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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9629498" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well...somehow I got 3/4 through responding to this and then it got completely deleted. I don't know how. It's quite frustrating. If things are less coherent than my usual, that's why; I may be thinking I said a thing that got deleted in the previous draft.If it is a design, how is it not a technology? That is what design is, the effort to construct something that achieves a specific desired end. Design absolutely includes artistic elements, and thus there may or may not be clean, simple comparisons between different designed things even in the same overall space. But design itself is a technology.All sorts of things are like this. Cooking, brewing, printing. Consider music. It is foolish to say that (say) Tuvan-Mongolian throat singing is "better" than neoclassical composition or that rap music is "worse" than librettos. But within a particular instrument or expressive form, we can compare technique--and it is objectively true that we have a better understanding of the technique of orchestral composition today than Mozart did in his day. That doesn't mean Mozart was inferior, such a thing is chronological snobbery and should be actively avoided. Instead, it means we have gained a better understanding of what we are doing, and in many ways that better understanding actually deepens the beauty and profundity of the great masters of the past.Same goes for cooking, or brewing. A thousand years ago, we had no idea how yeast worked. We just knew that if you allowed hot grain juice to sit out for a while, it would usually grow some stuff that tasted nasty....but then it would taste wonderful (for those who like beer, I'm afraid I don't) if you let it sit long enough and then decanted the good parts. Now? Now we quite precisely understand the science of zymurgy, and that helps us make better beer. Not "better" in the sense of "our beer is totally superior to the beer of a thousand years ago", but rather "if a brewer sets out to make a specific vision happen with his brew, it's significantly easier to do that now." My late father was an avid homebrewer and won many awards for his brewing, and he loved the fact that brewing was simultaneously an art and a science. Precise control over chemistry, hop varietals, grain varietals, roasting depth, secondary ingredients, mineral additives, yeast strain, etc., etc., etc., allow us to do all sorts of things that would have been absolutely impossible a thousand years ago.If we leave these things as purely and exclusively intuitive, as ineffable, as "taken for granted", we are setting up the next generation for failure. Because if we can't communicate it to them, how can they be expected to learn it? If we cannot describe it except in nonverbal sounds and vague gesticulations, how can we possibly help them achieve their understanding? This analysis isn't some horrible thing trying to rob the soul out of something you love. It's the request that you explain yourself, rather than relying on vagaries and "common knowledge" etc. that are all so, so easily lost, distorted, or (regrettably) abused.The problem is, this is fundamentally a "no true scotsman" argument. All you've done is say "well that thing isn't a REAL mystery", without actually adding anything further. That's not only not helpful, it actively presents your argument as unsound. That's a big part of why you perceived "hubris" in others: they're telling you the things you're saying not only aren't helpful, they're actively bad arguments. If someone throws a No True Scotsman fallacy at you, you're not going to find it very convincing and you're probably going to dismiss it for exactly that reason. That's what's going on here.</blockquote>

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