Eliezer was more influenced by probability theory, I by analytic philosophy, yes. These variations are to be expected. I’m reading Jaynes now and finding him quite wonderful. I was a mathematician at one time, so that book is almost comfort food for me—part of the fun is running across old friends expressed in his slightly eccentric language.
I already had a pretty firm grasp on Feynman’s “first-principles approach to reasoning” by the time I read his autobiographical stuff. So I enjoyed the books a lot, but more along the lines of “Great physicist and I think alike! Cool!” than being influenced by him. If I’d been able to read them 15 years earlier I probably would have been influenced.
One of the reasons I chose a personal, heavily narratized mode to write the essay in was exactly so I could use that to organize what would otherwise have been a dry and forbidding mass of detail. Glad to know that worked—and, from what you don’t say, that I appear to have avoided the common “it’s all about my feelings” failure mode of such writing.
Eliezer was more influenced by probability theory, I by analytic philosophy, yes. These variations are to be expected. I’m reading Jaynes now and finding him quite wonderful. I was a mathematician at one time, so that book is almost comfort food for me—part of the fun is running across old friends expressed in his slightly eccentric language.
I already had a pretty firm grasp on Feynman’s “first-principles approach to reasoning” by the time I read his autobiographical stuff. So I enjoyed the books a lot, but more along the lines of “Great physicist and I think alike! Cool!” than being influenced by him. If I’d been able to read them 15 years earlier I probably would have been influenced.
One of the reasons I chose a personal, heavily narratized mode to write the essay in was exactly so I could use that to organize what would otherwise have been a dry and forbidding mass of detail. Glad to know that worked—and, from what you don’t say, that I appear to have avoided the common “it’s all about my feelings” failure mode of such writing.