Comment by gdp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdp | Hacker News Reader

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> Amichail said SPJ is not member of that community and that's perfectly true.

My argument was that it is impossible to exclude SPJ from any sensible definition of "theoretical computer science", unless you are taking those words and re-defining them to mean something other than what they actually mean as a collection of words.

I accept that there may be a group of people who call what they do "theoretical computer science", and who believe that nothing else is "theoretical computer science", but in that case, the onus is on those people to remember to translate "theoretical computer science" as a term into "complexity theory" when they talk to people outside the complexity theory community, because the rest of us have a much stronger claim to the general meaning of the term, which encompasses both this idiosyncratic use of "TCS" as well as all of the other things that it can correctly be taken to mean.

Allow me to make my argument entirely concrete:

Let's say that I do "organic chemistry" and I go to organic chemistry conferences with other organic chemists. Obviously there are other sub-branches of chemistry. If I decided to stop calling what I do "organic chemistry" and start calling it just "chemistry" instead, to the exclusion of any other kind of chemistry, you can understand why people would be very confused (and probably a little annoyed) when I start telling them that Alfred Nobel wasn't a chemist.

I will go even further to say that the test for a sensible definition of "theoretical computer science" is probably which people it includes, and SPJ would probably be on that list, IMHO (along with Hoare and Milner and countless others who are excluded by this supposedly widely-held definition).

And I really don't think it's widely-held outside of the community that calls itself the TCS community, which by definition, doesn't make it a "widely held view", does it?

"widely held view"

;)

No. But it makes it "shared by many", your original quantification.

You see, you're misreading for the numerous time. First you didn't care to read what OP linked and went into generalisations having nothing to do with the case. [[BTW I just don't know what you're arguing with me about since it's the same thing you observed in that comment. I just feel like being trolled, I agree with your comment I'm responding to now and I agree with the comment #837189, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837189 ]] Then you didn't read mine, or decided to start petty argument supposing it's isolated incident of just Gasarch not knowing a thing about logic and verification scene where there was a common agreement in the thread that fields became separated to a point of sillness. Now your changing from ontological view to my position that communities define fields by what they call themselves (TCS is what SPJ does). Never mind changing quantifiers suggesting that I want to argue about who has holy right and the majority. It was just a point it's not isolated view. Of course america is isolated, in a sense, by the sea. If SPJ defines TCS then he still has nothing to do with whole TCS community. Because TCS forms no consistent community besides having to do with computers.

I'm prone to trolling.

I'm really not trolling. The only reason I started arguing this point is that it was with some irritation that I saw the suggestion from amichail that the definition of "Theoretical Computer Science" excluded theoretical computer scientists. An alternative name for what SPJ does was even offered, to make it distinct (once again) from "theoretical computer science".

The original article comments may have been talking about a specific community that happens to be called "the theoretical computer science community", hence my point that it is up to members of that community to remember to mentally translate into words that the rest of the universe can understand when talking to people outside their community (which I view as a sub-group of theoretical computer science, for the record).

For some reason you picked up the argument which was only directed at amichail's original comments.

Basically, the framing of the question should actually have read "Are people who go to conference X friendly?" - the actual discussion point was buried in the comments. The question annoyed me, and amichail's even stronger re-statement of this same viewpoint annoyed me further.

And then it just got silly, because now we're arguing about the meanings of words like "many" (my word), or "common" (your word), when really the use of quantifiers in this is really not necessary.

My point was not that there are only a small number of people who use this definition of TCS that I'm complaining about (although I do believe that to be the case) - my point, illustrated with my example about chemistry above, is that it is completely bonkers to use it in this way outside of that community.

impossible to exclude SPJ from any sensible definition of "theoretical computer science"

Yes, there is. Vide my last sentence above.

Proving that is futile because you want to argue anywas and as I said I'm not that eloquent.

Nobody takes away from SPJ of what he is.

Edit: you expanded your argument after I wrote above. I don't feel like I have anything useful to say. Not that I felt that in the first place, I just gave a counterexaple showing of how world stands. Next time I'll run into someone I'll first ask what school he attends and who is his advisor instead of arguing about what he semantically meant describing his field. Then it would be evident what he works in and if we have anything to learn from eachother insetad of wasting our both time for idle argument.

> Next time I'll run into someone I'll first ask what school he attends and who is his advisor instead of arguing about what he semantically meant describing his field.

If you actually meant the reverse of that, then I agree that would be a far superior topic of conversation than school of origin or advisor.

No, superior way would be to refrain from talking with people at all when I clearly see I'm not up to challenge. Especially to refrain from meta discussions.

As Richard Hamming said, one may either just do research accepting things as they are, or changing people's minds, but not both.

By the way, last time I checked there was no satisfactory definition of "computer" amongst various theoretical computer sciences. Thank god it's not my problem.

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