This hit the spot for me, thanks.
numpyNaN
Karma: 35
I wasn’t trying to hold you to that model, since it didn’t seem fundamental to the point of the article (and you already mentioned not being attached to it). It was more an “oh, this reminds me of this guy” kind of thing, which might or might not be relevant to the thing in question (probably less so than I originally thought). Either way, it wasn’t intended as a serious rebuttal.
In the ML example, generalization won’t work when approximating a function which is a completely random jumble of points.
Nice article, minor question. You seem to be treating random functions as qualitatively different from regular/some-flavor-of-deterministic ones (please correct if not the case). Other than in mathematical settings, I’m not sure how that works, since you would expect some random noise in (or on top of) the data you are recording (and feeding your model), and that same noise would contaminate that determinism.
Also, when approximating a completely random jumble of points, can’t you build models to infer the distribution from where those points are taken? I get it wont be as accurate when predicting but I fail to see why that’s not an issue of degrees.
Actually looking at the world the way someone you disagree with looks at it is often much more difficult than being able to pass their “intellectual turing test”
A somewhat relevant reference: [...] while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking “the bat’s point of view”, it would still be impossible “to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”
Imagine a toy model where everyone has a hundred points to put into being good at things.
(This is, to be clear, not just a toy model but an incorrect model. It’s easy to look at your incoming university students and notice a strong inverse correlation between math and verbal SAT scores, forgetting that those get summed together during applications and anyone below a certain threshold probably has their application discarded. Still, let’s use this model for the moment.)
Leading talents in a field maybe put 75 points in their area. Why not 100? Because you need points in living your life
Obligatory von Neumann reference when talking about allocation of mental resources.
I’m not sure if this hurts or furthers your case, since he was a known extreme polymath in the sense you describe (being the best A/B in the world was probably A/B/C/D.. for him), but for many individual areas of thought was arguably at some point either the “best” or at least maximal for most common ways to measure brilliance.
That is, he was the best A regardless of B and, at a potentially different point in time, the best B regardless of A.
Also, he was famously very well-adjusted for someone of his accomplishments.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.
A good place to sprinkle hyphens around and see what sticks
Great post! Is
possibly a typo? Based on the context and video It feels that you might mean “Gravity only applies to those who look down.”