Double_Cast (u/Double_Cast)

Double_Cast commented on Using GPT-3 to explain how code works simonwillison.net/2022/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw

l33t2328 · 3 years ago

What is thinking if not pattern generating?

Double_Cast · 3 years ago

My take is that pattern-matching is thinking. But it's low-quality thinking. High-quality thinking is logic. And higher still is causality, which is to logic what calculus is to algebra. I.e. if logic studies the relationship between x and y, then causality studies the relationship between dx and dy. And causality is what we actually want, because causality is power. E.g. causality is what lands astronauts on the moon. When folks like Judea Pearl complain that current AI isn't truly thinking, they're complaining that current AI can't reason logically/causally.

Double_Cast commented on Sayings of Spartan women penelope.uchicago.edu/Tha... · Posted by u/redwoolf

intrepidhero · 4 years ago

An awful lot of those sayings are extolling "willingness to commit violence" as a virtue. That's not the sort of society I think we should emulate.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

Potential violence != actual violence.

The potential to commit violence can be reframed as strength. It's useful because it grants you negotiating leverage, regardless of whether you are the aggressor or defender. Can't defend yourself? Vae victis.

Double_Cast commented on What if I were 1% charged? (2013) gravityandlevity.wordpres... · Posted by u/lanna

lmilcin · 4 years ago

> In short, if I lost 1% of my electrons, I would not be a person anymore. I would be a bomb. A Coulomb bomb, if you will, with an energy equivalent to that of ten billion (modern) atomic bombs. Which would surely destroy the planet. All by removing just 1 out of every 100 of my electrons.

The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.

70kg of mass is equivalent of 1,5GT of TNT.

So still a lot of bombs, but more like 1,5 thousand 1MT bombs and not "10 billions" of them.

I am not a physicist, but I think what this shows is physical impossibility of having 1% of your charge removed and your body still considered to be body even for an infinitesimal amount of time. To do that you would have to add so much energy to your body that just the mass equivalent of energy would have to be many times more than your body.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

> The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.

Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.

Double_Cast commented on Chekhov's Gun en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che... · Posted by u/thunderbong

samatman · 4 years ago

The tiny ring of invisibility which Bilbo uses as a plot devise to escape a few times, turns out in Lord of the Rings to be the most important artifact in Middle Earth.

About as Chekhov's Gun as it gets.

I wouldn't say that leaving frequent references to the depth and age of the world, and then filling in the Legendaria in note form for the rest of your life, is much related to this concept. If a sword hanging on the wall belonged to an ancient hero, already dead, and known to everyone in the scene, a paragraph with "Here is hung Such-and-such, the bright blade of so and so with which he did $mighty-deed" doesn't have to carry any more weight in the story. There might be a whole book or chapter about so and so, there might not be.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

fwiw, Tolkien wrote the trilogy only after fans requested an encore of The Hobbit. The ring's importance/malevolence was a retcon.

Double_Cast commented on The Two Cultures of Mathematics (2000) [pdf] dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2c... · Posted by u/vector_spaces

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

To me, the distinction maps onto the Effectual vs Causal distinction. For some path "A to B", some people prefer to consider their present tools/resources (point A) and work forward opportunistically. While others prefer to consider the end-goal (point B) and work backwards recursively. If the analogy is unclear: a theory is a tool; a specific problem is an end-goal.

Double_Cast commented on Do games like Factorio or Eve Online sap the intellectual potential of humanity? reddit.com/r/slatestarcod... · Posted by u/optimalsolver

xapata · 4 years ago

In other words, if you obsess about efficiency, you might be chasing a local optima and making your system more fragile.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

I tend to frame this in terms of the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. It's a trade-off between exploration vs exploitation. It's often impossible to predict beforehand which strategy is optimal for a given environment. Which, I suspect, is why progressive temperments and conservative temperments coexist.

Double_Cast commented on Killing TurboTax kunle.app/feb-2021-how-to... · Posted by u/kunle

ajmadesc · 4 years ago

Wealth tax has nothing to do with markets and Nobody whants to tax the level of wealth for an ordinary retire silly. That's a straw man.

The American capital, legal, and tax structure collude to reduce wages, whereas the Dutch system incentivises responsible 'market based solutions'

The only people who want to live with a somali gov are gop

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

The retiree example is intended to demonstrate that a wealth tax is inherently perverse, regardless of who is targeted. Savings are just deferred expenditure and debt is just expedited expenditure. When you tax wealth, you expedite consumption.

Another way of thinking about this: A wealth tax is like inflation, except assets are also devalued alongside your savings. Which means the wisest strategy is to consume now, save nothing, invest nothing.

Double_Cast commented on Killing TurboTax kunle.app/feb-2021-how-to... · Posted by u/kunle

mjevans · 4 years ago

A wealth tax. All assets and cash need to be properly valued and then that value taxed. I agree with the sibling comment and also with past discussions where a wealth tax is the only non-regressive (not-keep the poor down) tax code.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

One benefit of markets is price-discovery. But if you're not participating in a market, determining price is akin to shaking a magic 8 ball. It assumes a Just Price, which is a heuristic and a fiction.

Also, quality of living is determined by income, not wealth. Fresh retirees are generally wealthier than other age-groups because they've saved for retirement. But that doesn't mean they consume more. Also, consider the citizens of the Netherlands. They enjoy a comfortable existence while servicing an enormous amount of debt. If wealth were the primary determinant of quality of life, you'd think the Netherlands were as as destitute as Somalia.

Double_Cast commented on What’s Wrong with “Multiplication Is Repeated Addition”? (2008) denisegaskins.com/2008/07... · Posted by u/harperlee

tomxor · 4 years ago

Except we are talking about scalar multiplication, that was the premise, not matrices.

Double_Cast · 4 years ago

The point isn't "matrix multiplication != scalar multiplication". The point is "the process of evaluating a reducible expression inherently discards information about the original expression", which is a fact about evalution rather than any specific operator. The fact that "the information discarded is of little consequence to the compressed result" is a quirk specific to scalar multiplication. Thus, the commutative property distracts from explicitly modeling the "AST" so that the student understands what multiplication represents under the hood, beyond the rote memorization of scalar multiplication tables.

Perhaps an analogous situation would be: Suppose a teacher wanted to introduce the notion of limits to a calculus curriculum. "That makes zero sense. The only things a student needs to know are the shortcuts for each parent function, e.g. that (d/dx x^2) reduces to (2x) via handwavey magic." But what if an engineer needs to integrate over an arbitrary curve? Can students solve the problem without being comfortable with Riemann Sums? Maybe 1st-year calc students should rederive the shortcuts from scratch? "Except we're talking about a math course, not an engineering course."

> In particular this bit regarding multiplier/multiplicand makes zero sense to me.

> Isn't 2 rows x 3 chairs the same thing as 3 chairs x 2 rows? It's a bizarre argument.

It's bizarre to simias (and you, I assume) because y'all can't imagine performing the operation without thunking. (Don't get me wrong, I think "repeated addition" is the best method. I'm just attempting to explain the opposite perspective so that it feels less bizarre.)