6 ms·
You can't reach the brain through the ears
- macgyverismo 3y agoThis was very much in line with my own thinking, or at least that is what I suspect and can’t know for sure. With the recent AI buzz I got to think, maybe the keep from the story are higher level concepts that exist only after the underlaying layers have been trained and can therefore not be adressed before.
- firstlink 3y agoThis one does the rounds on HN periodically: "You can't tell people anything" http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an....
- jwilk 3y ago2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35282293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35282293 (183 comments) 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28775517 (94 comments) 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188 (193 comments) 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 (66 comments)
- born-jre 3y agothat was good one. i wanted to send this to a couple of people of then I realize the meta irony of that. edit: donot know why this reminds of song "Ooh La La - the Face" > Poor young grandson, there's nothing I can say You'll have to learn, just like me And that's the hardest way, ooh la la https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTVLVEFEMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTVLVEFEMc
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoAs a counterpoint to the introduction, my postgraduate degree at Oxford is the best thing I have ever done. The professors were engaged. Classes were very good and my social life has never been as interesting since. Don’t listen to this man.
- kfrane 3y agoNobody will, at least if there's any truth in this article
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI have two anecdotes now. They have reached the threshold of "actual data". One datum is a five star, the other is a 1 star. This means with some unusually high level of certainty, that the experience is actually only mildly/moderately good. Also, the correct approach is to heed the author's every other word. But when I attempt to do that, the statements make little sense, like "can't the through ears" or "You reach brain the".
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoThere is also the fact that I’m not an American and think Americans are used to being taught and treated a way during university which is fundamentally at odd with how Europeans universities work. Plus I guess moving to England if you have never been exposed to anything else than the standard American friendliness and uber positiveness might feel alienating.
- sctb 3y agoAnd as a third point between these two, a close friend is finishing a postgraduate degree at Oxford and would agree with “The professors were checked out, the classes were bad, and I felt isolated and alienated” but still feels as though it was worthwhile.
- sumtechguy 3y agoEducation is what you get out of it. Especially at the university level. If you are really engaged and trying to find new things it will be a wild ride. If you are there to just 'get the degree' you will find it dull, boring and a chore. What crystalized this thought for me was a few years ago. I had a class that started with 20 people in a corp env and optional. At first all 20 showed. By the last class there was 4. Most had checked out when they realized that you had to do the course work and be engaged (2-3 hours of study per week for 8 weeks). We even made accommodations for those who fell behind as long as they tried. I found being engaged into the coursework is not the norm.
- waterheater 3y agoWilliam Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire." Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
- rjbwork 3y ago>The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking. It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially, driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the uniquely ascetic. Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living if it paid like a fry cook?
- rednerrus 3y agoIt's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. The other thing that should be driving innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than any other time in history. The combination of these two things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace. We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely to see another massive explosion of innovation.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.
- rednerrus 3y agoRunning on the hamster wheel is a choice people make. If you wanted to you could live in a LCOL city and work remotely. People want to live in HCOL cities and in bigger fancier houses than they need, they drive bigger fancier cars than they need to, they take fancier vacations than they need to. Obviously this isn't true for everyone but through the middle and upper middle class, it certainly is true.
- nielsbot 3y agoMy personal tl;dr for this is: "People can't get a joke by you explaining it to them, they have to experience getting it for themselves." I lot of experience is just like this.
- pixl97 3y agoYea. Things we enjoy like cooked dishes that have wide appeal still say nothing if you are going to like that food. The only way for you to really know it to try it. Taste is highly objective. Now, if the person before me eats a bite and falls to the ground dead, I'm going to skip lunch for that day.
- dmbche 3y ago"A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us. If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing. The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain." I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it. And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn't have asked. Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.
- joelfried 3y agoIf you haven't read it, the book you haven't realized you're looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
- dmbche 3y agoWill do, thank you!
- vdqtp3 3y agoI'd say Lexicon by Max Barry is even more applicable
- satvikpendem 3y agoAlso, the Animorphs series. Mind you, they're not children's books, rather, they're books about children, in all sorts of horrifying situations.
- im3w1l 3y agoIt's really amazing to me how instinctive behavior works and what that reveals about how the brain works. Like an instinctive behaivor would need an instinctive pathway from stimulus to processing to motor response. In order for such a thing to work properly there must be hardcoded protocols along that entire path - i.e. not learnt. There may be some limited local learning along the way, for instance the input pipeline may learn to tune out some defects or noise. Another interesting point is that our conscious minds can interact in some limited ways with our instincts, it can be influenced by being put in a certain emotional state, and it can to some extent suppress or override the natural response, e.g. not flinching away from pain. Thus at the boundaries the conscious mind must also speak these common protocols. Then it follows that reinforcement learning in the brain is quite limited in where it happens.
- pxeger1 3y agoIf we could communicate emotions effectively through speech alone, we wouldn't have invented art.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoWe invented art as a mating ritual.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoWe kind of do - that's what poetry is, for example. One could do even better - but it quickly becomes obvious just how much shared context you need.
- nadermx 3y ago"Newton turned in her dissertation and then peaced out. Newton, if you’re out there: respect" A true pioneer
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- newaccount74 3y agoI find hearing about other people's experiences extremely useful. What I don't find useful is when people just tell me what to do. Instead of telling me not to go to Oxford, tell me about the things that surprised you at Oxford. I can make up my own mind about going, and the most effective thing you can do to help me decide is to tell me what it was like for you, without assuming it will be the same for me.
- elteto 3y agoExactly. Your experience does not have to be the same as mine, especially with overtly broad statements. It’s no different than someone saying “Don’t visit city $C. It sucks!”. I mean, it’s a _whole_ city, are you sure _all_ of it sucks? Maybe you were unlucky in your experiences and I don’t have to be. Now, if you tell me “Don’t visit restaurant $R in city $C, I got food poisoning and the service was awful” then I will probably avoid that place. It should really be “If you go to Oxford for graduate studies, in department $D, under professor $P then you will probably have a bad time for the following reasons…”
- smnrchrds 3y agoWhich is exactly what he did, to no avail: > I would sit across from them in the dining hall, plates full of chicken tenders and french fries, and explain that postgraduate education in the UK is largely a way of extracting money from foreign students. Professors over there are checked out, classes are bad, and the whole place is pervaded with this sense of isolation and alienation, like everyone is behind a plate of glass.
- gumby 3y agoIt's not a compression issue. You have some state in your head (which is crosslinked to other state) and you are trying to get someone else to have the same schemas in their head. But you don't really know what's already in their head. At least in 1:1 conversation you can use an interactive, iterative process which has a higher probability of success (in the article's example: the author spoke to someone and then got a question back indicating a complete lack of understanding). Still pretty terrible, but the best we have got.
- danwills 3y agoI agree it's not lossy-compression that's the problem here.. I think instead it's usually better phrased in terms of 'aliasing'. You can think of using a better (more care, attention and listener-adaptation) method for producing words in your mind as literally an anti-aliasing strategy, which should result in a 'better' resulting signal in the reciever.
- jschveibinz 3y agoI love this article, but I’d like to add that it is in fact possible to reach the “keep” as the author has called it through emotion. Emotion is very important to memory and steering thoughts as many studies have shown. [0] For example: Advertisers, sales people, politicians, coaches, military leaders, charismatic leaders, etc. all use emotion to change minds, create memories and influence behavior. For an interesting look at the power of this approach, see the documentary “Century of the Self” by the BBC. It’s very interesting and perhaps even eye opening.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's an accelerated way, kind of grapnel hooking over the castle walls and ninja-ing your way down to the castle treasury. However, it's still difficult to make such attempts stick long-term, and the impact is unpredictable on an individual level. If not for that, advertising would've zombified us all long ago.
- karaterobot 3y agoHey, this was a good blog post. During the first section, I came up with a bunch of objections, and then by the end he had addressed them all (that is not to say resolved them). And, it was fun. Thumbs up to the author. All that leaves me is this observation: > Computer people have a good word for this kind of thing: lossy compression. You simply can’t fit a thought into a sound wave. Something’s gotta go, and what goes is its ineffable essence, its deep meaning. You have to hope that the other person can reconstruct that essence with whatever they have lying around in their head. Often, they can’t. According to Tolstoy, the role of art is to reconstruct that lost data. That "[a]rt is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." So, maybe try writing an opera about how studying at Oxford is a waste of time. Hope that helps.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI liked the analogy I picked up somewhere (I don't remember where, maybe I synthesized it from some of Eliezer's writings), that words are handles, pointers to associations[0] - both factual and emotional ones - and poetry, specifically, is an art of using words to pull those emotional associations in a very calculated way, effectively executing code in your readers' brain to achieve the desired effect. -- [0] - Today we'd say "tokens stand for their embeddings in the latent space". Funny how those old articles about pointers to areas in concept-space, fuzzy boundaries, associations, etc. suddenly map pretty much perfectly, 1:1, to how LLMs and other generative transformer models work.
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "Eliezer's writings), that words are handles, pointers to associations" The first part sounds like the Detatched Lever Fallacy post on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-lever-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l...
- iamnotsure 3y agoI wish people would stop spreading fake news.
- sacnoradhq 3y agoThere is a common hesitancy from accepting wisdom because of ego: they didn't think of it themselves. In addition, wisdom given too freely is seen as low value because the receiver didn't have to earn it and so it doesn't seem scarce enough. Also, the impression between madness, foolishness, and wisdom is hazier and more easily confused for those with less life experience to draw from. Charisma, along with ethos and pathos, are ultimately more effective than logos. If committing to some career or education investment in time and treasure, then it's worth carefully considering the need and financial advantage for that particular outcome and working back how to get there most efficiently. It's unwise to earn an MBA or PhD simply because you can, because you might not need it or there maybe a net economic disincentive to having it.
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "explain that postgraduate education in the UK is largely a way of extracting money from foreign students." "I've been everywhere - all over the USA, raising funds - trying to sell them the idea of an Oxford education" "Africa is crawling with British Professors frantically trying to flog Sociology courses to the natives" - BBC sitcom Yes Minister, circa 1982 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E
- a_c 3y agoI think about the same question all the time. Instead of can't change, I think human mind is more of a slippery slope of ideas, an overton window. If you try to transmit an idea that is on the far end of that slope, it would appear no exchange has taken place. But that slope is different among a population. If you managed to transmit the same idea to a bunch of people, some will get what you are trying to convey. I believe ideas are better broadcasted and people do change, albeit slowly.
- namaria 3y agoI was having a conversation about this over the past weekend. I, and the other person, come from poor countries and now live in a rich one. We think it's important to give back. But sometimes it can feel like a non-trained person trying to save someone who's drowning, and they just drag you down with them. Then it hit me: you can't change someone's life, anymore than you can change someone's mind. The best you can do is be there for them when they are ready to ask for help.