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Feynman’s Razor

defenderofthebasic.substack.com

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Re: Feynman’s Razor

#111

Post by isleyaardvark »

nicbou wrote: post #74

I struggle a lot with this in my work. I can’t assume that my readers are fluent English speakers, nor that they understand the topic. I can’t even assume that they care to understand. I have adopted a plain and unambiguous writing style that hopefully accounts for it. I am now experimenting with formatting that allows them to skim everything and still get the gist of it. In my opinion, nhs.uk is the best example to…

You can probably skip nhs.uk and go straight to uk.gov's writing guidelines themselves:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#112

Post by mannykannot »

There's an association here to another topic which came up recently: a review of Matt Strassler's new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea [1]. Professor Strassler says a big motivation for writing this book was what he calls 'phibs': 'explanations' of physics so bowdlerized that they are not just uninformative, but at least misleading and sometimes outright wrong. The particular phib which got him started was a commonly-repeated attempt to give an idea of how the Higgs field gives rise to the masses of certain particles [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307

[2] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#113

Post by cubefox »

jiggawatts wrote: post #20

I miss Norton Disk Doctor, not because I work on drive recovery but because it had an interface that respected the user’s intelligence. Every other storage-related system I’ve ever used either had inscrutable gibberish like: “Mode 5/7?” [Y] Or overly dumbed down questions like: Are you sure? [N] What am I sure about!? What is mode 5? Or is it 7? Both? What!? [1] Norton meanwhile had several paragraphs of text explain…

A similar point applies to settings menus in software, especially advanced settings. It takes very little effort for people who make these settings to include e.g. a short tooltip explanation for every setting. Yet this is rarely done.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#114

Post by jack_pp »

powersnail wrote: post #26

I don't quite think the message-doesn't-exist example is caused by "dumbing down" too much. To me, the message "it no longer exists" is not the work of someone who, in trying to make layman understand, overdid it. Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context. From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is…

instead of server it could say "on our end"

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#115

Post by PartiallyTyped »

lukan wrote: post #94
pier25 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe at some point Google will release a Classic version of the algo like Coca-Cola did.

Coca-Cola used cocaine again?

It certainly uses Coca leaves.

> Coca-Cola might have taken the cocaine out of their drink, but the company still needed to source coca leaves, which became more and more challenging. By 1914, the American federal government had officially restricted cocaine to medicinal use. So, as the government began debating an official import ban, Coke sent its lobbyists into the fray, pushing for a special exemption. Their fingerprints are all over the Harrison Act of 1922, which banned the import of coca leaves, but included a section permitting the use of “de-cocainized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom, or to any other preparations of coca leaves that do not contain cocaine.” Only two companies were given special permits by the act to import those coca leaves for processing — one of which was Maywood Chemical Works, of Maywood, New Jersey, whose biggest customer was the Coca-Cola company.

> This special loophole would carry over in every piece of anti-narcotics legislation that followed, including international agreements restricting the global trade in coca leaves. Over the ensuing decades, the company continued to demonstrate the lengths to which they would go to protect their supply, from supporting opposition to the traditional use of coca, to developing a secret coca farm of their own on Hawaiʻi.

https://www.eater.com/23620802/cocaine-in-coca-cola-coke-rec...

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#116

Post by moate »

userbinator wrote: post #90
civilized wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of you will be familiar with this story: military pilot gear was once designed for the average person, but then they realized that actually, most people deviate significantly from the average in at least one way. So they made the gear adjustable, and that greatly improved performance and reduced mistakes. Why is it that in tech we are often told a seemingly contrary narrative -- that everything is better, or at…

[flagged]

Literally the same conceptual type of diversity, but go off and virtue signal yourself sis.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#117

Post by yosefk »

jack_pp wrote: post #114
powersnail wrote: post #26

I don't quite think the message-doesn't-exist example is caused by "dumbing down" too much. To me, the message "it no longer exists" is not the work of someone who, in trying to make layman understand, overdid it. Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context. From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is…

instead of server it could say "on our end"

It could say "cloud" instead of server and "your device" instead of cache and laypeople would get it, I think. It's unfortunate that servers are called cloud but at least there's a word that's commonly understood. Not sure if "on our end" would work, perhaps it would, too.

Contrary to GP I have no doubt that the original message was phrased the way it was to avoid explaining how things work, on the theory that it's bad form to explain this, because users understanding it is neither possible nor desirable. If a programmer was writing naturally, for their colleague or future self to read the message, the server and the cache would certainly make an appearance. They weren't omitted because the context was obvious but because exposing the context was considered undesirable; I think so because a more internal rather than end-user error message never looks like this.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#118

Post by Tao3300 »

hifrote wrote: post #28
jarvist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). I suppose you could try and do it with more commonplace trigonometric functions, but then you lose the simple vector interpretation of adding the contributions. Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex number…

> What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? It’s difficult to articulate, but two aspects are: The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain even modular arithmetic by calling on the clock analogy. And the fact that the little “clock hands” are a complete abstraction from both the physics being described and the mathematical models that de…

> The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain...

That's not Feynman's fault!

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