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New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

quantamagazine.org

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Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#71

Post by grogenaut »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #61
xorcist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I make equipment for high energy physics machines > I have yet to figure out a way to tell people what my business is in a way that is even slightly accessible. You ... just did? In a remarkable short, concise, and very accessible way. I can ask as many follow up questions as I want and we might even have an engaging conversation. Sounds interesting!

It doesn't really tell you much, and frankly my audience is mostly non-tech people. And no doubt some people really are curious and keep asking questions, but most people you can kinda see their head uncomfortably spin. I also obfuscated it a bit by giving the most general name just for privacy reasons since not many people do it. But rest assured it is a "Retro Encabulator" type machine, and as you add details it ju…

Help me that you're not a doctor a lawyer accountants software engineer working for a large company. It tells me you're a small business owner and you work on advanced things. You're not manufacturing knick knacks or toys.

Really if we're at a party that's more than enough unless I want to ask you more and you want to talk more about it. If you were a lawyer I'd probably ask what area of law that I probably stop and talk about something else. So I agree with others that you said was a very good distillation of what you do to the level that most people probably care about

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#72

Post by lupire »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67
dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I once told my dad that if the subject of my thesis was something I could easily explain then it wouldn't be interesting enough to do a PhD in. I said it half-jokingly and he laughed about it, but he stopped asking me what I'm studying after that so maybe he did take it more seriously.

Hard to explain doesn't make it interesting either.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#73

Post by Geezus_42 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #59
imoreno wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. What is the problem with this? Most jobs, when simplified, sound like "anybody can do it". I think it's generally understood among adults who have been in the workforce that, no, in fact anybody cannot do it.

There is no problem with it, but I assume there are many people who will look upon you favourably if they think you do a highly skilled job. While many of us may not care to impress those people, there are certainly those who do (possibly people with similar attitudes who care more about validation from people who think like them) A somewhat ungenerous characterization of the attitude may be something like the Rocket…

I think which direction you choose is about knowing your audience. As you mentioned, different people value different things and humans often want to present a different view of ourselves to different people at different times.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#74

Post by lupire »

misnome wrote: post #43
doubledamio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it well enough

And that’s why Feynman was always happy to explain how magnets work!

Feynman was happy to explain why he couldn't explain how magnets work!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#75

Post by fuzzy_biscuit »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #51
clickety_clack wrote: post #7

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 have my own micro business where I make equipment for high energy physics machines. I have yet to figure out a way to tell people what my business is in a way that is even slightly accessible. Everything about it is so esoteric and multiple steps removed from regular life. It's not necessarily complex, it just contains a ton of details that the average person has no familiar contact with, and don't really have ever…

My cousin has his own metrology business, and it took me a long time before I understood how he was doing so well financially. Kinda get it now.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#76

Post by aleph_minus_one »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #50
dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

> When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing).

For me, it's quite the opposite: such a choice demonstrates that they their prior is that I'm sufficiently smart and knowledgable to be likely able to understand this explanation - which I rather consider to be a praise. :-)

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#77

Post by tbrownaw »

jiggawatts wrote: post #53
thorum wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some ideas are too complex to explain accurately in simple terms. You can give someone a simple explanation of quantum chromodynamics and have them walk away feeling like they learned something, but only by glossing over or misrepresenting critical details. You’d basically just be lying to them.

Quantum Mechanics is the example of a subject where supposed experts don’t really understand it either and hence can’t explain it adequately. Also, it’s hilarious to get comments like this voted down by non-experts who assume this must be an outsider’s uninformed point of view. I have a physics degree and I studied the origins and history of quantum mechanics. Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of…

Take for example entanglement.

The math that describes it is known precisely. Specific implications of this are known. There's no information transfer, there's no time delay, etc.

And yet lay people keep incorrectly thinking it can be used for communication. Because lay-audience descriptions by experts keep using words that imply causality and information transfer.

This is not a failure of the experts to understand what's going on. It's a failure to translate that understanding to ordinary language. Because ordinary language is not suited for it.

> Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of guesswork and that the models we have are arbitrary and lack something essential needed for proper understanding.

We don't have a model of why it works / if there's a more comprehensible layer of reality below it. But it's characterized well enough that we can make practical useful things with it.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#78

Post by lupire »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #9

Neat. I spent a month trying to use sphere packing approaches for a better compression algorithm (I had a large amount of vectors, they were grouped through clustering). Turned out that theoretical approaches only really work for uniform data and not any sort of real-world data. EDIT: groped -> grouped

It's usually the case that the low hanging fruit in a decades old commercially valuable field have already been picked.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#79

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Angostura wrote: post #54
dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The latter option always comes across as rude. It's a very clear 'piss off you insect'

> The latter option always comes across as rude. It's a very clear 'piss off you insect'

To me, it rather tells: "I consider you to be likely to be sufficiently smart and knowledgable to understand this topic if you put in some effort: do you want to learn some cool stuff which otherwise would demand a lot of literature research to learn? And since I already hinted that I consider you to be smart and knowledgable: would you like to teach me some cool, complicated stuff, too?"

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#80

Post by teleforce »

> The answer matters for potential applications to cryptography and communications

Someone can take this challenge to provide a more secure and reliable communication systems hopefully with more energy efficiency, very much an exciting research direction.

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