People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently?
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class?
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.)
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
Heisenberg Certainty Principle
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
Uncertainty principle: The (badly misnamed) implication of quantum theory that for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object, some of their attributes must be diverse.
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.