I am finding the same problem with all articles in this sequence that I find with the explanation of Bayes’ Theorem on Yudkowsky’s main site. There are parts that seem so blindingly obvious they don’t bear mentioning.
Yet soon thereafter, all of a sudden, I find myself completely lost. I can understand parts of the text separately, but can’t link them together. I don’t see where it comes from, where it’s going, what problems it’s addressing. I find it especially difficult to relate the illustrations to what’s going on in the text.
I seldom have had this problem with the blog posts from the classical sequences (with some exceptions, such as his quantum physics sequence, which left me similarly confused).
Am I the only one who feels this way?
EDIT: upon reflection, this phenomenon, of feeling like there was a sudden, imperceptible jump from the boringly obvious to the utterly confusing, I’ve already experienced it before: in college, many lessons would follow this pattern, and it would take intensive study to figure out the steps the professor merrily jumped between what is, to them, two categories of the set of blindingly obvious things they already know and need to explain again. Maybe there’s some sort of pattern there?
This is a problem known as “bad writing” which I continue to struggle with, even after many years. Can you list the first part where you felt lost? Somewhere between there and the previous part, I must have skipped something.
I do hope people appreciate that all the “blindingly obvious” parts are parts where (at least in my guesstimation, and often in my actual experience) somebody else would otherwise get lost. The “obvious” is not the same for all people.
I would tell you about it, but now I’m afraid I’m distracting you from the latest chapter in Methods, which is kind of overdue and eagerly expected (and half of a Na No Wri Mo novel’s wordcount? what exactly have you been up to?). I swear I’ll take the time to go through the sequence and identify and point out the points at which I got lost, but first I’ll wait for you to publish that chapter.
And yes, I know that one person’s obvious is another’s opaque; after all, that is the very root of this very problem.
@Donvoters: I am genuinely sorry; I’m just being honest here. This is like being addicted to a drug and, after months of waiting, hearing that the next batch is imminent and huge. I’m sort of fretting right now, and I’m probably not the only one.
So, first of all, I’m going to complain that doing this was a pain in the neck, and that commenting/editing would be much easier on Gdocs or on some similar application. In fact, I used Gdocs to write this, because doing so on the LW interface would have been intolerable. Still, there you are;
“A single discrete element of fundamental physics”
I suppose you mean an “elementary particle”? Took me a second to get it; it’s not the standard expression.
different low-level physical states are inside or outside the mental image of “some apples on the table” or alternatively “a kitten on the table”
I found this frankly misleading. When you say “mental image”, I think of an actual visualization, which is not a category a “low-level physical state” can belong to (or be “inisde of”). “Mental configuration” or “mental arrangement” might be more appropriate, and “corresponding” or “not corresponding” sound more acceptable. However, I’d rephrase the entire thing differently, as “different low-level physical states whose observation would result in a mental image of some apples on the table or a kitten on the table”.
The picture underneath is confusing because the previous paragraph makes us expect a “brain” or a “head” “visualizing” the “high states”, not the “high states” being somehow (one is function of the other, a correspondence? identification? belonging) linked to the “this actual universe in all its low-level glory” picture. I also find the choice of fuzziness around the edges of picture fragments, and the use of dotted lines, to be rather jarring. Is it supposed to be cute? Because what it conveys to me is “we’re not sure” and “the concept is unclear” and “the correspondence is distant or uncertain”, and that contrasts strongly with the actual text, which is much more rigorous. At the very least, you may want the line from “the Universe” to “all possible worlds” to end in a thicker dot, and to distort the shape of “all the possible worlds that would result in “a bunch of apples on the table” (that’s what the dotted circle means, right?) to be bigger and more potato-shaped or something, as is traditional to denote “abstract set of stuff whose shape doesn’t matter”; a circle seems too regular, and, in fact, I originally thought it represented a point, not a set. Its shape should also be different from the shape of the “we observe that a cat is on the table” set of possible universes, so as not to imply any relationship between the two.
but I’m not going to draw the image for that one. (We tried, and it came out too crowded.)
Did you need to mention that? Every time I read it, I get distracted wandering what it would have looked like. Perhaps it would be better to make the picture, and to hell with crowdedness.
Constraining this output constrains the possible states of the original, physical input universe:
On the picture next, I would have put the points of the arrows in the other direction, since that’s the direction of the causality link; universe-observation-model-calculation-six.
fulfilled by a mixture of physical reality and logical validity
“Mixture” sounds a little too anarchic, it confused me for a while. Doesn’t “physical reality” come before “logical validity”? What do you think of “composition” instead? It implies an order, that one is compounded over the other. “Combination”, which you used later, seems good too.
“running a logical function over the physical universe”
Sounds like an abuse of language. Wouldn’t lengthening it to “running a logical function over a model of the physical universe” or “running a logical function over an observation of the physical universe” be a good tradeoff?
(I haven’t had time to go into this last part but it’s an already-popular idea in philosophy of computation.)
I got distracted again.
And the Great Reductionist Thesis can be seen as the proposition that everything meaningful can be expressed this way eventually.
Is it true then, that “The GRT defines ‘meaningful’ as equivalent to ‘can be expressed this way’, and thus postulates that things that cannot be expressed this way are meaningless?” How do we avoid Wittgensteinonsense?
self-sensitization
? You mean becoming sensitive to one’s own state of mind? “I notice that I am confused”?
unless you believe the Illuminati planned it all
How about the more impartial (and factual, and logical) “unless you don’t believe LHO acted by himself”? It seems unfair to promote to attention, of all the vast field of hypotheses, a Bavarian organization that seems to have been ended circa 1787. You should avoid making jokes that will make many laugh at the expense of pissing off others; it’s kind of a terrible PR strategy.
For the record, I don’t “believe” in any specific conspiracy theory, and I assign highest probability to the “lone nutter” chain of events, but I assign the “not a lone nutter” set of hypotheses a probability that is significantly above zero; I don’t presume to promote to attention any particular hypothesis of that set with the evidence currently available to the public. If this position deserves mockery, I would like to know it. If it doesn’t, I would like people to stop acting as if the only options were “accept the standard version and only the standard version” or “choose one elaborate conspiracy theory and stick to it in the face of all evidence (or lack thereof)”.
For instance, about the moon landing; if you want to use a fact that is caused by Kennedy’s election and which wouldn’t have happened otherwise, how about “Monroe Cake” instead, which isn’t a potshot at anyone? And yes, I believe there was a moon landing, in the exact way the tale was officially told, until and unless I’m presented with sufficient evidence of the contrary, which hasn’t happened yet and which I don’t anticipate happening. I just don’t endorse antagonizing people, or otherwise raising tensions, unless you have to.
a nice neighborhood-structure
?
do not in fact actually exist.
I thought many-worlds implied they did exist “somewhere”?
And the same law could’ve just as easily have said that you’re likely to find yourself in a world that goes over the integral of modulus to the power 1.99999?
“Finally, someone who speaks English!” Says Tony Stark and not many humans besides him.
I don’t have the equation in my head. Perhaps you could link to it?
a deterministic causal equation relating complex amplitudes inside a configuration space
Consider using parenthesis instead of a comma; I had to backtrack at the second semicolon, having thought that it was the second kind of stuff (and then remembering that, had the list items been separated by commas, you’d have used a colon and not a semicolon).
Why don’t you use bullet points and numbered lists more often? They’d make reading less fluid, but they’d also make some of your paragraphs much clearer, I think.
magical-reality-fluid
A bit of a distracting concept. How about the Pratchett formulation instead: thingness? It’s etymologically correct, and quite evocative.
This is just the same sort of problem if you say that causal models are meaningful and true relative to a mixture of three kinds of stuff, actual worlds, logical validities, and counterfactuals, and logical validities
Now this gets really confusing. Why are “logical validities” counted twice?
qualia are fundamental
I always thought ‘qualia’ was singular… Still, a link to Wikipedia would not be unwelcome; I’m having trouble parsing the sentence. “build references”? You seem to imply that they’re wrong for doing so, yet don’t seem to explicit why.
The whole paragraph on the Anthropic Trilemma has left me confuzzled. Then I clicked the link, saw the lengthy article, and thought “not today”. Maybe it would be beneficial to put a header/abstract/summary on top of your old sequences articles, for those of us who want to revise the old stuff but don’t want to have to read the whole thing all over again.
And -alas- the paragraph on modern philosophy ultimately leaves me with nothing other than “EY thinks modern philosophy is doing stuff that seems obviously stupid or half-baked”. Not the sort of thing you should do lightly; a link to something more developed would be good.
This is confusing the project of getting the gnomes out of the haunted mine, with trying to unmake the rainbow.
When reading your work, I often share the feeling that Ritalin just described. In this particular instance, I was with you up until you started talking about the Born probabilities and then I just felt totally lost.
Yes, I knew about them. I try to shorten them it in everything I do, from my vocabulary register to the concepts I use, which I try to make as rent-paying and empirical as possible. It’s heavier work than I foresaw.
This has moved me from “impossible-to-understand nerd who talks down to you from an impenetrable ivory tower” to “that creepy guy who talks in punches and has strange ideas that make sense”. Or, if you will, from a Sheldon Cooper to a coolness-impaired Tyler Durden. Socially, it wasn’t a big gain.
That’s more or less how I felt about Penrose’s The Road to Reality.
The great thing about talking with someone in person (or at least, in real-time one-to-one conversations) is that you can first assess how large the inferential distance is, e.g. “What are you working on?” “Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.” “Do you know what subatomic particles are?” “No.” “Do you know what an atom is?” “Yes.”
Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.”
You just have to hope they won’t Wheatley they way around your questions and try to feign understanding things they don’t, treating knowledge like a status game. That can really put a damper on meaningful communication.
I don’t think that ever happened to me—at worst, they incorrectly believed that the understanding they had got from popularizations was accurate. But pretty much everybody at some point admits “I wish I could understand everything of that, but that sounds cool”, except people who actually understand (as evidenced by the fact that they ask questions too relevant for them to be just parroting stuff to hide ignorance).
(I guess the kind of people who treat everything like a status game would consider knowledge about sciency topics to be nerdy and therefore uncool.)
One way to treat knowledge like a status game is to be a “science fan.” This is a game you play with other “science fans,” and you win by knowing more “mind-blowing facts” about science than other people. It is popular on Quora.
Ah, yes, the mathematician’s double take. One should be wary of those, especially at a high level; when an elder mathematician wants to skip inferential steps for the sake of expediency, there’s a chance that “then a miracle occurs” is somewhere in that mess of a blackboard.
In fact, the whole point of having a younger chevruta is so that they can point out that kind of details the bigger, more inferentially-distant minds might accidentally gloss over. They’re like the great writer’s spell-checker. Or like the comment section for Yudkowsky’s blog posts.
Joking aside, I was actually wondering if others here felt the same way as I about EY’s latest sequence of posts.
I am finding the same problem with all articles in this sequence that I find with the explanation of Bayes’ Theorem on Yudkowsky’s main site. There are parts that seem so blindingly obvious they don’t bear mentioning.
Yet soon thereafter, all of a sudden, I find myself completely lost. I can understand parts of the text separately, but can’t link them together. I don’t see where it comes from, where it’s going, what problems it’s addressing. I find it especially difficult to relate the illustrations to what’s going on in the text.
I seldom have had this problem with the blog posts from the classical sequences (with some exceptions, such as his quantum physics sequence, which left me similarly confused).
Am I the only one who feels this way?
EDIT: upon reflection, this phenomenon, of feeling like there was a sudden, imperceptible jump from the boringly obvious to the utterly confusing, I’ve already experienced it before: in college, many lessons would follow this pattern, and it would take intensive study to figure out the steps the professor merrily jumped between what is, to them, two categories of the set of blindingly obvious things they already know and need to explain again. Maybe there’s some sort of pattern there?
This is a problem known as “bad writing” which I continue to struggle with, even after many years. Can you list the first part where you felt lost? Somewhere between there and the previous part, I must have skipped something.
I do hope people appreciate that all the “blindingly obvious” parts are parts where (at least in my guesstimation, and often in my actual experience) somebody else would otherwise get lost. The “obvious” is not the same for all people.
I’ll be linking to this comment pretty often, I think, to reply to commentors on my own posts.
I would tell you about it, but now I’m afraid I’m distracting you from the latest chapter in Methods, which is kind of overdue and eagerly expected (and half of a Na No Wri Mo novel’s wordcount? what exactly have you been up to?). I swear I’ll take the time to go through the sequence and identify and point out the points at which I got lost, but first I’ll wait for you to publish that chapter.
And yes, I know that one person’s obvious is another’s opaque; after all, that is the very root of this very problem.
@Donvoters: I am genuinely sorry; I’m just being honest here. This is like being addicted to a drug and, after months of waiting, hearing that the next batch is imminent and huge. I’m sort of fretting right now, and I’m probably not the only one.
Did you get back to Eliezer about what you found difficult in Mixed Reference?
I had forgotten. Thanks for reminding me.
So, first of all, I’m going to complain that doing this was a pain in the neck, and that commenting/editing would be much easier on Gdocs or on some similar application. In fact, I used Gdocs to write this, because doing so on the LW interface would have been intolerable. Still, there you are;
I suppose you mean an “elementary particle”? Took me a second to get it; it’s not the standard expression.
I found this frankly misleading. When you say “mental image”, I think of an actual visualization, which is not a category a “low-level physical state” can belong to (or be “inisde of”). “Mental configuration” or “mental arrangement” might be more appropriate, and “corresponding” or “not corresponding” sound more acceptable. However, I’d rephrase the entire thing differently, as “different low-level physical states whose observation would result in a mental image of some apples on the table or a kitten on the table”.
The picture underneath is confusing because the previous paragraph makes us expect a “brain” or a “head” “visualizing” the “high states”, not the “high states” being somehow (one is function of the other, a correspondence? identification? belonging) linked to the “this actual universe in all its low-level glory” picture. I also find the choice of fuzziness around the edges of picture fragments, and the use of dotted lines, to be rather jarring. Is it supposed to be cute? Because what it conveys to me is “we’re not sure” and “the concept is unclear” and “the correspondence is distant or uncertain”, and that contrasts strongly with the actual text, which is much more rigorous. At the very least, you may want the line from “the Universe” to “all possible worlds” to end in a thicker dot, and to distort the shape of “all the possible worlds that would result in “a bunch of apples on the table” (that’s what the dotted circle means, right?) to be bigger and more potato-shaped or something, as is traditional to denote “abstract set of stuff whose shape doesn’t matter”; a circle seems too regular, and, in fact, I originally thought it represented a point, not a set. Its shape should also be different from the shape of the “we observe that a cat is on the table” set of possible universes, so as not to imply any relationship between the two.
Did you need to mention that? Every time I read it, I get distracted wandering what it would have looked like. Perhaps it would be better to make the picture, and to hell with crowdedness.
On the picture next, I would have put the points of the arrows in the other direction, since that’s the direction of the causality link; universe-observation-model-calculation-six.
“Mixture” sounds a little too anarchic, it confused me for a while. Doesn’t “physical reality” come before “logical validity”? What do you think of “composition” instead? It implies an order, that one is compounded over the other. “Combination”, which you used later, seems good too.
Sounds like an abuse of language. Wouldn’t lengthening it to “running a logical function over a model of the physical universe” or “running a logical function over an observation of the physical universe” be a good tradeoff?
I got distracted again.
Is it true then, that “The GRT defines ‘meaningful’ as equivalent to ‘can be expressed this way’, and thus postulates that things that cannot be expressed this way are meaningless?” How do we avoid Wittgensteinonsense?
? You mean becoming sensitive to one’s own state of mind? “I notice that I am confused”?
How about the more impartial (and factual, and logical) “unless you don’t believe LHO acted by himself”? It seems unfair to promote to attention, of all the vast field of hypotheses, a Bavarian organization that seems to have been ended circa 1787. You should avoid making jokes that will make many laugh at the expense of pissing off others; it’s kind of a terrible PR strategy.
For the record, I don’t “believe” in any specific conspiracy theory, and I assign highest probability to the “lone nutter” chain of events, but I assign the “not a lone nutter” set of hypotheses a probability that is significantly above zero; I don’t presume to promote to attention any particular hypothesis of that set with the evidence currently available to the public. If this position deserves mockery, I would like to know it. If it doesn’t, I would like people to stop acting as if the only options were “accept the standard version and only the standard version” or “choose one elaborate conspiracy theory and stick to it in the face of all evidence (or lack thereof)”.
For instance, about the moon landing; if you want to use a fact that is caused by Kennedy’s election and which wouldn’t have happened otherwise, how about “Monroe Cake” instead, which isn’t a potshot at anyone? And yes, I believe there was a moon landing, in the exact way the tale was officially told, until and unless I’m presented with sufficient evidence of the contrary, which hasn’t happened yet and which I don’t anticipate happening. I just don’t endorse antagonizing people, or otherwise raising tensions, unless you have to.
?
I thought many-worlds implied they did exist “somewhere”?
“Finally, someone who speaks English!” Says Tony Stark and not many humans besides him.
I don’t have the equation in my head. Perhaps you could link to it?
Consider using parenthesis instead of a comma; I had to backtrack at the second semicolon, having thought that it was the second kind of stuff (and then remembering that, had the list items been separated by commas, you’d have used a colon and not a semicolon).
Why don’t you use bullet points and numbered lists more often? They’d make reading less fluid, but they’d also make some of your paragraphs much clearer, I think.
A bit of a distracting concept. How about the Pratchett formulation instead: thingness? It’s etymologically correct, and quite evocative.
Now this gets really confusing. Why are “logical validities” counted twice?
I always thought ‘qualia’ was singular… Still, a link to Wikipedia would not be unwelcome; I’m having trouble parsing the sentence. “build references”? You seem to imply that they’re wrong for doing so, yet don’t seem to explicit why.
The whole paragraph on the Anthropic Trilemma has left me confuzzled. Then I clicked the link, saw the lengthy article, and thought “not today”. Maybe it would be beneficial to put a header/abstract/summary on top of your old sequences articles, for those of us who want to revise the old stuff but don’t want to have to read the whole thing all over again.
And -alas- the paragraph on modern philosophy ultimately leaves me with nothing other than “EY thinks modern philosophy is doing stuff that seems obviously stupid or half-baked”. Not the sort of thing you should do lightly; a link to something more developed would be good.
A couple links here would be nice.
And, yeah, what’s a Born probability?
When reading your work, I often share the feeling that Ritalin just described. In this particular instance, I was with you up until you started talking about the Born probabilities and then I just felt totally lost.
Ah yes. Have you read about ‘inferential distance’ yet? :)
Yes, I knew about them. I try to shorten them it in everything I do, from my vocabulary register to the concepts I use, which I try to make as rent-paying and empirical as possible. It’s heavier work than I foresaw.
This has moved me from “impossible-to-understand nerd who talks down to you from an impenetrable ivory tower” to “that creepy guy who talks in punches and has strange ideas that make sense”. Or, if you will, from a Sheldon Cooper to a coolness-impaired Tyler Durden. Socially, it wasn’t a big gain.
That’s more or less how I felt about Penrose’s The Road to Reality.
The great thing about talking with someone in person (or at least, in real-time one-to-one conversations) is that you can first assess how large the inferential distance is, e.g. “What are you working on?” “Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.” “Do you know what subatomic particles are?” “No.” “Do you know what an atom is?” “Yes.”
You just have to hope they won’t Wheatley they way around your questions and try to feign understanding things they don’t, treating knowledge like a status game. That can really put a damper on meaningful communication.
I don’t think that ever happened to me—at worst, they incorrectly believed that the understanding they had got from popularizations was accurate. But pretty much everybody at some point admits “I wish I could understand everything of that, but that sounds cool”, except people who actually understand (as evidenced by the fact that they ask questions too relevant for them to be just parroting stuff to hide ignorance).
(I guess the kind of people who treat everything like a status game would consider knowledge about sciency topics to be nerdy and therefore uncool.)
One way to treat knowledge like a status game is to be a “science fan.” This is a game you play with other “science fans,” and you win by knowing more “mind-blowing facts” about science than other people. It is popular on Quora.
Absolutely not, it’s quite a common feeling among mathematicians :)
Ah, yes, the mathematician’s double take. One should be wary of those, especially at a high level; when an elder mathematician wants to skip inferential steps for the sake of expediency, there’s a chance that “then a miracle occurs” is somewhere in that mess of a blackboard.
In fact, the whole point of having a younger chevruta is so that they can point out that kind of details the bigger, more inferentially-distant minds might accidentally gloss over. They’re like the great writer’s spell-checker. Or like the comment section for Yudkowsky’s blog posts.
Joking aside, I was actually wondering if others here felt the same way as I about EY’s latest sequence of posts.