Counter Point

This show is a counter point to: hpr3414 :: Critical Thinking may make You Critical of the Covid Crisis

Some time ago, I did some Hacker Public Radio episodes in which I ostensibly demonstrated how to create a PDF with Scribus. Secretly, I was actually demonstrating how unexpected payloads could be embedded into a PDF. Did the PDF I uploaded as part of that episode no longer contain a payload if the listener who downloaded it wasn't aware that the payload existed?

I've been diagnosed by educators as a "life long learner," which as far as I can tell is a buzzword referring to someone who takes pleasure in learning new things. In our world of technology, dear listener, I think this term is just "hacker." And that's appropriate, because this is Hacker Public Radio you're listening to now, and listeners of this show tend to be people who enjoy learning and exploring new ideas, taking apart gadgets to see what makes them tick, reverse engineering code and data to understand how it gets processed, and so on.

The thing about being a hacker or a life-long learner is that there's a lot of stuff out there that wants to be hacked, or learnt. And it turns out that it's just not possible to learn everything. Sometimes, you're out of your depth. It can be tricky to recognize when you're out of your depth, and I think there's a certain learn-able skill to knowing that you don't know something. There's a lot of value to this skill, because when you can recognize you don't have expertise on something, you're able to look around you and find someone who has. That's significant because you can learn from someone with expertise.

In my own humdrum life, before getting a full-time job at a tech company, I was commissioned on several occasions to build out infrastructure for a video game development project, an indie radio station, a few different multimedia projects, and so on. When I took on those roles, I became the resident expert. People turned to me for the authoritative word on what technological solutions should be used. When I told them, they were more or less obligated to listen, because that was the role I'd been hired for. If they were to ask me what a workstation should run, and I said Linux, but they bought a Mac instead, then my role would be unarguably redundant. They could just as easily type the question into a search engine on the Internet, and ignore the result. Or they could roll a die, or whatever.

In those cases, though, it's a question of my opinion compared to someone else's opinion. Both are valid. Because I was the architect, my opinion mattered more to the long-term plan, but if the long-term plan were to change from having a highly-available cluster for fast 3d model rendering to having workstations with a familiar desktop, then my opinion would be less valid.

But there are some areas in life where opinions don't matter. Specifically, that area is science. But what is science, anyway? People talk about science a lot, but it took me a long time, especially as someone who largely came from an artistic background, to comprehend the significance of the term, much less how it worked.

Forget about all the high school classes and pop dietitians and physicists. Science is a framework. It's a set of principles designed to help our human brains hack the world around us in a methodical and precise way. Instead of letting our opinions, which may or may not be relevant, influence conclusions and decisions we make, science looks at the results of controlled input and output. Wait a minute. "Input and output"? Those are words I understand. Those are computer terms!

Yeah it turns out that computers are the product of science, and in fact building computers and programming computers is a form of Computer Science. Those are just words we made up, but they reveal a lot abo