dalecosp;10971222 wrote:I'm a little lost, now, I think. Are you claiming that laziness is a characteristic of intelligence?
Well, I could, and it is incidentally related (is not laziness one of the qualities of a good programmer?), but I haven't been saying anything to that effect here. Nor has there been any deliberate impugning of anyone's intellectual abilities.
Reasoning is a lot more difficult than many people seem to think. The temptation to skip to the (desired) conclusion can be overwhelming - because otherwise the problem itself would be overwhelming. For a start, just avoiding a combinatorial explosion can be as difficult as just mechanically bulling through it (simply determining whether a given boolean expression is satisfiable ... well, the most efficient method known is to simply try every possible assignment of values to its variables in turn until finding a winner. Incidentally, for a dozen boolean variables there are approximately pow(10, 1233) different boolean expressions. It really did take Russell and Whitehead until page 84 of volume II of Principia Mathematica to build up mathematics to the point where they could prove 2+2=4).
It doesn't take much for a problem to become intractable. And that's even if the problem is fully defined. In reality of course, it's not that simple. You lack information. There are things you don't know. More importantly, there are things you don't know you don't know. Some of the things you think you know are wrong.
If you're trying to do something, remember that there are other people trying to do things as well. With or without your knowledge. These other things may or may not be relevant. They might or might not be in conflict with your plans. The people trying to implement them may or may not be behaving rationally (they probably aren't: for the reasons why, remember that everything here described as relating to you also relates to them). Note that the number of interactions between n agents scales with the square of n. Oh, and because these agents are active, and are often responding to your actions in real-time, your reactions to them sometimes have to be modified in real-time.
And of course many of those agents aren't even human. A lot of them are software - which may be well-written or not (programming is the most difficult intellectual activity: for reasons why, note the previous paragraphs). In late 2007/early 2008 (sometime over the summer break) I came across a paper whose author was describing a financial instrument compiler; financiers would cook up these instruments that served as implementations for trading operations and interest-bearing transactions, and this compiler would translate them into COBOL for running on the finance company's network. The intention was to make it possible for non-programmers (the financiers) to write programs (the instruments) to manage the company's accounts. It gave me the chills but I thought that at least it wasn't yet into System Fails People Die territory. Imagine if air traffic control systems were written that way - as a swarm of ad hoc scripts cobbled together by amateurs.
But I mentioned another big category of non-human agent gets introduced: the corporation. They can make governments look positively cuddly - at least governments exist to represent the interests of their populations (the problem there of course is that said population includes an increasingly large corporate segment - which may not have any franchise, but nor does it have any allegiance). Corporations do not share such goals.
Entire Turing-complete programming languages and formalisms have been built to describe pretty much any and every aspect of a company's operation (there's probably an XML schema and set of UML diagrams for it, too). Did I mention that programming is the most difficult intellectual activity?
I think it's balking at this layering of complexity on top of complexity - and not mere laziness or dimness - that is causing people these days to respond with tl;dr.
Just on a side note; my desktop PC is hardly cutting-edge, but if I took it back to the mid 1990s, it would be among the top ten most powerful computers in the world.
