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On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

cs.utexas.edu

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Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#41

Post by defined »

clock_tower wrote: post #4

"But then Galileo made the troubling discovery that the heavier stone does not fall any faster than the lighter one." It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance. Aristotle's physics were based on pretty accurate observation of the pre-industrial world, although they're surprisingly shor…

> It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance.

Not necessarily; for one thing, if the masses of the two stones are not significantly different, the difference in the effects of air resistance would be unmeasurable given the instruments of the day.

For another, the shapes of the stones are important. One with a much greater sectional density, oriented correctly, could fall faster than the other, even if it were lighter.

But that's just nitpicking. If I remember correctly, Galileo used inclined planes because there were only imprecise water clocks available to measure the passage of time. His choice of apparatus was brilliant :)

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#42

Post by gizmo686 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #39
gizmo686 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who is studying both linguistics and Japanese, this this type of comment is just cringy to read. In the grand scheme of potential "languages" Japanese and English (as well as all natural human languages; including signed languages) have incredibly similar grammars. It is only when you restrict your view to the range of human languages that Japanese and English start to look incredibly different. W…

> Speaking as someone who is studying both linguistics and Japanese, this this type of comment is just cringy to read. In the grand scheme of potential "languages" Japanese and English (as well as all natural human languages; including signed languages) have incredibly similar grammars. It is only when you restrict your view to the range of human languages that Japanese and English start to look incredibly different.…

That might not have been the best way for me to make my point, which is just that, qualitatively, all human languages appear to be incredibly similar. I am not aware of any way to quantify this observation. I do know, however, that children who do not acquire any language during the critical period find it much more difficult to acquire a language as an adult relative to a typical adult acquiring a second language [0]. This means that a native English speaker would be realying heavily of his knowledge of English when learning Japanese (although not necessarily at a conscious level).

I tried to avoid the "apple to oranges" objection you are raising by restricting the domain to that of "potential languages", which seems like the "fair" point of reference to take. Since Japanese and English are both natural human languages, I would consider comparing them more akin to comparing red apples and green apples.

The main point I was trying to make (which admittadly got berried at the end of my post) was that "wrong" and "not useful" are two very different concepts.

[0] This is best observed in deaf children who are not exposed to sign language at a young age.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#43

Post by fenomas »

gizmo686 wrote: post #42
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking as someone who is studying both linguistics and Japanese, this this type of comment is just cringy to read. In the grand scheme of potential "languages" Japanese and English (as well as all natural human languages; including signed languages) have incredibly similar grammars. It is only when you restrict your view to the range of human languages that Japanese and English start to look incredibly different.…

That might not have been the best way for me to make my point, which is just that, qualitatively, all human languages appear to be incredibly similar. I am not aware of any way to quantify this observation. I do know, however, that children who do not acquire any language during the critical period find it much more difficult to acquire a language as an adult relative to a typical adult acquiring a second language [0…

So what? You understood, and to all appearances agreed with, the point being made ("thinking of Japanese as analogous to English is counter-productive for most students"), right?

The poster clearly wasn't making any broader claim about the "qualitative similarity of all human languages" (whatever that might be).

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#44

Post by fenomas »

leoscuro wrote: post #8
chickenfries wrote: post #3

I have a coworker who describes everything in a very anthropomorphic and casual way, and their code is excessively imperative: everything is accomplished through conditionals rather than by designing the code in such a way that functions only run on data structures that they support. I would share this with him, but I imagine it would go completely over his head. > The implied abstraction, in which time has disappear…

I was a foreign language specialist in the military. When we were learning a new language, a few of the students hit a wall because they were approaching the material as "analogous to English." You can't think that way with most non-romance languages. I'm now doing sysadmin work, and do a little bit of scripting here and there while working on teaching myself Python and C. Do you have any advice to avoid the kind of…

I think the answer here is analogous between spoken and programming languages. When I was learning Japanese the thing that made me grok the grammar was when I stopped "learning" and started imitating - that is, instead of trying to know all the rules needed to translate what I wanted to say from English, when I concentrated on reading lots of sentences in the target language, and saying things in Japanese using the patterns I saw there.

So for programming the same gimmick would amount to, rather than just building code out of the constructs you're most comfortable with, also read code written by experts and try to imitate the patterns you find there.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#45

Post by arkades »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #5

This issue is pernicious in the biological sciences. Evolution is often depicted as having a will and is referred to as a marvelous creator which completely misses the point of evolution, a system driven by simple instructions that over time create emergent complexity (like a cellular automata). People assume that their is some mechanism for adaptation exercised. Adaptation happens at the species level and the only t…

>This issue is pernicious in the biological sciences.

It is?

I only ever see this come up in layman's discussions of evolution. I've never seen the anthropomorphism of evolution come up among actual biologists / grad students.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#47

Post by chickenfries »

Houshalter wrote: post #19
chickenfries wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your language metaphor works here, but I won't try to extend it for fear of misleading you with anthropomorphism :) Anthropomorphized code reads like someone reading off a gigantic checklist that keeps getting longer and longer. Each time a new problem comes up, we solve it by adding another "If A then B" except it's something like this if foo.bar.baz[0][1]['value'] if (foo.bar.baz[0][1]['value'] == 'undocume…

My favorite examples of overreliance on conditionals: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/285492834444771328/28... https://i.redd.it/6fh5xb20ttly.png http://i.imgur.com/GqcvMhp.png

These are great, I need to start a collection like this.

Here's something from this codebase, with names and variables altered but for the most part left alone. Note the hardcoded `ajax_max` variable.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/2d06bd45222999647d99df54fb...

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#48

Post by leoscuro »

elihu wrote: post #16
leoscuro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a foreign language specialist in the military. When we were learning a new language, a few of the students hit a wall because they were approaching the material as "analogous to English." You can't think that way with most non-romance languages. I'm now doing sysadmin work, and do a little bit of scripting here and there while working on teaching myself Python and C. Do you have any advice to avoid the kind of…

I suppose learning a language that forces you to work in a declarative style (such as Haskell) rather than imperative might be enlightening, but if that's not practical you could try using declarative style in C and/or Python. For instance, don't use global mutable variables and whenever possible write functions that take in const arguments and produce some return value without changing the state of anything.

I'll definitely check out Haskell, thanks for the input!

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#49

Post by chickenfries »

leoscuro wrote: post #48
elihu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose learning a language that forces you to work in a declarative style (such as Haskell) rather than imperative might be enlightening, but if that's not practical you could try using declarative style in C and/or Python. For instance, don't use global mutable variables and whenever possible write functions that take in const arguments and produce some return value without changing the state of anything.

I'll definitely check out Haskell, thanks for the input!

Another language I might suggest for exposing yourself to declarative / functional programming is Erlang or Elixir. I've tried to learn Haskell myself but the number of new concepts can be really daunting. Erlang is a little easier to get going with, and exposes you to many similar declarative concepts.

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#50

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

arkades wrote: post #45
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #5

This issue is pernicious in the biological sciences. Evolution is often depicted as having a will and is referred to as a marvelous creator which completely misses the point of evolution, a system driven by simple instructions that over time create emergent complexity (like a cellular automata). People assume that their is some mechanism for adaptation exercised. Adaptation happens at the species level and the only t…

>This issue is pernicious in the biological sciences. It is? I only ever see this come up in layman's discussions of evolution. I've never seen the anthropomorphism of evolution come up among actual biologists / grad students.

I am speaking directly to that circumstance. It gives some people the idea that evolution has a goal
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