29 ms·

Parable of Alien Chess

lmm 6y ago
> After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). But this is empirically false. It fails to explain that, for example, some players consistently beat other players, or at least have a much higher than 50% winrate. If chess really did consistently just have a 50% outcome, then it really would be equivalent to an overcomplicated coinflip. So I don't find this parable at all convincing, and remain a logical positivist.
- raldi 6y ago
  The aliens can’t see the players, other than that one is playing as “white” and the other “black”. They don’t have access to information about a particular player going from game to game.
  - lmm 6y ago
    That's not how I read the article's introduction. But under that interpretation, it would be meaningless for the aliens to try to understand the game in any more detail until they understood that kind of basic information.
    - simonh 6y ago
      That's the question the article is addressing. I think you're putting too much weight on the rough and sketchily defined example and missing the actual topic.
      - lmm 6y ago
        But the claim lives or dies by its example. The author's whole point is that he's discovered or imagined a situation in which doing science "badly" would be better than doing it "well". If his imaginary situation doesn't actually hold up then his whole argument is nonsense.
        simonh 6y ago
        Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense? I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
        lmm 6y ago
        > Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense? That's a bizarre attitude. Thought experiments were a major and important tool in developing the theory of relativity, precisely because they were taken seriously and done rigorously; contradictions weren't waved away as "just a tool to facilitate discussion". > I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life. On the contrary, being willing to call out nonsense has served me very well. There is no "underlying claim" here; the story is what's meant to carry the claim, and if the story doesn't work (and it doesn't) the whole thing falls apart (and it does). It's nonsense, top-to-bottom.
        simonh 6y ago
        >It's nonsense, top-to-bottom. This isn't a formal physical theory, just a heuristic for evaluating lines of investigation. Richard Feynman gave a good explanation of the principle, which he said he found helpful in his work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4
    - arrrg 6y ago
      I mean, who is which color actually is a coin flip (it‘s random or as good as random and there are repeat games to make sure the first mover advantage doesn’t play a role), so the model seems to be correct in that regard. They modeled that part of reality correctly, just missed that that’s not what the game is about. It‘s an interesting way of being “wrong”.
- vecter 6y ago
  There are so many unreasonable assumptions baked into this parable that make it difficult to take seriously. Any amount of meaningful investigation by the aliens would yield more insights into the fact that the game is in fact not a random coin flip. Even recognizing that white has a slightly higher win rate [0] would demonstrate some asymmetry that suggests the existence of a deeper structure or symmetry-breaking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
  - est31 6y ago
    Have they had individuals play the game enough times so that they can see this first mover advantage with a good p value? Maybe they only know that the win chance for white is between 0.4 and 0.6.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    The article is not a treatise on how aliens might investigate chess though. That's just a symbolic example to illustrate the idea that you could have a simple model with good predictive power that is somehow less correct than a complicated model with worse predictive power.
    - lmm 6y ago
      But the whole point of the article is to claim that its example are possible, and yet it fails to demonstrate that. We can posit a world in which God declares that logical positivists may not enter heaven, and in such a world logical positivism would be a poor choice, but there's no evidence that that's actually the world we live in.
    - 8note 6y ago
      The pieces that it does predict some things better: Is one player happier than the other right now? How long will it take to make the next move? How long will the game last? There's lots and lots of observable things other than who wins that the coin flip model does a worse job at. Thus, the example makes just as good an argument that making better predictions is still what makes a model better. The missing question is "what are you using the model for?" Are you trying to learn chess? Understand human psychology? Predict the outcomes of chess games? The same model isn't going to be the best for all of them. Like, the super GM level stockfish is going to suck at predicting beginner chess games Whether one model is better than another is all about the purpose it's trying to serve, and how well it does that.
- bruce511 6y ago
  It's not _players_ here that matter, just the color. If I play a grand master (or indeed just any moderately competent player) 10 times, I will lose all 10. But assuming we share who starts, white will win 5 times and black will win 5 times. Further, for some random chess tournament, I'm guessing the win ratio for black/white is close to 50/50 (perhaps white is a bit ahead for having first mover advantage - which is stipulated as ignored in the article) It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong. And discovering that relationship between players and winning is important and valuable! But trying to understand how the pieces move before you've even understood that this is a game of skill is putting the cart before the horse, and gives you a model that really is less useful than the coin-flip model.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      But how can you propose that chess is a game of skill unless you first propose that there are players doing something at which they could be skilled?
      - lmm 6y ago
        You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reason about how.
        jjk166 6y ago
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  The author did himself a disservice by attracting chess players to criticize his example that clearly could have been about literally any game more complex than coin flipping that has roughly 50/50 parity. He could have referred to the NFL or something, maybe that would have helped. The point was to set up the aliens to have a gross approximation of outcome determination that is both accurate and wrong. The aliens could have decided to use home vs. away teams as their "coin flip" and stopped investigating once they found out that home teams win a bit more, for example, and the "crazy" alien in the parable could suggest that examining only the first play of the game is a better answer. The "crazy" alien would be told to stop because the first play isn't more predictive, but the fact that the alien is looking at gameplay is more "right".
  - xscott 6y ago
    >The author did himself a disservice by attracting chess players to criticize his example Heh, I think the author's example is fine if the reader gives it a charitable interpretation. The disservice is from all the overly pedantic people who want to argue about chess instead of the philosophy of science.
raldi 6y ago
The conclusion, about the need for half-crazy people, reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-ex... Anyone who can muster their willpower for thirty seconds, can make a desperate effort to lift more weight than they usually could. But what if the weight that needs lifting is a truck? Then desperate efforts won't suffice; you'll have to do something out of the ordinary to succeed. You may have to do something that you weren't taught to do in school. Something that others aren't expecting you to do, and might not understand. You may have to go outside your comfortable routine, take on difficulties you don't have an existing mental program for handling, and bypass the System. [...] Are they really under the impression that humanity can survive if every single person does everything the ordinary, normal, default way?
Donckele 6y ago
As a parable it’s just about interesting. As for the story it’s not very good and has to many holes which detracts from the meaning.
tikej 6y ago
This text mainly shows that author either misunderstands chess, probability and science, likely at the same time, or just wants to critique for critique’s sake. Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique. EDIT: To clarify: by less predictive power I mean that it neither explains new effects or predicts new unknown ones, nor explains known phenomena or generates existing theories as special examples. I didn’t mean theories such as for example string theory, that has little predictive power at the moment, but has current theories as special cases and holds the promise of explaining things that current theories cannot. /EDIT Physicists are “stuck” with existing theories not because they like them, but because they work so well it’s hard to invent something that even works equally well (not to mention something that works better). There a lot of smart that are brave in thinking and propose wild explanations. Yet, in most cases they don’t stand up the test of time. Einstein couldn’t deal with randomness of Quantum Mechanics, put forward a hidden variable theory and it was (and still is) seriously considered, but he (and many others) weren’t able to put forward better-working theory. We stick to QM despite its weirdness/randomness because it works extremely well, not because we like it or think things must be this way and require no further study/“it is the most efficient and parsimonious possible model“.
- est31 6y ago
  I think the criticism of occam's razor is valid. Occam's razor comes at a cost, and denying it would be wrong. It brings many advantages though, which outweigh the disadvantages.
  - tikej 6y ago
    Sure it is valid, but in reality most scientists don’t religiously stick to Ockham’s razor and oppose alternative theories that give correct predictions. If hard sticking to Ockham’s razor was true, Quantum loop Gravity, String Theory and many other theories wouldn’t be intensively studied for past 50 years. Or development and studying interpretations of quantum mechanics (which btw yielded results in Quantum Information Theory). It’s just that constructing something correct and new IS really hard.
gandalfgreybeer 6y ago
Going through the piece, he builds upon things that make sense but then just completely goes off the rails at the end. I don’t even know what the point of the article is. It comes across as science/intellectual shaming. > Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws. And if the flaws are legitimate, no matter how much work a scientist has done, then he has to take these into account now. Science is incremental and self-correcting. Is it a flaw if someone points out something wrong? > All the years you spend in graduate school counting angels on pinheads in your respective theoretical framework is mostly a waste of time. What is the point of saying this? There are dead ends to science and some of these dead ends may seem like wastes of time but it’s all about incremental knowledge and discoveries. If something revolutionary comes along that disproves years of work, then that for science is a success. > Most of the scientific work is not meaningful outside of the theoretical framework that gave rise to it. What does this mean? Isn’t this “theoretical framework” based on our observations? Sure there is this chance that it might be wrong but if most of our data and observations show that this is true, then it is until proven otherwise. If someone tells you that the earth might be flat and what we can see with our eyes and what we currently know might not be true, is that sufficient evidence to make you think, “oh the earth might be flat after all”?
- Applejinx 6y ago
  My gut-level reaction (and this guy's clearly advocating for the merit of gut-level reactions! :D ) is this: This is about priming people to buy into some propaganda system, for instance one constructed for political purposes, and reject their existing assumptions. The weird swerve at the end is the payload. The reason to do this is, if you're knowingly maintaining a propaganda system that works towards some known purpose, and you want people to fall into it more readily. This doesn't discount the validity of the initial concepts: local maxima are real, and our ability to thoroughly understand things is limited. But we remain functional through pretending we can indeed understand things, and there's usefulness in that. Generally, axioms are brought into question when specific details don't line up with our theory. In a vacuum, 'abandon all theories!' is a fine position to have. In reality, 'abandon all theories!' is a set-up for getting fed a pile of information that benefits somebody else, because you become a willingly useful idiot ready to be programmed by anyone. Running into somebody like this, I find the initial 'abandon all theories!' attitude to be refreshing. I even agree with some of it. If the NEXT THING he tells me is all about how Pepe's face is on the Moon outlined in craters, I've learned to be extremely suspicious of what the guy is really selling. Because even if he is himself sincere… there is somebody up the chain pursuing 'Nigerian spam' techniques and finding out by this who's credulous enough to be used for their own purposes. And that's what I get from the 'going off the rails at the end'. The point of the article is to hook the truly credulous, and the writer may or may not be in on that.
jackhalford 6y ago
> In Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, in what an unreflective mind might misinterpret as a "troll," says that it is important for science that people have biases, financial interests, interfering religious and political doctrines and the like in science. Also dying, and new generations coming along is in the interest of science. quite ironically the development of eternal life would kill scientific progress, which might be the great filter after all.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Eternal life would also almost certainly kill any class mobility.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    On the other hand, we may develop a society where advancement does not depend on death.
    - gxnxcxcx 6y ago
      That could prove really difficult without the death of those not in need of any advancement. Power and privilege by their very nature tend to find ways of avoiding being watered down.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        As one still in need of advancement, I'd happily take that challenge (and that of continuing scientific progress). Eternal life can always be abandoned if we find out it doesn't work.
      - jjk166 6y ago
        A cure for aging is not necessarily a cure for beheading-by-guillotine
malf 6y ago
Any examples of what is supposed to work this way? It sounds like a rant against quantum measurement by someone who thinks everyone just forgot to consider hidden variable theories.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I saw it more as a critique of any area of science where the development of a statistical model of the behaviour of a system is treated as though it yielded any meaningful understanding of the system. Quantum Mechanics, sure, but you could also apply this to Climate Science if you wanted to start a fight...
vez- 6y ago
The author's argues that the 50-50 model of chess is less true and a dead-end. If this is a matter of which model to use then fair enough, you may wish to use a more exact model than the 50-50 model; but the author is not arguing about which model to use, they are arguing about which model to pursue building upon. Building upon any model of interest is not a dead end (because it is being built upon!). Even if the underlying principles of the model of interest need to be changed to accomplish something else in the future, it is still useful to develop the model. Approximate truths can also have deep meaning and are sometimes even more generalizable to multiple areas of reality than exact answers. Approximations are no less true than trying to be exact, they are just saying a different thing. Neither is inferior to the other, or at least if exactness really is better than approximation, this is not a good argument for it. Another commenter pointed out that some models need to be thrown out in order to make room for the new (e.g. the earth-centric view of the solar system had to go at some point), and I think that's valid and hard to argue against; and it seems to align with what the author is saying. But the work done upon the old models was certainly not worth nothing. For one thing, the work done upon the old models is what made the new work possible. I think perhaps the author's issue is that they do not acknowledge that the 50-50 model of chess has value. p.s. to the author if they read the comments: I actually enjoyed reading your thoughts even if I disagree with them.
- tpoacher 6y ago
  Tbh, I didn't think he gave that message. If anything, he even identifies the 50-50 model as a local "maximum" (i.e. it has value). To me the main point was to have a mindset that is willing to challenge the possibility of whether such an optimum could actually simply be a local one.
leto_ii 6y ago
I suspect the metaphor is inspired by Feynman's one about gods playing chess [1]. As it's almost always the case, Feynman manages to immediately inspire and illuminate. On the other hand, the present article seems to me to get some important things wrong. For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. More importantly though, if somebody is interested in investigating chess, they will supposedly understand that it's some activity that other (somewhat) intelligent beings are undertaking. Even if everything seems like a blur, an alien scientist should not be content with dismissing it as uninteresting randomness. More so, if somebody actually starts investigating seriously, they will immediately obtain useful results about the game, results that should almost certainly provide useful predictions about the game outcome (at least better than "it's all random"). I might find, however, some agreement with the spirit of the article. It seems to me that, even though the author doesn't articulate it properly, the idea is that scientists should pursue more fringe theories even if immediate confirmation is lacking. I think there's quite a bit of value in this, as long as your predictions are always checked against reality. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4
- seisvelas 6y ago
  >For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. He addresses that (first-move advantage from white moving first) in the parenthesis after that same sentence: "After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). "
  - praestigiare 6y ago
    Acknowledging is not addressing, and in this case the statement amounts to "they realize this: ... (they would not realize this)." It is either too flawed to make the point intended, or illustrates a flaw in the underlying argument.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    It is also the case that if you take into account which pair of players are competing, the random hypothesis is not even close. The author cannot have it both ways: either the aliens cannot distinguish the game from an equal-odds random process, or they can.
germanjoey 6y ago
And here I thought the article was going to be like this parody manga about Alien Mahjong...... https://mangadex.org/chapter/56995/1 https://mangadex.org/chapter/56995/1
- bmn__ 6y ago
  I am genuinely impressed. The author captures Fukumoto's style and tropes perfectly.
subroutine 6y ago
The statement, "A machine that allows his alien eyes to see the first move." seems too information-rich for what the author then describes as the alternative model. Perhaps not the point of this thought experiment, but let's assume the aliens can only crudely see the first move: they know how many pieces there are on each side of the board, their color, but otherwise all the pieces look the same. They cannot see the surface of the board (they don't know it is checkered), but they can determine the exact center of each piece (so during the first move they can compute a precise coordinate of the piece that moves). Promptly after the first move, the image goes away. Also assume they trust the humans who've told them: "there are actually pieces on the board with functions". They have collected data on 1000s of matches. What can the aliens know or deduce? - The number of pieces - The pieces are divided into 2 different colors (white and black) - The pieces are split by color and placed at opposite (vertical) ends of the board. - There is the same number of pieces in each color - The pieces are arranged into 2 vertical rows and 8 horizontal columns - Opening moves cluster at 2 different lengths, towards the opposite side of the board. - The longer opening move length is typically ~2x the short opening move length. - The opening move vector is always towards the opposite end of the board (not horizontal) - The opening move is always white - White wins slightly more often - They are given the duration and outcome of each game (win, loss, or tie) - ? When games end quickly, first-move advantage shrinks - ? Sometimes a series of games end more quicker than usual (they observe a blitz tourney) - ? Win P() is slightly different for each of the 8 (x2) possible opening moves - ? Everything here: https://old.chesstempo.com/images/en/openingExp.png https://old.chesstempo.com/images/en/openingExp.png What else? Also, a note regarding the statement in the article that the alternative model "is less predictive over iterated games than the coin flip model". I don't think this is technically possible. If the model was selecting the winner at a statistically worse rate than 50% chance, you could just flip the sign of the prediction, and do that much better than chance.
- slx26 6y ago
  Observing the movement of pieces quickly reveals that the board is divided in 64 squares. Squares being black and white or any other set of colors is actually irrelevant. They can basically fully understand the game from this, no need to make things complicated.
NumberCruncher 6y ago
At first I thought this article is just totally wrong, but than I have found this: > Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet... At least this one point is correct.
rvba 6y ago
That is why quantum mechanics seems so weak. All about statistics instead of saying that maybe a lot of things happen at same time.
thiago_fm 6y ago
I find the article great. His only mistake is to think that chess is a balanced game. White has clearly an advantage and in a long amount of random games, like he did propose, see a 50% winrate for black.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  From the article: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example).
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
This is one of the main sins of postmodernism: the thought that because all view points are tenable, all are correct. The scientific method is based on accuracy of prediction, otherwise we are not talking about science anymore. That's not bad, and many a researcher could do with the realization that maths and models are not the best way to describe all things. It's a different ballgame though.
- tikej 6y ago
  What kind of alternative to maths and models, that has predictive (preferably in quantitative way) power, would you propose?
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    I can't propose one, I think whoever could would have some sort of Renaissance discovery in their head. I say this because I feel the way we approach certain disciplines like psychology (in an increasingly scientific and statistical way) is the wrong take, although it has worked well for most things in the past. Although we can make good experiments, we are missing the intuitive part of it. There are some truths about the way minds work that you can understand, but you can't really write down or quantify, and science can do no help there. For physics though, we have it down right. Do the experiment, did it work?.. it's already the correct method. No need to improve there.
- adlpz 6y ago
  I believe the point being made here is that, indeed, scientific method is based on accuracy of prediction. However, in order to reach a good accuracy, a great deal of fine-tuning and tweaking is required. E.g. high energy physics. The standard model has something like 18 free parameters. A new theory, which could be "more correct" and provide, in the long term, better predictions, might require time and manpower for this fine-tuning and tweaking to occur. However, as it did not provide better accuracy of prediction in its initial stages, is said to be not worth pursuing or even directly pseudoscience or quackery. This used to not be the case because, 100 years ago, relatively simple theories workable by 1-3 solo scientists provided a large enough breakthrough in prediction power to be seriously considered. It may be the case however that nowadays, with the amazing level of precision measurement we are able to achieve, we've optimized ourselves into a corner. We've fitter our quite-a-lot-of-degrees-of-freedom theories into a local maximum so hard that finding a theory that predicts better is, at least, impractical. And through this process we've blinded ourselves from any new and disruptive ideas. Again, look at the standard model. It's got so many damn dials to tweak that no wonder it fits reality so well. And if it ever doesn't, we can just shove supersymmetry in there. We need to be able to dedicate resources to theories that do not provide better predictions, but that provide new perspectives. A moderate amount of resources. But calling those scientists quacks does no good.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
>They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board. (The whites and blacks and squares all blur together.) I suspect that the real breakthrough would come when the alien physicist designs a very sensitive instrument that can observe exotic wavelengths of light at high resolution, and thereby show that the board is not uniform, but is divided into regions that have 1 of 2 states: i.e. black and white squares.
hackeraccount 6y ago
yeah - I think his point was something along the lines of "you can have a useful theory but it might be worth getting rid of it for something less useful that might be more productive in the long run because it has better understanding of the fundamental mechanism." Or more shortly using predictive ability as the sole criteria can lead to less correct results then alternatives. If my description is correct I would say that the advantage of using prediction as the sole criteria is that it avoids the burden of making arbitrary selections. I understand the appeal of the choosing a course because it's more elegant or beautiful but if you were getting on a plane and were told that was the guiding light of the designer - or worse the engineers - how happy would you be?
praestigiare 6y ago
The central thesis of the article is supported mostly by the argument "Yeah, it is dude." Ignoring the weakness of the analogy, there is a reason science is "about models" and not about truth: We can measure and test models, and we cannot measure and test truth. A theory that is more complex and fits the data worse is a less good theory because it is easier to get stuck in. If I have two new theories with this property, how do I choose between them? Imagining a situation where the less predictive theory is closer to the underlying reality does not change this - the fact that it is closer to the underlying reality is irrelevant until and unless we have measurements that allow us to distinguish those cases, at which point, we will have evidence for the (now) more predictive theory. This article is actually arguing for a system that would result in more dogmatic acceptance and less critical testing.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  This was the only part of an otherwise great post I objected to. Science may have a side effect of uncovering truth but it shouldn't be the driving force. We should be striving for better predictive ability that doesn't go against our observations. Arguing which is more real is not science.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Drop some heavy objects and some light objects you have lying around. You will see that the heavier ones tend to fall faster than the light objects. If all you care about is predicting which object will fall faster, you could simply say gravity pulls the heavier one faster and call it a day. But if you were to forego predictive power and seek understanding, you'd eventually see that objects fundamentally fall at the same rate, and a confounding factor of air resistance was the reason for the observed discrepency. With this deeper understanding, you can make models of gravity and fluid dynamics which are not just more accurate for the specific cases you measured, but also extensible to other cases like the orbits of planets.
    - praestigiare 6y ago
      You are imagining this situation from the perspective of already having a more powerful / general model and looking backwards, so it seems obvious. But that is not how things work. Without data to support it, you can imagine all kinds of possible theories - that is not science, and it certainly gets you no closer to understanding.
ikeboy 6y ago
The author applies logical positivism incorrectly. There's nothing wrong with coming up with new models and testing them against the data, and eventually getting enough variables to be significantly more effective. But such models should be a low portion of your overall probability until actually found to be more effective. Of course, if you start out with a contrived example where there's a large amount of unobservable simple structure, then it looks like postulating unobserved structures is good. I could give a contrary example where it's impossible to do better than random and draw the opposite lesson. Beyond that, under logical positivism there isn't a notion of truth as the author applies it. To critique LP by saying it doesn't get at the truth is kind of missing the point.
Lewton 6y ago
The author unironically uses a parable about aliens predicting chess outcomes with a coin flip and how wrong that is, to promote the idea that random fringe ideas without predictive power have value. I severely doubt anyone who isn't already primed to agree with the conclusions would read this and find it convincing (I don't find the idea that science needs ways to escape local maxima particularly controversial, but this article is terrible, and made worse by the unnecessary antagonism)
- boldslogan 6y ago
  I think the issue arises, when a player who is not good at chess would lose, literally 100% of the time against anyone even close to a top regional level. In other words, chess is not a 50% chance game, it is a variable chance game depending on who you play, so the analogy is hard to follow because the aliens would not come up with this 50% outcome idea.
  - 8note 6y ago
    The other thing being that if both players are very good, it's near guaranteed to be a tie
  - gampleman 6y ago
    I think you misunderstand - you don't always play black in chess. So on average white wins 50% of the time (modulo first move advantage and draws as the article states).
    - a-nikolaev 6y ago
      But they can observe that Alice always wins when playing against Bob. (If they somehow can determine that one player is black and the other is white, they probably can also distinguish the players as well?)
      - jjk166 6y ago
        They can't see a chess piece but they can see humans well enough to tell them apart? Analogies don't work if you deliberately make assumptions that are inconsistent with what they are trying to convey. We could rephrase the analogy such that the aliens are listening to a specific broadcast from earth from 1000 light years away. Some percentage of the time the broadcast is "White won", the rest of the time the broadcast is "White lost." Is it reasonable to assume that it's a game of pure chance just because you don't have a good method of predicting the outcome?
gavanwilhite 6y ago
I’m a bit surprised that nobody has called attention to the Pepe the Frog meme. Given its association with the alt-right at worst, and trolling at best, this seems out of character for hacker news.
- yegortimoshenko 6y ago
  It gets much worse than that on this blog: https://archive.is/RtoKS#selection-397.1-397.222 https://archive.is/RtoKS#selection-397.1-397.222 > Nitpicking is more excusable for women to do. That's ultimately because men talk to others > exchange important information, while women only talk to others for social negotiation and > to test the social standing of others.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  Let people have fun for fuck sake.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  Use of Pepe and other alt-right tropes and 4chan lingo is consistent with who Luke Smith is and the image he wishes to cultivate for himself to attract a similar crowd.
jgilias 6y ago
Regarding the main point of the article. I do agree that it's very important to not get stuck in local maxima. However, I think the author heavily underestimates/overestimates the chances of the following: 1. The author underestimates the rate of competing ideas coming out of 'learned' scientists. 2. The author overestimates the possibility of an 'internet dilettante' without good knowledge of prior art coming up with something useful. To me it's a bit like me playing chess with a Grandmaster. Sure, I know how the chess pieces move, I know basic tactics and strategy. But I have never studied a chess theory book, never learned any openings. What's the chance of me coming up with a chess theory novelty that provides a better model of the game and lets me win the Grandmaster? It's not none. But due to my lack of knowledge of prior art the chance is pretty thin.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
I was disappointed to search through the comments and not find the phrase "two slit experiment". [1] The first half of the article is clealy about quantum mechanics, although it doesn't name it explicitly. The author seems to be arguing that there is something specific really going on below the quantum level, regardless of whether we can measure it, and scientists refuse to acknowledge that only because of philosphical dogma (logical positivism). They seemed to think we only use probabilities to reflect our uncertainty, and ought to come up with a more fundamental theory that avoids that uncertainty. But the two slit experiment shows that there is no more fundamental theory (at least not in that sense). If two paths have probability of 0.5, then it's not the case that only one or the other took place, we just don't know which is which. Instead, they both took place in some sense, to the extent that they interact with each other; that's not possible if there was one true path that we just couldn't deduce. It's maybe better to think of 0.5 as a weighting rather than a probability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
temptemptemp111 6y ago
Luke Smith hits HN! Good to see.
deleted 6y ago
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Patient0 6y ago
I thought this was a quite insightful article - and was surprised to find so much criticism in the comments. e.g. those who are attacking his parable on the grounds that "actually the odds aren't actual 50-50 in chess" or "an alien would have to wonder why some people win more than others"... these objections seem like nit-picking to me and miss the opportunity to broaden our perspectives. The example is to help illustrate and illuminate an intriguing idea which does merit consideration: that the scientific method and various aspects of the scientific process are very much a "gradient descent" algorithm which will tend to converge to a local minimum... the large jumps needed to discover the "global minimum" are not sufficiently rewarded... or may not even be within our capabilities! Here is a more concrete example I have been considering recently: The principal of least action can be derived from Newton's force laws. Alternatively, Newton's force laws can be derived from the principal of least action. Therefore, you could choose to make either "law" the more fundamental one and consider the other to be an emergent phenomena. Might this also apply to, e.g. the principals of thermodynamics? Might it be that all of the laws of physics are actually just an emergent phenomena that can be derived directly from the information theoretic properties of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy? But then, why even stop there? We choose/discover these examples because our tiny, mediocre brains can only understand the universe from that point of view, whereas the actual universe we live in is unimaginably vast and complex. But might there be a way, for example, of deriving the laws of physics from some narrative principal (e.g. "we live in the best of all possible worlds... therefore by some chain of reasoning: F = ma!"). Maybe that chain of reasoning is only comprehensible to an artificial intelligence which we have yet to invent, involving us inhabiting some element of a vast fractal structure subject to some sort of anthropic principal? And in general, it is worth considering the concept that not all things which are "true" are objectively measurable - those are just the things that are easiest to prove are true. To give an example of something which you know is true but which is, almost by definition, subjective: the existence of your own consciousness! It is impossible to prove, objectively, that you're not just some simulation that is running in a computer that's about to run out of memory and segfault... that you yourself are "real". That's not to say that any of the above is actually true... but it might be true. Our recent focus on "provability" and "objectivity" has been used to argue that such things are in fact false, or just not worth considering or thinking about. There is sometimes an arrogance when there should be humility. Just because something might be exponentially difficult to prove, the sheer difficulty in proving it does not mean that it is not true.... There may be things which are true which we will never have the resources to discover. I think it's all worth considering.
chronolitus 6y ago
If there is indeed no way for aliens to "see" the chess playing process (precisely: to make measurements which confirm/reject hypotheses about details of the game), then the best model they can ever come up with is a black box where the outcome has given statistical properties. Where the parable falls short, and a mistake often made, is to confuse one's own inability to come up with discriminating experiments, for an absolute truth about the universe's resistance to observation. What would it mean for aliens to not ever be able to measure chess' inner properties? it would mean that aliens could never read human texts, or talk with humans, as any of those would instantly lead them to the truth. Which in turn means aliens can't see light, or hear sounds, or interact with things which would allow them to do so. Going further, we end up at the conclusion that either these aliens exist in a completely separate universe from chess (and everything around it), or they CAN observe it (they just haven't tried hard enough). This post is confused, in that it first states aliens can't see chess, but later they can. If their sensors ARE able to measure chess, the scientific process will eventually weed out the worse models for the better ones and they will understand it. If they aren't, then they will be left with the statistical random model, and that is indeed the best explanation, as all guesses toward the complicated intricacies of the game are equally likely and cannot be differentiated. In the end, the post's theory boils down to one idea: "there is sometimes an underlying truth that is not observable", and it is a really weak one. Like the flying tea pot, it can not be disproven or proven. "Underlying Truths" that do not affect the universe in any way and cannot be measured, might as well not exist, and we should not attempt to model them. Everything else can and will be explained, in time. I'm not sure I see a paradox, or lesson here, other than it is important to understand what the scientific process of model, hypothesis and measurement can and can't do. -- the same argument is often made for magic, or spirituality, or any other thing people say is 'unexplainable' (which can often be translated to "something I don't want to think too hard about") We used to think many things were magic (light, magnets, the world), until someone smarter than us came up with a really smart experiment which let us shine light into boxes we thought were black (bell's inequality theorem is a fine example). The lesson from history is, if we look hard enough, we eventually get closer to the truth, every time.
seanhunter 6y ago
The whole article starts with a straw man about aliens making incorrect deductions based on a version of chess that doesn't correspond to actual chess. This is used to illustrate a very obvious point about local maxima that is in turn extrapolated in an entirely unsupported way to try to draw some conclusions about science and allow the author to make some strange and entirely unnecessarily edgy statements like "Logical positivism is kind of theoretical lobotomy"... "tweaking equations like an oblivious autist is Science" etc. It's very disappointing to see this on HN
micouay 6y ago
I think many comments here miss the point. I’ll try to summarise them and defend the article: * “Chess results are not 50-50” - I don’t think the exact numbers are that important. What’s important is that in the 50-50 model or x-y model the Aliens assume these values to be just a consistent result of an RNG. * “Chess is not random / the players are intelligent / the aliens could investigate who plays against who” - In the parable the Aliens don’t have direct access these variables, just like we might not have the access to some variables in QM experiments and we (and They) could mistake something hard to observe for random (i.e. if the rule is “if there’s an even number of atoms in a 1m radius, do A, if it’s odd, do B” the outcome would be 50-50 and would seem random even if it’s not) * “Theories that are more complicated, predict less or make worse approximations are worth less than simple theories that predict more / better” (in other words Science is about models and approximations, not about truth or “Shut up and calculate”) - I think the author simply disagrees but he also shows why non-mainstream models are worth pursuing and developing - so that we are not stuck in a local maximum with a worse model than the one we could have. Something else concerns me: I don’t know much about QM but if I understand correctly, Bell’s inequality tells us that there are no “hidden variables” and that QM is indeed random. I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.
- derbOac 6y ago
  One important thing the author seems to miss at some level is the context of the data being modeled. If all you have is data on whether black or white won, then, assuming the 50-50 outcome probabilities, this is a fine model. There is nothing to be gained by anything else. Where I disagree with the author I guess is to suggest that some other statistically inferior model would be better because, if you had a richer set of observations, it would be shown to be true. To me that scenario is irrelevant at some level, because it's a different scenario (I don't agree with the author's assertion that first move information would somehow decrease predictive information -- it might not improve it, but I doubt it would decrease it). If you had information on player identities even, you might be able to model ability or something like that, and use that to improve your predictions. But then that relies on the bit of information about which players are which, beyond black and white. The philosopher Quine argued that models cannot be decontextualized from the observations they are explaining, and I think that is particularly relevant in this case. At some level it doesn't matter whether the Aliens' models are true or not, because they have no information in the scenario that they could use to do anything with. The 50-50 model (per the author) isn't incorrect, it's just a (assumedly) correct model for the game of chess when all you know is which color won the game. If you were playing chess, and your pairings were random and you couldn't see the board or what pieces were available or where they could go, etc the game would seem very similar to what the aliens were observing. A more "truthful" model is only relevant or useful in the context where there is more data to make it useful.
arh68 6y ago
I would agree all models are bad, some models are useful even though it goes unstated. I feel like the author’s point is that asking for “the right model” is the wrong question. I don’t mind argument-by-analogy too much, but I think it would help if we knew what the aliens were trying to do with their model. People criticizing "inaccuracy" seem to just have high standards for their models (perhaps you want to simulate 100B chess games in 10 seconds.. how's that coin flip idea sound now?). Just imagine you're dreaming about backgammon: do you know all the rules? no, but you can roughly model what's going on. Your model could be said "worse" than standard rules, but it's good enough for a dream sequence. More than once have I seen a nice chess set in a home, set up completely wrong. They’ll be close! Their model isn’t too far off from standard, but just so (K & Q reversed, B & N reversed, &c). I presume the owners were quite content. Honestly, I don’t even know if most people would notice, so why point it out (is my model even the “preferred” one)?
deleted 6y ago
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lmm 6y ago

> After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). But this is empirically false. It fails to explain that, for example, some players consistently beat other players, or at least have a much higher than 50% winrate. If chess really did consistently just have a 50% outcome, then it really would be equivalent to an overcomplicated coinflip. So I don't find this parable at all convincing, and remain a logical positivist.

raldi 6y ago
The aliens can’t see the players, other than that one is playing as “white” and the other “black”. They don’t have access to information about a particular player going from game to game.
- lmm 6y ago
  That's not how I read the article's introduction. But under that interpretation, it would be meaningless for the aliens to try to understand the game in any more detail until they understood that kind of basic information.
  - simonh 6y ago
    That's the question the article is addressing. I think you're putting too much weight on the rough and sketchily defined example and missing the actual topic.
    - lmm 6y ago
      But the claim lives or dies by its example. The author's whole point is that he's discovered or imagined a situation in which doing science "badly" would be better than doing it "well". If his imaginary situation doesn't actually hold up then his whole argument is nonsense.
      - simonh 6y ago
        Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense? I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
        lmm 6y ago
        > Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense? That's a bizarre attitude. Thought experiments were a major and important tool in developing the theory of relativity, precisely because they were taken seriously and done rigorously; contradictions weren't waved away as "just a tool to facilitate discussion". > I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life. On the contrary, being willing to call out nonsense has served me very well. There is no "underlying claim" here; the story is what's meant to carry the claim, and if the story doesn't work (and it doesn't) the whole thing falls apart (and it does). It's nonsense, top-to-bottom.
        simonh 6y ago
        >It's nonsense, top-to-bottom. This isn't a formal physical theory, just a heuristic for evaluating lines of investigation. Richard Feynman gave a good explanation of the principle, which he said he found helpful in his work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4
  - arrrg 6y ago
    I mean, who is which color actually is a coin flip (it‘s random or as good as random and there are repeat games to make sure the first mover advantage doesn’t play a role), so the model seems to be correct in that regard. They modeled that part of reality correctly, just missed that that’s not what the game is about. It‘s an interesting way of being “wrong”.
vecter 6y ago
There are so many unreasonable assumptions baked into this parable that make it difficult to take seriously. Any amount of meaningful investigation by the aliens would yield more insights into the fact that the game is in fact not a random coin flip. Even recognizing that white has a slightly higher win rate [0] would demonstrate some asymmetry that suggests the existence of a deeper structure or symmetry-breaking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
- est31 6y ago
  Have they had individuals play the game enough times so that they can see this first mover advantage with a good p value? Maybe they only know that the win chance for white is between 0.4 and 0.6.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  The article is not a treatise on how aliens might investigate chess though. That's just a symbolic example to illustrate the idea that you could have a simple model with good predictive power that is somehow less correct than a complicated model with worse predictive power.
  - lmm 6y ago
    But the whole point of the article is to claim that its example are possible, and yet it fails to demonstrate that. We can posit a world in which God declares that logical positivists may not enter heaven, and in such a world logical positivism would be a poor choice, but there's no evidence that that's actually the world we live in.
  - 8note 6y ago
    The pieces that it does predict some things better: Is one player happier than the other right now? How long will it take to make the next move? How long will the game last? There's lots and lots of observable things other than who wins that the coin flip model does a worse job at. Thus, the example makes just as good an argument that making better predictions is still what makes a model better. The missing question is "what are you using the model for?" Are you trying to learn chess? Understand human psychology? Predict the outcomes of chess games? The same model isn't going to be the best for all of them. Like, the super GM level stockfish is going to suck at predicting beginner chess games Whether one model is better than another is all about the purpose it's trying to serve, and how well it does that.
bruce511 6y ago
It's not _players_ here that matter, just the color. If I play a grand master (or indeed just any moderately competent player) 10 times, I will lose all 10. But assuming we share who starts, white will win 5 times and black will win 5 times. Further, for some random chess tournament, I'm guessing the win ratio for black/white is close to 50/50 (perhaps white is a bit ahead for having first mover advantage - which is stipulated as ignored in the article) It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong.
- lmm 6y ago
  > It turns out the result of the game has lots to do with the player, and Little to do with the color, which makes the alien first model simple, accurate, and completely wrong. And discovering that relationship between players and winning is important and valuable! But trying to understand how the pieces move before you've even understood that this is a game of skill is putting the cart before the horse, and gives you a model that really is less useful than the coin-flip model.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    But how can you propose that chess is a game of skill unless you first propose that there are players doing something at which they could be skilled?
    - lmm 6y ago
      You'd observe that the players treat it as a contest, and care about the results. It's like if you were trying to understand, say, a water pump, that you couldn't understand see internals of - speculating blindly about what kind of gears and motors might be inside would be completely futile, the path to understanding it would be to first understand what it's being used for, and then you might be able to start to reason about how.
      - jjk166 6y ago
TameAntelope 6y ago
The author did himself a disservice by attracting chess players to criticize his example that clearly could have been about literally any game more complex than coin flipping that has roughly 50/50 parity. He could have referred to the NFL or something, maybe that would have helped. The point was to set up the aliens to have a gross approximation of outcome determination that is both accurate and wrong. The aliens could have decided to use home vs. away teams as their "coin flip" and stopped investigating once they found out that home teams win a bit more, for example, and the "crazy" alien in the parable could suggest that examining only the first play of the game is a better answer. The "crazy" alien would be told to stop because the first play isn't more predictive, but the fact that the alien is looking at gameplay is more "right".
- xscott 6y ago
  >The author did himself a disservice by attracting chess players to criticize his example Heh, I think the author's example is fine if the reader gives it a charitable interpretation. The disservice is from all the overly pedantic people who want to argue about chess instead of the philosophy of science.

raldi 6y ago

The conclusion, about the need for half-crazy people, reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-ex... Anyone who can muster their willpower for thirty seconds, can make a desperate effort to lift more weight than they usually could. But what if the weight that needs lifting is a truck? Then desperate efforts won't suffice; you'll have to do something out of the ordinary to succeed. You may have to do something that you weren't taught to do in school. Something that others aren't expecting you to do, and might not understand. You may have to go outside your comfortable routine, take on difficulties you don't have an existing mental program for handling, and bypass the System. [...] Are they really under the impression that humanity can survive if every single person does everything the ordinary, normal, default way?

Donckele 6y ago

As a parable it’s just about interesting. As for the story it’s not very good and has to many holes which detracts from the meaning.

tikej 6y ago

This text mainly shows that author either misunderstands chess, probability and science, likely at the same time, or just wants to critique for critique’s sake. Of course while it’s good to search for alternative models/theories/explanations, unless you can provide something with better with more predictive power than the existing/widely accepted ones, it’s a good idea to hold the critique. EDIT: To clarify: by less predictive power I mean that it neither explains new effects or predicts new unknown ones, nor explains known phenomena or generates existing theories as special examples. I didn’t mean theories such as for example string theory, that has little predictive power at the moment, but has current theories as special cases and holds the promise of explaining things that current theories cannot. /EDIT Physicists are “stuck” with existing theories not because they like them, but because they work so well it’s hard to invent something that even works equally well (not to mention something that works better). There a lot of smart that are brave in thinking and propose wild explanations. Yet, in most cases they don’t stand up the test of time. Einstein couldn’t deal with randomness of Quantum Mechanics, put forward a hidden variable theory and it was (and still is) seriously considered, but he (and many others) weren’t able to put forward better-working theory. We stick to QM despite its weirdness/randomness because it works extremely well, not because we like it or think things must be this way and require no further study/“it is the most efficient and parsimonious possible model“.

est31 6y ago
I think the criticism of occam's razor is valid. Occam's razor comes at a cost, and denying it would be wrong. It brings many advantages though, which outweigh the disadvantages.
- tikej 6y ago
  Sure it is valid, but in reality most scientists don’t religiously stick to Ockham’s razor and oppose alternative theories that give correct predictions. If hard sticking to Ockham’s razor was true, Quantum loop Gravity, String Theory and many other theories wouldn’t be intensively studied for past 50 years. Or development and studying interpretations of quantum mechanics (which btw yielded results in Quantum Information Theory). It’s just that constructing something correct and new IS really hard.

gandalfgreybeer 6y ago

Going through the piece, he builds upon things that make sense but then just completely goes off the rails at the end. I don’t even know what the point of the article is. It comes across as science/intellectual shaming. > Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws. And if the flaws are legitimate, no matter how much work a scientist has done, then he has to take these into account now. Science is incremental and self-correcting. Is it a flaw if someone points out something wrong? > All the years you spend in graduate school counting angels on pinheads in your respective theoretical framework is mostly a waste of time. What is the point of saying this? There are dead ends to science and some of these dead ends may seem like wastes of time but it’s all about incremental knowledge and discoveries. If something revolutionary comes along that disproves years of work, then that for science is a success. > Most of the scientific work is not meaningful outside of the theoretical framework that gave rise to it. What does this mean? Isn’t this “theoretical framework” based on our observations? Sure there is this chance that it might be wrong but if most of our data and observations show that this is true, then it is until proven otherwise. If someone tells you that the earth might be flat and what we can see with our eyes and what we currently know might not be true, is that sufficient evidence to make you think, “oh the earth might be flat after all”?

Applejinx 6y ago
My gut-level reaction (and this guy's clearly advocating for the merit of gut-level reactions! :D ) is this: This is about priming people to buy into some propaganda system, for instance one constructed for political purposes, and reject their existing assumptions. The weird swerve at the end is the payload. The reason to do this is, if you're knowingly maintaining a propaganda system that works towards some known purpose, and you want people to fall into it more readily. This doesn't discount the validity of the initial concepts: local maxima are real, and our ability to thoroughly understand things is limited. But we remain functional through pretending we can indeed understand things, and there's usefulness in that. Generally, axioms are brought into question when specific details don't line up with our theory. In a vacuum, 'abandon all theories!' is a fine position to have. In reality, 'abandon all theories!' is a set-up for getting fed a pile of information that benefits somebody else, because you become a willingly useful idiot ready to be programmed by anyone. Running into somebody like this, I find the initial 'abandon all theories!' attitude to be refreshing. I even agree with some of it. If the NEXT THING he tells me is all about how Pepe's face is on the Moon outlined in craters, I've learned to be extremely suspicious of what the guy is really selling. Because even if he is himself sincere… there is somebody up the chain pursuing 'Nigerian spam' techniques and finding out by this who's credulous enough to be used for their own purposes. And that's what I get from the 'going off the rails at the end'. The point of the article is to hook the truly credulous, and the writer may or may not be in on that.

jackhalford 6y ago

> In Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, in what an unreflective mind might misinterpret as a "troll," says that it is important for science that people have biases, financial interests, interfering religious and political doctrines and the like in science. Also dying, and new generations coming along is in the interest of science. quite ironically the development of eternal life would kill scientific progress, which might be the great filter after all.

keiferski 6y ago
Eternal life would also almost certainly kill any class mobility.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  On the other hand, we may develop a society where advancement does not depend on death.
  - gxnxcxcx 6y ago
    That could prove really difficult without the death of those not in need of any advancement. Power and privilege by their very nature tend to find ways of avoiding being watered down.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      As one still in need of advancement, I'd happily take that challenge (and that of continuing scientific progress). Eternal life can always be abandoned if we find out it doesn't work.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      A cure for aging is not necessarily a cure for beheading-by-guillotine

malf 6y ago

Any examples of what is supposed to work this way? It sounds like a rant against quantum measurement by someone who thinks everyone just forgot to consider hidden variable theories.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I saw it more as a critique of any area of science where the development of a statistical model of the behaviour of a system is treated as though it yielded any meaningful understanding of the system. Quantum Mechanics, sure, but you could also apply this to Climate Science if you wanted to start a fight...

vez- 6y ago

The author's argues that the 50-50 model of chess is less true and a dead-end. If this is a matter of which model to use then fair enough, you may wish to use a more exact model than the 50-50 model; but the author is not arguing about which model to use, they are arguing about which model to pursue building upon. Building upon any model of interest is not a dead end (because it is being built upon!). Even if the underlying principles of the model of interest need to be changed to accomplish something else in the future, it is still useful to develop the model. Approximate truths can also have deep meaning and are sometimes even more generalizable to multiple areas of reality than exact answers. Approximations are no less true than trying to be exact, they are just saying a different thing. Neither is inferior to the other, or at least if exactness really is better than approximation, this is not a good argument for it. Another commenter pointed out that some models need to be thrown out in order to make room for the new (e.g. the earth-centric view of the solar system had to go at some point), and I think that's valid and hard to argue against; and it seems to align with what the author is saying. But the work done upon the old models was certainly not worth nothing. For one thing, the work done upon the old models is what made the new work possible. I think perhaps the author's issue is that they do not acknowledge that the 50-50 model of chess has value. p.s. to the author if they read the comments: I actually enjoyed reading your thoughts even if I disagree with them.

tpoacher 6y ago
Tbh, I didn't think he gave that message. If anything, he even identifies the 50-50 model as a local "maximum" (i.e. it has value). To me the main point was to have a mindset that is willing to challenge the possibility of whether such an optimum could actually simply be a local one.

leto_ii 6y ago

I suspect the metaphor is inspired by Feynman's one about gods playing chess [1]. As it's almost always the case, Feynman manages to immediately inspire and illuminate. On the other hand, the present article seems to me to get some important things wrong. For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. More importantly though, if somebody is interested in investigating chess, they will supposedly understand that it's some activity that other (somewhat) intelligent beings are undertaking. Even if everything seems like a blur, an alien scientist should not be content with dismissing it as uninteresting randomness. More so, if somebody actually starts investigating seriously, they will immediately obtain useful results about the game, results that should almost certainly provide useful predictions about the game outcome (at least better than "it's all random"). I might find, however, some agreement with the spirit of the article. It seems to me that, even though the author doesn't articulate it properly, the idea is that scientists should pursue more fringe theories even if immediate confirmation is lacking. I think there's quite a bit of value in this, as long as your predictions are always checked against reality. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4

seisvelas 6y ago
>For one, it's not the case that overall white and black win 50% of the time each. He addresses that (first-move advantage from white moving first) in the parenthesis after that same sentence: "After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example). "
- praestigiare 6y ago
  Acknowledging is not addressing, and in this case the statement amounts to "they realize this: ... (they would not realize this)." It is either too flawed to make the point intended, or illustrates a flaw in the underlying argument.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  It is also the case that if you take into account which pair of players are competing, the random hypothesis is not even close. The author cannot have it both ways: either the aliens cannot distinguish the game from an equal-odds random process, or they can.

germanjoey 6y ago

And here I thought the article was going to be like this parody manga about Alien Mahjong...... https://mangadex.org/chapter/56995/1 https://mangadex.org/chapter/56995/1

bmn__ 6y ago
I am genuinely impressed. The author captures Fukumoto's style and tropes perfectly.

subroutine 6y ago

The statement, "A machine that allows his alien eyes to see the first move." seems too information-rich for what the author then describes as the alternative model. Perhaps not the point of this thought experiment, but let's assume the aliens can only crudely see the first move: they know how many pieces there are on each side of the board, their color, but otherwise all the pieces look the same. They cannot see the surface of the board (they don't know it is checkered), but they can determine the exact center of each piece (so during the first move they can compute a precise coordinate of the piece that moves). Promptly after the first move, the image goes away. Also assume they trust the humans who've told them: "there are actually pieces on the board with functions". They have collected data on 1000s of matches. What can the aliens know or deduce? - The number of pieces - The pieces are divided into 2 different colors (white and black) - The pieces are split by color and placed at opposite (vertical) ends of the board. - There is the same number of pieces in each color - The pieces are arranged into 2 vertical rows and 8 horizontal columns - Opening moves cluster at 2 different lengths, towards the opposite side of the board. - The longer opening move length is typically ~2x the short opening move length. - The opening move vector is always towards the opposite end of the board (not horizontal) - The opening move is always white - White wins slightly more often - They are given the duration and outcome of each game (win, loss, or tie) - ? When games end quickly, first-move advantage shrinks - ? Sometimes a series of games end more quicker than usual (they observe a blitz tourney) - ? Win P() is slightly different for each of the 8 (x2) possible opening moves - ? Everything here: https://old.chesstempo.com/images/en/openingExp.png https://old.chesstempo.com/images/en/openingExp.png What else? Also, a note regarding the statement in the article that the alternative model "is less predictive over iterated games than the coin flip model". I don't think this is technically possible. If the model was selecting the winner at a statistically worse rate than 50% chance, you could just flip the sign of the prediction, and do that much better than chance.

slx26 6y ago
Observing the movement of pieces quickly reveals that the board is divided in 64 squares. Squares being black and white or any other set of colors is actually irrelevant. They can basically fully understand the game from this, no need to make things complicated.

NumberCruncher 6y ago

At first I thought this article is just totally wrong, but than I have found this: > Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet... At least this one point is correct.

rvba 6y ago

That is why quantum mechanics seems so weak. All about statistics instead of saying that maybe a lot of things happen at same time.

thiago_fm 6y ago

I find the article great. His only mistake is to think that chess is a balanced game. White has clearly an advantage and in a long amount of random games, like he did propose, see a 50% winrate for black.

rgblambda 6y ago
From the article: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we'll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example).

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

This is one of the main sins of postmodernism: the thought that because all view points are tenable, all are correct. The scientific method is based on accuracy of prediction, otherwise we are not talking about science anymore. That's not bad, and many a researcher could do with the realization that maths and models are not the best way to describe all things. It's a different ballgame though.

tikej 6y ago
What kind of alternative to maths and models, that has predictive (preferably in quantitative way) power, would you propose?
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  I can't propose one, I think whoever could would have some sort of Renaissance discovery in their head. I say this because I feel the way we approach certain disciplines like psychology (in an increasingly scientific and statistical way) is the wrong take, although it has worked well for most things in the past. Although we can make good experiments, we are missing the intuitive part of it. There are some truths about the way minds work that you can understand, but you can't really write down or quantify, and science can do no help there. For physics though, we have it down right. Do the experiment, did it work?.. it's already the correct method. No need to improve there.
adlpz 6y ago
I believe the point being made here is that, indeed, scientific method is based on accuracy of prediction. However, in order to reach a good accuracy, a great deal of fine-tuning and tweaking is required. E.g. high energy physics. The standard model has something like 18 free parameters. A new theory, which could be "more correct" and provide, in the long term, better predictions, might require time and manpower for this fine-tuning and tweaking to occur. However, as it did not provide better accuracy of prediction in its initial stages, is said to be not worth pursuing or even directly pseudoscience or quackery. This used to not be the case because, 100 years ago, relatively simple theories workable by 1-3 solo scientists provided a large enough breakthrough in prediction power to be seriously considered. It may be the case however that nowadays, with the amazing level of precision measurement we are able to achieve, we've optimized ourselves into a corner. We've fitter our quite-a-lot-of-degrees-of-freedom theories into a local maximum so hard that finding a theory that predicts better is, at least, impractical. And through this process we've blinded ourselves from any new and disruptive ideas. Again, look at the standard model. It's got so many damn dials to tweak that no wonder it fits reality so well. And if it ever doesn't, we can just shove supersymmetry in there. We need to be able to dedicate resources to theories that do not provide better predictions, but that provide new perspectives. A moderate amount of resources. But calling those scientists quacks does no good.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

>They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board. (The whites and blacks and squares all blur together.) I suspect that the real breakthrough would come when the alien physicist designs a very sensitive instrument that can observe exotic wavelengths of light at high resolution, and thereby show that the board is not uniform, but is divided into regions that have 1 of 2 states: i.e. black and white squares.

hackeraccount 6y ago

yeah - I think his point was something along the lines of "you can have a useful theory but it might be worth getting rid of it for something less useful that might be more productive in the long run because it has better understanding of the fundamental mechanism." Or more shortly using predictive ability as the sole criteria can lead to less correct results then alternatives. If my description is correct I would say that the advantage of using prediction as the sole criteria is that it avoids the burden of making arbitrary selections. I understand the appeal of the choosing a course because it's more elegant or beautiful but if you were getting on a plane and were told that was the guiding light of the designer - or worse the engineers - how happy would you be?

praestigiare 6y ago

The central thesis of the article is supported mostly by the argument "Yeah, it is dude." Ignoring the weakness of the analogy, there is a reason science is "about models" and not about truth: We can measure and test models, and we cannot measure and test truth. A theory that is more complex and fits the data worse is a less good theory because it is easier to get stuck in. If I have two new theories with this property, how do I choose between them? Imagining a situation where the less predictive theory is closer to the underlying reality does not change this - the fact that it is closer to the underlying reality is irrelevant until and unless we have measurements that allow us to distinguish those cases, at which point, we will have evidence for the (now) more predictive theory. This article is actually arguing for a system that would result in more dogmatic acceptance and less critical testing.

karmakaze 6y ago
This was the only part of an otherwise great post I objected to. Science may have a side effect of uncovering truth but it shouldn't be the driving force. We should be striving for better predictive ability that doesn't go against our observations. Arguing which is more real is not science.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Drop some heavy objects and some light objects you have lying around. You will see that the heavier ones tend to fall faster than the light objects. If all you care about is predicting which object will fall faster, you could simply say gravity pulls the heavier one faster and call it a day. But if you were to forego predictive power and seek understanding, you'd eventually see that objects fundamentally fall at the same rate, and a confounding factor of air resistance was the reason for the observed discrepency. With this deeper understanding, you can make models of gravity and fluid dynamics which are not just more accurate for the specific cases you measured, but also extensible to other cases like the orbits of planets.
  - praestigiare 6y ago
    You are imagining this situation from the perspective of already having a more powerful / general model and looking backwards, so it seems obvious. But that is not how things work. Without data to support it, you can imagine all kinds of possible theories - that is not science, and it certainly gets you no closer to understanding.

ikeboy 6y ago

The author applies logical positivism incorrectly. There's nothing wrong with coming up with new models and testing them against the data, and eventually getting enough variables to be significantly more effective. But such models should be a low portion of your overall probability until actually found to be more effective. Of course, if you start out with a contrived example where there's a large amount of unobservable simple structure, then it looks like postulating unobserved structures is good. I could give a contrary example where it's impossible to do better than random and draw the opposite lesson. Beyond that, under logical positivism there isn't a notion of truth as the author applies it. To critique LP by saying it doesn't get at the truth is kind of missing the point.

Lewton 6y ago

The author unironically uses a parable about aliens predicting chess outcomes with a coin flip and how wrong that is, to promote the idea that random fringe ideas without predictive power have value. I severely doubt anyone who isn't already primed to agree with the conclusions would read this and find it convincing (I don't find the idea that science needs ways to escape local maxima particularly controversial, but this article is terrible, and made worse by the unnecessary antagonism)

boldslogan 6y ago
I think the issue arises, when a player who is not good at chess would lose, literally 100% of the time against anyone even close to a top regional level. In other words, chess is not a 50% chance game, it is a variable chance game depending on who you play, so the analogy is hard to follow because the aliens would not come up with this 50% outcome idea.
- 8note 6y ago
  The other thing being that if both players are very good, it's near guaranteed to be a tie
- gampleman 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand - you don't always play black in chess. So on average white wins 50% of the time (modulo first move advantage and draws as the article states).
  - a-nikolaev 6y ago
    But they can observe that Alice always wins when playing against Bob. (If they somehow can determine that one player is black and the other is white, they probably can also distinguish the players as well?)
    - jjk166 6y ago
      They can't see a chess piece but they can see humans well enough to tell them apart? Analogies don't work if you deliberately make assumptions that are inconsistent with what they are trying to convey. We could rephrase the analogy such that the aliens are listening to a specific broadcast from earth from 1000 light years away. Some percentage of the time the broadcast is "White won", the rest of the time the broadcast is "White lost." Is it reasonable to assume that it's a game of pure chance just because you don't have a good method of predicting the outcome?

gavanwilhite 6y ago

I’m a bit surprised that nobody has called attention to the Pepe the Frog meme. Given its association with the alt-right at worst, and trolling at best, this seems out of character for hacker news.

yegortimoshenko 6y ago
It gets much worse than that on this blog: https://archive.is/RtoKS#selection-397.1-397.222 https://archive.is/RtoKS#selection-397.1-397.222 > Nitpicking is more excusable for women to do. That's ultimately because men talk to others > exchange important information, while women only talk to others for social negotiation and > to test the social standing of others.
krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
Let people have fun for fuck sake.
approxim8ion 6y ago
Use of Pepe and other alt-right tropes and 4chan lingo is consistent with who Luke Smith is and the image he wishes to cultivate for himself to attract a similar crowd.

jgilias 6y ago

Regarding the main point of the article. I do agree that it's very important to not get stuck in local maxima. However, I think the author heavily underestimates/overestimates the chances of the following: 1. The author underestimates the rate of competing ideas coming out of 'learned' scientists. 2. The author overestimates the possibility of an 'internet dilettante' without good knowledge of prior art coming up with something useful. To me it's a bit like me playing chess with a Grandmaster. Sure, I know how the chess pieces move, I know basic tactics and strategy. But I have never studied a chess theory book, never learned any openings. What's the chance of me coming up with a chess theory novelty that provides a better model of the game and lets me win the Grandmaster? It's not none. But due to my lack of knowledge of prior art the chance is pretty thin.

quietbritishjim 6y ago

I was disappointed to search through the comments and not find the phrase "two slit experiment". [1] The first half of the article is clealy about quantum mechanics, although it doesn't name it explicitly. The author seems to be arguing that there is something specific really going on below the quantum level, regardless of whether we can measure it, and scientists refuse to acknowledge that only because of philosphical dogma (logical positivism). They seemed to think we only use probabilities to reflect our uncertainty, and ought to come up with a more fundamental theory that avoids that uncertainty. But the two slit experiment shows that there is no more fundamental theory (at least not in that sense). If two paths have probability of 0.5, then it's not the case that only one or the other took place, we just don't know which is which. Instead, they both took place in some sense, to the extent that they interact with each other; that's not possible if there was one true path that we just couldn't deduce. It's maybe better to think of 0.5 as a weighting rather than a probability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

temptemptemp111 6y ago

Luke Smith hits HN! Good to see.

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Patient0 6y ago

I thought this was a quite insightful article - and was surprised to find so much criticism in the comments. e.g. those who are attacking his parable on the grounds that "actually the odds aren't actual 50-50 in chess" or "an alien would have to wonder why some people win more than others"... these objections seem like nit-picking to me and miss the opportunity to broaden our perspectives. The example is to help illustrate and illuminate an intriguing idea which does merit consideration: that the scientific method and various aspects of the scientific process are very much a "gradient descent" algorithm which will tend to converge to a local minimum... the large jumps needed to discover the "global minimum" are not sufficiently rewarded... or may not even be within our capabilities! Here is a more concrete example I have been considering recently: The principal of least action can be derived from Newton's force laws. Alternatively, Newton's force laws can be derived from the principal of least action. Therefore, you could choose to make either "law" the more fundamental one and consider the other to be an emergent phenomena. Might this also apply to, e.g. the principals of thermodynamics? Might it be that all of the laws of physics are actually just an emergent phenomena that can be derived directly from the information theoretic properties of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy? But then, why even stop there? We choose/discover these examples because our tiny, mediocre brains can only understand the universe from that point of view, whereas the actual universe we live in is unimaginably vast and complex. But might there be a way, for example, of deriving the laws of physics from some narrative principal (e.g. "we live in the best of all possible worlds... therefore by some chain of reasoning: F = ma!"). Maybe that chain of reasoning is only comprehensible to an artificial intelligence which we have yet to invent, involving us inhabiting some element of a vast fractal structure subject to some sort of anthropic principal? And in general, it is worth considering the concept that not all things which are "true" are objectively measurable - those are just the things that are easiest to prove are true. To give an example of something which you know is true but which is, almost by definition, subjective: the existence of your own consciousness! It is impossible to prove, objectively, that you're not just some simulation that is running in a computer that's about to run out of memory and segfault... that you yourself are "real". That's not to say that any of the above is actually true... but it might be true. Our recent focus on "provability" and "objectivity" has been used to argue that such things are in fact false, or just not worth considering or thinking about. There is sometimes an arrogance when there should be humility. Just because something might be exponentially difficult to prove, the sheer difficulty in proving it does not mean that it is not true.... There may be things which are true which we will never have the resources to discover. I think it's all worth considering.

chronolitus 6y ago

If there is indeed no way for aliens to "see" the chess playing process (precisely: to make measurements which confirm/reject hypotheses about details of the game), then the best model they can ever come up with is a black box where the outcome has given statistical properties. Where the parable falls short, and a mistake often made, is to confuse one's own inability to come up with discriminating experiments, for an absolute truth about the universe's resistance to observation. What would it mean for aliens to not ever be able to measure chess' inner properties? it would mean that aliens could never read human texts, or talk with humans, as any of those would instantly lead them to the truth. Which in turn means aliens can't see light, or hear sounds, or interact with things which would allow them to do so. Going further, we end up at the conclusion that either these aliens exist in a completely separate universe from chess (and everything around it), or they CAN observe it (they just haven't tried hard enough). This post is confused, in that it first states aliens can't see chess, but later they can. If their sensors ARE able to measure chess, the scientific process will eventually weed out the worse models for the better ones and they will understand it. If they aren't, then they will be left with the statistical random model, and that is indeed the best explanation, as all guesses toward the complicated intricacies of the game are equally likely and cannot be differentiated. In the end, the post's theory boils down to one idea: "there is sometimes an underlying truth that is not observable", and it is a really weak one. Like the flying tea pot, it can not be disproven or proven. "Underlying Truths" that do not affect the universe in any way and cannot be measured, might as well not exist, and we should not attempt to model them. Everything else can and will be explained, in time. I'm not sure I see a paradox, or lesson here, other than it is important to understand what the scientific process of model, hypothesis and measurement can and can't do. -- the same argument is often made for magic, or spirituality, or any other thing people say is 'unexplainable' (which can often be translated to "something I don't want to think too hard about") We used to think many things were magic (light, magnets, the world), until someone smarter than us came up with a really smart experiment which let us shine light into boxes we thought were black (bell's inequality theorem is a fine example). The lesson from history is, if we look hard enough, we eventually get closer to the truth, every time.

seanhunter 6y ago

The whole article starts with a straw man about aliens making incorrect deductions based on a version of chess that doesn't correspond to actual chess. This is used to illustrate a very obvious point about local maxima that is in turn extrapolated in an entirely unsupported way to try to draw some conclusions about science and allow the author to make some strange and entirely unnecessarily edgy statements like "Logical positivism is kind of theoretical lobotomy"... "tweaking equations like an oblivious autist is Science" etc. It's very disappointing to see this on HN

micouay 6y ago

I think many comments here miss the point. I’ll try to summarise them and defend the article: * “Chess results are not 50-50” - I don’t think the exact numbers are that important. What’s important is that in the 50-50 model or x-y model the Aliens assume these values to be just a consistent result of an RNG. * “Chess is not random / the players are intelligent / the aliens could investigate who plays against who” - In the parable the Aliens don’t have direct access these variables, just like we might not have the access to some variables in QM experiments and we (and They) could mistake something hard to observe for random (i.e. if the rule is “if there’s an even number of atoms in a 1m radius, do A, if it’s odd, do B” the outcome would be 50-50 and would seem random even if it’s not) * “Theories that are more complicated, predict less or make worse approximations are worth less than simple theories that predict more / better” (in other words Science is about models and approximations, not about truth or “Shut up and calculate”) - I think the author simply disagrees but he also shows why non-mainstream models are worth pursuing and developing - so that we are not stuck in a local maximum with a worse model than the one we could have. Something else concerns me: I don’t know much about QM but if I understand correctly, Bell’s inequality tells us that there are no “hidden variables” and that QM is indeed random. I’d be grateful for any references to articles on this topic that can be understood by non-experts.

derbOac 6y ago
One important thing the author seems to miss at some level is the context of the data being modeled. If all you have is data on whether black or white won, then, assuming the 50-50 outcome probabilities, this is a fine model. There is nothing to be gained by anything else. Where I disagree with the author I guess is to suggest that some other statistically inferior model would be better because, if you had a richer set of observations, it would be shown to be true. To me that scenario is irrelevant at some level, because it's a different scenario (I don't agree with the author's assertion that first move information would somehow decrease predictive information -- it might not improve it, but I doubt it would decrease it). If you had information on player identities even, you might be able to model ability or something like that, and use that to improve your predictions. But then that relies on the bit of information about which players are which, beyond black and white. The philosopher Quine argued that models cannot be decontextualized from the observations they are explaining, and I think that is particularly relevant in this case. At some level it doesn't matter whether the Aliens' models are true or not, because they have no information in the scenario that they could use to do anything with. The 50-50 model (per the author) isn't incorrect, it's just a (assumedly) correct model for the game of chess when all you know is which color won the game. If you were playing chess, and your pairings were random and you couldn't see the board or what pieces were available or where they could go, etc the game would seem very similar to what the aliens were observing. A more "truthful" model is only relevant or useful in the context where there is more data to make it useful.

arh68 6y ago

I would agree all models are bad, some models are useful even though it goes unstated. I feel like the author’s point is that asking for “the right model” is the wrong question. I don’t mind argument-by-analogy too much, but I think it would help if we knew what the aliens were trying to do with their model. People criticizing "inaccuracy" seem to just have high standards for their models (perhaps you want to simulate 100B chess games in 10 seconds.. how's that coin flip idea sound now?). Just imagine you're dreaming about backgammon: do you know all the rules? no, but you can roughly model what's going on. Your model could be said "worse" than standard rules, but it's good enough for a dream sequence. More than once have I seen a nice chess set in a home, set up completely wrong. They’ll be close! Their model isn’t too far off from standard, but just so (K & Q reversed, B & N reversed, &c). I presume the owners were quite content. Honestly, I don’t even know if most people would notice, so why point it out (is my model even the “preferred” one)?

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