You're on... come back to ribbonfarm and write a regular column along those lines :D
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Replying to @vgr
That would actually be a really fun column to write. Like an advice column, except people write in with questions like: "Dear Brian, Can you tell me why we don't understand the internal combustion engine? -Running on fumes"
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Replying to @gravity_levity
yeah, I think it could rise above cynical calling out of the bad explainer culture by using the examples to actually think about the structure of scientific "explanations" what we should actually expect of models etc.
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Replying to @vgr @gravity_levity
The thing is that lay expectations of "explanations" is some sort of ontologically absolute, finite and closed causality/agency account of *everything* about X. They want religious magic explanations not a sort of moving target partial paradigm with predictive power thing
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Replying to @vgr
Yeah, I think that for this reason it could be fun to write a regular column that specifically looks at extremely well-understood things, and shows how they are not "understood" in that sense. That the very concept of "understand" is relative.
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Replying to @gravity_levity @vgr
(Wow, somehow I turned into
@meaningness so gradually that I hardly noticed. And I could have sworn ~5 years ago that he was impossible to understand.)2 replies 1 retweet 12 likes -
Replying to @gravity_levity @Meaningness
I think that's mainly because he's trying to do 3 things with 1 theory (attack naive rationality with a more modern epistemology, propose a post-buddhist metaphysics of meaning/nihilism, and provide a social account of meaning-making)...
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So there's way more conceptual machinery than if you wanted to do only 1 of the 3 things... I suspect he's trying the grand unification because it would be an alt foundation for thinking about AI if it works out, but the integration is not needed for more limited purposes
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Replying to @vgr @gravity_levity
Not my conscious intention, but who knows what confusions lurk in the depths of my psyche?
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