RE: Moving on

JB,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: J. B. Rainsberger 
[>] snip
> 
> "A" replies, "Look, I touched the furnace and it hurt. I'm certain
it'll
> hurt you, too."

[>] not to stretch this too far, but certainly A would not have to
experienced the pain of the hot furnace to advise B not to touch it.
Simple engineering skills would be used to conclude that a burning metal
object is painful to the touch. XP claim that "experience" is the
fountain head of knowledge simply does not holdup in the engineering
world. 

You might argue that software development is not engineering but that's
another subject.

> Why won't "B" listen to that simple statement?

[>] Maybe because he is stubborn and needs to learn from experience and
has failed to take into account there are other "truths" beyond simple
experience ;>)

[Snip]
> 
> I don't see how that helps. Academic studies cannot prove anything
useful
> unless it proves extremes.
 
[>] I what way is this conjecture supported in the epistemology of
science.  This claim means that "nothing" is provable (in the science or
math sense) unless it is "experienced." You'll need to come up with some
support materials here, since my background is in particle physics these
means that the experimentalist and the theorist paths never
cross....sorry to say here that that is not true in practice.

> XP is about programming as a social enterprise.
[>] Isn't all programming a social enterprise as is engineering and
science (physics certainly is).

> Isolating useful variables in that environment is staggeringly
difficult.

[>] On the contrary it is quite easy to isolate the variables. Drawing
conclusions from observations of these variables is the difficulty.

> Why not then just look at the people doing it, ask questions and
actually
> listen to the answers, even if they're unexpected?

[>] How then can these observations be put to the test for their
generality. You seem to have missed a fundamental aspect of science;
observation and theory go hand in hand.

> >So, if we have contexts that can be transposed then we may have value
> from
> >test tube and academic studies.
> 
> 
> J. B. 
[>]Glen B. Alleman



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