Can you detail the ideas you had regarding skrode?

Oh, really, is that all?

https://www.msu.edu/~lewiska8/finalwebisp213h/images/Letter.bmp

One example: programmers are used to fast, memcached filesystem access on their workstations. They they wonder why their I/O-bound server apps slow to a crawl when published.

Programming has a strange tendency to form psuedo-religions around a person, company, or group’s way of thinking. Microsoft is a good example here – until recently, dynamic languages were heresy to them. They’re still obsessed with giving every product, class, and member name the longest name possible. And using upper-case. Upper case is typographically ridiculous in code.

Humans are creatures of habit, and naturally develop “preferences” of coding (and reasoning) that keep us thinking inside the box. I’ve yet to see any language community that didn’t exhibit close-mindedness to some degree. Obviously, those best at judjing new ideas fairly tend to evolve quickest.

@Jim

I think modern medicine is wonderful, but they’re a long way from figuring everything out. The human body is one very complicated piece of architecture… several million times more complicated than our current computer technology.

To take another example of how people frequently build strong opinions or beliefs based on insufficient data – you stated that “faith healing is ludicrous”.

There is scientific evidence of people being raised from the dead (12 hours after dying), huge cancers disappearing without a trace, visibly, utterly blind people receiving sight, and thousands of other miracles. They happen on a daily basis. Personally, I’ve had medically impossible recoveries happen to me during time span of 5 minutes.

Of course – this data likely contradicts your understanding of the universe. So – do you modify your theory to fit the data, or do you throw away any data that doesn’t match your theory? Think carefully, since religious beliefs often come in the form of popular science theory.

There are also a lot of charlatans that take people’s money and pretend to be ‘faith healers’…

Most of the confusion occurs because people don’t actually know what faith is. The wikipedia definition of faith isn’t the faith that heals. And faith isn’t something you can psyc yourself into having. God has to give faith – it’s not psychological. If you haven’t had it, it’s rather hard to communicate. Maybe “sudden certainty without any doubt” would be closest. And healing requires more than just a fading faith – it’s possible to consciously doubt and have the faith disappear, with no results.

Faith is also usually very targeted, such as in a certain event, such as healing, occuring. Thus it is easy to confuse with wikipedia faith.

Since faith healing has preconditions that we can’t replicate at will, standard scientific ‘experiement-observe’ techniques don’t work. But the sheer volume of documentation and frequeny of occurences should be enough to make any clear-thinking individual reconsider his assumption that college teaches us about *all* the forces in the universe…

Anytime I think I know everything, I know I’m wrong.

But even more prosaically, when a doctor says that I have cancer and I’ve got 20% chance of of surviving 12 months, how great an understanding is that? That’s merely a description of some past observations. Additionally, consider the maladies whose causes are listed as ‘multi-factor’ That’s a dead giveaway they have no idea.

Modern medicine is a wonder, faith healing and homeopathy are ludicrous, but don’t think for a minute they’ve got it all figured out.

The others, well, the others will always be second class programmers. They will always be the ones that use the libraries and frameworks made by the real programmers. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Are you implying that a ‘primitive’ shaman’s repertoire is mostly worthless? If so, you might want to think a little more about what shamans did and why they did it. They were worked with people and extremely complex behaviors that could not be understood or predicted with much certainty. This is in stark contrast to working with automobiles and other trivial and simplistic systems.

When computer systems grow in complexity that approaches biological systems, we will see the emergence of many new and different kinds of learning and knowledge to help us deal with it. Some of these new ways will undoubtedly have lots of imprecision, uncertainty and incompleteness. That doesn’t mean they will be worthless.