Dijkstra on Reading Less Among Other Things
Dijkstra on Reading Less Among Other Things
Plus criticisms of Turing and even more Romantic science
The scientific optimism of the late 19th century is responsible for the common opinion that "the greater our knowledge, the more perfect our understanding". This assumption is the ultimate justification for so many of our university curricula, that one can hardly challenge it without running the risk of being accused of preaching the virtues of ignorance. Yet I challenge it: the greater our knowledge, the more perfect our understanding..... what sheer nonsense! Think about the wealth of information that the modern communication media give us about the world and its inhabitants: never before, Mankind has been so confused about itself as today! The overpowering flood of conflicting impressions leaves many of us so bewildered that, in utter despair, they seek salvation in cheap mysticism or a narrow minded ideology: the greater knowledge has not created greater understanding, it has created extremism instead. Another fine example is provided by the last decade of nuclear physics. At a fantastic expense a fantastic number of bubble chamber experiments have been made. And what has happened? By discovering a new "elementary particle" every other week, the nuclear physicists have made themselves the laughingstock of the scientific community.
If you knew everything, then you would probably understand everything, but if you have a huge sea of information, you can just pick what you already agree with. Not an astoundingly relevant picture, but since Substack is really full of more extremism than probably any other site I’ve ever used, here’s the first picture that comes to mind right now for the idea of extremism since I’ve just been talking about comics off and on.
…Well, this post is indirectly the origin of the meme about keeping telepathic dolphins away from the communists that Starfire Codes recently reposted. Ironically the cables in the ocean that sparked that debate might be helping to keep dolphins away from the communists. (Yes, that’s based on real, weird parts of Cold War history. You know how Cold War history is. Also based on the fact apparently dolphins are bothered by signals from cables underwater. But Extreme Groundskeeping overlaying this picture with a dolphin is what triggered the meme specifically.) I think Demi Pietchell just liked the comments that were making fun of Elon Musk though. I like making fun of Elon Musk, but I don’t like freaking out over Elon Musk, which she seems to like to do, because she doesn’t seem to hold the same view of knowledge as I do. I hold the so-called Romantic view of knowledge, where the highest form of knowledge is psychology because that’s the mind knowing itself, and physics is all the way at the bottom. Meanwhile she seems to exalt Elon Musk as being so powerful and dangerous even though I think he’s just straight out insane, not borderline insane but completely nuts and just getting away with it for some time due to his inheritance, because she seems to agree with him that the way we solve everything is with gadgets and physics is the most important science with psychology being virtually worthless.
Romanticism in science - Wikipedia
When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere.[2]: 15 It was also in this way that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: they did not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top of the hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences next and psychology placed even higher.[2]: 19 This hierarchy reflected Romantic ideals of science because the whole organism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, and the intricacies of the human mind take even more precedence since the human intellect was sacred and necessary to understanding nature around it and reuniting with it.
Various disciplines on the study of nature that were cultivated by Romanticism included: Schelling's Naturphilosophie; cosmology and cosmogony; developmental history of the earth and its creatures; the new science of biology; investigations of mental states, conscious and unconscious, normal and abnormal; experimental disciplines to uncover the hidden forces of nature – electricity, magnetism, galvanism and other life-forces; physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology, mineralogy, "philosophical" anatomy, among others.[2]: 6
This is also basically the polar opposite of how Comte rationalized his positivist system.
The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand—not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one. ... This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called "positivity," which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalizing thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.
— Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology (1898), [13]
I see things very differently, because I don’t see how increasingly complexity means you can’t be as exact, it just means it’s more difficult. It should be more difficult, since the more complex sciences are the better ones. Comte at least admitted that mathematics is not a science and should be allowed to apply to psychology and biology as much as it does to physics, which puts him miles ahead of his successors sadly. However, the root problem I see is that if you evaluate the more complex sciences as lower, you’re just looking for a rationalization not to put as much work into them, so you have to call them “less exact” and in the case of positivism, “less positive.” Positivism to me seems entirely like an exercise in rationalization by the “the Universe is so interesting because it’s big” crowd. Guys, Polaris is younger than sharks, as in, the star itself didn’t even physically exist yet. I want to go to space too… to look for aliens, space plants, and space minerals and be a space naturalist or a space linguist since there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough to do on Earth and or enough resources for everyone, not because I think space is better because it’s big. As the first link article puts it, that sounds like a very vulgar notion when you put it like that.
More from the Dijkstra article:
What, you may ask, has all this to do with Computing Science? Well, everything. In perfect analogy to the belief that our understanding was imperfect, because we did not know enough, it was also felt that many goals were not reached, because what had to be done for that purpose, could not be done fast enough. The usual explanation of the successful advent of the automatic computer refers to Babbage's technical failure to make one with mechanical means, and observes that, at last, electronic technology had made its construction feasible. I would like to offer another explanation: at last there was a cultural climate in which the attitude of "the more, the better" was such a predominant one that it was willing to accept the gimmick as the obvious tool for our salvation. And if you do not believe this explanation, try to imagine, how Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed or Homer would have reacted when they had been offered a UNIVAC 1..... Who of us doesn't remember the advertisements for the first electronic business machines, proudly announcing that "our machines will take for you more than a hundred thousand decisions a second!". The advertisement did not warn the reader that they were all trivial, nor that in this connection the use of the term "decision" is misleading, but to that misleading terminology I shall return later. Speed was the key issue and in the thinking of many still is.
We’ve actually had a mechanical computer for nearly 2000 years and people literally just forgot it even existed for most of that time, but yes, the culture has changed, probably because in my opinion physics-worship finally transmuted into machine-worship.
I’m sure there have been people who are skeptical of the whole idea of the Singularity for longer than there have been people who thought it was a swell idea. Before there was this David Bowie song there were books about how the machine would revolt. This just proves that people like Elon Musk really don’t read books all that often. Or listen to all that much David Bowie despite asking for people to make the background music for them “Life on Mars?” They already didn’t read X-Men before naming everything with the letter X, confirmed by both interviews and deciding it’s a great idea to compare George Soros to Magneto when Magneto was Jewish and basically got turned into an anti-hero who started a country for mutants and was just misunderstood. #MagnetoDidNothingWrong It’s all an absolutely terrible and shallow attempt at PR, yet people fall for it because they would never want to be seen as nerds or geeks, while Elongated Muskrat wants to be seen as a nerd or geek but really doesn’t actually have anything to back it up.
Dijkstra, continued:
One of the, in retrospect, most striking things is that for many years the correctness problem was solely viewed as a posteriori verification of given programs. Given a program and given a set of requirements, does the given program meet the given requirements? Phrased as a question that could be answered by "Yes" or "No", it was apparently not without appeal for the mathematicians of that period, mathematicians who, by their training, were on the average perhaps rather analytically oriented. But besides that, I think that a specific tradition pushed them into that analytic direction, and that is the tradition that got its pronounced form with the work of Alan M.Turing. It is the approach, in which a —hopefully well understood!— mechanism is started and we are invited to figure out, whether we can prove something about the class of ensuing happenings, corresponding to the class of initial states in which the mechanism may be started. We can ask ourselves whether it will terminate or, if that is too difficult, whether we can say something about the final state provided the activity terminates, and so on. It is the mechanistic, operational point of view which regards the "answer" to be defined as the last one of a long sequence of intermediate machine states of which the initial state is the first one. Turing's work and the branch of mathematics that emerged from it were so impressive that they caused a strong bias in the earlier work on program correctness, a bias which I do not consider as wholly fortunate. Its main consequences seem to have been the following.
Firstly, nearly all through the sixties, efforts at giving a formal definition of the semantics of programming languages have been in the form of writing an interpreter, i.e. designing an abstract machine, for such a programming language. Developing means for describing the intermediate states of such an abstract machine became soon a major concern.
Secondly, the unsolvability of the halting problem, combined with an early desire to mechanize correctness proving, has caused many to restrict themselves —apparently without much hesitation— to proving partial correctness only, viz. proving only that an acceptable answer will be produced under the additional assumption that the computational process terminates.
Since the late sixties we distinguish, however, a process for which "shedding the shackles of automata theory" could be an appropriate —be it perhaps too vivid— description. Two things started to happen in parallel, initially, as far as I can see, rather independently of each other.
A different Dijkstra article which I see as being indirectly related:
Apparently, many programmers derive the major part of their intellectual satisfaction and professional excitement from not quite understanding what they are doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most under-nourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic, and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineers, who are secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks they take in their daring irresponsibility. They revel in the puzzles posed by the task of debugging. They defend —by appealing to all sorts of supposed Laws of Nature— the right of existence of their program bugs, because they are so attached to them: without the bugs, they feel, programming would no longer be what is used to be! (In the latter feeling I think —if I may say so— that they are quite correct.)
Though Dijkstra did not make the connection, I’ve been under the impression Turing himself was very into what would widely be considered “black magic.”
It has been suggested that Turing's belief in fortune-telling may have caused his depressed mood.[180] As a youth, Turing had been told by a fortune-teller that he would be a genius. In mid-May 1954, shortly before his death, Turing again decided to consult a fortune-teller during a day-trip to St Annes-on-Sea with the Greenbaum family.[180] According to the Greenbaums' daughter, Barbara:[172]
But it was a lovely sunny day and Alan was in a cheerful mood and off we went... Then he thought it would be a good idea to go to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool. We found a fortune-teller's tent and Alan said he'd like to go in[,] so we waited around for him to come back... And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking, horror-stricken face. Something had happened. We don't know what the fortune-teller said but he obviously was deeply unhappy. I think that was probably the last time we saw him before we heard of his suicide.
If you think this is accurate, which I think it is overwhelmingly likely to be seeing as it’s a firsthand source, then the fascination with “black magic” in modern computer science seems to have directly come out of that part of Turing’s personality, which also literally caused him to kill himself. Eek. And what are the lyrics to that “Saviour Machine” song I posted up there for people who don’t have them committed to memory like I do from listening to tons of David Bowie all the time growing up?
David Bowie – Saviour Machine Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour MachineThey called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredomPlease don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you allDon't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour MachineI need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mindDon't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine
Oh, my. That is very Turing-esque.
Dijkstra also likes to call the engineering approach the black box approach, and this has essentially given me a theory of black magic, though I developed it in less concise terms before then when I was trying to decide why religions would ban certain kinds of things that would be called magic when it wasn’t so clearly about idolatry. I came up with the definition that black magic involves self-deception. Deceiving others is not a nice thing to do, but that in itself is not black magic. Giving someone an incentive to deceive themselves is, but the biggest form of black magic is self-deception. I think that’s also why a lot of self-described occultists are really mad at the chaos magick community, because I think the chaos magick community makes this very clear: their primary method is to make a sigil and then the instructions specifically say to forget about the sigil and try not to think about it or remember it at all. Why anyone would want to do black magic seems baffling from a “normal” perspective, but I think the trick is to try to paint it as somehow having a mastery over your own mind by blocking things out of it.
I need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind
I wrote in my cognitive enhancement article that I really learned how to hypnotize myself as basically a toddler and a long while after that I did end up deciding that mind-wiping myself or intentionally suppressing things in certain cases was a good idea and showed some kind of self-mastery. It’s only been relatively recent that I even questioned that at all. Even though I just figured out how to change (and perceive) my brain waves naturally and I don’t consider that a problem, I think using it that way is a problem. I don’t equate blocking out pain with trying to block out thoughts either. Just not feeling something as being subjectively painful is different than being cognitively unaware it’s even there. The latter is the problem and the root of what I would consider black magic. Lots and lots of people get addicted to black magic, and I would say the idea that the so-called elites are is accurate, and that’s basically the whole reason Elon Musk identifies with Doctor Strange and wants to put a computer chip in his head and yours despite literally calling it a demon (hello Doctor Strange.)
On the first topic, reading more is probably also a way to do black magic, since it’s a distraction and it overwhelms you so that you can now believe anything you want even if it’s obviously a problem and stupid. You add a lot of noise and then you can see whatever you want in the noise like someone in a horror movie staring at a TV screen that isn’t working and perceiving whatever kinds of demonic, ghostly, or otherwise evil things in it.
Credit to someone I played D&D with a couple of times for that reference.