[a1r]

Paul Graham's essay today: "We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them."

[steego]

As someone who has personally explained the phenomenon of cargo cult to individuals over the years, I made the decision to abandon it years ago.

I didn’t succumb to the pressure of heresy. I simply grew up and realized that it wasn’t actually that useful of a tool for explaining first principles or encouraging people to learn things from a first principles perspective.

My experience was: If a person felt like they already identified as someone who understands idea from first principles, the cargo cult story didn’t incentive them to question their understanding.

I also found if the person didn’t identify as someone who understood things from first principles, then the implication that they were implicitly being compared to clever primitive people. It wasn’t exactly reassuring and motivating.

At some point, people need to grow up and realize these conversations aren’t always about trying to censor people or to construct new heresies to use as instruments of cancellation.

Sometimes we need to have these conversations so we can reflect on what we say, how our words make people feel, and if they’re actually effective at accomplishing what we hoped those ideas would accomplish.

Zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

[gsf_emergency]

Relevantly: I saw (on ACM site) a decades old(!!) heretical essay (="heressay"?) which argued

    That there is *NO* gap between theory & practice.

(at least in Computer Science, & not in the eponymous eschew-first-principles Science cults of physicist Feynman's fame )

  Sounds familiar?? I cant find it now, someone please help?

:(

EDIT:

And Programmers, unlike Cargo Cult Psychotherapists of TFA's source, do quantitatively try to make deals with the spirits (in the machine)???

"In theory there is a difference between theory and practice - in practice there isn't"

-- Not [Comrade] Yogi Berra