I was in the programming channel of the lesswrong slack this morning (it’s a group chat web thing, all are welcome to ask for an invite if you’d like to chat with rationalists in a place that is not the archaic, transient mess that is IRC. (though irc.freenode.net/#lesswrong is not so terrible a place to hang out either, if you’re into that))
, and a member expressed difficulty maintaining their interest in programming as a means to the end of earning to give. I’ve heard it said more than once that you can’t teach passion, but I’d always taken that as the empty sputtering of those who simply do not know what passion is or what inspires it, so I decided, since we two have overlapping aesthetics and aspirations, that I would try to articulate my own passion for programming. Maybe it would transfer.
Here’s what I wrote, more or less
So, the problem that most philosophers in academia trip over, get impaled on, and worship for the rest of their careers, is that they’re using great clumbering conceptual frameworks that they do not and cannot ever understand, that is, natural language and common-sense reasoning, as it were evolved by a blind, flawed process that has never embarked to write any apologia or documentation for its subjects.
In programming, any ill-defined abstract concept is far more obvious, widely acknowledged, and mitigable. The act of programming is essentially the act of taking conceptual chimeras(the requirements) apart and reforming them into well-defined, practically computable processes. Debugging is the process of figuring out how you failed to articulate a concept properly, and identifying the problem in it.
For an analytic philosopher, programming is not just an occupation, it’s an opportunity to get paid to do good work, with the side effect of examining the nature of concept and thought and developing one’s sense for details and definition.
Aside from that, I’ve always felt like programming is a very progressive process. In theory, once a FOSS dev abstracts a concept properly everyone else in the world can then build on top of that concept. No other field can progress as quickly and concretely as programming.
(In practice, though, that is false. The tower of babel is collapsed and rebuilt every decade. Still, I’ve found it to be a helpful delusion where passion’s concerned.)
It was well received. Maybe it was enough? I don’t know. But I think more should be written on the relationship between the act of programming and the analysis of concepts. Every time I meet a programmer who clearly has enough talent to.. let’s say.. put together sanely architectected patches to the source code of our culture.. but who instead recedes into their work and never devotes any time to analytic philosophy, it breaks my heart a little.
I’ve heard it said more than once that you can’t teach passion, but I’d always taken that as the empty sputtering of those who simply do not know what passion is or what inspires it.
Could you elaborate on this? You sound very certain for someone whom I wouldn’t expect to have much background on the subject.
=/ The conveyance of passion is not an esoteric subject. Anyone who’s spent a significant portion of their life as a student will have seen it happen, on and off. We might be talking about different things, of course. I’m only talking about passion the spark, which is liable to fizzle out if it’s not immediately and actively fed, whereas I’d expect more extensive investigations into passion to focus on passion the blaze, a phenomenon has greater measurable impact, a passion well enough established to spread itself over new resources and keep feeding itself. (although with programming there’s less of a difference between the two, since there’s an abundance of resources.)
Aside from that, my prior for the probability of a complex of human thought being impossible to transmit from one mind to another is just extremely low. IME when a person who is not a poet, or a writer, or a rationalist or an artist says that a thought can’t be communicated or explained, that’s coming from a place of ignorance. People who are not rationalists rarely ever properly explain anything, nor do they usually require proper explanations. People who are not poets, who do not read poetry, have no sense of the limits of what can be expressed. When one of these people says that something can’t be expressed, they are bullshitting. They do not know. They could not possibly know.
I was in the programming channel of the lesswrong slack this morning (it’s a group chat web thing, all are welcome to ask for an invite if you’d like to chat with rationalists in a place that is not the archaic, transient mess that is IRC. (though irc.freenode.net/#lesswrong is not so terrible a place to hang out either, if you’re into that))
, and a member expressed difficulty maintaining their interest in programming as a means to the end of earning to give. I’ve heard it said more than once that you can’t teach passion, but I’d always taken that as the empty sputtering of those who simply do not know what passion is or what inspires it, so I decided, since we two have overlapping aesthetics and aspirations, that I would try to articulate my own passion for programming. Maybe it would transfer.
Here’s what I wrote, more or less
It was well received. Maybe it was enough? I don’t know. But I think more should be written on the relationship between the act of programming and the analysis of concepts. Every time I meet a programmer who clearly has enough talent to.. let’s say.. put together sanely architectected patches to the source code of our culture.. but who instead recedes into their work and never devotes any time to analytic philosophy, it breaks my heart a little.
Could you elaborate on this? You sound very certain for someone whom I wouldn’t expect to have much background on the subject.
=/ The conveyance of passion is not an esoteric subject. Anyone who’s spent a significant portion of their life as a student will have seen it happen, on and off. We might be talking about different things, of course. I’m only talking about passion the spark, which is liable to fizzle out if it’s not immediately and actively fed, whereas I’d expect more extensive investigations into passion to focus on passion the blaze, a phenomenon has greater measurable impact, a passion well enough established to spread itself over new resources and keep feeding itself. (although with programming there’s less of a difference between the two, since there’s an abundance of resources.)
Aside from that, my prior for the probability of a complex of human thought being impossible to transmit from one mind to another is just extremely low. IME when a person who is not a poet, or a writer, or a rationalist or an artist says that a thought can’t be communicated or explained, that’s coming from a place of ignorance. People who are not rationalists rarely ever properly explain anything, nor do they usually require proper explanations. People who are not poets, who do not read poetry, have no sense of the limits of what can be expressed. When one of these people says that something can’t be expressed, they are bullshitting. They do not know. They could not possibly know.
.