[HN Gopher] How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)
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How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)
Author : agomez314
Score : 218 points
Date : 2021-03-28 11:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.purdue.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.purdue.edu)
| graderjs wrote:
| This is pretty awful, as in mean. Why would you deliberately want
| to insult someone who hasn't done anything to you? If it's
| getting them back sure, but as sport? Just cruel.
| Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't
| require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss
| something? (This is an especially good ploy if you observe others
| struggling to understand the talk because they will not want to
| admit to that after you imply it was easy.) Isn't this just
| a straightforward extension of an old result by Hartmanis? (Not
| even Hartmanis remembers all the theorems Hartmanis proved, but
| everyone else will assume you remember something they have
| forgotten.) Am I missing something here? Can you identify
| any deep mathematical content in this work? (Once again, audience
| members who found the talk difficult to understand will be
| unwilling to admit it.) Wasn't all this done years ago
| at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers what was really done at PARC,
| but everyone else will assume you remember something they don't.)
| Have you tested this on the chip Intel got running last week in
| their lab? (No one knows what chip Intel got running last
| week, but everyone will assume you do.) Am I missing
| something? Isn't it obvious that there's a bottleneck in the
| system that prevents scaling to arbitrary size? (This is safe
| because there's a bottleneck in every system that prevents
| arbitrary scaling.)
|
| Reminds me of low effort "comments" on Show HNs. Now I'm thinking
| that maybe people were deliberately trying to be insulting. But
| why...? Especially when people are being vulnerable sharing their
| work....
| de_nied wrote:
| This is pretty awful, as in mean. Why would you deliberately
| want to insult someone who hasn't done anything to you? If it's
| getting them back sure, but as sport? Just cruel.
| Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't
| require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss
| something? (This is an especially good ploy if you observe
| others struggling to understand the talk because they will not
| want to admit to that after you imply it was easy.) Isn't
| this just a straightforward extension of an old result by
| Hartmanis? (Not even Hartmanis remembers all the theorems
| Hartmanis proved, but everyone else will assume you remember
| something they have forgotten.) Am I missing something
| here? Can you identify any deep mathematical content in this
| work? (Once again, audience members who found the talk
| difficult to understand will be unwilling to admit it.)
| Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers
| what was really done at PARC, but everyone else will assume you
| remember something they don't.) Have you tested this on
| the chip Intel got running last week in their lab? (No one
| knows what chip Intel got running last week, but
| everyone will assume you do.) Am I missing something?
| Isn't it obvious that there's a bottleneck in the system that
| prevents scaling to arbitrary size? (This is safe because
| there's a bottleneck in every system that prevents arbitrary
| scaling.)
|
| Reminds me of low effort "comments" on Show HNs. Now I'm
| thinking that maybe people were deliberately trying to be
| insulting. But why...? Especially when people are being
| vulnerable sharing their work....
| callesgg wrote:
| The article is supposed to be a joke.
|
| If the author did not intend for it to be a joke, you can make
| the conclusion that the author has psychopathic tendencies.
| esjeon wrote:
| > Like mathematicians, theorists in Computer Science take the
| greatest pride in knowing and using the most sophisticated
| mathematics to solve problems.
|
| This reminds me of some papers that got their proofs wrong by
| applying some fancy theorems. The fact that their results are
| correct clearly suggests that those theorems were added as a
| second thought.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| If you browse r/MachineLearning, you will see many people
| complaining about unnecessarily convoluted mathematics that are
| literally there to appease reviewers and don't actually say
| anything useful.
| TrailMixRaisin wrote:
| In my understanding this comes from the fact that many ML is
| more engineering than science but wants to be seen (or is
| reviewed as) theoretical research. So it fits the situation
| in the article even better.
| Someone wrote:
| I think many ML isn't even engineering. Speeding up the
| implementation of an algorithm is, but the algorithms
| themselves mostly are of the _"something like this seemed
| to work for problem P, so for problem Q, I tried this
| variation"_ type.
|
| Yes, there may be solid math behind it that says _"if your
| problem is of type T, this algorithm will get within Foo of
| the optimal solution in O(n log n) time"_ , but the problem
| is that nobody can tell whether a given real-world problem
| is of type T. Yet, people happily run the algorithm and if
| it works, it works.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I agree with you. I beliebe that many people are trying to
| emulate papers like Vapnik's SVMs in an attempt to appear
| as ground-breaking because, well, the competition is
| enormous.
|
| There isn't clear distinction between the engineering
| aspects and the theoretical aspects, as the article said,
| it looks as if we are trying to get approval by
| mathematicians so papers become a convoluted amalgamation
| of different ideas and more often than not actually provide
| the worst of both worlds.
| j45 wrote:
| If anyone wondered what a quality email forward looked like, this
| could be one.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| This article had the most volunteer translations I've ever seen
| (26). I wonder why.
| akalsz wrote:
| Well the Hungarian one feels like somebody took every single
| word in the essay and replaced it with the first result from a
| rather small dictionary.
|
| Google Translate produces a better translation (which is of
| course still awful), but I have a feeling that the one in
| question was made by an earlier version of Google Translate as
| well.
| cwadaniels wrote:
| I particularly like this because it applies across STEM
| disciplines. One could easily apply this in behavioral
| neuroscience (my field) and get quality results. Although as both
| a theoretician and experimentalist I'm not sure which would hurt
| me more: isn't your reinforcement learning model just a
| recapitulation of Pavlovian conditioning? Or isn't your
| experimental design problematic because it doesn't make use of
| [insert favored alternative methods of insulter]. Probably the
| former. Ego often gets involved with theory.
| cryptica wrote:
| The goal of the typical developer is to add as much complexity as
| possible while ensuring that the system works correctly
| 99.999999% of the time such that failure will not be detected for
| a few years - Just long enough for the project to be scrapped and
| rewritten by the next generation of developers.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Richard Feynmann once made a comment to Danny Hillis (Connection
| Machine) on Computer Science. It amounted to, "What is it you
| guys DO!? I thought of all that stuff during the Manhattan
| Project!"
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is very true. In all peer reviews I've sat through, you can
| see these two types pop up again and again. The deft presenter
| will play the counter-type argument (and including with bounds to
| allow switching between the two viewepoints):
|
| "There's no mathematical rigor" --> "That's a strength, it's
| simple, performant, and therefore easy to verify for our use
| cases"
|
| "This is unnecessarily complex, and anyway you've ignored the
| constants. Our N is small." --> "Asymptotic performance just
| let's us sleep at night knowing it'll never be that bad. Here's a
| plot of the predicted and actual cost over our sized N's, you can
| see they agree well".
|
| Perhaps the moral of the story is, be an engineer for your use
| cases, and a theorist for scaling.
| duckfang wrote:
| "You wouldn't know an IF from a THEN!"
|
| "Oh look, another dev surprise."
|
| "They improved the code... To run in O(2^n) time."
|
| "I'm sure it worked in dev."
|
| "I can't believe it passed QA!"
| jwuphysics wrote:
| I can also provide some input on how to insult different kinds of
| astronomers depending on the field they work in.
|
| Cosmology: Use the word "cosmology" interchangeably with
| "astronomy."
|
| Simulations: "Did you include dust?" If they say yes then ask
| about magnetic fields. Either way, claim that they tuned their
| physical hyperparameters to achieve their results.
|
| Observations: "Did you follow up with <X telescope at different
| wavelength>?" Pick one that's especially competitive to request
| observations, such as Hubble or SOFIA or ALMA, so that if the
| answer is no they'll feel extra bad about their rejected
| Hubble/SOFIA/ALMA observing proposal.
| danaliv wrote:
| Or call them an astrologist. They love that.
| miklosme wrote:
| > In fact, this is merely an extension of a ploy used by children
| on a playground: "Oh yeah? I could have done that if I wanted
| to."
|
| Or by adult professionals on Hacker News.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| What a lame comment. I could have written one better If I had
| the time!
| fctorial wrote:
| What a lame comment. I could have written one better If I had
| the time!
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| What a great comment! I wrote a similar one on Reddit.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I had an insufferable coworker who doubled down on that
| attitude. If he hadn't thought of something, instead of just
| saying he could have done it, he'd start rambling about why it
| was a bad idea, and that he was smart for choosing not to do
| it. His whole attitude was "I know everything, and if I don't
| know it, it's because it's not worth knowing". Worst part was
| the non-technical management ate it up because he was so
| confidently wrong, so people got dragged into working on his
| convuluted solutions that just happened to always match up with
| his skillset.
| titzer wrote:
| This describes an uncomfortably high fraction of CS people.
| lallysingh wrote:
| And very clumpy. Some places are nearly full, some nearly
| empty.
| dfee wrote:
| So how do you productively deal with this? There's got to be
| a way, I just don't know what it is.
|
| The worse form of this is when they: 1) make poor choices
| faster than you can catch up
|
| 2) have a less senior team (in ability, not title) that can't
| see more than a couple commits ahead to keep the damage in
| check.
| Thursday032521 wrote:
| > So how do you productively deal with this?
|
| Explain it in your exit interview.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I know you're joking, but it's considered impolite to
| explain things in exit interviews.
| jldl805 wrote:
| Not if done professionally, positively, specifically, and
| helpfully.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I have to deal with a couple of people like this and it's a
| waking nightmare. I'm trying to figure out if it's even
| possible to mitigate their damage or successfully negotiate
| with them, or if I just need to change jobs. This behavior is
| especially bad when it comes from manager / team lead types.
| nickelpro wrote:
| A rather bold usage of "professionals" there, and for that
| matter "adult"
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well played sir!
| danaliv wrote:
| _> adult professionals on Hacker News_
|
| No such thing.
| rq1 wrote:
| I really wanted to like this writing but it seems that the author
| doesn't know what's a decision graph.
|
| It should have been better concluded and summarized by a decision
| graph.
|
| :)
| musicale wrote:
| Decision graphs are too easy to understand. That's why we avoid
| them for machine learning.
| SassyGrapefruit wrote:
| Can confirm. I once watched an engineer build a beautiful,
| functional subscription management system. When I asked him some
| practical questions he said "Elegant programs allow us to code as
| though the physical machine doesn't exist"
|
| The only problem was that under real conditions his code behaved
| like the stack was infinite; you know like it is in a theoretical
| computer.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| As an engineer supporting researchers I ran into a peculiar
| problem. If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it,
| because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad
| students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique
| idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an
| admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they
| were doing. So I had to lead them to come round to a perspective
| so they could think it was their own idea and hence be
| comfortable adopting it. A lot of time was wasted and ideas
| thrown away before I figured this out.
|
| Also, if you are ever involved in academic research and you hear
| the words "that's just engineering" be very wary. It's a strong
| indicator that 1) the idea is not practical 2) they don't
| understand what they are doing. 3) you are going to have to make
| it work, often as an unacknowledged side project "that should
| only take a few days". I often spent years figuring out these
| "that's just engineering" side projects. Even worse, we'd build a
| "proof of concept" that ignored all the engineering, and then try
| to get other researchers or companies interested in the system as
| though it was complete.
|
| Yet another thing I discovered is that for engineers one of the
| most important words they use in discussions is "no". Listen to
| two engineers discuss a problem and almost every other sentence
| will start with "no", "no that won't work because..." It's an
| important part of how they figure out how to make things work, by
| figuring out what does not work. CS researchers take it as an
| insult however, as in "no, you're an idiot and here's why".
| Perhaps because lead researchers are treated as infallible by
| their grad students they get the idea they can't be wrong, so
| they are not used to being contradicted. It's a huge problem in
| getting anything done. It can take months or years and a lot of
| wasted work to lead them around the circular path back to the
| original bad decision and try to get them to reconsider it (they
| are often very proud of it which makes it even more difficult).
| Saying "no" is somewhat like the mindset that is necessary for
| computer security work, you have to be able to attack systems or
| ideas from a ferocious point of view, seeking any weakness,
| without feeling that attacks on ideas are attacks on you. It's
| one of the most productive parts of discussion and is not taught
| directly, only by example and many CS researchers are so intent
| on building their reputations they will not tolerate it and are
| highly insulted by it and will defend their ideas to the point of
| absurdity. Framing a contradiction as a question helps here
| somewhat, though you still have to be careful in framing the
| question so it only leads to the contradiction rather than
| stating it outright.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because
| they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad
| students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a
| unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would
| be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what
| they were doing.
|
| That's what authorship is for. What's the point in supporting
| academia if you can't get authorship?
| tristor wrote:
| > "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. So I
| had to lead them to come round to a perspective so they could
| think it was their own idea and hence be comfortable adopting
| it.
|
| This also applies to industry. This is basically managing up
| 101 for engineers. If the boss thinks it's their idea, it'll
| get approved and supported. If they think it's someone else's
| idea, depending on environment, it'll get blocked or sabotaged.
| aspaceman wrote:
| I really think this misses the mark. Grad students don't treat
| their prof as infallible - at least good labs. In most labs,
| the grad students are the ones actually doing the work and
| research. The prof is just the marketing man. And a good prof
| in CS will understand they're the clueless marketing man. It's
| not really feasible for them to keep up with writing code and
| the whole grant writing (and networking with companies like
| you...) game.
|
| Also I'm surprised that you had academics shopping "products"
| to you. I've definitely shopped ideas to companies before, but
| always with the explicit understanding that I'm doing
| "research" - i.e. you're spending a bunch of money on something
| that may go nowhere, and you're not going to get a product out
| of it.
|
| That misunderstanding often makes the conversations end right
| there.
|
| As a counter, I've found that many engineers will shut down
| ideas before you can even get started working on them because
| "no that won't work". It can be very frustrating, as the
| technical arguments they offer are stiff as a board. And not
| always as technical as they think.
|
| Granted I work with GPU hardware research, so it could just be
| a lack of products in this area. Maybe viz? ML especially
| probably? I get the impression ML profs are a load of shit tbh.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > I get the impression ML profs are a load of shit tbh.
|
| The field has exploded over the recent years and the new
| people are somewhat filtered for the ability to hype up
| hiring committees.
| oliverobscure wrote:
| My degree course is split across my university's Computer
| Science and Engineering departments, so I often get to hear
| both of the discussions you described. I would say that CS
| supervisors talking to their students are more direct in saying
| that the ideas that they come with won't work or that their
| mathematics is incorrect, whereas engineering professors seemed
| to be a bit more subtle and guiding where their students
| falter, as though they perhaps had the exact same ideas when
| they were younger and want to gently discourage the same
| mistakes. That's not to say Engineering professors wouldn't
| tell you you're wrong, it just feels that the knowledge gap
| between the experienced and inexperienced engineer is larger
| than that for the computer scientist, and so there is more room
| for small errors to grow into bigger problems if ignored.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > whereas engineering professors seemed to be a bit more
| subtle and guiding where their students falter, as though
| they perhaps had the exact same ideas when they were younger
| and want to gently discourage the same mistakes.
|
| It's because once something fails, in engineering the work
| doesn't stop. You have to root cause it and understand the
| failure. That's a valuable exercise in itself.
| cgtyoder wrote:
| > Yet another thing I discovered is that for engineers one of
| the most important words they use in discussions is "no"...
|
| This paragraph is a great insight - knowing how someone else is
| going to receive your (as you perceive it) constructive
| criticism cuts down miles to the destination of achieving the
| common goal. Speaking so your listeners will be able to "hear"
| you without perceiving an attack is critical in cross-
| discipline groups.
| musicale wrote:
| > if you are ever involved in academic research and you hear
| the words "that's just engineering" be very wary
|
| An eminent computer scientist (Jeff Mogul I think) once pointed
| out that computer systems research is basically engineering.
|
| I concur with this assessment and suggest that it's something
| that systems researchers should be proud of. After all,
| engineering means you're actually designing and building
| something that could potentially work.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Even worse, we 'd build a "proof of concept" that ignored
| all the engineering, and then try to get other researchers or
| companies interested in the system as though it was complete._
|
| This is far from unique to academic circles...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Career science / academia has these problems in general. But
| probably also industry as well. (Like who takes credit for
| what, if it's someone else's idea, it must be axed etc., if
| it comes from the boss' favorite then it must not be
| questioned etc)
| cycomanic wrote:
| Regarding the feeling offended to hearing "no", I think this
| has little to do with researchers/academics and more to do with
| managers and people who have to do it.
|
| Generally, I would argue most researchers are very similar to
| what you attribute to engineers, e.g. they often answer "no"
| first (I have heard that commented on by outside observers
| multiple times). In fact researchers (academic or otherwise)
| are trained to find flaws in systems quickly, which typically
| involves saying "no that doesn't work because ...".
|
| The flip side of the coin is that managers (and Professors or
| group leaders are essentially managers) don't like to be told
| that something can't be done. Especially if it was their idea.
| This is the same in many industry settings. So they really
| dislike to be told "no".
|
| The irony is that at some point in the transition from
| researcher in the trenches (PhD, postdoc ...) to
| Professor/group leader many start to think that the PhD
| students/postdocs say know because they don't want to do the
| work. It's really weird, because pretty much everyone who is in
| academia is strongly self-motivated as they should know from
| their own experience.
| _Microft wrote:
| _> you have to be able to attack systems or ideas from a
| ferocious point of view, seeking any weakness, without feeling
| that attacks on ideas are attacks on you_
|
| This is how you should work in science anyways: "we tried to
| refute a theory, failed at that and are now forced to assume
| that it is valid to some degree."
|
| Does CS have a problem with that in general?
| b215826 wrote:
| > _Like mathematicians, theorists in Computer Science take the
| greatest pride in knowing and using the most sophisticated
| mathematics to solve problems. For example, theorists will light
| up when telling you that they have discovered how an obscure
| theorem from geometry can be used in the analysis of a computer
| algorithm. Theorists focus on mathematical analysis and the
| asymptotic behavior of computation; they take pride in the beauty
| of equations and don 't worry about constants. Although they
| usually imply that their results are relevant to real computers,
| they secretly dream about impressing mathematicians._
|
| This is true about all fields that involve substantial amount of
| mathematics, e.g., physics and economics. In physics (and to a
| lesser extent, economics) you see a sort of "rift" between
| experimentalists and theorists very often, with both groups
| thinking that they are better than the other. Even among
| theoretical physicists, you tend to see this sort of petty
| rivalry: high-energy theorists thinking that they are better
| because they are after the fundamental laws of the universe,
| condensed matter (both hard and soft) theorists who feel that
| they are the better lot since their theories can be compared with
| experiments, hard-condensed matter theorists often look down upon
| soft-condensed matter theory as being a "classical" discipline
| invented to bring in more grant money, etc. While there's some
| truth to all these beliefs, rather than engage in this petty
| rivalry, it would actually do a lot more good to do honest work
| in one's own field.
| cturner wrote:
| I feel it misses a reliable take-down of the systems people.
| Recipe: (1) ask the person if they have evaluated some framework
| which would take months to evaluate; (2) suggest that their hard
| work reinvents the wheel; (3) step back and enjoy a smug victory.
|
| On the odd occasion that they have evaluated the framework you
| named, you can simply try again a few minutes later with a
| different framework. If you are challenged, use condescension to
| imply that the victim did not try hard enough.
|
| This tactic works even for situations where the victim has used a
| first-principles approach to completely demolish a problem to the
| satisfaction of all stakeholders. 'Reinventing the wheel' is a
| type of sin. The mere suggestion of it will stick like shit to a
| blanket.
| tralarpa wrote:
| You can attack them even if you have no idea what they are
| doing. Just look at the plots in the report and mumble
| something about "missing confidence intervals", "unrealistic
| workload", and "it's not even heavy tailed".
| mattkrause wrote:
| "Missing confidence intervals" is my (IMO) legit pet peeve.
|
| People fit frighteningly complicated models with millions-to-
| billions of parameters. They throw in hairy regularization
| schemes justified by fancy math.
|
| When it comes time to evaluate the output, however: "Our
| model is better because this one number is bigger than their
| number [once, on this one test set]."
| stcredzero wrote:
| As an undergrad, my circle had this drinking game called
| "Big Number." It came about because two of the biggest
| wastoids were the last people awake in the wee hours of
| Sunday, and one of them said to the other, "I'm too drunk
| to deal. Let's just roll dice, and the one with the biggest
| number drinks."
|
| Of course, over the years, the game developed dozens of
| other rules.
| skohan wrote:
| "Not reactive enough"
| tralarpa wrote:
| "Have you tried to quantify the QoE?"
| swebs wrote:
| Nice comment, but you should rewrite it in Rust.
| omginternets wrote:
| Nah man, Rust has overplayed its hand and has been turned
| into a meme. We need a new Rust that's exactly like the old
| Rust before it was cool.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Yeah, come on, write it in Nim or don't write it at all.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Nim is too simple and lacks complex mathematics.
| kodah wrote:
| Lisp has joined the channel
| collyw wrote:
| I tried Rust a while ago (I do mainly Python) but not for
| long enough to get my head around it (the borrow checker).
|
| Is it now past the peak hype cycle, or do people still love
| it?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I learned it a while back during some huge hype and put
| it down for a while after slow, minor, painful success. I
| recently came back and it feels much improved, and my
| troubles with the borrow checker seem to finally be
| something I have overcome. I think it will continue to be
| loved.
| swsieber wrote:
| There was a real improvement to the borrow checker to
| make it use non-lexical-lifetimes. The practical
| implications were the borrow checker being much better at
| reasoning about mutually exclusive borrows between
| branches.
| loopz wrote:
| That beginner-level Rust code made Coq barf. Rewrite your POC
| in Haskell before reverting back.
| collyw wrote:
| I have a system full of reinvented wheels to keep running
| (going to try and replace them with more standard solutions).
|
| The dev has now left but he would always insist that the
| existing solutions didn't meet every need. There was always one
| feature that required him to build some over engineered version
| of something. "Good enough" was never an option for him.
| bigjimbo wrote:
| I always liked this quote from Alan Kay - "Reinventing the flat
| tire"
| mcguire wrote:
| "Attacking Crossover Work" -- Ouch.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This is great fun, but did anyone else think the suggested
| insults for experimentalists were very weak? The Xerox Parc one
| is good but most experimentalists would love a question about
| bottlenecks! And who cares about testing on Intel's latest chip?
| I suggest a proper insult would suggest an easily avoided
| bottleneck or unnecessary point of failure.
| [deleted]
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I feel like experimentalists have changed quite a bit in 20
| years as big distributed systems have become more common. A
| good question might be "Sure your performance scales better
| than other systems but how does it compare to a single core, or
| a single big machine?"
| d23 wrote:
| > Have you tested this on the chip Intel got running last week in
| their lab?
|
| This is my favorite, not because I've heard this particular one,
| but because I've heard this vein of low-effort comment after
| nearly every talk I've ever seen. "Did you consider this specific
| aspect of niche-thing-only-I'm-working-on?" Some people seem to
| always look for the opportunity to show how much they know about
| a topic rather than actually discuss in good faith the topic at
| hand.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "Did you consider this specific aspect of niche-thing-
| only-I'm-working-on?"
|
| I've seen 2 kinds of people that usually make this comment.
| Some do because niche-thing is the one they currently know
| better, and they have to make some comment, so they ask about
| what they know better. The others are the more interesting
| kind, they ask because they want to use niche-thing in some new
| way, so if you did for a chance consider it, they are very
| interested in it, and if you didn't, it may be an opportunity
| for them.
| ntechau wrote:
| Criticism should not be insulting.
|
| The primary title of this document is a thinly veiled attempt of
| shrouding the author's true intent. It's clear from their final
| words on the topic that they mean to insult, not criticize.
| navbaker wrote:
| The author's primary field is Applied Criticism, so this is to
| be expected.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Agree. Articles like this are good fun (another favourite of
| mine is _How to Write Unmaintainable Code_ [0]), but misleading
| titles are still poor form.
|
| For good general advice on productive criticism, I recommend
| _How to Criticize with Kindness_ , by the philosopher Daniel
| Dennett. [1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
|
| [1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-
| rapo...
| bogwog wrote:
| The full title:
|
| > How To Criticize Computer Scientists > or > Avoiding
| Ineffective Deprecation And > Making Insults More Pointed
|
| Am I missing something? Isn't your failure to read the full
| title a result of your desire to insult the author, rather than
| to criticize them? Wasn't this done already at Xerox PARC?
| titzer wrote:
| Despite the seemingly original nature of your comments, is
| there a deep satirical result here that I am missing? Did you
| decide to try a second approach because you had insufficient
| results from the first?
| dehrmann wrote:
| Worth noting that this seems to be by Douglas Comer, the guy who
| write the book on TCP/IP.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Comer
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| > I once sat through an hour lecture where someone proved that
| after a computer executed an assignment statement that put the
| integer 1 into variable x, the value in x was 1.
|
| As someone who's mostly self-taught in CS (EE degree), I'd love
| to listen to something like this if anyone knows of a recording
| somewhere.
| oaiey wrote:
| Sounds like it is also applicable to regular non research
| computer scientists.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Or you could go full guilt-by-association:
|
| "Isn't that same approach suggested and funded by Jeffrey
| Epstein?"
| brigandish wrote:
| > they secretly dream about impressing mathematicians
|
| This made me chuckle, and then I read this:
|
| > systems researchers will light up when telling you that they
| have constructed a system that is twice as fast, half the size,
| and more powerful than its predecessor
|
| and thought "Oh God, that is me"! (I'm not in research) I almost
| don't want to read the rest.
|
| On a (possibly) less personal topic, I've found that non-computer
| science researchers who program will dismiss all help with "it
| doesn't need to be run by anyone else", (which is kind of scary
| considering the problems with reproducibility) or, if they are
| open to help but they don't understand what you've
| suggested/written/submitted etc, will try hard to drop it
| quietly. I think it's so they don't have to admit any lack of
| understanding, which is weird - I can barely understand code I
| wrote 6 months ago and I've written plenty of Perl in the past,
| too. The idea that code should be so easily understood that to
| ask a question would make one seem inadequate strikes me as a
| fanciful dream.
|
| Edit: don't want to mislead, I'm not a researcher, it just sounds
| like me :/ :)
| collyw wrote:
| > I've found that non-computer science researchers who program
| will dismiss all help with "it doesn't need to be run by anyone
| else",
|
| I used to work with bioinformaticians, and often wasn't
| impressed by a lot of the code that they churned out. But to be
| fair a lot of the work was just to produce a one off graph /
| heatmap to prove or disprove something, so most of the time it
| wasn't so important.
|
| > I can barely understand code I wrote 6 months ago and I've
| written plenty of Perl in the past, too. The idea that code
| should be so easily understood that to ask a question would
| make one seem inadequate strikes me as a fanciful dream.
|
| This was a big learning experience for me. I wrote and
| maintained a Django based system for four and a half years.
| When I couldn't understand my own code a few months later it
| was time to refactor. Ask yourself why you don't understand it
| and how you would expect it to be if it was written in an
| easier to understand way. It will save you time in the long
| run. Ex-colleagues commented that they found my code / database
| design fairly logical after I had left that job.
| CrLf wrote:
| In the past I've worked around non-computer science researchers
| and saw many places where having a programmer on-board would
| help greatly.
|
| It wasn't so much about understanding, I guess, but the
| apparent loss of ownership. Like if bits of the research get
| automated, then it isn't no longer their work, but the
| computer's.
| jrumbut wrote:
| They fall victim to the same thing every programmer in over
| their head rushing to finish does.
|
| It looks to them like if they can just add one more floor to
| the house of cards it will be over, why bother explaining the
| whole project to someone else?
| rocqua wrote:
| > they secretly dream about impressing mathematicians
|
| I read that, chuckled and felt offended because IT ME.
|
| > systems researchers will light up when telling you that they
| have constructed a system that is twice as fast, half the size,
| and more powerful than its predecessor
|
| Then I read this and I _also_ thought IT ME.
|
| I am not sure whether this means I have the skills of both
| sides or the foibles.
| bhntr3 wrote:
| This essay seems to have been published 20 years ago. In the
| modern version, the experimentalists use terms like "deep
| learning" and "neural nets" and the theorists use terms like
| "fuck all this deep learning bullshit"
| [deleted]
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| I would actually love the non-joke version of this article about
| how to constructively criticize, especially when you have to do
| it via text.
| teddyh wrote:
| Link via MaxBarraclough elsewhere1 in this thread:
|
| https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
|
| 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26620225
| sokoloff wrote:
| Your meaning is perfectly clear (and I'd also like that
| article), but for some reason 25% of my brain is stuck reading
| "text" as "text message" and imagining someone banging out a
| critiquing response in T9 mode on some old Nokia phone.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Like this:
|
| LOL UR PPR SUX JK ;)
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