The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

QJo:
The Poop... of DOOM!:
tharpa:
hobbes:
Mike:
After graduating college 5 years ago with an IT degree focusing in web design, I started at a insurance company jumping straight into an entry level position using COBOL, JCL, and Easytrieve+ in a mainframe environment. 6 months later, an opening came up for an open system position, and I gladly jumped over. COBOL is great for processing batch at night, but I feel much better with OOP.
I think I see the problem.. you have an IT degree focusing on web design.
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.

thedailywtf. Where the geek snobs hang out.
So making things look pretty is what IT is all about?

No, but it's where the money lies. Muggles will part with a lot of readies in order to obtain something sparkly and shiny, be damned to what it contains.

True enough. So all of us took the wrong profession and mock people who took the right one!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

ledlogic:
Don't discount Pascal! Comparison of object pascal, java, c++ salary trends: http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=object+pascal&l1=&q2=lisp&l2=&q3=c%2B%2B&l3=&q4=java&l4=&q5=javascript&l5=&q6=actionscript&l6=&tm=1

Clicking on the language names in that particular list to display the number of jobs advertised/offered via that site reveals the following:

"The search title:(object pascal) jobs did not match any jobs"

Delving further finds 1 job that required "Object Pascal"; ( and 26 that contain the two words "Pascal" and "Object", though not the specific phrase "Object Pascal")

So, the number of jobs advertised/offered via that site, reached by a single click:

Object Pascal = none Lisp = 1 C++ = 4,560 Java = 24,752 JavaScript = 1,605 ActionScript = 152

If those numbers are reasonably representative of the wider picture - and yes, that is a big IF - then they paint a very different picture than that painted by the "comparison of salary trends"...

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

anonymous bystander:
ledlogic:
Don't discount Pascal! Comparison of object pascal, java, c++ salary trends: http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=object+pascal&l1=&q2=lisp&l2=&q3=c%2B%2B&l3=&q4=java&l4=&q5=javascript&l5=&q6=actionscript&l6=&tm=1

Clicking on the language names in that particular list to display the number of jobs advertised/offered via that site reveals the following:

"The search title:(object pascal) jobs did not match any jobs"

Delving further finds 1 job that required "Object Pascal"; ( and 26 that contain the two words "Pascal" and "Object", though not the specific phrase "Object Pascal")

So, the number of jobs advertised/offered via that site, reached by a single click:

Object Pascal = none Lisp = 1 C++ = 4,560 Java = 24,752 JavaScript = 1,605 ActionScript = 152

If those numbers are reasonably representative of the wider picture - and yes, that is a big IF - then they paint a very different picture than that painted by the "comparison of salary trends"...

Does any Object Pascal dev at your company earn less than 100k/month?

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

[quote user="ceiswyn"]Psychology may be a science that is frequently taught badly, and even more frequently abused by frauds who want to add a veneer of 'scienceyness' to their crystal ball gazing, but that doesn't stop it being a science, any more than the existence of astrology means that astronomy isn't a science.

[quote]

Psychology occupies a curious middle ground. There are pieces of the discipline that clearly make testable predictions and reduce the number of entities needed to describe the world, and there are pieces of the discipline that seem to be nothing more than excuses for undergraduate-level handwaving. I think that saying "psychology [is/isn't] a science is probably misguided. You're more likely to be saying something coherent if you talk about one particular branch of psychology or another.

Also, some of the scienciest bits of psychology are the least productive of useful insight, for what that's worth. I'm thinking of the behaviorist stuff - I don't know if it's still going on, but when I was in school, there was a guy who was still running rats. What he learned obviously had no real application to human behavior, since the premise was essentially mechanistic, but he had lots of hypotheses and predictions and graphs and charts!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
I think that saying "psychology [is/isn't] a science is probably misguided. You're more likely to be saying something coherent if you talk about one particular branch of psychology or another.
Also, some of the scienciest bits of psychology are the least productive of useful insight, for what that's worth. I'm thinking of the behaviorist stuff - I don't know if it's still going on, but when I was in school, there was a guy who was still running rats. What he learned obviously had no real application to human behavior, since the premise was essentially mechanistic, but he had lots of hypotheses and predictions and graphs and charts!

Well, none of the branches I studied were handwavily unscientific; including the areas of social psychology and individual differences that include the topics most usually regarded as artsy woo. It all depends on how your particular institution teaches it, and mine was pretty darn' rigorous.

And while animal psychology / the biology of learning and memory (ie rats-in-mazes) might /look/ like the most scientific of the disciplines at a casual glance, they're actually pretty basic and mechanistic; I actually found that cognitive psychology and human information processing were far more scientific.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Peter:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.

No, I think they quit pushing Pascal as soon as I graduated (having had to learn Pascal, of course)

Alex could make good money today. Aren't most of the COBOL programmers dead?

No, there are still some of us around. However, we are all in late youth (to quote Isaac Asimov). Even so, finding work is no longer so easy . . .

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

ceiswyn:
Well, none of the branches I studied were handwavily unscientific; including the areas of social psychology and individual differences that include the topics most usually regarded as artsy woo. It all depends on how your particular institution teaches it, and mine was pretty darn' rigorous.

I didn't go into social psych very deeply, but what I saw did not impress me as having any real explanatory power. "Artsy woo" would be about what I saw, except there wasn't anything very artistic about it. The trouble was there was no effort to explain, only to catalog behaviors. The "explanations" were generally spurious, ad hoc stories that were developed around the data.

Compare this to the cognitive science approach, where there were plenty of spurious ad hoc stories, but they were told prior to the experiment, and then transformed into hypotheses, with the goal of reducing the internal complexity of the model. I found that much more convincing.

And while animal psychology / the biology of learning and memory (ie rats-in-mazes) might /look/ like the most scientific of the disciplines at a casual glance, they're actually pretty basic and mechanistic; I actually found that cognitive psychology and human information processing were far more scientific.

Yes, I think that's exactly what I said. And cognitive science and psycholinguistics are the branches where I found the most serious work being done, and the most interesting results.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

hobbes:
Mike:
After graduating college 5 years ago with an IT degree focusing in web design, I started at a insurance company jumping straight into an entry level position using COBOL, JCL, and Easytrieve+ in a mainframe environment. 6 months later, an opening came up for an open system position, and I gladly jumped over. COBOL is great for processing batch at night, but I feel much better with OOP.
I think I see the problem.. you have an IT degree focusing on web design.
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.

Not everyone seeks validation through academic acheivement. Some of us are well-endowed in other areas.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Wagner:
hobbes:
Mike:
After graduating college 5 years ago with an IT degree focusing in web design, I started at a insurance company jumping straight into an entry level position using COBOL, JCL, and Easytrieve+ in a mainframe environment. 6 months later, an opening came up for an open system position, and I gladly jumped over. COBOL is great for processing batch at night, but I feel much better with OOP.
I think I see the problem.. you have an IT degree focusing on web design.
Everyone else is not laughing with you. So you know.
Not everyone seeks validation through academic acheivement. Some of us are well-endowed in other areas.

Like hairloss.

boog · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Hortical:
boog (real):
Who cares?
You forgot to log out.

Why would I log out?

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

ceiswyn:
trtrwtf:
I think that saying "psychology [is/isn't] a science is probably misguided. You're more likely to be saying something coherent if you talk about one particular branch of psychology or another.
Also, some of the scienciest bits of psychology are the least productive of useful insight, for what that's worth. I'm thinking of the behaviorist stuff - I don't know if it's still going on, but when I was in school, there was a guy who was still running rats. What he learned obviously had no real application to human behavior, since the premise was essentially mechanistic, but he had lots of hypotheses and predictions and graphs and charts!

Well, none of the branches I studied were handwavily unscientific; including the areas of social psychology and individual differences that include the topics most usually regarded as artsy woo. It all depends on how your particular institution teaches it, and mine was pretty darn' rigorous.

And while animal psychology / the biology of learning and memory (ie rats-in-mazes) might /look/ like the most scientific of the disciplines at a casual glance, they're actually pretty basic and mechanistic; I actually found that cognitive psychology and human information processing were far more scientific.

Good for you, then. Hope you're happy.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
ceiswyn:
Well, none of the branches I studied were handwavily unscientific; including the areas of social psychology and individual differences that include the topics most usually regarded as artsy woo. It all depends on how your particular institution teaches it, and mine was pretty darn' rigorous.

I didn't go into social psych very deeply, but what I saw did not impress me as having any real explanatory power. "Artsy woo" would be about what I saw, except there wasn't anything very artistic about it. The trouble was there was no effort to explain, only to catalog behaviors. The "explanations" were generally spurious, ad hoc stories that were developed around the data.

Compare this to the cognitive science approach, where there were plenty of spurious ad hoc stories, but they were told prior to the experiment, and then transformed into hypotheses, with the goal of reducing the internal complexity of the model. I found that much more convincing.

And while animal psychology / the biology of learning and memory (ie rats-in-mazes) might /look/ like the most scientific of the disciplines at a casual glance, they're actually pretty basic and mechanistic; I actually found that cognitive psychology and human information processing were far more scientific.

Yes, I think that's exactly what I said. And cognitive science and psycholinguistics are the branches where I found the most serious work being done, and the most interesting results.

Back in my days, I've seen both kinds. One was "experimental and practical psychology", of which I still got the coursebook, as it's just plain interesting. The other was "sociology" or something like that and was just a load of bullcrap.

The former gave theories about how things are remembered, how behaviour gets ingrained, how people can put peel upon peel of behaviour onto themselves, and how depeeling those work. It also included fun stuff like all those experiments with a room full of people, and 2-3 actors, or putting something on fire in a room of cubicles and see who does what. The Prisoner's Dilemma was explained thoroughly as well. Actually, the entire Game Theory got explained in there. It was immensely interesting, fun and, most of all, practically applicable in plenty of other areas outside of psychology.

The latter was bullshit. I don't remember much of it due to that, except that we had to learn that people with a physical job paid less attention to every ouchie and owchie, while high-brow, well-paid, white-collar folks do, because {reason pulled out of ass}. I think I severely flunked that exam, cause I couldn't get that bullshit into my head, while I did well on the "practical and experimental psychology" exam, as I raced through the book and everything just stuck (well, technically, I didn't, as it was open book and I forgot about it. Could see the answers in the book, even knew which page to go to, but couldn't see the answers themselves, so.... flunk!)

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".
The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.

To be strictly accurate, it should be "the students are graduated from the school."

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

method1:
John Evans:
What got me was "Really? No one's ever gotten that far in the course before..."
Its the sort of thing you hear sooner or later if you're a bright kid with no access to expensive private schools.

I was sent on an "Extension Course" in PL/1 with CICS, supposed to last 3 days. We were given a problem with 2 CICS screens to be created, along with having to write the program to process them. The database was given.

After lunch on the first day, I had finished, had it checked by the assistant running the course, and had nothing to do. He suggested that I get the book of all the course material from his desk and try out the other problems.

That got me to the end of the second day. After that, I started to create my own variations of the programs, just to pass the time. Most of the other people on the course managed to complete the first problem by the end of the three days.

Either I'm brilliant (always a possibility), or the others were major league duffers.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

L.:
WC:
That sounds like the majority of my experience with guidance counselors, too. They don't even attempt to steer you straight. They just want you out of their office.
I had 96 credits for a 64 credit degree, and they told me I needed 3 more: Earth Science. The lowest of the lowest of the sciences. I had taken all the others and gotten A's, but none of them could substitute for it. And it was only available as a tele-course.

I quit and went and got on with my life instead.

Eh .. its not actually part of the sciences ;) Geography is, mineralogy surely etc.. but ...

earth science, psychology, women studies .. all that is NOT science -

Beware of imitators, look for the REAL "scienCe" logo !!!

The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word “science” in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power. Gerald Weinberg, “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking”

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

RogerWilco:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.
Yeah or FORTRAN.

I seem to remember that AS/400 CL wasn't uncommon in the early 90's

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

I quit and went and got on with my life instead.

Ah, then you failed to learn the single lesson that college is supposed to teach you: how to jump through hoops!

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

So why the fuck was he getting logged randomly out of the system? Not addressed at all on the first page of comments. I was waiting and waiting for the payoff, and it never came

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

COBOL68-RIVERCITY-ACADEMIC-PROCESSOR

Otherwise known as C-R-A-P?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

hoodaticus · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

boog:
Peter:
Nickster:
The college wanted 'C' experience in the late 80s? Really?
I thought they were still pushing Pascal in those days.

No, I think they quit pushing Pascal as soon as I graduated (having had to learn Pascal, of course)

At my high school they were pushing Pascal into the late 90s. They switched to C++ my senior year.

My high school had QBasic! I was in a group of three nerds who *acquired* Visual Studio on our own so that we could learn something useful.

I did manage to write a graphics library in QBasic (with graphical fonts, charting, and valid screen mode enumeration). But I honestly think my 15-year-old brain was too primitive to learn OOP or C++ at that point - it went flying straight over my head. I barely made it past "Hello World."

It all comes so much easier now.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
I was in a group of three nerds who *acquired* Visual Studio on our own so that we could learn something useful.

I don't get it... I know there's a punchline coming, though...

SuperousOxide · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Waste the poor kid's time in summer school because his guidance counselor is too incompetent to make sure he got enough electives. Nice.

I can only assume that some of his courses were disqualified for not being "elective enough" by some stupid criterion. Unless you're failing classes, you should hit high school requirements unless you're actively trying not to.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

The real WTF is that the problem wasn't a pool hall. Maybe Prof Harold Hill was teaching the class?

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Level 2:
DMJ:
I can sympathize with the last paragraph.
When I went for an MS in Business, I had to retake the remedial statistics because the professor explained that my previous classes were "Physics statistics" not "Business Statistics". In retrospect, since the class only really covered up through Least Squares Fit and Chi-Squared, I think I learned nothing but did get some credits that didn't count towards the Masters program.

So be it

You had to learn which subset of physics statistics you could use without confusing your business professor.

So, learning how not to confuse his superiors? Truly, a useful skill to be taught for one going into the business world.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

iToad:
I used to own an Atari ST. As a matter of fact, I tossed it about a year ago. However, I never got a chance to use it for COBOL. Instead, I had to use punched cards.

I punch people not cards.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

When I started college in 87, all they had was FORTRAN, Pascal and VAX assemblier. Later on, there was an optional one time course in C. The rest was advanced math and a couple of other comp sci classes that I never had any use for again. Totally sad, but I didn't know any better at the time. I later learned C++ and Perl on my own in the mid to late nineties when I was actually able to get a programming job.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

Kaine:
"COBOL".Substring(0,1) == "C"
There; it's equivalent. And first.

At least say it in C: "COBOL"[0] == 'C'

oheso · 2011-09-02 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
... but when I was in school, there was a guy who was still running rats. What he learned obviously had no real application to human behavior, since the premise was essentially mechanistic ...

Citation needed.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

"COBOL"[0] == 'C'

This is true.

2011-09-02 Reply Admin

oheso:
trtrwtf:
... but when I was in school, there was a guy who was still running rats. What he learned obviously had no real application to human behavior, since the premise was essentially mechanistic ...

Citation needed.

Allen Neuringer. Reed College. He's still there, as it turns out, still working on the same stuff, emeritus. That the premise of behaviorism is basically mechanistic is not controversial: it's the premise of behaviorism. Inputs and outputs and no sticky thoughts or beliefs or desires or anything. That's sort of the point. From the wikipedia article:

Behavior is a response (R), typically controlled by past consequences, which is also controlled by the presence of a discriminative stimulus. It operates on the environment, as in having an effect.

Behaviorist accounts reject intentional phenomena, which cognitive accounts take as essential to explanation. Zenon Pylyshyn uses this story as an example, which I paraphrase:

You see a man approach a street corner. He begns to cross the street, when a car comes suddenly into view, swerves to miss him, and crashes into a building. He runs to the car, and looks inside, and then he runs to a phone booth (the example was published in th 1980s, I believe) and dials the digits 9-1.

What is the next digit that he dials? Why does he do this?

The behaviorist would have to explain this story, and our ability to understand this story, without recourse to what the man knows, believes, or desires, because these things cannot be observed. The cognitive science takes those as the fundamental units of explanation. And that's the difference between behaviorists and cognitive scientists. (Allen Neuringer is the man who once, during a class session, tried to convince me that I enjoyed playing the guitar because I'd conditioned myself to enjoy it. I didn't find this convincing)

2011-09-03 Reply Admin

Nickster:
It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".
The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.

To be strictly accurate, it should be "the students are graduated from the school."

Or in my case, "given the diploma so they wouldn't have to deal with me any more."

oheso · 2011-09-03 Reply Admin

So what you're saying is, I was right to challenge your earlier statement (assuming you're the same sock puppet).

2011-09-03 Reply Admin

F:
Roger Garrett:
Aaaarrggghhh!
It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".

The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.
You must be thinking of English. This stuff is written in American.

It's not UK English; the correct term here would be "leave school", or perhaps "finish school". Maybe Australian?

2011-09-03 Reply Admin

Seems likely that only people that have mastered COBOL would have got the Meredith Wilson connection... And wasn't there another tune... "COBOL Librarian". Brilliant parody, thanks!

My youth? Misspent on Model 33 Teletypes (yes, with paper tape punches AND acoustic couplers!) recoding Trek to my liking, CPU-less Univac 1108's & 1110's (you figure it out, I already know!), Imsai's, Applesoft, Pascal, CHIMP and a crazy little thing called Procedure Division.

2011-09-03 Reply Admin

DMJ:
When I went for an MS in Business

I WAS wondering, who the f*ck would abbreviate Master of Science M.S. Figures.

2011-09-03 Reply Admin

foo:
Kaine:
"COBOL".Substring(0,1) == "C"
There; it's equivalent. And first.
At least say it in C: "COBOL"[0] == 'C'

*"COBOL" == 'C'

2011-09-05 Reply Admin

moz:
F:
Roger Garrett:
Aaaarrggghhh!
It's "graduate FROM high school", not "graduate high school".

The school graduates its students. The students graduate FROM the school.
You must be thinking of English. This stuff is written in American.
It's not UK English; the correct term here would be "leave school", or perhaps "finish school". Maybe Australian?

The language police force strikes again. What about http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/graduate:

"Informal . to receive a degree or diploma from: She graduated college in 1950."

2011-09-05 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
(Allen Neuringer is the man who once, during a class session, tried to convince me that I enjoyed playing the guitar because I'd conditioned myself to enjoy it. I didn't find this convincing)

... how else would you be able to enjoy it ? For you to like playing guitar, there must be an equivalent to "likeguitar=true" somewhere in your brain. In this case, your professor was a bit wrong, as music is appreciated by both humans and animals and that the conditioning doesn't only come from yourself but instead from being human (enjoying music), western culture (guitar = nice, guitar = default instrument, ...) and personal experience (*a fuckton of stuff that directly and indirectly influenced your choice of the guitar*)

2011-09-05 Reply Admin

L.:
trtrwtf:
(Allen Neuringer is the man who once, during a class session, tried to convince me that I enjoyed playing the guitar because I'd conditioned myself to enjoy it. I didn't find this convincing)
... how else would you be able to enjoy it ? For you to like playing guitar, there must be an equivalent to "likeguitar=true" somewhere in your brain. In this case, your professor was a bit wrong, as music is appreciated by both humans and animals and that the conditioning doesn't only come from yourself but instead from being human (enjoying music), western culture (guitar = nice, guitar = default instrument, ...) and personal experience (*a fuckton of stuff that directly and indirectly influenced your choice of the guitar*)

As Lemmy informed the world in a interview once, he learned at school that carrying a guitar around gets you laid. The real WTF is that he thought this worth noting.

2011-09-05 Reply Admin

L.:
trtrwtf:
(Allen Neuringer is the man who once, during a class session, tried to convince me that I enjoyed playing the guitar because I'd conditioned myself to enjoy it. I didn't find this convincing)
... how else would you be able to enjoy it ? For you to like playing guitar, there must be an equivalent to "likeguitar=true" somewhere in your brain.

Okay, you buy the behaviorist account. I don't. I believe that a correct account of human cognition is going to have to involve explanations at the intentional level, not simply setting mental variables.

But let's explore your premise. For my to condition myself to set the "likeguitar" variable, I would have to reinforce the activity of playing guitar, wouldn't I? Presumably, I would do that by making pretty sounds with the guitar and enjoying them, and the pretty sounds would be the reinforcement. But as it turns out, when I first started playing the guitar, I was terrible at it, and the sounds I made were terrible, so that wouldn't have been a reinforcement.

I might have picked it up for the Lemmy motivation, I guess, although it didn't do much for me in that regard when I was a kid, but that's a cognitive explanation: it says I want to get laid, and I believe that playing guitar will allow me to achieve that, therefore I will play guitar. That doesn't get me to "enjoying", though.

2011-09-05 Reply Admin

For you to like playing guitar, there must be an equivalent to "likeguitar=true" somewhere in your brain.

Not likely. The brain is a neural network - you should definitely read up on them because they're very interesting, and they definitely do NOT work like a Von Neumann machine!

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

Ok it's rather oversimlplified ... What you state about Pavlovian stuff isn't quite what I thought about when writing the reply -

An equivalent (yes neuralnet blabla) of likeguitar means that when you started and kept on playing, your perception was that guitar is good.

We all do lots of stuff we suck at in the beginning (and often at the end too but w/e) - this doesn't prevent the fact that the only reason you played guitar is because your brain was in a state that implied guitar is good.

This in turn means that without that state of mind (you can say conditioning produced it, as any form of experience is conditioning and thus the actual cause for the state of mind you're in), you wouldn't have played guitar.

And thus, saying you played guitar because you were conditioned to is perfectly correct.

a) if you did not like music to start with it wouldn't have happened b) if you weren't born in a guitar country, you'd have played shamisen or something else c) if you hadn't decided at some point to start playing,.. d) if you hadn't actually moved your * to do it, ...

All the above are but consequences of your state of mind, and thus the conditioning that we all inevitably get by just existing and processing information.

It's not like you could have started playing guitar if the concept wasn't presented to you (over and over may I add).

I play clarinet, because I listened to it and liked it, and my parents pushed and I enjoyed playing it anyway.

I also play guitar, and I can clearly say this wouldn't have happened if I didn't know guitars existed or if I didn't listen to any guitar music.

I even play a very tiny microscopic bit of piano... guess why ? same stuff.

Also - Hail Lemmy !

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

L.:
Ok it's rather oversimlplified ... What you state about Pavlovian stuff isn't quite what I thought about when writing the reply -
An equivalent (yes neuralnet blabla) of likeguitar means that when you started and kept on playing, your perception was that guitar is good.

We all do lots of stuff we suck at in the beginning (and often at the end too but w/e) - this doesn't prevent the fact that the only reason you played guitar is because your brain was in a state that implied guitar is good.

This in turn means that without that state of mind (you can say conditioning produced it, as any form of experience is conditioning and thus the actual cause for the state of mind you're in), you wouldn't have played guitar.

And thus, saying you played guitar because you were conditioned to is perfectly correct.

a) if you did not like music to start with it wouldn't have happened b) if you weren't born in a guitar country, you'd have played shamisen or something else c) if you hadn't decided at some point to start playing,.. d) if you hadn't actually moved your * to do it, ...

All the above are but consequences of your state of mind, and thus the conditioning that we all inevitably get by just existing and processing information.

It's not like you could have started playing guitar if the concept wasn't presented to you (over and over may I add).

I play clarinet, because I listened to it and liked it, and my parents pushed and I enjoyed playing it anyway.

I also play guitar, and I can clearly say this wouldn't have happened if I didn't know guitars existed or if I didn't listen to any guitar music.

I even play a very tiny microscopic bit of piano... guess why ? same stuff.

Also - Hail Lemmy !

Interesting.

There was a piano in the family home which both parents played to a certain extent. Was taught by my mother but hated her teaching technique, it was all too rigid and stratified: "You're not allowed to play the next tune till you've played this one perfectly."

I also played clarinet because I was pushed to (but in this case because my father liked the sound of it - I hated it too).

I tried to play guitar because it was a status symbol in our youth club: to be anyone you had to play guitar (although I never had a decent one to play on, and so at the time wasn't very good, although strumming chords is easy enough for anyone).

Stopped playing clarinet as soon as I was old enough to assert my will on my destiny (in this case: 16). Carried on with guitar to the extent of being able to play in public at folk clubs and open mic nights and so on. Still never very good.

Later in life when I had the money to spare I got a saxophone and delighted in how easy it was to play after my experience with the clarinet. Every so often I take it down to the local jazz club and have a blast with the rest of the boys.

What motivated me? a) Peer pressure, a desire to be admired and respected. b) Part of the same thing, wanting to be up on stage and be a rock star. c) The sheer joy of making a tuneful and enthusiastic noise with a musical instrument. d) The desire to create new music that nobody has heard before. e) Oh, and to get laid, of course. (Doesn't work as much as you'd expect, but works enough for personal gratification.)

Moral of the story: take up a musical instrument - but everyone plays guitar, a sax is far more exciting.

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

Definitely .. I'll play sax some day as I've always enjoyed the jazz/blues side of the clarinet more than the rest (which I do enjoy and which I chose myself)

Also : don't pick trumpet, unless you're into women who like hamsters.

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

L.:
This in turn means that without that state of mind (you can say conditioning produced it, as any form of experience is conditioning and thus the actual cause for the state of mind you're in), you wouldn't have played guitar.
And thus, saying you played guitar because you were conditioned to is perfectly correct.

Does the term "assuming the consequent" mean anything for you?

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

Michiel Overtoom:
Last month I wrote my first COBOL program: I heard good money can be made as a COBOL programmer.

The bank has tons of CICS. New COBOL is written every day. However, the good money is in TPF Assembler if you are a legacy-coder. Otherwise it's Java and Tibco for as far as the eye can see.

emurphy · 2011-09-06 Reply Admin

v. belatedly, assembler is good to learn even if you're not going to use it directly; it gives you an idea of what the computer actually has to do under the hood to carry out your high-level instructions, and thus why two similar-looking implementations may differ vastly in their efficiency.

2011-09-06 Reply Admin

Because he's too busy running his private island after putting those COBOL skills to use in the runup to Y2K.

2011-09-07 Reply Admin

An equivalent (yes neuralnet blabla) of likeguitar means that when you started and kept on playing, your perception was that guitar is good. ... this doesn't prevent the fact that the only reason you played guitar is because your brain was in a state that implied guitar is good.

Nope. Brain states are not like logical T/F premises. There is a whole lot more to "guitar is good" than storing a boolean value. There are innumerable combinations of reinforcement and inhibition.

At the least, there are numerous systems in the brain that can react to the sound of the guitar, the feel of the guitar, the pleasure of repeating a performance or matching a rhythm, etc. etc. Your oversimplification is not one of degree, but of quality.

2011-09-07 Reply Admin

Uli Kunkel:
An equivalent (yes neuralnet blabla) of likeguitar means that when you started and kept on playing, your perception was that guitar is good. ... this doesn't prevent the fact that the only reason you played guitar is because your brain was in a state that implied guitar is good.

Nope. Brain states are not like logical T/F premises. There is a whole lot more to "guitar is good" than storing a boolean value. There are innumerable combinations of reinforcement and inhibition.

At the least, there are numerous systems in the brain that can react to the sound of the guitar, the feel of the guitar, the pleasure of repeating a performance or matching a rhythm, etc. etc. Your oversimplification is not one of degree, but of quality.

Yes let's write tons of lines to give an incomplete picture of the subject instead of summarizing it (a lot) in order to discuss high-level abstract concepts.

Common Educational Oriented Language

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