I feel like you can summarize most of this post in one paragraph:
It is not the case that an observation of things happening in the past automatically translates into a high probability of them continuing to happen. Solomonoff Induction actually operates over possible programs that generate our observation set (and in extension, the observable universe), and it may or not may not be the case that the simplest universe is such that any given trend persists into the future. There are no also easy rules that tell you when this happens; you just have to do the hard work of comparing world models.
I’m not sure the post says sufficiently many other things to justify its length.
I sometimes like things being said in a long way. Mostly that’s just because it helps me stew on the ideas and look at them from different angles. But also, specifically, I liked the engagement with a bunch of epistemological intuitions and figuring out what can be recovered from them. I like in particular connecting the “trend continues” trend to the redoubtable “electron will weigh the same tomorrow” intuition.
(I realise you didn’t claim there was nothing else in the dialogue, just not enough to justify the length)
I strongly emphasize with “I sometimes like things being said in a long way.”, and am in general doubtful of comments like “I think this post can be summarized as [one paragraph]”.
(The extreme caricature of this is “isn’t your post just [one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche, completely missing the point, perhaps also mocking the author about complicating such a simple matter]”, which I have encountered sometimes.)
Some of the most valuable blog posts I have read have been exactly of the form “write a long essay about a common-wisdom-ish thing, but really drill down on the details and look at the thing from multiple perspectives”.
Some years back I read Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. For context, I’m not from the US. I was very excited about the post and upon reading it hastily tried to explain it to my friends. I said something like “your outgroups are not who you think they are, in the US partisan biases are stronger than racial biases”. The response I got?
“Yeah I mean the US partisan biases are really extreme.”, in a tone implying that surely nothing like that affects us in [country I live in].
People who have actually read and internalized the post might notice the irony here. (If you haven’t, well, sorry, I’m not going to give a one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche.)
Which is to say: short summaries really aren’t sufficient for teaching new concepts.
Or, imagine someone says
I don’t get why people like the Meditations on Moloch post so much. Isn’t the whole point just “coordination problems are hard and coordination failure results in falling off the Pareto-curve”, which is game theory 101?
To which I say: “Yes, the topic of the post is coordination. But really, don’t you see any value the post provides on top of this one sentence summary? Even if one has taken a game theory class before, the post does convey how it shows up in real life, all kinds of nuance that comes with it, and one shouldn’t belittle the vibes. Also, be mindful that the vast majority of readers likely haven’t taken a game theory class and are not familiar with 101 concepts like Pareto-curvers.”
For similar reasons I’m not particularly fond of the grandparent comment’s summary that builds on top of Solomonoff induction. I’m assuming the intended audience of the linked Twitter thread is not people who have a good intuitive grasp of Solomonoff induction. And I happened to get value out of the post even though I am quite familiar with SI.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
All this long comment tries to say is “I sometimes like things being said in a long way”.
I’ll add that sometimes, there is a big difference between verbally agreeing with a short summary, even if it is accurate, and really understanding and appreciating it and its implications. That often requires long explanations with many examples and looking at the same issue from various angles. The two Scott Alexander posts you mentioned are a good example.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
If the post describes a method for analyzing a situation, and that described method is not in fact the correct method for analyzing that situation (and is actually much worse than the correct method), then this is a problem with the post.
(Also, your description of my approach as “appealing very concretely to the object level”, and your corresponding dismissal of that approach, is very ironic! The post, in essence, argues precisely for appealing concretely to the object level; but then if we actually do that, as I demonstrated, we render the post moot.)
This sort of saying-things-directly doesn’t usually work unless the other person feels the social obligation to parse what you’re saying to the extent they can’t run away from it.
Yeah, but I do actually think this paragraph is wrong on the existence of easy rules. It is a bit like saying: There are only the laws of fundamental physics, don’t bother with trying to find high level laws, you just have to do the hard work of learning to apply fundamental physics when you are trying to understand a pendulum or a hot gas. Or biology.
Similarly, for induction there are actually easy rules applicable to certain domains of interest. Like Laplace’s rule of succession, which assumes random i.i.d. sampling. Which implies the sample distribution tends to resemble the population distribution. The same assumption is made by supervised learning about the training distribution, which works very well in many cases. There are other examples like the Lindy effect (mentioned in another comment) and various popular models in statistics. Induction heads also come to mind.
Even if there is just one, complex, fully general method applicable to science or induction, there may still exist “easy” specialized methods, with applicability restricted to a certain domain.
I think you could, but then it would be unintelligible to most people who don’t know wtf is Solomonoff Induction.
The Ponzi Pyramid scheme IMO is sn excellent framework, but the post still suffers from a certain, eh, lack of conciseness. I think you could make the point a lot more simply with just a few exchanges from the first section and anyone worth their salt will absolutely get the spirit of the point.
This reminds me of a bit from Feynman’s Lectures on Physics:
“What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. This statement can be expressed mathematically by the equation F=Gmm’/r^2. If to this we add the fact that an object responds to a force by accelerating in the direction of the force by an amount that is inversely proportional to the mass of the object, we shall have said everything required, for a sufficiently talented mathematician could then deduce all the consequences of these two principles.”
[emphasis added]
Like Feynman, however, I think his next sentence is important:
“However, since you are not assumed to be sufficiently talented yet, we shall discuss the consequences in more detail, and not just leave you with these two bare principles.”
Yes on the overall gist, and I feel like most of the rest of the post is trying to define the word “things” more precisely. The Spokesperson things “past annual returns of a specific investment opportunity” are a “thing.” The Scientist thinks this is not unreasonable, but that “extrapolations from established physical theories I’m familiar with” are more of a “thing.” The Epistemologist says only the most basic low-level facts we have, taken as a whole set, are a “thing” and we would ideally reason from all of them without drawing these other boundaries with too sharp and rigid a line. Or at least, that in places where we disagree about the nature of the “things,” that’s the direction in which we should move to settle the disagreement.
I feel like you can summarize most of this post in one paragraph:
I’m not sure the post says sufficiently many other things to justify its length.
If you already have the concept, you only need a pointer. If you don’t have the concept, you need the whole construction. [1]
Related: Sazen and Wisdom Cannot Be Unzipped
I sometimes like things being said in a long way. Mostly that’s just because it helps me stew on the ideas and look at them from different angles. But also, specifically, I liked the engagement with a bunch of epistemological intuitions and figuring out what can be recovered from them. I like in particular connecting the “trend continues” trend to the redoubtable “electron will weigh the same tomorrow” intuition.
(I realise you didn’t claim there was nothing else in the dialogue, just not enough to justify the length)
I strongly emphasize with “I sometimes like things being said in a long way.”, and am in general doubtful of comments like “I think this post can be summarized as [one paragraph]”.
(The extreme caricature of this is “isn’t your post just [one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche, completely missing the point, perhaps also mocking the author about complicating such a simple matter]”, which I have encountered sometimes.)
Some of the most valuable blog posts I have read have been exactly of the form “write a long essay about a common-wisdom-ish thing, but really drill down on the details and look at the thing from multiple perspectives”.
Some years back I read Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. For context, I’m not from the US. I was very excited about the post and upon reading it hastily tried to explain it to my friends. I said something like “your outgroups are not who you think they are, in the US partisan biases are stronger than racial biases”. The response I got?
“Yeah I mean the US partisan biases are really extreme.”, in a tone implying that surely nothing like that affects us in [country I live in].
People who have actually read and internalized the post might notice the irony here. (If you haven’t, well, sorry, I’m not going to give a one sentence description that strips off all nuance and rounds the post to the closest nearby cliche.)
Which is to say: short summaries really aren’t sufficient for teaching new concepts.
Or, imagine someone says
To which I say: “Yes, the topic of the post is coordination. But really, don’t you see any value the post provides on top of this one sentence summary? Even if one has taken a game theory class before, the post does convey how it shows up in real life, all kinds of nuance that comes with it, and one shouldn’t belittle the vibes. Also, be mindful that the vast majority of readers likely haven’t taken a game theory class and are not familiar with 101 concepts like Pareto-curvers.”
For similar reasons I’m not particularly fond of the grandparent comment’s summary that builds on top of Solomonoff induction. I’m assuming the intended audience of the linked Twitter thread is not people who have a good intuitive grasp of Solomonoff induction. And I happened to get value out of the post even though I am quite familiar with SI.
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
All this long comment tries to say is “I sometimes like things being said in a long way”.
I’ll add that sometimes, there is a big difference between verbally agreeing with a short summary, even if it is accurate, and really understanding and appreciating it and its implications. That often requires long explanations with many examples and looking at the same issue from various angles. The two Scott Alexander posts you mentioned are a good example.
If the post describes a method for analyzing a situation, and that described method is not in fact the correct method for analyzing that situation (and is actually much worse than the correct method), then this is a problem with the post.
(Also, your description of my approach as “appealing very concretely to the object level”, and your corresponding dismissal of that approach, is very ironic! The post, in essence, argues precisely for appealing concretely to the object level; but then if we actually do that, as I demonstrated, we render the post moot.)
For even more brevity with no loss of substance:
The shorter the better. Or as Lao Tzu said, Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know…
Nobody would understand that.
This sort of saying-things-directly doesn’t usually work unless the other person feels the social obligation to parse what you’re saying to the extent they can’t run away from it.
Yeah, but I do actually think this paragraph is wrong on the existence of easy rules. It is a bit like saying: There are only the laws of fundamental physics, don’t bother with trying to find high level laws, you just have to do the hard work of learning to apply fundamental physics when you are trying to understand a pendulum or a hot gas. Or biology.
Similarly, for induction there are actually easy rules applicable to certain domains of interest. Like Laplace’s rule of succession, which assumes random i.i.d. sampling. Which implies the sample distribution tends to resemble the population distribution. The same assumption is made by supervised learning about the training distribution, which works very well in many cases. There are other examples like the Lindy effect (mentioned in another comment) and various popular models in statistics. Induction heads also come to mind.
Even if there is just one, complex, fully general method applicable to science or induction, there may still exist “easy” specialized methods, with applicability restricted to a certain domain.
I think you could, but then it would be unintelligible to most people who don’t know wtf is Solomonoff Induction.
The Ponzi Pyramid scheme IMO is sn excellent framework, but the post still suffers from a certain, eh, lack of conciseness. I think you could make the point a lot more simply with just a few exchanges from the first section and anyone worth their salt will absolutely get the spirit of the point.
This reminds me of a bit from Feynman’s Lectures on Physics:
“What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. This statement can be expressed mathematically by the equation F=Gmm’/r^2. If to this we add the fact that an object responds to a force by accelerating in the direction of the force by an amount that is inversely proportional to the mass of the object, we shall have said everything required, for a sufficiently talented mathematician could then deduce all the consequences of these two principles.”
[emphasis added]
Like Feynman, however, I think his next sentence is important:
“However, since you are not assumed to be sufficiently talented yet, we shall discuss the consequences in more detail, and not just leave you with these two bare principles.”
Yes on the overall gist, and I feel like most of the rest of the post is trying to define the word “things” more precisely. The Spokesperson things “past annual returns of a specific investment opportunity” are a “thing.” The Scientist thinks this is not unreasonable, but that “extrapolations from established physical theories I’m familiar with” are more of a “thing.” The Epistemologist says only the most basic low-level facts we have, taken as a whole set, are a “thing” and we would ideally reason from all of them without drawing these other boundaries with too sharp and rigid a line. Or at least, that in places where we disagree about the nature of the “things,” that’s the direction in which we should move to settle the disagreement.