4 ms·

I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that poi

by twox2 6y ago

I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology. Beyond that, I do think history does matter for understanding how humans interact with each other and with our planet.

leto_ii 6y ago
> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.? The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm. To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
- Bakary 6y ago
  A better analogy would be Taleb's "green lumber" story.[0] The narratives we assign to things don't necessarily correspond to what really moved the needle forward. The ability to get things done might sometimes be influenced by historical reading, but it is mostly a factor of reading the present, creating new knowledge, and spending most of your energy on the problems at hand as they actually stand. A person like Zuck might draw parallels from their reading of the classics (to name one notorious example) but in practice their success will be contingent on making decisions in real time with few helpful analogies, or general principles for which historical reading is not strictly necessary. The journalists then comparing Zuck to Augustus are then probably misattributing the causal relationship. There will be a historical post-facto rationalization of what went down for anything happening in the recent past, but the meat we draw from historical analogies is often poorly applicable since the divergence between the map and the territory is so large. The difference between reality and a game of chess is indeed paramount here, but for different reasons. The past is so complex that the lessons we draw from it are likely to just be distorted narratives that are already just a reflection of the present. >To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind. In Levandowski's own example, he learned what existed in his time and then built useful things from there without worrying too much about the details of past beyond the directly visible iceberg spire in the present. This is broadly applicable to many fields and there are many people who did the same. It's tautologically true that disciplines that need to draw on the past to move on will do so, such as biology, but that doesn't say all that much about engineering for instance. [0]https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/ https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/
bananabiscuit 6y ago
In an ideal sense that’s true, but to use your analogy to make the opposite argument: consider someone that has no knowledge of what kinds of moves where made previously in this chess game and other historic chess games, even though theoretically they can figure out a good move given enough time to read the board but that is prohibitively infeasible. On the other hand it is people who have studied games of chess played in the past that end up building an intuition for what a good move is and are much more likely to come close to making a good move in a reasonable amount of time.
- twox2 6y ago
  I do like this take.
Cybiote 6y ago
That is only because subgame perfect equilibrium is applicable to chess. An imperfect information game like Poker cannot have that. Technology is not a process with complete information therefore the chess analogy in the context of technology cannot work. And as bananabiscuit points out, Leela Zero can get away with considering orders of magnitude fewer positions than Stockfish because of the extensive experience from past games encoded into its weights. Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects. Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.
warkdarrior 6y ago
> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. That is an immensely myopic view. Analyzing the game up to now and understanding the opponent's style of play and tactical preferences are very useful in planning your next move, especially when you have multiple, equally weighted choices.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Also analyzing your moves that got you to that point. Don't like where things are now? Well, what did you do to get here? Levandowski may wind up convicted of something else if he doesn't learn from history... his history. So maybe he really ought to look at it a bit. On the other hand, when you've messed up, and you understand that you've messed up, and you've learned what you can from it, then throwing away the past and moving on is perhaps a psychologically healthy thing.
CydeWeys 6y ago
> I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.

by twox2 6y ago

leto_ii 6y ago

> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.? The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm. To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.

Bakary 6y ago
A better analogy would be Taleb's "green lumber" story.[0] The narratives we assign to things don't necessarily correspond to what really moved the needle forward. The ability to get things done might sometimes be influenced by historical reading, but it is mostly a factor of reading the present, creating new knowledge, and spending most of your energy on the problems at hand as they actually stand. A person like Zuck might draw parallels from their reading of the classics (to name one notorious example) but in practice their success will be contingent on making decisions in real time with few helpful analogies, or general principles for which historical reading is not strictly necessary. The journalists then comparing Zuck to Augustus are then probably misattributing the causal relationship. There will be a historical post-facto rationalization of what went down for anything happening in the recent past, but the meat we draw from historical analogies is often poorly applicable since the divergence between the map and the territory is so large. The difference between reality and a game of chess is indeed paramount here, but for different reasons. The past is so complex that the lessons we draw from it are likely to just be distorted narratives that are already just a reflection of the present. >To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind. In Levandowski's own example, he learned what existed in his time and then built useful things from there without worrying too much about the details of past beyond the directly visible iceberg spire in the present. This is broadly applicable to many fields and there are many people who did the same. It's tautologically true that disciplines that need to draw on the past to move on will do so, such as biology, but that doesn't say all that much about engineering for instance. [0]https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/ https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/

bananabiscuit 6y ago

In an ideal sense that’s true, but to use your analogy to make the opposite argument: consider someone that has no knowledge of what kinds of moves where made previously in this chess game and other historic chess games, even though theoretically they can figure out a good move given enough time to read the board but that is prohibitively infeasible. On the other hand it is people who have studied games of chess played in the past that end up building an intuition for what a good move is and are much more likely to come close to making a good move in a reasonable amount of time.

twox2 6y ago
I do like this take.

Cybiote 6y ago

That is only because subgame perfect equilibrium is applicable to chess. An imperfect information game like Poker cannot have that. Technology is not a process with complete information therefore the chess analogy in the context of technology cannot work. And as bananabiscuit points out, Leela Zero can get away with considering orders of magnitude fewer positions than Stockfish because of the extensive experience from past games encoded into its weights. Another argument against ignoring the past is it's important to identify what things remain invariant in society as technology evolves. Allowing for a fuller contextualization, understanding and perhaps somewhat anticipation of the on-going changes and their effects. Technology itself is based on leveraging libraries, tacit knowledge, internet threads and mathematical concepts decades to hundreds of years old. That's a kind of history. It's not uncommon for advancements to occur after revisiting old lines of research that were ahead of their time.

warkdarrior 6y ago

> Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. That is an immensely myopic view. Analyzing the game up to now and understanding the opponent's style of play and tactical preferences are very useful in planning your next move, especially when you have multiple, equally weighted choices.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Also analyzing your moves that got you to that point. Don't like where things are now? Well, what did you do to get here? Levandowski may wind up convicted of something else if he doesn't learn from history... his history. So maybe he really ought to look at it a bit. On the other hand, when you've messed up, and you understand that you've messed up, and you've learned what you can from it, then throwing away the past and moving on is perhaps a psychologically healthy thing.

CydeWeys 6y ago

> I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. Chess is an abstract turn-based zero-sum discrete 1-on-1 board game with perfect information sharing. In other words, it's completely different from real life in every possible aspect, and thus any drawn parallel is likely to be worthless. Real life is not Chess.