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Comment by hoosieree | Hacker News Reader

Not a new issue:

    On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question

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This is a great example of the myopia of computer scientists. The meaning here is obvious, and the MP is remarkably insightful.

When I ask a question with a mistake in it, a human will either correct that mistake or ask me questions to clarify it. Such is an essential component to real communication.

If communication is just a procedural activity where, either by wrote or by statistics, an answer is derived by algorithm from a question -- then that isnt the kind of dynamic interplay of ideas inherent to two agents coodinating with language.

What this MP understands immediately is that, in people, there is a gap between stimulus and response whereby the agent tries to build an interiror representation of the obejct of communication. And if this process fails, the person can engage in acts of communication (thinking, and inference) to fix it.

Whereas here, no such interiority is present, no model is being build as part of communication -- so there is no sense of dynamical communication between agents.

I largely agree with this, but I would go as far to say that we don't even need to make a commitment to some idea of interiority or internal representation to assert a fundamental distinction here: what is important is that the two interlocutors share something like a common world or context, and endeavor within this space to do things together (such as communicate). There is no "gap" or latency between what-is-said and what-is-meant, there is just everywhere instances of language attempting to point outside itself, when it really can't do that.

And, imo, this very tendency in our use of language is probably what makes us distinctly human.

http://sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf

I agree, the MP sounds more insightful then Mr. Babbage. Especially since the answer to this question would also reveal the answer to the opposite, whether putting in the right figures could lead to the wrong answer.

This was in the 1850s. Babbabe was not trying to make a machine that thinks like a human. He designed a mechanical calculator capable of automatically solving differential equations, not a chatbot capable of holding a conversation with the user.

Perhaps the Difference Engine was described as a "mechanical brain" or something similar and that gave the MP the wrong expectation. He wasn't being insightful, only confused.

babbage was very much selling it as a miracle machine -- i think these replies echo the debate today.

one myopic side of engineers, another with an intuitive understanding of ecological rationality... a complete chasm of understanding whereby the machinist thinks of themselves as a series of cogs

Babbage here, is being archetypally dumb -- the dumbness of his ilk reduced down in this perfectly condescending quote

Why dumb? Because he understands how his machine works? I don't get it.

dumb in his inability to understand the question he was being asked, because he could only think in terms of his machine

What other terms should he be trying to think in? He was asked about his machine! And he understood the question perfectly well. The asker thought his machine is some kind of Victorian ChatGPT that enters a dialogue with the user.

I mean, imagine the Wright brothers: "Does your machine need to build a nest to lay its eggs? Does it migrate in the winter?". What are they supposed to think, no, the question makes sense because our machine flies like a bird so it should be expected to behave like a bird in other ways also?

That's an entirely separate issue.

As an aside, I always wondered if that was asked more pointedly. Had Babbage said it would eliminate errors and the MP was making a point that you still need to check things?

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