Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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I don't know if this was featured here, but I hope it generates some discussion. Edsger Dijkstra, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html
"Traditionally there are two ways in which science can be justified, the Platonic and the pragmatic one. In the Platonic way —"l'art pour l'art"— science justifies itself by its beauty and internal consistency, in the pragmatic way science is justified by the usefulness of its products. My overall impression is that along this scale —which is not entirely independent of the Buxton Index— Europe, for better or for worse, is more Platonic, whereas the USA, and Canada to a lesser extent, are more pragmatic."
"It is here that I must mention three general phenomena that go hand in hand with greater pragmatism."
"The first phenomenon is a greater tolerance for the soft sciences which purport to contribute to the solutions of "real" problems, but whose "intellectual contents" are singularly lacking. (When I was a student at Leyden, a quarter of a century ago, economy and psychology had been admitted to the campus, but only with great reservations and absolutely no one considered them as respectable; we had not dreamt of "management science" —I think we would have regarded it as a contradiction in terms— and "business administration" as an academic discipline is still utterly preposterous.)"
"The second phenomenon is the one for which I had to coin the term "integralism". Scientific Thought, as I understand it, derives its effectiveness from our willingness to acknowledge the smallness of our heads: instead of trying to cope with a complex, inarticulate problem in a single sweep, scientific thought tries to extract all the relevant aspects of the problem, and then to deal with them in turn in depth and in isolation. (...) Dealing with some aspect of a complex problem "in depth and in isolation" implies two things. "In isolation" means that you are (temporarily) ignoring most other aspects of the original total problem, "in depth" means that you are willing to generalize the aspect under consideration, are willing to investigate variations that are needed for a proper understanding, but are in themselves of no significance within the original problem statement. The true integralist becomes impatient and annoyed at what he feels to be "games"; by his mental make-up he is compelled to remain constantly aware of the whole chain, when asked to focus his attention upon a single link. (When being shown the derivation of a correct program he will interrupt: "But how do you know that the compiler is correct?".) The rigorous separation of concerns evokes his resistance because all the time he feels that you are not solving "the real problem"."
"The third phenomenon that goes hand in hand with a greater pragmatism is that universities are seen less as seats of learning and centres of intellectual innovation and more as schools preparing students for well-paid jobs. If industry and government ask for the wrong type of people —students, brain-washed by COBOL and FORTRAN— that is then what they get." (This was written in 1982, perhaps, today that will be Java.)
"Finally a difference that is very specific to academic computing science in Europe: Artificial Intelligence never really caught on. All sorts of explanation are possible: Europe's economic situation in the early fifties when the subject emerged, lack of vision of the European academic or military world, European reluctance to admit soft sciences to the university campus, cultural resistance to the subject being more deeply rooted in Europe, etc. I don't know the true explanation, it is probably a mixture of the above and a few more. We should be aware of this difference, whether we can explain it or not, because the difference is definitely there and it has its influence on the outlook of the computing scientist."
For me the first quote hits really close to home. I am so immersed in a "Platonic" tradition that I am constantly amazed how pragmatic LW-ers are, I constantly feel like a Sophisticus.