About IQ?
Let me back up and get a long running start on this. In evaluating a
software engineering project that has some kind of startoff or baseline
code, or that *may* use such a baseline, we have to sometimes make a
decision whether to start from scratch. The little conceptual universe
represented in such a code base may be well-structured, it may be a total
mess. If it's messy, we have to evaluate how much effort is required to
clean it up.
The complete set of variables, constants, data structures, functions, and
whatnot, for a single progrem, is a universe. The names of all these
things taken together forms a universe of discourse, or simply a nameset.
It's been my observation that any program big enough and old enough to be
a possible candidate for cleanup has a bigger universe of discourse than
it needs or wants or can really support. That is, it will have TOO MANY
VARIABLES, and too many of everything else too, but mostly variables.
This is my metaphor for the terminological morass that four hundred years
or so of Baconian "Science", misapplied in human affairs, has left us
with.
One of the signatures I periodically switch to, for my email, is a
paraphrase of Hamlet to Horatio: "there are far *fewer* things in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." What Hamlet originally
said, of course, was that there were *more* things, not *fewer*. But that
was back in the late 16th century. Modern Philosophy, Sociology,
economics, anthropology, molecularbiology and denotionationallinguistic-
anti-establish morphogenetic geometry... etc., have been industriously
creating new concepts ever since, and I believe that the balance has
actually shifted.
I'm advertising myself these days as an "antiprogrammer" who gets paid for
writing "antiprograms": lines of negative code which, when combined with
regular programs, make them shorter.
Wouldn't it be nice to wake up tomorrow with all the superfluous concepts
just *gone*? The world all clean spanking new again? Human institutions
reduced to just the irreducible logical primitives, whatever those might
be?
Let's begin with "IQ".
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
--------------------------------------------------- ---------------------
. . . . . There are more different kinds of people in the world . . . . .
. . ^ . . than there are people... . . . . .
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>