Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

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I actually disagree. People have a pretty good grasp of basic logic. The issue is that when we say "computers are logical", what we really mean is that you need to treat computers like someone who is missing important parts of their brain.

People are used to interact with other entities that can perform advanced logical inferences, deductions, etc in an intuitive way. They are at a loss when they're forced to dumb it down to "talk" to someone who needs to be told not to crash into the wall when being told to walk in a certain direction.

Worse still, when people do understand that computers are really dumb, but actually good at following orders when you treat them like a mentally challenged toddler, they get stuck again when even that fails; when they encounter application after application that does not operate in any logical sense, because they aren't programmed by other computers, but by lazy/dumb/stressed/ignorant programmers like me.

The best quote I read on this comes from this essay: http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."

This. The whole essay you linked is golden.

People have good grasp in logic, but they totally underestimate the amount of computation our brains do in the background when communicating. A lot of information is contained in our shared cultular upbringing, education, social norms and internal brain mechanisms. Computers don't have any of that. Even as I write this comment, 99% of information required to comprehend it is not in the text - is in the shared context everyone has in their heads already.

This essay is priceless:

> Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn't.

If you're using logic that assumes the entity you're interacting with "can perform advanced logical inferences, deductions, etc." but don't understand how to dumb it down for a computer, does that not mean that somewhere you don't have a grasp of something? What is that something, is it logic? I'm playing devil's advocate more than anything but I think being able to tell a computer step by step what to do requires logic, albeit perhaps a specific type of logic.

It's logical sentiments that have faded to the unconscious. If the society you are within has the same elements in their unconsciousness, information bandwidth to convey a message is reduced for all parties, with An unknown amount of subtle complexities (within messages) still successfully conveyed.

This idea (amongst many other gems) comes from a great short book I just finished on cybernetics (old, old book) The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) by Norbert Weiner

But I'm more on your side, only because I think we should be able to elaborate on the elements that faded to the unconscious, since if we cannot, we will not be able to apply the subtle rules in novel ways

> People have a pretty good grasp of basic logic.

I disagree. Consider that most people fail the Wason test, unless it is being explained using a scenario involving cheating, when they pass.

I had to look up what the "Wason-test" is[1] -- and I'm not convinced it proves people do not have a good grasp of basic logic. I think it shows that people don't see logic as a useful tool in determining the classification of a grand total of four real-world objects.

I think people are just better at optimizing their brain power than that, with just four cards, why not look on both sides of all of them? You examine twice as many cards, but you'll probably complete the task quicker than if you think carefully about the wording of the question.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

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