Notices by Brian Marick (marick@mstdn.social), page 5

Haidt is one of those “public intellectuals” whose later work makes me wonder if his earlier work that I liked was just as bad, but happened to tickle my biases or my innate contrarianism.

See also Jared Diamond. https://mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/112309679600238882

“An international experiment involving over 17,000 lost wallets has revealed that humans are far more honest and altruistic than anyone, including professional economists, had ever imagined.” (“Than anyone” is a stretch - a reflection of the very ideology the experiment tends to refute.)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/behaviour/lost-your-wallet-it-may-not-end-badly/

(via @shekinahcancook, @haruki_zaemon)

“All Models Are Wrong (Metaphors for the Insufficiency of Metaphors)”

“The map is not the territory. But the "map-territory distinction" is itself a metaphor for how models fail to represent reality. What are some others?”

https://www.rethinkingpower.info/all-models-are-wrong-metaphors-for-the-insufficiency-of-metaphors/

(via @bmo)

RIP Niklaus Wirth, whose “Program Development by Stepwise Refinement”* made a huge impression on me as a callow youth. It didn’t *work* as a methodology, mind you – as I discovered by trying it out on a largish project – but it prepared me for variations that did work. Explains why I remain a mockist** at heart even though the world has mostly moved on from mocks.

* https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362575.362577
** https://github.com/marick/Midje/wiki/The-idea-behind-top-down-development

Introducing Wirth at the IFIP Congress (1965), Adriaan van Wijngaarden was apparently the originator of the ultimate programming language burn, which Wirth later would charmingly tell about himself:

“Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.”

@ironchamber @22 @danluu Perhaps it matters that different people can hold *different things* in their head for a good while.

I mean: does it really make sense that the “magic number 7 +/- 2” is *independent* of what’s being remembered?

@ironchamber @22 @danluu I read a polemic about studies of rodent behavior. These studies changed a rat’s environment to see how the changes affected exploratory behavior. They involved putting new things in the environment. Few described what the “thing” was. But it turns out rats will explore a new object much more if that object has a useful affordance. “Object” is not a useful category to a rat.

@ironchamber @22 @danluu It’s weird that I have a bad short-term memory (etc.) but I’ve gravitated toward dynamically-typed languages since, oh, 1983.

I have no great insight into why.

Back in the days before high-level languages (like C!) were common, a “detailed design” was often written in pseudocode or flowcharts, then translated into assembly language. My impression (but this was before my day, old as I am) is that this was considered “women’s work” – essentially clerical. But I can’t find any citation. That could be because I’m just wrong. Anyone know?

Have any pontificators-on-software who favor self-organization engaged with the famous-in-certain-circles essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”?

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness

It’s a description of how what I might call self-organization fails. But there are examples of how it’s succeeded (as in, I think, /Governing the Commons/).

It would be super-useful to discuss what factors push toward success and what push against.

I’d like to address this in the podcast.