Indeed! I was very close to writing a whole bit about TEEs, enclaves, and PUFs in my last comment, but I figured that it also boils down to “just don’t give it permission” so I left it out. I actually think designing secure hardware is incredibly interesting and there will probably be an increase in demand for secure computing environments and data provenance in the near future.
cqb
Karma: 21
This is an extremely hard problem. One way to demonstrate this is is to ask the less constrained question, how would you prevent an adversary from copying some arbitrary piece of data?
I think under a classical computing paradigm this is likely impossible. But is there a way we can make the data useless even if it is copied? This then becomes the realm of cryptography, and seems possible with fully homomorphic encryption and the like. This will boil down to “just don’t give it the secret keys”, which seems like a pretty solid subset of “just don’t give it the permission”.
Under a quantum computing paradigm this might be possible, but that would require waiting for QC hardware to become commonplace and I don’t think anyone is waiting for that.
I’m not really sure if I’m talking past you in this or not, but I wrote it all out already so I’m going to post it.
I think I found the context of the quote. I’m reasonably certain it’s not meant to be taken literally. It illustrates that when used skillfully writing can enhance one’s thinking in such a way that it will outstrip the performance of thought without the assistance of writing.
You have to think before you write, and then you have to read what you wrote and think about it. And you have to keep rewriting, re-reading and thinking, until it’s as good as you can make it, even when writing an email or a text.
You’re right that you can pretty clearly practice thinking without the assistance of writing, but writing gives you the constraint of having to form your thoughts into concise and communicable language, which pure thinking doesn’t provide. Pure thought only needs to be legible to yourself, and repeating the same thought over and over with zero iteration isn’t naturally penalized by the format.
… revising shouldn’t be the art of modifying the presentation of an idea to be more convincing. It should be the art of changing the idea itself to be closer to the truth, which will automatically make it more convincing.
.
Often times, an idea incubates in my head for months before I find a good way to represent it as words or math or pictures or anything else.
This points to a pretty valuable insight. A thought isn’t always ready to be rigorously iterated upon. And, rigorous iteration is what writing is both a good tool and a good training method for. You can use pure thought for rigorous iteration, but using writing provides an advantage that our brains alone can’t.
Writing gives us an expansion to working memory. I think this is the most significant thing writing does to enhance thought. Objects in our working memory only last 2-30 seconds, while we can keep 5-9 unrelated objects in working memory at a time. This seems quite limited. With writing we can dump them onto the page and then recall as needed.
Graham’s claim that people who aren’t writing aren’t thinking is clearly false. People were thinking well before writing. But I do think writing is at least a good tool for significantly improving our thought processes. The words of Evan Chen sum it up better than I can:
The main purpose of writing is not in fact communication, at least not if you’re interested in thinking well. Rather, the benefits (at least the ones I perceive) are
Writing serves as an external memory, letting you see all your ideas and their connections at once, rather than trying to keep them in your head.
Explaining the ideas forces you to think well about them, the same way that teaching something is only possible with a full understanding of the concept.
Writing is a way to move closer to the truth, rather than to convince someone what the truth is.
I would add that bold capital letters are often used in linear algebra to represent matrices.
Have you considered species other than orcas? Not that I know a whole lot about whales, but what specifically makes orcas the prime candidate? I know CETI is focused on sperm whales. So, maybe there are other species that would be more amenable to learning and communicating in an entirely new language?
I did the survey! Skipped some questions out of laziness though