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Double_Cast

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Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music

arxiv.org

7 pointsby Double_Cast12년 전1 comments

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4년 전discuss

My take is that pattern-matching is thinking. But it's low-quality thinking. High-quality thinking is logic. And higher still is causality, which is to logic what calculus is to algebra. I.e. if logic studies the relationship between x and y, then causality studies the relationship between dx and dy. And causality is what we actually want, because causality is power. E.g. causality is what lands astronauts on the moon. When folks like Judea Pearl complain that current AI isn't truly thinking, they're complaining that current AI can't reason logically/causally.

5년 전discuss

Potential violence != actual violence.

The potential to commit violence can be reframed as strength. It's useful because it grants you negotiating leverage, regardless of whether you are the aggressor or defender. Can't defend yourself? Vae victis.

5년 전discuss

> The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.

Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.

5년 전discuss

fwiw, Tolkien wrote the trilogy only after fans requested an encore of The Hobbit. The ring's importance/malevolence was a retcon.

5년 전discuss

To me, the distinction maps onto the Effectual vs Causal distinction. For some path "A to B", some people prefer to consider their present tools/resources (point A) and work forward opportunistically. While others prefer to consider the end-goal (point B) and work backwards recursively. If the analogy is unclear: a theory is a tool; a specific problem is an end-goal.

5년 전discuss

I tend to frame this in terms of the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. It's a trade-off between exploration vs exploitation. It's often impossible to predict beforehand which strategy is optimal for a given environment. Which, I suspect, is why progressive temperments and conservative temperments coexist.

5년 전discuss

The retiree example is intended to demonstrate that a wealth tax is inherently perverse, regardless of who is targeted. Savings are just deferred expenditure and debt is just expedited expenditure. When you tax wealth, you expedite consumption.

Another way of thinking about this: A wealth tax is like inflation, except assets are also devalued alongside your savings. Which means the wisest strategy is to consume now, save nothing, invest nothing.

5년 전discuss

One benefit of markets is price-discovery. But if you're not participating in a market, determining price is akin to shaking a magic 8 ball. It assumes a Just Price, which is a heuristic and a fiction.

Also, quality of living is determined by income, not wealth. Fresh retirees are generally wealthier than other age-groups because they've saved for retirement. But that doesn't mean they consume more. Also, consider the citizens of the Netherlands. They enjoy a comfortable existence while servicing an enormous amount of debt. If wealth were the primary determinant of quality of life, you'd think the Netherlands were as as destitute as Somalia.

5년 전discuss

The point isn't "matrix multiplication != scalar multiplication". The point is "the process of evaluating a reducible expression inherently discards information about the original expression", which is a fact about evalution rather than any specific operator. The fact that "the information discarded is of little consequence to the compressed result" is a quirk specific to scalar multiplication. Thus, the commutative property distracts from explicitly modeling the "AST" so that the student understands what multiplication represents under the hood, beyond the rote memorization of scalar multiplication tables.

Perhaps an analogous situation would be: Suppose a teacher wanted to introduce the notion of limits to a calculus curriculum. "That makes zero sense. The only things a student needs to know are the shortcuts for each parent function, e.g. that (d/dx x^2) reduces to (2x) via handwavey magic." But what if an engineer needs to integrate over an arbitrary curve? Can students solve the problem without being comfortable with Riemann Sums? Maybe 1st-year calc students should rederive the shortcuts from scratch? "Except we're talking about a math course, not an engineering course."

> In particular this bit regarding multiplier/multiplicand makes zero sense to me.

> Isn't 2 rows x 3 chairs the same thing as 3 chairs x 2 rows? It's a bizarre argument.

It's bizarre to simias (and you, I assume) because y'all can't imagine performing the operation without thunking. (Don't get me wrong, I think "repeated addition" is the best method. I'm just attempting to explain the opposite perspective so that it feels less bizarre.)

5년 전discuss

I tend to think of multiplication as a transformation. "repeated additional" almost makes it sounds like we're merely telescoping an interval within a single dimension. Whereas "transformation" (to me), evokes more of a Cartesian Product or Quadrature sort of mental image.

5년 전discuss

Suppose your friend Alice arranges your wedding. You ask her to arrange the lawn chairs in an arrangement of 2 rows and 3 columns. But she misinterprets your request as 3 rows and 2 columns. Oops. Now a particular family can't all sit in a single row without rearranging the chairs.

If all you care about is the total number of chairs, the order of operands is irrelevant. but if you care about the structure, "2 x 3" may encode information that "6" does not.

5년 전discuss

Bubbles are inductive. Arbitrage is anti-inductive.

5년 전discuss

I think snarfy is expressing incredulity that meteorology doesn't already account for these types of emmissions. Analogously, suppose the headline had read

> Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why.

"But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

5년 전discuss

A literal trigger is a lever that fires a gun. A figurative trigger is some event that sets in motion a cascade of events that occur in rapid succession. The root cause of firing a gun would probably be analogous to loading the chamber with a live round. Which may have occurred hours, days, months, etc before the trigger was pulled.

I think the distinction is that the "trigger" relates to a particular instance of failure, whereas the "root cause" relates to a class of failures.

6년 전discuss

> Slowly I became like Gollum. Which is ironic because I love The Lord of the Rings for the exact opposite reasons: calling for adventure, exploration, to love your friends, and to live in harmony with nature.

...

> When the lock-down was in full effect it dawned on me: bitcoin is indeed utterly useless when things go haywire. What's the point of wealth if you can't do anything with it, won't do anything with it, or have no one to share it with.

During his journey home, Bilbo gifts a portion of his treasure to the King of the Wood Elves. This generosity is juxtaposed with Thorin, who

  A) Roped his 12 buddies and Bilbo into a speculative venture (with ZERO plan to realistically defeat Smaug), 
  B) obsessed over the Arkenstone to an unhealthy degree, 
  C) refused to share the spoils with Lake Town or the Wood Elves, and
  D) locked himself away in the mountain.

The moral of Bilbo's gesture was to demonstrate that wealth should be shared. Rather than hoarded in "Erebor, the Lonely Mountain".

6년 전discuss

IIRC Grant formerly made videos for Khan Academy, and thus uses the same virtual-blackboard as Sal. However, Grant animates with a Python lib whereas Sal draws by hand.

6년 전discuss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrPgsrfZWOU

The Office – How Michael Scott Makes a Sale

(7 min video essay)

TLDR he's a people-person.

6년 전discuss

Ideally, the mapping from object to image is injective. What you're proposing will lead to "hash collisions" aka blurriness, since each point in the object will bleed colors into neighboring points in the image.

The entire object doesn't get collapsed to a single point. Rather, a single point of the object radiates light in all directions. A lens then captures a fraction of that radiation and collapses it back down to a single point. Then we iterate over each point in the scene with a "for each".

6년 전discuss

I feel obliged to contextualize "Billionaires Build" on behalf of the unaware.

Marc Andreesen published an essay "It's Time to Build" [0]. He claims that ostensibly, COVID-19 inflicted acute trauma on the U.S. economy. But it merely excaberated the symptoms of a deeper dysfuntion. The root problem is the cultural decay of "a will to build". The solution is to rekindle this norm.

Several have published their own takes [1]. pg must have figured "What you can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview" conveniently dovetails into the larger debate. Had he written the essay in a vacuum, I suspect he'd have emphasized "sell users what they want". Rather than the grand narrative "civilization is built by founders" which might increase exposure but possibly dilute the original intent.

[0] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...

6년 전discuss

I think Barron92 is drawing a distinction between "lust for power" vs "effective use of power".