A thing I wanted to check: were you grokking the general premise that calculus and much of physics haven’t been invented yet, and the metaphor here is more about an early stage physicist who has gotten a sense of how “I feel confused here, and I might need to invent [something that will turn out to be calculus]”, but, it’s at an early enough stage that crisp physics to easily explain it doesn’t exist yet?
(If you did get that part, I’m interested in hearing a little bit more about what felt annoying, and if you didn’t get that, I’m interested in what sort of things might have helped make the pre-physics/calculus part more clear)
I didn’t get the premise, no. I got that it was before a lot of physics was known, didn’t know they didn’t know calculus either. Just stating it plainly and clearly at the start would have been good. Even with that premise, I still find it very annoying. I despise the refusal to speak clearly, the way it’s constantly dancing around the bush, not saying the actual point, to me this is pretty obviously because the actual point is a nothing burger(because the analogy is bad) and by dancing around it, the text is trying to distract me and convince me of the point before I realize how dumb it is.
Why the analogy is bad: rocket flights can be tested and simulated much more easily than a superintelligence, with a lot less risk
Analogies are by nature lossy, this one is especially so.
A thing I wanted to check: were you grokking the general premise that calculus and much of physics haven’t been invented yet, and the metaphor here is more about an early stage physicist who has gotten a sense of how “I feel confused here, and I might need to invent [something that will turn out to be calculus]”, but, it’s at an early enough stage that crisp physics to easily explain it doesn’t exist yet?
(If you did get that part, I’m interested in hearing a little bit more about what felt annoying, and if you didn’t get that, I’m interested in what sort of things might have helped make the pre-physics/calculus part more clear)
I didn’t get the premise, no. I got that it was before a lot of physics was known, didn’t know they didn’t know calculus either.
Just stating it plainly and clearly at the start would have been good. Even with that premise, I still find it very annoying. I despise the refusal to speak clearly, the way it’s constantly dancing around the bush, not saying the actual point, to me this is pretty obviously because the actual point is a nothing burger(because the analogy is bad) and by dancing around it, the text is trying to distract me and convince me of the point before I realize how dumb it is.
Why the analogy is bad: rocket flights can be tested and simulated much more easily than a superintelligence, with a lot less risk
Analogies are by nature lossy, this one is especially so.