G. [01.11.07 11:03 PM]

Well call this Kant guy Emmanuel and you will have more credibility :-)

  michael schrage [01.12.07 08:07 AM]

this was really a hoot (even though i could grasp barely 2/3rds of the SGML/XML fine points)...there reeally is something to be said about seemingly abstruse arguments really clarifying what we want our 'real world' instantiations of value to be...

...but to so deftly toggle between code and doggerel reflects an aesthetic that shows a successful design(s) really do have a sense of humor

  Prokofy Neva [01.12.07 09:31 AM]

Yes, I surely do remember the old Two Cultures debate, Tim. And the tables are utterly turned today as you surely see.

Back in C.P. Snow's day, scientists were trying to be accepted into the elite ruled in that day by those educated in the humanities. They were seen as a lesser caste. Today, you have tekkies claiming that all humanities are now their provenance merely because they are all rendered digital and electronic, or have become Internet or technology-dependent. They are not even according the right of the humanities in fact to be a second culture. They imagine they've subsumed what used to be the first culture rightfully. Every computer technician is suddenly a scholare of literature and an economist merely because he controls the programs that create text or calculate.

Of course there are exceptions as you've noted, tekkies who are erudite Renaissance men. Raph Koster is one -- he writes poetry and reads novels. Philip Rosedale is one -- he ponders the theory of corporations and economics and sociology.

But by and large, even among these humanitarian scientists what you find are narrow minds and literalist conceptions and code-as-law -- which is the ultimate extremist scientific position which utterly eradicates the values of the humanities culture -- completely obviating the need for human wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and universality by substituting it with various toggles of ban/mute/yes/no/permit/

I think we are still facing a very grave cultural gap between science and humanities not only because scientists, now the rulers of a very technologically sophisticated modern world, believe they have endorsed the values of the humanities merely by nominally becoming secular humanists, and merely adopting this or that "progressive agenda," as if standing for net neutrality or clean water or eliminating world poverty makes them experts on the humanities.

The mind of the tekkie tends, by its nature, to be one that admits only absolutes and scientific certainties very narrowly construed. I see this each time a tekkie claims in Second Life that if something can't work 100 percent perfectly, it cannot be used at all and that something working well enough, 70 percent, is unacceptable (i.e. on issues like copyright).

  adamsj [01.12.07 09:41 AM]

Prokoly,

It's not just techies. I recently read Lee Silver's Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life. In the introduction, I believe, he notes with disdain a fellow academic who called him an "amateur anthropologist". Or was it noted with amusement?

(The book was not totally convincing on all points, but is still well worth the reading.)

  Prokofy Neva [01.12.07 09:44 AM]

OH, and now having read this keynote, which of course is in a technical jargon an outsider can't be expected to really understand, I grasp that what he's saying is that not every document has to have a tag literally when it has the capacity to be tagged and therefore its tagability becomes a kind of Platonic tag in the noosphere that it always has, due to the logic of naming and systems. If it's not about that, well, it's about something like that.

But the bit of doggerel cobbled up to the tune of "Drink to me only with thine eyes" borrows only the external form and rhyme, not the meaning.

When Ben Johnson writes,

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;"

what he means -- and I could be wrong, it's been awhile since English Literature 202 -- is that he wants to have a communion with a woman where she exchanges a meaningful glance with him of great promise, signifying perhaps love and the consummation of love, and doesn't want her only to raise a literal wine glass and toast him. If all she does is exchange a meaningful look with him, a toast of the eyes that he meets with a pledge, that is enough, and the external trappings of wine and toasting as a ritual are not necessary -- they would be merely empty signifiers without the internal meaning of the eye's look through which the soul speaks.

Meanwhile, the doggerel writer says:

Serve to me only docs with tags
And I will parse just fine.

That tells me that somebody has only used the external rhyme scheme, and skipped over the meaning.

Ben Johnson just told you that you don't have to serve up the meaning of love with the external ritual of a wine-glass raised in a toast, i.e. a tag upon a document.

He's said:

Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.

-- and made it more clear that he isn't looking for wine, intoxication, the external but is looking for the meaningful glance, the kiss, the love, not the drinking expedition.

So to turn THAT around and say that and admit to i an interpretation of "serve to me only docs with tags" is to translate Ben Johnson not only crudely, but falsely, implying that he meant:

"Drink to me only with thy wine glass".

Discuss.

  Prokofy Neva [01.12.07 09:46 AM]

adams, if your point is that those in the humanities snipe at each other for not being cultured or credentialed *enough,* they surely do. BTW, science and spirituality does clash at the frontiers of modern life, yes indeedy. And scientists dismiss ths problem by grabbing only certainly politically-correct and expedient parts of the humanities for their repertoir (those that bother to go beyond hard science). Think Chomsky.

  adamsj [01.12.07 11:43 AM]

Prokoly,

Lee Silver is a biologist--not a humanities guy, but not (what I think of as) a techie, either.

  shayne [01.24.07 12:35 PM]

Yes tim, Its indeed Immanuel, and he every logic loving coder ought read critique of pure reason just to remind themselves that its philosophy where it *all* starts from.