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.

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.