Lisp, Jazz, Aikido – Three Expressions of a Single Essence | Hacker News Reader

Lisp, Jazz, Aikido – Three Expressions of a Single Essence

arxiv.org

28 pointskuwze12 comments

Previous discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16993330

At various points in my life, I’ve done all three of these things. But I see no essential nexus between any of them. I mean, if we torture any metaphor enough we can link anything to anything.

Most human activities of sufficient complexity are a mix of art and science. All three of these activities are of this sort (neither being purely aesthetic nor completely reduceable to settled science). But those kinds of pursuits are common.

I’d gladly recommend aikido, jazz, and lisp to someone, but I’d also happily recommend judo, rhythm and blues, and smalltalk. Or fly fishing. Or go (the game or language). Or woodworking. Or... well the list goes on.

I concur. It’s a stretch. And you could also stretch to any other “purist” activity.

Go, go and go-go dancing

Right. From the article "My personal life has been revolving around three major creative activities, of equal importance: programming in Lisp, playing Jazz music, and practicing Aikido." This is someone who extrapolated their own life to a universal.

Next!

I think what he means is a certain "frestyle potential" of those activities, basically creating complexity based on a limited set of rules, rules you make up yourself, which then work in tandem with the procedural aspects of the activity and determine the limits of complexity.

While this is true for many real world activities, Lisp seems to be an outlier there, because most other programming languages don't allow you to change the underlying rules.

Why on earth would someone publish a paper like that? This is absolutely rubbish. A guy wanted to show the world how special he is because he writes Lisp, listens to jazz, and practices Aikido, and wrote a whole meaningless paper for that. I thought that papers where examined by some committee before publication, and you need to have serious work done to get your research published. This lookes more like an article on some lifestyle magazine or personal blog, rather than a scientific paper.

This is ArXiV, a place where you can post preprints. Little if any moderation is done here, even less if you post something outside of the topic of math or physics. Presence of a paper on here does not mean it has passed peer review or been published in a reputable journal.

"Science (what we can explain), and Art (what we can't)"

Er, no. This is a horribly limiting definition of both terms.

Neither of which is very effective. Aikido is not a very efficient form of martial arts, even though it looks good. Jazz is not a popular form of music even though it sounds good. Lisp is not a popular language even though it writes good.

I always have a small problem with trying to define art, and relate it to science. It never seems to go well.

In which Dean Moriarty writes a paper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com