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Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

antithesis.com

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Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#41

Post by jpadkins »

wwilson wrote: post #7
DRMacIver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased: Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him." Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?" Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news." Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?" Will: "No, probably not." (Wh…

If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments." One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.

Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...)

Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#42

Post by DRMacIver »

mullr wrote: post #40
DRMacIver wrote: post #2

Post author here btw, happy to take questions, whether they're about Hegel in particular, property-based testing in general, or some variant on "WTF do you mean you wrote rust bindings to a python library?"

Why would I use this over the existing Proptest library in Rust?

Answered this over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506274

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#43

Post by Groxx »

js8 wrote: post #32
pron wrote: post #8

> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly. There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage…

> There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. Given Curry-Howard isomorphism, couldn't we ask AI to directly prove the property of the binary executable under the assumption of the HW model, instead of running PBTs? By no means I want to dismiss PBTs - but it seems that this could be both faster and more…

And how do you know if it has proven the property you want, instead of something that's just complicated looking but evaluates to true?

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#44

Post by skybrian »

js8 wrote: post #32
pron wrote: post #8

> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly. There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage…

> There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. Given Curry-Howard isomorphism, couldn't we ask AI to directly prove the property of the binary executable under the assumption of the HW model, instead of running PBTs? By no means I want to dismiss PBTs - but it seems that this could be both faster and more…

Proofs are a form of static analysis. Static analysis can find interesting bugs, but how a system behaves isn't purely a property of source code. It won't tell you whether the code will run acceptably in a given environment.

For example, if memory use isn't modelled, it won't tell you how big the input can be before the system runs out of memory. Similarly, if your database isn't modelled then you need to test with a real database. Web apps need to test with a real web browser sometimes, rather than a simplified model of one. Databases and web browsers are too complicated to build a full-fidelity mathematical model for.

When testing with real systems there's often the issue that the user's system is different from the one you use to test. You can test with recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, etc, which helps a lot, but what about extensions?

Nothing covers everything, but property tests and fuzzers actually run the code in some test environment. That's going to find different issues than proofs will.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#45

Post by sigbottle »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #38
sigbottle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I don't know about Hegel, but Kant certainly dipped into mathematics. One of the reasons why he even wrote CPR was to unify in his mind, the rationalists (had Leibniz) versus the empiricists (had Newton). 20th century analytic philosophy was heavily informed by Kantian distinctions (Logical Positivism uses very similar terminology, and Carnap himself was a Neo-Kantian originally, though funnily enough Heidegge…

My claim is that genuinely all of those previous analytical forms are absolutely useless if you have the capacity to utilize a more mathematical framework The problem is, those more mathematically challenging frameworks are inaccessible to the majority of the people so they don’t actually take off because there’s no mechanism to translate more rigor in social studies and social sciences in large part because humans r…

Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it)

But I've never thought critically (in a long time) about applying it back to social science / political philosophy. Mind discussing more about what you're reading and targeting? I've personally avoided a lot of studies in this area because I didn't think they were actually rigorous but I probably just don't know where to look.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#47

Post by biggestlou »

hugeBirb wrote: post #4

Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.

This is 100% true and a major pet peeve of mine.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#49

Post by AndrewKemendo »

sigbottle wrote: post #45
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My claim is that genuinely all of those previous analytical forms are absolutely useless if you have the capacity to utilize a more mathematical framework The problem is, those more mathematically challenging frameworks are inaccessible to the majority of the people so they don’t actually take off because there’s no mechanism to translate more rigor in social studies and social sciences in large part because humans r…

Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it) But I've never thought critically (in a long time) abou…

Well if you’re interested in the history of it the best start is really just Jeremy Bentham’s consequentialism.

To be clear I don’t believe in consequentialism

He built what was called Fellicific calculus (iirc) that would allow you to more or less take measurement of decisions. It was a mess and it obviously doesn’t work but this is kind of the first serious attempt to bring mathematical rigour to political philosophy.

You could argue that the tao te ching teaching does this in the way that it’s utilized in the sense that you have a set of things that you measure to give you predictive capabilities, but that’s closer to mysticism and tarot card reading its worth acknowledging the input as it’s the basis for like half the human population.

I have my own perspective of this which I wrote out in a fairly lengthy document (General Theory of Cohesion) on my website if you wanna go read it. Warning it’s not particularly scruitable if you’re not already pretty deep into cybernetics and systems theory.

Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis

#50

Post by amalcon »

jpadkins wrote: post #41
wwilson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments." One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.

Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus... ) Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal i…

"No such thing as bad publicity" is a very old idea. That quote is usually attributed to PT Barnum, but the idea is much older than him.
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