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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#31

Post by QuercusMax »

JackFr wrote: post #17
JohnMakin wrote: post #5

I wasn’t aware there was a term for this or that this was not common knowledge - for me I refer to them as “if I fix this, it will break EVERYTHING” cases that come up in my particular line of work frequently, and my peers generally tend to understand as well. Cause/effect in complex symptoms is of course itself complex, which is why the first thing I typically do in any environment is set up metrics and monitoring.…

I’ve come across (possibly written) code that upon close examination seems to only work accidentally — that there are real failures which are somehow hidden by behavior of other systems. The classic and oft heard “How did this ever work?”

In at least a few cases I can think of, the answer was almost definitely "it actually never did work, we just didn't notice how it was broken in this case".

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#32

Post by DJBunnies »

kortilla wrote: post #3

Meh, these are just examples of the inability to correctly root cause issues. There is a good lesson in here about the real cause being lack of testing (the teammate’s DOM change should have never merged) and lack of monitoring (upstream mail provider failure should have been setting off alerts a long time ago). The changes only had adjacency to the causes and that’s super common on any system that has a few core pie…

Yeah why did he rebase unreleased code?

And the “right” RC only has to be right enough to solve the issue.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#33

Post by jstrieb »

Relevant (deleted, as far as I can tell) tweet:

> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#34

Post by nmaley »

Gettier cases tell us something interesting about truth and knowledge. This is that a factual claim should depict the event that was the effective cause of the claim being made. Depiction is a picturing relationship: a correspondence between the words and a possible event (eg a cow in a field). Knowledge is when the depicted event was the effective cause of the belief. Since the paper mache cow was the cause of the belief, not a real cow, our intuitions tell us this is not normal knowledge. Therefore, true statements must have both a causal and depictional relationship with something in the world. Put another way, true statements implicitly describe a part of their own causal history.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#38

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

n4r9 wrote: post #29
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

Could you elaborate what you mean by that?

We all carry around multiple falsehoods in our heads that we are convinced are true for a variety of reasons.

To say that this is not "knowing" is (as another commenter noted) hair-splitting of the worst kind. In every sense it is a justified belief that happens to be false (we just do not know that yet).

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#39

Post by recursive »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #26
namuol wrote: post #13

I always come back to this saying: “Debugging is the art of figuring out which of your assumptions are wrong.” (Attribution unknown)

As long as "your assumptions" includes "I know what I am doing", then OK. But most people tend not to include that in the "your assumptions" list, and frequently it is the source of the bug.

What if you never believed that in the first place?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#40

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

JadeNB wrote: post #30
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

> That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do. I think the philosophical claim is that, when we think we know something, and the thing that we turns out to be false, what has happened isn't that we knew something false, but rather that we didn't actually know the…

The problem with the hair splitting is that it requires differentiating between different brain states over time where the only difference is the content.

On Jan 1 2024 I "know" X. Time passes. On Jan 1 2028, I "know" !X. In both cases, there is

(a) something it is like to "know" either X or !X

(b) discernible brain states the correspond to "knowing" either X or !X and that are distinct from "knowing" neither

Thus, even if you don't want to call "knowing X" actually "knowing", it is in just about every sense indistinguishable from "knowing !X".

Also, a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to X is indistinguishable from a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to !X. In both cases, we possess knowledge which may be true or false. The knowledge we have at different times alters; at all times we have a belief that we have the knowledge that justifies X or !X, and we are correct in that belief - it is only the knowledge itself that is false.

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