The Kooks

The "Kooks" are deviants who destroy order and create dischord by stating things as facts which are in actuality places within reality where dialectic is to be performed. Or, they are posing a question to counterpose a proposition, putting the burden on the other, proposing, party. That is, there is ambiguity and they are either attempting to take advantage of the readers' ignorance, or grab an opportunity to create reality. In any case, it is an act of claiming power. You can spot a kook by the fact that they never have a name or follow the convention documented for the wiki.

Kooks are generally clones of one another in the sense that they all relate to the same original Kook. But here it gets Biblical.

You can tell Kooks in conversation around ComputerScience and ProgrammingLanguages by the fact that they never deal with an actual underlying machine. They are not computer programmers who know what a typedef is. They are the weirdos in some other universe that went for the ManMachineSymbiosis? and manipulate symbols as themselves and in fact co-opt ASCII symbols to take power. They pretend being connected with rules of grammar and such, but only to the extent it is convenient for them. TheyAreNotOfUs?. Avoid them, they will use any dialog to trick important (to them) information out of you (where it might seem harmless or irrelevant).

Kooks are related to Trolls, but the latter sometimes are simply understandable reactions to a misuse of power by the Kooks.

The Kooks think only for and of themselves. If you think you might be a Kook, you probably aren't.

Re: "by the fact that they never deal with an actual underlying machine."

Software engineering is for the most part NOT about machines. We code primarily for humans, not machines. Machines don't maintain code, only humans do. Sure, we need unambiguous code for the machine to figure out, but this also helps human readers because if it's ambiguous to a machine then it can probably be ambiguous to a human. -- t (a possible alleged "Kook")

You are not a kook. If you have humans in mind, you are separate. Thank you! (Also, in my world, we have "floating point" data types -- this requires us to deal with the underlying machine.)

How do floating point data types require you to "deal with the underlying machine"?

Perhaps "influenced by" is more accurate than actual dealing with. If we didn't have to or ignored machine-side issues, then something base-10-friendly and perhaps not limited to 4 or 8 or 16 bytes may be a better choice for human WetWare. Some practical upper limit may be necessary, but ideally if we are ignoring machine issues, it could be 20 or 30 or 75 digits or something else that is not a power of 2 or fits in bytes. In practice, if the machine-centric view is only slightly worse than the human-centric view, we live with the machine-centric view to get the machine performance benefit. -t

Definitions of kook seem to relate to a person regarded as strange, eccentric or crazy. This does not refer directly to the stating things as facts when there is ambiguity mentioned at the top of the page.

It is practically unheard of for a real programmer to ever state something as a fact, when it is ambiguous or unknown. Only kooks do that. Where there is disagreement between two camps, the programmer will simply state "Well then, I don't know" and postpone the problem until later (Because a PersonOfReason?, in my world, knows that everything mundane or manmade is ultimately knowable and it is only a matter of time. But kooks, they don't wait and confuse the discussion with unearned authority. If a programmer or academic is seen doing this, it is an error and they are simply mistaken.

My experience is that there a lot of people who are very sure of certain things, and other people who are sure of other things which are in contradiction. On this wiki that can easily lead to HolyWar. People on neither side of the argument would see themselves as a kook, although they might think that of the people on the other side of the argument. On reflection this situation is quite common. -- JohnFletcher

You are right in a way, and well-worded. However, dialectic should be a way to resolve these disputes, but that is not what occurs with these debates. They stay unresolved, keeping the full potential underpresented. If you don't work on machines of DigitalLogic, you (and they) shouldn't be using the wiki.

There is an assumption made by this writer that there exists a 'dialectic' which is capable of resolving all ambiguity, and that failure to use it represents a loss of potential. I think that assumption not necessarily true, and that there are problems where it is inevitable that there will be a difference of opinion and no resolution possible. I don't see that as a reason not to participate in this wiki, where I have been active on and off for more than 15 years. -- JohnFletcher

In the realm of logic and defining a lexicon for the field, these things should prima facie be resolvable. An academic field should not have unresolvable squabbles over something as small as terminology. I mean, really, make a simple rule (CreatorAsOwner, for example) and let's get on with it. But if we don't even agree on the terms we use, we no longer have a basis for discussion. Again, if they aren't using machines of DigitalLogic, what are they doing here? The machine came first -- you can't be a programmer without using such a machine. --MarkJanssen

{In principle, every technical or scientific field could create a single lexicon. In practice, every technical or scientific field has redundant and sometimes contradictory terminology, and sometimes quibbles over it. This is only a source of confusion -- and a relatively minor one at that -- for students and outsiders. For example, in my field the terms "tuple", "row" and "record" get used (mostly) interchangeably; which term holds prominence depends mostly on the context. It's not a source of confusion. Students soon become industry/field insiders and get used to it, and it fades into unimportance. Occasionally, an outsider comes along who demands a rationalisation of these terms, and sometimes even with good reason -- like making teaching easier -- but no field that I know of has a leader so definitive and powerful that he or she can significantly change overall terminological practice at all. So, what chance has a relatively unknown individual to influence terminology? Answer: None.}

No, it's not a "rationalization" to want consistency of terms -- it doesn't require "a leader so definitive and powerful ...". In our world, (of the UnitedStates) we converge on a definition through dialog, not fiat as you're suggesting. What culture are you from, may I ask?

{I've never seen this "converge on a definition through dialog" except for occasional conference activities that result in forgettable publications and not much else. I've never seen definitions converge via fiat, either. Technical and scientific fields don't converge on definitions at all; terms tend to evolve naturally, often with multiple terms simultaneously in use for a single definition. This is not a problem. Sometimes scientific or technical communities do pay particular attention to leading figures in education within their field (C J Date in databases, or Feynman in physics, for example), but even these figures don't shift popular terminological usage, which is why I mentioned it. As for culture, I am a US citizen born of an American and an Australian of German and Russian descent, raised in Canada who has been resident in the UK for over a decade supporting university students from around the world. I am, as a result, quite familiar with a number of cultures, including various scientific communities.}

If you're not "converging on terms" then you aren't "evolving" anything, you're only dissipating knowledge, degeneratively, towards ambiguity.

{For the majority of insiders, duplicate terminology is worth, at best, a "yeah, whatever" response -- they've got better things to worry about.}

This is nonsense, completely without justification or evidence. I suggest its author reconsider whether or not he really wants to be known for such an AdHominem page, and delete it. At best, it looks like something that in the morning the author is going to regret having written the night before. At worst, allowing it to remain makes WardsWiki appear to have lost its critical faculties and capacity for rational thought.

WardsWiki is a collection of pages on a web site. It is the people who particpate who have human minds and critical faculties. We each participate from our different perceptions. See my comment on TheKooks. -- JohnFletcher

I should have been clearer. I meant that keeping these pages makes WardsWiki appear to have collectively lost its critical faculties and capacity for rational thought. WardsWiki is certainly host to controversial ideas, which is as it should be, but I don't see anything controversial in this page. It's just claptrap.

I have been keeping an eye on the discussion which has been going on to see if I could fit it into a category. Up until now I have not suggested anything. I am particularly interested in how the human mind works, particularly when presented with evidence which contradicts a confirmed position. We have examples where some sorts of intervention lead to confrontation and confusion. -- JohnFletcher

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