Re: Puzzling "premisse"

Le Sat, 13 Oct 2007 10:22:54 +0100,
Alessio Guglielmi <A.Guglielmi-Rt3rC56PhZmelh0iW8I7Qg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit 
:

> We are academics, and we ultimately need to churn 
> out many papers and theses in order to have 
> brilliant careers, honours, etc. 

I know, this is just what I said.

> It would be nice 
> if we could dedicate ourselves to finding the 
> true nature of proofs, but the reality is that we 
> cannot and nobody really cares. Or, at least, I 
> don't care and I don't know anybody that does.

ROFLMAO

Would you write "I don't care and I don't know anybody that does" in a
grant submission?

Wasn't the 2005 ICALP Workshop titled :

    "STRUCTURES AND DEDUCTION"
"The quest for the essence of proofs"

Would you tell the sponsors of such events that "nobody really cares"?

Actually I do care for the "true nature of proofs" and this is NOT a
"metaphysical quest" driven by lunatic interests, if I may explain.

When I started my career at IBM in 1968 they nearly apologized for
teaching us COBOL, saying "In a few years there will be no more
programmers, the computers will be able to directly understand the
needs of the users and run accordingly". 

As I hope you know this is not quite yet the case in 2007.

After a while (circa 1980) and out of frustration I started to keep a
close eye on the progress made in program verification, program
synthesis, software engineering, artificial intelligence, knowledge
representation & als related.

I have been and still am disappointed by the goals and methods of
scientific research, I DO understand that you cannot help but follow
the crowd and that "the reality is that [you] cannot [do any REAL
research]" and you have to produce shitloads of papers instead, and
that any actual USEFULL result is just a fortunate but minor by-product
of academic research.  

I am only suggesting that diverting a small amount of efforts toward
actual THINKING instead of grinding over and over on well known and
"promising" subject matters may lead to better insights and probably
even allow to produce more *significant* papers (Wow!).

> So, maybe, can we drop this discussion?

Not a problem for me if you "drop this discussion" since it wastes
valuable time that could be used for polishing the "next paper" or the
"next grant", this isn't necessarily the case for everybody on this
list. 

Cheers,

JLD