The triangle inequality isn't even that abstruse. What a fucking tool.
> I mean, I suppose you could try very hard to never talk about a shortest path and only talk about alternative recipes that yield shorter paths. You could diligently make sure to never imagine this shorterness as a kind of decreased distance-in-performance-space from any 'shortest path'. You could make very sure that in your consideration of new recipes, you maintain your ideological purity as a toolboxer by only ever asking about laws that govern which of two paths are shorter, and never getting any inspiration from any kind of law that governs which path is shortest.
What a fucking tool. See, it would never occur to these dorks to think, "I'm bored of taking the shortest way home. I think I'll deliberately take a different way home because my life is a damn grind because everything is the same. Oh hey! A new coffee shop just opened up here! How delightful!"
And I'm sure if you did point this out to them, and if they acknowledged the truth of the need for some variety, they'd look for some number to quantify the amount of randomness a human needed without going insane. And if you pointed out that looking for an exact number was madness, they'd get in a huff about how you don't seem to think that improvements are possible, and you'd have to wearily explain, no, it's not that I don't believe in improvements, it's not that I don't even believe that broadly speaking, there is such a thing as the good life that we can aim for, I just don't believe that certain things are quantifiable, even if you can describe them as better or worse...
I have a working theory that he's just now started working his way through the Russell & Norvig introduction to AI textbook and this week he got to the bit in chapter 3 where they talk about heuristic search, but he hasn't gotten to the bit in chapter 4 where they talk about how to deal with your search heuristic being inadmissible yet so he thought it was some big insight he could spoonfeed his followers like lukewarm bovril instead of something utterly banal
The idea that there’s a shortest path through the maze isn’t a
“normative ideal” instead of a “prescriptive ideal”, it’s just true.
Once you define distance there is in fact a shortest path through the
maze.
no “prescriptive ideal” once you define distance
no “prescriptive ideal” once you define distance
no “prescriptive ideal” once you define distance
does this guy actually read what he writes? what on earth does he
think it means to “define distance” if it’s not just prescribing an
ideal? like does he think there’s elaborate prayers to Gauss involved or
what?
I think he covers that a little way down:
> Once you can admit a path can be "shorter" in a way that abstracts away from the walker - not better, which does depend on the walker, but shorter - it's hard not to admit the notion of there being a shortest path.
He's trying to draw a distinction between values and "morally neutral" perceptions, I think. Of course, when "shortest path" becomes "most intelligent person" or something, moral neutrality is mostly impossible.
Within nearly-Euclidean mazes, the triangle inequality - that the
path AC is never spatially longer than the path ABC - is always true but
only sometimes useful. The triangle inequality has the prescriptive
implication that if you know that one path choice will travel ABC and
one path will travel AC, and if the only pragmatic path-merit you care
about is going the minimum spatial distance (rather than say avoiding
stairs because somebody in the party is in a wheelchair), then you
should pick
honestly the most telling thing is that he thinks that the question of "what if your heuristic for distance is inadmissible in a maze?" is a particularly interesting one and not for instance something that's addressed at length in everyone's AI101 class
This is unecessarily verbose, and a general distinction between
toolbox and lawlike thinkers I suspect doesn’t really hold up,
but a distinction between toolbox and lawlike thinking seems
pretty useful to me.
Law-thinking because it's rational to use bayesian reasoning for everything.
It's hard to tell until you read https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think
i need to throw something at someone now
does this guy actually read what he writes? what on earth does he think it means to “define distance” if it’s not just prescribing an ideal? like does he think there’s elaborate prayers to Gauss involved or what?
This is beyond parody
This is the David Chapman essay that this reads very like a direct response to (years after the fact).
I feel like I just read a comp sci freshman’s dreadful attempt at summarizing Levi-Strauss.
…aaaaand I’m out
This is unecessarily verbose, and a general distinction between toolbox and lawlike thinkers I suspect doesn’t really hold up, but a distinction between toolbox and lawlike thinking seems pretty useful to me.
(Yes, this comment itself is rather toolboxy.)
Seems like Yud’s getting jealous of the traffic all the “X-type thinkers and Y-type thinkers” posts have been getting.
Soo, which is the Rational and therefore correct one?