
Catching crumbs from the table (2000) - nether
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html
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sgentle
One thing I think is particularly interesting about this idea is the ways in
which it already applies today.

Working with overseas-produced chips with no or poor English documentation is
a kind of hermeneutics. The ESP8266 is a popular chip but mostly because of
the (now) enormous body of third-party English-language instructions. The
RTL2832 is perhaps an even better example - nobody knew it could even do SDR
for a long time. In the west we rely a lot on third parties to bridge the gap
with the real hardware hubs in Asia.

Popular science is another example. We can see lots of videos of people
trotting around the LHC handwaving about how it works. Is that really useful
if there's basically zero chance of the audience getting involved in particle
physics? And yet widespread opposition to evolution and climate science shows
that teaching science to non-scientists can be a wise investment.

And, of course, the infamous "programming by poking" metaphor from Sussman:
"You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that
poke it and see what it does. And you say, 'Can I tweak it to do the thing I
want?'" In other words, programming by hermeneutics. And yet, this approach
solves certain problems far more quickly than building from the ground up.

I see these as an essential artefact of specialisation; we're not smart enough
to be particle physicists, and computer scientists, and chip engineers. We
can't understand everything, and as these fields deepen, they only get more
incomprehensible. I'm sure most observations by one serious physicist to
another would go totally over my head, despite my relatively decent amateur
physics knowledge. It's maybe not a stretch to say that at some point to push
the frontiers of physics you will need to be a physicist from birth.

So it seems we don't necessarily need a jump from human to metahuman;
hermeneutics is important already, and going to become more so as our
specialists become more specialised. Greg Egan once wrote about passing
important information through a kind of enormous transhuman game of telephone,
where each kind of intelligence translated the concepts into a form its
nearest intellectual neighbours could understand, and so on until it spread to
everyone. Perhaps that's where all of this ends.

~~~
chris_st
Well put.

Except:

> _And, of course, the infamous "programming by poking" metaphor from Sussman:
> "You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that
> poke it and see what it does. And you say, 'Can I tweak it to do the thing I
> want?'" In other words, programming by hermeneutics._

I'm afraid that this is sometimes the excuse for not documenting software --
sort of a, "Hey, here it is, just poke at it, you'll figure it out!" kind of
attitude. Eat your veggies, rotate your tires, document your code.

------
bouvin
I don't know how many people realise this, but Nature puts out great little SF
short stories. If the interaction between humans and “metahumans” tickle your
fancy, I can recommend Peter Watts' Blindsight/Echopraxia as well.

