Development and Philosophy

From WindyCityRails 2012

Presenter: Steve Klabnik

Summary

The software world doesn't exist in a void; we can learn a lot by studying philosophy and related subjects. This talk was wide ranging, and was more about planting the seed of knowledge than anything.

Watching the video is encouraged, once available.

Memorable Quotes

• "Logic'd!'
• "We aspire to be evil as well"
• "You will be a total newb again"

Notes

From @benjaminoakes, with additions by @steveklabnik:

• A lot of info can be found on Wikipedia (see there for more)
• Humanities are important
• Refinement -- you see more the second time you read something
• Rewarding to study this
• Monocultures = death
  • Get out of your filter bubble

Philosophy

• "love of wisdom"

• Get to the root causes of things -- general and fundamental problems

• Aesthetics

  • We use Ruby 'cause it's beautiful
  • How can you be critical about this?

• Logic

  • You committed a fallacy... "Logic'd!'
  • Sometimes we care too much about this

• Epistemology

  • What can we / can't we know?
  • Laplace's Demon: know all particles at state 0, all laws of physics, can you predict state N? (Is the world deterministic?)

• Metaphysics

  • physics of physics
  • What stuff is there?
  • Abstract
  • Ontology (used in NLP, etc): determine what types of things there are. OOP is building an ontology.
  • Lots of work in whether a particular ontology is a good ontology... why don't we look at those 100s of years of work (as software people)?

• Ethics and Political Philosophy

  • Structuralism
  • Structural Linguistics
  • Saussure
  • Lévi-Strauss
  • Chomsky, compilers, and Chomsky Hierarchy
  • Post-structuralism
  • Foucault and Discipline and Punish
  • Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Post-script on the Societies of Control
  • Galloway and Protocol: How control exists after decentralization

• "Protological control" (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc)

  • See writings here: words.