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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#201

Post by hwillis »

dingo_bat wrote: post #110
hwillis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and bu…

Except looking inside a neural network is almost impossible. For example, google photos still turns mum if you search "gorilla". They could not figure out wtf was wrong with the recognition networks and had to just blacklist the keywords. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google...

It's not impossible, just time-consuming. It's the kind of task computers excel at but cannot currently do for general cases.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#202

Post by brians »

tdb7893 wrote: post #131
le-mark wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.

As long as they would allow me to do it on company time it would be a nice distraction from work.

Of course you can do it on company time. What other time is there?

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#203

Post by sodapopcan »

debt wrote: post #190
nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

"they look terrible" Well then don't do a shitty job? I mean if the budget is there, then yeah, just build me some stairs.

This misses OP's point completely--they're talking about the people who will use pieces of cardboard to fill pits in the earth and make the railing way too high because that's how long they happened to cut the boards. In my experience, these have indeed always been the people who hastily say, "Let's just do this!" instead of asking, "What do you have to do here?"

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#204

Post by red75prime »

goatlover wrote: post #118
hwillis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and bu…

> An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. Except this AI doesn't exist. You're imagining there is such a technology, and this technology will just be able to see all the detail in the world it needs to learn, and presto it does everything better than opaque humans. If you think deep learning is such a technology, then ask yourself to what extent ANNs underst…

We know that human level opaque AI can exist. So the question becomes: how do you solve this problem if you can get access to the low level details of your brain processes and if you can run copies of parts of your brain with arbitrary inputs?

One answer would be: generate thousands of short descriptions of input signal for its different aspects, find the ones which correlate with the outputs more, refine hypotheses using scientific method.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#205

Post by sodapopcan »

nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

I tried to implement a fine at my old job for every time anyone--technical or not--started a sentence with "Can't you just..."

No one complied, of course, but I never let the sentiment die.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#206

Post by telchar »

dekhn wrote: post #179
appearsonline wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on dekhn, we want to know

OK, sure. One of the most interesting long-running issues in proteins is how they adopt their 3D structure and remain stable for such long periods. Most people would say that covalent bonds hold the protein together and they dominate the overall structure- for example, you wouldn't ever see a strained covalent bond, so you can easily eliminate all structures with strained bonds. This was long an assumption. However,…

Interesting, thanks!

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#207

Post by Xeoncross »

> I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

> Reality has a surprising amount of detail

You can't have it both ways. The amount of details, relative to your ability to perceive them all, is no-where near "mostly".

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#208

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jpfed wrote: post #191

>If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. Wait, do programmers actually think that programming is fiddly? The fiddly part is always the concerns of the real-world domain; what's special to programming is t…

Sure, but eventually you have to write a doubly-nested loop to walk over your abstractions. Which is rather a concrete thing to do.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#209

Post by TeMPOraL »

jpfed wrote: post #191

>If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. Wait, do programmers actually think that programming is fiddly? The fiddly part is always the concerns of the real-world domain; what's special to programming is t…

Abstractions are, in their way, new things, and introduce further fiddliness.

Consider these pieces of eternal wisdom from our industry:

- https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

- https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

The author suggests that similar problems are a feature of pretty much everything humans do.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#210

Post by TeMPOraL »

fb03 wrote: post #7

I'd say "fiddliness" is a characteristic of happiness and focused work. If you overlook most details you are basically just 'doing stuff to get objectives done', which is meager imho. Getting acquainted with detail takes us away from the vast sameness that we experience when we are just running on automatic and helps us cherish and savor each moment as complexity unfurls.

Depends on the point of your focus. Fiddliness stops being funny when you have a deadline. Or when you're doing what you love, but have only so much time between work, errands and social obligations - and then a bullshit issue comes up and stops you in your tracks.
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