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Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Its hilarious watching a group of some of the smartest people on the planet still not getting it, over and over. It just sails right under their heads :-)

The nuts are discrete, point-like objects. But length is continuous, and so is area. The whole point of the artwork is to point out that its possible to confuse discrete objects with continuous objects, and confuse 1 dimensional objects like lengths with 2-dimentional objects like area.....and have off-by-1 errors, and double-counting errors...basically, you can make every mistake that it is possible to make.....

....AND STILL not realize you are wrong, because in this particular test case, the numbers came out to be what you expected them to be. Its saying don't do that.

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I agree. And I’ll also say that whether the artist intended this as the meaning of the work is irrelevant. Art once created exists apart from its creator and can be analyzed and criticized and understood in ways the artist never expected or intended. So even if the artist just made a mistake here the art itself is able to evoke the much deeper and more interesting meaning which you read into it.

>Its hilarious watching a group of some of the smartest people on the planet still not getting it, over and over. It just sails right under their heads :-)

The hubris displayed in thinking that HN is "a group of some of the smartest people on the planet" is revolting.

Well, on the basis of this reply, I'll have to agree that the readers are not uniformly very smart :-)

What's awful about this site is because you couched your insult in superficially polite language, dang won't do anything.

If I respond to this insult, though, that's not "curious conversation".

The moderation on this site is total horse shit.

If anybody took it as an insult, I apologize. It was not meant that way at all.

It was meant to be ironic. The reason they didn't get the artwork wasn't because they were dumb, it was because they were smart. Kind of like how Goedel's technique works on the strengths of a formal system, not its weaknesses.

It's easy to outsmart yourself, and I've fallen into this trap more than anybody else. For example, it's harder to debug code than write code, so if you write the cleverest code you can, you won't be able to debug it.

I can't tell you how many times I've had to replace code I wrote, which so slickly used the latest C++ feature, or was so "elegantly" written, with the dumbest, dorkiest code possible which would solve the problem, just so I could actually deliver a robust and bug-free solution.

This particular artwork so elegantly captures the moral of this story, and in a very visually appealing way.

No, that's not the point of the artwork. The artist still doesn't even get that this is what's wrong with the artwork:

> "What I had stumbled upon was that physical entities (stones) are not equatable with conceptual entities (points)," Bochner said

Nope, that's not it.

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