I was having a lunch conversation today about an experience I had years ago, which I now realize touches upon what C.P. Snow referred to as “The Two Cultures”. Those cultures are, respectively, the cultures of scientific thought and of humanistic thought.<\/p>\n
This particular experience dates from the very beginning of my career in computer graphics. I was part of an interdisciplinary team that was creating special effects for films and TV commercials. At some point Chris Wedge — a phenomenal animator, and later to become the founder of the great NY computer animation house Blue Sky Studios — asked me whether I could program a tool that would allow him to achieve a certain lighting effect.<\/p>\n
All fired up by the task, and maybe too young and stupid to see beyond my own ambition, I stayed up all night and implemented a software tool that would allow Chris to do pretty much anything. It had all sorts of variables and parameters, complete with a cascading crescendo of calibrated components, creating a cornucopia of cool capabilities.<\/p>\n
The next morning, flushed with pride, I showed Chris my creation. “Here,” I said, “you can use this to do all sorts of things. For example, this is the particular thing you wanted, if you just set these variables like so.”<\/p>\n
He hated it. “I just wanted a tool that would let me do this<\/i>“, he said, “I don’t care about all this other stuff.”<\/p>\n
And that was the first time I got an inkling that there are two fundamentally different ways to look at the space of interesting problems. The ‘scientific’ approach looks for the most general solution, the one that will encompass as many answers as possible. THe ‘artistic’ approach doesn’t care about this vast space of all possible answers. Rather, it looks toward a particular human space of meaning, and is only interested in paths that lead to that space of meaning.<\/p>\n
It’s not that one of these approaches is right and the other is wrong. They are both quite powerful, each in their own way. It’s more that these are two different languages — each better at approaching a different kind of truth.<\/p>\n
When faced with the reality of these two different languages, maybe it’s best to be bilingual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was having a lunch conversation today about an experience I had years ago, which I now realize touches upon what C.P. Snow referred to as “The Two Cultures”. Those cultures are, respectively, the cultures of scientific thought and of humanistic thought. This particular experience dates from the very beginning of my career in computer … Continue reading “The two cultures, revisited”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14564"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14564"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14566,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14564\/revisions\/14566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}