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Peter_de_Blanc comments on Rationality Quotes: December 2010 - Less Wrong
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| Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
I felt a desire to argue against this quote, but of course a better idea would be to ask what it means.
I'm guessing that "practice" means "the way people are solving this problem now," while "theory" means "the study of what makes a problem-solving method good."
If theorists invent some method that they think is good, but which has already been rejected by practitioners, then I would guess that the theorists have a wrong notion of "good," and they should update their theory on the evidence. If the theorists invent a new method, then there is a chance that it is an improvement, and it may catch on.
Practitioners can reject an idea for wrong reasons -- for example, because it seems weird and runs contrary to how things were always done.
My first reading of this quote was essentially "the map loses to the terrain". I interpreted "theory" as "our beliefs" and "practice" as "reality".
If your beliefs are defeated whenever they clash with reality, then you have attained a mastery of rationality that very few humans achieve. Torvalds' quote looks to me like an "is" statement rather than an "ought" statement, so I can't agree with your interpretation.
Interesting nuance. You have taken "loses" to mean "defeated", presumably leading to "and therefore updated"; I agree that this is by no means an automatic process. But I took "loses" to mean "is less accurate" (which of course makes my interpretation more tautological).
He's talking about the status of the code in question in his Linux tree, the one everyone in the world pulls from, so in that context he does in fact have the power to make his opinions reality ...
According to gerg's interpretation, you're saying that Torvalds' theory wins against practice, which contradicts Torvalds' statement.
I don't think that quite jives. The situation seems to be the opposite: Torvalds' practice (the Linux code base, and its quite healthy community of contributors and users, who would be annoyed if ext4 programs stopped working suddenly) is winning against theory (the notion that the API policy of the Linux kernel should be revised more in favor of elegance over compatibility).
I've been assuming that this subthread is about gerg's interpretation. Are you claiming that interpretation is correct, and offering some clarification, or are you just offering a different interpretation?
The former. Gerg's interpretation is about the map and the terrain, and it seems to me that "the actual codebase in its practical usage" associates closely with "the terrain", while "ideas/predictions about what would make the API more elegant" associates closely with "the map".
Tovalds doesn't have direct access to the reality of his users, but he does have direct access to the code they use.
Torvalds is an engineer applying engineer's thinking, and here "practice" means engineering. The context was problems with a particularly awful API that just wasn't fit for purpose, but which had twenty years' encrusted usage to work around. He was responding to an ext4 filesystem programmer who was complaining that KDE4 users suffering dataloss on ext4 just weren't using the bad API the way he thought they should, even though other filesystems did not exhibit the dataloss.
I must confess that, reading the email, I don't see how he derives the last line from what he's saying above ... it doesn't seem to follow from taking about a 20-years-encrusted SNAFU. Perhaps it does follow from a programmer demanding people use an API the way he thinks they should, rather than the way everyone conventionally had for two decades. Real-world use winning over abstractions of how things should be:
It is, however, a widely-quoted statement - it resonates with people somehow. This is not, of course, the same as constituting or being about rationality.
It's about rationality on the grounds that the filesystem programmer had lost sight of the necessity of winning; in this case, putting out code that actually works, rather than code that makes the programmer feel good.
It's painful to write clunky APIs, and pleasant to write elegant APIs... but that doesn't mean much if your elegant code would just be thrown away on release because everyone's already using the existing API.