Structure quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Nima_Arkani-Hamed

Some Other Structure

“So, there's some other structure that we're looking for. And some way of thinking about interpreting this structure will let us see spacetime and quantum mechanics emerge simultaneously and joined at the hip.”
  • Source: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Harvard Lecture I. 2019. YouTube video entitled “Donald Hoffman's New Approach To Consciousness” channel “Dr Brian Keating”. Online at <https://youtu.be/mU_WBela71Y?si=fNfLLsOsUDRDC1XD> posted 2024-08, retrieved 2024-08. In video at 33:00.

Robert_N_Britcher

Complexity of Loops

“... within a procedure, fascinating problems exist - for example, verifying the correctness of a loop, one of the most complex structures in logic.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 112.

Fred_Brooks

Productivity Magnitude

“Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 16, page 202.

Programmer Poetry

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering (Anniversary Edition) | 1975/1995 (Anniv.). Boston. MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0201835959. Chapter 1, page 7.

Melvin_Conway

Conway's Law

"Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Albert_Einstein

Questioning

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. ... Don't stop to marvel.”

  • Source: A statement made to William Miller, a Life Magazine editor, recorded in his personal memoirs. Reprinted in LIFE magazine 1955-05-02, in the article entitled “Death of a Genius: His Fourth Dimension, Time, Overtakes Einstein”, page 64. Online at <https://books.google.com/books?id=dlYEAAAAMBAJ>.

David_Epstein

Problems

“In familiar problems, the space is ‘well-structured’ — marked with clear roads, so to speak — so one merely need follow known routes... For unfamiliar challenges, or ‘ill-structured’ problems, the problem space is so vast and uncharted that imposing some structure — deciding where to begin and how to advance — becomes the challenge.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 29. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Stuart_Hameroff

Brain Neurons

“Well I used to think as other people do that the brain is a computer and I think instead, as I have said before, it's more of a multi-scale hierarchical system. More like a musical system in some sense. I'd refer to it as a quantum orchestra. Because I think the computational metaphor doesn't work because, well it works to a point but it treats neurons  as simple on/off switches and that's an insult to neurons... If you go inside neurons there's all this interesting, I hate to use the word complex because I think complexity is often the last refuge of the bewildered. Just say it's complex and that explains everything which I think is wrong. But you have all this structure, these microtubules doing all this interesting quantum stuff and quantum computation reducing by OR [Orchestrated Objective Reduction/Orch OR] is not the kind of computation I was disillusioned with. So, I'd say that one thing is that the brain is a multi-scale hierarchal system more like music than a classical computer.”
  • Source: Stuart Hameroff speaking in the YouTube video entitled “Sir Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff: Collapsing a theory of quantum consciousness? Part 2 (248)” on the channel entitled “Dr Brian Keating” streamed live 2022-08-05, retrieved 2024-04-17 from <https://www.youtube.com/live/OoDi856wLPM?si=XJrLm0AVUIl_dECG>.

Donald_Hoffman

Spacetime Deep Enough

“The question is, is spacetime itself a deep enough structure for us to try to boot up consciousness from.”
  • Source: Donald Hoffman, in the YouTube video entitled “Donald Hoffman's New Approach To Consciousness” channel “Dr Brian Keating”. Online at <https://youtu.be/mU_WBela71Y?si=fNfLLsOsUDRDC1XD> posted 2024-08, retrieved 2024-08. In video at 36:10.

Bernardo_Kastrup

Metaphysically Real

“Synchronicity — insofar as it defines the structures or tendencies underlying all quantum events — is the only metaphysically real ordering principle in nature. The laws of nature we are familiar with in our daily lives become mere epiphenomena of archetypal synchronicities.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 69. Chapter 4.

Inverting Materialism

“Here we have Jung completely inverting the logic of mainstream materialism: it’s the psychic function that creates, maintains, and modifies the organic structure, not the other way around.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 78. Chapter 5.

Robert_K_Merton

Certified Knowledge

”The institutional goal of science is the extension of certified knowledge. The technical methods employed toward this end provide the relevant definition of knowledge: empirically confirmed and logically consistent predictions. The institutional imperatives (mores) derive from the goal and the methods. The entire structure of technical and moral norms implements the final objective. The technical norm of empirical evidence, adequate, valid and reliable, is a prerequisite for sustained true prediction; the technical norm of logical consistency, a prerequisite for systematic and valid prediction. The mores of science possess a methodologic rationale, but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they are believed right and good. They are moral as well as technical prescriptions. Four sets of institutional imperatives – universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism – comprise the ethos of modern science.”
  • Source: Robert King Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), 552-3.

Ipek_Ozkaya

Hello World Development

“We teach students hello world development, while we should be teaching them how to read millions of lines of code, triage and fix bugs that they have not contributed to and understand the structure and behavior of the software rather than the single class or story card they are responsible for.”
  • Source: Ipek Ozkaya, “Application of Large Language Models to Software Engineering Tasks: Opportunities, Risks, and Implications,” in IEEE Software, volume 40, number 3, pages 4-8, May-June 2023, DOI: 10.1109/MS.2023.3248401.

Alan_Perlis

Human Communication Limits

“A man can communicate with about five colleagues on a software project without too much difficulty. Likewise he can supervise about five people and know pretty well what they are doing. One would structure 120 people in three levels, in which no man is talking to more than about eight people, both across his level and up and down”

Programming the Excluded Muddle

“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.”

Karl_Popper

Scientific Knowledge

“If the picture of the world which modern science draws comes anywhere near the truth — in other words, if we have anything like ‘scientific knowledge’ — then the conditions obtaining almost everywhere in the universe make the discovery of structural laws of the kind we are seeking — and thus the attainment of ‘scientific knowledge’ — almost impossible. For almost all regions of the universe are filled by chaotic radiation, and almost all the rest by matter in a likewise chaotic state. In spite of this, science has been miraculously successful in proceeding toward what I think should be regarded as its aim. This strange fact cannot, I think, be explained without proving too much. But it can encourage us to pursue that aim, even though we may not get any further encouragement to believe that we can actually attain it; neither from metaphysical realism nor from any other source.”
  • Source: Realism and the Aim of Science: From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1983, p. 146, ISBN 0415084008

Willard_Van_Orman_Quine

Science as a Tool

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries - not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
  • Source: From A Logical Point of View (1953), p. 44.

Rittel_and_Webber

Tame Versus Wicked Problems

“The problems that scientists and engineers have usually focused upon are mostly 'tame' or 'benign' ones. As an example, consider a problem of mathematics, such as solving an equation, or the task of an organic chemist in analyzing the structure of some unknown compound, or that of the chess player attempting to accomplish checkmate in five moves. For each the mission is clear. It is clear, in turn, whether or not the problems have been solved. Wicked problems, in contrast, have neither of these clarifying traits.”

Herbert_Simon

Operational Research Restrictions

“The powerful algorithms associated with OR impose a strong mathematical structure on the decision problem. Their power is bought at the cost of shaping and squeezing the real-world problem to fit their computational requirements.”

Computer Programming as Data Structures

“When we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes, that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless, for most purposes, it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes.”

Top Down or Bottom Up

“Alternatives are also open, in organizing the design process, as to how far development of possible subsystems will be carried before the overall coordinating design is developed in detail, or vice-versa, how far the overall design should be carried before various components, or possible components, are developed. These alternatives of design are familiar to architects. They are familiar also to composers, who must decide how far the architectonics of a musical structure will be evolved before some of the component musical themes and other elements have been invented. Computer programmers face the same choices, between working downward from executive routines to subroutines or upward from component subroutines to a coordinating executive.”

Stephen_Wolfram

Heat and Temperature

“Heat is the randomized motion of molecules. Heat is a feature of the microscopic structure of matter. If matter wasn't made of molecules there wouldn't be heat in the same sense. And so the concept of temperature is a feature of a characterization of the amount of randomness in these molecules... It's just the average kinetic energy of molecules... That's what defines temperature.”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘Stephen Wolfram | My Discovery Changes Everything’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-01-19. Video offset 21:39. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Foundational Math Problem

“Here's the foundational problem. The mathematics you need is completely unknown. We're trying to build it, but here's how it works. If you study calculus, you'll study univariant calculus, calculus of one variable. You'll study multivariant calculus, calculus where there's variables x, y, z, and so on. What we need is calculus where there are fractional number of variables, and nobody has ever figured that out. Nobody has even tried to study that. When you look at the kind of geometry that emerges from these hypergraphs and things you end up needing to know about things like calculus in 3.1 dimensions. That's simply a mathematical structure that hasn't been built. We're in the process of building it, but it is a fairly heavy lift. That's a deep, foundational piece of mathematics that has to be built...”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-12-02. Video offset 1:32:08. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Shoshana_Zuboff

The Panopticon

“The Panopticon was an architectural innovation developed by the moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Foucault's view, it is both a sign of and metaphor for this new disciplinary society. Bentham extolled the Panopticon as a technological triumph capable of exploiting the productive potential of those who had flouted, thwarted, or otherwise escaped social authority. His initial targets were convicts and paupers, though he did not fail to see the potential usefulness of the Panopticon for students, asylum inmates, and workers. The architectural plan conceived by Bentham was first constructed by his brother Samuel, an engineer, in 1787 for a factory at Critchef in Russia. It was later adapted to the problems of housing convicts and paupers. The structure consisted of a twelve-sided polygon formed in iron and sheathed in glass in order to create the effect of what Bentham called 'universal transparency.' A central tower, pierced with wide windows, opened onto the inner wall of the surrounding polygonal structure, which itself was divided into narrow cells extending across the width of the building. Each cell had a window on both the inner and outer walls, allowing light to cross it and illuminate all the inhabitants to an observer in the central tower, while that observer could not be seen from any one of the cells. Mirrors were fixed around the tower to direct extra light into these apartments.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 320. ISBN:0465032125.