Letters to the Editor
PaulBC
Published Letters: 238 Editor's Choice: 24
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culture bigotry... nonsense!
[Read the article: Belly of the beast]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some cultures have practiced human sacrifice. Some still practice slavery. These are clearly wrong. End of story. The people who practice them are fully my equal and probably share many similar hopes to my own. But they got certain things wrong and I'm not afraid to say it. No reasonable person has ever said that a practice is morally acceptable just because a large group of people embraces it. It's not bigotry to suppose that there are some universal principles to be discovered over time. It is bigotry to assume you have nothing to learn from others.
Likewise with evolution. It may explain, but it can never justify. We evolved (as far as I can tell) to be clannish and superstitious, pragmatically clever, but certainly not objective, critical thinkers. Over time we have developed a different outlook by removing ourselves from our instinctive perspective. Obviously we can replace all the proteins in meat from vegetable sources because people have done it for thousands of years. Today we could do it on scales and economies that would have been impossible in the past. That's probably the way to go. The idea that we should behave in the way closest to how we evolved runs counter to human experience.
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the lerpa and mjwycha
[Read the article: Belly of the beast]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"He suggested that my culture had to "learn" (presumably from his values); his values are right, and mine are hopelessly wrong."
Actually, no, but I can see how you might have read it that way, and I apologize for that. I meant we can all learn from each other, and the refusal is the definition of cultural bigotry. I can even learn something from cultures that practiced human sacrifice or slavery, but hopefully not the idea that those practices are acceptable. Differences can always exist in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
Other than that, I cannot really come up with a better explanation of my previous post than the lerpa's, because it is what I was trying to say, and is written very clearly. The comparison to human sacrifice is not to equate but to draw an analogy to make a point. If anyone were to claim that the adoption of a practice by a culture removes it beyond criticism, I would use slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism as reductio ad absurdum arguments against this claim. I consider animal slaughter a less serious offense than any of these, but I don't know how future generations will see it or whether their understanding will be better or worse than mine.
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Quit it with the "computer genius"
[Read the article: My interview with murderer Hans Reiser]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know about the advantages of ReiserFS, maybe I'll look it up, but there are plenty of code monkeys out there, myself included.
Writing software is not quantum physics; it is not even hard computer science--say, holographic proofs, expander graphs, or nearly any proof of intractability (as opposed to a reduction to another conjecture). You want a computer to do something, just hammer away at it until you have nailed down all the cases, and voila! If software engineers fancy themselves Olympians, they should look down and ask who built their Mt. Olympus, because their 100k+ lines of code wouldn't get them very far on the computers of twenty years ago. Most software "advances" are a matter of finally possessing the hardware to do something proposed decades ago. And I say that as a software engineer.
You have to be clever and mentally organized (in that particular domain) but let's leave the term "genius" for people that advances that would not have would have been significantly delayed in their absence. A fancy new file system isn't one of them. (It's also not true that all actual computer geniuses become rich, because some do their work for free, and some delve into areas of limited short-term commercial benefit.)
As for Reiser, I followed the story a little in the local papers. What struck me is that the facts allowed for little conclusion other than guilt (anything's possible, but the least far-fetched possibility is that he murdered his wife). At some times, it sounded as if he was laughing at the court, for instance brushing aside why he removed the seat from his car. Assuming there was any point to all this, I thought maybe he had some ridiculous and naive notion that you cannot be convicted unless the body is found. But I'm not a mind-reader, so it's just a hunch. Even if he is a genius in some domain, he's surely not a great legal thinker.
My gut feeling is that he should not benefit from producing the body, since it is clear that he had no intent to do so while on trial. OK, pragmatically, we should have some incentives even for convicted criminals to provide new information of use to the public. But he is clearly a sociopath and his late actions should not be misinterpreted as remorse.
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john_bessa, you might not be a narcissist...
[Read the article: My interview with murderer Hans Reiser]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Still, there is something curious about your perspective. Yes, the World Trade Center attack, such a terrible, terrible tragedy--for open source software! There I was feeling bad about some poor waiter at Windows on the World restaurant, or maybe Danny Lewin (1970-2001), Akamai founder and highly accomplished computer scientist (genius?). But now I see I was ignoring the real victims.
OK, I'm probably being too mean, but get a grip, man! The reason IBM feted you at FAO Schwartz is because money was flowing freely back then. There was a revolving party for anyone remotely connected to the internet. It couldn't last, and nobody should have wanted it to last.
I'll take everyone at their word that ReiserFS is a big deal. Look, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was an unrepentant Nazi who personally supervised slave labor camps... but that doesn't take anything away from Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man." So by all means, keep using Reiser's software, but just don't let it cloud the point that he's a murderer. The two facts are just unrelated.