Gwern and Scott are great writers, which is different from writing great things. It’s like high-purity silver rather than rough gold, if that makes sense.
I do think they write a lot of great things, but not excellent things. Posts like “Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie” are probably around the limit of how difficult of an idea somebody can communicate while retaining some level of popularity. Somebody wanting to communicate ideas one or two standard deviations about this would find themselves in obscurity. I think there’s more intelligent people out there sharing ideas which don’t really reach anyone. Of course, it’s hard for me to provide examples, as obscure things are hard to find, and I won’t be able to prove that said ideas are good, for if it was easy to recognize as such, then they’d already be popular. And once you get abstract enough, the things you say will basically be indistinguishable from nonsense to anyone below a certain threshold of intelligence.
Of course, it may just be that high levels of abstraction aren’t useful, leading intelligent people towards width and expertise with the mundane, rather than rabbit holes. Or it may be that people give up attempting to communicate certain concepts in language, and just make the attempt at showing them instead.
I saw a biologist on here comparing people to fire (as chemical processes) and immediately found the idea familiar as I had made the same connection myself before. To most people, it probably seems like a weird idea?
The idea that popularity must be a sign of shallowness, and hence unpopularity or obscurity a sign of depth, sounds rather shallow to me. My attitude here is more like, if supposedly world-shattering insights can’t be explained in relatively simple language, they either aren’t that great, or we don’t really understand them. Like in this Feynman quote:
Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he came to me and said: “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
I think it’s necessarily truth given the statistical distribution of things. If I say “There’s necessarily less people with PhDs than with masters, and necessarily less masters than college graduates” you’d probably agree.
The theory that “If you understand something, you can explain it simply” is mostly true, but this does not make it easy to understand, as simplicity is not ease (Just try to explain enlightenment / the map-territory distinction to a stupid person). What you understand will seem trivial to you, and what you don’t understand will seem difficult. This is just the mental representation of things getting more efficienct and us building mental shortcuts for things and getting used to patterns.
Proof: There’s people who understand high level mathematics, so they must be able to explain these concepts simply. In theory, they should be able to write a book of these simple concepts, which even 4th graders can read. Thus, we should already have plenty of 4th graders who understand high level mathematics. But this is not the case, most 4th graders are still 10 years of education away from understanding things on a high level. Ergo, either the initial claim (that what you understand can be explained simply) is false, or else “explained simply” does not imply “understood easily”
The excessive humility is a kind og signaling or defense mechanism against criticism and excessive expectations from other people, and it’s rewarded because of its moralistic nature. It’s not true, it’s mainly pleasant-sounding nonsense originating in herd morality.
Gwern and Scott are great writers, which is different from writing great things. It’s like high-purity silver rather than rough gold, if that makes sense.
I do think they write a lot of great things, but not excellent things. Posts like “Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie” are probably around the limit of how difficult of an idea somebody can communicate while retaining some level of popularity. Somebody wanting to communicate ideas one or two standard deviations about this would find themselves in obscurity. I think there’s more intelligent people out there sharing ideas which don’t really reach anyone. Of course, it’s hard for me to provide examples, as obscure things are hard to find, and I won’t be able to prove that said ideas are good, for if it was easy to recognize as such, then they’d already be popular. And once you get abstract enough, the things you say will basically be indistinguishable from nonsense to anyone below a certain threshold of intelligence.
Of course, it may just be that high levels of abstraction aren’t useful, leading intelligent people towards width and expertise with the mundane, rather than rabbit holes. Or it may be that people give up attempting to communicate certain concepts in language, and just make the attempt at showing them instead.
I saw a biologist on here comparing people to fire (as chemical processes) and immediately found the idea familiar as I had made the same connection myself before. To most people, it probably seems like a weird idea?
The idea that popularity must be a sign of shallowness, and hence unpopularity or obscurity a sign of depth, sounds rather shallow to me. My attitude here is more like, if supposedly world-shattering insights can’t be explained in relatively simple language, they either aren’t that great, or we don’t really understand them. Like in this Feynman quote:
I think it’s necessarily truth given the statistical distribution of things. If I say “There’s necessarily less people with PhDs than with masters, and necessarily less masters than college graduates” you’d probably agree.
The theory that “If you understand something, you can explain it simply” is mostly true, but this does not make it easy to understand, as simplicity is not ease (Just try to explain enlightenment / the map-territory distinction to a stupid person). What you understand will seem trivial to you, and what you don’t understand will seem difficult. This is just the mental representation of things getting more efficienct and us building mental shortcuts for things and getting used to patterns.
Proof: There’s people who understand high level mathematics, so they must be able to explain these concepts simply. In theory, they should be able to write a book of these simple concepts, which even 4th graders can read. Thus, we should already have plenty of 4th graders who understand high level mathematics. But this is not the case, most 4th graders are still 10 years of education away from understanding things on a high level. Ergo, either the initial claim (that what you understand can be explained simply) is false, or else “explained simply” does not imply “understood easily”
The excessive humility is a kind og signaling or defense mechanism against criticism and excessive expectations from other people, and it’s rewarded because of its moralistic nature. It’s not true, it’s mainly pleasant-sounding nonsense originating in herd morality.