Re: Resiliency To New Data Requirements

Keith H Duggar wrote:
> Marshall wrote :
> > But there's still a lot missing, specifically
> > semantics. What exactly do new, select, create, update,
> > delete do? (I think I've got 'and' figured out, though.)
> > What kind of scope do symbols have?
>
> Jay Dee wrote :
> > But I really don't know what the results of those
> > functions are. Are the, perhaps, operations that have no
> > results? ...
>
> Neo has repeatedly been asked precisely these same questions
> in a variety of ways and every time has refused or remains
> unable to provide /actual/ answers.

Yes, in fact Neo has been with us for a number of years now.

> He often responds with
> troll-like behavior: referencing irrelevant material as in
> his direction to the "IDJIT" thread, responding with skew
> lines and tangents, responding with wanna-be-erudite false-
> pith like "lambda", etc.

Yah, and in fact I think he's gotta be getting something of a persecution complex by now.

> If it weren't for his website,
> examples, etc he could easily be dismissed as a simple
> troll. The presence of that material either makes him an
> Elite Troll or a demi-crank of some kind.

Nice terms! I'm going to vote for demi-crank. Troll to me denotes that someone who is not actually arguing in good faith; that is, they don't even themselves believe what they are saying, being motivated instead entirely from the effect of what they say. I don't believe Neo falls in to that category; I think he really does believe what he's saying. Unfortunately he has seized upon a number of ideas that are not particularly justified, such as the insufficiency of first order logic for some particular, unspecified task. And the fact that he has lots of requirements but he can't say what they specifically are, and that he has lots of solutions but he can't say specifically what they are either, moves him in to crank territory. But Neo does actually come up with ideas, and he does actually make progress over time, so maybe "demi-crank" is actually pretty good.

> His reluctance to answer "what" probably points to it being
> a disguised rehash of network or entity-relationship models
> or similar. But Neo is afraid if he comes out and honestly,
> plainly states this fact nobody will pay attention to him
> any longer.

I suppose that's possible, but I'm more inclined to think that he's actually unable to state those things clearly. I think he's kind of bit off more than he can chew, in that he seems to be going for a solution that's AI-complete.

Marshall Received on Sat Aug 05 2006 - 08:54:56 CEST