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