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Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

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Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#51

Post by shrughes »

nopinsight wrote: post #34
human_v2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Math isn't NOT intuitive as far as math itself goes. It happens to be a very nice language. I tend to think that relativity and quantum mechanics do not mesh well because of the language we use to describe them. While standard maths is NP complete, it does not seem to inherently describe the universe without getting all crazy complex. I encourage you to try and comprehend even some of the simplest M-Theory equations.…

There is a good possibility though that the universe is inherently complex in certain aspects for our brains. Human brains are evolved to survive in the part of the physical world observable by human organs, not to comprehend the essential forms of the universe. E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works. Maybe a different math for describing the un…

E=MC^2 could be just an aspect of reality that happens to coincide with the way observable physical world works.

All aspects of reality coincide with the way the physical world works. Or, what does that sentence mean?

Maybe a different math for describing the universe written by an alien intelligence with different sensory organs could be simple for them, not still incomprehensible for us.

I think there is a strong argument against this. That some alien race is really good at visualizing certain kinds of N-dimensional systems of some weird kind of space is plausible, but to throw all of mathematics out, I think, is not. They would have a mere superset of the mathematics we have.

In particular, take computation. Are aliens never going to deal with strings of units of data? If they do, right there you have the notion of their length, and of natural numbers. You have notions like concatenating strings. And the homomorphism between the two. And we're off on the road to abstract algebra.

It's very unlikely for smart aliens not to develop the same study of discrete math and abstract algebra that we do, unless they were never to use discrete units of information, and were only capable of processing infinite amounts of information at a time. Would they then have no use for the idea of associativity? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in a finite alphabet? Of proofs that consist of a finite set of symbols in an uncountably infinite alphabet? With any of these they would on the road to having a superset of our mathematical knowledge, rather than something different. We don't know how such a being would be physically possible, in the first place.

I think it would be more correct, and less exciting, to predict that some aliens might be smarter than us in certain ways.

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#52

Post by RevRal »

human_v2 wrote: post #3

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS! I sort of feel like the internet is as close as we get to it now, with Twitter and other microblogging services bringing us a step closer. But really, I want full-on instant telepathic communication with anyone. Cell phones don't cut it. Gone would be the days of humming a tune in your head, whose name you do not know, only to realize you cannot emulate those noises with your mouth. Good luc…

Ha! I started reading your comment, and I said to myself: "hey, this sounds like human_v2." Nice to see you around :)

So, are you saying that the rote structure of nuanced math is too complicated for it to be accurate or meaningful? I'm sure you're familiar with reductionism (http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Reductionism). Just imagine that mechanical duck as math.

One possible reason that we have not yet found "that one fundamental" thing in math is that our universe itself probably isn't a perpetual machine on its own (or, what we can perceive as our universe). So, there is a good chance that it is physically impossible for us to get to where you want us to be with our understanding of math. We wont know until we reach the singularity. But even then....

Anyway, my criticism of math has been that it has been getting far too philosophical. But, I am an amateur.

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#53

Post by a-priori »

heyrhett wrote: post #43
rphlx wrote: post #32

teledildonics

One of the inherent problems with tactile feedback over a distance is the speed of light. The last haptic device I used received feedback from a computer every ms. Too much latency kills the experience for long distance tactile communication. How far could you reasonably "reach out and touch" someone? I'd guess maybe a hundred or few hundred miles.

As a general rule, the human brain doesn't notice any delay of less that 100ms. Anything less than that is "instantaneous".

Light takes 1.6ms to travel 300 miles, or 3.2ms for a round-trip, which is well below that threshold. To get up to a 100ms round-trip, the two parties would have to be 0.05 light-seconds apart, or just shy of 15000km (9314 miles).

That's plenty to get you North America, Europe and East Asia, but unfortunately Australia is a bit far from North America or Europe.

Obviously, that's assuming the signals are transferred at the speed of light with no other sources of latency, which is an ideal. But still, it's a far cry from "a hundred or few hundred miles".

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#54

Post by netcharmer »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #24
_bfhp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comment; though, I think the OP was just comedically endorsing Net Neutrality, which, iirc, asserts a negative right.

Net Neutrality isn't a negative right. If you own a network, net neutrality takes away from your ability to use it as you see fit; if you want, for whatever reason, to dick around with your customers and block Craigslist, you should be able to do so -- just like a newspaper can refuse to run an ad, or even refuse to write about a story.

In my opinion, newspaper is not a right analogy. Newspapers provide content, ISPs don't. I can understand if, say, National Geographic puts some restriction on the online content but why should my ISP decides if I can access National Geographic or not. Telephone networks is the right analogy here - will you allow your telephone provider to control whom you can call?

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#55

Post by staunch »

WalkingDead wrote: post #48
staunch wrote: post #46

Everything. I wish I was born at least 500 years in the future. Science is just beginning and I was born at the wrong damn time. I could be flying my own space ship and visiting HN over The Subspacenet. No single advance could ever satisfy me or make up for my disappointment at being born too soon. (Not that I'm not appreciative for being alive at all. I'm fortunate in many ways, but that doesn't stop me from imagini…

If we look back at human history and extrapolate that trend, 500 years on we could be worse off than what we are now in technology. Civilizations no matter how strong they look, have a trend of rising and falling. And when it falls, it's knowledge gradually gets lost. 40 years back, human where more capable of visiting the moon then they are now. Fundamental discoveries in physics is almost stuck now for 60 years, si…

No. Technology has progressed over thousands of years.

Of course the world could go to complete shit. If it doesn't though, we'll end up with technology that's unimaginably advanced. Whether that's in 500 years or 50,000 years makes no difference.

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#56

Post by teeja »

patio11 wrote: post #29

I think all of the test & measure stuff we talk about so much in the web context -- A/B testing, analytics, etc -- would revolutionize the world if it were applied with one tenth the dedication by human institutions which are not teeny little web startups. This isn't to say that we have the patent on The Scientific Method. However, there are darn few organizations which seem to have it written into their DNA. Toyota…

"... what would happen if your typical big-city school system did."

Education science never made it into US K-12 education. We Americans have a very fluffy concept of what education's about. We worry more about socialization than education (Neil Postman was right).

For a looooong time there have been US educational research journals with data far ahead of current practice, but many US educators never get much chance to see them. And I've never heard of a US (K-12) school that's doing anything empirical (beyond, oh, statistics anyway).

Re: Ask HN: Which idea irritates you because it has not been taken far enough?

#57

Post by teeja »

Voice-command computing. As Scotty said, "A keyboard? How quaint!"

(NOT for offices!) I want to tell my wearable to look up facts, do math, remember everything I tell it to remember, and comb through ALL the news keeping my personal preferences in mind. And quick instructions on what I can cook with the food I've got on hand ... which it remembers.

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