And so in that case, I’ve been wondering how the Chronophone would handle the fact that my culture has orders of magnitude more information available to it than Archimedes’ did. It seems the simplest thing to do would be to drop packets, but that would complicate all the individual transmissions sent by all the people prior to this question. Avoiding that issue, I think there’s a difference between the ancient culture and my own that the Chronophone couldn’t easily handle: back then, the sum of human knowledge was probably knowable to a brilliant mind like his. So if I used a computer to send back all of wikipedia, it would have to lose so much detail that Archimedes would be able to understand all of it in his own lifetime, whereas I couldn’t even read the new content added to wikipedia each month.
I’m not trying to say that I’d read wikipedia to him, or that I think a data dump would be a good way to try and get the right insights into his mind to get his culture going down the path that my culture would most approve. What I’m trying to say is that since he was a big fish in a tiny pond, and I’m an exceedingly below-average fish in a freaking colossal sea (which in the spirit of maximal inconvenience, I will take to be a community of Feynmans), and the Chronophone scales down the bits of my sea that I’m trying to import to his pond, there is a tiny chance that anything I say will be 1) true, 2) surprising, and 3) able to sway him in the direction I want.
Boiling down the requirements of 1 and 2, this Chronophone doesn’t seem to map true statements to true statements. It maps the obviousness of statements. So things that are both true, and obvious to my maximally inconvenient community, won’t map to true insights to Archimedes’ world. As I understand the question posed by Eliezer about bringing science to them, my task is tantamount to teaching Feynman that he is wrong about science: that there is a better way to come to know the world. Unless Feynman knew less about Bayes Theorem than me (which would be an accident of history more than anything), this could not be both true and obvious.
And so in that case, I’ve been wondering how the Chronophone would handle the fact that my culture has orders of magnitude more information available to it than Archimedes’ did. It seems the simplest thing to do would be to drop packets, but that would complicate all the individual transmissions sent by all the people prior to this question. Avoiding that issue, I think there’s a difference between the ancient culture and my own that the Chronophone couldn’t easily handle: back then, the sum of human knowledge was probably knowable to a brilliant mind like his. So if I used a computer to send back all of wikipedia, it would have to lose so much detail that Archimedes would be able to understand all of it in his own lifetime, whereas I couldn’t even read the new content added to wikipedia each month.
I’m not trying to say that I’d read wikipedia to him, or that I think a data dump would be a good way to try and get the right insights into his mind to get his culture going down the path that my culture would most approve. What I’m trying to say is that since he was a big fish in a tiny pond, and I’m an exceedingly below-average fish in a freaking colossal sea (which in the spirit of maximal inconvenience, I will take to be a community of Feynmans), and the Chronophone scales down the bits of my sea that I’m trying to import to his pond, there is a tiny chance that anything I say will be 1) true, 2) surprising, and 3) able to sway him in the direction I want.
Boiling down the requirements of 1 and 2, this Chronophone doesn’t seem to map true statements to true statements. It maps the obviousness of statements. So things that are both true, and obvious to my maximally inconvenient community, won’t map to true insights to Archimedes’ world. As I understand the question posed by Eliezer about bringing science to them, my task is tantamount to teaching Feynman that he is wrong about science: that there is a better way to come to know the world. Unless Feynman knew less about Bayes Theorem than me (which would be an accident of history more than anything), this could not be both true and obvious.