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I have trouble explaining to my parents how my job is a real thing. I can only imagine trying to explain ‘I study shapes, but only ones that don’t jut inwards’.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like dumbing it down or immediate heavy jargon with people you don't know are just both equally bad options. What's wrong with asking their level of experience with the topic? Sure, with parents you know the level. I'm talking "other strangers" you meet outside of a context where some familiarity would be expected (like at a conference one might assume at least some form of knowledge and ability to just have…
> What's wrong with asking their level of experience with the topic? Nothing. That's precisely the point. Giving a wall of jargon, isn't asking if someone is familiar.
FTA: “in 100-dimensional space, his method packs roughly 100 times as many spheres; in a million-dimensional space, it packs roughly 1 million times as many“ Nice example of how weird large-dimensional space is. Apparently, when smart minds were asked to put as many 100-dimensional oranges in a 100-dimensional crate as they could, so far, the best they managed to do was fill less than 1% of its space with oranges, an…
“Fill less than 1% of its space” becomes a very counter intuitive statement in any case when discussing high dimensions. If you consider a unit n-sphere bounded by a unit cube, the fraction occupied by the sphere vanishes for high n. (Aside: Strangely, the relationship is non monotonic and is actually maximal for n=6). For n=100 the volume of the unit 100-sphere is around 10^-40 (and you certainly cannot fit a second…
I have trouble explaining to my parents how my job is a real thing. I can only imagine trying to explain ‘I study shapes, but only ones that don’t jut inwards’.
Explain it from the perspective of, "well, in order to get XYZ done, we are frustrated by it being hard, so we make an easy guess .. we try thinking about the problem in this crude way way because that's easy to think about, and then we make ABC because we know about ABC's ... and we are excited when using it gets us closer to working than anything else we've tried before".
Emotion-laden explanations are a viable way to explain to non-techs. They may be more comfortable thinking emotionally, whereas we are steeped in the logic and sometimes mathematics of our practice. So we must reintroduce emotion into the explanations.
It worked for me, explaining to my family, they followed on and actually understood.
I have trouble explaining to my parents how my job is a real thing. I can only imagine trying to explain ‘I study shapes, but only ones that don’t jut inwards’.
I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…
For reasons that I care not to ask people get seriously annoyed by that.
Why does this seem incredibly obvious to me?
The article does mention that phenomenon, deceptive simplicity.
Don't Shannon's channel coding theorem and rate-distortion theorem establish bounds on possible sphere packing?