41–50 of 70 posts
This jives with something that’s occupied my brain a couple times in the last year, the separation of art and science. Science is empirical knowledge and processes which can be transferred, art is gut feeling and subconscious knowledge applied automatically, which can’t be transferred. Roughly I think this corresponds to how our minds perform cognitive offloading of repeated tasks. New tasks that require instruction…
That said, procedural knowledge remains suspicious because it could hinge on a cheap mental shortcut. A very experienced pedestrian may unconsciously make terrible decisions based on overfitted train data or causally irrelevant variables. Expressing the model "formally" can help expose those terrible decisions (e.g. I feel good about 1980s Fiat Pandas so I cross more confidently when I see them...). Problem is that introspection does not always work well.
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You raise an interesting question. How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly? A little bit is natural and expected, but this kind of change in meaning feels like a consequence of a culture that in the last decade has accelerated the practice of re-framing specific words and concepts as something that's "actually a positive" or "actually quite negative if you think about it". P…
It's always been like this, just on a smaller scale. Every time you join a group, some people can read the room, learning and sensing the cultural implications, while others step in all the landmines and don't even hear the explosions. How do you do this? Not sure how to explain it, mostly calibration through experience!
I believe what is missed here is that the brain assimilate things outside of it (not in the physical sense of course). Use a hammer for some time and the brain start to dedicate some networks to simulate the hammer internally and to integrate the hammer as parte of your body. The brain starts using the hammer in the same way it uses your hand. It becomes part of what the higher level processes use to read from and to…
When I was 17 I was hired by a startup to write a book. The end product was a complete disaster (don't hire a 17 year old to write a book, also don't enter into contracts with 17 year old high school students w/o informing parents.) The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was really good at Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling pro…
It's not just you. There is something about it that is qualitatively different.
I believe what is missed here is that the brain assimilate things outside of it (not in the physical sense of course). Use a hammer for some time and the brain start to dedicate some networks to simulate the hammer internally and to integrate the hammer as parte of your body. The brain starts using the hammer in the same way it uses your hand. It becomes part of what the higher level processes use to read from and to…
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When I was 17 I was hired by a startup to write a book. The end product was a complete disaster (don't hire a 17 year old to write a book, also don't enter into contracts with 17 year old high school students w/o informing parents.) The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was really good at Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling pro…
>IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has. It's not just you. There is something about it that is qualitatively different.
EVERYTHING is awful compared to Rhino3d. Viscerally painful to use bad in comparison.
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I believe the author was arguing that “calibration” is also rational but it cannot be transmitted. You cannot learn it from reading or following a framework. Books and frameworks are too lossy. The author cited the example of doctors in their residency as an example of this second mode of learning. They are learning from hands on experience what other doctors had also learned before. With residency there are others w…
You're arguing against something I wasn't trying to imply. Choosing a good abstract dichotomy is hard (mine is also faulty, as you have noted). They chose "instruction" versus "calibration" which I feel is a terrible splitting plane (muddying whatever they are trying to articulate). I have been fascinated listening to a smart nursing friend of mine explain some of the intuitions they learnt through observation (not e…
Intuition and other forms of knowledge are stock quantities while calibration and instructions are types of flows which change the stock. I'd love to know if there a better word for learning through trial and evaluation than calibration.
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You're arguing against something I wasn't trying to imply. Choosing a good abstract dichotomy is hard (mine is also faulty, as you have noted). They chose "instruction" versus "calibration" which I feel is a terrible splitting plane (muddying whatever they are trying to articulate). I have been fascinated listening to a smart nursing friend of mine explain some of the intuitions they learnt through observation (not e…
I think intuition is what is developed through calibration, so I personally like the word calibration. Intuition and other forms of knowledge are stock quantities while calibration and instructions are types of flows which change the stock. I'd love to know if there a better word for learning through trial and evaluation than calibration.
How about training. Implies practicality. You can be trained or do your own training. Avoids the bad academic/factual associations of "teaching".
Calibration makes some sense to people that work with tools, but the word is a poor metaphor for honing our intuitions.
It is quite amazing how little of what we do or know is actually explicitly taught. I learnt the most in the sandpit.
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What is wrong in that quoted sentence? Do you mean "articulacy" should instead be "articulateness"? "Articulacy" is also a word, and correct in this context.
Articulation. The lens of articulation. Or otherwise, "eloquence;" the lens of eloquence. LLMs ain't gonna do sheeeeeeeit if this is still where we are at...