Publish or Perish → Demo or Die

I haven’t posted on Reddit in months, but I just got a new reply to a five-year old comment of mine in the The Last Psychiatrist subreddit, reading only “This is one of the best posts on Reddit.” Judge for yourself!

The point about being “grounded” is essential. I was discussing this with a friend last night insofar as (Western) music theory goes. Music theory is like a set of abstract rules regarding basic properties of matter, and the ratios between numbers, which can be instantiated in many different material forms. You can make an instrument out of anything, as long as what you fashion has all the ratios right to allow the playing of all the notes, scales, etc.

So it’s grounded materially, but also a high-level abstraction. Code is the same thing: it compiles to a physical world of (basically) telegraph switches which are wired in complicated ways to provide the physical grounding for the play-out of logic which can be abstracted away from the instantiation.

The physical instantiation is the “proof”. The objective fact of it actually working. There’s a good reason that “demo or die” was the slogan at the MIT Media Lab in the 80s when they were developing prototypes of all the gadgets we take for granted today. Talk is cheap—to have the physical thing is proof. But let’s contrast that with the academic phrase which inspired it: “publish or perish”. Getting published is essential, but it’s also not necessarily as “grounded”, since there can be shitty journals out there.

I see the same differentiation in groundedness between computer programming and law. They are, on the one hand, very similar. The legal “Whereas-therefore” clause construct is the execution of an “if-then” control in programming. Both a programmer and a lawyer speak magic words to make shit happen. Except the “ground” for law is mushy, subjective, interpretive meatspace. It’s literally rhetoric, in the technical sense of the medieval Trivium.

I was always under the impression that anything can be argued, and nothing is really “true”, but programming has really grounded me in that regard.

That’s precisely the difference between programming and law. Or art (content) and engineering.