Comment by jdauriemma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdauriemma | Hacker News Reader

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This is a nice article with some good guidelines but I have to point out a bit of irony, just for fun:

> Filter #1: Are they free to speak their minds?

> If they are in an institution – who funds it?

> If they are in a company - what are the incentives of the company?

> As an individual, what are their incentives?

This is great advice. In the case of this article, according to the "About" info, one of the authors works for a VC-funded tech company who's making an online game platform. Would they be incentivized to write about a BS filter that denigrated venture capital, tech, or online gaming specifically?

> Filter #2: Does their livelihood depend on being right?

From the "About" info, that doesn't appear to be the case here. But still, I tend to agree.

> Filter #3: Do they take cyberspace seriously?

This is where working for a VC-backed online gaming startup may activate filter #1, given the author lists examples that neatly support the industry they're in. I'm not convinced this filter belongs with #1 and #2, and because of #1 and #2, I'm skeptical of #3.

But I liked the article, thanks for sharing!

I really feel like #3 really means "Do they take my field of expertise seriously?"

The author's field of expertise is software, therefore only people who take software seriously are worth listening to.

I respectfully disagree.

When I was a structural engineer (Ontario EIT) I did not think that buildings were going to change the world dramatically. I thought software, biotech, and nanotech would. And so far, it's been software that has been leading the way with biotech coming second. Software is huge.

We've only had the internet for a few decades and it's already dramatically changed almost anything I can think of. Politics (including war, espionage, campaigning, propaganda), the economy (gig economy, AirBnb / Outdoorsy, high frequency trading, remote work), society / culture (including the quality range of damn near everything from shows on Netflix to music to even food), funding (Kickstarter, cryptocurrencies).

Like, I struggle to even comprehend how many decisions are made by computers around the world each second. Cyber is the number one issue on the DNI report on global security. It's a big deal.

This is a stronger argument than that in the article. Still, you could make a strong argument for a variety of important industries/fields. Agriculture? Climate science?

Edit: I see everyone's latching onto agriculture as a literal suggestion rather than a rhetorical device, sorry for the confusion. I think it's valid to treat agriculture as seriously as cyberspace but honestly I don't know enough about the former to respond to the good scrutiny in this thread.

Agriculture is important, and software is driving most of the innovation. Whether its better software to design the machines that harvest crops, more efficient futures markets for selling grain in advance of harvest, better watering scheduling, self-driving harvesters, a basis of information for farmers to learn about advances in farm tech, computers that enable genetics research for better genetically modified crops.

Put another way, it isn't like the head of cabbage I ate six months ago has me writing better code then or today. But the script I wrote to make my development loop faster still does.

The system is chaotic and interdependent, but the flows of causation are still broadly understandable. It even makes sense on a philosophical level. Humans were once the only agents in the economy with decision making power. Now a human writes some code and the code operates long after the human that wrote it has gone. Output is no longer tied to attention.

Furthermore, we happen to live in an existence where information transfer is extremely, extremely, cheap from a resource standpoint. So the software doesn't just scale attention on the one computer it was written on, it scales for everyone! An upgrade to Microsoft Excel helps millions of people all at once! We can even use software to make better computers and software! It's naturally self-building, and the main reason why I think it will continue to lead biotech until biotech merges with software.

So, I'd say the Network is a bigger deal than Agriculture. Agriculture was important for humans to settle down, it definitely shouldn't be underestimated just because we take it for granted now, but the Network enables human culture to scale enormously further than it could have otherwise.

In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.

But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.

The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.

Agriculture is clearly a need but doesn't have a huge impact on society. It's not like there's multiple gardens in everyone's home, and even if it was they still lack some key capabilities software&internet combine for

Climate science is clearly being overwhelmed by bad actors, generally exerting their influence thru bot & troll farms, communicating thru various software&internet platforms

I don't think either of those are particularly compelling reasons not to s/tech/agriculture|climate science/ to the original argument. There aren't multiple IDEs in most homes, but there are multiple food products. And the climate science bit doesn't really say much - there are bad actors but taking it seriously is no less credible than taking cyberspace seriously IMO.

I don't agree at all. The point was that software has changed the world the most in the last some-odd amount of years, more so than any other discipline, and I don't really understand your counterpoints - there's always been multiple food products in every home, that is actually a demonstration of how little agriculture impacts our lives. It's a mainstay.

And climate science is once again really not impacting our lives - it should be, we should all be making sweeping changes to our behaviors and requiring massive corporate overhauls & pricing in costs of disposal & cleanup - but it's not, because no one cares, and no organization with real teeth bites you for that.

Software, though, it doesn't matter what you do, it will find a way to impact you & what you've done, and if you have non cognizance of that someone else will probably eat your lunch eventually. It's obvious how climate science doesn't have the same level of import wrt every aspect of our lives [note I'm not saying this makes sense, and I would argue climate science is the most important thing, but someone saying "pollute less" isn't more credible for it].

Far be it from me to understate the importance of software, but I think that the notion of “always” having food products is (a) not true for most people in most places throughout most of history and (b) not a compelling counterargument. Food is not like oxygen, the abundance of which is all but guaranteed.

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