> Dr. Gelernter:
> People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.
> In the epilog of your book, Mirror Worlds, you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable, and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to prevent invasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (to which computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.
> As for the inevitability argument, if the developments you describe are inevitable, they are not inevitable in the way that old age and bad weather are inevitable. They are inevitable only because techno-nerds like you make them inevitable. If there were no computer scientists there would be no progress in computer science. If you claim you are justified in pursuing your research because the developments involved are inevitable, then you may as well say that theft is inevitable, therefore we shouldn't blame thieves.
> But we do not believe that progress and growth are inevitable. We'll have more to say about that later.
Gelernter is also a prominent neoconservative thinker (but with paleo sympathies) and an avid painter of roughly the same skill level and taste as Paul Graham (i.e., low and bad). He impressively had to re-learn how to paint with his non-dominant left hand after the blast (so unlike pg, he has an excuse), because it permanently damaged his dominant right hand enough to render it useless, along with his right eye.
As someone who's admired him (with reservations) for a while, I find the disclosure disheartening. However, the fact that he named his pet programming language after a porn star (Linda Lovelace) does suggest his attitude towards women isn't the most enlightened.
anonnon•2h ago
He's a professor of CS at Yale (emeritus, I guess?) who created the Linda programming language and came up with the concept of "Life Streams," a forerunner to temporal feed-based social media, like Twitter and Instagram: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
He's also arguably something of a patent troll: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-prof-loses-625-5m-ap...
And he was also famously attacked by Ted Kaczynski, presumably because Kaczynski anticipated the significance of Gelernter's ideas (that, or the old Harvard-Yale rivalry got a little too heated).