People sometimes make grand claims like “system X is basically just Y” (10-sec off-the-cuff examples: “the human brain is just a predictive processing engine”, “evolution is just an optimisation algorithm”, “community interaction is just a stag hunt”, “economies in disequilibrium is just gradient descent”...)
When I first saw you mention this in a comment on one my posts, I felt a similar suspicion as I usually do toward such claims.
So, to preserve high standards in an epistemic community, I think it’s very valuable to actually write up the concrete, gears-like models behind claims like that—as well as reviewing those derivations at a later time to see if they actually support the bold claim.
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Separately, I think it’s good to write-up things which seem like “someone must have thought of this”—because academia might have a “simplicity tax”, where people avoiding clearly explaining such things since it might make them look naïve.
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For the record, I have not engaged a lot with this post personally, and it has not affected my own thinking in a substantial way.
People sometimes make grand claims like “system X is basically just Y” (10-sec off-the-cuff examples: “the human brain is just a predictive processing engine”, “evolution is just an optimisation algorithm”, “community interaction is just a stag hunt”, “economies in disequilibrium is just gradient descent”...)
When I first saw you mention this in a comment on one my posts, I felt a similar suspicion as I usually do toward such claims.
So, to preserve high standards in an epistemic community, I think it’s very valuable to actually write up the concrete, gears-like models behind claims like that—as well as reviewing those derivations at a later time to see if they actually support the bold claim.
___
Separately, I think it’s good to write-up things which seem like “someone must have thought of this”—because academia might have a “simplicity tax”, where people avoiding clearly explaining such things since it might make them look naïve.
___
For the record, I have not engaged a lot with this post personally, and it has not affected my own thinking in a substantial way.