fault in humor.dll..."

    "Okay, run Scandisk and delete all your temorary friends, then restart your life. That should work fine."

    [hold music]

    I'm usually pretty skeptical about theories that declare the theorists as "immune" or "above" a pathology or unsavory trait present in all those not approved of by the theorist. But nothing beats being told that, since I'm a singularly unimaginative coder, I'm addicted to boredom, and I don't even know it! And here I was, thinking that The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Captialism explained the spread of european industrial culture across the face of the earth, when in fact, all those poor "natives" were simply addicted to their own unhealthy thought processes!


  • Yeah... the site.. the original article, it's all just gibberish to me.
    Maybe I'm just not intellectually enlightened enough to understand it eh? :-)
    Just the author's choice of words alone tells me s/he is more interested in writing text than expressing and idea.

    - Anything I can't understand must be bad. :-)
  • Hmmmmmm...interesting
    Would you happen to have the schizophrenics manifesto of metaphysics available online or through email? I would have email you but you did not give any reply address...
  • Interesting ideas, but the writer's ego shines through much too clearly.
  • The verification principle itself is neither a tautology nor empirically verifiable; so by it's own criterion it is meaningless.

    Res ipsa loquitor. HST.
  • Hey, if you liked that one, I got another one for ya:

    The whole earth suffers from a virus, a disease known as sin.
    This sin blinds the people, so they cannot see the One True God (tm), or even see the fact that they suffer this disease, and are doomed to perish in everlasting fire and brimstone because the tarnished cannot enter His Holiness.

    But fear not, my fellow man! There is hope! Repent of your sins and embrace Jesus Christ and blindly believe all that he and the prophets tell you (conveniently written in our Holy Scriptures for your perusal).

    How do we know that the world is diseased? Why, just look at the state of things! Wars and famine and nature that is very contrary to the way that the One True God (tm) intended it to be!
    You can find out about all of this by reading our Holy Scriptures. There, you have proof now!

    Order today and you'll receive absolutely free this piece of the One True Cross!

    Act now! Operators are standing by!

  • Maybe we should be posting URLs to alt.humor.best-of-slashdot. This is just great!

    Oh, by the way, you don't come with any warranty, not even an implied one of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE...
    --
  • The verification principle itself is neither a tautology nor empirically verifiable; so by it's own criterion it is meaningless.

    LOL! :-D Not only that, but the author of that post presumably gets along in life by understanding all kinds of things, like imperatives and questions, that according to that principle are "meaningless".

  • I thought even after reading all the negative stuff on /. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt, but then I came to this in "The Ghost Not":

    Scientists: ... They shun inductive reasoning

    What???

    That says it all. Merriam-Webster gives induction as "inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances", among other meanings. Obviously, science could not exist without induction. He's instantly lost all credibility with me - just another crackpot.


  • I'm quite Floccinaucinihilipilificationary myself.

  • Seems to me, there are 2 major reasons to write something and publish it to a wide audience

    1. Communicating an idea which is new to your audience
    2. Providing a better discussion/presentation of an old idea than previously existed.
    IMHO, these writings are neither novel nor particularly well presented. The author seems to be caught up in the concept of his own genius that he comes across as a virtual Polonius: arrogant to the point of idiocy, speaking in flowery language, accomplishing nothing.
  • " an extropian technomystical feeding frenzy . . ."

    Is this the writing of A.C. or Don King?!

  • Re:Badly flawed (Godel) (Score:3)

    by J.Random Hacker ( 51634 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @12:58PM (#1586072)
    Sorry -- I can't let this pass.

    Godel's proof is about undecidability. If a formal system has enough expressive power, there will be statments whose truth in that formal system cannot be assertained in that system. It most assuredly does not require complete formal systems to contain contradictions.

    Godels proof, Turing's incompleteness theorem (aka the halting problem), and the Church-Rossier (sp?) theorem are all equivalent statements of that idea. It places limits on computation, and prevents us from ever having a perfectly constructed and provabily correct mathematical logic (some uncertainty will always remain), but we can be free of contradiction -- thank God. With a single contradiction, you can prove anything.

    Having said this -- I agree that Carter has wandered a long way from a solid theory. At least the Mapper/Packer distinction could be tested (and I am astisfied that it is a real phenomon).

    Perhaps our feedback will assist in the refinement of the ideas into real theories that work to Godel's limits. Perhaps not ;-)
  • My pseudo-English translator parsed it as reciprocal-ity. That is, having the characteristics of two things that correspond or answer to each other.

  • Re:How great it is (Score:3)

    by JordanH ( 75307 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @01:28PM (#1586074) Homepage Journal
    Research? I don't see any research there. Just a lot of speculations and anecdotes. I can understand why this "is not garlanded with references". Great works of the past often came about because the authors stood on the shoulders of giants. This "academic" work asks us to "Try to get under it".

    It's difficult to fathom that we have this great communications medium that allows us to publish our ideas in written language and distribute them instantly to a world-wide audience, yet people seem to have forgotten what the word research means. Here's a clue, it's not just sitting around, thinking up "a radically altered view of the nature of time, space, consciousness, causality, life, the universe and everything", at least, not without a lot of supporting material to back up this "radically altered view".

    Every advance that improves communication seems to lead to a decrease in the average content of our messages.

    Someday soon, I expect we'll all have our minds linked in one great matrix and we'll be sending out grunts and squawks.

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