Lambda the Ultimate

Appeal to authority, obviously. Dijkstra (or Knuth, or Kay, or Friedman) says it's humbug, possibly indirected through an unnamed third party, and therefore it is. ;)

... holds in conferences as elsewhere, so the judgement of humbug has Bayes on its side...
Josh

...and seems pretty self-contradictory to me.

I think you mean Sturgeon's Revelation: "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

That "everything" term seems ill-defined -- does he mean the powerset of any universe's ontology? That would be my guess, since he was describing science fiction novels at the time.

Anyway, I think he's saying that ten percent of the universe is non-crud (though this isn't required by the revelation.) If so, would ninety percent of that non-crud subset be, again, crud?

Ah! The "crud" predicate is a description of one's own emotional reactions, not any sort of "external" prediction. I see it now. So this could be more precisely stated as "Sturgeon claims disappointment ninety percent of the time." And that would accurately apply to arbitrary conferences.

(Poor Sturgeon!)

Reading the paper explains why Kay said that 'hubris is measured in nano-dijkstra' in his talk.

Yeah, except he should have given the conversion rate to micro-kays to make the notion perfectly clear. ;-)

The kay talk was about nothing but kay worship and kay's fantasy.

And he has experience to back them up. That's different than J. Random Blogger.

It's also interesting to read old writing by e.g. Kay and Papert and see that what they've predicted has actually come true in the expected timeframe. That's pretty amazing. Compare with many of the "within ten years" predictions of their peers in AI and robotics :-)

It's also interesting to read old writing by e.g. Kay and Papert and see that what they've predicted has actually come true in the expected timeframe.

This statement screams for concrete examples. I'm not doubting you -- I'm just asking you to list what you had in mind when you made that statement. It's a bit much to ask all the readers of LtU to go through or be familiar with old Kay or Papert papers.

I ask all readers of LtU to be familiar with old Kay and Papert papers, if not for the sake of my claim but for the sake of their own peace of mind.

I am with you, Luke. I try to remember what's in them, not that I always succeed. Still, I'd be interested to know which predictions you had in mind...

This is starting to sound religious. LtU is about honest intellectual discussion, not appeals to lore.

I've recently watched two Kay lectures linked from LtU. I have a list as long as my arm of classical Computer Science texts I'd like to read. I could go through every paper written by Kay and Papert and still not know exactly what you had in mind when you wrote your statement.

Explicating papers would introduce the undesirable property of "falsifiability" to the hypothesis.

(Anyway, everyone knows the only way to really know anything is to channel Monad the Ineffable. Praise him!)

Hallelujah, brother! May the Circle of the Monad bind thee.

(Sorry, couldn't resist :)

This statement screams for concrete examples

Kay quotes some evidence of his prescience in The Early History of Smalltalk. Scroll down to "A Simple Vision of the Future", written in 1977. Sound familiar?

Around the mid '80s, someone in Byte magazine promised holographic disk storage for PCs within 5 years. If I were an AI or robotics researcher, I'd simply point out that the hardware guys let me down. ;)

Just use cdr.

that for example the "Constructionist learning" thing is not working out all that well for math education.

that the on there most important points papert and kay are totaly wrong !

Gotta admit that Kay has interesting ideas, though. And he has experience to back them up. That's different than J. Random Blogger

A distinction that is often overlooked nowadays, as Kay himself laments:

"When I first prepared this particular talk … I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law—bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything."

From his recent talk, How Simply and Understandably Could The "Personal Computing Experience" Be Programmed?.

You just can’t criticize anything.

It almost sounds to me as if you are saying (or maybe Kay himself is) that Kay is such a great man with so much experience, that none of us, no matter how long we have studied or thought about the issues, can possibly have any opinion of value to contribute. Does getting lucky with a prediction imply prophet-like powers of insight?

I really don't think that PLT would be better off if the rest of us just gave up, gave Kay the total monopoly on criticism he seems to want and hung uncritically onto his every word.

Kay is a giant of the field, but even giants can put the emphasis on the wrong thing, call the kettle black, or be just plain wrong.

Dissenting from the pronouncements of previous giants is the basis of most progress.

It almost sounds to me as if you are saying (or maybe Kay himself is) that Kay is such a great man with so much experience, that none of us, no matter how long we have studied or thought about the issues, can possibly have any opinion of value to contribute

That's certainly not what he's saying. He's complaining about uninformed criticism. If you are informed, then by all means criticize.

His complaint is that the web encourages such an egalitarian culture that it can be hard to distinguish the informed from the uninformed. It used to be that if you were reading a book from a reputable publisher, or a paper in a reputable journal, you could be somewhat certain that there was some thought behind the words. Now, you see both brilliant insights and unresearched, unreasoned opinions formatted in the same default Wordpress layout. Casual readers give them the same weight.

Kay doesn't want a "monopoly" on criticism; he wants less of an anarchy. When a widely-acknowledged giant in the field has trouble getting people to listen to him, when he feels he's being drowned out by Slashdot rabble, there is probably a problem.

I, for one, would like to hear what the Buddha has to say before killing him.

Casual readers give them the same weight.

Even the most casual of readers makes judgements about this sort of thing. Certainly, they may not judge correctly, but is it important to worry about the least discerning members of the audience?

When a widely-acknowledged giant in the field has trouble getting people to listen to him, when he feels he's being drowned out by Slashdot rabble, there is probably a problem.

If that is indeed the problem he perceives, perhaps he simply hasn't gotten used to the web. But authority still has weight: as a "widely-acknowledged giant", people are, in fact, going to be interested in what he has to say. He, and you, should probably worry less about it.

That said, if someone like Kay makes strong claims with a weak argument, as I think he was doing in this quote, his giant status should not insulate his position from criticism. Perhaps he's really lamenting the fact that that particular style of criticism can be difficult to distinguish from that put out by the "rabble"; in this particular case, I'd have to agree with him.