

Doug Comer: How to Insult a Computer Scientist - dedalus
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.criticize.html

======
stcredzero
I once witnessed a wily 40-something Master's student torturing one of the
department's young star PhD candidates. The PhD student had caught one of his
mistakes and was taking it back, as any honorable academic should. The
Master's student continued on, pretending as if the PhD student was insisting
on the correctness of his earlier assertion. You could see the urgency with
which the PhD student was trying to roll over and expose his belly, and his
perplexity at that not working.

Never have I seen someone so distressed at being told he was right.

~~~
sofal
I've read this comment about ten times now and I still can't quite understand
who was doing what to who. Am I going crazy?

Edit: I think I see now. The master's student was the distressed one.

~~~
stcredzero
Nope. The PhD was the distressed one.

~~~
robertk
Please rephrase. It sounds like an interesting anecdote if it were
understandable.

~~~
stcredzero
M = Master's student P = PhD candidate

M discovers P is wrong and says why.

P realizes his mistake and admits it like any honest academic would.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P relents again, embarassed, since sticking to his guns would be anathema to
his being.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P tries harder to make it clear that he's relenting.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns...

I wish I could remember what they were talking about. M kept the other guy
going for quite awhile and got him pretty riled up.

In essence, it was Trolling, but in person. (There is a good chance that this
thread is trolling of the more common online variety.)

~~~
sofal
Ah, okay. It was just the last sentence that threw me for a loop:

 _"Never have I seen someone so distressed at being told he was right."_

From the anecdote I understood that the PhD candidate was being told he was
wrong. Anyway, I promise I'm not a troll, at least not on purpose.

~~~
stcredzero
It's a bit subtler than that, even. The M doesn't tell P _that_ he's wrong, he
says _why_ he's wrong. He never comes out and says P is wrong, he just lets
everyone around "get it." P gets it too, and tries to back off. M keeps
spinning the illusion that P is sticking to his guns.

I never realized how evil M was until I thought about it again.

------
tomsaffell
Would a computer scientist be insulted if you suggested he had wrapped a small
amount of useful functionality in multiple and unnecessary levels of
abstraction?

What if you suggested the same of his essays?

------
delano
Is referring to engineers as "experimentalists" part of the joke?

In any case it was a good, light read that I'll take to heart in the next
version of my insulting library.

<http://insults.rubyforge.org/>

------
bitdiddle
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice,
there is.

I think it was Kissinger who said that academic politics are so intense
because the stakes are so small. These kinds of essays get old after a while.

------
anuraggoel
Doug Comer seems to be quite disillusioned with academia - he has posted
several similarly wry CS 'essays' on his website:
<http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/>

~~~
cconstantine
Comer is just a straight out character. He's one of the few people who can
legitimatly point at the internet and say "I made that".

Yes, he knows where to point to be pointing at the internet.

With that kind of work behind him it's hard to do anything else as important,
and it's hard for anyone to criticize him.

------
aolnerd
Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 21:15:34 GMT

~~~
sspencer
Oh gee, you're right. It wasn't posted last week, so it must be irrelevant and
worthless, right?

