How does 2020 have complicated technology, if most people don’t know how it works? One big part is specialization: across the world, quite a few people do know what bicycles look like.
I find this example pretty uncompelling. While I probably couldn’t draw you a bicycle if you gave me 5 minutes of time (which is what the experiments I’ve seen are doing), I am very confident I could understand and draw you a bicycle if you gave me a day or two of time in which I could experiment and propagate all the various disparate fact I know about bicycles into my beliefs of what they actually look like. I just don’t think my ability to draw you a diagram in five minutes is particularly predictive of my ability to reconstruct a relevant technology given substantially more time and feedback.
I am very confident I could understand and draw you a bicycle if you gave me a day or two of time in which I could experiment and propagate all the various disparate fact I know about bicycles into my beliefs of what they actually look like.
If you’re not allowing the Internet, talking to other people who know about bikes, looking at a bike, or other things like that (as would be the case if you went back to 1200), this seems wild to me (EDIT: tbc, it’s the “very confident” that seems wild, I could see it happening but seems less likely than not). Perhaps we have different notions of “understanding”, or perhaps you just know a lot about bikes. Still, if we found a good operationalization, I’d take a bet at even odds that you couldn’t do this (trusting you not to look things up now such that you could then do it once we had finalized the bet).
Sure, I would be up for doing this if the stakes are even just medium high. I.e. at $500 even odds I would probably be up for spending a weekend on this, maybe with a friend of mine so it’s less lonely. We could do the thing that Buck did where he did a livestream of trying to figure out relativity (I think) from first principles.
I am also committing to not looking up how a bicycle works, and will avoid pictures of bicycles for a week until it’s been decided whether this might happen. I will also avoid reading any comments on this post that aren’t on this specific subthread, just in case someone explains how bicycles work.
Yeah, I’m willing to do $500. (Also please tell me if you secretly are a bike expert, e.g. if you’ve been fixing bikes for years and so have intricate knowledge of the mechanics of bikes, in which case I’d buy your claim and wouldn’t want to bet any more.)
I would probably be up for spending a weekend on this, maybe with a friend of mine so it’s less lonely. We could do the thing that Buck did where he did a livestream of trying to figure out relativity (I think) from first principles.
Sounds reasonable to me. (With the obvious restrictions on the friend not being a bike expert.)
I think my biggest qualm is on how we operationalize “understanding”, or even just what counts as “good enough”. I could imagine finding a third party who knows a lot about bikes, and having them list a bunch of important aspects about bikes ahead of time, and then requiring that the drawing has ~nearly all of them (perhaps something like 90%). I’d also want them to be able to look at your drawing afterwards (perhaps with an associated written explanation from you?) and then judge whether or not the bike would be functional or if there’s some clear mistake that would make it fail.
Given that you wouldn’t be allowed to participate in the creation of this list, probably I also shouldn’t be allowed; this is basically outsourcing the meaning of the word “understanding” to some third party and a good portion of our bet is on what we think the word “understanding” means to other people.
Personally, the thing I would be most surprised by is if you could actually build a reasonable bike in (say) a month given access to “raw materials” from a hardware store (which is probably a better situation than if you were teleported to 1200), but I don’t really see how we could get a good proxy for that.
I was excited about this, so I got started and am video recording me and Claire (mingyuan) figuring it out together. We have a bunch of drawings that I feel pretty confident in, but would like to run some more experiments, but don’t want to leave my house or go into my backyard because we have bikes there. Are we allowed to use a 3D modeling software to design the bike as an alternative to testing it with a prototype?
Ooh interesting. Yeah, I think this makes sense as a thing to allow given the underlying thing we care about, and does make me more optimistic about your chances (though I still assign < 50%, so the bet still makes sense).
Oli recorded some videos, but unfortunately it was kind of hard to tell whether the detail in them was sufficient to demonstrate sufficient competence, so we annulled the bet.
Also please tell me if you secretly are a bike expert
I am not secretly a bike expert, no worries :P My experience with fixing and designing bikes only extends so far that I changed the chain on some bikes a few times, and adjusted the breaks a few times.
I am also not sure how to best do evaluation. I would want us to be particularly forgiving of things that you will kind of obviously figure out when you try to assemble the thing, but pretty unforgiving for things that are hard to figure out if you try to put anything together.
I agree that I would be most interested in the “build a bike given access to raw materials from a hardware store” question, but I also don’t want to spend a month doing that, so let’s not aim for that proxy. But I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating the other thing.
I would want us to be particularly forgiving of things that you will kind of obviously figure out when you try to assemble the thing, but pretty unforgiving for things that are hard to figure out if you try to put anything together.
Yeah that seems right. Perhaps we just look at the result and discuss between us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m hoping the operationalization is more about “would you get a working (and decent) bicycle if you tried from this drawing (+ maybe the stuff you would obviously figure out while trying from the drawing)” and less about “does it have every one of the fancy improvements that modern bikes have”.
I would probably be inclined to reject such a public offer on the grounds that some of the possible people who are similar to me (possible people whose decisions are correlated with mine), when finding themselves in a similar situation, may not trust the offer-maker or may not have $500 to spare, and would not want to publicly disclose that information.
This makes me wonder, for every experiment that’s had a result of “X amount of people can’t do Y task”, how would that translate to “Z amount of people can/can’t do Y task when we paid them to take 2 days/ a week off of work and focus soley on it”.
I find this example pretty uncompelling. While I probably couldn’t draw you a bicycle if you gave me 5 minutes of time (which is what the experiments I’ve seen are doing), I am very confident I could understand and draw you a bicycle if you gave me a day or two of time in which I could experiment and propagate all the various disparate fact I know about bicycles into my beliefs of what they actually look like. I just don’t think my ability to draw you a diagram in five minutes is particularly predictive of my ability to reconstruct a relevant technology given substantially more time and feedback.
If you’re not allowing the Internet, talking to other people who know about bikes, looking at a bike, or other things like that (as would be the case if you went back to 1200), this seems wild to me (EDIT: tbc, it’s the “very confident” that seems wild, I could see it happening but seems less likely than not). Perhaps we have different notions of “understanding”, or perhaps you just know a lot about bikes. Still, if we found a good operationalization, I’d take a bet at even odds that you couldn’t do this (trusting you not to look things up now such that you could then do it once we had finalized the bet).
Sure, I would be up for doing this if the stakes are even just medium high. I.e. at $500 even odds I would probably be up for spending a weekend on this, maybe with a friend of mine so it’s less lonely. We could do the thing that Buck did where he did a livestream of trying to figure out relativity (I think) from first principles.
I am also committing to not looking up how a bicycle works, and will avoid pictures of bicycles for a week until it’s been decided whether this might happen. I will also avoid reading any comments on this post that aren’t on this specific subthread, just in case someone explains how bicycles work.
Yeah, I’m willing to do $500. (Also please tell me if you secretly are a bike expert, e.g. if you’ve been fixing bikes for years and so have intricate knowledge of the mechanics of bikes, in which case I’d buy your claim and wouldn’t want to bet any more.)
Sounds reasonable to me. (With the obvious restrictions on the friend not being a bike expert.)
I think my biggest qualm is on how we operationalize “understanding”, or even just what counts as “good enough”. I could imagine finding a third party who knows a lot about bikes, and having them list a bunch of important aspects about bikes ahead of time, and then requiring that the drawing has ~nearly all of them (perhaps something like 90%). I’d also want them to be able to look at your drawing afterwards (perhaps with an associated written explanation from you?) and then judge whether or not the bike would be functional or if there’s some clear mistake that would make it fail.
Given that you wouldn’t be allowed to participate in the creation of this list, probably I also shouldn’t be allowed; this is basically outsourcing the meaning of the word “understanding” to some third party and a good portion of our bet is on what we think the word “understanding” means to other people.
Personally, the thing I would be most surprised by is if you could actually build a reasonable bike in (say) a month given access to “raw materials” from a hardware store (which is probably a better situation than if you were teleported to 1200), but I don’t really see how we could get a good proxy for that.
I was excited about this, so I got started and am video recording me and Claire (mingyuan) figuring it out together. We have a bunch of drawings that I feel pretty confident in, but would like to run some more experiments, but don’t want to leave my house or go into my backyard because we have bikes there. Are we allowed to use a 3D modeling software to design the bike as an alternative to testing it with a prototype?
Ooh interesting. Yeah, I think this makes sense as a thing to allow given the underlying thing we care about, and does make me more optimistic about your chances (though I still assign < 50%, so the bet still makes sense).
What was the result of this?
I just brought this up in a convo at a party, came to check the result, and wish it were here.
Oli recorded some videos, but unfortunately it was kind of hard to tell whether the detail in them was sufficient to demonstrate sufficient competence, so we annulled the bet.
I am not secretly a bike expert, no worries :P My experience with fixing and designing bikes only extends so far that I changed the chain on some bikes a few times, and adjusted the breaks a few times.
I am also not sure how to best do evaluation. I would want us to be particularly forgiving of things that you will kind of obviously figure out when you try to assemble the thing, but pretty unforgiving for things that are hard to figure out if you try to put anything together.
I agree that I would be most interested in the “build a bike given access to raw materials from a hardware store” question, but I also don’t want to spend a month doing that, so let’s not aim for that proxy. But I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating the other thing.
Yeah that seems right. Perhaps we just look at the result and discuss between us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m hoping the operationalization is more about “would you get a working (and decent) bicycle if you tried from this drawing (+ maybe the stuff you would obviously figure out while trying from the drawing)” and less about “does it have every one of the fancy improvements that modern bikes have”.
That’s how I’ve been thinking about it.
I would probably be inclined to reject such a public offer on the grounds that some of the possible people who are similar to me (possible people whose decisions are correlated with mine), when finding themselves in a similar situation, may not trust the offer-maker or may not have $500 to spare, and would not want to publicly disclose that information.
I would quite like to see this bet, basically for inquiry’s sake. (Though it would cost 1-2 days of habryka’s time.)
This whole chain is amazing and I have upvoted all of it. This is not only a bet on the topic but a full exploration of it. Cool!
This makes me wonder, for every experiment that’s had a result of “X amount of people can’t do Y task”, how would that translate to “Z amount of people can/can’t do Y task when we paid them to take 2 days/ a week off of work and focus soley on it”.
Hard to test for obvious reasons.