Great you bring up Hoffman; I think he deserves serious pushback.
He proofs exactly two things:
Reality often is indeed not how it seems to us—as by much too many, his nonsense is taken at face value. I would normally not use such words but there are reasons in his case.
In as far as he has come to truly believe all he claims (not convinced!), he’d be a perfect example of self-serving beliefs: how his overblown claims manage to take over his brain, just as it has realized he can sell it with total success to the world, despite absurdity.
Before I explain this harsh judgement, caveat: I mean not to defend what we perceive. Let’s be open to a world very different to how it seems. Also, maybe Hoffman has many interesting points. But this doesn’t mean, his claims are not completely overblown—which I’m convinced they, are after having listened to a range of interviews with him and having gone to lengths for reading his original papers.
Here three simple points I find compelling to put his stuff into perspective:
You find a moaning gap between his claims and what he has really ‘proven’ in his papers. Speech: “We have mathematically proven there’s absolutely zero chance blabla”. Reality: Used a trivial evolutionary toy model and found a reduced form representation of a very specific process may be more economical/probable than a more complex representation of the ‘real’ process. It nicely underlines that evolution may take shortcuts. Yes, we’re crazy about sex instead of about “creating children”, or we want to eat sugary stuff as an ancient proxy for actually healthy diet which in our today’s world doesn’t function anymore, and many more things where we’ve not evolved to perceive/account for all the complexity. Problem? Is of course nothing new, and, more importantly, it doesn’t proof anything more than that.
I like the following analogies:
Room-Mapping Robots vs. Non-Mapping Robot cleaners (Roomba stuff). A not too far-fetched interpretation to Hoffman would be: A (efficient) vacuum robot cannot map the room, it’s always more efficient to simply have reduced-form rules/heuristics for where to move next. Well, it’s nice to see how the market has evolved: Semi-random moving robots made the start, but it turns out if you want to have robots efficient, you make them actually map the territory, hence today LiDAR/SLAM become more dominating.
Being exposed to a cat, I realize she seems much more Hoffmanesque than us. When she pees on the ground, or smells another weird thing, she does her ‘heap earth/sand over it’ leg moves, not realizing there’s just parquet so her move doesn’t actually cover the stink. It’s a bit funny then, with Hoffman the species that has overcome reliance on un-understanding instincts in so many (not all) domains, is the one that ends up claiming it would not ever be possible to overcome mere reduced-form instincts in whatsoever domain.
Trivial disproof by contradiction of Hofmann’s claim of having absolutely proven the world could not be the way we think: Assume the world WAS just how it looks to us. Imagine there WAS then the billion-year evolutionary process that we THINK has happened. Is there anything in Hoffman’s proofs showing that, then there could be only dumans, like humans but perceiving in 2d instead of 3d, or in some other wrong-way-with-no-resemblance-to-reality? Nope, absolutely not. His claims just obviously don’t hold up.
In sum: His popularity proves an evolutionary theory for information where what floats around is not what is shown to be correct, but what is appealing; distracting voices debunking it being entirely ignored. I imagine him laughing about this fact when thinking about his own success: “After all, my claim seems to not be that wrong, they do not perceive reality, mahahaaa”. According to google there are not merely a million people reading him, but literally millions of webpages featuring him.
Happy to be debunked in my negative reading of him :)
Great you bring up Hoffman; I think he deserves serious pushback.
He proofs exactly two things:
Reality often is indeed not how it seems to us—as by much too many, his nonsense is taken at face value. I would normally not use such words but there are reasons in his case.
In as far as he has come to truly believe all he claims (not convinced!), he’d be a perfect example of self-serving beliefs: how his overblown claims manage to take over his brain, just as it has realized he can sell it with total success to the world, despite absurdity.
Before I explain this harsh judgement, caveat: I mean not to defend what we perceive. Let’s be open to a world very different to how it seems. Also, maybe Hoffman has many interesting points. But this doesn’t mean, his claims are not completely overblown—which I’m convinced they, are after having listened to a range of interviews with him and having gone to lengths for reading his original papers.
Here three simple points I find compelling to put his stuff into perspective:
You find a moaning gap between his claims and what he has really ‘proven’ in his papers. Speech: “We have mathematically proven there’s absolutely zero chance blabla”. Reality: Used a trivial evolutionary toy model and found a reduced form representation of a very specific process may be more economical/probable than a more complex representation of the ‘real’ process. It nicely underlines that evolution may take shortcuts. Yes, we’re crazy about sex instead of about “creating children”, or we want to eat sugary stuff as an ancient proxy for actually healthy diet which in our today’s world doesn’t function anymore, and many more things where we’ve not evolved to perceive/account for all the complexity. Problem? Is of course nothing new, and, more importantly, it doesn’t proof anything more than that.
I like the following analogies:
Room-Mapping Robots vs. Non-Mapping Robot cleaners (Roomba stuff). A not too far-fetched interpretation to Hoffman would be: A (efficient) vacuum robot cannot map the room, it’s always more efficient to simply have reduced-form rules/heuristics for where to move next. Well, it’s nice to see how the market has evolved: Semi-random moving robots made the start, but it turns out if you want to have robots efficient, you make them actually map the territory, hence today LiDAR/SLAM become more dominating.
Being exposed to a cat, I realize she seems much more Hoffmanesque than us. When she pees on the ground, or smells another weird thing, she does her ‘heap earth/sand over it’ leg moves, not realizing there’s just parquet so her move doesn’t actually cover the stink. It’s a bit funny then, with Hoffman the species that has overcome reliance on un-understanding instincts in so many (not all) domains, is the one that ends up claiming it would not ever be possible to overcome mere reduced-form instincts in whatsoever domain.
Trivial disproof by contradiction of Hofmann’s claim of having absolutely proven the world could not be the way we think: Assume the world WAS just how it looks to us. Imagine there WAS then the billion-year evolutionary process that we THINK has happened. Is there anything in Hoffman’s proofs showing that, then there could be only dumans, like humans but perceiving in 2d instead of 3d, or in some other wrong-way-with-no-resemblance-to-reality? Nope, absolutely not. His claims just obviously don’t hold up.
Broader discussions highlighting I think in part some fraudulent aspect of Hoffman: The Case For Reality, or also Quora Is Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception true?
In sum: His popularity proves an evolutionary theory for information where what floats around is not what is shown to be correct, but what is appealing; distracting voices debunking it being entirely ignored. I imagine him laughing about this fact when thinking about his own success: “After all, my claim seems to not be that wrong, they do not perceive reality, mahahaaa”. According to google there are not merely a million people reading him, but literally millions of webpages featuring him.
Happy to be debunked in my negative reading of him :)