I’m curious if I’m an outlier here—have you really never tried to relate some joke or funny story and then cracked up before you could finish it? I can’t tickle myself, but I can easily make myself laugh.
Anyhow, I think this is to some extent a low-dimensional analogy for a high-dimensional world. When the world is complicated, trying to do something new can result in finding connections to something you already know about, and studying something familiar can uncover the surprising. This is for exactly the same reason that a 1D patch on a string is close to fewer neighbors than a 3D section of space, which in turn has fewer neighbors than a drug molecule has in the space of possible chemicals. In high dimensional problems, both connections and surprises are so common as to be unavoidable. But if we’re just walking around on the 2D surface of the earth, we’ll probably run into connections and surprises at about the rate we’d expect from our stories.
I do indeed make myself laugh at times. I think it has something to do with depth. The consequence of a line of thinking can be surprising, and that’s probably relevant.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Feynman had a hunch on the topic, which he shared in his Nobel Prize speech: nature is simple in some sense. We can describe things in many different ways without knowing that we’re describing the same thing. Which, he said, is a sort of simplicity.
That’s what we need for LW: BibTeX support :P
I’m curious if I’m an outlier here—have you really never tried to relate some joke or funny story and then cracked up before you could finish it? I can’t tickle myself, but I can easily make myself laugh.
Anyhow, I think this is to some extent a low-dimensional analogy for a high-dimensional world. When the world is complicated, trying to do something new can result in finding connections to something you already know about, and studying something familiar can uncover the surprising. This is for exactly the same reason that a 1D patch on a string is close to fewer neighbors than a 3D section of space, which in turn has fewer neighbors than a drug molecule has in the space of possible chemicals. In high dimensional problems, both connections and surprises are so common as to be unavoidable. But if we’re just walking around on the 2D surface of the earth, we’ll probably run into connections and surprises at about the rate we’d expect from our stories.
I do indeed make myself laugh at times. I think it has something to do with depth. The consequence of a line of thinking can be surprising, and that’s probably relevant.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Feynman had a hunch on the topic, which he shared in his Nobel Prize speech: nature is simple in some sense. We can describe things in many different ways without knowing that we’re describing the same thing. Which, he said, is a sort of simplicity.