First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous | Hacker News Reader

First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous

joshimhoff.github.com

20 pointsjimhoff1113 comments

I'm starting to believe that people who disagree with your sentiments described here simply don't get it yet (I, for one, agree with just about everything you said). I don't mean that as a put-down and I don't mean that condescendingly. We're all learning at our own pace. But I think you are correct. Thanks for sharing this.

"Electrical engineers work with Kirchhoff’s Voltage and Current Laws, not the nightmare that is Maxwell’s Equations."

I have a strong feeling you are not an electrical engineer.

You are right. I did not mean to suggest that electrical engineering is easy -- clearly, I know nothing about it -- but only that electrical engineering benefits from abstractions too.

Not using Maxwell's equations is surely not one of them :)

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

-Edsger Dijkstra

IMO use of abstractions is vital to any profession, not just programming. This is because of how the human brain is structured: we can only hold 5-9 things in our working memory at any time. In order to tackle more complex concepts, we have to chunk several basic ideas into one theory, which is a big part (though not the only part) of what abstraction is all about.

Great article right up until the last sentence. If anything moves a scientist to prayer, he has been mislabeled.

Scientists are not allowed to pray?

I'm glad I live in America where I'm free to pray even if I can discover the mechanisms of the universe through experimentation.

'Atheist' is not a prerequisite for 'rational', as much as many atheists like to pretend this is the case.

I don't personally 'get' prayer, nor do I practice it despite my Catholic upbringing, but I can see how the practice might be psychologically comforting. It's basically an acknowledgement of not having complete control or knowledge.

The thing about prayer that most people don't get is it's just a form of meditation. A lot of people think that it's just saying a bunch of words, others that it's just a conversation with God. It can be the latter and you can extract value from that if you believe but, in the sense of the former, it's never this.

If you think about repeating Hail Mary on rosary beads for n amount of times, this becomes very similar to other Eastern forms of meditation, notably the Hare Krishna mantra. The key is the clearing of the mind and focusing on the mantra.

I don't agree with many of the practices in Catholicism, having also been raised one myself, but I can certainly see the parallels in prayer with meditation as a whole. If you get meditation, prayer becomes easier to understand.

My grandfather, David Fisher, has been writing an international radio program for decades called "Truth in the test tube". It's aimed at a general audience so it's not very in-depth scientifically, but the idea is to interview scientists who believe in God, just to get people to realize that they are not mutually exclusive. https://www.twr.org/judyblog/?p=2789 Even if you don't agree with those beliefs, you can't claim that religious people can't be scientists.

Regardless of your persuasion "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" by Knuth is well worth a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-Inf...

http://www.internetismyreligion.com/

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