This post, by example, seems like a really good argument that we should spend a little more effort on didactic posts of this sort. E.g. rather than just saying “physical systems have multiple possible interpretations,” we could point people to a post about a gridworld with a deterministic system playing the role of the agent, such that there are a couple different pretty-good ways of describing this agent that mostly agree but generalize in different ways.
This perspective might also be a steelmanning of that sort of paper where there’s an abstract argument that does all the work, and then some code that tells you nothing new if you followed the abstract argument. The code (in the steelmanned story) isn’t just there to make the paper be in the right literary genre or provide a semi-trustworthy signal that you’re not a crank who makes bad abstract arguments, it’s a didactic tool to help the reader do these sorts of exercises.
This post, by example, seems like a really good argument that we should spend a little more effort on didactic posts of this sort. E.g. rather than just saying “physical systems have multiple possible interpretations,” we could point people to a post about a gridworld with a deterministic system playing the role of the agent, such that there are a couple different pretty-good ways of describing this agent that mostly agree but generalize in different ways.
This perspective might also be a steelmanning of that sort of paper where there’s an abstract argument that does all the work, and then some code that tells you nothing new if you followed the abstract argument. The code (in the steelmanned story) isn’t just there to make the paper be in the right literary genre or provide a semi-trustworthy signal that you’re not a crank who makes bad abstract arguments, it’s a didactic tool to help the reader do these sorts of exercises.