Python advocacy

[Alex Martelli]

"Steve Horne" <sh at ttsoftware.co.uk> wrote in message
news:8iak3t4a3lrqcqp9iqftmekdoahuico2b0 at 4ax.com...
    [snip]
> the books by Steven Pinker (one on the origins of language, the other
> more generally on human nature - I forget the titles).

"The Language Instinct" is (he admits grumblingly, as somebody
who has his own not-perfectly-consonant professional opinions
on linguistics -- but I've been out of the field for 10 years,
so I can't really argue against Pinker effectively!-) is a
rather good book, yes.  "How the Mind Works", I haven't read
(darn the 'net -- I can't get more than 20-30 books read per
year, any more -- so I'm _badly_ falling behind, as my huge
stacks of just-waiting-to-be-read books keep reminding me!).

Pinker's polemic against S. J. Gould, to be found at:
    http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/GOULD.html
also makes for pretty interesting reading -- though I wish
I had an URL for Gould's side of the coin, too, since that
is the one which I find more convincing.  However, something
both sides fail to note is that evolutionary psychology has
_intrinsic_ interest, when it fails to match the facts just
as much as when it's spot-on -- just as, and for the same
reasons as, economics.  Economics can be seen as a formalized
attempt to explain _every_ human behaviour "as if" humans
were perfect utility-maximizing machines (Steven Landsburg's
splendid "The Armchair Economist" is a good framing of that).

One does necessarily believe humans really *are* that way,
but it's very interesting to see what can be explained, and
what gets left out, by rigorously following that assumption
("If the fool would but persist in his folly, he would
become wise", as Blake put it:-).  I look on evolutionary
psychology as a similarly extremized attempt, except that
the assumption (which one had better not _truly_ believe in...)
is that every single aspect is reproductively adaptive (but
Dawkins himself originated the idea of 'meme', so how can
any disciple "believe" that _genes_' reproduction is what
is being maximized in each case...?).

The difference seems to me to be that some of the best
economists appear to be fully aware of the nature of their
game (Arrow and Landsburg come to mind at once), but I'm
not so sure about similar self-awareness in evolutionary
psychologists -- the mentions of possible non-adaptiveness
which Pinker quotes do happen (though much more rarely
than he leaves the impression of, it seems to me), and
that spoils the game a little bit.  Oh well...


> >Makes me wonder why Larry Wall didn't think to include at least
> >ONE strangeness, wart, or inconsistency *somewhere* in Perl...
> >thus making it so boringly perfect and un-idiosyncratic as to
> >leave its advocates without a suitable 'scapegoat feature'!
>
> Erm - either you haven't used Perl, or your an advocate yourself!

We're sorry, but our supply of emoticons is temporarily exhausted.

This emergency situation will be remedied shortly; in the meantime,
you are advised to try and ascertain the actual intent of utterances,
particularly which ones are intended to be taken "in jest", on the
basis of context.

(One great feature of 'Jeeves and Wooster', to go with the
nonpareil skill of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry of course,
was the _lack_ of a laugh-track.  It did run for 4 series,
so maybe I'm not the only deadpan-humour-lover left...?)


Alex