Re: Sixth normal form

JOG wrote:
> ...
> Does anyone else understand any of this? ...

It strikes me as absurdly technocratic, no apparent value, ie. for me the answer is no. I don't see any value in theory for its own sake unless you can say or guess at *some* point along the way what the "sake" is. It might be some abstract beauty, some line of escape from known problems in this or some other field or it might be some more immediate practical advantage any anything in between any of those. Occasionally there is some accurate but repetitive observation, but so what? When the foundation is nothing more than mysticism, arbitrary vocabulary and name dropping, any result no matter how ostensibly it appears to be reasoned is likely to be up for grabs. After a while it all struck me as directionless. For me the only value is how it puts roboticism, for want of a better word, and humanism side by side for anybody who feels a need to compare the two.

Sometimes it reminds me of the guy who happened to be a Newfie and who briefly convinced me nearly twenty years ago to waste a lot of time re-writing quite a lot of code for 64 bit processors. I like Newfies, even had an uncle who was one of them, but I finally realized that his charming glibness was just a disguise for his underlying reason, which was that everything should stop because somebody said those cpu's were the coming thing but more urgently because the re-write was theoretically possible. Eventually, I came to my senses.

In Voltaire's Bastards, (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) John Ralston Saul explored what I think is the same phenomenon as it appears in other fields. It's a good thing he didn't cover this one, otherwise he'd still be writing that book. Saul claims to speak for a kind of humanism which I think is mostly ignored in the IT fields.

p

ps: meanwhile we have a recent question about "families" here that nobody but Neo has tried to answer. I was expecting that various theoretically recursive operators might be mentioned by the experts here and half-hoping that there might be talk of recursive structures too, but so far, no go. Received on Sun Aug 19 2007 - 04:08:59 CEST