4 ms·
I’ve made similar arguments. I have a term for them, “economic reasoning.” The argument is basically that economic forces, from greed and survival to the basi
by aj7 7y ago
I’ve made similar arguments. I have a term for them, “economic reasoning.” The argument is basically that economic forces, from greed and survival to the basic underlying technical capabilities available would have ALREADY caused a proposition to succeed or fail. This is a powerful principle, and in my experience, does not mediate against innovation. That reviewer was using his version of it. Secondarily, Buridan’s principle fails. An important lesson in growing up is, sometimes you just have to choose, and if you waste enough time, the urgency of choice exceeds the urgency to be right. In technology, binary switches have an avalanche mechanism, and if properly designed, have built in hysteresis. Noise then makes the decision, and the hysteresis prevents “waffling” by turning off the ability to redecide. Read (older) data sheets on comparators. That a person could write a scholarly paper and not mention that indecision has been thought about, and workarounds have been assiduously developed IS probably cause for rejection.
- pjc50 7y agoHowever, the "dithering between choices" is a real problem with a real name in hardware design: metastability. It is precisely when sending a signal between two clock domains that it arises, because a flip-flop may be clocked while its input is transitioning, and that may put it into a "metastable" intermediate middle state. Prolonged metastability can destroy the device. And the usual solution is somewhat probabilistic: put a second flop behind the first.
- yters 7y agoThat's why I don't believe in Einstein's theory of relativity. All the experts, at least the English speaking ones (my language), thought he was a quack. Ether all the way, baby!
- carapace 7y agoI probably shouldn't do this, but, uh, you know about Rex Research, yeah? http://rexresearch.com/ http://rexresearch.com/ I like you yters. You're crazier than I am and that's hard to do. But despite a rocky beginning (cheers!) Einstein turned out to be correct. We've measured and verified relativity to the heavens and back. Really, it's a staggering feat what he did: you take two basic ideas, that the laws of Nature are the same in every (inertial reference) frame, and that Maxwell's equations (laws of Nature as far as we know) have a constant c, and everything else flows from there. The Universe is stranger and more wonderful than anyone has ever imagined.
- yters 7y agoI am putting my money on timecube for now.
- shakezula 7y agohttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/12/On-the-Glitch-Phenomenon.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/1... The author specifically addressed “noise” in another paper. In this paper, the predecessor to the one linked, the author shows that noise doesn’t fix the problem, rather it makes it impossible to determine which inputs would make it hang for an arbitrary amount of time.
- mannykannot 7y agoAre you referring to this passage? 2. Introducing noise to drive the device out of its metastable state.The noise can be considered to be just an unpredictable input.The introduction of noise cannot eliminate the possibility of the device hanging up for an arbitrarily long time, but can make it impossible to predict which inputs will cause it to do so. While I do not disagree, introducing noise changes the issue from being stuck forever on a single decision, to being a series of decision points (each time the noise signal changes), with the chain being broken as soon as one results in a definite outcome. In practice, this allows us to engineer the risk of being stuck, for longer than some specified period, to an arbitrarily small probability - at the cost of a small loss of precision, and possibly much greater complexity in modeling the device.
- senderista 7y agoCoincidentally, this is reminiscent of the usual solution to Paxos liveness violations: introduce randomness into the timing of the competing proposals.
- shakezula 7y agoTrue! Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why Lamport was originally thinking about the problem.
- aj7 7y agoNo no no! Using noise is useless without hysteresis. You must have a process, built in, which prevents re-decision or waffling for a time sufficient that conditions are so changed as to eliminate the original decision. Once you stop, you stop long enough for the train to pass. Or you close your eyes and floor it, and stand on the accelerator.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> I have a term for them, “economic reasoning.” I think this is known as the old joke about the efficient markets: an economist sees a $100 bill on the ground in a public (and frequently walked through) place and, instead of picking it up, decides they must be hallucinating; after all, if there was really a $100 bill on the ground, somebody would've already picked it up. Real life situations vary in their degree of similarity to a perfectly efficient market, so the "economic reasoning" only makes sense in context. Does the situation involve an efficient enough market for the proposition to be of extremely low probability? In terms of reviewing scientific papers, I don't think you can assume that with enough confidence to use it as a sole reason to reject a paper. I think Eliezer wrote a whole book on it: https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/. It's probably relevant to Leslie's situation.
- aj7 7y agoMy argument doesn’t particularly rely on the market mechanism per se, but rather, an estimate of the probability that something gets overlooked, or not tried.