[HN Gopher] Category Theory
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Category Theory
Author : pizza
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-09-19 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cap-lore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cap-lore.com)
| Twisol wrote:
| I think this happens in many domains. The way an expert thinks
| about a topic is very different from the way a novice thinks
| about a topic. It's not that the expert thinks in more complex
| ways than the novice; I'd actually argue that the expert thinks
| in _simpler_ ways. But these ways of thinking are entirely
| different from each other, and when you 're in one camp, the
| behaviors of the other camp appear unexplainable and complex.
|
| When folks on the outside of category peer across the gap, they
| see a huge array of ways of speaking about both familiar and
| unfamiliar concepts. When an analogy is made across the gap,
| folks think "is that all it is?" or "how is that useful?" or "why
| are you making something so simple into something so
| complicated?". The categorical ways of thinking form such a
| vastly different basis of thinking that it's the _translation_
| into and out of that basis that 's deeply complicated. When
| you're actually across the bridge, it's as simple as anything
| else -- but good luck explaining that to non-experts!
|
| I've had managers who have the same attitude to software
| engineering. To them, if we understand the problem to be solved
| and the needs of the users, it's as good as solved! Why are you
| software engineers complicating things!? But I think many of us
| on this forum would side with the engineer, rather than the
| manager, because many of us _are_ across the bridge. And how
| often do you have to try to translate what you do into something
| they can understand? (How often do they actually _get_ it?)
| deltasixeight wrote:
| It's more than just a different way of thinking. There's an
| intuition gap caused by human bias. We bias towards one way of
| thinking and moving out of that bias is extremely hard.
| norswap wrote:
| I have genuinely no idea what this is saying.
|
| He was talking about "sensory keys" but the other person thought
| it was "requestor's keys"? That can't be it - because it's
| implied the other person heard the term "sensory".
|
| Can someone explain?
|
| (I must refrain from being very snarky and say that maybe the
| author is not very good at making points. Oops.)
| throwoutway wrote:
| It looks like the context is missing. So the author assumes the
| audience is familiar with past knowledge about their OS (I
| clicked through to the main webpage)
|
| Still not sure what it means either
| Twisol wrote:
| My read: there is something called a "key", and keys come in
| various kinds. If you only know that something is a key, the
| author says it should be clear that you can tell if something
| is a sensory key based only on its content. They explain that
| the adjective is part of the key's identity.
|
| Their collaborator notes that another kind of key, a
| "requester's key", cannot be distinguished just by the contents
| of the key itself; it's more about the context in which the key
| is used. The collaborator notes that "sensory key" could very
| well be the same kind of thing, if you don't already know any
| better. The author was surprised at how implicitly this
| knowledge was in their mind. They had attributed this feature
| to adjectives in general, not realizing the subtlety.
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(page generated 2021-09-19 23:01 UTC)