I can fully understand mocking people who changed their mind after being totally sure, utterly convinced, proselytizing and annoying. If they were so sure, how could they change their minds, except by being dishonest about their surety or by being easily mislead? All good reasons for mocking them.
People who weren't so sure and were honest about it are of course different. Those deserve respect for their objectivity and honesty. But those are unfortunately rare specimens.
The latter is a convincing change of mind. The former looks more like abandoning a feebly held belief.
~1.5 years ago it was totally racist and xenophobic to think a lab escape in Wuhan could be a viable source of the pandemic.
~15 years ago being queer was something you should be quiet about.
~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".
~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm.
~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo.
These attitudes do not exist in a vacuum where the people that hold them hold them all. Had I ejected and mocked people from my life for them, I'd have very few friends today, and maybe a good percentage of those friends would've never changed their minds. In net, less people changing their minds yields less progress over time. It also results in an Orwellian sense of right without reason and decreased dialogue between opposing views to determine rightness; some people call this a "chilling effect". The point of life is not to be right, but to continually try to understand better. The cynicism and mockery of today's society combined with exacting tools like weaponizing shame and guilt are abhorrent and anti-progress.
I really dislike the framing that the only objection people have ever had to the lab leak theory is that it is "racist".
To the extent that it was true then (taking saalweachter's comment in mind), it's still true now.
> ~15 years ago being queer was something you should be quiet about.
"Queer" is a very broad term, which also includes trans- men and women, drag queens, and so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills which make it more difficult to bring up many queer issues now than it was 5 years ago.
Members of ACT UP in the 1980s certainly did not believe that being queer was something you should be quiet about.
> ~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".
I remember people being enthusiastic about Go, which came out more than 10 years ago and fits that description.
> ~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm.
Not true. In 1994 Stroustroup wrote:
] One reason often given for learning Smalltalk is that it is ‘‘pure’’ and thus forces people to think and program ‘‘object-oriented.’’ I will not go into the discussion of ‘‘purity’’ beyond mentioning that I think that a general-purpose programming language ought to and can support more than one programming style (paradigm). - https://archive.org/details/designevolutiono0000stro/page/17...
and
] The fundamental reason for the size of C++ is that it supports more than one way of writing programs, more than one programming paradigm. From one point of view, C++ is really three languages in one: - A C-like language (supporting low-level programming); - An Ada-like language (supporting abstract data type techniques); - A Simula-like language (supporting object-oriented programming) - https://archive.org/details/designevolutiono0000stro/page/19...
> ~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo.
What? I don't remember it that way either.
I really don't think viewers of "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-1978) were expected to view Robert "Bob" Hartley, Chicago psychologist, as a voodoo practitioner.
It is entirely possible to be skeptical and critical of the labs handling of the virus and want investigation into it without assuaging anything about the Chinese people or some grandiose theory involving their military. Most people are interested in the former, not the latter, but people who don't want this discussed rule all discussion about the latter.
As for the rest of what you wrote, you can definitely object that there are exceptions today and that there exceptions years ago but I'm talking about prevailing attitudes, not that there weren't zero people who did or didn't believe something.
Case in point, the 1990s is when the idea about OOP being dominant began to die. This was culturally marked in the show Halt and Catch Fire.
I disagree. You are presenting strawman attitudes, representing an extreme interpretation of the past. Exactly what you accuse me of. Except I cited counter-examples.
Even your example of "possible to be skeptical and critical of the labs handling of the virus" has strong issues because when the general scientific consensus is along the lines "Although there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. .... Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from activities associated with the live wildlife trade there." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 .
The general response to the lab leak hypothesis is "where's the evidence"? Not "you're racist".
> This was culturally marked in the show Halt and Catch Fire.
A show made, what, 25 years after the era it describes?
Do you know about "Kirk Drift"? The Kirk of the original series is not the womanizer people remember him to be. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-remem...
Why do you think Halt and Catch Fire accurately describes things, rather than being subject to its own sense of drift?
While my own pop culture example comes from the era you describe.
Here's another 1991 quote, from Lippman's C++ Primer:
"""Object-oriented programming is an evolutionary advance in the design and management of large software systems. It is not, however, the deus ex machina come forth to resolve the many ills of the software industry.""" - https://archive.org/details/cprimer0000lipp/page/530/mode/2u...
That's in the section titled "Living in a Multi-Paradigm Universe".
lmao, this is so over the top ridiculous. I didn't "accuse" you of anything. I validated your examples and said that there's exceptions but I was describing prevailing attitudes. Take your frustration and hostility somewhere else.
The only thing I flatly disagree with is that all or most people that agree with lab leak are somehow racists and xenophobes and I find it distasteful that this was pushed by "scientists" who turned out to be heavily involved in the whole thing. Lab leak has just about as much evidence as "zoological origins" so folks like you step off your sad little soap boxes.
The original Lancet article calling Lab Leak a "dangerous conspiracy theory": https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The addendum acknowledging competing interests: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The article acknowledging lab leak should be investigated and carries about as much weight as other theories: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
If you look up articles and conversation that reference that first citation you'll see most of them derided the theory as racist and xenophobic which had a chilling effect on further investigation for over a year, so much so that it required secretative investigation.
You accused me of cherry picking exceptions and interpreting them as prevailing attitudes.
Show me the evidence that your points are indeed prevailing attitudes.
Where is your evidence that "~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm." I've given several counter-examples. You haven't shown anything.
Where is your evidence that "~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo"? For that all I have a is a pop-culture reference, but your view doesn't explain why a psychologist character in the 1970s is seen as a member of the professional class similar to a dentist or airline flight crew.
Where is your evidence that "~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".? I gave Go as a counter-example.
If you can't provide evidence for those things, why should I believe your viewpoints are other things are any better?
> If you look up articles and conversation that reference that first citation
As a reminder, you said "~1.5 years ago", not 3 years ago. And I said things haven't changed in the last 18 months or so.
No I did not. I was talking about what I mentioned being prevailing attitudes and I validated what you said by saying there are exceptions.
OOP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
Midway down the page there's a graph that reflects the early 2000s, OOP languages dominated that graph and that was not a new trend. Another source that claims it directly: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-post-oop-parad... this isn't some niche opinion of mine, it's widely accepted fact that you could've googled on your own.
My evidence for what was being said about Go is that I was there, in those conversations.
The social relevance and crisis of psychology is discussed here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13698...
You sitting around demanding evidence for stuff that you can easily Google that's non-controversial is exhausting BS. I'm on a cross country road trip my guy, I'm not going to type into the googler for you anymore. You are a completely insufferable human being.
> OOP languages dominated that graph and that was not a new trend
That's fine.
But your claim was that the prevailing attitude was that "OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm".
That is not true.
> Another source that claims it directly
It says "software development has been dominated by a methodology". That is not what you argued.
Also - wow, an AOP hype paper from 2003! I hadn't read praise for AspectJ for a long time.
In any case, there were a lot of multi-paradigm languages by 2003 - and yes, with OO being a commmon one. People in general were not rejecting procedural, functional, or logic programming on the basis of being a worse paradigm!
> My evidence for what was being said about Go is that I was there, in those conversations.
And I was there too, and know people who jumped right on it. Meaning that we can't tell what the common perception was.
> The social relevance and crisis of psychology is discussed here:
That link is about "social psychology" (quoting it, "By 1960, social psychology was primarily a subdiscipline of general psychology; that is, it was practiced primarily by psychologists, in psychology departments, following the principles and methods of general psychology "), not psychologists in general, like a private psychologist one would go to for mental health reasons.
And the issue wasn't one of voodoo. The most damning criticism is:
] Thomas went on to argue that social psychology had not only failed to assuage racism; it had in fact sustained and contributed to it, and in the process, alienated minority groups: ‘‘It is not entirely by accident that ghettoized people are saying, more and more, words to the effect, ‘Psychologists, take your psychology and go home’’’ (Thomas, 1970, p. 259). It became increasingly clear to social psychologists and to academics more generally (Metzger, 1970), that they were being accused not just of failing to account for the diverse experiences of oppressed groups, but also of purposefully maintaining the structures responsible for that oppression.
It also highlights how that crisis was part of what Schlesinger termed a '‘‘crisis of confidence’’ in American culture' and "undoubtedly part and parcel of what one scholar saw as a larger crisis of academic authority (Metzger, 1970), characterized by student revolt and persistent questioning of the power structures and professed neutrality of the ivory tower."
This is not how you characterized it.
Let's not mistake this for regression!
15 years ago it would have been literally unthinkable to e.g. do a drag queen story time with kids or have teachers talk about their sexual orientations. Now it's an active cultural battlefield, on which the pro-queer side has evidently made significant progress.
> or have teachers talk about their sexual orientations.
When I was a kid, I well remember teachers talking about their sexual orientations, like how one teacher took time off when his wife gave birth to their kids.
Did it matter if it escaped the lab or natural transmission ?