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From: Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: the command line is language (Was: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy)
Date: 27 Feb 2025 03:31:11 -0400
Organization: Bridgewater Institute for Advanced Study - Blacksmith Shop
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Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> writes:

> Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:
> 
>> [snip]
>>       The command line is like language.
>>
>>       The GUI is like shopping.
>>
>> Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are
>> to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature
>> find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.
>> They just don't get it.  Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary
>> level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the
>> intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read
>> attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.
>>
>> [snip]
>
> I'm sorry for a follow-up with very little to add, but you really said
> everything.

Thank you.


> The command line is language.  And, yes, it turns out we
> have an entire population who don't master much language at all.  And I
> equate language with thinking.

I think language is what determined that homo became and remains
sapiens.  A vast corpus of neuroscience hasn't unravelled how language
originated or why other animals with complex brains don't have it.
Unless you're going to fall back on something mystical like "eternal
souls", language is what makes us what we are.


>  If you're thinking, you're using language....Anyway, this lack of
> intellectual abilities, which boils down to language, grammar skills
> has crept up even in the computer science graduate group, which is
> appalling.

The other side of the coin is people with the skill (or learned,
calculated ability) to persuade millions of others to do stupid stuff
using semantically vacuous language.  Now (YADATROT) you can devise
by trial and error algorithms or neural net constructs  to do it for
you. 

Thirty years ago, I made jokes about "epistemogical engineering".  Now
epistemological engineering has probably doomed the world's most
powerful nation to chaos.

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada