A lot of people just don’t believe in their hearts that different skills are a thing, that you can be good at one thing and bad at another. And people especially don’t like the notion that you can be better at the stylistic part of writing than the “making sense” part.
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But look: my mom, who worked in academic publishing, could do a brilliant job editing a math manuscript for style without knowing calculus.
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She also subconsciously imitated the accent of whoever she was speaking to. And picked up Romanian by listening to phone conversations. She had a freakishly good ear. I’m convinced this is a single phenomenon.
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If I watch an episode of Peaky Blinders I’ll acquire an Irish accent by osmosis for the next hour. I subconsciously pastiche whichever writer I’ve been reading lately. I can’t *not* mirror conversational tone & emotion. One phenomenon.
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I claim Scott Alexander has the same thing: writes compulsively, great at style pastiche, nobody believes him when he says he’s bad at math.
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I think some people are legitimately better at style than sense or vice versa! They are not faking! Fluent pattern-matching != structural comprehension!
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Spectrum disorders may in part be explained by differences in attention. GPT-2 is a deeper model, but it is not a fully integrated one. Meaning is given by the relationships to a more or less unified model of the universe. I wonder if we need to go deeper, sparser or different.
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Replying to @Plinz @s_r_constantin
Pattern matching and prediction has proved sufficient for creativity, but not understanding. I think reflection and *integration* (unification) are the sort of things needed for understanding. Yes, meaning is given by integrating ideas into a global model
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I really doubt that you can squeeze the round peg of 'understanding' into the square hole of probability theory. Need some sort of extension to probability theory? For understanding, we're not *predicting*, we're *unifying* (integrating)
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Marc Retweeted John Carlos Baez
The answer could lie in a brief exchange I had with
@johncarlosbaez a while back. I lean towards an extension of probability theory based on some notion of *possibility* rather than *probability*. See here:https://twitter.com/johncarlosbaez/status/1054125666176688128 …Marc added,
John Carlos Baez @johncarlosbaezReplying to @zarzuelazen @36zimmer and 2 othersThere's a branch of math called "possibility theory", analogous to probability theory but with probabilities replaced by number 0 (impossible) and 1 (possible): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possibility_theory … This is less analogous to numbers vs. sets, more analogous to numbers vs. truth values.2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
I have a short discussion of that here https://youtu.be/e3K5UxWRRuY (roughly 27:15)
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