John has also made various caveats to me, of the form “this field is pre-paradigmatic and the math is merely suggestive at this point”. I feel like he oversold his results even so.
Part of it is that I get the sense that John didn’t understand the limitations of his own results—like the fact that the telephone theorem only says anything in the infinite case, and the thing it says then does not (in its current form) arise as a limit of sensible things that can be said in finite cases. Or like the fact that the alleged interesting results of the gKPD theorem are a relatively-shallow consequence of the overly-strong assumption of G.
My impression was that I had to go digging into the theorems to see what they said, only to be disappointed by how little resemblance they bore to what I’d heard John imply. (And it sounds to me like Lawrence, Leon, and Erik had a similar experience, although I might be misreading them on account of confirmation bias or w/e.)
I acknowledge that it’s tricky to draw a line between “someone has math that they think teaches them something, and is inarticulate about exactly what it teaches” and “someone has math that they don’t understand and are overselling”. The sort of observation that would push me towards the former end in John’s case is stuff like: John being able to gesture more convincingly at ways concepts like “tree” or “window” are related to his conserved-property math even in messy finite cases. I acknowledge that this isn’t a super legible distinction and that that’s annoying.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
Note that I continue to think John’s cool for pursuing this particular research direction, and I’d enjoy seeing his math further fleshed out (and with more awareness on John’s part of its current limitations). I think there might be interesting results down this path.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
In hindsight, I do think the period when our discussions took place were a local maximum of (my own estimate of the extent of applicability of my math), partially thanks to your input and partially because I was in the process of digesting a bunch of the technical results we talked about and figuring out the next hurdles. In particular, I definitely underestimated the difficulty of extending the results to finite approximations.
That said, I doubt that fully accounts for the difference in perception.
John has also made various caveats to me, of the form “this field is pre-paradigmatic and the math is merely suggestive at this point”. I feel like he oversold his results even so.
Part of it is that I get the sense that John didn’t understand the limitations of his own results—like the fact that the telephone theorem only says anything in the infinite case, and the thing it says then does not (in its current form) arise as a limit of sensible things that can be said in finite cases. Or like the fact that the alleged interesting results of the gKPD theorem are a relatively-shallow consequence of the overly-strong assumption of G.
My impression was that I had to go digging into the theorems to see what they said, only to be disappointed by how little resemblance they bore to what I’d heard John imply. (And it sounds to me like Lawrence, Leon, and Erik had a similar experience, although I might be misreading them on account of confirmation bias or w/e.)
I acknowledge that it’s tricky to draw a line between “someone has math that they think teaches them something, and is inarticulate about exactly what it teaches” and “someone has math that they don’t understand and are overselling”. The sort of observation that would push me towards the former end in John’s case is stuff like: John being able to gesture more convincingly at ways concepts like “tree” or “window” are related to his conserved-property math even in messy finite cases. I acknowledge that this isn’t a super legible distinction and that that’s annoying.
(Also, I had the above convos with John >1y ago, and perhaps John simply changed since then.)
Note that I continue to think John’s cool for pursuing this particular research direction, and I’d enjoy seeing his math further fleshed out (and with more awareness on John’s part of its current limitations). I think there might be interesting results down this path.
In hindsight, I do think the period when our discussions took place were a local maximum of (my own estimate of the extent of applicability of my math), partially thanks to your input and partially because I was in the process of digesting a bunch of the technical results we talked about and figuring out the next hurdles. In particular, I definitely underestimated the difficulty of extending the results to finite approximations.
That said, I doubt that fully accounts for the difference in perception.