Mat comments on An Alien God - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (137)
I understand your point and your examples, but it is wrong to infer that conflicting subsystems are evidence of poor design or no design at all. For instance, in CMOS design of logical ports, we use PMOS(es) to pull-up and NMOS(es) to pull-down the output voltage(s). More generally, when we want to design something able to change its state in a certain state-space, we often put sub-systems which go one against the other and let the contour conditions decide where the balance will be (in the CMOS example, the contour conditions are the input(s) of the logical gate). We as human designers do this a lot, actually.
I agree with all you other points, though.