The emperor has no clothes

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I'd just like to say: hehe, good one guys. Ok, you can stop it now. Nice joke. Stop it, ok. Stop it, you're scaring me here. Look, i'm meant to be the insane one here, why is everyone else off in their own little fantasy world. It's like we've lost the foundations our whole technological civilization was built on. We can survive with our current cargo cult science... for a little while.

The fundamental that we've lost is Occam's razor, which can be gotten at many different ways:

My favourite has to be Pooh's version:

Got it? There is a fundamental, objective reality out there which we're all a part of. We don't know quite what it is, but if we forget it's out there, it will bite us in the ass in a very real and fatal way. The universe has it's own agenda, it isn't going to play along. It doesn't matter how much hot air people spout, how many serious papers they publish, how many exciting new words they invent, how many megabytes of bytecode interpreter library functional next-generation XML RPC exchange tunnelling protocol they wrap about HTTP/TCP/IP. For the most part, it all comes to absolutely nothing.

Once in a while someone comes along and says, well actually there's a simple trick and then it's really quite easy. And people look around in confusion for a while. And then it starts up again. Great! Lets wrap it in a library! Does it use XML? Here's a 1000 page document describing the next great leap forward in human evolution. And so on, and so forth.

Not that there aren't sane people out there: Joel Spolsky, Paul Krugman, Bruce Schneier, and no doubt many more, lost somewhere in all the noise.




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