LOGO-L> Re: Why is accurate thinking so unpopular?

[graham telfer <gtelfer@po.synapse.ne.jp>]

Brian Harvey wrote:

> Bob Gorman <bgorman@kncell.org> writes:
> >I used to think that thinking skills went from 0, for non-thinkers to some
> >large number for those that are enraptured by it. But certain things didn't
> >make sense, till I realized the scale actually goes negative!
> > [ snipped]

>
> I agree that a lot of people believe wrong things in a lot of areas, but
> perhaps you're too harsh in putting the blame on their emotional needs.
>
> Very little in the world is like mathematics, in which wrong things are
> manifestly wrong because they're self-contradictory.  In other areas,
> things are contingently wrong -- something that might have been true, in
> a different history, just happens to be false.  How do we ever know about
> any of those things?  There are many things that you believe because
> you've been told them by people you took as authoritative, such as
> parents or teachers.  How do you know, for example, that water is made of
> two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen?  At some point, in high school,
> you probably did the experiment of separating water into those components,
> but you probably knew about H2O before that, and even the experiment
> proves its conclusion only by way of a lot of interpretation of the meaning
> of the results.  (Specifically, you have to believe that equal numbers of
> atoms of two different gases will have the same volume, rather than the
> same weight.)
>
> It makes *sense* to believe your teachers about things like that.  There
> isn't enough time for you to recapitulate the entire intellectual history
> of the human race; you have to believe people about most things.  So it's
> not so surprising if one believes the same people about ideas like
> democracy in the USA, or chemical weapons in the Sudan, or Vietnam
> attacking US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or that Iraq is more
> aggressive than Indonesia, or any of the other lies that we're told with
> the same kind of authority.
>
> The only reason you or I know better is that at some point we met other
> authority figures who told us contradictory things -- and *then* we had
> to use our critical thinking capabilities to sort out what's really true.

Wow what esoteric stuff. First of all let's not forget that we all think,
all of
the time. That part of the thinking process called conscious thought is
just one
small bit. Do programming languages help you think? Do some programming
languages
help you think better than others?

I live in Japan and when I began learning Japanese I read in many
introducions to
Japanese courses that said Japanese was more ambiguous than English. This is
complete nonsence! The confusion arises because the languages differ in
what each
considers important. In a similar way computer programming languages differ.

Being a hobbyist programmermeans I have the privilige of using several
languages:
Forth, Logo, Prolog and Eiffel. Most of the thinking goes towards
understing the
problem domain. To do thst I use all kinds of techniques. Sometimes I will
write
about what I think the problem is about. This is especially true if the problem
domain is unfamiliar. I jus want tio get a few handles on the problem. At other
times I will use diagrams. Semantic nets are good for understanding the
relationships that exst between entities. Sometimes I will continue and
tansform
nets into VDM or use an object oriented analysis method to hone in on specific
parts of the problem.

Eventually a kind of critical mass is reached and I can begin to consider what
language I shall use. As my understanding grows I begin to think more about the
targert language I will use.  Otherwise I will think about Forth and
Eiffel. For
speed and compactness I use Forth but for bigger applications I use Eiffel.








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