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I have no idea what I'm doing

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Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#71

Post by calvins »

cjp wrote: post #68
c22 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What possible evidence do you have to support this? Why is it crazy to think that the beaver builds a dam because it wants a place to live? Why wouldn't the beaver choose to cut down logs with the intention of using them to build a dam? After all, this is what we observe the beaver doing. Of course since we cannot inhabit the mind of the beaver we cannot know for certain whether the beaver is a thinking being or a bl…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_beaver#Behaviour Beavers are best known for their dam-building. They maintain their pond-habitat by reacting quickly to the sound of running water, and damming it up with tree branches and mud. Early ecologists believed that this dam-building was an amazing feat of architectural planning, indicative of the beaver's high intellect. This theory was tested when a recording of…

Interesting, and reminiscent of what Douglas Hofstadter has called Sphexishness " rel="nofollow">http://www.personalityresearch.org/evolutionary/sphexishness...

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#72

Post by hawleyal »

hammerdr wrote: post #43
hawleyal wrote: post #39

I know TDD has been discussed to death. However, I disagree completely with TDD encouraging creativity and material exploration. In my opinion, small, iterative increments are much more useful. Creating a test puts a tight box around how you assume (without any experimentation) an interface should work. As opposed to a tiny iteration to learn about how it could work. Then writing a test after for that tiny bit. Final…

Writing the test is the experiment, in your example. You're playing with how it is going to be used and interacted without worrying about the details/implementation. You'll take care of that later.

I don't see how you can experiment with functionality by writing tests at all. Tests are basically just pseudocode. It's writing the requirement/interface before figuring out what is possible.

For example. I was recently trying to figure out how to make an autocomplete list faster, as the database was too slow. I already had a functional test taking in search parameters and returning results. But there would be no way to write a test for the actual implementation of the indexed/faster search classes until I figured out a real approach. In the beginning, I had no idea if this would require a separate daemon process to do indexing, or if it could index realtime, or caching, or memoization, or where it might need to keep an index once created. These are just a couple of the unknowns. Once I figured out a workable concept, I wrote tests for those classes and functions. Then I refactored multiple times, altering the tests accordingly.

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#73

Post by collyw »

gitaarik wrote: post #25

Summary: If you look closely enough, nobody really knows exactly what they're doing. When you realize this, you're no longer blinded by the thought that you or other people know everything about something. Then you also realize that all the stuff that is created by people isn't necessarily how it should be, it's just the outcome of the circumstances that the people were in. With this realization you allow yourself to…

This sounds a lot like mindfulness or other meditations when you describe it this way.

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#74

Post by JoeAltmaier »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #60
mod wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. GP can reason about what he's doing. He knows that he's commenting on HN. He can come up with a plausible reason why (recreation, perhaps). In a more interesting scenario, say building a dam, GP would cut down logs with the express intention of building a dam to make a pond. The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc…

>The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, That's because beavers don't speak English. > it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coin…

All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#75

Post by JoeAltmaier »

increment_i wrote: post #65
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That denies conscious thought to me. You can ask me why I do something. Go ask the beaver, see what it says.

Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members: "When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their fa…

Beaver compulsively place sticks in piles near water until they don't hear the water falling any more. Nothing to do with intent.

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#76

Post by hawleyal »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
hawleyal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go further. All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing, blah blah blah. The beaver knows it's building a dam insasmuch as anyone else knows what they are doing.

That denies conscious thought to me. You can ask me why I do something. Go ask the beaver, see what it says.

Does the fact you can communicate why you think do something mean you could have changed your decision?

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#77

Post by increment_i »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #75
increment_i wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members: "When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their fa…

Beaver compulsively place sticks in piles near water until they don't hear the water falling any more. Nothing to do with intent.

Can we say compulsion is completely different from intent though? Or are we just arguing over semantics? Can we place an arbitrary intelligence threshold on when compulsion can be inferred as intent?

For instance, most spiders build webs, and it would seem they do it by no other mechanism than pure genetic instinct. However, there don't seem to be any external 'cues' as to when the web is finished (in contrast to the water falling cue we assume beavers use). The spider builds the web until it's done building the web. Did the spider intend to build a web, or was it compelled to?

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#78

Post by hawleyal »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #74
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, That's because beavers don't speak English. > it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coin…

All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.

You're pretending like human shelters are somehow different.

Re: I have no idea what I'm doing

#79

Post by hammerdr »

hawleyal wrote: post #72
hammerdr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing the test is the experiment, in your example. You're playing with how it is going to be used and interacted without worrying about the details/implementation. You'll take care of that later.

I don't see how you can experiment with functionality by writing tests at all. Tests are basically just pseudocode. It's writing the requirement/interface before figuring out what is possible. For example. I was recently trying to figure out how to make an autocomplete list faster, as the database was too slow. I already had a functional test taking in search parameters and returning results. But there would be no wa…

Your functional test was a test that allowed you to experiment. You designed the parameters and then altered the variables involved under the conditions of those tests.

You probably even "called your shot" and make guesses about what would be successful before you even approached the problem.

Then you wrote a test and saw whether your guess was right or not. If not, then you misunderstood something and you dug deeper.

Software, in some ways, in simulated science.

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