Subject: Re: On comparing apples and oranges (was: Q: on hashes and counting) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/10/21 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3181130899420606@naggum.net> * Dirk Zoller <duz@onlinehome.de> | Thanks, but was and still am absolutely calm. _Absolutely_, even? That would explain the absence of thought and other brain activity. If you aren't even stirred the littlest bit by what I told you, you are probably a dangerous lunatic who feels as calm when actually killing as when just talking casually about it. I'm not comforted by the fact that you post from Germany with that emotional dysfunction. | (LOL!) At what other times to you laugh out loud when you don't understand that you're talking about death and misery? Do you think _Darwin_ failed to realize that only by the death of the masses does the species advance? He's acutely aware of it, and he was depressed that people at home took his ideas about Nature to apply to humans. But not a German idiot! No, no, no! Darwin is good for humans, too! It's been only 50 years, but by God, keep the Germans in check lest they advance their Social Darwinism ideas. | You're again missing the point. Do you think this is a game where the guy who last says that wins? | For the programming languages out there, what is the nature? The | "nature" is all other programmers. Some programming languages | "live" on because they are used, others "die" because they're not. And you think "Darwinism" is applicable in such an environment? Do you at all understand what evolution is about? It's about accidents of mutation and random changes that fall into the category "not lethal before giving birth" while they are insignificant, but then they may become what separates the living (as in: those most able to have offspring -- individual _lives_ do not count in Darwinism) from the dead some time long into the future relative to where they first occurred. For this model to work with programming languages, first, the languages would have to evolve on their own, languages spawning languages randomly, and, second, they would have to be selected according to some essentially random criteria by programmers, who would not stick with a language, but choose a new one each time, like you don't stick to eating some abstract "vegetables", you eat different _physical_ ones each time. I'm sure this model fits your very unevolved intellectual capacity, but if you think anyone who understands the least bit about the process of evolution and Darwinism beyond the slogan "survival of the fittest", which seems to be your upper limit to appreciation, would find your idiotic analogy useful, that's an insult to intelligence as a phenomenon. Evolution works so well because about 99% of the offspring of each generation dies before they can themselves give birth. After we reach such incredibly advanced stages as human beings (yourself excluded by your own admission), this process stops working because the cost of giving birth to more and more complex beings takes more and more resources and longer and longer time, which leads to that anti-evolutionary concept of _caring_ for each offspring not just while young and in need of parental shelter, but for life. Normal people don't shoot and kill mentally retarded or sterilze them so they won't have children. Some Germans who believed in what you believe in did that, you know. You don't care about that, do you? We humans, you excluded, obviously, don't "evolve". First, we keep even the children whom Nature would have killed. Second, we try not to engage in the enormous waste that is natural competition (the closest we have is Microsoft's predatory romp through intelligent life), but find that our resources are so sparse that we must think carefully to avoid serious mistakes. This means we get a lot further before a mistake kills something, which Nature does not. We humans can do on purpose and with forethought in a single generation what Nature requires millions of generations to produce by random _because_ we don't wantonly kill everything at random, like you want us to do because you were somehow spared that process and feel charmed or something. You see, Dirk Zoller, the idea of "individual" has actually made it into the human meme pool. We no longer talk about the advancement of the _species_ by sacrificing individual people. We deal with individuals one by one. As an individual, that means you no longer have that very easy escape of just dying if you make a mistake: You have a responsibility (or should I say Pflicht to a German?) to do more than comes "naturally", which would be to sit on your ass and do nothing, least of all think, as long as the food comes basically for free. This isn't about bringing the most genes to the next generation, anymore, Dirk, it's about what you do in _your_ life. This isn't about producing something new all the time, despite what you see in the TV commercials, but what you do with what you have. As it happens, all human endeavors are about what they do while people are alive, because that's what's going to outlive us. We're past the brutal, German philosophy of killing those who don't fit. Except for the Middle East, most people on this planet have figured out that it means more to have something to live for than something to die for. This also includes working hard to save companies, familes, values -- you don't just abandon them. This also means caring for something, a concept that I'm sure is so foreign to you that you have to laugh out load, again, when you see what people care about: A cat, a programming language, an air gun or two (Walther, of German make, btw), the intellectual property rights of an employer's production of financial news, the violation of human rights in the collection of taxes in Norway, the conservative American response to FDA approval of RU 486, the failure of most people to consider anything but the best possible scenario of the application of their ideas. I care. You can't even _pretend_ to feel, Dirk Zoller. | There is nothing cruel about this. Then you understand exactly nothing about what you're talking about. Which is, like, today's biggest surprise. What's next? "The Origin of the Programming Languages" by Dirk Zoller? At the very least Charles Darwin was a scientist with respect for the scientific method. You're just a nuthead who can't even read his theories. | Unless you feel so compassionate towards your language, that for you | there lies cruelty in all those incompetent other programmers out | there not being a comfortable habitat for your pet programming | language. Now I know you are so fantastically devoid of intelligence that you are forever prohibited from accepting input from the outside world. This explains your need to laugh out loud when you should have made the connection that explains why Germany _still_ is the culture on this planet with the worst record and worst prospects when it comes to _not_ understanding how an idea can turn into a killing machine. | (Now you please also calm down, Erik. I'm meanwhile used to your style | and won't enter into any further exchange of insults with you. That you are "used to my style" means you _are_ an idiot. People who have a grain of clue manage to figure this out and change their ways to get a different style, that of respect for an intelligence at work that learns. You are obviously not one of those, and you're damn _proud_ of it, too. And, _surprisingly_, you're German, like most others who are proud to be wrong, and who don't stop to think what it means to be proud to be dead wrong. | After all, those transport no interesting thought nor information | but only bad feelings, which I'd anyway have to pretend.) If you _had_ the capacity to feel, you would find both thought and information -- if you don't feel and think at the same time, you don't _learn_ anything. My style is one where I _want_ you to feel pain, laugh, enjoy yourself, and cringe in horror, while your brain is doing the hard work of thinking and making connections. You, and some other one-trick morons, are so devoid of a working intelligence that you think that if you feel anything at all, that's the whole purpose. I have found my style _exceptionally_ good at identifying your kind of pre-intelligent beings. But again, the German psyche. Good old Immanuel Kant rearing his ugly head, stopping a whole culture from evolving by disallowing and suprressing all feeling at the outset, which leads to fewer mistakes that cause creative leaps, except, of course, the _really_ big mistakes where not having human feelings is the key. | BTW certain newsgroups are also sort of closed habitats and there are | some strange beasts to discover! I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, but you're the clown. If you had the capacity to feel shame, you would have stuck your head in the nearest toilet and flushed it down by now. But I'm sure you're still all laughing out loud and not getting a _single_ idea through that wall that protects the part of you that would die instantly if it were ever exposed to any _human_ feelings. Germans like you actually scare me, because you _think_ so little about your ideas and their effects on this world and on the lives of the people in it. Go and actually read the works of Charles Darwin, Dirk Zoller. They aren't about economics or social processes or programming languages or how groups of people interact. If a connection is found between biology and how we build societies, it is _not_ in the process of natural selection. The economy is _not_ a part of nature that obeys an extrapolation of the theories discovered to apply to evolution. I also recommend all of what Richard Dawkins has published. In The Blind Watchmaker, for instance, he uses simple computer programs to show how evolution works over vast stretches of time. That might be able to hold your attention, as you seem to be very narrowly focused on one thing at a time, and now it's programming languages. Widen your scope, Dirk Zoller. Don't just _pretend_ that you know about the outside world. Feel, think, learn. Care. Be _human_. And quit espousing ideas that, with just a little consideration of the source and likely consequences in your specific culture, means you felt nothing, did not think, did not learn, and do not care. Or laugh out loud, again. At least you're good at that, Dirk Zoller. #:Erik -- I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to death your right to say it. -- Tom Stoppard