Discussion
Has anyone in programming come across the idea of Plato's Theory of Forms?
Which is the idea you can create the perfect form of say a city in your head, but reality will force you to compromise.
I feel this could be applied to our application designs. Particularly with our failures to consider accessibility. We're too attached to perfection.
But I'll need to dig in more. As I only have the Symposium. I think it's worth the question though.
@onepict Have you read Popper's take on Plato? 🤣
@onepict The TL;DR of that is that Plato *also* includes the notion that those Ideal Forms existed, and everything since then is a "degenerate" form of its ancestor, so with every iteration, things move further away from the ideal.
It's inherently anti-evolutionary, reactionary to the core. Not something you can build on.
@jens I'm more thinking about the fact that we aim for this idea of the perfect design and that's also why we aren't great at considering the idea that people access systems in different ways.
With accessibility and also as to why we have a bad habit of thinking that LLMs and AI will lead to intelligent thinking machines.
Platonic philosophy is built into our consciousness even when we aren't taught it. Well all Greek philosophy is.
So how do we open up and accept imperfect and improve?
@onepict So, that's something that has motivated me a lot over the years, but I'm still stumped with regards to "how do we do it?", even though I feel I've been practicing it for decades in my own flawed way.
A sadly deceased friend of mine turned me to systems thinking in a discussion on that point, and - personally - I "see" systems in anything from software to games to groups of people. It's a bit of a jump, I know.
But we actually have something of our own in our space that goes in the...
@onepict A large part of Open Society and its Enemies is actually consumed by this criticism of Platonic Ideals, and its inherent inhumanism.
@jens this idea of perfect forms does affect our politics, particularly with nostalgia.
The idea of the perfect tradwife and society.
Being in Scotland at a state school, I didn't get taught basic philosophical concepts. Nor did I get a unit at university. No humanities.
Is it any wonder we have the issues in tech that we do?
@onepict @jens I've never thought of the Platonic concept of ideals as something to build *on*. For me, it's been more about a framework for defining the thing we want to build *to*.
Sometimes that thing is concrete - a painting or sculpture - and sometimes it's abstract - meet user needs - but it's always about clearly defining and strongly holding whatever that essential goal is.
I'm a roboticist, so I envision the Platonic ideal of my robot and the job I want the robot to do. Refining that ideal into a clear definition is what enables me to make design choices - it tells me what the non-negotiable must-have things are, what the nice-to-haves are, what things it absolutely positively cannot be allowed to do.
Then I build the actual robot, that inevitably looks terrible and is hacked together with hot glue and screws and 3d printed parts in random colors. It kind of a little bit does some parts of the job.
But that Platonic ideal robot is still there, in the back of my mind, guiding my design choices and trade-offs and enabling me to polish my hacked together piece of junk until it becomes a beautiful example of its kind and can actually do the job sometimes.
Having a vision of the ideal is how we get beautiful utilitarian things instead of functional-but-ugly utilitarian things. (The problem being when one person's beautiful thing is another person's horror show.)
@Robotistry I understand this. I hope I made clear that Plato didn't seem to have seen it that way.
He wrote a lot more about a *return* to Forms than the envisioning of new ones.
@onepict
@jens @Robotistry ah but according to Plato the new forms already existed in perfection, we just hadn't found it yet .
😉
@onepict after implementing hybrid frontend/backend form validation a couple times in my career, I find I can't really argue with Plato on this one.
What if the truest form of perfection wasn't a pristine ideal, but one that gracefully embraced every real-world variation and shift?
@seaborgium1234 I think the point is striving for the idea, and understanding that even our imperfect form are a part of the grouping of the perfect form.
We can't really perceive or touch the perfect form because it's outside our material universe, but we can recognise it in the imperfect forms.
@onepict in my carreer as software engineer I've never come across Plato's theory. In my experience no one has a clue about perfect software design, many schools of thinking have evolved.
@onepict Ha, good comparison though I know more about planning than programming. My understanding though was that there weren’t a billion different forms of everything in everyone’s head but one true perfect Form for every possible idea and we are all struggling towards them, sometimes closer, sometimes further. Haven’t read Plato since undergrad sadly.
This yes, plato believed there was a realm where ideas existed separate from the material world. Everything here in our world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect forms. We live in a shadow realm. Things like justice or virtue or the photonic solids all exist in the realm of forms.
This idea has evolved in different ways such as mathematical platonism where people believe mathematical structures actually exist and are discovered, not invented.
@Lyle As I understand it, it's taught to architects?
Would you say they absorb the lessons? Given your background in Planning.
@onepict I personally had to seek it out, ARCH 101 leaned on Vitruvius instead, which was wonderful but IMO it assumes you already know prior philosophy. I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 practicing architects have read any Plato
@Lyle you see this is why I asked 😊.
Depending on the translation Plato's a dry read.
But I think there's a germ of an idea there. Not having studied Philosophy I'm not very far into this idea or the concepts.
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