brockm on Nostr: We literally would not be having this conversation right now if people hadn't sat ...

We literally would not be having this conversation right now if people hadn't sat around philosophizing about the nature of reality, which gave birth to natural philosophy, physics, quantum theory, which led to the development of the transistor. It is highly unlikely that computer science would have simply been stumbled upon purely through "doing" without having had a theoretical foundation for how computers might work. A good example being Turing. He worked out in his head how general purpose computers ought to work, long before we built the first general purpose computer. But his "philosophy" and it *is* philosophy by the way: mathematics and science are subsets of philosophy -- was the basis for engineers evening attempting to build such contraptions. So I find this anti-intellectualism a little bit misguided, to say the least.

Saying that as we get older, we can realize that we don't actually need any of this intellectualism and it's all meaningless in the face of practical application and doing, I think, betrays a fundamental ignorance of the history of ideas and their relationship to what is possible in terms of doing.