3 ms·

If I see a programmer saying he/she tried to read the original papers, but couldn't understand this and that, I'll do my best to help them. I don't have a probl

If I see a programmer saying he/she tried to read the original papers, but couldn't understand this and that, I'll do my best to help them. I don't have a problem with people using metaphors to explain specific points, but I do think people who replace trying to work through the originals with repeating a lazy metaphor or two from the popular press are doing themselves and others a huge disservice. This isn't something unattainably complicated that you need years of education (on top of a typical CS education or its self-taught equivalent) to understand. I think it's worth pointing out to people that they shouldn't be afraid of reading the original material. And frankly, I've found many of the popular metaphors harder to understand than the papers.

taeric 9y ago
As I am trying to say in the sibling post, though. Metaphors aren't necessarily lazy. It is quite literally how many people think through these problems. Easily put, your best to help them may be to get common footing using one of these "lazy metaphors." And again, I'm just cautioning if you are offhandedly dismissing metaphor. Tone can be lost in forums, obviously, so don't think I am "correcting" you. I do not intend it that way.
- keldaris 9y ago
  As a physicist, I'm quite used to having to resort to metaphors to convey some ideas to a non-technical audience. If a non-physicist asks me to explain AdS/CFT correspondence, I'm not going to be able to explain precisely why the correspondence requires the particular geometry of an anti-de Sitter space to work in a few minutes because the mathematical background required is just too deep. So I don't think metaphor-based explanations are necessarily bad, but I do think they are overused. It's one thing to use a metaphor to convey some essential property of a complex idea to non-experts. It's quite another to see domain experts argue about the (often non-trivial) details of strained metaphors far beyond their area of applicability. Without demeaning the usefulness of metaphors, I'm essentially trying arguing that: 1) domain experts should be far more cognizant of the limitations of the metaphors they employ and 2) domain experts should at the very least try to read the original material before perpetuating solely metaphor-based explanations.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Off topic, but can you recommend any resources for getting into the subject of AdS/CFT correspondence? I’m loosely familiar with it, but I’d love more depth. Thanks for any links or hints!
    - keldaris 9y ago
      Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analogous to anything simpler. That's why it's very hard to explain beyond the level of vague metaphors without being rigorous about it. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        This is precisely what I was hoping for, and I just cannot thank you enough for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate you giving me a full range of resources too.

taeric 9y ago

As I am trying to say in the sibling post, though. Metaphors aren't necessarily lazy. It is quite literally how many people think through these problems. Easily put, your best to help them may be to get common footing using one of these "lazy metaphors." And again, I'm just cautioning if you are offhandedly dismissing metaphor. Tone can be lost in forums, obviously, so don't think I am "correcting" you. I do not intend it that way.

keldaris 9y ago
As a physicist, I'm quite used to having to resort to metaphors to convey some ideas to a non-technical audience. If a non-physicist asks me to explain AdS/CFT correspondence, I'm not going to be able to explain precisely why the correspondence requires the particular geometry of an anti-de Sitter space to work in a few minutes because the mathematical background required is just too deep. So I don't think metaphor-based explanations are necessarily bad, but I do think they are overused. It's one thing to use a metaphor to convey some essential property of a complex idea to non-experts. It's quite another to see domain experts argue about the (often non-trivial) details of strained metaphors far beyond their area of applicability. Without demeaning the usefulness of metaphors, I'm essentially trying arguing that: 1) domain experts should be far more cognizant of the limitations of the metaphors they employ and 2) domain experts should at the very least try to read the original material before perpetuating solely metaphor-based explanations.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Off topic, but can you recommend any resources for getting into the subject of AdS/CFT correspondence? I’m loosely familiar with it, but I’d love more depth. Thanks for any links or hints!
  - keldaris 9y ago
    Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analogous to anything simpler. That's why it's very hard to explain beyond the level of vague metaphors without being rigorous about it. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      This is precisely what I was hoping for, and I just cannot thank you enough for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate you giving me a full range of resources too.